BAM Good!

So, like at least 80% of artistically inclined New Yorkers, I wait tables part time to pay the bills. It makes sense, because it takes a minimum of your time and provides maximum money. By that, I mean you can live on it. Even in New York, because like everything else in New York, eating out is horribly expensive, which means bigger tips. I'm not saying you can raise a family of 4 and own property on a wait staff salary, but you can keep the lights on, keep food in your belly and pay the rent on time. I work for a cafe at the Asia Society Museum on Park Avenue on the Upper East Side. It's lunch only, but I still make more than I've ever made anywhere else waiting tables. And it's pretty easy. Lots of support staff, cool management (see Bobby Miranda, I told you I'd mention you in my blog!), a great menu, nice clientele - UES ladies who lunch, museum patrons, Asia Society staff, neighborhood locals and of course, tourists - but the type who come to NY to see Sasanian Art, as opposed to the type who want to find the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company... Anyhoo, it's a good job, in a beautiful environment - our cafe is a glassed atrium designed to be an Asian meditation garden, complete with live trees growing inside - and I average 22 hours a week which pays my bills and leaves me time to pursue the other slashes that I do.

The company that runs my cafe is called Great Performances. They also run several other high-end museum/art/cultural center cafes in NYC. Our sister cafe is at BAM - the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Our cafe is only open from 11-4 and BAMcafe is only open from 5-8, so sometimes, our staffs will pick up shifts for each other when needed. My first shift at BAM was last night. If you're going to see a performance at BAM, you should definitely check out the cafe beforehand. It's got a full bar and full dinner service served in the Gillman Opera House lobby, which is gorgeous! The menu is yummy, the wine list is great, and obviously the service is fantastic. The craziest thing about it is, as a server, you get there at 4pm, eat a staff meal, and then you set up the space. By 5pm the cafe opens... And no one comes in. I had one person from 5-6pm. The other waiters kept telling me, "Just wait until 6pm!" At 5 till 6pm, I got another table. I took their order and entered it into the system. When I turned around, I had 4 more tables. At the same time. Then my other 3 tables got sat, and at 6:10pm I had a full section who all wanted to order at the same time, get drinks at the same time, get their food at the same time, get dessert and coffee at the same time, and pay their checks at the same time. It was like serving one big table with 22 people at it. CRAZY! And suddenly, it was 7:25pm, the bells were ringing to let people know that it was almost curtain for their shows, and magically, everyone got up and left. 7:30pm - it was over. Another 30 minutes of settling up the cash and checks and by 8pm, shift over, out the door and on the train! And I made pretty good money, too, since the average check was over $100 (drinks, appetizers, dinner and dessert/coffee). WOW.

This is another thing that amazes me about New York. People eat out all the time. In my previous "Happy Passover" post I mentioned that no one, not even the rich, have functional kitchens. And people pay a lot of money to eat out. The company I work for is particularly good at installing semi-permanent food venues in convertible spaces. Sort of a hybrid between catering and restaurant food service. They find a needed niche and really exploit it - and I mean exploit in the nicest of terms. I mean, I'm grateful for it - I made an average of $50/hour last night and was home before 9pm! You can't beat that.

Now, I don't want to wait tables forever, it's hard work. Lots of running, lots of details - people get pretty picky about their food... But this city has a lot of really unique ways to earn money. It's just another example of New York's possibilities. Which opens up time to explore all those other NY possibilities! Like taking a class, auditioning, writing a screenplay, running your own business... Crap, I gotta wrap this up, I've got a lot of stuff to do today!

Movie Magic!

While I worked Easter Brunch yesterday, Ryan and our friend/collaborator/DP/business partner Renzo Spirit Buffalo shot the final shots of Ryan's short film, "Billy." Ryan conceived of, wrote, stars in and produced the short. I helped him brainstorm about it, held a boom, schlepped a few bags and produced, largely in name only. This was definitely Ryan's labor of love. Our friend Larry Tobias appears in it in an HILARIOUS turn, and he helped shoot the inside shots. Ryan's friend Elizabeth Durham also appears in it, and is wonderful. The whole thing cost about $600, but it looks like a million damn dollars. It's a simple story, well told by good actors and a DP who made every single outside shot look like it was shot on a $250,000 camera. It doesn't hurt that Renzo has shot big studio feature movies on $250,000 cameras before...

