NYC EOY 2025 (part one)

Felix Empanadas
(Do you know this trio?
Would like to credit them.)

Since Covid, my wife and I have been making a point of visiting NYC at least once a year. It’s a city that holds so many important memories for both of us; primarily hers, she lived there for seven years. But Manhattan has changed so much since the 1990s, and we have spent a great deal of time there since, together and apart.

Toni finds the most amazing places to stay, this time it was the Historic Blue Moon Hotel on the LES, right across the street from the Tenement Museum. We checked in late on Saturday evening, and walked about the neighborhood to find necessaries (beer, wine, pain reliever).

Yes, it was Saturday night and yes, it was New York City, and yet I was surprised by the sheer density of clubs for which young people would stand in line in the freezing cold to access. As a trio of bright young things in short shirts passed us on the sludgy sidewalk, one observed, “I can’t feel my knees.”

Russ & Daughters Cafe

We passed a walkdown jazz club, we knew it was a jazz club because there was a sandwich board outside reading “Live Jazz” and though we were on a drug store mission we were both like, “Maybe? Maybe some jazz?” So when further down the street we noticed and then did a double-take on a trio wedged into one corner of a small empanada emporium, and were then waved in by a seated patron, we were primed to engage.

By then it was nearly midnight, we sat for a few numbers, an entertaining ensemble that warmed my bones and made the walk back to the hotel much more jolly. We promised each other to return for lunch before our time was through.

Sunday morning we took breakfast at Russ & Daughters Cafe and then made our first visit to the Tenement Museum, an institution which is a testament to everything the current administration hates and fears, a monument to the immigrant experience in America and to the working class in general.

The Tenement Museum

The Tenement Museum was founded in the late 1980s by two women, Ruth J. Abram and Anita Jacobson. 97 Orchard Street (later, 103 Orchard was also acquired) was built during the Slaveholder Rebellion (1861-65) in the style which had become prevalent, with four street front business spaces and four stories of apartments above, featuring a total of twenty apartments built specifically to accommodate the exploding immigrant population.

For the museum, many of the spaces have been restored to a state they may have appeared in when they were home to a variety of first generation Americans. Our first tour, Tenement Women: 1902, was to the home to the Levine family, when learned a great deal about the garment business, and of the Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902 for which the Jewish women of the Lower East Side united to mount a successful (if often violent) protest against a sudden rise in the price of beef.

Now a National Historic Site, 97 Orchard Street was required to maintain a number of spaces in the condition they were found at the time of their designation. As the landlord had decided in 1935 that bringing the residential spaces up to newly revised safety codes was no longer cost-effective, he chose rather to leave the apartments unoccupied and to only let the storefronts. You can imagine what state the apartments were in after fifty years of neglect.

It was just his kind of space – ceiling buckling, lath exposed, plaster cracked, wallpaper torn, no water, no heat, no electricity – that we can imagine being occupied by the denizens of the musical Rent, and it makes you wonder how many theatre kids would continue to fetishize “la vie Bohème” if they were forced to spend one night in such a squat.

God, I hate Mark.

To be continued.

A Chorus Line (London, 1977)

Original Drury Lane Company of "A Chorus Line"   The 1975 Tony award-winning musical A Chorus Line was mounted in London's West End at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, opening July 22,1976, where it won a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical. This was the first professional musical I ever saw.

In 1977 my entire family took a springtime vacation in England. It was the Queen's Silver Jubilee, and if I weren't so young, I might have noticed it was one of the most depressed and spectacular years to visit Britain. Because my ageing grandfather was with us, we took buses or taxis almost everywhere, avoiding the "Tube" and so I missed out on all the punks.

Why a new musical was on our agenda, I have no idea. Knowing my brother's and father's appreciation for Agatha Christie, you'd think we would have front row seats for The Mousetrap or something. But they had made this trip the year before without me, and had already seen it.

Brief synopsis: A successful Broadway producer briefly satisfies his need to dominate and control by pressing those auditioning for non-acting roles to reveal their most deeply personal and humiliating life stories. Songs by Marvin Hamlisch!

In hindsight, my mother was mortified. I do not know which was more embarrassing, subjecting her nine year-old son or her eighty year-old father to songs about tits, masturbation and "the life". Probably that she was sitting right between us. Poor mom.

As for me, most of what was truly shocking flew right over my head. When the kid has his first orgasm and misdiagnoses it as gonorrhea, well shit, I didn't know what either of those words meant.  And listening to a woman sing about tits and ass was nothing, because by that point in the show, I was so charged from how revealing the women's leotards were, giving voice to it was merely hilarious.

What sticks with me was the one gay character (wait for it) named Paul. He is the one who describes when he was "outed" performing in a drag act at which his parents show up as a surprise. To this boy, that one story gave me entirely the wrong impression -- reinforcing the already dominant point of view at the time that being gay was something to be ashamed of, something exotic and interesting, but something to keep hidden at all costs.

And then Paul, the gay one, blows out a previously injured knee. So he loses, basically, the gay one loses. Pathetic. Maybe it was the memory of this that sent me into such a rage watching Rent. The most flamboyantly gay character, Angel, is the only one who actually dies, the straight, hot chick lives another day. The gay one always gets it.

For anyone familiar with the show, you know that Paul is not the only gay character in the show. He's not even the only character who talks openly about being gay, but he was the only one to speak so clearly about it as to make me understand what he was saying. Even Greg, for some reason, didn't stick in my memory, and he is such a queen, girlfriend.

The other day, the boy (7) and the girl (9) and I were heading into the pool, and we ran into a friend of the girl's from Girl Camp heading out. This friend was with her two moms, and after introductions and farewells, the boy asked if there was a dad. My girl said, "nope."

The boy thought for a moment and concluded, "They must have done that with the gay marriage."

Things are not more complicated today. They are more clear.

Sources:
Wikipedia
BroadwayWorld.com

Marvin Hamlisch died August 6, 2012.