"You can picture the city. 1996: there was no Time Out New York; there was no solo show about a restaurant that was so popular they needed a special reservation line; there was no internet, really, to speak of, and no 9-11. Giuliani was in his first term as Mussolini. Neighborhoods in Manhattan had unmarked borders and no-man’s-lands; you were that much younger; the city was angrier but thawing; everyone had big plans they didn’t blog about it because, well, no one had blogs, and no one knew yet that you were supposed to tell everyone about everything all the fucking time, right? It was still a city in which secrets thrived.
"By June, Liver Lady had taken to showing up at 9 or so, because on Wednesdays, business had tapered to the point where, most of the time, we’d have nothing to do but chat with her and listen to her while she ate her liver, extra onions, mashed potatoes instead of rice, and drank her glass of water.
On this one particular Wednesday, while summer started to become impossible, two things happened: we ran out of liver, and Anything Man made an unscheduled appearance. " (c) 2010, all rights reserved
4/11/2010
Liver Lady And Anything Man, part 4
"There was another regular at Nick & Eddie, that last summer it was open, who we called Anything Man, and he came on Tuesdays. At first we had wondered about him but we quickly stopped. Anything Man was just another weeknight eccentric, and not a very interesting one; another lonely character the city used to reveal more regularly. Anything Man seemed to be in his late 50s, was dressed like a professor who never achieved tenure, or like someone trying to keep up the appearance of sanity, or like a lonely old guy who desperately sought out ways to seem interesting. Maybe he worked at the post office or a bank or a drug store.
The first time he came in he said, “I’ll have anything, surprise me.” No dietary restrictions, he said, the world was his oyster. When whoever his waiter was that time pressed him for more specificity he refused to say, but smiled inscrutably instead. So of course after conferring with the manager we gave him the more expensive of our two steak options. He asked for wine that went well with it and we gave him the fancy Australian Cab. He paid in cash, smiled suspiciously and refused to say whether he liked it. He didn’t read during his meal, didn’t unbutton his old tweed sports coat.
Restaurants design their nighttime lighting to soften the edges off dates, to gauze some of your day from your face, to try and make everyone feel a bit like Sigourney or Drew, if not Anthrax. Nick & Eddie made Anything Man seem pretty close to normal, and perhaps even content. But after three or four Tuesdays we realized he was less than normal and also less than interesting. He twitched almost imperceptibly when he answered a question. His smile seemed plastered-on, utterly unspontaneous, exactly the same each time. We put him into our file of evidence that Nick & Eddie clearly had sunk from its former glory. Even if we wanted to be somewhere else, while we were there we wanted it to be a place people wanted to be, where you had to know someone to get a table on a busy night, where the prices were worth it because you were paying for a little bit of glamor.
So each Tuesday he’d get something different. He started in March, I think, and by the time June came around, we were running out of options, reduced to mixing the sides from one entrée with another, despite Kevin the chef’s protests that the tomato-onion salad was specifically designed for the Angus Steak, and the smoked trout appetizer shouldn’t be paired with the chicken shnitzel and spaetzel. We hoped he wouldn’t notice. He never let on if he did." (c) 2010, all rights reserved.
The first time he came in he said, “I’ll have anything, surprise me.” No dietary restrictions, he said, the world was his oyster. When whoever his waiter was that time pressed him for more specificity he refused to say, but smiled inscrutably instead. So of course after conferring with the manager we gave him the more expensive of our two steak options. He asked for wine that went well with it and we gave him the fancy Australian Cab. He paid in cash, smiled suspiciously and refused to say whether he liked it. He didn’t read during his meal, didn’t unbutton his old tweed sports coat.
Restaurants design their nighttime lighting to soften the edges off dates, to gauze some of your day from your face, to try and make everyone feel a bit like Sigourney or Drew, if not Anthrax. Nick & Eddie made Anything Man seem pretty close to normal, and perhaps even content. But after three or four Tuesdays we realized he was less than normal and also less than interesting. He twitched almost imperceptibly when he answered a question. His smile seemed plastered-on, utterly unspontaneous, exactly the same each time. We put him into our file of evidence that Nick & Eddie clearly had sunk from its former glory. Even if we wanted to be somewhere else, while we were there we wanted it to be a place people wanted to be, where you had to know someone to get a table on a busy night, where the prices were worth it because you were paying for a little bit of glamor.
