Big-City Stories

The Truly Ugly Chair

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‘Left in the street, unwanted and alone’

The news that The Child had scored her very own First Apartment (with a roommate, but still) sent me down Ugly Furniture Memory Lane. Visions of the bookshelf-made-with-planks-and-bricks and the headboard-fashioned-of-an-old-quilt-thrown-over-a-piece-of-plywood flashed before my eyes.

Oh, and let’s not forget the black fake-leather sleeper sofa that was so heavy it splintered the railing while being hoisted over the balcony so it could help furnish my own First Apartment — a $105/month fourth-floor walkup on the dodgy end of the loftily-named Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. My landlord was not amused.

I owed my collection of stuff to sit on, sleep on, and in which to store things to my Mom, various thrift shops, and certain absconded boyfriends. And I was grateful. Well, maybe not to the absconded boyfriends.

When you’re in your twenties, ‘furniture’ does not occupy a top spot in your priorities. But there does come a point when you look around and think: Continue reading

Small towns, Big City

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‘Where I’m from is a lot like where I am’

Ah, hiking in the Catskills. A great way to get away from the City over Columbus Day Weekend. Also a great way to set the mind to wandering (along with the feet) and think about random stuff like why people like me and my friend Phyllis (both from teensy towns) tend to feel well, at home, here in Big Ole New York. If you feel one of my theories coming on, you would be right.

Get ready for my ‘New York is Really a Bunch of Small Towns Smooshed Together’ theory.

First, a bit about my home town. Which is Carlyle, Illinois. That is a recent (you can tell by the cars, if nothing else) picture of it at the top of this post. Carlyle is smack dab in the middle of Southern Illinois — nope, not anywhere near Chicago. ‘Our’ Big City (where you’d go for baseball games, the zoo, or to buy your wedding dress) was St. Louis. Which was about 50 miles due west of us.

Quick note: if you ask someone from Chicago where they are from, they will say ‘Chicago’; if you ask me the same question and I say ‘Illinois’, it means I am not from Chicago. Otherwise, trust me, I would say so.

Okay. Back to Carlyle. If you’d like to delve into the town and its demographics (including, interestingly enough, the number of sex offenders who live there), Continue reading

The Cat Is The Hat

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‘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

Hello, Kitty

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‘It’s Art if I say it’s Art’

Okay, I said I wasn’t going to publish a new post till Monday. But I just saw the Jeff Koons Retrospective at the Whitney Museum (details here). And, well, I just can’t help myself. I simply must ‘share’. For one thing, you just might want to go see it. Not only is it ending soon, it’s also the last show that’ll be held in the ‘old’ Whitney — before it pulls up stakes and decamps downtown, where it seems everything cool in New York is heading (oops, excuse me, Brooklyn).

Here, to tantalize you, are some of the pieces you’ll see if you go:

There’s tons more. Like that ceramic sculpture of Michael Jackson with his monkey. And some racy stuff featuring Jeff himself with his then-wife, the porn-star-member-of-the-Italian-parliament Cicciolina. Thank goodness this is a family blog.

You notice that I am not even attempting to play Art Critic here. I’m pretty much in the camp of Art being whatever you think it is. The Dude, for example, thinks something is Art if Continue reading

Horowitz plays the bedroom

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‘Midwestern Girls have all the luck’

When I arrived in New York, fresh from the Midwest and eager to conquer the world of advertising, I faced a most formidable challenge. No, it wasn’t rising to the high expectations of my new employers at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. It was finding an apartment.

This was back about the time that the earth’s crust was cooling. But then, as now, finding an apartment that one could both abide and afford was a most daunting task.

I can’t remember the precise formula (remember, the earth had just cooled at this point), but it had something to do with rent being a certain percentage of your take-home pay. At any rate, this magic figure fixed firmly in my head, I combed the classifieds.

Most of the listings I could afford sounded dreary and dungeon-like. And those were the good ones. But there among the Continue reading