Men Carry Dogs On Madison

Fred Flaneur

A disturbing trend on Madison Avenue in NYC

Sitting in a sidewalk café, sipping a delicious coffee one unseasonably warm day in November day I bore witness to a trend that bears careful watching.

On upper Madison Avenue a bond forged over the ages is being slowly eroded.  The dog, a superbly adapted quadruped with the ability to walk or run for miles is having its physiognomy subtlety subverted.

The hounds that lunch are being carried about town in expensive over-the-shoulder-bags, chauffeured by their chi-chi owners like little potentates,  feet nary touching the ground,  paw pads pink as the day they were born.  Sadly,  this trend of portaging pets is spreading.  By my rough unscientific analysis,  of every five dogs living near Madison Avenue two or more do little or no walking.   How far will this go,  is there an upper theoretical limit to the size that a porta-pet may attain?  Will men who normally favor the more robust breeds,  challenge each other for sidewalk supremacy by slinging Rottweiler’s and Sheep Dogs over their shoulders echoing the days of the huge boom box?  No doubt laws will soon be needed.

Surely,  with the advent of genetic engineering can a breed of dog bred purely for the Prada bag be far behind?  This movement must be stopped in its tracks or we will see in the not too distant future dogs whose legs have become vestigial organs,  resembling snakes more so than the animal we’ve come to adore.  Are we ready for the cocka-boa?  I pray not!

Dogs belong on leashes strutting proudly beside their masters where they have been for millennia.  A canine needs to stand on its own four feet the way God intended,  anything else is an abomination.

NY Times

Rhythms of Gotham

There’s a certain miracle about just getting up in the morning.  And its better when it’s before anyone else.  It was that way in the City, when the rhythms were soft, the streets empty, and people slowly gathered themselves for coffee.  And I saw them and I was one of them. Some days.  I saw the cops in the cars, sitting and sipping, girl boy.  So new age.  It was only later (in the day?) that all was lost.  The bullets began to fly.

True.

So, this morning I was up early, rolled out the garbage and recycled containers and drove to town, arriving before the boys in Hatfield, to buy the Times.  The boys.  Seven or eight regulars, average age fifty or sixty, who talk it up.  And once in a while a brave or brazen woman joins them. But this morning, the white plastic chairs were empty.  I imagined them at home, bailing out the basements.

And as I often do,  I tucked the Times under my arm and I looked at the front pages of the other papers.  The Globe,  the Harford Something.  Mostly about the great,  freaky New England flood,  the rain that refused to quit,  and continues to drizzle as I write.  You have to run it,  my editors.  People are drowning.  Funny,  how fashionable the pages really are.  And hopelessly local.  The Times never did report on the seventy-five million dollars worth of drugs that were taken from a Hartford warehouse,  at night.  Record drug heist.  A hole in the roof.  That kind of wonderful stuff keeps happening,  and I see little more than the front pages,  hanging by habit with my lovely old lady The Times.

So.  I’ve taken my two pain pills, (OTC, for my elbow) and will play a little racquetball at the Y with Jon, such a good partner, at nine, the only open time, and later we’ll both go down and look at the basement to be sure that the sump pump is working. There are pools on the fields all around, and the water table, the best evidence of our river valley, would float the house if it could, and yet we’re so much,  much better off than all those people in boats,  see your local paper,  saving their asses.

Edwin Lynch 3/31/10

Red Tailed Hawk

It’s always a thrill to see Red Tailed Hawks in the sky above the Beresford on Central Park West, The birds float in the sky above the turrets, barely flapping their wings. One swooped down over my tour  bus and lead the way down CPW. Did you know that Central Park has over 250 species of birds calling it home? There are hawks, and kestrels,  long eared owls,  peregrine falcons, ducks, egrets, swans, and for a couple of days two bald eagles, plus robins and wrens, warblers and of course millions of rock doves. The wild life of Central Park, sounds funny,  right!  A busy place that park, a tour guide’s got to keep up, I never cared much about birds until I saw the hawks over the Beresford, now I watch for them with great anticipation.

Manhattan Elephant Walk

What the hell? No one paid attention to me today, I’m  a tour guide, I talk, I entertain, I did the uptown tour, Harlem, Fifth Avenue, The Upper West Side.  As usual I put on a good show, full of fun and facts, nobody smiled, no one reacted, a bunch of Eloi. Was it me, was I delusional? I’m a Cicerone I got a hide like a pachyderm.  I’m enthusiastic, I know things about NYC that no one knows. No one cared. When the tour ends I’ll go down and commiserate with the dispatcher, he’ll understand. A buck-and-a-half in tips,  man, this ain’t no way to make a living.

