Collectables

They say that the word ‘now’ is a bomb that’s thrown through your window, whose wick you can watch fizz away into nothing. When I think about time, I think about how things come back into fashion; like leotards and high-waisted shorts, skinny jeans and Converse.

Time is a dressmaker whose speciality is alterations.

Time is who I was and who I am and all the things I know now.

Time is the new and the old and the difference in between.

The only thing that stops time is a photo. A moment caught on camera, captured for the world to see; what we were wearing, what we were doing, who we were friends with…

*

Manhattan, NYC. 2001.

 Jason’s grandmother had sadly passed away recently and she’d left him her house in Dallas. He was more interested in the vintage camera he’d found in the attic than anything else in the house. The moment he saw it, he knew he had to have it. There would have been so much history wrapped up in it, he just wanted to be a part of it. It was a camera that, he had decided, was probably from the early sixties. It had a dent in the side, but it was still worth the best part of $500, and that was today. Jason couldn’t imagine how much it would have cost in the sixties; let alone how much it must have meant to someone.

It was still early in the morning but the sun was already bright in the Manhattan sky. People in suits rushed up and down town to get where they had to be and no one noticed that the sky was unusually clear for early September.

Smartly dressed in his grey pinstripe suit, Jason left his apartment on 87^th and Lexington just like he did every morning. When every morning was the same, he could cruise through on autopilot. This morning was slightly different as he had to pop into Duane Reade on the corner to pick up some photos he’d had developed. His grandmother’s camera had at least fifty undeveloped pictures on it.

As he walked to the bus stop, packet of photos in hand, he thought about his family and mused about his life just as you do when you’re walking somewhere you know so well. His wife left for work the same as he did every morning, but she went the opposite way; she worked on the West Side.

His family life was hectic, but that faded from his head as he got to the bus stop.

Settling on the bus, Jason sat in the same seat he did every day. Second in from the right; it was the idyllic spot to watch his favourite city go by and to psyche himself up for the day ahead. He tucked his newspaper under his arm, and flipped open the lip on the packet of photos; he expected family photos, old family pictures of kids playing in the sun or maybe a school graduation.

 It was this fascination with the past that enthralled the man so much into parting with his money for some photos someone else would have just let rot in an attic.

*

Dallas, TX. 1963.

Bonnie and her friends practically ran to the corner of the street, squeezing through the masses of people and hubbub on the street, all trying to get to the same place.
One girl put her hands on Bonnie’s shoulders “This is the most exciting thing to happen all year!” A group of young girls had been given the day off work to see the President and his wife on their visit to Dallas; they lined the sidewalk all wanting the best view.

Outside the Texas Book Depository in Dealey Plaza the streets were a mass of people all moving at once. A whole range; young women just like the secretaries from the office down the street; old men who wanted to say they’d seen President Kennedy in the flesh before they died, little children who looked on in awe and laughed at the hordes of people hunting down their spot on the grass bank. Everyone wanted their glimpse of the Kennedy’s; he was a celebrity and she a fashion icon.

“Do you remember that little pink dress she wore in Vienna?” The youngest of the girls asked Bonnie. Ensuing a moment of clamouring fashion talk, all the girls talking over one another, smoothing down each other’s clothes and plucking at loose threads.

Bonnie swapped the camera in her hands back and forward; it was heavy and her hands were slightly clammy. She didn’t understand why she felt so nervous. Winding the handle that allowed the camera to capture moving images; Bonnie made sure she had enough recording time to see the President’s motorcade.

Having a camera at her age was a complete rarity. Bonnie knew this, she knew she didn’t earn very much herself and she knew people around her were looking, wondering how she had the means to a camera such as this one. Truth be told, it was a gift from her parents for her twenty first birthday this year. They both saved all year so she could have it and it meant so much to her. And now look, here she was. Standing on the edge of history; holding history, watching history. She was going to be a part of history.

“Oh gosh, I can hear them coming!”

The streets grew quiet as the sound of a car pulled along an adjoining street. The cheers made the tension in Dealey Plaza that much more exciting. The people of Texas collectively held their breath.

