There are lots of ways to see New York. As a tourist, you go to the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Central Park. If you’re an art lover, you head straight to the Metropolitan Museum and, especially if you like saying it out loud, MOMA.
If you’re me, you eat a lot, discover a whole lot of what you don’t know, and feel guilty about both.
Take this for example.
Thanks a lot, David Barton Gym. This is supposed to be motivational, I know, and in a world where there are TV series featuring serial killers as heros and chemistry teachers making meth, I shouldn’t be surprised. The sign looks a bit strange because like a lot of New York buildings, it’s being renovated and the scaffolding protects passers-by. Who presumably have murder on their minds.
But of course, after a couple days taking huge, salt-and-butter laden bites out of the Big Apple, I was starting to think such ghoulish thoughts sounded good.
Visiting my sister Cara, chef of a darling restaurant, Cafe Ghia in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, means eating. A lot. She and our other sister, her twin Leah, are only 30 years old and ridiculously active. A few 1,000 calorie “starters” (what we in New York are now calling appetizers) sit lightly on their yoga-trimmed and cycle-pared thighs. Add 18 years and a lot of sitting around on your ass blogging, and such delights tend to drag down one’s derriere considerably.
So there’s that guilt trip: eat your way across New York and no matter how much walking up and down stairs to the subway you do, you still arrive back home in Kentucky with a newly minted double chin and a drawer full of jeans you can’t zip.
Here’s something else: The Hotel Chelsea. Heard of it? Maybe? Well, maybe I had too.
“It’s famous for something,” Leah allowed, as we walked past it to get to the Doughnut Plant next door. (Mmmm doughnuts. See above.)
“Well, it’s also closed,” I announced, seeing the sign on the door.
“Probably bedbugs,” was my mother’s Regis and Kelly-informed opinion.
Well, as it turns out, it too was being renovated, as a group of pretty good-looking guys rolling giant iron carts to the curb told me. Their accents were as thick as the iron too. I felt like I was in On the Waterfront. They couldda been contendas!
As it was, they approved of my photographing the building, wisely acknowledging its fame. I snapped away, wondering, what for?
Ah, how good of the Chelsea, to provide historical-markeresque plaques for the rubes from the hinterlands. Reading along, I learned this was the famous hotel where writers would go to write, holed up in their New York-fueled frenzy, churning out Pulitzer Prize winning novels and one Great American Novel after another.
Guess what? Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while at the Chelsea and oh, who else stayed there? Just a few nobodies like Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, who wrote On the Road there.
Good stuff! Why then, the guilt? Oh, because I majored in LITERATURE for Pete’s sake! Literature of the English language! The literature written by people like Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. You’d think the name “Chelsea” might have penetrated my consciousness at some point. Not to mention all the musicians who flopped, dropped acid, or were murdered within its walls (Nancy, girlfriend of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Viscious was found murdered there.) I SAW SID AND NANCY!
Ah well, I’m an older, wiser, and more well-traveled woman of the world now. I may have to slap on the Spanx and hold my breath for 15 minutes to get into my jeans now — but by golly, I’ve eaten octopus and rabbit in Brooklyn and consumed pizza and fried dough in Manhattan. And I’ve stood on the sidewalk before the buildings where John Lennon died (the Dakota) and Nancy Spungen expired (the Chelsea).
Maybe it’s not necessary to do any killing to look better naked. Hanging around New York literary hotspots might just make me thin by association.
I’m reminded of the old Flintstones cartoon, which featured Wilma in a failed attempt to hang a picture on the stone wall of her Bedrock hut. Predictably, the wall cracked in all directions the instant she hammered in the nail. No problem; Wilma the FBI Agent/Mother immediately painted leaves and flowers along the cracks, creating a unique mural that enhanced her lovely home.
Behold. Or rather, perhaps — “BEHIND!”
Not that there’s any danger of me needing any large, energy efficient industrial ceiling fans or commercial ceiling fans — but as I find out on their website, they now deal in residential ceiling fans. So perhaps there is cause for concern. But no matter: I restate. It would be a cold day in hell before I would blythely purchase anything so crassly named. Not because I’m a prude, mind you — ask anyone I work with, or my husband for that matter and you’ll learn I’m apt to curse like a sailor if the occasion warrants. No I just object to the reality-TV shaped world around us, which has led us to the conclusion that Big Ass is a perfectly good name for a serious company.
Despite my nearly 10 years as a vegetarian, I now enjoy barbecue and eat it semi-regularly, thanks to a husband who grew up in Owensboro, Ky., the middle of a barbecue-obsessed region of the state, Western Kentucky. Oh I started slowly … deigning only to eat chicken in my vegetarian-to-omnivore transition years. Which is why my family still hoots about the time, at an elementary-school sports banquet catered by another local barbecue restaurant, I heartily dove into the “chicken” barbecue. The thing was, I was pregnant, uncomfortable, bored, and starving — to hell with vegetarianism today, I gotta eat. On and on I went about the deliciousness of this chicken barbecue. On the way home, Claire tentatively asked, “Uh, Mom you know that was pork barbecue, right?”
NouveauSoileau 