An Urban Experience

In the late 1980s I lived in a efficiency apartment in Center City Philadelphia and was mere blocks away from the beautiful Academy of Music which was then the home of The Philadelphia Orchestra and The Opera Company of Philadelphia. I came home from work one evening feeling especially festive because I had managed to get a ticket to a production of Tosca starring Eva Marton and Sherill Milnes.

I entered the elevator. WHAM! In a heartbeat I found myself on the floor. I had slipped on some oily substance. The left side of my face was stinging and the left earpiece from my glasses had broken off.

I picked myself up and went to have a quiet word with the apartment manager.

“What the hell is on the elevator floor?” I shouted.

Carla, the young receptionist, wasn’t really looking at me.

“One of our tenants works in a big office building on Walnut Street. He said he found this great treatment for wood.”

“Did you tell him that the walls of the elevator are genuine faux wood and would not absorb whatever precious oils he rubbed on them?”

Carla looked up and gasped.

“Gosh, what are you going to do? The side of your face is swollen.” She looked closer. “Your glasses are broken. You can’t go out looking like that.”

“Just watch me.”

I put ice on my face for a while and, stuffing and two aspirin into my mouth, left for The Academy.

If the woman at the ticket office or the usher who showed me to my seat noticed anything, they didn’t mention it. I squeezed into my amphitheater seat. The gentleman next to me did a double take.

“You’re missing your left earpiece on your glasses.”

I just looked at him.

“I guess you know that. And your left cheek is bruised.”

“Yes, I fell.” I told him the story.

“These aren’t good seats,” he said. “I got them at the last minute because my wife took forever deciding she didn’t want to come.”

He got up from his seat and looked over the railing.

“You know the plot of Tosca?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good because you’re not going to see much tonight.”

That was a bit of an exaggeration. I didn’t see Scarpia breathe his last, but I didn’t miss much else. Clearly many people had come to see Sherill Milnes because once Scarpia died, they headed for the exits. I said goodbye to my neighbor.

After Tosca threw herself from the parapet (though from where I was sitting it looked like she hopped over a fence), I left and walked out onto Broad Street.

A man fell into step with me. When you walk as slowly as I do, you have to decide whether to talk to strangers or ignore them. I was happy the guy wa walking to my right. I didn’t want to answer questions about my face or my glasses.

The man himself was a sight. He resembled an Elvis impersonator. He had elaborately coiffed black hair and wore a black jumpsuit that featured a sequined dragon coiled around his leg. I decided I would talk if he did, but not much.

“You limp,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I had a girlfriend who limped like you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He waited a beat or two. “She’s dead.”

I decided not to ask for details.

“Am I making you nervous?”

“No,” I lied.

“Oh, you live here.”

We had turned onto Spruce Street, the gay corridor of Philadelphia. There were always people out. The folks on the street made for an entertaining and very effective Neighborhood Watch.

“Well,” he said. “I gotta go.”

Relieved of my burden of vigilance, I asked a question.

“Were you at the opera?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Milnes sucked. Give me Gobbi any day.”

I was wrong about Elvis. He was not Las Vegas; he was La Scala.

Stephanie Patterson

City of Troy: Memoirs Central

Troy’s a real city here in Upstate New York. (By ‘real’, I mean it can compare with my hometown, NYC.) As far as I know, unless you head West in a wagon train, the only other one is Albany, where I’m living now these past four years, having spent sixty-plus years in New York City. Burdened by ordinary old age, I fled my birthplace and its ever-increasing multitudes as developers threw up glass-and-faux-brick ‘Town Houses’ on every empty lot bigger than a Bocce Ball Court (60 feet by 12 ft.), in Jackson Heights, Queens. I had taken refuge there in a Pre-War Co-op a decade ago. Remember the old SciFi movie, ‘Soylent Green’ (Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson)? In the year 2022, people are living on the staircases in apartment buildings! Yes, I yearn for the City I remember, not this crass successor.

Troy speaks to me. In the early 1900’s, it was among the wealthiest of American cities. It was the Collar City when the Arrow Shirt Company detachable-collars-and-cuffs factories and the Iron Works were going full-blast on the banks of the Hudson. But no more. The crumbling red brick commercial buildings stand empty, although the stately Victorian townhouses that predominate in Downtown are fully occupied. The City has ‘good bones’ architecturally throughout its principal neighborhoods — Downtown, the South End, Lansingburg and North Central — and its population is staying put. The new Troy is a home to small business, in its Antiques Quarter, Little Italy, and ethnic restaurants. The State government agencies and the schools — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Sage Colleges — provide a stable economic base, as in Albany.

But ask me, and I say: rename the Collar City, Memoir City. It’s the hottest game in Troy.

The other night I read a piece of my memoir to an audience in the theatre at the Troy Arts Center on River Street. Ten of us read for ‘Bookmarks, the Memoir Project Reading Series’, moderated by its creators, authors Donna Miller and Marion Roach Smith. We read 1,000-word pieces about “Circling the Dark; Choosing Light: Moments of Transformation,” the theme of the evening. Experienced and first-time authors, we read about the death of a child; the loss of a spouse; the revival of long-dead emotions; the comforts of cooking, the peace of gardening, a friend’s betrayal. “Life stories that mine the personal to express the universal,” as the moderators put it.

The Arts Center is a unique, vibrant non-profit home to practicing arts in the crafts, cooking, dance, writing, et al., in a big space off Monument Square in Downtown Troy. Marion Roach Smith is the founder and heart of its Memoir Project. In fifteen years of facilitating life-writing in its various forms — “Writing What You Know” – she’s guided 1,000-plus students to find their truth. I know because she got me started, too. She’s a former NY Times staffer, author of four published works — the most intriguing to me, “The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair” (she has), and her latest, “The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text on Writing and Life.” To me, she’ll always be the Queen of Memoir.

Afterward, don’t fail to eat at the Illium Café in Monument Square: home cooking with a big dollup of NYC class.

Robert Knightly