So each Tuesday he’d get something different. He started in March, I think, and by the time June came around, we were running out of options, reduced to mixing the sides from one entrée with another, despite Kevin the chef’s protests that the tomato-onion salad was specifically designed for the Angus Steak, and the smoked trout appetizer shouldn’t be paired with the chicken shnitzel and spaetzel. We hoped he wouldn’t notice. He never let on if he did." (c) 2010, all rights reserved.
4/09/2010
Liver Lady And Anything Man, Part 3
"The Liver Lady came in on one of those Wednesdays, because she came in every Wednesday, because Wednesday was the day we ran the liver special. The liver was always on the menu, but on Wednesday it was two dollars cheaper than usual and the Liver Lady was thrifty. She told one of the waiters, who then spread it around, that she had millions to give away when she died, to several nieces and nephews, but she didn’t want to waste even a dollar of their inheritance on overpriced food. The problem, she said, was she had fine, uncompromising tastes. That was why she came to Nick and Eddie on Wednesday, like clockwork, and got the liver, because she knew value when she tasted it.
"You can picture her: thin blue quilted coat that she wore in all seasons; eyebrows plucked and painted on with a few stray stubble hairs visible underneath a layer of pancake; blue fake-jewel earrings to match the coat; unruly gray hair that must have taken a long time to look just this side of nuts; bright, blinking eyes and an rusty brownish color of lipstick that can’t have looked good on anyone.
"And she smiled and she chatted. And at first we were all wary of her because we – with our far-reaching ambitions and our desire to just get done and get home to whomever or whatever was waiting on us, or wasn’t – we didn’t like to be disturbed, or to be brought from our real life, which was not at this restaurant, into the present moment, which was. What was important to us was outside these walls. We didn’t say it, we would never have admitted it, but we all wanted at least a little bit to be next year’s Sigourney or Drew or Anthrax dining at whatever edgy overpriced but admittedly well-done place popped up in whatever newly defined neighborhood that had not yet been discovered." (c) 2010, all rights reserved
"You can picture her: thin blue quilted coat that she wore in all seasons; eyebrows plucked and painted on with a few stray stubble hairs visible underneath a layer of pancake; blue fake-jewel earrings to match the coat; unruly gray hair that must have taken a long time to look just this side of nuts; bright, blinking eyes and an rusty brownish color of lipstick that can’t have looked good on anyone.
"And she smiled and she chatted. And at first we were all wary of her because we – with our far-reaching ambitions and our desire to just get done and get home to whomever or whatever was waiting on us, or wasn’t – we didn’t like to be disturbed, or to be brought from our real life, which was not at this restaurant, into the present moment, which was. What was important to us was outside these walls. We didn’t say it, we would never have admitted it, but we all wanted at least a little bit to be next year’s Sigourney or Drew or Anthrax dining at whatever edgy overpriced but admittedly well-done place popped up in whatever newly defined neighborhood that had not yet been discovered." (c) 2010, all rights reserved
4/06/2010
Liver Lady and Anything Man, Pt. 2
"Nick & Eddie was a pioneer in a long line of Soho restaurants that served fancy comfort food made with a lot of fuss, at inflated prices. If you know the original Blue Ribbon, this was started by one of those guys, and occupied the corner of Spring and Sullivan Streets for about eight years. Nick & Eddie served “a great burger” and a “solid steak” and “the bartenders knew their way around a martini and didn’t ask you too many questions if you just wanted to nurse your drink alone.” For a long time it was hard to get a table on a Friday night because movie stars and rock bands ate there; models picked at their fried catfish, moving it around on their plates. It was the mid-90s, and to open a restaurant with a $14 burger west of West Broadway was still a bold move – a “just so crazy it might work,” maneuver. New York Magazine covered us extensively. Drew was a regular. Sigourney. The band Anthrax. We easily cleared $250 a night on a Friday, even toward the end, and without having to deliver anything remarkable, service-wise. To be fair, the food was very good, but the great thing about waiting tables at a hot but “off-the-beaten-path” New York restaurant serving trumped up comfort food at trumped up prices was that you didn’t have to be nice or even good to contribute to the vibe.
But by the time I got my job there, the restaurant was past its prime. Blue Ribbon had upped the ante and lines ran out the door there six nights a week, until 4AM, just across the street from where we watched. While Fridays and Saturdays may have still been busy, even then it was no longer impossible to get a table, and our regulars, while still sometimes including Drew and Sigourney and Anthrax, also consisted of the UPS guy named Yuri who delivered our fresh fish every other day and who brought a different lady there each week so that he could act like a big shot with us—by that time in Nick & Eddie’s evolution he kind of was—and gain proximity credits with his dates by pointing out Drew and Sigourney and Anthrax.
