The woman in this New York Times story embodies my idealized definition of what it means to be a New Yorker. When the lights from a new park shine directly into your living room, you don’t get mad. You turn your house into a stage.
I hope she gets her own Off Broadway show.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Kim W. // Jun 25, 2009 at 8:22 pm
This sounds like a story I swear I heard once on NPR. This supposedly happened somewhere in the East Village in the late 90′s, during a summer when cops were especially diligent about cracking down on crowds lingering on sidewalks.
Somewhere on East 5th Street, right on the same block as one of the police precints, apparently a guy living there had a 2nd-floor apartment and just spontaneously decided to give weekly free concerts every Saturday night on his fire escape. He’d drag out a karaoke machine, fire up a Frank Sinatra karaoke tape, and just sing. Crowds would, of course, gather to hear him. Sometimes a woman on the first floor of the same building would drag out a fake floor and do a simultaneous tap dance routine.
One night, a cop car from the local precinct rolled up alongside the sidewalk as he sang. A couple people braced themselves for the cops to break up the crowd, but the cops just sat silently in the car and waited for him to finish before then getting on their loudspeakers and asking the crowd to disperse. People did leave, but they noticed the cops hadn’t gotten out of their car, and seemed to be more amused by the whole thing.
So next week, the guy came back out on his fire escape and tried again, and some of the crowd came back. After a few numbers, sure enough, another cop car pulled up. The cops inside sat silently, once again waiting for the singer to finish his latest number.
Then, when he had finished, the cops in the car once again fired up their loudspeaker, but instead of asking the crowd to disperse, they instead said this:
“Do ‘Summer Wind.’”
The singer, bemused, fired up “Summer Wind” on his tape, and started in: “The summer wind came blowin’ in from across the sea….”
And that’s when the cops in the car switched on their headlights and shone them on him, giving him a spotlight. When he got to the end of the song, the cops once again fired up the loudspeaker, and only said: “Very nice. Thank you.”
And they drove off, leaving him to keep singing.
2 jkc // Jun 25, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Thanks for sharing this story. And this is how I always imagine New Yorkers to be…taking something that was a “mistake” and making something beautiful and creative with it.
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