The scene in the lobby of Primary Stages ten minutes before the curtain rose on ‘Hunting and Gathering‘ was cutthroat. “Locke was right,” Ruth muttered under her breath as UES ladies got — literally!– pushy as they plowed imperiously through the ticket line. Seriously: one of them reached out a manicured paw to actually push me lightly in the stomach. “Excuse me,” she said as she did this. Not excused!
It was mysterious that a play about four under-35 New Yorkers looking for apartments on Craigslist had attracted so many mean old ladies, but they weren’t the only demographic represented: a gleamy-haired duo of Murray Hillish girls chattered loudly in line behind us. “I swear, one hour of therapy is more draining than two hours at the gym,” one of them said. This is just what theatergoers are like, I guess.
The play opened with a monologue from its protagonist (also named Ruth, just like my roommate!) accompanied by a slideshow of her last fifteen years worth of apartments. They all looked exactly like the last five or so overpriced, crappy-showered tenements I’ve lived in. Ruth (the real person) and I spent most of the next hour and a half laughing and nodding appreciatively as we watched characters fantasize about health insurance, venture to Ikea, and play ‘Big Buck Hunter’ in bars. There is no telling what the pushy ladies and therapized girls thought of this play, but it seems safe to say that they might not have been able to relate to quite as much as we did. It was a little odd, actually, to feel that you had more in common with fictional characters onstage than actual people seated next to you in the theater.
Though the play had a hopeful happy ending involving the signing of a two-year lease, reality is less rosy. As I walked to the office I’m working in right now in Dumbo this morning I thought about how I used to cherish fantasies of transcending my transient lifestyle and how I pretty much don’t anymore. I glanced idly at the antler-shaped decor items in the windows of West Elm and the signboard advertising 6am Pilates at the fancy gym and the bundled Bugaboos parading past me on the street, and I thought about how it’s kind of weird that, as I’ve gotten older, all the signifiers of “real” adulthood just keep receding further into the distance. Or maybe I’m just at the age when it hits you that apartments and babies and careers and healthy lifestyles and incremental pay raises don’t just happen. It’s not like going from junior year to senior year if you pass all your classes. You actually have to work for these things if you want them. You have to make a bunch of choices that lead to them, and some of those choices are so unappealing that it’s tempting to just want to stay where you are, even if ‘where you are’ is a sublet with cracked walls and a stained carpet on a garbage-strewn block that’s just close enough to the pretty brownstone blocks to remind you that you don’t live there.
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I definitely meant Hobbes, even if that’s not what I said. Derrr.
Oh, Emily. I made all of those choices and have the incremental pay raises etc, etc, and I frankly wish I was living a more sublet-ish life, because most of the people I know from this life are so washed-out and gray. Always easy to glamourize the other side of the fence.
This was exactly how I felt until I moved out of Brooklyn (where I had lived for a long time after college) to Washington Heights, land of ruins both literal and metaphorical. Life is still really horrible, of course, but at least it feels slightly more real than it used to and all the things I used to crave about Brooklyn now feel as far away as last week’s nightmare.
BAM! Another Gould masterpiece. Artistic critique –> social critique –> life insights that are both personal and general. Does this come easy to you or do you have to work at it, that’s what I want to know.
P.S. I know this sounds sarcastic but it is sincere.
Same thing happened to me when I went to that play during previews. I was the youngest one there by about 45 years and I’m not even exaggerating. Talk about awkward, three old ladies sitting next to me had walkers and were reminiscing about the days of wearing garters to hold up their stockings.
Now you’re starting to get it.
Then you slog through some more to move your station in life forward, until it seems you’re sitting in neutral again. You realize it’s time to slog forward again. And you do it. Because the alternative is a premature death.
If you’re as insightful as YOU appear to be, somewhere along the way you realize that it’s not the slogging or the number of cracks in the walls or how much of your furniture is from the catalog that defines your life. And then you concentrate on becoming who you really want to be.
But you never stop trying to make a better home. Because it IS your home. And it’s a great thing to buy your first adult bed… headboard and all. And you want to make a real home AND a real life for yourself, your spouse and your kids.
And that’s good.
Emily:
I am a big fan of your blogging. I have even considered buying your teen fiction because I miss your voice on gawker so much.
Over the last month, I’ve winced a couple times as you’ve made me reflect on my past. Got a dog, gave up a dog? Check. Affair with a colleague? Check. Brooklyn. Greenpoint, right? Check.
All I can say is to stop focusing on what you think you should want in the future and go after what you’re sure you want right now. You want a better apartment? Make it happen.
Only you can decide what it is you want and you’re more than smart enough to make it happen. Don’t get hung up on the “should do/be” and listen to your heart. If it’s full of whims and flights of fancy, follow them. You never know where they will lead you. All you ought to be is Emily.
this is fascinating! i wrote that play. it’s based on a lot of weird experiences i’ve had with housing (and love and the idea of finding a physical place that will be home.)
i had this amazing 1 BR on mott street for 3 years. it was a dream come true. i bought furniture for the first time. and i grew a lot. and i miss it - every day - as right now, i’m staying with friends, all my shit packed up and stored at chelsea mini-storage. but i will also admit, as i have to no one, that there was something limiting about my life in that apartment in that… it was expensive. i had to work harder to maintain. i gave up a lot. i worked four or five jobs. i went out less. i bought myself nothing. without a lease, floating as i am, i’ve been able to travel (france for two weeks and now, new hampshire for six) and explore. i still yearn for a settled home.
oh yeah, and i did become who i wanted to be. both in the apartment and outside of it and with it and without it.
the play came out of some dialogue with the book of laughter and forgetting (the part where they change the names of the streets after revolution) and the way memory sits on top of itself and also, some vague memory of “slaves of new york” and the way new yorkers in particular can chart our growth through our apartment lists…
btw, i hope you all got in on our “20 dollars for people under 35″ tickets. it was our hope to bring in audiences who might relate.
That last paragraph is not too shabby. I (usually) love the blogging, but you know you have the curiosity and intellect and sometimes grumpy demeanor of an essayist, right? Put it to use.
See, also:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/825grtdi.asp
A genuinely smart and grumpy old essayist on why he thinks people like us suck. (Not his best essay, but most relevant.)
Got tired of that life too. After kicking out my addicted (and addicting) girlfriend, I decided to make some serious choices for internal peace - and quit focusing on the external. As John Mellencamp sings in the song Between a Laugh and a Tear, “I know there’s a balance ‘cuz I see it when I swing past.” I’m coming closer and closer to that balance.
Eight years ago, I finally got sane enough to enter into a permanent relationship and began having kids 3 years ago. My daughter has changed my life! If I’d known it would be this cool - I’d have gotten sane a long time ago!
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[...] 29, 2008 art (/) life Posted by nynz under New York, good times Today Emily wrote about the play we went to in celebration of my birthday. I have nothing to add, except that I [...]
[...] whose creators run from the best-selling crime-writer Ian Rankin to the leading …news.scotsman.comHunting and GatheringHunting and Gathering February 29th, 2008 The scene in the lobby of Primary Stages ten minutes [...]