city mouse

Archives

  • March 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006

Categories

  • A Day in With ... (9)
  • Dispossessed (4)
  • Moping (5)
  • Mousetrap! (13)
  • Oh god she's become one of those GYN bloggers (1)
  • On the Street (11)
  • Predictable Dilettantism (2)
  • Stirrings (1)
  • Story Time (5)
See More

Friday mousetrap

It's been a while, but (yawn, stretch) I think I'm ready to emerge from my winter's hibernation ... I feel like I need a remedial course in blogging. Whatever did I used to write about?

Greenpoint! Though some may argue that our imminent Starbucksification is a sign of doom, some parts of the neighborhood remain resolutely anti-commercial (sort of):

Feb_07_022_3 

I'm not sure if you can call this a typo if the sign across the block replicates the error ...

Wait for the beep! YouTube saves the day again -- I've had these answering machine jingles lodged in my head since 1986 or so. Leave your name, leave your number ...

Arts & Letters, and cats! I think it's sort of funny that my mom has a black cat named Sasha and Mr. L. Management has been translating a poet named Sasha the Black for a while. Well, if not really funny, then at least a little cute. Anyway, you should check out his new -- never before translated into English! -- batch of poems over at Archipelago, just the thing for a sleety day in mid-March.

happy weekend!

March 16, 2007 in Mousetrap! | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

So long, 10021

Distracted by my Great Migration to Brooklyn this month, I haven't had time to put together the list I'd hoped to write, enumerating Reasons Why I'm Glad to Be Leaving the Upper East Side. Fortunately, today's New York Times has done most of the work for me, with this charming piece about a Madison Avenue antiques dealer who's suing the homeless people who congregate outside his shop:

A Madison Avenue antiques dealer is suing a group of unidentified homeless people for $1 million, saying that the group has taken up residence outside his posh Upper East Side business, using the sidewalk in front of the shop as a urinal, spittoon and occasional dressing room, according to court papers and a lawyer for the businessman...

... The suit contends that a large percentage of the shop’s business comes from shoppers who admire its wares from a large storefront window that has been maligned by the presence of the homeless people and their lackluster sense of fashion.

“They dress in what appears to be old, worn and unsanitary clothing,” according to the suit, filed in State Supreme Court on Jan. 16.

OK, the "lackluster sense of fashion" quip is a bit unsubtle on the NYT's part. But glancing at the linty, rumpled woolens I've been reduced to wearing after boxing up most of my wardrobe, I'm thinking I'd better get across the bridge soon ...

January 17, 2007 in Story Time | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

For what ails ya

Garmonbozia_1

I have a profound new admiration for food photographers. This is the best I can muster at the moment. But at the risk of turning your appetite in the wrong direction, I decided to run this picture of my Get Well Soon Cheesy Lemon Chicken Soup Delight, as part of a new, hopefully recurring feature in which I’ll share some of my favorite recipes with you. (I'll keep working on the camera thing, I promise). Yes, your City Mouse loves to cook, and is looking forward to moving out of her postage-stamp-sized Manhattan kitchen and into a real Brooklyn EIK with miles, I tell you, miles! of counter space in just a few weeks.

This zippy, therapeutic, tastier-than-it-appears soup, which I came up with a few years ago, has most recently helped me through my Last Cold of 2006/First Cold of 2007, which kept me whimpering on the couch covered in used Kleenex for much of the past week.

But I did rally to make my soup, which really only takes 15 minutes or so! In case you suffer the same misfortune – or if you’re just in the mood for a satisfying sort-of-homecooked quick meal – I’ve outlined the recipe below. Chicken broth, lemons and garlic for your health, plenty of cheese and pasta to soothe your self-pity, and some French herbs and artichoke hearts to make you feel civilized. Bon appetit!

You need:

About a tablespoon of olive oil

Two or three cloves of fresh garlic, bruised or chopped into big pieces

One can artichoke hearts

Some dried herbes de Provence

One container store-bought low sodium chicken broth (I like Swanson Organic)*

Package of spinach fettuccine (nests, if you can find them – DeCecco is good)

One or two lemons

Shredded parmesan cheese

Black pepper

Flat-leaf parsley, optional

One or two medium-large pots for pasta/soup

In a large pot, heat up about a tbsp. of oil and add the garlic, sauteeing on medium for a minute or so. Drain, rinse and break up the artichoke hearts and add to the pot with a heaping tsp. of the herbes de Provence. Sautee for another minute or so and dump in the broth. Raise the heat and bring up to a simmer, adding more herbs if you like more flavor.

