"He knows immediately she is who he has been searching for. This is not a love story."

Maybe my limbs are made mostly for decoration.
You can’t really eat them, but I remember you trying.

If you grab my soft skin with your fist, it will feel funny.
Like you’ve been here before and uncomfortable.

Like you’d rather squish it between your teeth impatiently,
before spitting the soft parts back up to linger on the tongue like burnt sugar or guilt.

It was all an accident. We cut the right branch and the light grew dark and needy.

Think crucial hanging.

Think crayon orange.

There is one low, leaning heart-shaped globe left.

And dearest, can you tell, I am trying to love you less.

------------------

It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything hard.
So I brought Johnnie Walker Red along with some resentment.

Which was not helped by the sight of little nameless things
pierced with toothpicks on the tables, or by talk that promised to be nothing if not small.

But I’d consented to come. I knew what part of the house
the animals would be sequestered, whose company I loved.

What else can I say, except that old retainer of slights and wrongs,
that bad boy I hadn’t quite outgrown— he brought himself along too.

I was out to cultivate a mood. My hosts greeted me, but did not ask about my soul.
Which was when I was invited by Johnnie Walker Red to find the right kind of glass, and pour.

I toasted the air. I said hello to the wall, then walked past a group of women dressed to be seen.

Before long I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up the party, scarf the hors d’oeuvres.
But you animals said, No, don’t do that. Calm down.

After a while they open the door and let you out, they pet your head.
And everything you might have held against him is gone.

"We’re good friends again," I lied.
"Stay," he lied.

"I Felt Like a Wild Thing, Ready To Mess Up The Party. I Toasted the Wall."

New York may never sleep, but I'm pretty sure it's taking a disco nap. A few signs the city's little siesta has gone on long enough:

April, 2009: R.I.B.
At this point lamenting the absence of Beatrice was a popular ice breaker when bumping into another regular at whatever replacement bar we vigilantly sat in, pretending to enjoy. We'd shout over lousy loud playlists, "Oh, it's definitely re-opening." Or, "Yeah, we'll go on Tuesday - it's in Page Six and stuff."

But those mythical Tuesdays kept passing, and our collective grief went from Denial to Depression. The Free Bea parties seemed like such a sweet kind of reassurance, a subtle winking promise that they'd be back soon. If we wore our Free Bea t-shirts often enough, we'd be just like those plucky prohibition fighters and Stonewall schismatics. Revolution would be ours.

And now? I highly recommend the double Jameson at Avenue. It's only $56, and it did help me move on from Depression to one of the more fun stages of grief: Bargaining!

Spring 2009: New York Nightlife Better than Ever, Insist Journalists
We read in the Post, the only reliable source for anything hip, trendy, edgy or sexxxy, that debauchery after dark lives on. A two-page spread on private, exclusive "underground" bars introduces us to places like Greenhouse, where people known as "high-rollers" are involved in something called "bottle service." And a club known as 1Oak apparently serves "alcoholic beverages" and features "sexy cocktail waitresses." Alas, these hot spots are tougher to get into than Harvard.

Luckily, New York Magazine came to the rescue with a list of the top five best new bars in town. An East Village lounge with jello shots, the latest Unlisted Phone Number bar where, if you're awesome enough to get it, you'll find posters of Aerosmith and even a smoking patio. Also, some place in Flatbush and a dungeon in Queens that sounds suspiciously like a Medieval Nights restaurant. But with quesadillas.

July 2009: The Day the Disco Cried
I agreed to accompany my boyfriend to his friend's birthday party at Bungalow 8. Vague memories of sharing a joint with 50 Cent on the balcony, watching Mary-Kate Olsen's friends turn a bedsheet into a trampoline for her to jump on wearing nothing but a Hanes t-shirt, losing at least 5 credit cards and 3 winter coats floated through my head. Four years later, I walked inside high on memories, and quickly felt those come-down shakes after seeing what's become of the bunghole. But then I spotted Him. Disco hugged me hard. I asked him what he was still doing there, and he said, "I'm the last one standing." Then the gentle dreadlocked giant actually teared up, like a Wild Thing crying "Oh please don't go, we'll eat you up! We love you so!" The fairy tale was over. No one knows where the wild things are.