Double decked tour buses are very popular in New York City, people come from all over the world to ride them no matter what the season. The companies that run them tout heated, enclosed vehicles, all the luxuries of home.  passengers assume it’s true – it’s not. The buses have zero heat, and are dirty and drafty.

Last Saturday, the first one in February was 18 degrees F. I’ve learned how to dress, I prepare emotionally for the chill. I refuse to be cold, I can’t be cold, it’s not in my lexicon, I won’t discuss it. But, just in case there’s a chink in my psychic armor I layer up. “Trust in Allah, but tether your camels” is what I believe.

It’s a process, first I put on my wife-beater T, then a regular T, a thermal top, thermal bottom, a long sleeve fleece, a cozy flannel top, my official uniform shirt, a scarf, my NorthFace 700 Goretex Down Jacket, my uniform jacket with zero warmth value, jeans, flannel pajama bottoms and then my ski pants. On my feet one pair of heavy athletic socks, ski socks over them and heavy insulated boots.

Soon as I’m finished dressing I need to pee – bad.  You’d think I’d have grown wise to this quirk, but I haven’t. Soon as I finish dressing I gotta leak. Elapsed time about a half hour, It doesn’t takes an astronaut that long to get ready for an EVA.

Just before I go out, I adjust my NY Mets black hat with the orange interlocking NY lettering, flip up my hood, cinch my scarf, button the last two buttons on my jacket, step out into the hallway, and slip into the breeze.  I trudge up the block and wait on the curb until I get a bus assigned to me.

My passengers have not been forewarned and although dressed for winter are hardly prepared to spend two hours in an ice box. They only have one question “where’s the heat?” I keep them warm with words, humor and charm, my tips are always good. I take a lot of pride in my winter trips, especially in such adverse conditions. I feel it’s my duty to give excellent trip, and I do.



Come and Hear

The Projectionist

Saturday night – The Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center

My career has been varied,  jobs have come and gone,  employments that neither suited my temperament nor my imagined earning potential.  I counted buttons in a button factory, messengered packages around Manhattan,  crawled around in dirty basements in Brooklyn intermittently repairing water heaters or explaining to irate,  disbelieving homeowner in one too many steamed up bathroom that the little twenty-five gallon water heater the plumber swore on his mother was perfectly adequate;  would not actually allow his wife and four children to shower consecutively within five minutes of each other.  I enjoyed that job;  I performed a vital service,  hot water is a key to civilization.  That gig lasted for a while, and of course in the end I didn’t make much dough.  Finally a friend of mine seeing my despair and who also happened to be a movie projectionist offered to sponsor me into Local 306 of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees – I was saved,  I was a union projectionist.

After some very perfunctory training, that consisted primarily of fetching coffee and Danishes for a corpulent, motor mouthed projectionist and then taking a licensing exam dating from Year One -  I was ready for the big time. I dreamed of hitting the sheet on a sold out  Saturday night at The Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center or maybe The Ziegfeld Theater or Cinema 1 and 2. I wanted to feel the weight of everyone’s cinematic dreams bearing down on my ready shoulders. I was a highly trained professional honed to a razors edge, ready to handle the pressure.

The reality was the union shape-up. Once that slapped me awake I realized that the plum jobs, the gigs of my fantasies went to guys with low seniority numbers, fella’s that had been members in good standing for forty years. I had been on board for forty eight hours; my dreams needed to season for another thirty, thirty-five years. There were 1198 guys in the union. I was Mr. Eleven hundred and ninety eight. My lack of sonority wound up being a greasy slide into an endless string of fourteen hour days at some of the most decrepit movie houses lining 42nd Street, New York,  NY

1)  42nd Street Projectionist

2)  Still in show biz

3)  Boredom and the booth

4)  Straighten the candy Ma

5)  Set your traps here

6)  Pandemonium breaks out

7)  We’re gonna come up there and kick your ass !

8)  A torrent of four letter words

The time was the late seventies, before multiplexes, theaters sank or swam on one movie. They ran anything they could get their hands on, exploitation, blax-ploitation, straight porn, gay porn, kung-foos or chop-socky’s. The owners were desperate small business men trying to squeeze every nickel from these tired, worn out movie palaces, they wouldn’t spend a dime on upkeep or preventive maintenance. Often the booths had no toilets. One dump I worked had a booth door that opened onto the roof, over the portal was a crudely lettered sign that read, “Do not piss on door, piss on roof.” My once promising career had veered seriously off-track. When I tried to explain this to my father he said, “Well, at least you’re in show business.”

