In/Out

As someone powerless against the allure of the first page of a blank notebook, a new day planner, and the clean-slate freshness of January 1, even I am stepping into 2023 with a bit of weary trepidation. If the strangeness and unpredictability of the past few years have imparted anything, it’s this: New Year’s Resolutions? Honey, I’m taking everything day by day.

A whiff of superstitiousness now hangs around any inclinations I may harbor toward planning anything too far in advance–let alone setting a 1-year or (can you imagine) 5-year plan. What gods might I offend? What horrible illness or random tragedy will befall anyone arrogant enough to think she can plan her future? (I am relieved that no one asked “Where do you see yourself in five years?” when I was interviewing for my job. “Alive, I hope,” would have been my answer, and somehow I doubt that’s the response they’d have been looking for.) This fear of being struck down as punishment for planning ahead is medieval, magical thinking, for which I blame both middle age (THE WORST COULD HAPPEN) and The Pandemic Years (THE WORST IS HAPPENING). And yes, Dad, I am saving for my retirement anyway.

Anyway, all of the above notwithstanding, I do like to stop and take stock of the year past and cast my eyes toward the horizon, so to speak. When I saw a bunch of In/Out lists floating around Instagram and various other media outlets, I decided to make a list for myself and it proved to be an interesting exercise.

I think stream-of-consciousness is the way to approach something like this; letting the mind flit from one random idea to the next. It’s after the fact that one can “zoom out” and see that the ideas were not so random, after all. My list reveals a longing for completeness (three-course dinners, albums) as opposed to the piecemeal ways we seem to take in food and culture these days (enough with share plates and one-off song releases); a turning-away from social media (no more memes by 30-year-olds about how “old” they are or advice from Instagram sages who portray themselves as Very Wise as they spout meaningless platitudes about “taking up space” and “manifesting” goals); and good citrus (I have had it with buying bags of underwhelming clementines).

Nota bene: I am–and have always been–wrong about every pop culture trend. My tally of ins and outs is emphatically not a forecast; rather, it’s a list of loves and intentions. Even if you’re nowhere near as cranky as I am–and especially if you are!–I’d love to learn what’s in (or out) for you in this new year; let me know in the comments. Happy new year!

midsummer dispatch: July 24, 2022

Our air conditioner broke precisely at the onset of this seventh-level-of-hell heatwave. The repair guys told us it would take 2-3 weeks and at least $600 to repair it—in their diagnostic efforts, they also broke the on/off switch, so all in all I’d rate their visit a bust. And so I am presently sitting directly in front of a fan at its highest setting, blowing warm air on me as I type. The condensation from my water glass, the ice having long since melted, is leaving watery rings on the table.

I’m having a hard time loving summer this year. I want to be charmed by late July: the musky, floral melons and jewel-bright cherry tomatoes at the farmers’ market; the scents of sunscreen and barbecue on the breeze; the slower pace that borders on torpor. But I am too attuned to the smells of urine on hot sidewalks and weed and cigarette smoke hanging heavy in the air around every corner to find romance in the New York City summer the way I used to.

I reread Frank O’Hara’s The Day Lady Died, as I do every summer, and felt a keen sense of affinity with his description of the stifling, sleepy business of running errands on a weekday when the city is a concrete convection oven and one is overdressed for the heat. O’Hara doesn’t say anything about wearing a business suit in his poem; there is no discussion of the loosening of a tie or fanning himself with his hat, but he does mention a shoeshine and a rush hour train ride to the Hamptons, so I am reading between the lines. Or maybe I’m simply projecting.

You see, I am wearing sensible shoes and office attire these days, sweating on the subway platform as I head to and from a Real Job and asking myself, à la David Byrne, “How did I get here?” (Other recurring questions that pingpong around my heat-addled brain lately: “Am I still a musician? Was I ever really a musician? Have I sold out my dream for affordable health insurance? What was my dream, anyway? Do I still have a dream? Did I really not want to do certain kinds of gigs anymore or did I just get tired of constantly worrying that I wasn’t good enough?”) When I do get out to hear music, it seems like everyone is twenty years my junior (spoiler: they are) and I feel out of touch with the scene, as though I’m a former regular showing up at a once-familiar restaurant after a long absence, only to discover that it’s become a trendy nightclub with overpriced drinks and a strong social media presence.

