TEMPLE IN THE VILLAGE

Thursday is about NYU.
I travel to NYU near east 3rd & Broadway.

(There used to be a Starbucks on Astor Place where you could sip your latte gazing at two OTHER Starbucks)

I give myself plenty of time to get to NYU.
I take the x42 bus to the subway, take the C to West 3rd, and brace myself for the processional walk across
Washington Square.

(I used to swoop through the city)

Today however,
I'm in a slow parade, waiting for the floats in front of me to get a move on!
Or it is though I walk as if I just received very sad news and am slowly taking it in.

I walk slowly enough that I can't escape the crazies who engage you in conversation but it also allows me to stare.
(Something that comes easily to me)

I eat at "Temple in the Village" on west 3rd. I'd been there before and now that I am a slow walker I rediscover it!
It's healthy food, cafeteria style.

I buy spoonfuls of organic glop from a steam table . It comes to $8. I saw a headline on Yahoo that people are leaving New York City because of the rising cost of living.
Whenever I eat out in New York, I imagine I'm paying the rent, not for the price of food and service.

As I enter the reception area of the seventh floor of the Tisch building,
I stop and stare at a super cool poster for the reading I am in tonight.
A cute, young kid behind the desk notices me admiring the poster and dares me to take it.

He is grinning.

He is giddy in life.

He loves being a student, loves his student job as receptionist,
trusts anyone who walks though the elevator doors. (You can tell)

The goofy goodlooking kid has no thoughts of death.
He is in the heady throws of feeling apart of the machinery of the University.
He's just where he's supposed to be.
Optimism and trust radiate.

Like Richard says in O'Neil's Ah Widlerness!

"I love the stars and the grass and the moon and the trees!
It's all in me, and I'm in it!"


The seventh floorof the writing department is lined with sofas, chairs, and coffee tables for writers, directors and actors to meet.

It's emptyish. But it feels alive. Like a ton of students just left to go have a smoke.

I fall into a couch and go over my lines.

It is old home week for me.
I’ve been through six months of grief but the last time people saw me here... I was fine.
Now I have a secret.

Various types glide by. A teacher, a teacher's aide, an actor who is now a writing student, acknowledge me.
I've been acting with this department for six years and I'm happy they don't know about my plight.

(Maybe that doctor is wrong. The staff at Depart of Dramatic Wriitng don't detect any neurological problems)

I feel reprieve.

There's an exciting element to the halls of a theatre department. I remember it from Northwestern.
It's an icky judgmental feeling mxed woth huge hope. Your peers may not believe in your talent, or they may be afraid of their own inadequacies, but it is tempered with the idea that we're all on this joyous ride, we are all riding this big lucky hopeful boat. So happy sailing.

The young girl who wrote the play I am to perform tonight (and her father) enter my little couched world.
We nod to each other but don't talk.

The young playwright looks dressed by the Olsen twins.
She has healthy blond hair (long and thick like a wig).
She wears $500 new knee high black leather boots and a felt grey coat with butterflies embroidered on the pockets.
She is cream rinse and perfume.
She is catalog chic.

The father answers his cell phone and I learn they just had a sirloin steak dinner with chocolate cake for $45 (a steal compared to Pittsburgh prices!).

After the phone call,. they're awkward with each other. As if she has always lived with her mother but her father has been paying her tuition.

It occurs to me that I am playing the father in the play tonight and the father in the play is a creep.
What will her father think?

I wonder how a father is able to pay for leather boots, NYU, a sirloin dinner.