Celebs in the City

OK, I learned about this place from watching Sex in the City, just like everybody else in the world. New York is the city where the streets are paved with famous people. So to see the town, I found a few famous-person-was-seen-here web sites, got a little info and headed towards the city.



First stop, Sarah Jessica Parker territory. I went to her neighborhood, the West Village and prowled but no SJP. Was hoping for a glimpse of her with her adorable son with their cranky nanny, but nothing.



I did get a close-up of her trash can though.


Then I headed over to Union Square because I really was hoping to see Ethan Hawke who hangs out at the Starbucks there, according to the Google.

But I got there and wtf, which Starbucks?




There are three, if you count the one in Barnes and Noble.







I tried them all and no Ethan. I need to try a more reliable famous-people web site. Maybe Celebrity Blackberry Sightings?

It is just not that easy to find famous people. They move around too much. Even getting myself on the Twitter celebrity-sightings instant feed, I just could not get to Queen Latifah’s location before she had moved on from the Madame X lounge.

Then, just when I had moved on from celebrity stalking, I was back on Long Island at the Syosset Starbucks and I totally saw Alicia Keys in the drive-through!

She lives in Muttontown. And OK, she was in The Nanny Diaries so we would have a lot to talk about. I’m just sayin’.


This is Deb in the City, celebrating my triumph with a humungo holiday pumpkin spice latte, saying baaaa from Muttontown.

Old New York, New New York

"I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me."

And curious questionings they are, Mr. Whitman. Deb needs to know, for instance, where does one buy churros in this town? I needed to find something to try and make peace with the child since I’m clearly on my own here. She’s just a little kid with a deadbeat dad.


On the train going towards what I thought might yield churros results, I smiled at this woman and gave her the secret nanny solidarity glance.
She was wrangling two toddlers and I lacked my nanny prop of the child to indicate I was of her clan so I don’t think my united front registered with her but she was cheerful and smiling still.

Then my prayers were answered at the Metropolitan Avenue stop.



Churros, two for a dollar, right there in the subway! I tried to ask the lady selling them if she’d made them but she was too busy texting someone to answer my questions.



G train churros. How fantastico is that? I cannot take the child to Mexico to her dad but maybe I can bring a little of Mexico to the child.

Once more I arrived at Fort Greene and I meandered into DARE Bookstore, over on Lafayette Ave run by Desmond, the store’s owner-operator.



Desmond is another Jamaican transplant to Brooklyn, and has lived here for decades. He was chatting with another customer when I walked in and he said he was so grateful to have lived during the times he had. He saw his first tv when he moved to NY at age 17 and got to see a black man elected president.



But Desmond also said that he was about to close his store, which specializes in African American literature. His main source of income is the contract he has with the city department of education and he lost his account, along with about 100 other small contractors, when the city chose to use one giant megacorporation instead.

Desmond has plans though which involve moving to a warmer climate and building up his own publishing house, DARE Books. "I never expected anything from anyone", he told me. Perhaps in our Obama-victory nation, Desmond can soon afford the luxury of expectations.

This is Deb, living just enough, just enough for the city.

Emporers of the Empire State

Ended up in Brooklyn again today, at the Green-Wood Cemetery in search of the emperors of the empires and I was not disappointed. First of all, this place is beautiful and anyone can get to it by taking the R train to 25th street and walking a couple of blocks up the hill towards the trees. It’s so lovely actually, that in the 1850’s it rivaled Niagara Falls as the main tourist attraction in the country and over half a million people visited annually to have picnics with the departed.

Green-Wood is bursting with famous “permanent residents” and I was humbled to pay my respects to them and thank them in a small way for their mighty contributions to this earthly life.

First stop, Leonard Bernstein, Emperor of Broadway and the New York Philharmonic.



Next I found Peter Cooper.



19th century industrialist who built the first steam locomotive, made a fortune in glue and iron production, laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable and invented, with the help of his wife Sarah, what we now know as Jell-O. He had little formal education and could not spell, and because of this created the Cooper Union for Science and Art which still confers degrees in engineering, art and architecture, free of cost. Cooper was the emperor of philanthropy, setting the standard for successful industrialists that give back to the community. We miss you, Pete.

I was wandering around looking for the grave of prematurely departed artist Jean Michel Basquiat



When a cemetery security car rolled by and the driver asked if I was “off to see the wizard”. He directed me to a grave nearby.