I was alone 99% of the time; I had hours and hours to fill. I’m a creature of habit, I’d start off the day with coffee and a roll; the caffeine would kick right in and flood me with a tremendous feeling of affinity and empathy for humanity. When that would subside, I’d grab my beloved Daily News and read, I loved perusing the dailies. I could read all day if I wanted to.

I began to accumulate all kinds of data, facts that disturbed me. One day I read that scientists had discovered that the cesium atom was not as stable as previously thought. Since this is the particle whose vibratory frequency is used to calibrate atomic clocks. They were going to lose 1.7 seconds over the next several million years. I didn’t know how I was going to live with that level of uncertainty in my life?

1) 42nd Street Projectionist

2) Still in show biz

3) Boredom and the booth

4) Straighten the candy Ma

5) Set your traps here

6) Pandemonium breaks out

7) We’re gonna come up there and kick your ass !

8 ) A torrent of four letter words

Crossroads of the World - Times Tower

The Golden Rule on The Great White Way

Boredom and the booth was a dangerous one-two punch, I began to commit public errors. They varied in severity, but by far the worst was to put a reel on out of order. I’d have to strip the offending reel form the projector, then lace up the correct one. It could take three or four minutes to get back on the screen, an eternity. Meanwhile the audience was screamed and yelling for my blood. I’d get nervous, wind up drenched in sweat. I felt bad for the customers, I’d destroyed the carefully crafted illusion they’d paid two bucks for.

Fortunately most of these mistakes occurred when the theater was close to empty; who goes to the movies at 10AM? Usually it was just me, the candy girl, a couple of derelicts in from the cold and the two house cats. Meooow, wrong reel, hiss.

There was one simple golden rule to follow; never under any circumstance, short of death or serious injury have the screen go dark. A black sheet led to rampages, riots, damage, and usually a frantic call to 911 from the manager’s barricaded office. The audience that had paid their hard earned dough for three features, five cartoons and assorted shorts and newsreels.

Bearing this huge responsibility I relentlessly worked my two Simplex projectors in an unforgiving twenty-minute cycle. Back and forth, first one then the other, thread up rewind changeover, thread up rewind changeover. Squeezing another show out of the ancient machines, praying nothing would go wrong, a few minutes of work each hour.

By mid-afternoon I was bugged out, read out and spaced out. I’d pace back and forth in the booth or meticulously clean everything in sight, finally in desperation I’d go downstairs to buy a piece of candy. I needed some human contact, someone to talk too, anyone. I’d try to hone new conversational gambits on the candy lady. If I could get a rise out of her, I knew I could wake the dead, she was at least a hundred years old and never responded to anything, undaunted I’d riff on current events, movies, tv, weather, local news, politics; She’d nod her head and continue aligning the candies like I was invisible.

1) 42nd Street Projectionist

2) Still in show biz

3) Boredom and the booth

4) Straighten the candy Ma

5) Set your traps here

6) Pandemonium breaks out

7) We’re gonna come up there and kick your ass !

8 ) A torrent of four letter words

The other passenger on this slow boat to nowhere was the candy ladies son, who also happened to be the manager. He, like his Mom didn’t talk much, but was very protective. Seconds after I’d show up downstairs he would emerge from his office and hover around by the popcorn machine making sure I wasn’t hitting on her. Eventually, if I got too persistent he’d intercede very formally.

“May I help you, sir?”

I’d been there three weeks! He’s acting like I just popped out of the sky.
He’d turn and bark at his mother.

“Straighten the candy ma! I said fix the candy ma, it looks like your bedroom”

Say what, did she live in a sea of candy bars? Instantly in my minds eye I saw her getting out bed, slipping on her housecoat, putting on her bunny slippers and rustling off to the bathroom through a sea of spent candy wrappers.

Well, we all have our quirks, right!

Being he was in earshot, I hi-hoed him and tried to engage in some chit-chat, but he had his head down counting soda cups like precious gems. It was the way they kept the books; he had to account for every cup, pennies, nickels, dimes.

My cheeriness seemed to rub them both the wrong way so I headed back up to the projection booth. On my way up I glanced out the one window in the theater that had a view of the outside. I could see the sun shining brightly in a brilliant blue sky; the sidewalks full of people bustling about their business. They looked so happy and purposeful.

1) 42nd Street Projectionist

2) Still in show biz

3) Boredom and the booth

4) Straighten the candy Ma

5) Set your traps here

6) Pandemonium breaks out

7) We’re gonna come up there and kick your ass !

8 ) A torrent of four letter words