New

I know it’s awful to say but the smell of the subway (the regular smell, not the smell of the subway when it’s 115 degrees) was immediately soothing. Immediately I knew where I was, who I was, and what I was about: The City.

I walked into the Drama Book Store in Times Square, and the woman behind the counter said, “I love your dress,” and someone loving your dress in a fashion capital of the world feels especially good.

The walls were covered with old theater posters, and the space was full of both plays, and people who were nerding out on theater shit. That also told me who I was (someone who’s seen about 30 shows on Broadway), and what I was about (caring way more about art than the man on the street).

In line at TKTS, we end up chatting with a woman who is getting tickets for herself and her granddaughter. “She didn’t like ‘Music Man,’ she thought it was too old-fashioned,” she said, and my party and I accepted that the granddaughter had limitations.

The city kicked our ass the first evening: the best piano bar on earth was crowded, and the pianist made terrible choices. Then the 1 train was completely shut down. It was 2 am. None of us were young enough to be reasonably out at such an hour.

We saw “Camelot” at Lincoln Center. The book was a complete mess. The sort-of villain was a female scientist (?) who used the word “digit” instead of “number.” I know. It was a hodgepodge of modernizing the characters, writing about work relationships and gender in ways that didn’t really work, and using contemporary language that upset me (like “digit,” which with Sorkin’s precision of language just ate at me as an ugly, boldly contemporary word). None of this mattered, really, because we got to see Phillipa Sousa perform, and she was so effortless, so powerful, so clear in her every movement. She was way better than the material.

(I’m also struggling with missing Gueneviere sing “Genevieve, St. Genevieve, it’s Gunevire, remember me?”)

The rest of the cast were similarly gifted. I was less enchanted by the set design and costumes, but there’s no accounting for taste.

Mostly I wanted to hear the tunes sung live with an orchestra, especially “How To Handle A Woman,” “Then You May Take Me To the Fair,” “If Ever I Would Leave You.” And I wanted to bark laugh at “Fie on Goodness,” which is funny shit.

I met with some old friends, who were able to prove to my mind that I actually did live in NYC, and functioned there. It seems like a dream I had.

Alone, I went up to the cathedral of St. John the Divine. The last few years have been brutal, spiritually speaking, and I was relieved to feel the same peace and power in that space. I had my sacred Hungarian coffee and had to branch out with a new pastry because they didn’t have chocolate leaf cookies. The ladies who worked there were still brusque and efficient. The menu, still handwritten.

My sister and I hit one of my remaining Famous New York Bars, the King Cole. We ordered $30 cocktails, gazed upon the Maxfield Parish work, and chatted a long while with a woman who was in the diplomatic field. She ordered a martini with a separate cup of ice, and she wore a leopard print top, very classy, and I knew she was leading the way into my 50s and 60s. We shared our grief about the political situation, the feminist situation. She loved on me as a public school teacher. We swapped book recommendations. She told us about meeting Jane Fonda (friendly and passionate) and Katherine Graham (not friendly at all).

Tipsy, we headed for the Roosevelt Island tramway. This was good. The tram makes me nervous, sober.

From the island, we hopped on a ferry and bopped back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan, going south. The weather was “Truman Show” perfect, the lights of the city so beautiful it was hard to believe it was all real.

People asked me for directions on the subway.

I explored the Whitney again, finding myself wildly intolerant of depressing art. The stuff about climate change made me want to stab myself.

But they had plenty of interesting bits, including a room with glass viruses hung from the ceiling, each one containing someone’s personal effects. I immediately knew it was about covid, but actually it was about unemployment.

I paid homage to Calder’s circus, something that has brought me joy many times, running into it at the Whitney.

What I’ve always told people is, New York will not disappoint you. Even at 2 am when the 1 train isn’t running and there are no cabs, NYC is my beloved. Certain of my appetites can’t be satisfied anywhere else. And I left full.