Anyway, all that's left to do now is post-production: editing, music, titles. The stuff Ryan does at work every day. I think he'll probably have a rough edit within a couple of weeks! His first movie. Our production company's first personal project! As Ryan said at our wrap dinner celebration last night - "My whole life I've dreamed of making my own movie, and now I've done it!" I'm SO proud of him. He had an inspiration for a character about 4 months ago, and now he has his first short film shot and ready for editing. He believed in it and made it happen: on his days off, after long days at work, before long days at work - whenever he could steal some time. He borrowed cameras, rented equipment, got friends excited and involved in the project. He schlepped all around the city, asked for favors, bartered trades. Whatever it took, he made it happen. The power of the creative spirit and the determined will. There's still a lot of work left to do, but the hardest part has been completed, the rest is just lovingly laying it out on a timeline and letting it tell its story. And then, of course, marketing the hell out of it. Creativity meets the real world! As the movie progresses, I will document it here!

Happy Passover

About twice a month, I work for a nice little catering company called 2 Peas and a Pot. It's run by two chefs, Lauren and Phil, who also happen to be a couple. They are really cool and fun to work for and we always have a good time at the dinner and cocktail parties that they cater for their upscale Manhattan clientele. Some of the clients are crazy - after all, it's Manhattan, and the clients all have money. Some of them have money and no manners, or money and no taste. For example, a Rockefeller (yes, as in THE Rockefellers) didn't tip the waitstaff, nor did the philanthropic widow with 15 Matisses adorning her 5th Avenue apartment's dining room wall. Nice. Other clients are low-key, fun and fabulous. You just never know who you'll be working for. It's also cool to see the inside of luxury multi-million dollar Manhattan apartments. No matter how large and lavish the apartment, the number one most common denominator in all these places is that every one of them has a small, inconveniently laid out kitchen - proof that no one in Manhattan cooks.

Last night, I worked a Passover Seder for a family in Soho. Their apartment takes up an entire floor of their building. I've worked for them before. The husband is either a partner at a large legal firm, or a high-powered investment banker. Don't know, really. He's a cypher. He completely ignores the "non-essential" people - I don't know that he's ever said anything to me besides, "I'll have a gin and tonic." Otherwise, he looks through me like I'm invisible. It's a little disconcerting, but I treat him the same way, so it's fine. The wife is a former speech writer for the Clinton administration turned Manhattan housewife, complete with the late-fertility child accessory, pill addiction and laundry list of philanthropic events and parties she participates in. I wouldn't say that she's horrible, but I wouldn't call her nice, either.

Anyway, the chefs were not working last night, they had their own family Seder to attend, so they prepped the meal and dropped it off, and it was my job to basically do the final food prep and serve it with another waiter. The plan was, we would arrive at 4pm to begin food prep, guests would arrive at 5pm for an hour of hors d'oeuvres and cocktails, and then dinner would be served buffet style at 6pm. At 4:30pm Natalie, the other waiter, and I had been standing in front of the building for 30 minutes when the nanny returned home with the child and kind of casually asked us if we were the help for the night, and let us in. The hostess didn't arrive home until 4:45pm. The first guests started arriving early at 4:50pm, asking for food, which wasn't ready yet, and drinks which hadn't been delivered from the market yet. The dinner was supposed to be for 15, and I immediately noticed that the table was set for 20. Right off the bat we are short on food, and late on prep - non of which was our fault. What a mess.

Around 5pm, the hostess announced to Natalie and I, "I hope this won't be a problem, I hate to even mention this because people just get so weird around celebrities, but we will be having celebrity guests tonight - Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts. Please just be yourselves and don't gawk." Coincidentally, I've already worked a party where Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts were in attendance. This is New York and I cater waiter, lady. I've seen it all. I've seen Victoria Secret models doing blow and throwing up in 23rd Street Armory bathroom, ok? The hostess went on to say, "I really feel that the famous should just stay in their own circle, but they're my husband's clients and they have no Seder to go to on Passover, so I HAD to invite them, I couldn't turn them away..." How gracious of her.

