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A colleague's newborn son, now a few weeks old, made his first appearance at the office today. He's a beautiful child and was very quiet for most of his stay (he got a little fussy once or twice, but quieted down in short order).
I got to hold him for a little while and will now spend a brighter day as a result. Holding a baby is one of life's simplest, and yet richest, pleasures, and it's one of which I get to partake far too seldom.
I very much enjoy living in Manhattan, but one of my few complaints about my life is my limited interaction with kids. I'm hundreds of miles from my seven nieces and nephews (most of whom are no longer children) and from my one grand-nephew. I've no regrets about having moved to NYC more than two decades ago, but key among the sacrifices that accompanied that immigration was the time I would have gotten to spend with my siblings' offspring.
New York, and especially Manhattan, is Singlesville. Of course there are families -- many thousands of them -- but I feel confident in stating (though I have no actual data to back it up) that the ratio of single adults (of all ages) to married ones is higher in NYC than just about anywhere else in the United States, if not the world.
That's often a good thing. One can be, as I am, forty-something and single here and not thought an oddball or even considered an anomaly. It's nice to be in and among millions of others who have yet to stumble upon Ms. or Mr. Right. Almost no one in New York ever asks, "When are you going to settle down, anyway?"
But it'd be nice if there were more kids in the mix.
I hope you've enjoyed the few weeks that Brett & You has been up and running; I certainly have.
However, I have an announcement to make: Brett & You will soon be under new management.
I've been approached by a consortium of Amish bloggers who have made an offer to buy me out. Their intention is to change the name to Brett & Thou and to tweak the content ever so slightly so as to appeal to the Amish community (expect extensive coverage of the latest techniques in quilting and trends in the uses of natural fertilizers).
I trust that my loyal readers will give the new B&Y -- er, better make that B&T -- a look once the changeover is complete. And again, I thank you for your weeks of support.
I listened to the entire three hours of the first day of The O'Franken Factor, Al Franken's daily show on the new liberal radio network, Air America.
Overall, I'd have to give it a thumbs up. There were a few glitches and dead spots -- the pretaped sketches will have to improve -- but overall the show managed to be both entertaining and informative. I'll be interested to see how the other programs on the network stack up to what it clearly considered by AA brass to be the network's cornerstone.
Loyal B&Y reader Steven Sidwell kindly passed along a 1998 story that enlightened us regarding an interim chapter in the life of New York's Martha Washington Hotel.
In those days, the hotel had become primarily a single-room-occupancy establishment, peopled mostly by older women of limited means. At the time the story was written, the hotel had only just been opened to male residents (during its heyday, men were only allowed in the restaurant), and tenants at the time insisted it was merely a ruse intended to rid the hotel of its permanent residents, so that it could be renovated and reopened as a tourist hotel.
And it appears those former tenants were right -- the refurbished Martha Washington is today known as the Hotel Thirty Thirty. It is, from all reports, a modest, budget-priced hostelry that welcomes guests of both genders and all nationalities.
I suppose that's progress, but I imagine the Martha Washington of yore as resembling the theatrical boarding house in STAGE DOOR -- with brainy, wisecracking actresses like Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden, and Lucille Ball (and the occasional patrician interloper, like Katherine Hepburn) -- and I kind of wish it still existed in that incarnation.
When I was new to New York, I knew a woman (a friend from college) who resided at a women's residence. When we had plans together, I'd have to wait in the lobby of the building while she was summoned.
That policy was quite old school, even then; it's positively anachronistic now. And yet that women's residence, the Parkside Evangeline Residence, still exists (it's located at 18 Gramercy Park South and is operated, as it was in those days, by the Salvation Army).
That cheers me, somehow.
I hope the current management of the Hotel Thirty Thirty makes known the hotel's heritage; it'd be nice if those who stayed there knew of its previous life as a haven for female travelers.
Sometimes it's the little things.
The young woman behind the counter was chatting in Polish with her coworker as she deftly tossed my salad.
She threw in the bits of diced grilled chicken, the sunflower seeds, the sliced hardboiled egg, and the Caesar dressing, expertly manning the tongs in giving it all a light toss.
She then transferred it from the mixing bowl into a plastic serving bowl, snapped a lid onto it, and handed it to me.
"Dziękują bardzo," I said -- Polish for "Thank you very much."
The young woman fairly beamed. "You're very welcome," I'm pretty sure she said -- also in Polish.
Mind you, she speaks English. I've heard her. And my command of Polish is extremely limited -- "please" and "thank you," basically.
In my bartending days, I worked for a while with a Polish barback (sort of a busboy for the bar). He, too, spoke a reasonable amount of English, but I figured it'd be nice for him to hear his native tongue spoken (albeit poorly) every now and then, so I learned how to say "please" and "thank you" in Polish. He seemed to appreciate the effort.
As did my salad maker. No more than my pidgin Polish was needed. She got a little lift from the encounter, and I was the recipient of a lovely smile and two stamps instead of one on my "buy nine, get the tenth salad free" card.
Like I said, sometimes it's the little things.
Why does it so often happen that, within a day or two of the very first time one hears reference to a particular place, person, or thing, one again hears it mentioned?
I was watching Sin Takes a Holiday (1930) the other night, and in it, Basil Rathbone, a well-to-do wolf, was in pursuit of Constance Bennett, who'd recently undertaken a marriage of convenience (convenient for her husband, that is) and was now sailing to Paris.
Her character was a newly bloomed wallflower who knew little of the ways and wiles of the world.
Rathbone asked her where she was staying in Paris, and she said she didn't know. "Is there a Martha Washington hotel in Paris?" she asked.
Which led me to wonder, were there a number of hotels named after Martha Washington that catered to women traveling alone?
A Google search turned up references to such a hotel by that name in New York City, but I was left wondering whether Bennett's character was referring to that particular hotel (it's possible, if it was well enough known) or if, in those days, most cities of a certain size boasted a Martha Washington Hotel for female travelers.
Could a female traveler of that era, upon arriving in any given town, merely catch a taxi at the train station and tell the cabbie, "Martha Washington Hotel, please"?
Or could she only do that in New York?
A day or two later, I was watching another early thirties picture, Murder on the Blackboard (1934), which also had a reference to a Martha Washington Hotel.
A would-be Lothario (would be, that is, if he were twenty years younger, better looking, and not married) with an eye for young women is a suspect in a murder case. He's been picked up at his apartment with his bags packed (he insists it was only because he and his wife had had a fight) and brought to the police station.
The detective in charge of the investigation decides not to hold him (or a couple of other suspects he's brought in) for the moment, so Lothario asks the detective, "Does that mean that we may go?"
The detective responds, "You may. But don't let me catch you trying to register at the Martha Washington."
So, what to make of this? Both movies were set in New York (Bennett's character in the first film lived in NYC before she departed for Paris). So was Gotham's Martha Washington Hotel widely enough known to explain these references? Or were there other hostelries by that name in other towns?