tavie.com

I'm reading the Sunday Times Magazine, having exhausted the crossword to the best of my abilities (rat *$(&#% bastard this week) and the theme of the magazine this week is "rebuilding New York". One of the features consists of various prominent New Yorkers-- writers, poets, choristers, anchorwomen-- describing their favourite things about New York, their favourite parts of the city or what they consider the essence of the city.

These are some of my favourites, © The New York Times:

Hal Sirowitz, poet laureate of Queens

Samuel Parsons planted New York City's oldest weeping birch in Queens. It was made into a landmark, and an iron fence was put around it. If one so much as touched the fence, a woman at the historical house next door would run out and order that person to leave. Once I was practicing Zen meditation there, and a squirrel jumped on my lap and took a bite out of the cupcake I was saving as a reward for deep concentration. In 1997, there was a celebration for the tree's birthday. Shortly after, the tree was found to be diseased. They cut off so many branches that it died. Luckily, before dying it gave birth to some saplings. They were not as big as the original, but they did cover up the stump, which looked like an elephant's foot.

Amy Sedaris, actor

If I decide I need a last-minute stethoscope or a skin-disorder book, I can go to the old Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue. They sell medical supplies up on the very top floor. Not a lot of people know about that. And if it's the middle of the night and I decide I want a tooth or a taxidermied weasel, I know where to go: Wandering Dragon, on East 10th Street. I went there at 2 in the morning once with my older brother, David, and he bought a brain, and I bought a stomach. It's a really creepy place, and it smells bad. They have a two-headed calf and old whooping-cough posters, and they always play rip-roaring 20's music.

Tina Fey, television writer and actor

Every Saturday before I go to work at ''Saturday Night Live,'' I go to Bonjour Nails above McDonald's on Sixth Avenue. I know it's a good salon because it has a poster of a beautiful Asian gal with very long nails holding a violin. I am told to ''pick color.'' I always choose No. 123, ''Delicacy,'' a sheer pink that is not to be confused with No. 68, ''It's Delicate,'' which is a sheer pink. The first time you get a manicure, you're very aware that you're holding hands with a stranger, but after a few hundred times, you just feel like a New York lady. My manicurist is a smiley teenager who massages my hands while the radio plays, ''If I could turn back time, if I could find a way. . . .'' She looks up. ''Oh. This singer is . . . Chair?'' ''Cher, yeah.'' She listens for a minute. ''Man or woman?'' ''Cher? She's a woman.'' ''Hmm. The voice is so low.'' ''She has a low voice, yeah.'' She wipes my hands with a Kleenex. ''But Cher body is beautiful.'' We laugh in agreement. ''Yeah, she's got a good body.'' So visit Bonjour Nails. For $7.00 plus tip you get a manicure, a hand massage and the chance to discuss in an open forum whether Cher is a transvestite.

Mark Morris, choreographer

From my window I have a fabulous view of the skyscraper that a child I know calls the Entire State Building. Each evening, beginning at dusk, tiny lights twinkle near the top. After a long time, I finally deduced that they are camera flashes from the observation deck. I don't know much about photography, but I do often wonder how all those pictures turn out.

Paul Auster, writer

Riding the subway at a busy time of day -- morning rush hour, evening rush hour -- and having the good luck to find a seat. Counting the newspapers not written in English, scanning the titles of books and watching people read (the mystery of it, the impossibility of entering another person's mind), listening in on conversations, sneaking a look at the baseball scores over someone's shoulder. The thin men with their briefcases, the voluminous women with their Bibles and devotional pamphlets, the high-school kids with their 40-pound textbooks. The variety of skin tones and features, the singularity of each person's nose, each person's chin, the infinite shufflings of the human deck. The panhandlers with their out-of-tune songs and tales of woe, the fractious harangues of born-again proselytizers, the deaf politely placing sign-language alphabet cards in your lap, the silent men who scuttle through the car selling umbrellas, tablecloths and cheap windup toys. The lurches, the sudden losses of balance, the impact of strangers crashing into one another. The delicate, altogether civilized art of minding one's own business. And then, never for any apparent reason, the lights go out, the fans stop whirring and everyone sits in silence, waiting for the train to start moving again. Never a word from anyone. Rarely even a sigh. My fellow New Yorkers sit in the dark, waiting with the patience of angels.

John Cameron Mitchell, actor

For an entire year, I performed in ''Hedwig and the Angry Inch'' at a theater in the ballroom of the Hotel Riverview, a beautifully decrepit semiflophouse on the Hudson River patronized by drug addicts and European backpackers. In its 94-year history, the ballroom has been a thousand venues -- bars, theaters, rock clubs, cruising spots. The age-slanted steps of the Riverview lead up to a lobby entrance guarded by a vending machine (Trojans next to the Snickers) that partially covers the bronze plaque honoring the surviving Titanic crew, who took shelter there in the hotel's early years. I'd walk in every day and wave to the sweet-natured Jamaican widow-owner behind the bulletproof glass. Antoine, the elevator operator, would usually be moving a mattress or a corpse, so I'd have to walk six floors. It was not unusual for me to bump into a down-on-her-luck tranny on my way up. I was often the first person in the dressing room, an octagonal loft in the Rapunzel-esque cupola that crowns the building and offers -- offered -- a view of both the twin towers and the Statue of Liberty. I'd usually arrive at sunset, the room filled with shafts of gold light. I was suddenly in Chartres.
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They should have asked me mine. Okay, so I'm not a prominent New Yorker, but I love this town. I could have talked about the exquisite mint tea at the Hungarian Pastry shop across the street from St. John the Divine, which is crowded always with Columbia students and peacock-fanciers; about the view at sunset from the roof garden at the Met; about the view of Manhattan, Queens, Roosevelt Island, and all the river in between from the airborne Roosevelt Island tram at sunrise when everything is still haze and hardening yellow light, and one can see both the sun and the moon in the same scope of vision; about the traffic cop at 59th and second, directing cars onto and off of the Queensboro Bridge as she dances to the music inside her head and waves her white gloves in time to her personal beat. I could say plenty. They should ask me.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:43 AM | shower me with attention