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All night Foxy Kropotkin had thrown the covers on and off. It had been hours since she told Virginia to get her an orange soda. She thought to herself, Larry’s not cold yet three days—but I still have the credit card. In an instant she was out of bed. She pulled her coat over her muumuu, went out the door, [...]
9/3/05 7:51 PM Whenever I feel melancholy I like to find the nearest basketball court and play until I sweat and my knees buckle. I have kept up this habit for about three years, during which I have lived in five neighborhoods, playing in about as many courts. I played on a strip of black tar in Bushwick that lay [...]
If all goes according to plan, in three weeks I will run the New York Marathon. For most people, training for a marathon is empowering. It gives them a feeling of accomplishment and a sense of self-worth. For me, it has been one lesson after another in humility. At five am one morning this past August, I set out on [...]
For six years I worked as a trainer and gym floor manager at the Vertical Club. What Studio 54 was to 1970s New York, the Vertical Club (VC) was to 1980s New York. A warehouse-sized health club, complete with neon lights and blaring dance music, it was where the Big Apple's social elite came to sweat, strain, moan, groan, and [...]
"The Case Of The Missing Pasta" I tried improving my second grade special education students' skills at addition by having them count pasta. I had them line up the brown and white rigatoni into two groups. Then all they had to do was add them. It worked well - my students were learning while enjoying what they were doing. Then [...]
There was a while when it seemed like every year New York played host to a parade of hand-painted fiberglass animals. The cows were the most famous. The German shepherds were a lot less famous and they disappeared from the streets pretty quick. But, here and there, you'll still see one, sitting guard outside the entrance to a hospital or [...]
It was a beautiful November afternoon. I was relaxing in my house located in Wagner Projects, when I realized that I had enough money saved up to buy the leather jacket I wanted. So I went in my sneaker box, where I had $500 saved and went to a store called Jan’s. Jan’s is located on 122nd and 3rd Avenue [...]
I came to Washington Park because I did not know where to go. Riding in a cab with my friend John, on his way to study at the NYU library, provided me with a sure and fast way out of his apartment. This morning, a fight had been close to breaking out between the two of us, and the sound [...]
Although I moved to New York in 1994 with Manhattan in mind, I quickly became fascinated with the city’s boroughs. On weekends I'd take the subway to Coney Island, Brooklyn, Astoria, Queens, or the Bronx Zoo to see the other parts of my new home. Staten Island, however, remained elusive. In my early days, I often took the Staten Island [...]
i'm getting fat. the thing is, i i'm a dominatrix. so i really can't. it's not that i'm in the habit of over indulging. my sister just got back from switzerland. so i'm eating her presents. that's p-r-e-s-e-n-t-s, not presence. i know you're going to think everything i say is about sex. that's what happens when you're a dominatrix. this [...]
Earlier that afternoon I had come back from a trip to visit my Dad in the Midwest. I braced myself for the crush of people as always, but as I left the gate at LaGuardia I immediately noticed that something felt different this time. First in the airport, then on the bus, and finally on Broadway no one seemed to [...]
Hello. Thank you for tuning into “The 1st Anniversary of the 2004 Republican National Convention.” Happy Birthday, Mr. President, indeed. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is proud to present twelve stories recounting the way that the Republican National Convention reshaped New York City, articulated from a wide variety of perspectives and in a wide variety of voices. Click here to enter the [...]
(Following is an excerpt from “Chapter 15: Prelude to Battle” of "Now is Not a Good Time," a book-in-progress about (among other things) progressive patriotism, the antiwar movement during the first term of the Bush administration, and one woman’s attempt to learn to love her country and its people—if not its government—in complicated and troubling times. The setting is a [...]
On the far Northern side of a vast concrete enclosure, we had been divided up into two parallel rows at either side of a narrow barricaded space and Jason, our Arresting Officer, stood between the two rows talking about sports, TV, and how he was looking forward to his retirement. Jason was a 23 year old beat cop from Staten [...]
Last August, I lived with my ex-boyfriend in my ex-neighborhood of Brooklyn, neither of which could I find my way around. Coming back from the city late one night -- I remember it being very hot and damp out -- I exited the G's Metropolitan stop around 2 a.m. and halted at the top of the steps, utterly baffled. I [...]
The revered pugilist/philosopher Iron Mike Tyson once mused: "Everyone has a plan until they get hit." And get hit everyone will. Case in point: Many of the Anybody-But-Bush (ABB) protesters who took to the streets of the Big Apple during the Republican National Convention in August 2004. I don't just mean blows suffered at the hands of an over-eager policeman; [...]
I expected to lose some dignity, I just didn't expect to lose it on the convention floor. The month of August the New York party business is in a coma--waitstaff and chefs either decamp to the Hamptons where there is plenty of work or vacation themselves. But last summer there were so many parties in town that the waitstaff could [...]
I work in the New York Public Library in the Wertheim Study. Tuesday, August 29th, 2004 I decided to work there and show up at the demonstration against the Republican National Convention to meet at the front steps of the library. Not only did we opposed the war in Iraq, as an expression of an attempt at submission, the Republicans [...]