Occupied permanently by Frank Morgan, the actor who played the wizard in the movie, along with four other characters.

The security officer, Tommy
was taking pictures of the various monuments to note any damage for the maintenance records of Green-Wood. He has been working there for only a few months but spent his whole life in the neighborhood, and was raised in a house that overlooked the cemetery. He started playing there when he was four years old and clearly loves the place. It’s nice to work here, I said and he replied that he never wants to leave. I asked the next logical question: will you spend eternity here?

Tommy answered happily that he had already got that settled and that he owned two plots in the place but he wasn’t sure which one he’d be buried in. I gotta see who moves in around me, you know. Yeah, you don’t want noisy neighbors for the afterlife, I said. That’s right, Tommy smiled.

This is Tommy’s favorite monument in the place, the lady on the stairs, as he called her:



She was murdered and she’s just beautiful, he said.

Of course this got me thinking about my own memorial and what that should look like. First of all, granite or bronze or a combo is a must. Marble just does not hold up over time. I cannot claim to be the Emperor of the nanny empire, not yet anyway. I have my aspirations. My fellow nannies of this city are ripe and ready to recognize their status as caretakers to the future, so maybe that’s my calling. A little community organizing can get you far these days so who knows.

Deb in the City, contemplating eternity but trying to stay in the moment, saying so long.

Living for the City

Hello there internet. In case you've forgotten, I am Deb and you have clicked on my blog, Deb in the City, which is my coping mechanism to deal with my recent move to a new place. I now unbelievably live in New York. New York City, just like I pictured it, as the blind poet sang. I can’t believe it. OK, I get to live in an incredible house.



And as you can probably tell it’s not really in New York City proper. It’s in Nassau County, Syosset to be more precise. It’s in a beautiful planned community with its own name:



Yes, Stone Hill at Muttontown is where I live. If you go to the web site of Stone Hill at Muttontown, you can hear the soothing theme music and take the virtual tour and see the clubhouse where there’s an indoor pool and you can see a picture of the gates of this gated community. All this, right off the Jericho Turnpike.

But I’m really close to “the city” as the locals call the big town at the western end of the Long Island Railroad and I am drawn there, like a moth to a bug zapper. Pretty hard to get a handle on this giant melting pot and I find a psychic oven mitt of willingness to get lost helpful.

The commuter train required me to change at Jamaica, something I thought geographically impossible, but New York City does have everything, Jamaica included. I duly transferred towards Flatbush and emerged right into Walt Whitman’s “Brooklyn of ample hills” and began my wandering, as Walt would have done. Fort Greene was his neighborhood, after all.

The economic downturn has me in a thrifty mood so I found myself in the Goodwill where I struck up a conversation with fellow home economist, Patrice.


Who it turns out, really is from Jamaica! Patrice was buying things to fill up her barrel of goods to ship back to Jamaica for her family there before she returns for a visit in January. She misses her mother and her sisters, she told me and the hot peppers back home, "that keep you healthy". Patrice is also a fellow nanny and the woman she has worked for the last 20 years recently got fired from her job at one of the famously-collapsed citadels of finance. Patrice does not know if she will have a job for much longer.

Patrice got me thinking that this high-end nanny lifestyle does not offer that much security and I wondered is there a nanny union? We could band together, pool a little money each month and microfinance each other during tough times.

This is Deb in the City, thinking globally but acting locally, saying so long from Long Island.

On a Mission

Headed to the Mission district today and was bombarded with purchase options from everywhere in Latin America. It’s muy fantastico over there and right away I found what I was looking for in one of the many many produce outlets on Mission.

Cactus! So pretty! But also so peligroso. The thorns are still on them but I am in luck because safety cactus comes in a jar.



The guy who owns the produce place was behind the counter and he was amazing. Check out the giant original oil painting behind him, the Virgin of Guadalupe appears to the cowboy grocer. Only in the Mission, friends.









The Mission is a 99 cent store jackpot and I wandered into this great big place at around 18th. I bought myself a nice windup alarm clock, that features a chicken image on the face, with a head that bobs up and down and pecks with each tick of the clock.




I started chatting with the guy behind the counter, Ramon.

