unable to "pull the trigger" on a play to see tonight or tomorrow night on my discount web site. And that includes Oklahoma, which I feel it is very important to see. What is the problem, cityboy? Is it what we might call "theater malaise" or simply trying to keep to an almost impossible budget system. Well, you are still here for a while; we can always return to the web site---keep me posted.
An interesting memory. A Saturday in April, 1955. My father and I have just seen a matinee of The Desperate Hours---a play about three escaped prison convicts who take over the home of a "normal" family by force and hide out there. Very intense melodrama, very exciting. Playing the leader of the convicts is a young actor named Paul Newman, his younger brother, the more sensitive one, is played by another actor I have never seen before named George Grizzard, and Karl Malden plays the head of the family who is captured. Great performances, a great climax---very vivid production. Usually my father and I return to the Bronx right after a performance, but this is a very hot April afternoon, and my father suggests we visit his best friend Harvey, who lives on 93rd street. Harvey and his wife Zerlina, are the only friends my parents have who live in Manhattan. So we take the bus that goes north on Central Park to 93rd street This is all new to me. Harvey's apartment house is between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenue, a block and a half from the park. We get off the bus and walk west on 93rd. The block between Central Park West and Columbus is filled with Puerto Rican people. They are mostly outside the small apartment houses that line the block. Coming from an all Jewish and white neighborhood in the Bronx, seeing all these people of color, living in poverty is strange, a little frightening---I am amazed that there are blocks like this. We cross Columbus and approach Harvey's house---he is not there and we continue west.
I bring this up because yesterday evening, I wanted to take a crosstown bus to the east side, but the UN schedule meant that buses were re-routed; I got off the bus at the earliest possible stop, and found myself on Central Park West and 88th street. Getting to the east side ( and a coffee shop that I wanted to stop at on 2nd Avenue) is impossible. I decide to walk north, thinking that maybe I will turn right at 94th street and re-take that journey from 1955. Lots of people on the Central Park west side, some dog walkers, then I turn right on 94th, and proceed west. Of course the street has since been gentrified, a calm presence exists on all of it. Very few, if any traces of the poverty that I saw 64 years ago. The Central Park West apartment house on that block, actually has its entrance on 94th street. I wonder how the people who lived there at the time (mostly middle class professionals who worked in Manhattan) considered the rest of their street which they could see as they went into the apartment house.
Is it an amazing thing, to be able to try to consider the changes in a block over a 64 year period? As I walked west, I could see the block in 55, the large number of Hispanic people outside their apartment houses socializing. Could anyone then have thought that the block and the city would have evolved into what it is today? Later I walked west on 95th between Columbus and Amsterdam, past the many brownstones that are on that block, I got a nice feeling of warmth and energy generating from the street. A nice sense of community. I ended up at the Dive Bar, to watch some baseball (irrelevant in terms of the now decided pennant races) and had a beer. A nice place,I was treated with friendship from the serving staff---I got what I needed and returned home.
Tonight, again--undefined---will report later.
No comments:
Post a Comment