As expected, all anyone talked about after the celeb couple arrived was them. Naomi had no makeup on, had her hair pulled back in a ratty unwashed ponytail, and looked really cute, but normal, by the by. Liev hadn't shaved. In days. Frankly, they both looked like they'd rolled out of bed late that afternoon just in time to make dinner. They brought cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery for dessert. Naomi had to use the bathroom like 5 times - she's in her second trimester of pregnancy. Liev asked me for horseradish and when I found it for him, he was thrilled. I think it may have been his favorite moment of the whole meal. It was pretty surreal to be standing in someone's tiny kitchen and have a film actor of international renown come in and ask you for a paper towel because he'd dropped a glass of water on the rug in the living room. By the by, Natalie and I were the only people at the party who didn't gawk at them, and Liev and Naomi were hands down the most down to earth, gracious guests at the party. The hostess, who was so concerned about "the help's" reactions to being in the company of greatness, proceeded to put on a three hour show while they were there - playing adoring, gracious hostess-with-the-mostest, and Manhattan Power Wife. It was pretty hilarious. She even made her kid sing for them. I'm sure she spent all day today telling EVERYONE she knows how she had Liev and Naomi over for Passover, and pretending that it was a real hassle to have them show up. Whatever. She ate it up like kugel.

My Worst Nightmare

Just read this little number from the NY Times. It's the second item in the article. Rats on trains - the classic combination of one of the best things about NYC and the absolute dreaded worst aspect of NYC. (See my previous post on "Trains" for more rat/train action.)

Real Estate

I'm obsessed with real estate right now. I've been living in apartments for a very long time, moving from place to place, and always imagining what I WOULD do with the apartment if it were mine. Take out a wall here, paint the room a bright not-even-close-to antique white color, put some new flooring in, etc. All things I can't actually do as a renter. Right now I'm dying to put down a white laminated wood floor and take out a door in our current apartment. Not going to do it, but I'm sure I'll obsess over it the whole time we live here.

In the last apartment - the UES apartment - we had to do about $750 in improvements just to tolerate it. It was a horrible place. The floors were 2 inches lower towards the middle of the building, so everything ran down hill. The kitchen floor had vinyl flooring held down with DUCT TAPE, over a lumpy, uneven tile removal. We scrubbed the crap out of it and put rugs over it so we never had to look at it again. The bathroom floor tile was so disgusting, I covered it with press 'em tiles so I'd also never have to look at it again. We scrubbed until our skin cracked and bled, and what still wouldn't come clean, we painted over, including the pepto-abysmal pink bedroom and kitchen - ??? We used paint as a cleaning agent, caulking agent and repairing agent. The kitchen cabinets and countertop were starting to sink toward the middle and due to numerous leaks in the 100 year old pipes, they were starting to rot a little, too. It was a total rathole (somewhat too literally - the week before we moved out I found two rodents fighting over the garbage in the kitchen - eww!). It was the only apartment that I imagined torching for the insurance money if I owned it, and our rent was $600 more than the American median mortgage payment. Gack!

Our Astoria apartment is pure Grandma retro. Wood panelling, for reals. But it's really clean, has pretty good light and everything works. It's rodent free and the rent is cheap. It may not look as good superficially as the last one did after our ghetto rehab, but it's a million times more solid underneath. But it's not ours and never will be. We're priced out of Astoria already, which stinks. So, I keep web searching for what we can afford. It's amazing how many neighborhoods in NY we can't. The entire island of Manhattan, for instance. Conversely, we can afford half the apartments in the Bronx, none of which we want. There are only about 4 nabes left in Brooklyn in our price range: Sunset Park, Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach and Bay Ridge. Great water views, but WAY out there. We'll probably stay here in Queens because there are a lot of neighborhoods we can afford here, and many of them are actually less than a day's long commute to the city. I exaggerate, but seriously. Bay Ridge?!? You need a passport to get there, don't you?