>From: "LL Smooth J" >To: Subject: RNC Diary: Day One >Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 04:59:29 +0000 > Hello Friends. Pat Flynn threw down the gauntlet with his Boston DNC diary, and no one's picked it up just yet: Whatever, No Problem! I can do it! Day One of the RNC was quieter than expected, and besides I had to [...]
Take one large city already threatened into a constant state of low-level nervous breakdown with terrorism jitters and a rockpile of an economy. Scare away a large percentage of the population by placing a Republican Convention in the city’s center. Pour in 5,000 delegates, half a million protesters, seven billion journalists and a concentration of cops greater than the entire [...]
One morning last August, a week before the Republican National Convention, I took a cab to my studio in the Film Center Building on 45th and 9th. My cabdriver was wearing a natty chauffeur’s uniform, cap and all. Once we got going, he smiled at me in the rearview mirror and said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m all dressed [...]
Senator Wellstone: I will not go on about the curious timing of your death. People are very impatient with conspiracy theories these days, even when past theories have revealed conspiracies. Still, I read with weary cynicism that you spoke to a meeting of war veterans in Willmar, Minnesota in October 2002 and told them that Dick Cheney said to you, [...]
I had that week off from work. I hadn’t yet taken a summer vacation and figured that, like thousands of other New Yorkers, I would get the hell out of the city during that time. I’d walk in the August 29th protest march, make my sentiments known, and then hit the road. But as things turned out, I couldn’t leave. [...]
I saw your ad for RNC experiences and thought I'd share mine with you. My wife and I participated daily in protests against the RNC and our organizing efforts were filmed by a documentary film crew from Spain's CANAL+ network. When we first heard the Republicans were holding their convention in NYC, we were outraged. It was yet another example [...]
Have you ever had a great experience or adventure and you want to share it with every one you know, but you just don't know where to begin? Well, that seems to be my particular problem right now. I've been staring at my laptop for at least an hour and I still can't seem to figure out where to start. [...]
The model boat pond in Central Park is often the scene of fierce competition, but on a recent sunny afternoon I witnessed a real life-or-death struggle. A yellow retriever named Sam bounded away from his owners and plunged into the water to chase the pond’s resident ducks. At first only a few passersby noticed what was going on, but the [...]
My first after-school job was delivering the long-defunct Long Island Press but I really entered the working world when, at the age of seventeen, I started as a temporary summer worker at Gimbel's department store (my Dad knew someone there...lucky me). I eased my way into the good graces of the bosses until I got into the union. Ultimately, I [...]
It happened on an unseasonably mild February night around 9:30 between 23rd and Christopher Streets on the No. 1 train: I fell in love all over again on the New York City subway. I was on my way home from seeing a movie alone in Times Square, a depressing Oscar-nominated flick about a woman stuck in a vicious cycle of [...]
It had been quite a long time since I’d last visited the Anthology Film Archives, that temple of avant-garde and everything cinema in the East Village. Last night, however, I lost my own personal battle with the heat and decided, fatigued and irritated, that a movie in the dark and cool of a film theater would be just the thing [...]
12:15: Heading downtown in car for two o'clock appointment with lawyer. Half-listening to Leonard Lopate on WNYC. Callers telling stories of bizarre summonses for unfair parking tickets. Mentally pat self on back for six months ticket-free. Cop calls in. Defensive. Won't give name. Claims cops have no ticket "quotas" to meet, just "production goals." Claims he's "just following orders." Sounds [...]
I go in the afternoon, before the hordes set in and children are let out from school. Your Fairway, my speedway, basket in hand, I dash past soft, yielding cheese;/crisp baguettes and spears of tender green, fast as I can. Racing through the crowded market, I avoid the stew of white-haired ladies with heavily laden carts/ and elbows, pointy and [...]
I stink. It’s not a good stink, musky, that hints of a hard workout but doesn’t offend. I’m offensive. I’ve been in New York for a month-and-a-half. I still haven’t done laundry. The one suitcase I brought held seven shirts, six pairs of boxers, four pairs of pants (one pair only for occasions), two pairs of shorts, and three pairs [...]
Emil Schupp always sat on the same stool at the end of the counter in Artie's Luncheonette at 223 West 14th Street. Artie was my father and he let me help out at the grill one summer. Every morning, same time, same stool, same toast and tea and tomato juice, Emil sat there for exactly an hour, calculating bowling averages. [...]
For 10 years I lived in New York City in the House of Carpati. Moving to New York after college was an ideal next step for a person who wanted to be a magazine editor, so that’s what I did. After spending the summer post-grad as a nanny in Scarsdale, and then six weeks house sitting for friends of the [...]
I’m in the McDonald’s on Broadway and 82nd one morning, walking towards the counter, about to order a Sausage McMuffin with Egg: a special breakfast vice that I allow myself in exchange for having given up cigarettes, which makes two breakfast vices now that I’ve started smoking again. Floating in a compact mirror above a table, turning pink to red [...]
I hadn't planned on adopting a piano. Long ago I sold my family piano to a neighbor; I rarely touched it and like most New Yorkers, we needed the space. Young and eager for cash, I never predicted I'd later feel guilty. Besides, a piano tuner called my spinet, whose keys my mother's and brother's fingers had caressed, a cheese [...]
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