NEW YORKER IN THE MAKING

“Windmills and Fashion Shows”

I’m not a New Yorker yet, but I’m proud to say that I’m a New Yorker in the making. Like a blockbuster movie released on a 4-DVD gift box set, perhaps in the coming years of my life I will release my own “making-of featurette”. Or better yet, I will start right now, bit by bit.

Having just moved from La-La land, and belonging to a foreign culture in origin terms (yes I do have an “alien” number), I am right now at a point in my life where I’m desperately and rather self-amusingly trying to balance the ying and yang of the New York that was advertised to me continuously throughout my life and the New York that is “in your face”.

The New York that Woody Allen painted with his humor and imagination seems to be fading away, leaving its place to the New York of Sex and the City. Annie Hall hats have long been out, and the Carrie Bradshaw-do is in. The trademark New York neurosis is leaving its place to a more difficult to obtain Manolo Blahnik pair of shoes. Much to my surprise, the taxi drivers don’t talk like Robert DeNiro, and (to hell with political correctness) as a matter of fact I’m surprised if they talk English at all. This is the city where you walk one avenue up and find your self in absolute chaos, or in an utterly divergent atmosphere. The best example of this is the “Fashion Week” that we are all enjoying/suffering.

My visitor friend from LA and I wanted to go out and do some New York club scene this weekend. After going to three known clubs and bars, and after being refused entry to each and every one of them due to a Fashion Week private party, she arrived at two conclusions.

One: She was not in Sex and the City. She was just in the city. The city that was hosting “the” fashion week, during which neurotic designers, bulimic models and their hot couture fans came from all around the world, and New Yorkers were able to get away with anything they wore.

Two: I haven’t lived in New York long enough to make the necessary connections and networking to be able to get in to clubs or bars during a high-concept week, and that she should have come when I’ve had enough names in my brand new, inkless phone book.

I wasn’t going to take this lying down, or watching Metro TV at home in my pajamas. I did what every decent person would have done. I took my friend to the airport, told her a million times that I was sorry about the whole deal, came home and called my best (only) friend in New York and asked him to find a connection to get us in to some place. Any place. Bar, club, fashion show… It didn’t matter to me. I was on a quest to prove to the city that never sleeps that neither did I.

Little did I know that my friend’s connection was someone he never met, but talked on the phone for business. However, he had been promised a favor, and I was determined like a madman to redeem that favor that night. It was a duel. I was Don Quixote and New York was my windmill.

I was told by my friend to wait in Bryant Park, and to come as fashionable as possible. I did arrive at the appointed time fashionably dressed, but he was more than fashionably late. It is one thing to wait for your friend in a park when you have a shield mechanism like a book or an iPod, but it is another thing when you’re wearing a flashy shirt and tight Diesel jeans, and your shoes are as comfortable as having a root canal during The Great Depression with no anesthetics. I was getting glares and stares, like I was the new addition to the park’s art section, a live statue to test the audience reaction. I decided to move out to the front.

Unfortunately this New Yorker in the making was waiting at the wrong side of the park where old people with umbrellas and topless Chelsea men were getting into the sun and away from the fashion vamps that lurked around. But at the front, was photographers, press, rich people that got out of cabs and limos, and other people with flashy outfits waiting for someone to get them in as well. At that moment, I was with my own kind. I was like a leper that had finally found his colony.

When my friend arrived, I had forgotten all my anger to his tardiness, since I became a part of the mumbo-jumbo while waiting. He speed-dialed his business friend, and was told to wait at the main entrance for a while. His friend came out half an hour later and told us to follow him. I think we lost all the charisma we had at that moment since we ran up the stairs like kids running to open the presents on Christmas morning; spastic in movement, and ecstatic in emotions. My joy was not entirely because I was finally going to see a real live fashion show, but also that I was winning my bet with New York. I could become an overnight-someone even if I had a blank Rolodex. (I know I was channeling my inner Fatal Attraction Glenn Close with this baseless obsession, but I blame the celebrity culture we live in. Yes… That’s who I blame. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

That night I watched my first catwalk show. It was fabulous. I was in Sex and the City. The lights, the music, the models, the same, blank, android-like expression on their faces, the horrible outfits, the angry press photographers who rudely yelled at people to sit down, or get the f*** away… I was in heaven. After the show we were offered a drink and an invitation to the after party by some guy who had no idea how we got in, or who we were for that matter. By that time, the business friend who let us in was MIA. But none of it mattered. I was a New Yorker in the making on a quest almost completed. (I could see myself looking like I just escaped a mental asylum and carving my leg with a butcher knife, with which I just kill a sweet little bunny…“I won’t be ignored, Dan.”)

We got out of the tent through the main entrance. I saw others waiting or conjuring a way to sneak in. Some were familiar faces that waited along with me 2 hours ago, but who cared. I was coming out. (of the tent I mean) I guess the tempo and deliverance of the day combined with the alcohol on an empty stomach made me say goodbye to my friend at the front gate and leave him to be on his own at the after party. I just wanted to walk around for a while and breathe in my victory.

For some strange reason it didn’t bother me to walk around in that outfit anymore. I mean if Carrie Bradshaw could walk around like a greenhouse-gone bad, and still be found attractive, who was I to fear judgment? After all, this was one of the few cities in the world where “judgment” itself was judged severely.

I stopped at the traffic lights to cross the road. While waiting, I got surrounded with true New Yorkers who also wanted to cross the road. Just when I was thinking about a chicken/road joke, shockingly enough, a man carrying an actual live chicken stopped right by me. Behind me were two obvious “fashion people” with outfits they might have just purchased from the show I watched. On my left was an investment banker talking flirtatiously on his phone to someone, and next to him was an old couple arm in arm wearing huge smiles on their faces and clothes that reminded them of their youth.

You might think that this part, my reader, is probably my imagination running wild, but right at that second, a street musician started playing a Chet Baker tune on the corner we were waiting at. There I was, in a Sex and the City outfit, surrounded by Taxi Driver people, accompanied by Woody Allenesque street music. It was everything combined, everything advertised. It was the New York of my own Hollywood.

At that moment, I reached two personal conclusions.

One: New Yorkers could always get away with what they wore, as long as they wore it with a confidence, and that, they always did.

Two: I was not in a duel with New York. It was more like a duet. How can I defy a city that opened her arms for me, and agreed to make me a part of it? True, I still felt like Don Quixote, on an endless quest to the unknown, a challenge of self-discovery… But New York was my Sancho Panza. It was by my side, holding my hand, ensuring me that there is nothing wrong with dueling with windmills or fashion shows. The goal was irrelevant. It was the journey that mattered. And what a fantastic place to take that journey. After all, it’s the perfect grid system. You can never get lost. Even if you did, like the saying goes: “Sometimes the best way to find where you’re going is to get lost.”

NEW YORK BASED WRITER Jason Mason III