The NY Times has a great real estate section online - you can look at all the pictures. Ryan made me stop looking at it and come to bed around 2am on Friday night. Like I said I'm obsessed. I can tell you exactly what $240,000 will buy you in Jackson Heights, Sunnyside, Woodside, Flushing, Corona, Bayside, Forest Hills, and all of the above mentioned Brooklyn nabes. Some of them, not much. Others a lot. I'm ready for a piece of the American dream. Even if it comes in a 550 sq. ft. package. At least it'll be mine. And I'll be able to paint it whatever color I want. Besides, who wouldn't want to live in a place called Sunnyside??

The Glory of Wash-N-Fold

I hate laundry. I don't know why, but doing laundry to me is just about the worst chore imaginable. I'd rather scrub the toilet than do laundry. At least with scrubbing the toitey, I get a sense of satisfaction when it's gleaming and smelling good. Laundry just sucks. There's the lugging of it to the mat, the loading the washer, the unloading the washer, the loading the dryer, the unloading the dryer, the folding, the lugging home, and then the putting away... Ugh.

Once I had an apartment that had a washer/dryer in it - that was a little better, but I still hated it. Instead of lugging 40 pounds of laundry to the mat once a week with an Us mag and a Dr. Pepper, I did multiple loads throughout the week at home, which made me feel like the live-in washerwoman. But no matter how onerous it was, I always did my own laundry, except for those rare times when I visited home and my ma did it before I could. (Bless you, ma!) The thought of someone else doing my laundry seemed like a luxury that only rich people who had "help" could afford. Then, I moved to New York.

Since moving to NYC, I've done my own laundry less than 10 times, because I discovered the glory that is the Wash-N-Fold service. I'm sure they existed in the other cities I've lived in, but nowhere else are they so prolific, so prominent. At my old apartment in the Upper East Side, there were two within half a block of each other - I didn't even have to cross the street to get to them. There was also a laundromat right next door to one of the Wash-N-Folds on our block, and for the first week or two after I moved I did my own laundry there. But one hot July day, after lugging 40 pounds of dirties down 4 flights of stairs, I just didn't feel like spending 4 hours in a stiflingly hot laundromat watching Spanish telenovellas on the mat tv, so I walked one door down and for the first time in my life, dropped my laundry off for someone else to do. It cost $0.65 a lb. - $26.00 to drop off the clothes, turn and walk away and not worry about it again until I had to pick it up the next day. Wow. What a bargain!! It would cost me almost $20 for me to do all that laundry myself, and in old machines that never seemed to get the smell out of Ryan's t-shirts no matter how much detergent I used.

The next day, I went to collect my laundry from the Wash-N-Fold. Like magic, the two HUGE bags I'd dragged in were now two tidy sized plastic wrapped cubes. When I got them home and opened them, the smell of freshness filled the air, and all of the clothes were folded into precise, tight little squares that let me fit about twice as many things in my drawers, which is a big bonus when your apartment is the size of a bread box. I knew right then and there, if at all possible, I would never do my own laundry again. A mere 30% differential in price for 100% freedom - delightful. Then I found out that my Wash-n-Fold picked-up and delivered... I never took advantage of that, because it was such a delicious, delightful thought, that it almost seemed perverse. I might go to hell if I indulged in that.

Over the course of the next year, Ry and I tried several of the Wash-N-Folds in our UES neighborhood. We'd evaluate them on price ("Wow, I found one that only charges $.55/lb!"), smell ("Hmmm. Not quite as mountain fresh...), fold ("Look, I can LITERALLY bounce quarters off this shirt!"), and turn around time ("Dude, they want 24 hours to do those 6 loads, who do they think they are!"). In short, we got spoiled. And it was GOOD. Manhattan is hard, and anything that makes it easier is GOOD.

