You are currently viewing the stories for May, 2006

The Cosmo Girl And The Wet Spot

by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

The organizers of Erotica USA threw a party recently at a place called Club New York, and all the exhibitors and exhibitionists who will shortly be filling up the Javitz center for the four-day Sex Expo were invited. The evening began with a sort of Freudian slip–the address on the invitation, “225 West 43rd Street”–did […]

The Gunfighter

by 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

In the spring of 1902, the lawman swung down from the train. He was nearly fifty and a trifle stocky now. But he had worked for Wyatt Earp and known Doc Holliday, he had upheld the law in Dodge City and kept the peace in Tombstone. His shooting hand had lost none of its cunning, […]

Biographer’s Lunch

by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

Patricia Bosworth, the author of biographies of Montgomery Clift and Diane Arbus and who has been at work on a biography of her father, Bartley Crumb, for the last 10 years, recently had the idea that it might be nice if a group of biographers could gather now and then and commiserate, perhaps over lunch […]

Mizrahi to Mirabella: Condolences

by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

Here is a note Isaac Mizrahi wrote to Grace Mirabella shortly after she was replaced by Anna Wintour as the Editor of Vogue Magazine.  

Robert Andrews: Safe Salesman

by 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

I call myself a security consultant because it sounds better than salesman but, essentially, I’m a salesman. I sell security products, primarily safes. My dad preceded me in this. He was with the Mosler Safe Company starting around 1948 and, quite frankly, as a kid, the work sounded very dull to me. I wanted to […]

The Old Building on the Way to Dad’s Office

by 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

My dad worked in midtown at an advertising agency and for years as a young kid I would go to work with my him in the summers, just as a way to stay out of trouble. We would always take the same route and on the way we would pass an old decrepit building sandwiched […]

Unexpected Stories Arising From NYC City Streets

by 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

My story is true. Every detail I will relate is exactly as it happened on a beautiful spring day, May 16, 2000. This story starts in Kingston, NY, where four co-workers from the Ulster County Department Of Social Services prepare for a wonderful, exciting day in New York City. At 6:30 a.m. all four women, […]

Brooks Brothers in the Tropics

by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

One of the first things a new visitor to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is likely to notice is how well dressed most of the men are. Monsoon rains may turn the streets into shallow lakes, the electricity may be erratic, but the men are fairly consistent in their outfit–a pair of slacks and a neat button […]

The Quintessential

by Dino Gerard D'Agata 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

The strange twinge that often comes when I leave work and head west on 56th Street is, oddly, much like the same thing that hit the center of my gut when, at 13, I rode a bike to a movie theater in South Jersey and, with my school buddies, went to see my first R-rated […]

The Slump at Shea

by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

1993 Like most of the people who haunt Shea Stadium these days, Steve Calandro is a diehard Mets fan. He’s also a vendor, and the vendors, like the Mets, aren’t having a terribly good year. The vendors work for the Harry M. Stevens Corporation, and when things are slow, as they have been this season, […]

The Eyes Wide Shut Party

by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut: a masterpiece or utter crap? My own impression was that it was utter crap when I saw it a little over a year ago, though I did enjoy the movie in certain ways, none of them, I felt at the time, intended. Since then I watched […]

Manhattan, Floating World

by 05/31/2006
Neighborhood: Midtown

Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or like a lozenge or like a paramecium (the protruding piers its cilia) or like a gourd or like some kind of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere. The Japanese of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth […]