If any of you are looking for recommendations for times and places to have your first seizure— aren’t we all— a rehearsal studio post-show is actually the best case scenario. I felt an immediate sense of comfort knowing that I would be “yes, and”-ed into an ambulance faster than you can say thank you, five.

Let me paint the picture for you:
We were in a rehearsal studio with an audience of—I don’t know—maybe forty, and mercifully, the last performance had just finished. Not because the performance was anything less than incredible, which it was, but because the stage needed to be clear for the day’s next show-stopping performance….

Ah, the cats of New York. A city too sophisticated for the feral—at least on the island.

Of all the things to acquire in this city, the best is hotly disputed. Some say a hedge fund. Others, a trust fund. Personally, my heart is split between a rent-stabilized apartment and a cat. Because once you have a house in New York—and a creature to make it a home—there’s not much else left to conquer.

Boomers had to share a family phone. Connected to the wall. With a wire. Millennials texted—perfected the LOL, OMG, and of course the ROFLAMO, which I am still trying to decode (I assume it’s either a government code or a cry for help). That means Gen Z, with its abundance of connection, has become the supreme phone call generation.

We arrive an hour and forty minutes into the two-hour set. Fashionably late. Outside the venue stands an ironic smoker and two halfway tipsy women debating left door or right. We dust the pavement off our shoes and enter with an air of pretentiousness that lets the room know: yes, we’ve been to a reading before.

Imagine, if you will, settling in on a Saturday night. Pizza— ordered, thankfully. Wine bottles—empty, orphaned on the kitchen counter. Your roommate beside you, denting the cushions and lighting a blunt, generous with puff puff, less with the pass. The outside world may be churning with headlines and heartbreaks, but inside— inside, Saturday night is a sacred place. 

And like all sacred things, it must be guarded.

How unfortunate, then— would it be— if someone were to interrupt you.

The Jane Ballroom in the Jane Hotel on Jane Street — commonly referred to as The Jane — never failed to provide the boring with stories and the interesting with cocaine, though I’d recommend partaking in neither. But now, with The Jane long gone, I can’t help wondering if that ballroom was less a place than an Era— and if the lack of it has hit me harder than expected.

Because— oh, the memories…

I was staying at a friend’s house in the Hamptons.

I thought I knew what soap looked like.

I was wrong.