Little Brett, Big City

  Once I decided to move from Bowling Green, Ohio to New York in 1989 with no job or home, I sent away for The Guide To Temporary Housing in New York City.   The YMCAs listed on its photocopied pages seemed to be the safest and cheapest options for Manhattan. I would have had more choices if I were a young lady looking for a chaperoned, Christian environment. But I was going in the opposite direction.   Once I graduated, I went back to my mom’s house in Piqua to execute my escape to New York.   But as the days passed, my commitment sagged like an old Mylar balloon. What seemed like my destiny in Bowling Green, felt like pending doom from the family living room. Angst paralyzed me from calling the Sloane House near Penn Station, final destination on the train I would take from Lima. Making a reservation at the Y meant making a commitment to leave everything and everyone I knew. And risking my life to a virus that had me in its crosshairs as soon as I stepped into the ...

This week in 1989, Madonna hit #1 with “Express Yourself”…in Cashbox magazine. She was blocked from the top of the Billboard chart by Martika’s “Toy Soldiers.” I don’t know her.   Like most songs then, I first heard it on MTV. I was grinding out my last semester that summer at Bowling Green State University in an A/C-free apartment.   My pending graduation stirred up equal parts excitement and dread because I had decided to skip searching for jobs in Ohio to pursue a career in PR in New York. Where I knew no one. Or had a job. Or anywhere to live.   Madonna’s video was a “ray of light” through my anxiety, mixing Hollywood glamour, the 1927 film Metropolis , and half-naked men, sweaty from work or wet from rain falling as they exercised. Because they had the $5 million budget for it.   I simultaneously ogled and envied the men. They were way too hot to ever notice a scrawny kid like me. Surely, I wasn’t worthy of their touch. But I appreciated seeing them.   Mad...

One of the best parts of summer is cooling off in a movie theater with the A/C so high you wish you wore jeans.   No one’s doing that this 4 th of July weekend. *sigh*   I’ll let the cinephiles debate if we’re missing much now. But in 1989, the New York Post asked and answered: “Was 1989 the best summer for movies ever? Yes.” You had quite the choice of future classics at the Cineplex that holiday when Batman starring Michael Keaton was #1 at the box office, along with:   ·        Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ·        Dead Poets Society ·        Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier ·        Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing ·        Honey, I Shrunk The Kids ·        License to Kill with Timothy Dalton in his second (and final) performance as 007   And these films were all released before t...

  Besides my resume, the two most important documents I brought to New York in “The World’s Heaviest Briefcase” are seen above, still intact 30 years later.   I must have saved the AAA 1983 Citibook©, New York Edition, from my 1984 Drama Club trip to the Big Apple.    Not a lot to it besides dry descriptions of the usual attractions and how to get around town. There’s a map of Midtown where I starred the locations for Penn Station and the Sloane House YMCA two blocks from it, a nearby personnel agency, and the Citicorp building where I temped for a week.   Its opening paragraph hasn’t aged well:   “New York City is the business, entertainment and publishing capital of the country.  The Nation’s largest city, it is teeming, busy and always rushing. It is a magnet that draws native Americans to its manmade canyons and the city most foreigners have in mind when they think of America.”   Now the “A Temporary Place to Live” directory of hotels and res...