Earlier this month I visited my family in the Midwest, staying at my grandmother’s house, which overlooks rolling green Iowa farmland as far as the eye can see. For the second summer in a row, my trip was cut short due to the (everlasting, goddamned) pandemic. But before Covid struck (not me, this time around, so there’s that) and the proverbial wheels came off, we enjoyed a few days of mustardy potato salad and firefly-dotted twilights. One evening, I sat in a cool basement bedroom and took a battered but indestructible 1980s tape deck off the dresser. I plugged it in and switched on the radio, turning the dial past present-day Top 40 hits and a live chanting of the Rosary (!) until I heard Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” I listened to “I’m Gonna Keep On Lovin’ You” and commercials for discounted steaks and “When Doves Cry.” I remembered the feeling of giving myself over to the whims of the airwaves, tolerating tunes I don’t care for and feeling the thrill of recognition when a beloved song, pulsating with nostalgia, finds its way into the rotation. (I also remembered how much better pop music was when songs had bridges.)

Listen, it’s all FINE, I’m fine, everything’s fine. These sea changes in the music business, in New York City, in being a middle-aged human, are a lot to take, is all. And even as I turn over all those navel-gazing, self-indulgent, angsty questions in my mind, I am also preparing to make a recording next month, an optimistic, hopeful endeavor if ever there was one. Gigs are beginning to pepper my calendar in the fall and winter. And you know what else? Pop songs should still have bridges and it’s really nice, actually, to have affordable health insurance.

purgatory and small joys

Oh, February is a bleak little month, isn’t it? I feel a little guilty even saying (typing) that out loud, considering how much better things are since a year ago, when I wrote my first “February is wearing on my spirit” missive here. Then, I was waiting not-so-patiently for my turn to get vaccinated, living a cozy but confined existence within the perimeters of our apartment and Brooklyn environs.

Now, thrice-vaccinated–and after a mild but terribly timed bout with Delta back in August–I am gigging again, seeing friends, planning travel, riding the subway. Life is once again imbued with a sense of forward momentum (although riding the subway has never been worse, let’s be honest).

Nevertheless, this purgatory between spacious, austere January and spring’s arrival seems endless. Seeing even one branch of audacious yellow forsythia in bloom might save my sanity, but we’ve got a ways to go yet before the air softens for real and the tender green shoots and buds begin to emerge from their long sleep.

Here are two true things: 1. I am grateful for what we have regained since we lost the Before, and 2. I am weary and unsettled by this period of awaiting the After. Illness, war, mistrust, division: round and round we go, century after century.

My wise, thoughtful mama recently gifted me a subscription to The Isolation Journals, Suleika Jaouad’s Substack, filled with eloquent reflections on writing, mortality, and the creative process. Each week brings a different writing prompt, and a recent one was an invitation to create an inventory of loves.

I won’t take comprehensive stock of everything and everyone I love here–there’s a solitary, private quality to these prompts that feels monastic and right, plus, why should I assume anyone would be interested in that?–so I’ll save the big list for myself. But in case you, like me, are feeling some doldrums, whether February-induced or of the existential, “the world is on a greased toboggan to hell” variety, I thought it might be nice to share a list of some recent small joys that have proved calming, restorative, thought-provoking, and sensory-awakening:

The Isolation Journals
Suleika Jaouad founded this online community in response to the pandemic. She is the author of Between Two Kingdoms, her memoir of navigating leukemia treatment and recovery in her early twenties; sadly, her cancer has recently returned and she is once more undergoing treatment. She shares her own elegant, eloquent writing and artwork, and every Sunday includes a journaling prompt from a different contributor.

