The Alligator Is at the Rear of the Platform: An NYC Travelogue

One constant in Ted’s and my relationship has been a need for “a New York fix” every few years. But on a recent trip to the city, we found that the recipe for that “fix” had changed.

Though our previous NYC trips centered around Times Square and the number of shows we could attend on Broadway, this time we stayed away from it. (Does anyone really need to see a Red Lobster restaurant the size of a city block? Or the tired old Naked Cowboy? Or pay $300 for tickets to a show you’re not crazy about seeing, or the restaging of a show you’ve seen 49 times?)

Our focus this time was more diffuse, more surprising, more fun.

And yes, more economical.

The reason for the visit went beyond sightseeing.

Riverdale Avenue Books, the publisher of my memoir, invited me to attend the Rainbow Book Fair, the largest LGBTQ+ book event in the country. Here I am with my editor, David T. Valentin, at the show’s opening in Greenwich Village’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. Riverdale Avenue Books was a sponsor of the event.

No matter how many books I sold at the RBF (and I did sell a few!), my best takeaway was this revelation from David: “Your book has touched my heart and has inspired me to create a loving relationship, home, family and community.” David and his boyfriend are building a house together. He is an absolute sweetheart … and a wonderful editor.

I will be forever grateful for his interest in the first draft of my memoir, The Way from Me to Us, way back in 2020 … when he was 24 years old.

We also enjoyed dinner with Lori Perkins, my publisher, at a terrific Italian place called Dominick’s. It has been a fixture on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx’s Little Italy for 50 years. Yes, we’re having enormous artichokes stuffed with bread crumbs and sausage. And that was just the appetizer.

After dinner, we searched for the best cannoli in the Bronx. We found it!

We found other good things, too.

Here we are with two travel buddies we met on our tour of Scandinavia last summer. After the Book Fair, we joined Christopher Bowen and Michael Watson at a lovely Greenwich Village bistro called La Ripaille, a short walk from the LGBTQ Center.

Ripaille is French for feast. Appropriate, since the day was a feast for us: a heady mix of new experiences–I was a guest author at a book fair in New York!–and the joy of bonding with friends.

And that’s not all.

We began the day with brunch at another Greenwich Village restaurant with Ray Albergotti, a friend of Ted’s from their high school days in Anderson, South Carolina, and his husband Andre. Like Christopher and Michael, they also live in the Village.

They were even kind enough after brunch to walk us to the Community Center where the Book Fair was held.

Here are Ray and Andre with Ted by the Stonewall Memorial, now a national monument.

And here are the tulips in Christopher Park. Andre is a volunteer guardian of the park. He helps maintain its gorgeous flowers and greenery and ensures this historic spot stays in tip-top shape.

In fact, all of the Big Apple looked pretty fabulous to us. This photo is from a morning stroll through Central Park.

It was our first time to visit the city when a touch of spring was in the air.

The tulips alone are reason enough to visit in late April.

Here are some beauties in one of the gardens at The Cloisters, the Met’s museum of medieval art and architecture in the Washington Heights neighborhood of northern Manhattan. The big red ones are the scene-stealers. They’re like goblets designed to hold a generous pour of some heavenly liqueur.

Among the items displayed at The Cloisters are seven astonishing tapestries. Woven in the South Netherlands around 1500, the Unicorn Tapestries were likely created to celebrate a wedding of an aristocratic couple.

Exquisite in their intricate detail, woven with wool, silk and silver-wrapped thread, the tapestries are impressive in size, too. I hope this attractive young woman will forgive me for including her in the photo as a way of showing the tapestries’ scale.

(I generally ask permission when taking photos that include strangers on our travels, but the mood was so hushed in the tapestry rooms that I didn’t think it would be cool to start chatting. At any rate, I love the contrast between old and new here.)

An opera with breakdancing.

Also on our non-traditional tour of New York, we saw an operatic piece based on the memoir by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow. It is the first piece by a Black composer to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera in its 138-year history.

The Met staged Fire Shut Up in My Bones grandly, with a breakdance performed at the beginning of Act II by actors playing characters in the protagonist’s college fraternity. It brought down the house. (How often, I ask you, is an opera lauded for its choreography as well as its music?) Still, the story and music and the performances were so consistently energetic that the opera, with a score by Grammy Award-winning trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, only gained power from that point forward.

As well it should. The story is about young Charles’ coming to terms with the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of an older cousin when he was seven years old. Heavy stuff, but beautifully crafted and staged. And featuring a boy soprano impeccably singing the role of young Charles.

A play with breakthrough photographs.

The other show we saw was the New York Theatre Workshop‘s production of a new play directed and co-written by Moisés Kaufman, the author of The Laramie Project. A visit to this theater gave us a chance to see a part of Greenwich Village we hadn’t seen: the Washington Square Park neighborhood around New York University.

It’s a cool spot, but watch for students in drab clothing speeding along after dark without lights on their bicycles!

The play Here There Are Blueberries is based on the true story of recently discovered photos of Auschwitz staff members enjoying leisure time activities, even celebrating their accomplishments and eating fresh-grown blueberries, at a vacation-style lodge built near the camp.