August 2009: Requiem For That Dream
A few recent quotes from friends:

"Going out is boring the hell out of me."

"I miss Bea. Even the bathroom line."

"I've reached the point where I just don't WANT to be 'on the list.'"

"I've been at this party before. I've made out with that girl before. I've fallen asleep in that bar before. I've...done all of this before."

"When I went to a party upstate and wasn't shoved, pushed, or had wine spilled on my shoes ONCE the whole night, I wondered if I was actually at a party at all."

September 2009: Fashion Weak
Little Shop of Horrors composer Alan Menken called New York "Skid Row." Bob Dylan called it "Desolation Row." The Stones? "Heartbreaker."

An old friend I'd always considered the most optimistic, glass-half-full guy in my life (from California naturally), someone whose eyes I never thought could stop sparkling, told me how fashion week was going:

"A bit like hell. Quasi-suicidal actually."

My personal solution?

Follow in my parents' footsteps once they tired of ol' New York back in 1979. Their paradise island started to disintegrate post-Studio 54, eerily similar to today's post-Beatrice collapse. So they left their Bank Street townhouses and Upper East Side penthouses for the sticks. Got hitched in their backyard, my mother in a white linen maternity wedding dress. Had me. Planted vegetables. Shoved snow. Rode horses, watched me in the local Nutcracker, hosted lawn parties, and insisted they'd left New York for all the right reasons.

I may just do that. And, just like my parents, finally miss this messy fantasy camp so much that I inevitably move back within ten years. The city may be sleeping now, but as soon as it wakes up, I'll personally destroy its snooze button.

"Easy-Peasy, Quickly Over, Fun And Games"

A friend recently showed me this photograph of Mick Jagger and Bianca on their wedding day in 1971. I'm an art world dunce when it comes to recognizing iconic images like this one (despite sharing genes with the most talented contemporary artist living today). But as soon as I saw this Patrick Lichfield classic, I couldn't stop staring at it. The phallic champagne bottle in between Mick's scrawny legs, the possibility that he might actually be singing (and singing what?), one hand decorated with a cigarette, the other with a ring. Bianca's asymmetrical cleavage, her veil still on, the way St. Tropez sunlight somehow manages to add color to a black and white photo.

But most importantly, Bianca's smile. In Lichfield's UK Times obituary, this image is described as "a glimpse...capturing a moment of rock ‘n roll frivolity." And Joanna Lumley (an icon herself for we cultish Ab Fab fans on Team Patsy) described Lichfield as "a light going on, or a champagne cork popping." Bianca the newlywed was not posing. She isn't looking at the camera and, after seeing other photos of her the same night, something about this smile is purely frivolous, the way a face lights up when champagne corks pop.

I have a bad habit, inherited from my father, of relating everyone else's stories and epic anecdotes "back to me," as Dad would put it. I opened my MFPhotos folder and tried to figure out if I'd ever been part of a moment like Mick and Bianca's, if anyone had ever flashed their lens just when I'd briefly stumbled into just the right room, with just the right company, feeling just...right.

A few moments in my life that come close:

December 2006: We wore what we felt like wearing, ignoring freezing weather. We still smoked in bars without fear. One of us wore bright red lipstick, one wore endless black leather bracelets, and one wore blue silk. That's when a Polaroid camera appeared.

October 2008: The first night I met my then-boyfriend, I asked for a pair of shorts (my dress, which he described as a "cupcake", was uncomfortable). He pulled out a pair of corduroys, then a pair of scissors, and tore them apart. I was comfortable. So much so, that I began running around his dining room table just as he changed his digital camera's tint to a shade of blue I'd only seen before after staring for a dangerously long time at the sun.

Spring 1988: I grew up as an only child in a big house with lots of closets. Only children learn pretty quickly how to entertain themselves. I pulled a garden chair out of one closet, a ladies-who-lunch hat from another, and perched myself atop our leather couch next to (who else?) my dad. Just as I was trying to figure out how to hug my father gracefully without breaking a window or our lab's ear, my mother appeared with a camera.