“Survival as a creative process” is a literal credo for Jaouad as she makes her way through a second bone marrow transplant. But her invitation to literally make something of our hurts, losses, unanswered questions, vulnerabilities–as well as our loves, discoveries, and joys–feels urgent and universal. The newsletter and journaling prompts are always free, but subscribers get access to the full archive, as well as additional writings, videos, interviews, and more.

As the Season Turns - a Podcast by Ffern
Whoo, boy, is this ever up my alley. Ffern is an organic perfumery based in Somerset, England. They release four perfumes every year, on solstices and equinoxes, with the aim of restoring the art of perfumery to its artisanal roots. Ffern created a once-monthly podcast, designed as “something short, lasting only fifteen minutes or so, that you might listen to on a walk through the park, in the kitchen or by the fireside.”

The podcast is written and narrated by Lia Leendertz and touches on an array of topics pertinent to each month: seasonal foods, what birdsong one can expect to hear, what’s in bloom (or waiting to bloom), pagan and religious rituals and traditions, and more. I’m grateful to be reminded that even (especially) surrounded by the hard angles and chaos of city life–particularly this city, in these days–we can find grounding and (dare I say it?) healing in the rhythms of the natural world.

Tuscany
Sadly, I am not referring to Tuscany, the place. (Would I even need a list of antidotes to spiritual malaise if I were typing this from a hillside home in the Val d’Orcia or a little apartment in Lucca? Possibly, I suppose. But the views would certainly be better.) No, I’m referring to Tuscany, the fragrance by Estée Lauder that I began wearing at around age fifteen and for which I still harbor a cellular fondness.

I seldom wear perfume in everyday life; it’s a big no-no in choral settings, for obvious reasons, and I’d hate to be the cause of anyone’s perfume-induced headache on the subway or at Trader Joe’s. But at home and on days when I know I won’t be on the subway or in a crowded setting, I’ve been indulging in a few spritzes of my long-beloved scent, and it is transporting. Because Tuscany has been my perfume, on and off, for over twenty-five years, it acts as a bit of a sensory time machine: one whiff and I’m walking around the Piazza del Duomo in Milano or listening to music in my old Seattle studio apartment with a bay window and view of the Space Needle.

PBS Masterpiece
Every Sunday evening, the programs on PBS Masterpiece have been a balm to my spirit and a gentle way to wind down the weekend, from the bucolic warmheartedness of All Creatures Great and Small to the globe-trotting adventurousness portrayed in Around the World in 80 Days.

Why do we human beings tell each other stories? From pre-historic cave drawings to shows binge-watched on Netflix, why do we need stories? To escape, I suppose; all of us, hunt-wearied cavemen and beleaguered 21st-century folk alike, crave a diversion from the obligations and frustrations of our workaday lives. But stories also help us make sense of our place in the long, troubled history of the world. At their best, the stories we tell each other can impart a fresh perspective, reminding us that neither good times nor bad times last forever. And really good stories inspire us to connect with one another, to shoulder the collective burden and blessing of the human condition with renewed courage.

Milk Street: Tuesday Nights Mediterranean
We’re only three recipes into this new cookbook, a Valentine’s Day gift for my husband, but each dish so far has been a home run. Lord knows I’m a fan of those comforting kitchen stalwarts: the recipes we revisit again and again with confidence in their utility and power to soothe. But after two years of pandemic life–and a wonderful but disconcerting return to busy schedules and the need for efficient weeknight meals–this book, filled with unexpected flavor combinations and recipes organized by fast/faster/fastest, has reinvigorated our cooking.

If you’re so inclined, please feel free to comment and share some of what’s making you feel hopeful and happy these days–I’d love to hear what’s getting you through this bewildering time.

tour blues

This missive comes to you from a nondescript hotel room in North Carolina, where it’s chilly and raining. En route to the hotel, my driver wore no mask (jarring for this NYC girl) so I kept the car window down and arrived windblown and half deaf from the freeway noise.

