This Week's Metro Diary. Which's Your Fave?

Dear Diary:

Time: 10:30 p.m., weeknight.

Place: No. 1 uptown train, from Sheridan Square.

Date: Twenty years ago today (more or less).

A large group of people enter the No. 1, heading home from the theater. The subway car is packed as if it were a rush-hour morning. Moving along, then suddenly the train halts. The lights go out, pitch black. The engine stops. We all smell smoke.

The seconds tick on. Anxiety heightens. Although probably only a minute passes, of course it feels like 10. The smoke is smelling more intense. Everyone is close to panic.

My dear friend Steve (long since departed this world and never forgotten) leans over to me and, in his best stage whisper, declares, “We really should have had dessert!”

The car erupts in laughter. With that, the lights come on. The engine restarts, and on we go, as though it had all been a dream. Can one’s attitude change one’s reality?

-Linda Maryanov



Dear Diary:

Arriving at work in Midtown a few months ago just before 9 a.m., I glimpsed a man walking uptown on Fifth Avenue. He was neatly dressed in a business suit, walking briskly, carrying a large cup from Starbucks in his left hand. Nothing special about this.

But under his right arm? A huge live, clucking rooster. No one gave him a second look. Only in New York. (Perhaps that was the breakfast special of the day?)
-Beth G. Kneller



Dear Diary:

For those of us old enough to remember the opening scene from “A Thousand Clowns” with Jason Robards: Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in front of the library. Mr. Robards’s character tells his 12-year-old nephew that he is about to see a horrible, horrible thing: people going to work.

I grew up in New York and now live in California. Every time I come back to the city, I stay in a Midtown hotel and get up at 6:30 or 7 and go stand on the same corner. Almost 50 years later it is still the same: New Yorkers marching off to work by the thousands. We all have our private memories of New York and what it means to each of us. This scene is my New York.
-Charles Slesinger


Dear Diary:

I was in line waiting to buy a BART ticket (for our Bay Area subway system in California) when this lady started to push herself ahead of me. I promptly told her, “Don’t pull a New York on me.”

She replied that she was from New York.

I quickly replied that my wife is from New York also.

The lady says, “Tell her I said hi.”

New Yorkers, go figure.

-Charles H. Greene Jr.



Dear Diary:

Overheard outside a florist’s shop on Third Avenue near 71st Street in Manhattan:

Potential customer, older man: “Got any doyt?”

Clerk: “What’s doyt?”

P.C.: “Ya know ... ya dig it ... outa da oyt.”

-Conrad Eberstein