thoughts while sprinting down four new york avenues
or how a field trip changed the trajectory of my life.
Last week, while I ran between an irish pub and a broadway theater to make a 7:00 pm show, I remembered the story of how I decided to move to new york.
The story starts in middle school, where I was bussed to a rich neighborhood in miami to attend their theater program. I'd just moved to the u.s. from peru and my english was not, let's say, shakespearean. My older sister had been accepted into that school for their art program, and she didn’t need to speak the language, her talent was undeniable. They had a policy not to separate siblings, so they threw me into the only program that had room for me.
I could not act. It was painful.
Valeria, we really need you to enunciate the words here. Really hit it on never DID. never DID run smooth.
The COURSE of love never did run SMOOTH.
No, you’re not…
My teacher graciously, and probably through years of experience, pivoted. She explained the importance of the stage manager, the show runner. Nothing could happen without them. I was a natural.
I made my mom take me to the dollar tree to buy legal pads. I cut out the pages of the scripts into neat rectangles and I glued them down to individual pages, leaving plenty of room for actors to scribble down stage directions and notes. I coordinated sets and lights. I got my own clipboard. I mediated drama between the one straight guy in our program and his legion of followers.
What do they say? To be seen.
In 8th-grade we took a field trip to new york. I remember that the price of the trip was $1200. I remember parents were ecstatic at the price, gracious to the PTO for their fundraising. And I remember knowing that we didn't have it, my dad 6 months dead, my mom scrambling. But, surprisingly, she never hesitated. She signed up for the installment plan. She let me know this was my birthday gift and christmas gift for the year.
But you have to go, she said, you have to see it.
My mom and dad had met there. A lifetime ago. She’d been a waitress at the airport, he’d been a taxi driver.
Julio, mucho gusto.
Gaby, igualmente.
Her push for me to go was more than just nostalgia though, at least to me. My mom always treated me like our time together was temporary, fleeting. She said that I was the one who would leave, go elsewhere, see the world. She's always been able to see that in us, my sister and I, that we need different things from her. My sister, an artist, needing to be held more closely, released more gently.
The plan for new york was to watch four plays, three on broadway and one off-broadway. We were to attend a class led by the cast of the lion king where they taught us stage fighting. I can still spot a choking stunt in movies every time I see it. We were given 20 dollars for our own breakfast every day and lunch and dinner were group activities at those diners where aspiring singers belted old hollywood tunes in between entrees.
My friend Emma's grandma, Mrs. Willis, chaperoned four of us. We shared a hotel room in midtown, and the lights filtered into the window facing my bed every night, flashing, eternal.
Mrs. Willis knew a thing or two about new york. In the mornings, when we were free to roam with our small group, she took us to get one dollar bagels and then to canal street to haggle for a fake handbags with our remaining cash. I'd been selling beaded lanyards at school to make some extra spending money. I bought my mom a “coach” wallet, while Mrs. Willis nodded in approval.
Good deal.
My mom used it for years, laughing every time she told the story of me haggling with a grown man.
I can do ten. Take it or leave it.
I knew immediately that this is where I would end up. The feeling bubbling up inside, becoming bigger and bigger by the minute, ballooning after every show: here. here or nowhere.
I was stifled by life in florida, I was never meant for it.
In peru, I could roam. I was allowed to explore.
The few fragments of memories I still held were becoming more distant by the day by the time I went to nyc for the first time. My dad, pushing vines aside, way ahead of us, leading us to waterfalls, and mountain ranges, and adventure.
This way vale.
How was I being led to believe that life was better in the suburbs?
The city seemed to be a path to something more wild.
I moved there ten years later. My adult life there was built outside of midtown. That one bar in bushwick, off puerto rico avenue. The apartment building in ridgewood. The place I liked to picnic in prospect park. The food court at new world mall in flushings. The street where I ran through fire hydrants one summer in washington heights, hand in hand with someone whose name I don’t even remember. These are the places that put meat on my bones, hardened them, dared me to get stronger or get spit out. I don’t live there anymore. I visit these haunts like a ghost.
I say hello. I keep moving.
Still, while running late through times square, just as spring was breaking, I remembered her for the first time in a long time. That young girl. So decisive, so sure about everything.
Where has she been?
Where did she go?