Manic Panic and Velvet Ropes

A list that recalls the unforgettable NYC of a past life.

I was out with a new friend last night who also grew up in NYC in the seventies and eighties. We had a feeling there would be a six-degrees type connection, if we just reminisced and mined our best stories over outdoor drinks for long enough. It took us a lot of circuitous humble-bragging and memory jogging before we made the connection that we had attended the same elementary school — P.S. 41. Jackpot!

I got home and saw Tree Langdon’s challenge to write a list. Fun! My memory is patchy at best, but there are a few highlights that have stuck in my mind from an unconventional, unpredictable NYC childhood.

Does a list define a life?

I was born in Manhattan in 1969. Right now, when NYC is suddenly so different, it feels like an exotic life that readers might enjoy a nostalgic peek into. Here’s a list of things I reminisce about sometimes that could only happen growing up in NYC in the seventies and eighties.

1. We lived above a Jazz club called the Tin Palace on the Bowery for a year. The floor vibrated. CBGB’s was across the street. The Hells Angels clubhouse and a men’s shelter were nearby.
2. My mom was a feminist artist who dragged my sister and I to boring gallery openings. I still can’t stand the smell of cheese or cheap wine.
3. We moved to a TriBeCa loft, above a noodle factory. We didn’t have walls. We didn’t have a kitchen sink. My sister and I washed dishes in the bathtub until my mom found a kitchen sink on the sidewalk.
4. Magoos Bar was like a second home, and I got pretty good at pinball. My Mom traded paintings for bar tab credit. The food we ate there is my nostalgic comfort food: peach melba, beef bourguignon, profiteroles.
5. In the late seventies, my mom used to wake my sister and I up at midnight and take us out dancing in clubs until 4 am. But she drew the line at the Mudd Club.
6. My elementary school was across from the original Original Famous Ray’s Pizza.
7. Fanelli’s Bar was around the corner from the galleries. Mr. Fanelli used to give us $1 every time our mom took us to the bar. I saved up and bought a bike. May he rest in peace.
8. Jean Michel Basquiat was in my mom’s performance art. I’m serious. When I met him he was part of a group of graffiti artists who called themselves SAMO. I think she met them at the Mudd Club. For the performance, she and the four teenagers painted themselves gold and ran around a huge loft. May he rest in peace.
9. I served Billy Idol frozen yogurt when I was 15, shaking like a leaf.
10. Manic Panic was not yet a chain. My classmate Joanna told me about the shop on Saint Marks Place when I admired her red mohawk. It was a revelation.
11. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was where I tried Whip Its for the first and last time.
12. I met a boy at Cooper Union Saturday Art Program, and he took me to a Black Flag concert. That was my first try at moshing.
13. When we cut high school we would take the subway to Rockaway Beach. Or hang out in Washington Square Park with the skaters.
14. Senior year I had an internship with a dress designer. I learned absolutely nothing but didn’t have to go to school so I thought it was great.
15. There was a club called Nell’s. It was cozy and glamorous and $5 cover. We were teenage girls so we got in. There was one called the Tunnel that had been an actual subway tunnel. It was huge and wild and we walked in for free because my best friend worked part time for the bookkeeper.
16. I once tried to get into Studio 54 in high school. I looked about 12. My friends got in and left me standing outside. An hour later they came back and begged the bouncer to let me in. It was fun but turned me off to waiting in line behind velvet ropes forever. I much preferred it downtown.

MTV was new and I listened to everything — from Bowie to Beastie Boys to Grace Jones. After the movie Kids came out, I wondered how my friends and I had survived high school. Not all of us did, which is another story and not mine to tell. The setting and the times combined with the insecurity, immorality and immortality of adolescence made a dangerous cocktail. I guess that was the point.

It was a pivotal time in NYC.

The abductor of Etan Patz and the vigilante shooter Bernhard Goetz and their high profile cases brought in an era of fear-based parenting. We avoided all that by a few short years. We were rogue.

Does a list define a life? I don’t feel defined by the list or the life. It is fun to look back at the end of a long and tragic year for my city, grateful to have survived.

NYC in the seventies and eighties was my hometown. It was where I belonged, and it was all I knew. NYC may not be the same ever again, but it will be something. Something unforgettable.