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As a television addicted kid coming up in New York City during the 1970s, I regularly watched reruns of the long-running anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Its mysteries of mayhem, murder, betrayal and brutality had plotlines where sometimes the bad guys (or gals) got away with their crimes. Before launching into the drama, the show opened with Hitch greeting the [...]
I’m sitting in Straus Park at 107th Street, where Broadway bifurcates. No need for alarm about this. Things created by God bifurcate. Adam would have been just another lonely guy moping around Eden if he hadn’t bifurcated after Eve stepped out of a dream and into his life. Directly across Broadway is The Garden of Eden©—the supermarket, not the [...]
I didn’t know that my father was a bad driver, a reckless and dangerous driver, until I was in my mid-twenties. During my childhood, in the 60s and 70s, my father drove a white Cadillac El Dorado. He saw himself as a player, and he traded it in every two years for the latest model. The caddy was a boat. [...]
“Let’s go around the circle,” the writing instructor began. He was a small wiry man with a trim brown beard. “I’m Alan. I graduated from SUNY Buffalo and last year I got my master’s degree in fine arts. I’m from Long Island, Great Neck,” he told us. “Everyone give your name and anything you want to say about yourself.” “Hello,” [...]
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 [...]
Years ago, I coined the term “White Socks Moment” to describe that instant when you are suddenly and jarringly turned off by a romantic interest because of something distasteful and unusual happening. The kids today refer to this phenomenon as “the ick”. Once I was turned off by a guy – who had seemed so intellectual – when he started [...]
ROUND ONE: JAY Walking out of the crowd, my ears are still ringing. It’s late. I’m more than tipsy, but I haven’t felt tired in hours. I bounce down the stairs that lead from the East Village dance floor and head to the bar. There, I shift my weight around on the balls of my feet in my black knee-high [...]
Zapkus. His name was almost an onomatopoeia: its electric prod forcing me to sit up and pay attention. “Design Fundamentals” had to be, in theory, the most yawn-inducing chunk of time in the Parsons School of Design illustration curriculum for Spring 1972. I looked at the course card and envisioned the need to occasionally cut class and dip into the [...]
Klaus Nomi and Cookie Mueller. November 3, 1978 - East Village - Journal Entry Last night THE NEW WAVE VAUDEVILLE SHOW at Irving Plaza was a great success for the performers, but a debacle for me. Klaus Nomi was the headliner along with a horde of starry-eyed rockers and artists. My friends and I were asked to be the security. [...]
I was too young to comprehend “dark energy” that pulls apart the human psyche. But at 19, I was a witness. New York State Psychiatric Institute, high up and hovering over the Hudson in Washington Heights, was, and still is, a special teaching hospital connected to Columbia University. In the 1950s, when I worked there, it catered mostly to the [...]
There is a saying in New York City that you can either have a job or keep a car on the street. Garages in my neighborhood cost upwards of $700 a month, and street parking is free, sort of. I do not have a job, other than walking my two dachshunds, Henry Longfellow and Hanna, and playing the intricate game [...]
I first met Ari Horwitz in front of a pizzeria near the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal in 1978. I wasn’t in the habit of talking to people I didn’t know, but Ari was about my age, mid-20s, and we seemed to have an immediate psychic connection. Ari, it turned out, lived with a roommate on Barnes Avenue near Pelham [...]
This is Part 3 of a three part story by Nina Camp. Read Part 1 and Part 2. The locksmith was a lean, twenty-something guy. He arrived on time and stood quietly outside our apartment door after I buzzed him into the building. Soft-spoken, with kind eyes, he brought a moment of problem-solving stability into my home. Alex was out. [...]
Phil Rosenthal This is Part 2 of a three part story by Nina Camp. Part 3 will appear on Thursday. Click here to read Part 1. I went into the theater, threw my coat across two seats to save them, went back out to the lobby and called Alex again. He was about to walk into his voice lesson on [...]
This is is Part I of a three part story by Nina Camp. Part II will run on Tuesday and Part III will appear on Thursday. The aim was to repair our wounded relationship. Nothing overcomplicated, our plan had just three elements. The first involved a man we’d come to think of as The Happiest Guy on Netflix. The second [...]
I’m headed to the elevator, working at my volunteer job in Lenox Hill Hospital, carrying patients’ EKG printouts, which I am supposed to distribute to various wards. Getting on at the basement level, I press the button for the 8th floor—the psych ward, which had been my temporary place of residence until I was discharged six months before. There are [...]
Bored on a pre-pandemic Sunday, I scan through Facebook’s dating app to see who liked my profile, and finally, someone interesting! Connie is heavily tattooed and only has three pictures (just one includes his face). Aside from a giant Yankees logo and “CONNIE” emblazoned on his abdomen, I can’t see many tattoo details and his profile is sparse. But he [...]