“Bonnie, get ready! He’s coming. He’s really coming.” Bonnie’s friend tittered in her ear as she smiled.  Bonnie took a shaky breath in and held her camera up to her face as the President’s motorcade got closer.

 ‘Maybe he’ll be wearing a grey suit’ Bonnie thought to herself, her excited eyes craning to see. ‘He always looks good in grey. And Jackie, maybe pink again? No. White, she’ll be wearing white I bet.’

The President’s motorcade seated the President in the back along with his wife Jackie accompanied by Governor Connelly and his wife in the front. As it slowly entered Dealey Plaza the cheering erupted; the shouting and the sight of handsome President Kennedy made Bonnie smile unawares. Her chest swelled with a rise of patriotism in her heart, there was no positive emotion that she wasn’t feeling; happiness and the excitement of standing at the edge of history.

President Kennedy was smiling and waving and as he pulled past Bonnie was adamant he looked right at her and smiled. She struggled to keep her camera up and steady from all the jostling around her.

Jackie Kennedy, America’s first lady, as beautiful and poised as ever sat next to her husband. She waved delicately out to the crowd and giggled happily at their smiling joyful faces; she held the flowers she’d been given upon arrival in Dallas on her lap, from where Bonnie was stood they looked like red roses. Governor Connelly and his wife were equally as present, smiling just as the Kennedy’s were but something was different.

‘He is the Governor of Texas, but he’s nowhere near as handsome as Mr. President’ Bonnie thought as her eyes followed the car, along with her camera. ‘They’re just not as glamorous.’

 “Mr. President, we love you!” Sandra from the office yelled as the car approached. Bonnie laughed; everyone in the office knew Sandra was a big fan. Sandra’s eyes had glazed over with glee; she wanted to commit this memory to her brain for life. The day she saw President and First Lady Kennedy, in her very own town, down the street from her own little office job.

An unexpected sound ripped across the forecourt of the plaza, making every single head turn, every hair on the back of every neck prickle up.

 “What was that!?” The girls grabbed onto each other, their frantic eyes scanned the crowds around them. Bonnie kept her camera up, confused. She saw people grasping their children close and collapsing flat on the grass as if to avoid gun shots or an explosion.
“Did the motorcade blow a tyre?”

Another bang.

And then one more.

“Oh my Gosh, Kennedy’s been shot. They shot the President!” Someone in the crowd cried as people fled from the streets in hysteria, some already in floods of tears.  Bonnie looked up from the viewfinder on her camera to see the right portion of her beloved President’s head get blown away into nothing, across Jackie’s white suit.

“No…They’ve shot the President!”

Bonnie’s hands fell out of the air, her limbs suddenly jelly. The camera landed harshly on its side.

*

Leaning his shoulder against the side of the bus made Jason’s seat rumbled as he watched Manhattan fly by his window; the tourists, the New-Yorkers, the jay walkers. His unopened pocket of his freshly developed photos sat on the seat next to him. The bus was fairly empty, even as it crawled down town.

As he was about to open the photos and leaf through what he was sure to just be pictures of his grandmother’s youth when he noticed a little boy playing a few seats in front of him. He smiled, the child could have been no older than seven or eight and he sat with his mother reading aloud all the street signs that they passed on their route.

“East seventy second street…”

The vibration on the man’s shoulder was stronger than usual, he knew because he took this bus on this route so often, sometimes twice a day.

“East sixty fifth street…”

He felt it in his legs, and eventually it crept up and grew in his chest too.

“East sixtieth street…”

The rumble kept growing, quietly for now but definitely getting bigger, getting faster.

“East fifty seventh street…” The child went on.

“Mommy...Mommy!” The child tugged on his mother’s coat sleeve.

“Look Mommy, a plane!” he said, his skinny little arm pointed up.

Jason, in his the grey pinstripe suit, looked up again from his blackberry and craned his neck to glance out of the dirty bus window.
The little boy was right, it was a plane.

