Archive | City Matters

Second Chakra Ladies and Germs

I had a piece to write for money today and I wrote it. This is newsworthy only because I threw out my back on Friday and even a few years ago this would have incapacitated me for at least a week. These days, I know the drill, though not well enough to stop me from throwing out my back in the first place. The morning I’d done so, I’d been too busy to go to the gym or the dance studio so I’d gone running instead.

I called Beztie upon returning from the track. “I went running,” I said triumphantly.

“Dummy,” she said. “It always throws out your back.” I could hear her lighting a cigarette, and I smiled.

Then I went into spasm, and lay flat on the floor. After I stopped crying and permakitten Grace stopped licking my paws sympathetically, I took four Advil and did the stretches my old trainer Leslie taught me. My regular acupunk–the brilliant, elfin Tim–is abroad for the rest of the year, so I looked up C., his replacement. That’s when things got hairy.

C., as it turns out, was working out of a communal space, which was perfectly fine in theory but precarious for a radioactive witch like me. Continue Reading →

Behold the Magic Chair

For the last few years, I’ve been convinced I do my best writing in this chair. It’s the perfect height, the perfect angle, the perfect location—right in front of Oslo Coffee, where I can swill strong americanos and people-watch and puppy-flirt whenever I need a break. When the first iteration of this chair fell apart, Oslo owner JD reordered it from Amazon “so I’d have one less thing to worry about” after I lost my job. When its replacement was stolen last week, I am sorry to report I broke down in tears. (This may have something to do with my overall blocks regarding writing my first book.) Today, a second replacement magically appeared. “JD reordered it again,” reported a barista blithely. “Someone really needed it.” The small kindnesses loom the largest.

A Midsummers Night Magic

Last night I attended the first performance of A Midsummers Night Dream at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, and the whole night was magic, pure magic. I won the tickets in a TodayTix lottery (TodayTix is the best) and it so happened I already had plans in place with Lisa F., my friend who always treats me to theater tickets. Lisa had never seen the play, and as it’s my all-time favorite I was so pleased to share it with her. (Lisalisa power is no joke.)

Midsummers was the first play I ever saw in a theater–it was in the 1980s at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, and my beautiful, already-ailing grandmother who couldn’t drive put on her best green dress and took the commuter rail down to scarysnobby Cambridge from Lowell, Mass to sit with her kindred spirit grandaughter in the Bard’s bigcity forest magic. Since then, every meaningful relationship of my life has been graced with a Midsummer’s Night Dream story, and midsummer has become my favorite time of year. Also I am abashed to say this was the first time in my 24 years as a NYC denizen that I ever attended Shakespeare in the Park, and it was of course the perfect introduction. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy