Snippets from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur weeks:
In olden days Martha’s — Park and 58th — was the dress shop. Glasses of wine. Models parading. Ladies in furs, designers — not jeans and T-shirts.
Minding the holiday, instead of cars they’d walk to temple. And, en route, they — wearing Chanel — would drop by Martha’s. Business wasn’t done on the holy day, so they didn’t pay, buy, try on — but they’d point and say: “After the holiday I’ll take this dress” or “Next week send me that.”
Another story. Not saying this happened holy week — just saying it’s happening. Coney Island. Forget the parachute-jump excitement. Shove the Ferris wheel and roller coaster and toy cars that bump into one another. I am not telling tales. Not revealing. Just mumbling that come weekends there’s lots of human activity. At night. In cars. Is all I’m saying.
Caine you believe it?
A Sir Michael Caine story, which he tells himself: “Long back, filming in the Philippines, I’m at a party. Staring, unflatteringly, not knowing who I was, the hostess asks me: ‘You a drug dealer?’ I said, ‘No, why do you ask?’ She said, ‘Everyone calls you “my cocaine”!’ ”
Cockney is not big in Manila.
A city of movers and shakers
Be it known: NYC’s new citywide rot — pot, taxes, filth, crime, poverty, costs, progressives, stores closing, buildings empty, streets dirty, immigrants arriving, politicians fuhgeddabouded — is already feeling it. Longtime residents talk of inching south. Younguns are creeping east. Even Connecticut families behind gates talk of moving. They’re beginning to feel it. I’m hearing it. I’m reporting it.
New York, New York, you once were a helluva town.
To get to Queens a subway guard says: “Grab a cab.” . . . Keys to the city? Pros now teach how to pick the lock . . . Vandalized so often a store hung the sign: “We gave already.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.
