What lies beneath

In the naïve hope of generating some sense of a routine in this chronically routine-less city, I recently joined up to a bi-weekly fitness class. My first session was last night, and I was directed via email to a relatively non-descript, beige lobby-ed high rise on 54^th Street. As I ascended the floors, peeking out onto each level as my fellow elevator-riders exited, I noticed a large number of signs for studios and production companies and wig sellers and costume designers. Snippets of bellowing tenors singing opera, or the brassy sounds of a teenage showtune solo drifted into the elevator at each stop. When I finally emerged onto the twelfth floor and navigated the narrow wooden hallway to my destination, I found dozens of rooms full of chorus lines and four-part harmonies; scores of people, crammed into each room, in fits of hysterical laughter or stony silence. One room was full of solemn applause; a sign on the door which said AADA suggested to me some sort of serious Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (I just googled the acronym, it also stands for American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which is probably more likely, in the circumstances). As I entered the room for my class ten subdued Shakespearians exited, having just audition for The Twelfth Night (according to the sign on the door). The adjacent door was labeled, “Felony for Fun”.

It struck me, not for the first time in the last couple of weeks, what mysteries and scandals and adventures and oddities are going on behind every door and underneath every street in this city. Dreams realized and discarded, friends made, tattoos received, debts incurred, chances dashed, clothes bought, meals cooked, fights fought, love consummated, rules broken, lives built behind each and every door. The most ordinary building containing the most extraodinary goings on. How often in New York does a friends lead you on a seemingly wild goose chase-eqse trip to some broken door in some grimy alley in Chinatown, only to reveal to you a vibrant, warm, colourful Mexican restaurant with amazing Margueritas? Only in New York can you find a burger joint behind a curtain at a fancymidtown hotel, and a bar accessible only through a telephone booth in the back of a hotdogstore. Sometimes it seems that the bright lights and tall buildings and big windows of the city only exist to conceal the real excitement and dynamism below the surface.

On the weekend I watched Bill Cunningham New York, the touching documentary about a man who has lived by the motto, “he who seeks beauty, finds it.” Bill, more than anyone, knows the truth about the layers of New York. He scratches the surface with an intuitiveness and curiosity that is often rare amongst fashion journalists today, and what he discovers says far more about style in this eternally stylish city than the billboards and the model-filled bars could ever communicate. He is at once a living example of the incongruity between the city’s exterior and interior (for all his fame, he lives in a filing cabinet filled semi-squat in Carnegie Hall) and a documentor of it. We would all do well to be a little more like Bill; taking the time to look behind the façade, and understanding what lies beneath.