My room wasn’t ready, so I walked across the parking lot to a sprawling sports bar with flat-screen TVs covering every available inch of wall space and dithered over what to order: wings? A burger? Chips and queso? I opted for the still-artery-clogging-but-slightly-more-virtuous Cobb salad, deviating from the menu with my request for grilled chicken, not fried (sigh).

Thus fortified, I returned to the hotel, where I have since been sequestered, getting some work done, listening to the hiss of passing cars on the wet pavement below and feeling a little blue. Nothing specific, really, just that vague, Edward Hopper-esque melancholy indigenous to, well, rainy nights spent alone in nondescript hotel rooms in strange towns.

I’ve got a blue motel room/with a blue bedspread/I got the blues inside/and outside my head… (Joni Mitchell, Blue Motel Room - Hejira)

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I keep replaying a conversation I had, early in the pandemic, with a woman whose husband had had a heart transplant some years prior. She and her family were no strangers to self-isolation; living in fear of exposure to potentially deadly pathogens; and emerging, later, into a world at once strange and the same. “What people don’t realize,” she said, “is that there’s no ticker tape parade when it’s over. And it’s not really ever over. You just gradually get to start doing things again. You slowly get your life back.”

I, like you, I’m sure, would have preferred a dramatic and complete end to this pandemic, a firm demarcation separating the past from the present. Something ticker tape parade-worthy. Instead, we’re fumbling along toward endemicity, doing daily risk/reward analyses and, little by little, doing things again. Case in point: tomorrow I’ll sing some French songs for a gala here, south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the next morning I’ll get up early and fly back to New York City in time to make my church job on Sunday. Living the dream, singing for my supper, now with masks and vaccines.

I wondered many times over the course of the past eighteen months if I’d ever get to wallow in the bittersweetness of tour blues again. And here I am, sipping anemic tea from a paper cup in this highway-adjacent hotel, my emotional thermostat hovering somewhere between loneliness and solitude, boredom and stillness. Joni Mitchell is on repeat. A blue motel room is not a ticker tape parade, but I’ll take it. Gratefully.

a genteel jungle

I am, as of yesterday afternoon, home from a full twelve days away from New York City. Twelve days! We vacationed on a South Carolina barrier island, a genteel jungle of palms, cypresses, pines, and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. We drank Arnold Palmers and read books–real paperbacks, wavy-paged from the sea air–under a wide umbrella on the beach and body surfed in the Atlantic when the heat became too strong.

We pedaled brightly-colored cruiser bicycles past golf courses in the honeyed sunlight of the late afternoon, the verdant canopy overhead dappling the bike path. We biked past egrets and ibises wading in salt marshes and spotted a few languorous alligators in the lagoons peppering the island. Some evenings we returned to the beach–a wide, flat stretch of gentle shoreline with hard-packed sand, just right for walking–and let the breeze whip our hair around as the sky turned variegated shades of pastel.

Nighttime on the island was as dark as the inside of a pocket and thick with the sound of cicadas. Drives home from dinner were slow and deliberate, punctuated by exclamations of “Ooh, watch out, there’s a deer.” The animals, usually munching vegetation beside the road, were placid and seemed unlikely to dart without warning, suggesting that Southern deer are not as highly strung as their northern counterparts. (Ahem.)

We spent a pleasurable (if torrid) afternoon in Charleston, wandering the French Quarter in 90-degree heat and humidity that draped itself around everything like a velvet duvet. Later, we were revived by the air conditioning and crab beignets (and shrimp and grits, and, and…) at a restaurant called–what else?–High Cotton. We ate impossibly sweet peaches daily, and indulged in ice cream and pimiento cheese whenever the mood struck, which was often enough.

Twelve days is long enough to settle into the rhythms of a new place, to set aside familiar routines and rituals, and ask oneself, “What if this were home?” South Carolina isn’t home, of course. Couldn’t be, not really. We are inveterate Yankees (and Yankees fans) and so we have returned to a different jungle, our jungle: the concrete kind, with its unpredictable stone fruit and sirens–not cicadas–singing through the night air. And this morning, with tea in my favorite mug, Luis Bonfa on the stereo, and high rises looming in the overcast skies over Brooklyn, I am glad to be home.

