More than the New York landscape and skyline changed over the past decade. The mental map of the city carried by most New Yorkers altered. So much of the city was reshaped so quickly that there are times now when nothing feels the same. Even if you didn’t leave the city while a decade of… Read more »
When we think of the most important information of our life a few things may come to mind such as our name, our social security number or the balance of our bank account. However, the most important information of our life is our genetic code and we exchange this information through the language of sexuality…. Read more »
As a boy in the early 1960s, I’d go up my grandparents’ second floor apartment on York Avenue several times a week. Their hallway was lit by one low watt exposed bulb. The dark hall frightened me. Sometimes my fear was compounded when I’d hear fuzzy radio sounds coming from the usually locked basement. I… Read more »
Dance is passion. Dance is rapture. Dance is liberation. Dance is exhilaration. Dance is … exercise? Marcella Walker often takes groups of dancers out into the streets to prove that not only does New York have it all, but people here have the most fun too. And not only is she dancing in the streets… Read more »
There is an understanding between women that, as a man, will always elude me. When I was a child, I recall my mother and sister communicating in ways I was incapable of comprehending. It was not a conversation of what was said, but of what was understood. Countless times, my sister would pull me aside… Read more »
Everyone has heard the phrase that all roads lead to Rome. When I first arrived in New York City in 2011, I felt all the literary lines I had been reading through my life had been leading me here. I had never stepped foot in the city, I had never even been within 200 miles… Read more »
Last weekend, I wrote and worked on a park bench near Sailboat Lake. I saw a few trees that looked familiar and thought back. As a boy, I’d climb trees all over Central Park, never looking down, go up as far as I could, then I’d look down. My heart would relocate to the outside… Read more »
Final Analysis, written by Otho Eskin and directed by Ludovica Villar-Hauser, tries too hard to be profound and by doing so exhausts itself. While interesting in its historical dimensions, it skimps on plot, and the dialogue never manages to succeed in captivating us. The play begins with a projected backdrop of Vienna on the cusp of… Read more »
You can learn a lot about a place by what it denies is floating around its sewers. In New York, where I live, there are rumors of alligators lurking around our poop canals. They originated, according to believers, when in days of yore parents purchased tiny, adorable reptiles for their children, only to discover (quite… Read more »
In any other person’s basement, spending hours upon hours punctuated only by pretending to be a doll salesman would be unnerving. Indeed it sounds like an Edgar Allen Poe plot, as observed in the play itself. When the celebrity in question is Barbara Streisand, however, it is a comedy—and a raucous comedy at that. Buyer… Read more »