June 2008: Bea, RIP.

October 2006: Didn't we almost have it all? My dream job, my at-the-time perfect boyfriend, a comped week-long trip through the South, and a hotel room with a desk like this one.

March 2009: The worst best tattoo given to me by the worst best person I know.

January 2008: I spent my last night in Israel on a Tel-Aviv beach. Drunk on ice water and joy, I'd lost my tights and shoes hours ago. The first and last time I've ever smiled so hard my face nearly morphed into diadem fireworks.

"Everybody's Youth Is A Dream."

For the last three years, I've hosted a party at my parents' apartment when they go on their annual vacation. As an embarrassingly obsessive linguistic freak, I've always enjoyed the word "party." Like the words "entertainment," "family," or "sex," they instantly catch your attention, encompassing infinite meanings (Entertainment: a Danielle Steel novel v. a Lenny Bruce act; Family: a cancer-stricken father v. the moment "I Do" means the love of your life is now family; Sex: Juliette Lewis dancing in her jail cell at the end of Natural Born Killers v. Juliette Lewis dancing with Mickey in the bar in the opening scene.)

All of us hear words like these and instinctively, engage in a mental Rorschach test. I hear "entertainment" and a Broadway stage appears in my head. I hear "family" and see David Hockney's eerie, enormous "Parade" my parents have hung on each of our houses' most prominent wall. I hear "sex" and the last time I had it is reenacted in my mind. Then there is that funny little word "party." Without fail, I imagine Gatsby's lawn in the wrong Egg.

Each of the three parties I've thrown here at Casa Friedman have varied so wildly, looked so different, and sent me to bed dreaming of fantasies vastly unrelated to those dreamed of the year before. Gatsby obviously threw parties far more often than me. But he and I had one party habit in common: we both end these evenings staring at the sky, drink in hand, wearing an ensemble colored only in unstained shades of black and white, alone. Alone, of course, despite knowing the love-of-life-at-that-time was sleeping on one side of a gigantic and comfortable bed inside, waiting for us to join them in satiated, anxiety-free sleep on the other side.

Last week...

...there were bookshelf-decorated rooms filled with people either brilliant or beautiful, or both.

There were women smoking cigarettes...












...on rooftop floors.

And there were moments captured on film like these, moments when we followed Fitzgerald's advice:

"His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."

Or living out a line from Gatsby about the meaningless of knowing who your party guests are, and how little knowing them means...

"...The air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names."

Finally, there is the reason why both he and I would end the night looking at stars alone:

"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness, and felt it in others too...wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."

However many jovial smiles you see lunging towards you, handsome acquaintances turning into summer flings, champagne glasses smashed, or profound talks with distant friends you finally discover are somewhat interesting...every party ends. Weeks later, it doesn't matter whether you (maybe?) imagined the whole thing like so many Lit professors theorize Nick Carroway imagined Gatsby himself, or if the evening was just as lively as you remember. Until someone dives into a pool with no intention of climbing out, a party can be as enchanting or dull as possible: it, as the Jewish saying goes, "too, shall pass."

So what's the point? To improve upon the negatively designated spin assigned to post-millenial "parties" in Manhattan, I'll borrow an admittedly cliché quote from Hemingway, a man I imagine could have convinced even Gatsby that glasses are never half-full: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Maybe I dreamed the whole thing, maybe I did wind up alone on my roof contemplating the night's many meanings, maybe the night existed and everyone's lives went on without affect. I like to think, prettily so, that the city's lights shined slightly brighter that night than on other nights. Guests smiled without that familiar need to force it.

I looked up at those non-existent city stars from my rooftop, and decided not to dive off.


Sometimes, it's prettier to know so.