It’s only mid-July; there are weeks and weeks of summer ahead. Let’s make the most of them.

the nucleus of the atom

I mark my New Yorkiversary every year as a sort of second birthday. I entered the world in Omaha, Nebraska in 1978, but I was born in New York City on March 31, 2003. I came to New York full of anticipation and an optimism borne of having no real idea what I was getting myself into. The friend I was staying with worked in theater and that first night we attended a preview of the Broadway revival of Gypsy, starring Bernadette Peters. While we stood on line to to enter the theater, Sarah Jessica Parker stopped to chat excitedly with someone she knew in the crowd. I had arrived.

The next day I began pounding the pavement: I stopped into restaurant after restaurant downtown with a stack of résumés I had printed at the Kinko’s on Astor Place. In between rejections, I’d visit an honest-to-God internet café (!) in the East Village to check my email and peruse apartment listings on Craigslist. (New York City restaurants were–probably still are–skittish about hiring servers without New York City experience, a prejudice that I found ridiculous. I was right about very few things in my early twenties, but I knew then, as I know now, that waiting tables is waiting tables, regardless of the coast.)

Every manager at every establishment I walked into either turned me down outright or offered a position as a coat-check girl or part-time hostess, neither of which was appealing or financially viable. Tired of being told “no” and with the brashness indigenous to the very young, one day I marched right up to Mario Batali himself at his trendy new pizzeria, Otto, and told him that I used to wait on his father, Armandino, in Seattle (true) and that I was newly arrived in New York with a very special dream in my heart: to work for Mario Batali (…less true). I was hired as a waitress and soon thereafter met my first roommate and found an apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Bit by bit, my New York life began to take shape.

Nothing was simple; everything was harder than expected, took longer, cost more. Of course, I was twenty-four years old (my God, was I ever really twenty-four years old?), a time when highs are high and lows are low and everything else–to paraphrase Tennessee Williams–is Cleveland.

I was forever running late as I struggled to navigate the subway system, taking the express when I should have taken the local (and vice-versa), and somehow always choosing the stations with the most labyrinthine corridors and the most stairs for any necessary transfers. I had come to New York to be a singer, but I was perpetually hoarse from shouting over the din of the restaurant. And, of course, I was broke. Every day brought frustrated tears and bone-aching weariness. Somehow, though, it never occurred to me to leave. Yes, I was exhausted and miserable, but I was exhausted and miserable in New York.

Because, you see, for all the frustrations and setbacks, there were also Greenwich Village bookstores and brownstones lining leafy Brooklyn streets. There was that wild, unexpected night on the town with that TV chef and his entourage that began at Balthazar and ended at Park Bar (because, as all the foot soldiers in the NYC restaurant trenches of the early aughts know…of course it did). There was the evening that daffodils were bursting into bloom in Central Park as Chanticleer made the Temple of Dendur vibrate with shimmering overtones. There was a shared smile with Carla Cook at Iridium when she saw me quietly singing along to “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand” during her set. There were voice lessons in airy studio spaces on 72nd Street and big band rehearsals in East Harlem. I read E.B. White on the subway and saw Blossom Dearie at Danny’s Skylight Room in midtown. There were countless electric moments of knowing I was bouncing around in the very nucleus of the atom. It was a heady, hopeful time.

Yesterday, on the eighteenth anniversary of my move to New York City, I woke early and had an everything bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee for breakfast–not my usual fare, but most appropriate for the occasion. Then my friend R. picked me up and we traveled to Elmhurst, Queens, the epicenter of the epicenter of the pandemic here in New York City. As I had done exactly eighteen years before, I stood in a long line of New Yorkers, but this time at a hospital, not a theater. Everyone shuffled along in masked silence–Sarah Jessica Parker did not make an appearance this time–and the atmosphere was quietly buoyant. At the end of that long line, I received my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, starstruck by the efficiency and kindness of the healthcare workers and staff.