When we moved to Queens, life got a little easier, and I thought I'd take the high road and go back to doing my own laundry. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, right? I was shocked and pleasantly amazed to find that it costs about half as much to wash and dry a load of laundry at the laundromats here, and like Manhattan, we have about 6 laundromats in a two block area around our apartment, so proximity isn't a problem. Again, I spent about two weeks doing our laundry before I once again realized that I HATE doing laundry. HATE it. So, I'm back to dragging 40 pounds of dirties to the neighborhood Wash-N-Fold. Strangely, the one thing that isn't cheaper here in Queens is the price of a lb. of laundry - it's around the same $.60-.65 here. Probably because no one really wants to do it, unless they're properly compensated for touching your dirty underthings. Makes sense. The only difference is that in this neighborhood, the Wash-N-Fold is run by a Latino family, and in Manhattan it was a Vietnamese family. Both can make laundry smell like flowers and fold clothes so tightly, they seem to defy physics. God bless them.

Trains

I'm totally in love with the NYC subway. It was one of the first things that I enjoyed about NYC. Being able to just catch a train in your neighborhood and take it, with a few transfers, just about ANYWHERE in the city is so amazing to me. I've lived in other cities with public transportation - New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee. The pub trans systems in these cities vary in their quality and usage. Chicago's CTA has fantastic coverage of the city and on the grand scale of things, is pretty efficient and affordable. Detroit, the Motor City, has a joke of a system, as you could probably guess. The powers that be, when designing the city, decided encouraging people to take mass transit was encouraging them to reject the very industry that made the city what it was, so the only train in Detroit, the hysterically monikered "People Mover" (thepeoplemover.com) is like the train of the same name at Disney's Tomorrowland - it just takes you on a continuous loop and only tourists ride it. The Streetcar in NO was nice. I took it to work every day and it cost a buck. But there's only one line left, and it only goes up St. Charles and Carrollton and back. There's a bus named Desire now, no streetcar. I never took public trans in Milwaukee - I think it just has buses. Someone I worked with got mugged while waiting for a bus in a generally safe neighborhood about 2 weeks after I moved there, so I walked or drove everywhere for the 10 months I lived there.

I hate buses. I will do just about anything to avoid a bus ride. Not sure why. Probably due to the fact that I've had bad experiences on buses in every city I've lived, except for Milwaukee in which, as per above, I never rode. The fact that there isn't a subway under Central Park still steams me. I'd really rather walk through the park than take the Crosstown bus. HATE it! Ryan, my fiancé says it's irrational. It makes perfect sense to me. Why ride a bus when you can take THE TRAIN.

Since moving here, I've taken nearly every train line somewhere. Even the infamous G, which everyone in NY calls the Ghost train since you almost never see it. They sometimes stink, they're often crowded, on the older unautomated trains you can rarely ever understand the conductors' announcements or if you can they're at ear-splitting levels... The trains are delayed a lot, and sometimes, like the 7 train on the weekends until the middle of April, they don't run at all, forcing you onto (I shudder to think) a Shuttle bus. Some of the lines have cars that are so old, you feel like you just walked onto the set of 1979's "The Warriors" upon entering them. But I love them.

When I lived in Manhattan, I lived off of the 4/5/6 (Green) line. All the trains are new on the 4/5/6. The announcements and doors are operated automatically and they have digital read-outs that show you what the next stop will be and what the current time is. The computer voice that announces the stops is soothing and set to a comfortable volume level. The cars are, relatively speaking, clean. But for some reason, the cars are narrow. Very narrow. AND, the East Side of the city only has one train line, as opposed to the 3 on the West. Friday afternoon in a 6 train is like taking a joyride in a sardine can - smelly, wet and extremely crowded. But the 4/5/6 trains run pretty reliably and they aren't always packed...

Now I live off of the N/W (Yellow) line in Astoria, Queens. The first time I took this line, I got on the wrong train. I was trying to get to Flushing. I got some instructions on hopstop.com (a treasure for anyone living in DC, Chicago, NY, Boston, or SF using pub trans) which told me to take the R train to a dreaded bus. Hey, I was a newbie - now I know you take the N/W to the 7 to get to Flushing. Duh! But, I was ignorant. Really ignorant. I got on the N instead of the R and as soon as we cleared the East River, the train miraculously rose up, up, up right into the daylight. I'd taken the R to the Queens Target before, so I knew I wasn't supposed to be above ground. But what a sight - just like my hometown El train! Here I was on an elevated train, looking out on the sun-dappled graffiti filled urban landscape that is Long Island City.