"There Is A Near-Hysterical New Beat In The Air"

This afternoon, I was looking for a story collection called Nelson Algren's Book of Lonesome Monsters: 13 Masterpieces of Black Humor. My dad suggested I look at our anthology bookcase. (Yes, our bookcases are full, genre-designated, and replace what are known in other people's apartments as "walls.") I grew up walking past the bookcase dedicated solely to my dad's books and plays every day, meaning a) I only recently learned God does not live in a steambath off-broadway, and b) I wound up asking my father, Daddy, what's a "dick?" at age 5. But there was just one mysterious book on those BJF shelves that I never once inquired about: Black Humor, a collection of essays by Joe Heller, Nabokov, Edward Albee, and Thomas Pynchon (among others) he edited in 1965. Recently, whenever I'm working on my book, the title keeps haunting me. Judging by these excerpts from my dad's introduction, I now know why:

"There is a new mutative style of behavior afoot, one that can only be dealt with by a new, one-foot-in-the-asylum style of fiction."

"If you are doing anything as high-minded as examining society, the very best way to go about it is by examining first its throwaways, the ones who can't or won't keep in step...Perhaps 'bad' behavior of a certain kind is better than 'good' behavior."

"The novel is the proper place to open every door, to ask the final questions, turn over the last rock, to take a preposterous world by the throat and say okay, be preposterous, but also make damned sure you explain yourself."

"If you are alive today, and stick your head out of doors now and then, you know that there is a nervousness, a tempo, a near-hysterical new beat in the air, a punishing isolation and loneliness of a strange, frenzied new kind."

"The Black Humorist is a kind of literary Paul Revere, a fellow who unfreezes his mind, if only for a moment, and says, 'For Christ's sake, what in hell is going on here?'"

"There is a fading line between fantasy and reality, a very fading line, a goddamned, almost invisible line."

BJF wrote this in the 60s–over forty years ago. But somehow this "near-hysterical beat in the air," the need to confront a preposterous world, and rising prominence of "society's throwaways" is eerily relevant today. Despite lacing his definition of the then-emerging genre with such ominous, esoteric themes, he ultimately noted that "the effective social critics are working through humor." And then I had a kicker for my book's elevator pitch: a black humor renaissance.

"There is an awful lot of questioning these days, some of it despairing, bleary-eyed, bedazzled, some of it young, vigorous, outrageous. And a group of novelists, very often working obliquely, coming at you from somewhere in left field, throwing you some laughs to get you to lower your guard [will] follow every labyrinthian corridor to its source."
~Dad, 1965

Somewhat related is the fact that, while eye-ing our anthologies, I spotted a tiny red paperback called The Rascal's Guide: Naughty Women and How to Tame Them, with my father's name barefaced in bold-face on the spine. This odd collection was his very first Editor credit, published in 1959, making him just four years older than me at the time. Among the story titles:

"What to Do When the Lady Is a Tease"
"How to Be Unfaithful"
"Southern Girls–Lousy Lovers?"
"Secrets of a New York Free-Loader"
"The Grande Olde Sport of Girl-Tickling"
"How to Lush It Up and Influence People"
"Making It on Madison Avenue"
"A Tip for Rogues: The Wildest Party in the World"
"How to Be a Damned Fool at a Convention"

Then I remembered the time my dad disliked one ex-boyfriend because he used the word "awesome" twice over dinner. When he disliked another because he had never "shown much interest" in my dad's books. Another because he "just seemed too calm."

The point? My elevator pitch may fail. My first manuscript may wind up in several recycling bins, stained several times by several manicured D-girls' red polish. Ideally, Knopf will publish it, commission a glossy Chip Kidd-designed cover, and feature it prominently in every Barnes & Noble across the country. But someone like my father was first published in the form of a 35¢ cringe-inducing cad's guide, earning the most laughs not from a reader, but fifty years later when his daughter recites its chapter titles back to him. But then? He went ahead and canonized Black Humor, instantly earning himself a spot in every index of every book dedicated to the genre written after his own.

I'd love the Kidd/Knopf treatment, for Sam Tanenhaus to deem me a post-millenial McInerney detached from D words, a movie option sale pre-publication from Weinstein...the works. But knowing I could pull a Rascal on the first at-bat, then "obliquely" hit a Black Humor on the next swing? These last forty pages I've bent my brainstorm-heavy head over suddenly feel less like labor, and more like that last rock my dad insisted should be turned over without fear.