The past eighteen years–and especially the past year–have made my optimism a little more cautious. New York and New Yorkers alike have been forever changed by the pandemic, but we’re still here. And I am, once again, filled with hope and optimism.

home fires

It’s gray and cold this week here in Brooklyn. (It occurs to me that opening this missive with a weather report is, qualitatively speaking, about on par with beginning a song lyric with, “I woke up this morning.” Oh, really? How fascinating! Tell me more! We’re all friends here, though, and I trust you’ll be understanding if I lean on the occasional cliché when I pop in here to say hello.)

As is appropriate for a time of blizzards and hard freezes (oh, yes, and a global pandemic), I’m keeping my spirits up by stoking home fires both metaphorical and literal. The old stand-bys–regular exercise, rib-sticking nightly dinners, the occasional bouquet of bodega flowers–continue to serve me well, as does my newish tradition of baking a batch of scones or muffins on Sunday mornings. For pure escapism, though, nothing–but nothing–beats a good book.

Right now I’m reading Rosamunde Pilcher’s Winter Solstice, a story I am wrapping around myself like a cozy cable-knit sweater. Set in rural England, London, and Scotland (so far), Winter Solstice is a book in which not much outwardly happens, save the catalyst that sets the plot in motion. Rather, the reader comes to intimately know a host of characters, all of whom are weathering loss and loneliness while doing their level best to take care of one another. They’re flawed and well-intentioned, forever eating homey meals and drinking mugs of hot tea in front of fireplaces whilst they sort themselves out; it’s all enormously comforting. To wit:

“…she put the kettle on, found the frying-pan and the bacon. She laid the table with a checked cloth, and cups and saucers. She cracked two eggs. Oscar enjoyed a cooked breakfast, and although Elfrida did not eat it with him, she relished the smell of bacon frying.

Cautiously, she made toast. Making toast in this old-fashioned kitchen was something of a hazard, because the toaster was elderly and past its best, and behaved accordingly. Sometimes it popped up two quite reasonable, nicely browned slices. Other times, it regurgitated two uncooked slices of bread. But if in a bad temper, it forgot to turn itself off, with the result that the kitchen was filled with dark smoke, and the blackened crusts on offer were so disgusting that not even the sea-gulls would eat them.

Every now and then Elfrida told herself that they should buy a new toaster…One day she had gone into William G. Croft’s to price the cheapest, but quailed at the expense, and departed without having made a purchase…So she struggled on with the old inherited toaster, having decided that if she did find herself with a bit of spare cash, she preferred to spend it on books or flowers.”

I mean. Did your shoulders relax, reading that passage? Mine certainly did.

A whispered aside: I have been writing, showing up at the page most days to let some ideas out to play. It’s too early to say much more about it as, frankly, I don’t know where any of it’s going (or, indeed, if it’s going anywhere at all). I have moments of flow and small bursts of clarity, but more often than not I am stymied, certain that everything I’m scribbling is destined for the waste-bin.

Patience, then, seems to be the order of the day, a necessary ingredient for baking, writing, and making it through a time of crisis. As Rosamunde Pilcher and her sympathetic protagonists knew well, copious mugs of hot tea help too.

May the day land gently, wherever you are.

as we are

Hello. I’m writing from New York City, where I can assure you that the reports of our collective metropolitan death are greatly exaggerated.

Recently my husband and I traveled to Manhattan to see Central Park in her autumn finery. Much was different; much was the same. We took the ferry, not the subway (different). On the way home, tired and with aching feet, we were met with travel delays and garbled announcements over the loudspeaker (same as it ever was, just on the water instead of underground).