Ramon it turns out is not latino, though he speaks Spanish and English. He also speaks Farsi because he is originally from Afghanistan. He asked me if I voted and I said yes and he said he voted for Obama. "We have to give him a chance", he said. Ramon got the money to open his 99 cent emporium by going back to his country and working for the US Department of Defense. "Good money", he said, "220 thousand a year." I asked him if it was dangerous and he said "Look, someone can come here and boom boom shoot me. Only God knows when it is your turn to go. And until then God protects me." I hope Ramon, you are right about that. So far, so good, my friend.

I forgot to ask him what his name was back in his country. I doubt it is Ramon.This is Moe, sifting through the diasporas, saying adios and salaam and farewell from the Mission.

Windmills of my Mind

Today I hopped the 71 Muni bus from The Haight where I had spent some of the afternoon wandering around while trying to convince myself that I really do need medical marijuana to control my restless leg syndrome. No, seriously I do have restless leg. And don’t leave a lot of comments about how it doesn’t really exist. You try my legs on for a night.

Anyway, the 71 was a long ride so I had time to chat with the driver, a nice fellow from, as he said, “the Phillipines, m’am”. Today was his day off and this was not his regular route and he’d taken an extra shift for the overtime. His family lives in a house he bought in Sacramento and he sees them only on his days off. He was shy so didn’t want me to take his picture but here he is, picking up a customer.

What can I say? I’m a public transit romantic. This driver stays with his brother when he is in the city working. His whole family is part of the largest export product of the Phillipines, labor. Human beings who work hard are the primary resource of that country. Nurses, teachers, construction workers, domestic help, cover bands at nightclubs, Filipinos do it all and they do it all over the world.


The 71 deposited me once more at the beach on another gray, otherworldly day. Wandering along the edge of the ocean, lost in damp thoughts, this emerged:

I was having a psychedelic experience, completely drug-free. Yes, that is a Dutch windmill, not 300 yards from the coast of the Pacific. It’s actually the largest Dutch windmill in the world, having the largest sails, according to the plaque that’s stuck on it. It was built to pump water from an underground well to irrigate the “useless” sand dunes of the 19th century that are now the lush and beautiful Golden Gate Park.

A sign said that the garden beneath the windmill is the “Queen Wilhemina Tulip Garden”. Alas, tulips are out of season, as you can see from the flowerless beds in the foreground. But this is San Francisco, so queens are never out of season and the scrubby underbrush trails around the windmill play host to a robust crop of them.

It hard to see the gents I saw go into this shrub together and in the spirit of keeping the anonymous in anonymous sex, I let them have their encounter, minus the prying eyes of the internet. There are plenty of other sites for that, if you really have an interest.

Icons, literally

Today I went on an excursion, out to the beaches of the mighty Pacific Ocean.

It was all gray and fogged in again. Not the California of the Beach Boys today but that of the Mamas and the Papas when all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray. Dreamy.

I wandered around the nearby residential neighborhood, which was once called Carville, because disused horse-drawn streetcars had been sold to beachgoers in the late 19th century to be used for beach shacks. A few houses still exist that are made of the old cars, though it’s impossible to tell from the street nowadays. Maybe this one is one, since it’s so skinny and they used to just pile the cars on top of each other:











Here’s the interior of one house that still exists, though I couldn’t find it on the street. The benches that the passengers sat on are still intact along with the gas lamps at either end.

Didn’t find a house made of a street car but I did find a house of the lord over on Geary that could have been plucked from the steppes of Russia.

This is the Holy Virgin Joy of All Who Sorrow Russian Orthodox Cathedral

The various eastern orthodoxies really know how to do a cathedral. With its golden onion tops and wall-to-wall iconographic interior, the cathedral definitely hails from the “more is more” school of interior decoration.

Pictures of saints, icons in the truest sense of the word, are amazing but I have to say the real flesh and bones of an actual saint really ups the ante.



This is Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco a for-real saint, taking visitors at his earthly resting place in the cathedral. I must admit, I did not take this picture myself but got it off the web. I wanted to go inside and see Saint John but I did not have a skirt on and I did not wish to be disrespectful. The Orthodoxies of the world have dress codes which are more strict that my nanny dress code. The Holy See does not recognize catalogue items from the Limited or track suits.

Nonetheless, I will return with proper attire another day. Not that I am some sort of obsessive who is into dark tourism of the religious sort, but seriously, I’ve only been here a little while and I’ve already seen the relics of a Buddha, and the relics of a Russian saint make for a nice fusion of perspectives.

This is Moe, striving for balance in these polemical times, saying so long.