Miscellaneous Quotage: And We Don’t Care About the Young Folks

While casually observing the hipsters outside Pianos on the Lower East Side with my friend Deb:

“It’s like Romper Room…with booze!”

Get Me Through Grey Gardens Tonight

This evening, for the first time in years, I partook in a longstanding New York tradition — I “second-acted” a Broadway show. Not just any show, mind you, but Grey Gardens. I’d seen it in its off-Broadway incarnation, but with news that it would shutter at the end of this month, I wanted, nay, needed to see it again. Plus, GG is the perfect show to second act– while the first half is an ingenious imagining of the Beales’ younger days, the second draws largely from the cult documentary, with Big Edie and Little Edie wallowing in the squalor of Grey Gardens, picking through the refuse of their lives in their inimitable, iconoclastic style.

I was a tad nervous as I approached the Walter Kerr on 48th street and knew if I were to pull of the caper I’d need to be, to borrow a word from Little Edie, staunch. I had checked Playbill.com earlier in the day and saw that the show had been playing to about 94% capacity, but there were still tickets available on the Telecharge website so surely there’d be one or two still unoccupied, especially in the balcony.

I arrived shortly after nine and loitered across the street from the theater. By 9:11, the doors had opened and the audience came trickling out. I crossed the street, lit a cigarette, and mingled with the masses, and even bought two of the souvenir buttons from the merch stand on set up on the sidewalk. I lingered on the pavement, drawing out my cigarette, until what I calculated was about a few minutes until intermission would end. You don’t want to go into the theater too early, then you’re left wandering around and are more likely to arouse suspicion.

I made my way to the mezzanine, surreptitiously collecting a Playbill, a convenient prop to hold and to establish my legitimacy. The mezzanine was crowded, and almost every seat was filled, with more people milling around. It didn’t look promising. I climbed the next flight of stairs to the balcony.

The nosebleed seats in the balcony were almost full as well, but there were three that looked promisingly empty. I saw a guy on his cell phone, pacing back and forth, and took that as a cue to also take out my phone, to “check the time” or a “text message,” any number of excuses just hovering on my lips should someone ask what I was doing. I had my eye on three seats, one was the aisle seat on the last row of the middle section, the others were a pair at the front of the balcony, on house right. I gravitated towards the pair, and as I did I saw a familiar figure bound up the stairs, look around, then seeing that this area was almost full, feign an excuse in his head to go back downstairs. It was Shulman! Shulman was a portly theatre-lover I used to work with, and as I watched his balding pate descend the stairs I knew he was trying to pull a second-act swindle as well.

I took a seat in the first row, on the aisle, as the orchestra began the opening strains of the second act. I was in the clear. At least, until a tardy couple arrived and informed me that I had taken one of their two seats. I quietly surrendered my location and went to claim the one I’d spied earlier, the center section/last row/aisle seat, but when I got there I found it was occupied by none other than…Shulman! Damn! He’d bested me.

I crept back downstairs, wondering If I should just try to leave, feign illness to the usher guarding the door. I reached the orchestra and saw an empty place in the standing room section. I sidled up to the railing and took the spot, ready to say, should anyone ask, that I had a seat upstairs, but wanted to be closer. Luckily, no one questioned, and I was able to take in Christine Ebersole’s Tony-winning performance from the back of the house–a much better vantage point than the one occupied by Shulman. Save for the fact that he got to sit on his plump posterior for the hour-plus second act. Still, as Elbert Hubbard said, “Victory; a matter of staying power.” And as John Heilpern noted, “[S]tanding room can be the best seat in the house. The electricity that comes from a happy audience actually rolls down to the stage from the back of the house.” And so it was, and so it did. I did feel like I had the best seat in the house. Even if I were standing.

Related: Here’s Ebersole, sans Edie drag, singing the song “Around the World” from the musical.

Summer’s Here and the Time Is Right

Ah, the solstice arrived, summer’s officially here, and though I didn’t celebrate by doing yoga in Times Square or dancing naked in the woods eating pomegranate seeds, I will be going to the beach for a few days to indulge in sun and booze. Hey, you have your way of welcoming the summer, I have mine.

Also, summer is the time for dancing, in the street as it were, and I can’t stop watching this much-derided cover of the Martha and the Vandellas song by Messrs. Jagger and Bowie.

Something tells me it’s not the first time ol’ Mick and David pranced around the streets after dark, singing Motown to each other while flinging more jazz hands than chorus boys in a high school production of Chicago. But that’s just a hunch.

Also, they say it doesn’t matter what you wear, but really, someone should have given those outfits a thumbs down. All you 80’s enthusiasts out there, do you really want to bring this craziness back? Think about it.

I Remember You Well In The Chelsea Hotel

Sad, but not terribly surprising, news on the increasingly greedy New York real estate front: a new management company has wrestled control of the storied Chelsea Hotel in a plan to generate obscene revenue from the landmark, either by (potentially) gutting it and turning it into condos, or renovating it as a luxury boutique hotel. To quote another Leonard Cohen song, “that’s how it goes/and everybody knows”…at least in the city nowadays.

What’s truly unnerving is the displacement of manager Stanley Bard, ousted by the board on his 73rd birthday. According to the Hotel Chelsea Blog, Bard has managed the property since 1957, when he took over from his father, making the hallowed haunt a home for artists like Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and on and on, ensuring that the Chelsea was a bohemian mecca, a refuge for like-minded kooks and musicians, authors and drunkards, famous or not.