At this point, you have two options: the quick two-pot method or the slower one-pot. For the two-pot, bring some salted water to a boil while you're doing the above and add about two nests of the pasta, cooking til almost al dente. Once it's done, drain and add it to the soup pot. Or for the one-pot method, just dump those nests into your soup, add a cup or so of water, bring up the heat and boil until the pasta is done.

Once you've got your broth and pasta together, you can start adding lemon juice to taste (I add at least a half a lemon) and as much black pepper as you like.

Ladle the soup and noodles into a big bowl and top with lots of shredded parmesan, plus another squirt of lemon juice. If you want to be real fancy you could pretty it up with some flat-leaf parsley, too. Best served with a good baguette or crunchy roll with butter and garlic. And a good strong hot toddy if you're really sick. Or even just sort of sick.

*oh sure, if you're one of those people who keeps homemade chicken stock on hand in the freezer, or if you only have or prefer only to eat vegetable-type broth, use that, why don't you.

January 02, 2007 in Stirrings | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Decisions, decisions

Mrs_1

I'm trying out a few options for my future Married Lady stationery ... They all have a certain appeal, no? Perhaps my adorable fiance will weigh in with his opinion or at least some sort of Russian anecdote. I guess I can't move back to the Webster, alas. Greenpoint will have to take me. 

Back to our regularly scheduled programming once I can feel my feet on the ground again ...

December 04, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Overheard!

None of these are as poetic as my favorite overheard comment from some months back. But humor me anyway; I’m still regaining my strength after several days down South.

Overheard in Greenville, SC, Bob Jones University art gallery* edition:

Geeky Religious Dad, to wife in floor-length denim skirt and two gawky homeschoolish teen boys, backing away from a portrait of a fierce looking Virgin Mother holding a chubby little Christ child while crushing the head of a serpent underfoot: “I like this painting. But I do not like that it shows Mary’s bare foot. No [shaking head gravely], I do not like that at all.”

Overheard in New York, predictable edition:

Blonde walking up Lexington Avenue with a big SCOOP bag slung over her shoulder, on cell phone: “No, I’m on my way to get my eyebrows done. But if you want to meet me at 80th and Madison I can give you a quick peck.”

Overheard in an office, stolen from my dear friend O- edition:

Slackjawed yokel co-worker, commenting on handbag: “huh-huh ... Prada ... the devil wears Prada. Is that from that movie? Did you get that because of that movie?”


*Yes, it is with some regret that I confess to giving this unfortunate institution money in order to look at their impressive collection of religious art from the 14th-19th centuries. Actually, my mom did. And actually, we only visited so that Mr. Management and my Russophile mother could see the vast collection of Russian icons housed there; they are, unfortunately, in storage for the next two years. Anyway, they have lots of other stuff, including two paintings that actually feature God Himself. It’s true, he really is an old white guy with a beard!

But the best part – aside from Easily Offended Religious Dad – was when my mom attempted to guilt-trip the Bob Jones gift shop lady who broke the news about the missing icons by telling her that we had traveled “all the way from New York City just to see them.”

I tell you, my mother's guilting technique is unstoppable! I’ll bet that cashier is still smarting from it. The poor thing may never know that we were actually in Greenville to visit my family anyway ...

November 30, 2006 in On the Street | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Just like Sister Ray said

Bread Note to GYNs everywhere (and especially mine): Diflucan is not some dangerously addictive substance that's going to take me on a crazyride to Fun City only to leave me licking sugar packets in an alleyway behind a Denny's and later writing an overwrought memoir about my journey which everyone will pretend to be moved by. It's a one-day antibiotic pill, for cryin out loud, and the most effective, cheap and non-messy one around for a certain common female condition, as you well know. So it would really help if I wasn't made to feel like some desperado out of Drugstore Cowboy the one or two times a year I call you and request a prescription. In addition, I think we all -- particularly those who work in an establishment such as yours -- are familiar with the classic symptoms of such a condition, thus making it unnecessary for me to have to describe and repeat said symptoms in explicit detail over the phone to you and half of Wall Street during my lunch hour. Thanks.

(Photo courtesy of the fabulous Bread Museum of St. Petersburg)

November 17, 2006 in Oh god she's become one of those GYN bloggers | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Friday mousetrap

Cat On the uptown 6 train the other night two office ladies standing near me chatted animatedly, one telling her friend the story of a child who'd gone missing in her office, only to be found hiding under a desk. "I'm telling you, my heart was in my ass," the storyteller said.

This is now my new favorite expression.

In other news, this really makes me miss the days when vomit was the highlight of presidential visits overseas:

In his first day in the capital of a country that was America’s wartime enemy during his youth, President Bush said today that the American experience in Vietnam contained lessons for the war in Iraq. Chief among them, he said, was that “we’ll succeed unless we quit.”

OK, I'm spending my weekend in CAT TOWN. Enjoy yours!

November 17, 2006 in Mousetrap! | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Mouse jamboree

Trap Given all the mouse-related Google searches that lead random Internet wanderers here ("mouse+feces+photo" and "mouse+crushed+by+woman+high+heel" are typical), you would think I'd devote more time to writing about this blog's namesake. So here's one stab at it -- though not, sorry, with a sexy stilletto.

As of tonight, my total mouse body count to date is six. Not atypical for a New York City tenement, and not bad for a three-year-plus time span, but unsettling nonetheless, especially when I think of all their luckier relatives.

Thanks to the trusty D-Con Ultra-Set Covered Snap Trap loaded with peanut butter and parmesan (which remains, in my vast experience, the only extermination method that really works), I just came home to another victim. This saddens me, it creeps me out, it makes me feel guilty and icky and angry at the universe all at once. I'm sure there's a German word for this.

I hate having to kill the little guys. I'm not unsympathetic to their cause. While a glimpse of one scurrying across my floor sends me into barely-contained hysterics, I'm enough of an animal lover to recognize a certain charm in these clever little creatures, disease vectors though they may be. And it's just awful to see a dead mammal of any sort, let alone to be the agent of dispatch.

Leading a sheltered and fortunate life, I guess, I spent a solid three decades never seeing an expired mammal in any form other than road kill. I haven't even been to a funeral. This all changed a few years ago, when I stroked the soft grey fur of my faithful kitty companion on a veterinarian's table in Carrboro, NC. Aside from the emotional horror of losing someone I loved so dearly, there was a shock totally new to me, seeing a body at one moment quick with life, and the next stiff and drained of energy. You can read and hear about it most of your life, but there’s no way to prepare for what this is like. It seems magical, this transformation -- one minute she was there, and the next, well, as the vet put it, "she's gone." And she really was -- just suddenly there/not there in a way that transcended the physical.

But I didn't mean to get all metaphysically gloomy on you; this is a blog, for goodness' sake. The reason I bring this up is that upon my return from that terrible vet visit down South, I came home to find the stiff tail of my first mouse victim sticking out of the D-Con Covered Trap I'd set before I left. This was after I'd abandoned all hope for any sort of “humane” trap; those just hadn't attracted the visitors I knew were roaming my kitchen. But I don't think I'd really expected this murderous trap to work, either; I was just going through the motions, as I was with most everything during that sad time.

Anyway, the tail. I couldn't help noticing that its silvery color was not dissimilar to that of my departed friend's fur. And the stiffness of it, the horror of death, the unfairness of it all -- it was all too much. Working up the courage to deal with the unpleasant disposal, I steeled myself by thinking of my Lithuanian great-grandmother, who fled her village to travel, alone, to Boston (via Amsterdam, via a German prison) at age 13, and who found her beloved husband taken by an aneurysm in the middle of the night at his upholstery shop, a few decades later. I reminded myself that Libby had to deal with plenty of dead mice and worse during her lifetime, and damnit, here I was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan armed with a fresh pair of yellow rubber gloves and a supply of plastic bags -- I could deal with this. I still try to apply this trick, to become mercenary and tough, but it never really gets any easier.

Guilt aside, it’s the psychological aspect of an infestation that gets me. It’s no good pretending I haven’t seen a mouse dart between my kitchen and hall closet when I suspect I have. And it’s no good pretending the brown specks on my stovetop are charred bits of rice. These denial strategies only leave me filled with more despair when the inevitable true sighting occurs (a highlight so far being the cute little mouse butt and tail I saw leaping out of my Calphalon pot full of leftover rice to disappear back into the stove last year).

Really, the only thing that allows me to cope is a little trick my boyfriend invented to comfort me, which is to imagine these creatures as sort of cartoony and cute visitors. “Imagine,” he'll say, “all these little guys dressed up in tiny marching-band outfits, the drum guy, the guy with the baton, all their funny hats, filing through your apartment, a Mouse Jamboree!” Then he'll hum a little tootle-y Mouse Jamboree song and I'll laugh and, at least temporarily, feel a sense of peace and fondness for these silly characters. It works, really. The guy can make me laugh myself out of any problem.

