New York Minute #12: These Are the People in My Neighborhood
4 March, 2009
Some of my fondest childhood memories are from my annual summer visits to my grandparents’ house in Glen Ellyn, Illinois when I was seven, eight and nine. It was a magical time, and Glen Ellyn was a magical place.
First of all, there’s the name: Glen Ellyn. Poetic. Musical. Evocative. Two words that stood in stark and definite contrast to my own dully named hometown of Neenah, or, “Place of the Stinking Water,” as local legend had it. On top of that there were sidewalks, something completely unheard of in my gravel cul de sac on Peckham Road. There were live lobsters and Rainbow Trout in the tanks at Dominick’s grocery store; a next-door neighbor boy whose dad was an actual pilot for American Airlines; two kids on the other side who lived in a split-level ranch with a driveway that went down to the basement–– their dad parked his car in the house!––even a shadowy group of older neighborhood boys who fashioned homemade scooters from scrap lumber and roller skate wheels, and had made an actual go cart out of bicycle parts, a green-webbed folding lawn chair and a lawn mower engine. Clearly, anything could happen. It was a place of infinite promise.
But beyond even all of that there was color television.
Hundreds of miles to the north and seemingly worlds away the two sets that my family owned—the small one in the kitchen and the huge nineteen inch in the den—were still both black and white. Not that it really mattered because there were only three channels to choose from and there was never anything on. Nothing for kids, anyway. I can hardly believe it myself, but I don’t think TV, at that point, had even really entered my consciousness. It was an electrical appliance like the washing machine or the toaster. It didn’t do anything.
My grandparents, though, owned a finely crafted, truly spectacular, 25 inch Magnavox Color Console. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen and there was always something on: Garfield Goose and Clutch Cargo in the morning; Magilla Gorilla, Quick Draw McGraw, Bozo’s Circus and Speed Racer in the afternoon; and just before dinner, best of all, Sesame Street. (I know, it seems like a perennial morning favorite, but I swear that’s when it was on.)
Sesame Street first aired in November 1969 when I was a “pre-K” five year old, the fledgling show’s ideal demographic. “Educational TV” was an all but unknown concept at the time, so it aired in but a scant few major metropolitan areas, and most certainly not the hinterlands of Wisconsin’s Fox River Valley (where people still owned black-and-white TVs).
Suddenly, I was the Marco Polo of broadcast television.
I returned from the distant Chicago suburbs not only with fantastical tales of TVs with elegant, hand-crafted wood cabinets and multi-colored pictures, I described a certain alluring new show in which a six-foot-tall talking yellow bird meandered down the street singing the ABCs, a grumpy little green guy lived in a garbage can on the street, and two ambiguously gay roommates sang about––among other things––taking a bath with their rubber ducky.
No one could believe it.
It didn’t make any earthly sense.
The whole thing seemed preposterous.
A cartoon sheriff horse who carried a six shooter? Sure, everyone can wrap their head around that. But a gigantic, bipedal yellow bird masquerading as a kindergarten teacher? What was I trying to pull?
And therein lay much of its charm. No one else knew a thing about it. I was the only one who’d seen the show. My audience listened in rapt attention as I described the hapless guy with the bucket of paint whose apparent job it was to span the globe painting certain numbers and letters in random places only to accidentally perform the task on someone’s newly whitewashed fence or an unsuspecting bald guy’s head. Or the chef who would triumphantly announce, “Seven cherry pies,” stop for a moment to count them making sure there were seven indeed, only to then trip on the stairs, drop all but one, and plant his face in the last.
No sooner had I finished describing one small part of the show than they’d beg me to tell them another. They couldn’t get enough. It was a giant, imaginary puzzle they somehow had to fit together. Finally, when it was getting late and they’d begun to flag, I’d quietly start to sing:
Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood?
In your neighborhood?
In your neighborhood?
Say, who are the people in your neighborhood?
The people that you meet each day….
This, to me, was the radical concept of all. Who were the people in my neighborhood…? Other kids and their parents. Who were the people that I’d meet when I was walking down the street…? No one! We didn’t even have sidewalks!
Yet here was my good friend Bob singing to his purple, yellow, blue, pink and orange Muppet friends about interacting with the postman, the baker, the fireman, the shoemaker and all manner of exotic urban professional on a daily basis.
The baker…?
Bread came in plastic bags from Red Owl. No one actually baked it.
The shoemaker…?
Gimme a break. Obviously, shoes were squeezed out of the same industrial tube as the bread. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday it was bread; Thursday, Friday it was shoes.
The bus driver…?
I never saw a bus with a fare box in my life.
On and on it went. The dentist, the trash collector, the teacher, the doctor…. The cleaner who cleans and presses your clothes…? What on earth is Bob talking about?
But there on Sesame Street, that mythical, idyllic block where the kids sang and counted and spelled––where they played hopscotch and stickball in the street––the barber not only snipped and clipped and never rested until your haircut looked its best, he’d happily stop and sing with you about it, detailing the joy of his labor.
Oh, how I wanted to live there with Bob and Big Bird and Ernie & Burt and Oscar the Grouch and Mr. Hooper and everyone else. It was the most amazing, magical place I’d ever known––before or since. And that song was my siren song. I practically ached to hear it. I dreamt of living in that neighborhood, right there on Sesame Street.
Flash forward 30+ years (okay, almost 40). Now, I do live in New York where fantasy and reality often collide, perhaps most of all when it comes to the “people in my neighborhood,” the actual denizens of Manhattan who flit in and out of my daily life as I race back and forth to school or trudge home from the grocery store heavily laden with bags:
On Sixty-First there is a traffic cop
Whose sole joy is making drivers stop
When he stops a cab on green
The things you hear are quite obscene
He’s a person that I meet each day
Under the bridge there is a homeless guy
I see him every time that I walk by
He sleeps upon a cardboard box
Wearing fourteen pairs of socks
He’s a person that I meet each day
The Botox Lady has a face so tight
Her lips are huge, her teeth insanely white
She has issues, I must say
Shhh! She’s walking right this way
She’s a person that I meet each day
The Trail Mix-Muncher sees me every day
But he doesn’t have a word to say
He just stands there munching nuts
In a doorway strewn with butts
He’s a person that I meet each day
The Duane Reade cashier’s a major jerk
I don’t know why he even comes to work
He is spiteful, gruff and rude
I mean a really nasty dude
He’s a person that I meet each day
Oh, the transvestite joggers breasts are really huge
But in spite of that she’s still a dude
With her package busting out
Of her gender there’s no doubt
S/he’s a person that we meet each day*
[*Actually, Will and I only saw her once while coming home from hockey, but s/he was flying down the sidewalk at top speed with a woman’s leotard on, white wool gloves, a long pony tail, size 14 running shoes and a lot of equipment below the waistline. We both turned to each other and said, “Did you see that guy?”
Oh, these are the people in my neighborhood
In my neighborhood
In my neighborhood
Oh, in my neighborhood
Yes, these are the people in my neighborhood
They’re the people that I meet
When I’m walking down the street
They’re the people that I meet each day
It’s true: New York is chock full of characters, But if there are more weirdoes, creeps and jerks than anywhere else on earth, it’s only because there’s more of everyone than anywhere else on earth.
They say Times Square is the “crossroads of the world.”
They say if you stand by the clock in Central Station, eventually everyone will go by.
I say the people of the world—beautiful, crazy, wonderful, flawed, rude, asinine, gracious, elegant, insane, astonishingly normal, shabby, dumpy, frumpy, gorgeous, brilliant (and everything in between)—are the People of My Neighborhood.