Of course, the news has sparked an outpouring of grief and lamenting in the comment section of the blog. One commenter referred to the Edgar Lee Masters Poem, “The Hotel Chelsea,” which seems eerily prescient.

Anita! Soon this Chelsea Hotel
Will vanish before the city’s merchant greed,
Wreckers will wreck it, and in its stead
More lofty walls will swell
This old street’s populace. Then who will know
About its ancient grandeur, marble stairs,
Its paintings, onyx-mantels, courts, the heirs
Of a time now long ago?

(Full text here.)

And while the real estate bubble will burst (someday, maybe, hopefully) the damage will already be done. I’d hate to think people will forget the very reason that the Chelsea had any meaning in the first place, reduced to a hot destination for the hotels.com set.

“Why are we staying here again?”

“Who knows, I think a bunch of artists used to live here. But look, we get wi-fi and hot stone massages.”

For me, at least, the Chelsea was more than a trendy zip code, it was a destination, a touchstone when I moved to the city. To know I could walk by, walk into, even stay in, the same hotel that housed everyone from Dylan Thomas and Thomas Wolfe to William S. Burroughs, and served as a point of inspiration for everyone from Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol to Leonard Cohen, makes it more than just a location. It’s a haven. But then, I’m a sentimentalist. I’m a romantic.

If it were just the Chelsea, I may be able to grudgingly accept fate. But it’s not. It’s the Plaza. It’s any location that can be redone, remodeled, remade into some facsimile of its former glory, trading on a name and a past in the name of the almighty dollar.

A gutted Chelsea hotel, remade and rebranded, may turn a hefty profit. But it’s not likely to inspire anyone to create any lasting work of art. I guess it’s a matter of what you value more, artistic heights or the bottom line.

 

 

This Bed Is On Fire

The brazen alarm woke me from sleep. Only it wasn’t my alarm clock, I realized groggily, it was the fire alarm. I rolled over and groaned. They were either testing the system in my building, or it was malfunctioning, both occurred with annoying frequency. Then came the announcement over the loudspeaker, as muddled as a conductor on the “A” train. Again, I tried to ignore and focus on sleep. They were probably just informing us it was test, I rationalized. The alarm, however, kept going. Then I heard raised voices, and banging down the hall. There was a sharp thwack at my door and I bolted out of bed. I opened it to see one of the maintenance workers, behind him the hallway was filling with black smoke. “Fire, let’s go,” he said and moved down the hall. I released the handle, letting the door slam shut, and stood mute for a second. Then the adrenaline kicked in and I did a little panic dance. Wallet, pants, wallet, pants, these were the things I needed before I could evacuate. I just couldn’t get my brain coordinated with my body to locate them fast enough. I threw on last night’s jeans, found my wallet on the bookcase, and slid my feet into my sneakers. I caught sight of the clock–8:55AM.

There was a second thwack on the door and this time I was ready. I followed an orderly stream of tenants down the hall, through the smoke, my hand over my mouth. It smelled like a campfire. It was clear to me it had started on my floor. I went down the fire escape and back into the building, onto the mezzanine, and finally into the lobby. I was lucky that I was only on the second floor.

The security guards and maintenance staff were all donning neon-orange mesh vests, corralling the tenants on the far side of the lobby, then finally onto the street in front of the building. Four firetrucks arrived, the firemen entering, asking where the stand pipe was, and dragging a length of hose up the stairwell to the second floor.

I stood on the street, dazed, shivering. It was cold for a June morning. As I milled around, trying to see what was happening, I asked myself why I’d never bothered getting renter’s insurance? Also, who was the cute neighbor I’d never noticed before? These were the thoughts I was having in the midst of what might be a crisis.

I called Julia, my friend and go-to emergency contact, to appraise her of the situation. Also, I just might need a place to crash. “Did you grab your favorite thing?” she asked. What?!! “No, I grabbed my wallet and my pants,” I said. Call me a pragmatist, but should my entire apartment, and all the possessions within, be incinerated, I’d rather have my ID and credit cards than my signed copy of The Year Of Magical Thinking or a framed photo. Besides, I didn’t want to be the one caught by some news photographer, huddled on the street shoeless and in my boxers, clutching the one possession I’d managed to save from the blaze. Wallet and pants, Julia, wallet and pants, that’s what you should grab. Unless of course it’s some sort of apocalypse scenario, where money is rendered worthless, then it’s best to grab a weapon and some beef jerky and pray you can hold out when the mutants come.

At this point, no one knew why it started or how soon, or even if, we’d be let back in, so in went into the deli next door to have a coffee and wait. In less than an hour, the firemen were exiting and and we were able to go back inside. The janitor was mopping up the lake of water in the stairwell. I got back to the second floor to find the hall fairly soaked, the institutional green paint smeared with black near the apartment where the fire had started. Luckily, it hadn’t spread down to my place. The hallway stank. I would have loved to have gone back to bed, but I was too wired. I double-checked that everything was indeed fine in my apartment then went back outside. I needed fresh air and and time to decompress.

I called my mother from Bryant Park to tell her what happened. “Did you have a chance to grab your favorite thing?” she asked. Again with the thing. “No,” I said emphatically, “I grabbed my pants and wallet.” “I bet you took your cigarettes didn’t you?” she asked. “No.” “You didn’t start it did you,” she joked. “Jesus, no.”

I found out later that night that it was indeed a cigarette that had started the fire. I’d never passed out with a lit cigarette burning, or left one unattended, but I made a note to be more careful. And to make sure I left my wallet and pants close to the door.