... Until nights like this one, when I get home from work, alone, casually glance at the trap in the kitchen, and see yet another stiff tail. I’m not in the mood to deal with it and I’m not in the mood to laugh about it and I’m not going to call anyone else to help me deal with a problem humanity has managed to cope with for centuries. Instead, I’m just going to sit here blogging about it for a while, and then maybe toast the latest fallen Jamboree member with a glass of sauvignon blanc. R.I.P., little city mouse.

November 02, 2006 in Mousetrap! | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

OK, their mimosas are excellent

ParkThe last thing I expected to see in a Scorsese shoot-'em-up about gangsters and corrupt cops running the gritty streets of South Boston was the North Williamsburg yuppie-brunch spot my Brooklyn beau and I pass on the way to (OK, I'll admit it) jog and shop for organic arugula at McCarren Park across the street most Saturday mornings. So congratulations, Park Luncheonette, for Most Incongruous Film Cameo by a Brooklyn Location, 2006!

Never having seen the place in its original state, I have to take LM's word for it that it once operated without that godawful burgundy and yellow awning, and served items that didn't involve brioche. So I'm grateful to Scorsese for preserving some semblance of the original for posterity. And for a very fine movie, at long last. Pow!

October 30, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Webster women

Esb If the comments on this sort of creepy Curbed item are any indication, New York real estate savants are unfortunately ignorant about one of the more fascinating buildings in the city, the Webster Apartments, on the westernmost reaches of 34th Street.

Commenters who protest, "How can this be legal? All women housing," and, better still, "creepy. where's this building? why is it 'all women?'" do themselves a disservice by not visiting the Webster's fine Web site, where one can see charming pictures, I'd guess circa 1987, of the "fashion merchandisers, designers, artists, lawyers, teachers, actresses, technicians and many other business and professional women" who reside in this odd throwback.

Your City Mouse is (formerly) one of those "other business and professional women." I don't recall meeting any technicians or lawyers during my four-month stay there a few years ago, shortly after the end of the first fussy sublet that brought me to the city. I do remember lots of pretty, young, enthusiastic intern types. This, after all, was what the building was designed for – housing bright-eyed young things as they got their starts in the big city. The founders of the residence, the brothers Charles and Josiah Webster, established it in 1916 “solely for the purpose of providing unmarried working women with homes and wholesome food at a small cost to them.” It also provided cheap housing for the burgeoning workforce at the megastore just up the street, in which the brothers had inherited a majority ownership from their cousin, Roland H. Macy.

The residence, ostensibly open to unmarried ladies “regardless of their religious belief or nationality,” continues to fulfill its mission, more or less, to this day. After a brief application process, including furnishing proof of employment, Webster women are assigned a weekly rental rate based on their income. I think mine, calibrated to the highest level, was around $220 a week, two relatively wholesome meals per day included – plus, of course, the blissful privacy of a roughly 100-square-foot room of one’s own.

I've been trying to write about the Webster for the longest time, but it was a strange period in my life and I always end up abandoning the project, getting lost in the maudlin journals I kept that winter. Somehow all those complicated, sad, lonely, yet desperately hopeful feelings I was grappling with upon my arrival to the big city got tangled up with my feelings for the building itself. It was a place where you could catch a glimpse from a certain angle – the utilitarian, aqua-painted 1930s fan secured to the wall above the bed; the fire safety cards by the elevators instructing ladies to "gather your purse and your gloves" before exiting the building in case of an emergency; the creaky metal contraptions, apparently designed for indoor clothes drying before the age of dryers, lining the walls of the laundry rooms; the heavy metal skeleton key that accessed the tiny room’s door as well as the “trunk room” for extra storage – and be transported easily into the past.

Sitting at my white-painted metal desk writing letters to North Carolina (approximation of the scene here, without quite so much hair volume), washing my face in the small porcelain sink with its old ceramic fixtures, staring uptown at the glow from Times Square to the northeast outside my eighth-floor window, I’d imagine the girls in my room before me. Who lived in Room 817 in 1981? 1942? Who was the first girl, in 1926? I conjured a Midwestern farm girl, having come to the city to (she told Ma and Pa) pursue work as a sales clerk, bounding in the door after successfully auditioning to join the Ziegfeld chorus. I saw another starry-eyed girl from the south, perhaps not so fortunate, rubbing her sore feet after another long day working the Macy’s perfume counter in heels. I worried about a lost soul from upstate getting caught up with a bad downtown crowd in the 70s, maybe never making it back to 817 one night. All these ghosts – decades of them – of hope, of loneliness, of the fear surrounding their “unmarried” status, tossing in that same old creaky metal twin bed, applying lipstick in the same heavy etched mirror, sighing over the same maddeningly slow elevators, late to work again.

