You are currently viewing the stories for “June 2024.”
My Martz Trailways bus rolled into Manhattan from Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1969, landing me in Port Authority. I dragged my big, ivory-colored, plastic suitcase up the escalator, stepped onto Eighth Avenue and a cab screeched to a halt at my feet—a lucky break, since I hadn't the vaguest idea how to hail one. I had been discovered by an affable, [...]
Not long after I moved to New York, my mother’s college friend Lois invited me to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum. After it ended, she suggested we go to the Nectar Diner for a cup of tea. I’d been hearing about Lois my whole life. To my mother, she represented a glamorous New York lifestyle that my mother not-so-secretly [...]
One of my first jobs in the city was as a hostess at Coco Pazzo, a very hot spot at the time on the Upper East Side. We had a famous clientele, and I truly loved when the A-listers would roll in. I would stand the whole night of my 8-hour shift behind a podium, usually in my black flats [...]
It was 1985 and the “Jewish Club” was a social club that seemingly popped up from nowhere at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. One day, we were told this club existed and that a woman named Akiva would be coming to the school every few weeks to run the club’s meetings. Akiva wasn’t a teacher, and this club was [...]
