Broadway Baby
Dear Diary:
Imagine you are a teenager in the 1970s and the only person in your family to request a ticket to a Broadway show as a gift for your December birthday.
Maybe it was the 1965 television production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” that hooked you, but every year as your birthday approaches, you scan the paper for the show you want to see.
Your father treks back from Midtown and collects you and you depart together from the Ho-Ho-Kus station and then transfer to the PATH train in Hoboken. No stopping at the Clam Broth House.
You emerge in Manhattan, and as your generally stern father gently guides you away from the seediest doorways and alleys of Times Square, you forget about school and your younger siblings at home.
You don’t know in advance where you will eat, but it turns out that your father will steer you over thick cables and into the doorway at Sardi’s for the first time.
You eat upstairs because Jerry Lewis is being filmed downstairs. Another time, you eat at the Ginger Man, where you steal glances at Mary Tyler Moore across the room.
Over the years, you and your father head to the Majestic Theater to see “The Wiz” starring Stephanie Mills, and to the Delacorte — or was it the Uris — to see Kevin Kline in “The Pirates of Penzance.”
Imagine trying but failing to stifle your silent sobs while you watch Yul Brynner perform the death scene in “The King and I.”
Back then, this was me.
— Cynthia Strickland
Pinch Walker
Dear Diary:
A new gas line had recently been installed at my house in Park Slope, and the contractor needed to check every gas jet after the service was turned back on.
Just then, my tenant came down the stoop to walk her dog.
The contractor asked if he and his crew could check her stove.
She said she was very late and had to walk her dog.
The contractor called one of his workers over and asked if it would be OK if the workman walked the dog so that he and my tenant could go up and check the stove.
Everyone was happy with the solution.
— Bill Shumaker
Too Quiet
Dear Diary:
I had been awake since 5 a.m. thanks to the baby. It was still dark out, so we stood by the window watching the twinkling subway cars chug by. She clapped each time one passed.
My son woke up at 6, and the next two hours were a blur of doling out toast, cereal and chunks of fruit. At 8, I wrangled them into a wagon, and we headed out.
Park Slope was full of Halloween decorations, and on our walk we admired the giant spiders and webs of cotton stretched across windows.
At the day care, I hiked up three flights of stairs with the baby, now weighing 20 pounds. It wasn’t even 8:15, but I was already exhausted from the schlepping.
A few minutes later, I waved my son into school and felt the sweet relief of being child free. I got on the F, put on my headphones and enjoyed the quiet.
The man next to me had sweat beading on his brow. He was staring at a picture on his phone of a smiling toddler. He zoomed in on the child’s chubby face, then flipped to a picture of the child laughing on the same swing set my daughter had played on the previous weekend.
I was so relieved not to be caring for my children in that moment, but suddenly I missed their soft, little bodies. I started scrolling through my own photos.
The man and I sat side by side, looking at pictures of the children we had just dropped off for the day.
— Samantha Mann
Riders’ Reading
Dear Diary:
I was on the 4 train to Brooklyn reading a copy of “Angel” by Elizabeth Taylor, which was published in 1957 and is not a book many people read these days.
I glanced up to see a young woman across the aisle who was also reading a book. As a librarian, I’m always thrilled to see anyone with a book in their hands.
As I started to look away, she gave me a big, broad smile and held up her book: “Angel.”
I was stunned.
I approached her and asked whether she had read the same article that I had, about novels with unlikable, manipulative female protagonists in which “Angel” was mentioned.
She had not but had just been browsing in a book shop, and had read the blurb on the back, which piqued her curiosity. And there she was. Subway reading serendipity is joyful.
— Pam Abernathy
Sidewalk Snippet
Dear Diary:
It was a sunny fall afternoon, and I was walking up Eighth Avenue when I passed a flower stand opposite Abingdon Square.
Two women were talking on the sidewalk. One reached into a large white bucket. The other stopped her.
“You don’t want eucalyptus,” she said. “It is so overdone.”
— N. Scott Johnson
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Illustrations by Agnes Lee
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