The work’s central question is whether the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum should display the photos and, more crucially, whether the Auschwitz telegraph operators, purchasing clerks and other menial workers knew what was going on at the camp.

Again, heavy stuff.

But the play is skillfully written and performed. And it was a pleasure to see Kathleen Chalfant playing a member of the museum’s research staff. (We saw her decades ago playing numerous roles in the original Broadway run of Angels in America. )

Though the production was technically sophisticated, with projections of the photos featured throughout, it’s always inspiring to see a play where the cast moves set pieces and props by themselves. Chalfant, an American theater grande dame who won an OBIE award in 1999 for her performance as the cancer victim in Atlantan Margaret Edson’s play Wit, was no exception to the practice. At one point, standing in shadow, she pounds a gavel to add a sound effect to the reading of the transcript of a trial involving an Auschwitz commander.

There is something about this kind of a performance by a seasoned actor that I love. Somehow it captures the essence and craft of theater more than all the helicopters, falling chandeliers and other special effects intended to dazzle audiences on Broadway.

And for this hearing-compromised spectator, it was also a thrill to understand every single syllable uttered by the polished pros in this cast. It’s good news that the run of the play has been extended into June of this year.

And finally … about that alligator.

I do have hearing issues. Even when I wear hearing aids, consonant sounds in particular go blurry in my head … especially when certain mumbling ministers occupy the pulpit and elocution-challenged customer service reps pick up the telephone.

And when announcements blare on crowded subway cars.

We rode the subway often on this trip. We got a good price on a nice hotel room in the Bronx, but most of our activities were in Manhattan.

Whenever our train would arrive at one of New York City’s nearly 150 handicapped-accessible subway stations, an announcement told us and other patrons where the elevator was located on the platform.

What I heard, however, was, “The alligator is located at the rear of the platform.” Or, “The alligator is located at the center of the platform.”

The alligator gets around, I thought.

On our subway ride back to the Bronx from the play near NYU, I glanced at a fellow about our age who stood across the aisle from us. He smiled at me after the announcement. It was a smile of commiseration, as if he knew instantly what I was thinking, as if he had heard exactly what I had heard.

“I’ve been looking for that alligator for years,” he said with a glimmer in his eye.

“We haven’t found it either,” I said.

It’s easy to strike up quick friendships in New York.

We never did see the alligator, but we saw many other incredible things.

We saw gorgeous and long-overlooked works of art by Black Americans in a Metropolitan Museum show focusing on the Harlem Renaissance. The piece above, titled The Creation, is a 1935 oil by Aaron Douglas.

This one is called Blues, painted in 1929 by Archibald J. Motely, Jr.

What a joy to see the more than 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography and film from the 1920s to 1940s, the early decades of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South.

And what a joy to see the works displayed front and center in a place that has long been known primarily as a shrine to white European and American art.

Times have changed, indeed.

Food was part of our adventure.

On our third night in New York, we ate expertly prepared oysters at Matsu Sushi on the Upper East Side. Tonguç Yaman, our friend and one of my clients from my freelance writing days, chose the restaurant, his favorite sushi place in New York.

It quickly became ours, too.

Whenever we visit with Tonguç, I am grateful yet again for this writing knack of mine.

Especially in the later years of my career, it enabled me to get to know and work with people who are way smarter than I am. People like Tonguç, who was born in Turkey and now is a professor in the department of epidemiology at Columbia University. He’s also a bicyclist, a rower and a marathon runner. And one of the most enjoyable people you’d ever want to meet.

How I treasure the fact that, going on nearly 10 years now, no trip to New York is complete for us without seeing Tonguç.

The Little Island rises from the Hudson.

Also on our New York trip, we saw a futuristic-looking forest planted in the Hudson River alongside the Whitney Museum. It’s part of the Little Island project, the realization of a long-awaited city renewal plan for this part of Manhattan.

We’ve walked along New York’s High Line on previous visits, but this unique urban park was a total surprise to us.

Another surprise was this mural by Keith Haring.

It is located in what was once a bathroom at the LGBTQ Center in Greenwich Village.

The work celebrates the sexual liberation joy experienced by gay men after the Stonewall uprising … and before AIDS appeared on the scene.

If you’re curious, you can see the complete mural here.

But beware. It’s pretty graphic in Haring’s comically twisted way. We found it almost as startling as hearing about an alligator in the subway stations.

But a lot more fun.

We also experienced a much friendlier New York than we remembered from our last visit to the city, before the pandemic.

Indeed, several kind souls asked if we needed help … once when Ted and I stood on a street corner trying to figure out GPS routes on our cell phones, and another time in a subway station when we puzzled over whether to take an express or local train to The Cloisters.

We even met a woman who generously offered to take our photo at The Cloisters as we struggled to strike just the right selfie pose with tulips included … and fingers not … in one of the museum’s gardens.

It was such a wonderful trip, in fact, that although we’ve been home for only a week, I’m ready for another New York fix.

Maybe the recipe will be the same on future visits.

More stretching beyond the bounds of Broadway.

More searching for new sights uptown, downtown, in the Bronx and beyond.

I hope so.

We’ve got to find that alligator.