A Year In New York

As I crossed the street into Union Square for some farmer’s market groceries, a woman’s voice called out, “I love you! I love you! I love you!”
I turned to see two teenage girls were following and looking at me dreamily. “You know, she’s single,” said the blonde one, angling her head toward the brunette, who [...]

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My friend Dane Golden is in town from San Francisco and wrangled us a tour of the offices of Mad magazine, the publication that was honing satire to a lethal edge years before Stephen Colbert and the editors of The Onion were even born.
The office is in a glitzy tower on Broadway near Times Square, [...]

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This evening I unexpectedly find myself at dinner on the Lower East Side with a columnist for a big New York magazine and his girlfriend. (Don’t ask.) There had been no warning, no time to prepare.
I smile and nod gamely over the eggplant lasagna and wish I’d shaved, or combed my hair, or gotten around [...]

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In  California, the knish is the only well-known cuisine of New York that no one tries to sell you. Bakeries like Noah’s purport to make New York bagels and corner pizzerias make New-York-style pies, but until today I had never even laid eyes on a knish.
What I did know is that knishes are Jewish, so [...]

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I met my friend Jacques for a drink in the West Village, where we navigated the bridge-and-tunnel crowd buoyed by political bonhomie and a dangerously strong pitcher of margaritas.

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Scrambling around on the asphalt with an airhose, trying to fill the tires of an old borrowed Camry, I got that deflated feeling of getting nowhere. No matter how much I pumped the tires seemed to sag a little more.

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Something about the way Paul opened the door told me he didn’t particularly enjoy having guests. We’d made a Craigslist connection – he had a coffee table and I needed one – and now here I was, an interloper in his 500-square-foot kingdom, looking over his stuff, saying hello to his wife, who was at [...]

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If my transformation into a New Yorker is already underway, I thank Rebecca the Mattress Saleswoman. I have been bouncing onto an inflatable mattress for two weeks now, and today I would get some real bedding. Rebecca was the first person I met when I walked into Sleepy’s, a bed store that is as [...]

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As I walked through Central Park past the Conservatory Water, I passed a pair of girls who looked about twelve smoking cigarettes on a rock. One of them gave me a defiant glare that was just a bit wobbly and unpracticed. It seemed to say, “This is my life, and I will smoke this cigarette [...]

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I crept into the Metropolitan Museum with Ariel and Seth to escape the afternoon heat. Outside, a crowd milled about, blinking in the painfully bright reflection off the museum steps and the marble columns of Fifth Avenue. Inside, at the entrance to the lofty Great Hall, it was cool and dark and even peaceful for [...]

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