So you see why I run aground trying to write about the damn place – I just can’t do it without slipping into the voice of Thomas Wolfe. O lost!

But onward. On the other end of the age spectrum, the Webster in my day was inhabited by a coven of postmenopausal lifers. These women had somehow been grandmothered out of the clause specifying a maximum length of stay of up to a year – in fact, I was told some of these dames had lived there for decades. Sometimes you could get a glimpse into one of their rooms along the narrow corridors, piled to the rafters with all of their belongings as well as a contraband cooler. The plastic Igloo was the true sign of a lifer, as far as I could tell – no cooking was allowed on the premises; one took her meals during specified hours in the ground-floor cafeteria, but some of these thrifty ladies had apparently devised a way to preserve leftovers or food from the diners in the area.

Anyway, I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you I was anxious about my position on the Webster age spectrum, going through the fourth or fifth of my probably countless midlife crises. I found myself in an uncomfortable space somewhere between the loud, sociable, full-of-promise interns (whose constant complaints about the place – its “gross” old fixtures and “creepy” staffers and general uncoolness – always piqued my latent hostility toward them), and the quietly dignified aging set, whom I admired for their practical spirits but whose very presence, of course, served as a reminder of what might happen if I didn’t get my act together very, very soon.

And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I associated a certain odor that hung around the halls of the Webster -- a mix of decades-old stale smoke and something like wet dog, mixed with whatever industrial cleanser was used to swab the communal bathroom and shower facilities – with the older ladies. I desperately hoped the smell didn't cling to me and tail me outside the building.

Just as the Curbed comments suggested, the gender segregation of the Webster was the first point of interest for everyone I told about my residence. Some variation of “do you/do others ever sneak boys in,” always came up immediately in conversations about it. And I’d laugh along and explain the rules – no boys allowed, except by prior arrangement and then only at designated times in the publicly accessible sitting areas or piano rooms off the lobby – and these explanations were met by further comments about Bosom Buddies, and Sapphic affairs, and passing guys off as your dad/brother/shrink, and on and on, none of which I ever found as amusing as my interlocutors seemed to.

Having left a long-term relationship down south, I was reaching the far end of the age at which a woman could respectably be defined as young and unmarried (certainly by Charles and Josiah’s standards). I had a new job I wasn’t sure I liked, and new acquaintances I wasn’t sure liked me, and I really hadn’t been single for any length of time since age 17, and I was worried about the clinging odor of the Webster, and I seemed to have lost all knowledge of how dating worked, or even flirting, for that matter, and I hadn't been able to shake an unattractive habit of talking about my ailing, elderly cat back in North Carolina every five minutes or so. So for me, the segregation was probably for the best – as thrilling as it was to be kissed by a rakish flirt on 34th Street, the Empire State building glowing white up above, it was equally thrilling to tell him, sorry, no boys allowed!, and spare myself certain heartbreak by ending our date chastely on the curb.

And so I spent a good deal of my time on my own. I tried to pour my romantic energies into the city, telling myself I was falling in love with the far west side of Manhattan. Despite the brutal temperatures of January-through-early spring, I would take any excuse to visit the Webster’s expansive rooftop "garden" (such as it was, in winter) and look across at its iconic neighbor down the street, or wander the sketchy blocks below Port Authority until forced back by weather or common sense to the residence, where I’d be met by the gruff Russian doorman who never remembered I lived there, night after night. 

Maybe it was this anonymity that mattered most to me about the Webster, a sense of safety that kept me sequestered there for four months when I could have found myself a proper rental earlier. In any case, by the time spring started to thaw things out, I’d found my current apartment across town.

As much as I protested I’d miss southern Hell’s Kitchen, miss the weird little Dyer Avenue area, the desolation of 10th Avenue on a Sunday afternoon, walking over the railyards, I haven’t made it out there too often since my move. In a way, I kind of like thinking of the Webster, and the time I lived there, as imaginary. Only in an imaginary world, real estate observers might say, will New York's mercenary developers manage to miss this piece of prime property over the next few years. Meanwhile, I can imagine the future unmarried working women of Room 817, imagining some version of me, in the receding past.

October 19, 2006 in Moping | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBack (0)

»

Recent Posts

  • Friday mousetrap
  • So long, 10021
  • For what ails ya
  • Decisions, decisions
  • Overheard!
  • Just like Sister Ray said
  • Friday mousetrap
  • Mouse jamboree
  • OK, their mimosas are excellent
  • Webster women
Subscribe to this blog's feed