All the man could think was “My God…’

The man’s eyes were transfixed on the large moving object in the sky above them.
He strained his eyes to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
He raised his phone to the window and he took a picture.

‘...that plane is flying awfully low.”

*

Newtown, CT. 2012.

Show and tell was Izzie’s favourite part of her teaching week. Friday morning, in her elementary school, meant that Miss Izzie Smith got to hear all about her student’s favourite new toy or something they’d done with their families over the past weekend. It was first grade she was teaching, which meant all of her students were only six or seven but seeing their faces light up when they talked about their older brother’s new car or the new family dog made Miss Smith’s week. 

Currently, Oscar James was snivelling at the back of the classroom because it wasn’t his turn to take Chocolate, the class hamster, home with him this weekend. Megan Rowe was doing a wonderful show-and-tell presentation about a camera her Uncle Jason had given her when she and her family went to visit him in New York City, or as Megan referred to it “…the place where the all lights are always on and no one ever tells you to turn them off…”

Her Uncle Jason had become very well known in the last ten years or so because he’d bought a vintage camera online, the camera Meg was telling class 4E about now, and he’d found pictures from 1963 when Kennedy was shot stored in the film. He eventually commissioned the photos into an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and gave the camera to Megan, as long as she promised to let her Mommy and Daddy take very good care of it.

“…and Uncle Jason says that if I held it up to my face like this…and look through this tiny whole here…” Miss Smith listened intently to Megan’s story “…that I can see history from all of America…”  She was interested, but also delighted in the progress Megan had made since she’d been in this class. That was the trouble with being an elementary school teacher, especially with younger children, you get so attached when you watch them grow up and then when they move up into the next grade, you end up missing their funny little ways.

Class started at 7.30am, because the younger ones don’t have homeroom, but about 9.35am Miss Smith heard what she thought sounded like popcorn loudly popping come over the classroom intercom.

Megan heard it too and stopped talking momentarily to look up at her teacher.

“It’s okay Megan, you carry on…” Izzie smiled, nodding enthusiastically to the little blonde girl.

Smoothing her grey pencil skirt down, Izzie headed over to the door of her classroom, looking back at her students for a second who were still all watching Megan. Izzie opened the door and stepped out slightly, she noticed Miss House from the classroom opposite doing the same.

“Did you hear the…” Izzie’s casual comment to Miss House was cut off by a door slamming at the end of the corridor their class rooms were on.

A man stood at the door way about 100ft away from the women and looked at them for what felt like eternity, before slowly, sadistically raising his right arm until it was parallel to the shiny grey tiles under his feet.

In his arms he cradled what the women knew to be a gun and yet a second passed before they registered.

“Run!” Izzie screamed at Miss House across the corridor and they both slammed themselves back into their classrooms as Adam Lanza, the man with the rifle, ran towards them.

Doors closed but not locked, both women rallied their children who were beginning to panic.

“What’s wrong Miss Smith?”

“Why are you running, we’re not allowed to run?”

*

They say that the word ‘now’ is a bomb that’s thrown in through your window, whose wick you can watch fizz away into nothing.

It turns out that time can stop, if only for a moment.  

Clocks stop ticking, phones stop ringing and dogs stop barking.

These are the moments we remember for the rest of our lives.

Summer In NYC; 2010

The summer of 2010 I was halfway through my BTEC national diploma in Performing Arts and my French A Level when I moved transatlantic to stay in New York for a month and a half. I was in heaven.
I’d just come back from performing at a festival in Oostende in Belgium but nothing could have prepared me for the sticky summer city heat that I felt when I got off my plane at JFK – I’ve never known a city so humid. London is never that bad in the summer.

Thinking I’d be spending my summer in a normal city I had only packed jeans, t-shirts and the occasional summer dress. I should have known, NYC is not a normal city. The city that doesn’t sleep; the big apple.

