From Blue Blood – by Edward Conlon, a marvelous book I am tearing through at the moment (it’s so good, I can’t recommend it highly enough):
There is so much to the City, so many little worlds on the wax and wane, pulling you in and pushing you out. You might be met by a wary eyeball through the peephole, or with wide-armed welcome, if you have a pretty face, a pocketful of cash, the name of a friend. The dress code could be black tie, or you might have to leave all your clothes at the door, or a simple weapons check would do. There are cafes and clubs where you can speak Amharic, Bulgarian, or Catalan, and next door to each there are others where you can leave the mother tongue and mother country behind. People come here to be dancers, bankers, witches, chefs; to take jobs that have been just invented or long forgotten, union jobs and city jobs. New York maintains civil-service positions for ostlers – they take care of the municipal horses – and may be the only city to do so since the Kaiser left Berlin. If you require other Bulgarian ostlers so as not to feel lonely, you might have a problem, but we have both Bulgarians and ostlers. And there may well be an enclave of Bulgarian ostlers – in Queens, most likely – that I just haven’t come across, because I haven’t looked. You can never get lost in New York, as long as you keep on moving, but you can get stuck sometimes. It depends more on your stamina more than sense of direction.
If you yearn to be with your own kind, then you can find it here. One Sunday a month, a small bar in the east Village has a ukelele festival in their backroom, and you have never seen such a packed bar in your whole life. Every guy was dressed like Robert Crumb, and the girls wore seamed stockings, and everyone had a ukelele and it was bedlam. Ukelele-driven friendly bedlam. Lonely ukelele players, through the five boroughs, waiting eagerly for the next gathering … and then descending on the joint like gangbusters, having held in their fervor until they could be amongst their own kind.
Tonight I will be with my own kind. What a relief. To not have to explain, to defend WHY I am love this night of nights, to build a case in order to make someone else who is inherently hostile towards the whole thing understand. Boring. Let me hang out with other enthusiasts who are into it, who bet on it, who have scoring cards, who cheer when their favorite has won, who discuss, who have “predictions” laid out in front of them, who whoop it up, who do not condescend, who do not snark and bitch, who are blatantly INTO it, because it’s fun, it’s interesting, and it’s what we’re about.
It’s going to be riotous. Allison and I, belly-up to the bar, filling out our score cards, chatting with strangers (most of whom have Irish accents), ordering food, talking like maniacs, watching, discussing, picking apart, analyzing … and, in the end? Appreciating. Appreciating the event, in and of itself. We do this every year, and it is always hysterical.
Snowy grey skies. But the bar will have a fire blazing in the fireplace. A bar where everybody knows your name. And where there are people who have FIERCE opinions about who should win Best Makeup. People who will ask you to “step outside” if you think Babel should win Best Picture. People who not only have seen every entry, but can list who was the gaffer on each picture. People who will literally raise their voices over the Best Animated Short. My kind, indeed.
Happy Oscar night!!
