The Players

It's week three and I still have a sorry lack of friends. Which led me to search for something, anything to do on a Friday night. After perusing the web sites for under 21 nightlife (damn this age - in Hell we're all 20) and finding little to nothing, I, in a last kick of enthusiasm, picked an event from the NYU calendar to attend. It had a vague title - Storytelling at the Provincetown Playhouse: For Love... And the Provincetown. But it had storytelling in it, and I had acquired an appreciation of spoken tales from Governor's School, where Ad, a teacher of unclear sexual orientation (a topic of much discusion amongst the students), had a talent for telling amazing stories about the Civil War and bears.

Anyway, I figured it would be a better way to spend my evening than playing neopets again. And if I didn't get into a club later, I would have at least done something tonight. And who knows? Maybe there would be someone there who would be my friend.

There was no one there to be my friend. Although it was put on by NYU, this storytelling was being performed for a strictly over-40 crowd, with the exception of two kids who played Gameboy Advance for the entire show. So I sat alone, and hoped that this would be more amusing than that time my grandparents took me to see a silent movie about space.

It was. It was fantastic. It was one woman who told stories both made up and real about the very area, the very theatre we were in. She told us about revolutionaries that included Marcel Duchamp climbing to the top of the Washington Square Memorial and declaring Greenwich Village an independent nation. She told us about intellectuals and writers who lived here in the twenties, now mostly remembered by tourists who read the plaques on the older buildings. She read us their poems and she described how they all interacted, and she reminded me of why I came to New York.

This was the New York I dreamed of, where the people who will change the world meet and create their world-changing creations. Where everything is questioned, where everything is dramatic and real and the occurances on one small street can be talked about for hundreds of years to come. It's always been a secret dream of mine to be one of those intellectual writers, to voice thoughts that will echo through distance and time.

I swallowed my timidity - a trait that has been terminal to my social interactions here - and approached the woman (Regina Ress, or so it said on the flier) who was shaking hands and embracing all her friends who had come. When the crowd had subsided, I moved forward and put out my hand. She grasped it so firmly, it was as if within that shake she was holding my entire body.

"I just wanted to say thank you. I might be the only person in this line who doesn't know you, but it really was lovely."

"Thank you." She said with sincerity. "Who are you?"

"Me? I'm nobody."

Ms. Ress was appalled by my apparently ludicrous statement. "You're not nobody!" She exclaimed. "Are you an NYU student? Then you're not nobody! You must be somebody!" This seemed so genuinely meant that I almost burst into tears right in front of the woman with the flaming red hair and the vocal tone echoing back from the first half of the twentieth century.

She was very happy someone had paid attention to the postings on the NYU website and thanked me dearly for coming. As I left my hands were shaking, not just from the warm touch (a thing I miss very much when I have no friends or family around) but because this woman, who knew the stories of the bohemians that changed the world from right here in Greenwich Village, said that I was somebody. Of course it was a throwaway statement. Of course she most likely meant that everyone out there is somebody and nobody is "nobody," as I had claimed to be. But it still made me feel important, like somehow I too could write things that would be remembered and live a life that someday a girl a hundred years from now could dream of. An important, somebody life. As I walked past the boys and girls in their all black going-out outfits with their cigarrettes and laughter, silently sliding through them like a shadow or a ghost, I looked at the lights on the Washington Square memorial, so bright and so warm against the stone cold white. And I paused - just for a moment - with the arch in my eyes - and I was glad.