I’m a city girl at heart and living in London for most of my life I’ve noticed – these cities have their personalities. London is the promiscuous Miss that’ll go straight out after work, dance and drink until the walls can’t hold her up, find someone to go home with and then appear back at work the next day in yesterday’s eyeliner and a dress that also looks vaguely similar. Manhattan is the socialite butterfly flitting from Fifth Avenue, to Central Park, to a bar to a house party in the village before rushing back up town as the sun rises to squeeze in breakfast with her family.

As well as the cities, the inhabitants certainly have some interesting character traits about them. John T Cahill for example, wore an expensive suit and handmade shoes. He was so uber friendly I had begun to wonder if I’d walked into a movie. He was a business man, and he asked if I as new to the city (clearly I had a sign on my back reading New York Virgin, or it could be the constant look on my face of amazement). I met him on one of my first days in Manhattan whilst I was walking around the 1.58 mile jogging track which surrounds the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, otherwise just known as the Central Park Reservoir. We only spoke for about ten minutes but before going on his own way, he gave me his card and said if I ever needed a tour of the city, he’d be delighted.  A part of me always thought he thought I was a little older than I was; me stood there, wide-eyed and reasonably innocent, having only just turned seventeen.  When I look back on it now there had to have been something a little unsavory about his character.

Crumbs Bakery on 93^rd street played host to my next meet cute with a New York random. His name now escapes me but he looked vaguely like Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye, Avenger’s Assembled.) He was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with TEXAS across his chest. Having grown accustomed to the perfect homemade lemonade, the idyllic mix of sweet and sour, that the Crumbs Bakery provided, Crumbs had become a regular pit stop for me in the sweaty heat.
So, killing some time chatting to Texas and his highly intellectual young son Achilles Alexander was fine by me. (I don’t remember Texas’ name, but Achilles Alexander is a name you tend not to forget ) We chatted about Manhattan, the topic of everyone’s conversation no matter if New York virgin like me or New York born and bred like Texas. Then  Achilles had finished his cookies and it was time for them to skateboard home.

I was staying in an apartment on 87^th and Lexington, on the fifth floor of an amazing building with a doorman. Having a doorman was an incredibly new experience for me. Someone to hold the door open for you, tell you about the weather, take in your take aways, hail you a cab, say hi to you every day and this particular doorman always made baby small talk with city dog; Brody. Brody was a small, hairy yet cuddly dog of undefined breed, who inhabited the apartment with me. Part of the deal of my staying there was that I walk Brody morning and night. Admittedly it was more midday and midnight, but either way, the dog got walked.

Along with Brody, the apartment was everything I needed and more. Two lounge areas separated by a partitioned wall, a single room, a perfectly adequate sized kitchen and a double master bedroom with an ensuite bathroom which was off limits to me. But not apparently to my cousin who occasionally frequented the apartment (his parents owned it). I thought he was Manhattan’s golden boy attending Hunter College and looking at prospective Universities this summer, but it turns out he actually likes to invite his friends over and sit in the ensuite bathtub with them, smoking weed with his stuck up, Upper East Side friends.
For an example of their uppity behaviour, my cousin Zachary and his friend Ian were paying, parting with actual dollars, to learn how to do a back flip; because it’s something so necessary to know in the Manhattan life style.  A professional back flip teacher was instructing them – for God’s sake. Come on, find an open space and teach yourself if your heart is so set on it.  They have the vast open space that is Central Park on their doorstep and yet they choose to trek all the way to Brooklyn to flip into a pile of foam blocks.

(NB; Smoking weed in a public place is an offence, it is not however in your own property or on The Great Lawn in Central Park. From what I’ve heard, the Great Lawn is similar to Speaker’s Corner – you can pretty much get away with anything.)

Zachary was only a year older than me so when it came time for him to leave the city for a weekend to visit Universities in Washington DC, I tagged along for the ride out of curiosity.  We stayed in a delightful middle of the range hotel called The Georgetown Suites (1111 30^th Street, NW) -  the hotel is located right in the centre of Georgetown which meant the rows of idyllic shops, on M Street, were not far away. I particularly enjoyed the whole store dedicated to Ben and Jerry’s (something I have never seen in the UK.) Staying in DC, however was the only time I’ve ever had anything stolen from me, the night we happened to visit Ben and Jerry’s after dinner at a local restaurant I realised my sunglasses had been stolen. So to all you New York safety sceptics, I felt safer in the heart of NYC than I did in DC.

