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 At some unidentifiable point, after I lived in New York City a long while, I started talking about leaving. I would say, if it weren’t so cold in Wisconsin in the winter, I would have already moved back to Milwaukee.
The sore point and source of my complaints always boils down to the stupidly high cost of living in Manhattan—from housing to groceries to taxes to well, everything.
But when I step outside my apartment in the summer and stroll by the North Cove and the World Financial Center plaza, I know I live in the best place in the world. I think how, if I woke up in a foreign city and found this view, this cove, this plaza outside my hotel window, I would be satisfied that I had landed a great vacation spot.
Nothing puts the unpleasantness of cost-of-living conversations behind me better than the Frank O’Hara quote embedded in the metal fencing alongside the cove:
“One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. —Frank O’Hara
There is another famous quote, by John Lennon I believe, in which he says, everyone always talks about leaving New York, but no one ever really does. That isn’t true; I know a lot of people who have left New York, some with eventual regret and some none at all.
But I fall into the category of people Lennon is talking about. I won’t leave New York City. Unless I can’t afford it anymore.
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 Attitudes about race from both sides of the fence expose themselves in Race, David Mamet’s play at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway.
The structure is simple: a single set with four characters and an unseen fifth character, a red-sequined dress that the audience only sees on the cover of their Playbill.
The action takes place in an austere, book-lined room in a law firm. The law partners, one black, one white, played by Dennis Haysbert and Eddie Izzard, are deciding whether to take the case of Charles Strickland (Richard Thomas), a rich, white man accused of raping a black woman in a hotel room.
The lawyers’ approach is rational: can they win? What isn’t the client telling? Why did he dismiss his first lawyer? Or did the first lawyer dismiss him? Then back to the question, can they win?
The young and pretty junior lawyer who witnesses their debate interferes in the action making a seemingly novice mistake. Susan’s actions take the play from the surface racial questions to unmasking the deep prejudices within all four characters.
Afton Williamson gives a powerful performance as Susan, the role originated by Kerry Washington. The demure Susan of Act 1 morphs into an angry, vengeful, yet naive, character at the play’s end.
Henry Brown (Dennis Haysbert), is a world-weary realist yet commands the stage in a way his partner should have but couldn’t. Partner Jack Lawson (Eddie Izzard of whom I am a big fan), performed well as the hyper, type-A, star lawyer but didn’t have the presence of the other three actors.
Finally, Richard Thomas (Charles Strickland) will forever be John-Boy Walton to me and I apologize to Mr. Thomas for that. But John-Boy has made good on Broadway and doesn’t give away his guilt or innocence.
Like all Mamet’s work, the play is powerful and lingers in your mind long after the curtain has gone down.
 The Cherry Blossom Blink and you miss them.
Cherry blossoms bloom for only a week, but that week bestows upon me a glorious view from my apartment window in Battery Park City.
Americans associate cherry blossoms with Washington DC and the annual Cherry Blossom Festival at the Tidal Basin.
Most of the thousands of cherry blossoms the Japanese gave the United States in 1912 were planted in DC.You also can find cherry blossoms in several other areas of the United States, including San Diego, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. And some ended up here in New York, and a few outside my window.
But this 18th floor window isn’t the first to afford me a view of cherry blossoms. Growing up on an army base in Japan, I could see a single cherry blossom tree from my window. The small tree didn’t hide the chain-link fence and the gravel field beyond, a field of broken tanks, row after row of tanks waiting for repair. Continue reading Sakura (Cherry Blossoms) Bloom
 Met friends at The Crosby Bar for brunch Sunday.
Checked out the online reviews first, of course. Every reviewer ranted about the cocktail prices that apparently go boldly where no others dare to go. Some just raised an eyebrow and some ranted on. They are right; starting at $18, cocktails at the bar-restaurant in the new Crosby Hotel will turn Joe Six Pack into Joe One Tap.
Fortunately for us, G. and I are on a cocktail-hiatus but we still approached with trepidation. I picture crowds lined up outside, squeezing in to wait for their table to be called, and oh the noise, said the Grinch. As happens so often, I was wrong.
G. and I arrived first, so we have time to look around. The spacious room is half empty. The hostess is polite and doesn’t make us wait until our whole party arrived to be seated.
The decor cannot be labeled; it’s retro, it’s modern, it’s homey but not cluttered. I am so tired of the minimalist gray and black decor that screams I am trendy. Candy-colored fabric covers the booths in front, earth-tone fabric lines the back area. A Fifties-style cluster of neon-colored lamps hang from the middle of the room, but the lamps against the walls are old-fashioned wrought-iron.
The ladies room is worth a visit, even for aesthetic reasons. Two winding floors down, the restroom is larger than some studio apartments, with a pink chairs and marble walls. Two little girls with their mom dart from one thing to another, awestruck at the pink chairs and other pink accents among the gray marble.
The food? Okay. Pretty good, even. Worth the price? No, but it’s great to spend a relaxing couple of hours with good friends in a great atmosphere. The Crosby Bar may draw Beautiful People, but the comfortable atmosphere allowed no Beautiful-Person chill to enter the air.
I saw the play The Diary of a Teenage Girl Sunday night. The teenager, Minnie, has a lot to tell dear diary—far more than the typical teenager. That is, I hope she has far more material than the typical teenager. After sleeping with her mother’s boyfriend, what worse choices could she make? Quite a few, it turns out.
Minnie dives into the seedy side of 1976 San Francisco with confused exuberance. She lacks boundaries; her mother, just an old teenager herself, lives to party. In her own way, mom worries about Minnie, but not enough to take action.
Based on the graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, the play’s tagline is “a story of female sexuality and unabashed optimism”. I don’t know about unabashed optimism, but Minnie’s optimism is certainly rebounds time after time.
The play, staged at the Three Legged Dog, an ultra-modern space in Tribeca, literally happens all around you. The audience sits on carpeted steps and leans back on green cushions in the bowl-shaped theater. Center stage is only one step down from where I sat. At times, the actors performed only inches away from me. The five-actor team used the raised perimeter of the room and the multiple entrances to create a surreal effect.
The warm brown theater “walls” with painted cream-colored arrows and flowers were the screen for the video and images that played through most of the show. Video appearing on all four walls added to the sense of being inside cartoon pages. Videos of the actors made you feel like you were seeing their home movies. The images, sometimes a pencil drawing, sometimes abstractions like water, added to the sense of a diary.
The play is engrossing and well worth seeing. Even if you were a different kind of kid, this show will take you back to those wonderful, horrible years of being a teenager.
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