The park was teeming with people as it is every sunny autumn weekend, which felt familiar and reassuring, if a touch too crowded. But while it’s impossible to say for sure, it seemed–bizarrely–as though there were nary a tourist in sight. And instead of the lazy-afternoon-in-the-park atmosphere one might expect, there was a palpable “smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em” freneticism in the air: how many crisp, clear-skied days with 1%-positive Covid numbers would we be allotted this fall? (Precious few, as it turns out; as of today’s writing, the numbers are nearly 3%–and rising–and new lockdown measures are being considered.)

News of a 90% effective vaccine and (hallelujah!) a new president bring glimmers of hope to the final months of this grim year. But cases are skyrocketing throughout the country. The mutual contempt on both sides of the political aisle is depressing and exhausting. By any measure, a return to anything resembling “normal” life is a long way off.

Nevertheless, New York City is alive–occasionally bustling, even. She is neither a ghost town nor an “anarchist jurisdiction,” and while it is true that too many storefronts are boarded up and the marquees are all dark, it is also true that children’s music classes are taking place on Brooklyn stoops, clarinets and recorders squeaking merrily. Every Saturday morning, the farmers’ market offers its bounty of Renaissance painting-worthy lacinato kale, fat pumpkins, and darkly glowing eggplants. Jazz musicians perform ad hoc concerts in the park and even schlep their instruments to Smalls Jazz Club (just one set a night, for an audience of fifteen, but still!).

Anaïs Nin famously said, “We see things not as they are, but as we are,” and I suppose that’s true. Like the city I love, I too am plugging along as best I can in spite of all the fear and loss and worry. I do part time administrative work for a music school here in Brooklyn; my office is the kitchen table. The choral job I was so thrilled to land last winter has gone fully remote, so every week brings new music to learn and the ever-challenging task of making an iPhone video of myself singing alto lines without the intrusion of car horns, sirens, or construction noise. While I mourn the loss of my performing and touring career (and its attendant income), I am grateful to my bones for the work that remains, and duly chastened by the privilege of being able to work from home when so many brave and dedicated souls are reporting to work at grocery stores, hospitals, public transit, and other essential services.

Long runs (dodging the mask-less) and YouTube yoga classes keep my body moving and my mind off the headlines. Seasonal rituals have assumed new emotional significance: for the first time in years, we carved a jack-o’lantern this Halloween and it delighted us beyond all expectation. The evening meal–the planning, preparation, eating (natch)–sustains and soothes, acting as both anchor and buoy. Curiously, I’m in touch more regularly with friends than I was pre-Covid, thanks to bi-weekly play readings over Zoom and long, chatty email correspondences. One footfall at a time, one meal at a time, one connection at a time, we are making our way through this bewildering period.

I’ve just started reading Peggy Guggenheim’s autobiography, with an introduction by Gore Vidal. I haven’t gotten very far in the book yet, but I can’t stop thinking about what Vidal wrote about his younger days and the Greenwich Village party where he first met Guggenheim (and which he attended as a guest of Anaïs Nin):

“I still think that somewhere, even now, in a side street of New York City, that party is still going on and Anaïs is still alive and young and chéri is very young indeed, and James Agee is drinking too much and Laurence Vail is showing off some bottles that he has painted having first emptied them into himself as part of the creative process and André Breton is magisterial and Léger looks as if he himself could have made one of those bits of machinery that he liked to paint; and a world of color and humor is still going on–could be entered again if only one had not mislaid the address.”

Even as I type, somewhere, in a side street of the Village, a few jazz musicians are eating burgers at Corner Bistro, drunk on music and camaraderie and bourbon. Patrician Upper East Siders are “declining a Charlotte Russe, accepting a fig” at an elegant bistro. Tourists and broke young aspiring performers are queuing up at TKTS in Times Square for reduced-price Broadway tickets. Teenagers are hawking candy bars in a crowded subway car. The Metropolitan Opera is packed with patrons sipping champagne at intermission. Fans are cheering at Yankee Stadium.

Hear me, and know that this is true: this city is not “over.” New York City is very much alive. The party is still going on. We have simply–and temporarily–mislaid the address.