A West Side Story

Memorial Day Weekend 2015.

I was sitting on a bench on the island in the middle of Broadway, surrounded by swaying trees and verdant foliage and by shifting my eyes slightly, I found myself in a forest primeval.

More than 50 years had passed since my family moved to Manhattan from Bayside, Queens, where I grew up in the 1950’s. Green and pleasant, Bayside was a neighborhood where returning veterans found an oasis in which to raise their families. It was an idyllic childhood, despite the cold war, intruding every so often in shelter drills, duck and cover and headlines in the New York Post heralding impending doom which I read fearfully on the stoop of our garden apartment.

When I go back now, the trees, which then were saplings, reach right across 73rd Avenue, forming a canopy of lushness. A few years ago, sitting on a porch in Bayside on a beautiful summer day with a family friend, serene and content, I was reliving my memories of growing up in Bayside.

But sitting on that bench on Memorial Day weekend, jiggled me back (or was it ahead?) in different directions. Summer memories of heat-filled haze in Bayside morphed into memories of those halcyon years of fun and frolic in Manhattan in the 1960’s, where my childhood ended and the city streets became my oyster.

It was a rich landscape, and had, well …. everything!

Broadway was a boulevard of enchantment. A narrow joint on 89th and Broadway with about 5 different accordion-like entrances sold franks and orange drinks to Latinos and Broadway Joe’s. On 83rd there was a cafeteria where Isaac Bashevis Singer and other old yiddishkeits spent the morning schmoozing over coffee and buttered bialys. A few doors down, a tiny luncheonette from the olden days sold egg creams, and on 86th Street was William’s Barbeque, a neon-lit take out establishment where older Jewish and Black men dished out barbeque chicken and mushroom barley with a wink and a smile. Shortly after moving, my mother enrolled my sister and me in the Children’s Drama Department at the 92d Street Y, and so it began.

We were a gaggle of public and private school kids that performed the classics, including Commedia Delle'Arte plays, “The Marvelous Adventures of Tyl”, “Emil and the Detectives” and did it exquisitely under the tutelage of our director and muse, Muriel Sharon.

There was Jeffrey, a baby-faced talent (cursing as he stumbled backstage in the “Servant of Two Masters”), Betsy who was a born talent, she didn’t have to try, and a rather large 12 year old named Marjorie who got yelled at by Muriel,, “What do you mean, you’re not performing because you have 104 degree fever. You’re in the theatre!”

Off-stage we were merry pranksters, roaming the city streets and getting into hilarious scrapes. I remember the time Jeffrey and Marjorie (at least a foot taller than me) were holding my hands as I inquired of doormen in various posh apartment buildings on Park Avenue if there were any available apartments for my children and me. We couldn’t stop laughing!

When we weren’t performing on-stage or involved in antics off the stage, we went to the New Yorker movie theatre to see “Children of Paradise”, “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” (or was that The Museum of Modern Art?), to The Thalia and The Symphony movie theatres to see Chaplin and the Marx Brothers and climbed the winding cast-iron staircase at the New Yorker book shop to browse the overfilled shelves. I fell in love with the ballet and saw Nureyev and Fonteyn at the old Metropolitan Opera House, danced Israeli and Balkan folk dances with Fred Berk, studied art at Music and Art High School, hung out in Washington Square Park with the beatniks and exploded in all directions artistic. 50 years of life lived for Art and creativity followed that explosion.

Memorial Day Weekend 2015.

I am making my way to a celebratory fete for myself, a jubilee of sorts on the Upper West Side. A man is selling poppies on Broadway and 86th Street, near where Williams Barbeque once stood, “In Flanders Field the poppies blow” ….

Sitting on the bench in the middle of Broadway on that windy day, smack back in the forest primeval, at the beginning of time, where it all began, I am ready to start anew.

To life!