Sunday through Thursday nights were straight-up slow. There had grown, since the place opened, a regular clientele of neighborhood people who came in for this or that dish, to chat with the staff, and who were made to feel welcome. They also, as long as there had been enough models and actors and rock bands populating the place, contributed to the vibe. At that time the area west of Soho (it’s now become part of Soho), was still a neighborhood on its own terms, with vestiges of Italian and Portugese populations still opening sawdust strewn butcher shops every morning and giving $10 haircuts and $5 shaves to people on their way home from work. Drew and Sigourney and Anthrax may have made the trip to eat at Nick & Eddie on a Friday night, but on a Wednesday, in July, when the restaurant was closing, usually at 10:30 after serving a few dozen dinners to a few dozen forlorn couples without a lot to say to each other, and single diners with magazines, and old guys who’d rather have been alone anyway, you could still feel like you were in the city the way it was when it was just New York." (c) 2010, all rights reserved.
But by the time I got my job there, the restaurant was past its prime. Blue Ribbon had upped the ante and lines ran out the door there six nights a week, until 4AM, just across the street from where we watched. While Fridays and Saturdays may have still been busy, even then it was no longer impossible to get a table, and our regulars, while still sometimes including Drew and Sigourney and Anthrax, also consisted of the UPS guy named Yuri who delivered our fresh fish every other day and who brought a different lady there each week so that he could act like a big shot with us—by that time in Nick & Eddie’s evolution he kind of was—and gain proximity credits with his dates by pointing out Drew and Sigourney and Anthrax.
Sunday through Thursday nights were straight-up slow. There had grown, since the place opened, a regular clientele of neighborhood people who came in for this or that dish, to chat with the staff, and who were made to feel welcome. They also, as long as there had been enough models and actors and rock bands populating the place, contributed to the vibe. At that time the area west of Soho (it’s now become part of Soho), was still a neighborhood on its own terms, with vestiges of Italian and Portugese populations still opening sawdust strewn butcher shops every morning and giving $10 haircuts and $5 shaves to people on their way home from work. Drew and Sigourney and Anthrax may have made the trip to eat at Nick & Eddie on a Friday night, but on a Wednesday, in July, when the restaurant was closing, usually at 10:30 after serving a few dozen dinners to a few dozen forlorn couples without a lot to say to each other, and single diners with magazines, and old guys who’d rather have been alone anyway, you could still feel like you were in the city the way it was when it was just New York." (c) 2010, all rights reserved.
Patient Boy
Mallory Catlett and I are working on a piece that involves abandoned malls. Right now it's called Patient Boy
Can anyone tell me how to perform a piece in one?
Like, this one?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lookinthetunk/176615260/in/set-167023/
Can anyone tell me how to perform a piece in one?
Like, this one?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lookinthetunk/176615260/in/set-167023/
4/03/2010
Liver Lady and Anything Man, Pt. 1
Here is part of a new essay or monologue I'm working on, about my last restaurant job:
"My most successful blunder as a table-waiter happened on a June Wednesday and involved a woman we called “The Liver Lady.” This was in 1996, not long before the restaurant closed for good. The Liver Lady came in to Nick & Eddie once a week, when we ran a regular liver and onions special, and ordered it cooked a certain way – I think extra onions, or rarer than usual, or mashed potatoes instead of rice. She was truly eccentric, perhaps separated from complete craziness by the half-decent quality of her coat, as well as the effort it was clear she made with her hair. She was a type of which New York seems to accommodate fewer and fewer with each year. The kind of person we all could look inside and see ourselves becoming if a series of things went a series of ways. Or maybe we see ourselves that way now." - (c) 2010, all rights reserved.
"My most successful blunder as a table-waiter happened on a June Wednesday and involved a woman we called “The Liver Lady.” This was in 1996, not long before the restaurant closed for good. The Liver Lady came in to Nick & Eddie once a week, when we ran a regular liver and onions special, and ordered it cooked a certain way – I think extra onions, or rarer than usual, or mashed potatoes instead of rice. She was truly eccentric, perhaps separated from complete craziness by the half-decent quality of her coat, as well as the effort it was clear she made with her hair. She was a type of which New York seems to accommodate fewer and fewer with each year. The kind of person we all could look inside and see ourselves becoming if a series of things went a series of ways. Or maybe we see ourselves that way now." - (c) 2010, all rights reserved.
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