Edward Albee called Thornton Wilder's play "Our Town," the greatest of all a-merry-kan-kan plays. While I'll admit to knowing nothing, my conventional wisdom would give that moniker to something by O'Neill or Arthur Miller or maybe even Albee himself.
Last week, back in the City of Broad Wallets, I had various appointments around town. As a consequence, I walked over 17,000 bone-aching steps, my arthritic hip howling like a politician missing out on some payola.
There's this early passage from Our Town that I thought about yesterday as I walked through My Town, listening to this by Nino Rota from a Fellini movie, Il Bidone on my iPod accentuated my melancholy. Nino Rota's music mixes so many emotions in just a few bars. This is bar-hopping at its best.
I remembered this from Our Town. I had a decades-long idee fixe on Thornton about half-a-century ago.
Grover's Corners
Sutton County
United States of America
North America
Western Hemisphere
the Earth
New York, as always, is under construction. As my father used to quip when I was a boy, "New York's will be a great place to live if they ever finish it."
That's still funny today. Every street is being dug up. Every building is under scaffolding. Every dream is a dead end.
Within my upper east side neighborhood, every tenement building (these are Jacob Riis improved tenements) built between 1880-1910 is being razed and a 44-story limestone rectangle, financed by the Rockefeller Realty Trust is going up in their place.
The tenements they're tearing down by the dozens are "sanitary" tenements. They were built in response to the rickety dwellings Riis wrote about in "How the Other Half Lives," in which many apartments had no windows and roughly 25 people would share a single cold-water privy. You know, conditions like you'd find in a New York ad-agency today.
I began writing this as I walked, listening to the melancholy of Rota.
Living in New York is like living on a film set. Elaborate constructions are made, only to be torn down and thrown away by the end of the day. The city itself is like a picnic blanket with too many crumbs. Before long it's shaken out, the crumbs scatter to the winds and we start all over again. At least the ants are happy.
When I moved to the Upper East, though it was already 1980, the neighborhood was still influenced by the Hungarian revolution against Stalinism which occurred in 1956 and the waves of Hungarians who emigrated thereafter.
As a consequence, there were half a dozen restaurants within a spaetzel's throw from my apartment that were named "The Red Tulip," or "Csarda" or "Mocca." Hungarian places with chicken paprikas that made sense of a disorderly universe.
Today, and for twenty years now, all those places are long gone. What set this post off was seeing remnants one of those Hungarians torn-down and now replaced by a Brazilian grocery store. There were no Brazilian grocery stores back in 1980.
New York makes you realize how nothing stays the same. Germantown--what they used to call my neighborhood the last time Hitler was in vogue--is flux. The waiters in Old Heidelberg are Mexicans now--but they still wear lederhosen.
Mexicans in lederhosen.
Coming from a blue-eyed Russian Jew with a German last name born on the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception, those three words show when the world works.
That's what the maggot movement can't understand.
But that's what matters.
Mexicans in lederhosen.
People living together.
Sharing by proximity.
Elbows sharp and out.
Living, learning, loving, laughing, leaving and beginning again.
That's New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment