‘Hey! I don’t do this for fun, you know!’

I am often amazed at the resourcefulness of New Yorkers. Just look around and you can’t help but be impressed by how they can turn almost any activity — playing bongos in the subway, playing Sponge Bob Squarepants in Times Square — into a money-making proposition.

Now that Autumn has arrived, and theatre season is back in full swing, I was reminded of a terrific example of New Yorker make-a-buck-out-of-anything ingenuity. And, since it’s Monday, it’s a perfect time to tell you the story — and also to tell you about the Metropolitan Diary.

It’s special feature that appears in the Times every Monday, where readers send in anecdotes about something that happened to them — or that they observed happening to someone else — here in New York. The anecdotes can be sweet, or sad, or funny. Personally, I’m partial to the funny ones.

If your anecdote is selected, it gets printed. In the Olden Days, you used to get a New York Times mug if your story got printed. These days, everyone’s feeling the pinch, even the New York Times. So you just get the honor of having your story printed. Which is still pretty cool.

Here’s an example (one of mine, natch), printed on Monday, Jan. 1, 2007:

Dear Diary: Continue reading