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.