The big joke was I was on my way to a work assignment as a cater waiter, and as always happened to me when they sent me to Queens, I got lost. Every trip to Queens for the first year I lived here involved me getting lost, calling Ryan and asking him to look up where I was on Google maps and asking him to help me get unlost. He was my ghetto GPS. I got to the job just a little late, after taking the train all the way to Astoria (my first unintentional visit to my current beloved nabe!), getting a kind bus driver to literally take his bus PAST the end of his line (the first good experience I ever had on a bus - although the engine on it died and he had to pull over and restart it about 4 times) to drop me off at the walking path at Flushing Bay on which I literally ran a mile to the jobsite. Anyhoo, I digress.

I've taken trains at all times of the day and night. I've gotten lost, missed my stop and wound up in the wrong Borough and had to go back, I've gotten shut out from stations by using my unlimited MetroCard at the same station twice in under 10 minutes (don't even get me started on that one)... I walked 7 miles round trip to work during the MTA strike of Christmas 2005 in the bitter cold. I've watched urine roll back and forth across the floor of a train. I had a rat stand right next to me on the 53rd Street station platform while waiting for the E train on Thanksgiving morning, like he was waiting for the train, too. I've been harrassed, panhandled, yelled at by crazy people, pushed, hit up to buy candy about a million times... I've waited an eternity for a train to come - like "I could've walked home in the same amount of time" long, and yet, I love the NYC subway. I wish it could take me everywhere. I could write a whole blog entry on the brand new N trains... Maybe I will!

Qboro or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

It occurred to me this past Friday night, as I was rushing through the Times Square station transferring from the N train to the 1, that like it or not, I am becoming a NEW YORKER. It was a stunning discovery, one that's been creeping up on me for the last couple of months. January marked the official 18 month anniversary of my moving to New York and I have resisted and fought the notion of becoming a New Yorker with all my might. I am a nice Midwestern girl with Midwestern manners, values and folksy charm (or so I'm told - especially by New Yorkers: "You're so NICE!").

I've watched New Yorkers on the streets for the past 18 months, and the one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty about them, is that they are an ANGRY bunch of people. Ok, I generalize, not all of them, but a LOT of them are angry. A lot of the time. About a lot of different things. None of which really matter that much. But, it's not their fault that they're angry. Here's why - Manhattan is an island. A small island. And 3,000,000 people live on it. Several million more commute to work to Manhattan everyday, as well. Needless to say, it gets a little crowded. And as we all saw on the national news a couple of weeks ago, it's not the cleanest place in the country, either... (Anyone up for some Kentucky Fried Rat?) Manhattan is smelly, it's cramped, it's loud, it's dirty and everyone's personal space is invaded on a daily basis. You can spend entire subway rides lodged in a stranger's armpit (I'm looking in your general direction L train). Facing this first thing every morning can make people... uptight. Venomous, really.

Oh, and did I mention that Manhattan proudly proclaims itself to be the most expensive piece of real estate on the planet? It is exactly the crazy lack of space that drives up the prices on everything in Manhattan to the point where even a stinkin' apple at your dirty, dirty neighborhood Gristedes is at about a 200% markup compared to the rest of the country. You think I'm exaggerating? Then you haven't lived here. Anyhoo. All of these things led me to mentally distance myself from the place I was living. New York was where I lived, but it sure wasn't home. And I sure as HELL wasn't a New Yorker.

So... why did it dawn on me, as I juked and zigged and zagged my way through the teeming throngs Friday night in Times Square station, that I am becoming a New Yorker? That's what I will be exploring in my future posts at this very site! If you like it, bookmark it and come back and visit. Tell your friends! If not, thanks for dropping by for this one time only visit. Nice to have you. Don't forget your umbrella, it's by the door there. For the rest of you, see you in a day or two!