Saturday in CinCity. The "I Was Mad About It" Edition.

Might I recommend a movie to you all? Diana Vreeland. If you are "of a certain age," male or female, this movie brings our past back to kaleidescopic life through an entirely different lens. The quotidian wrappings of our day have, more likely than not, become icons. The Twiggys, the Rolling Stones, the Jean Shrimptons, the Veruschkas. Pages and pages of magazine photos that filled our minds and eyes in the travels of our every days now fill in the gaps of our history of events of that time.

I'd seen the previews at our neighborhood movie theater and thought it looked interesting enough, though easy enough to keep putting off. Yesterday I put it on the To-Do List for 5:05pm and to quote another great icon, "I'm mad about it!! Simply mad!"




Goodbye, New York

(song from the wrong side of the Hudson)


by Deborah Garrison


You were the big fat city we called hometown

You were the lyrics I sang but never wrote down



You were the lively graves by the highway in Queens

the bodega where I bought black beans



stacks of the Times we never read

nights we never went to bed



the radio jazz, the doughnut cart

the dogs off their leashes in Tompkins Square Park



You were the tiny brass mailbox key

the joy of "us" and the sorrow of "me"



You were the balcony bar in Grand Central Station

the blunt commuters and their destination



the post-wedding blintzes at 4 A.M.

and the pregnant waitress we never saw again



You were the pickles, you were the jar

You were the prizefight we watched in a bar



the sloppy kiss in the basement at Nell's

the occasional truth that the fortune cookie tells



Sinatra still swinging at Radio City

You were ugly and gorgeous but never pretty



always the question, never the answer

the difficult poet, the aging dancer



the call I made from a corner phone

to a friend in need, who wasn't at home



the fireworks we watched from a tenement roof

the brash allegations and the lack of any proof



my skyline, my byline, my buzzer and door

now you're the dream we lived before