If you want to call me a cool kid, please do. You see, back in 1975 when I was seven years old , I visited Tribeca for the first time…with my mom and dad. We didn’t go to the Mudd Club or Artists Space or anything like that; instead we went to a factory just south of Canal Street. One Saturday [...]
The bathroom was small, at first glance appearing to be a large closet that opened off the kitchen. A beautiful nautilus shell, almost a foot long with a pale-pink pearlescent chamber, had been placed in the bathtub. The tub itself was deep and old-fashioned, made of heavy porcelain; the wall behind it was protected with waterproof wallpaper depicting faded tiles [...]
photo by ajay_suresh It felt glorious to look at Edward standing on the corner of Madison, knowing this would be the last time I’d have to look at him for a week. As he hugged me, the steam rising from the gutters around us seemed neither tawdry nor romantic, but ordinary. “I have a gift for you honey,” Edward said, [...]
We moved to Greenwich Village in the mid-1980s, and at every landing of our fifth-floor tenement walk up there was a nose-full of tantalizing smells. This was in the very Italian section of the West Village, full of tenements that we called “V.I.V’s” or “Vertical Italian Villages.” The older folks, who sat out in front, chatting and fanning themselves in the [...]
I almost exclusively wear black no-show socks — mostly because I wear booties all winter or sneakers, neither of which warrant the obtrusive show of a sock. As such, I have ten pairs of basic black ones from Walmart, another four pairs of slightly different black ones from Duane Reade and one pair – my favorite – from a specialty [...]
Every now and then, someone in my apartment building posts a sign on the bulletin board next to the lobby elevators—often about something that was lost, or possibly taken by mistake, from either the laundry room or the lobby. Usually these notes are simple, straight-forward requests. A typical sign might read: “Lost in laundry room—pair of blue wool socks. Please [...]
Back then, I lived alone in a terrible apartment on the Upper West Side. I was twenty-six. After five years of shitty roommates, I’d decided to suck up the cost and make a go of it. The rent was $467 a month. This was actual money in 1985, which might be why I still remember the amount, when I’ve forgotten [...]
photo credit Dianne Washington Harlem Superstar: DJ Hollywood & the Birth of Hip-Hop This year the world is celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip-hop culture. While it includes elements of break dancing and graffiti, most people’s first thoughts about the genre go to the rappers and DJs behind the music. It has been written that the soundtrack to the movement [...]
“Careful with that!” I exclaimed to my new husband, Harry, as he carried my Art Deco stained glass window up the stairs to our new apartment. I had gotten the window, a gift from my parents, when I married Harry in 1967. We were both so excited to move into an apartment over a diner in the Meatpacking District, where [...]
When my mother and I returned to New York City in 1993 — following a short, confused stint in Dallas, Texas — we moved into an apartment on 83rd Street between York and East End avenues, in Yorkville. A few years earlier, at age seven, I had migrated to the city from Westchester County with my mother and her boyfriend, [...]
The Times Square ball has dropped, giving birth to 1982, unnoticed by me and my friends who have been prowling the city streets for hours. We ricochet from one dimly lit bar to another, drawn to brain-damaging music and access to drugs. In the Mudd Club, where we’ve landed, the entrance to both bathrooms is jammed; getting in or out [...]
Image by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman On January 23, 1917, artists Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan, poet Gertrude Dick, and three actors from the Provincetown Playhouse broke into a hidden spiral staircase in the Washington Square Arch and ascended to the summit. They dangled Chinese lanterns and red balloons, fired off toy cap pistols, and galivanted until dawn, whereupon, with Bohemian [...]
I could never get over the thrill of walking into the Church of the Heavenly Rest through the side door on East 90th Street. The limestone turrets and stained-glass windows, reminiscent of Notre Dame, inspired a sense of awe It always took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim light and to get my bearings in [...]
When I was a teenager, during the second half of the 1970s, I pretty much lived in Washington Square Park during the summer. I sometimes joke that in some ways I was raised there. In some ways that is not so funny. Yippies, Jesus Freaks, drug addicts, tourists, and street performers were my friends and neighbors. My actual friends were [...]
The black and white world has enchanted me since I was little. Those films are like fever dreams, so divorced from reality. And film noir is the most fevered dream of all – doomed men and women, gangsters, con-men and dupes, all trapped, all lost, all hopeless. It is hard to imagine these desperate characters and the actors and actresses [...]
Avant Gardener/Brooklyn Mirage I didn’t get invited to go to Fire Island this year, which makes me feel like a gay pariah. I’m painfully aware of this after watching the movie, Fire Island. I loved it, but it reinforced my feeling that I lacked a queer community, and notably, one with a summer share in the Pines. My best friend [...]
Mid-morning, I set out for a short walk—ten blocks, twice a day, prescribed for my aging heart and arthritic body. I clear the lobby and make my entrance on to 106th Street. I’m ready to start my hike to health, ready to laugh—or at least snicker—in the face of mortality. I take my first step, then pause, thinking, why push [...]
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