We had bookings to visit George Washington University as well as American University and The University of Georgetown. I went to the Georgetown viewing but quickly realised, as beautifully architecturally  built historic G-Town was, I could find other things I was more interested in seeing than the inside of a classroom I’m never going to study in. Or should that be, seeing the inside of a classroom I could never afford to study in? $20,000 per year is not something I happened to have sat at home.

In one short afternoon in the sweltering DC summer, way hotter than Manhattan by the way, I walked to the Lincoln Memorial, all the way along the mall, up the pool of reflection to the WWII memorial, down to the obelisk and finally back up to the White House. I must have walked miles that day. I distinctly remember sitting on the lawn in front of the White House and thinking that this would be the closest I was ever going to be to Obama; I’m actually okay with that.

After Zachary was done in DC, we headed back to Manhattan. I was glad for the excursion, but I still felt I was missing out on things happening in the city. Before I went to DC, I’d been in New York for almost two weeks, in that time I’d managed to do most of the touristic sight-seeing that everyone expects you to do. In one afternoon, I did Wall Street, Staten Island, The Statue Of Liberty and I’d wandered around Grand Central a lot too.
My visit was ten years after the 9/11 attacks, and I did feel compelled to visit the memorial site at Ground Zero. A massive void marks the place where the towers once stood now surrounded by rows upon rows of memorials. FDNY- Never Forget. PDNY – Never Forget.  A bronze plaque runs along a building next to the site and it reads “Dedicated to those who fell, and those who carry on.” That saying and my time spent at Ground Zero stayed with me for the rest of my trip even though I was only eight  in 2001 when the news billowed with smoke and sirens and even after ‘d come back from DC to start living in NYC, instead of holidaying.

In one of my remaining weeks in NYC, I visited The East Village taking in the student meets bohemian feel.  I remember particularly enjoying lunch at The Life Cafe, reading The Village Voice. The Life Cafe is where Jonathan Larson chose to set his rock opera version of Puccini’s La Boheme; Rent. I had performed  in my theatre company’s version of Rent the October previous to my trip, so this lunch felt slightly like a pilgrimage to the place where bohemian life was all anyone ever needed.

Rounding off my trip, there was only one more NY tradition to indulge in; Broadway. I managed to convince a friend to come with me to see Burt Bacharach’s “Promises Promises” starring Kristin Chenoweth (Wicked, Pushing Daisies, Glee) and Sean Hayes (Jack in Will & Grace). With dancers with legs like the Rockettes and singers that sent shivers down my spine, it was a thoroughly engaging performance. My friend enjoyed it equally as much, because a few weeks after my arrival back in London, I received an email about how he’d taken his whole family back again.

When I look back on my time in New York now, three years down the line, I remember it all like it was last summer. Looking through the thousands of photos stirs the feelings of a battle between innocence and independence that I was riddled with at the time. I filled my spare time with visits to Barnes & Noble, I spent far too much money on Pinkberry, and I fell in love with the Starbucks’ drink only available in America, and so perfect on a humid day in the city; Passion Tea Lemonade.

If I could take certain people back with me, I would go tomorrow. The city changes just as fast as I do and I know I won’t be able to stay away from the bright lights of Manhattan forever. I miss sitting on the steps of the MET just watching the world go by, finally finding  Strawberry Fields in Central Park right next to The Dakota Building that John Lennon was shot at, finding the cutest little stationary shop in Grand Central, lunch in Union Square reading Teen Vogue and Seventeen magazines. Oh, and who could forget my little moments in Crumb’s Bakery on 93rd street?

One warning to anyone planning a day in Brooklyn, I would get the metro. Walking bridge is an initially a great idea but when you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be off the other side and you’ve been walking across for twenty minutes, you’ll regret that decision. I speak from experience.