My Watch Is Exactly Two Days Slow.

I like to hyperbolize springtime, even before it arrives. But all that embellished anticipation never disappoints. The trees turn pink, we suddenly can't find our jackets, and the deep end of this chaotic city is now an unrestricted area. I recently decided not to wade on over, but dive right in. To start making money again, to take risks in love, to demolish so many follies I'd created mid-winter. I'm even writing my book again, and this time I know why I'm writing it in the first place. More on all these adventures and misadventures soon, but in the meantime, a nostalgic quote-plus-photo post.

I may or may not be appearing in a groundbreaking documentary, shot in the very best of mumblecore style. Above is a still from my five-hour interview.

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it–don't cheat with it."
~Hemingway

"It's not men who limit women. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don't have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it."
~Tom Robbins

"Where's your will to be weird?"
~Jim Morrison

"The Edge...there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
~Hunter S. Thompson

This is a photo of my mother around my age. I recently interviewed her on camera and asked her what was going on in her life, in her head, in this photo, at the time. She kept trying to explain it all to me, but in the end, told me it didn't matter. She was now here, and all that was now there.

"I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't."

~F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Linguistic Fuego"

A Manhattan Fairy Tale

Scene I: "Once Upon A Whirl"

Characters: BEV REY (pr. BEV-ray), blonde female, athletic and flirty, tan cleavage; MOLL FRIE (pr. MAWL-free), brunette female, lean and jaded, long legs.

Set: NEW YORK CITY, 2009.
Dir. Notes: TEXT EXCERPTED FROM BLACKBERRY MESSENGER; Until Scene II ("The Ballad of Bevs 'n Molls"), characters are synonymous (GIRL ONE and GIRL TWO).

GIRL ONE:

I hope I don't fall out my window.

GIRL TWO:
Why would you fall out of your window?

GIRL ONE:
If you compel me to write the letters LOL on my Blackberry, you'll need to cab it to Gansevoort and scoop me up quickly before they turn me into a Tory Burch store.

GIRL TWO:
You've officially just forced me to L O far too L for my Blackberry to forgive. I've just fallen right out my window to the gutters of Chelsea. Please retrieve me before I become a pair of American Apparel tightie-bluesies about to make my debut as part of "Matt's-A-Dame-On (West-25th St.)"'s 11pm show.

GIRL ONE:
I am the saddest girl to ever hold a martini.

GIRL TWO:
Poor pretty young thing, you. No black Amex, no Bea, a belly full of Thai food. Those kids in Darfur don't KNOW from misery.

GIRL ONE:

He wants to come pick me up in the city and have another go-round. I told him my chin was still erupting.

GIRL TWO:
I think you need to plug that tub. Mine is a verklempt gent and sweet as Suge Knight.

GIRL ONE:

My chin, though. I've tried excess moisturizing, scrubs, acidic sprays...

GIRL TWO:
It still looks like someone cast it as the lead prop in Meth Face Returns.

GIRL ONE:
At least it makes the marquee.

GIRL TWO:
My vodka is yum. I just toothpasted my face. How sweet-sixteeny bop. I set my alarm for midnight to alert myself that this Proactiv Info-Star Understudy should put down the substances and sleep like beauty.

GIRL ONE:

Please don't be your incredible whirl of a girl self right now. I've got a cheek full of red sitting on a crisp white bedspread.

GIRL TWO:

Fate Says Holla Back Bevs: my wit balloon just popped. Coincidentally, just as my vodka headache commenced.

GIRL ONE:

I just started choking. I miss cute things, like dads and blankets. I want Nyquil.

GIRL TWO:

We live in New York. Nyquil never sleeps, dear.

GIRL ONE:

You're kind of on linguistic fuego this eve.

GIRL TWO:
I'm kind of in love with you.

Scene II: "The Ballad of Bevs 'n Molls"

Set: Two corporate offices, one uptown and one downtown. Both BEV REY and MOLL FRIE sit near large windows in private key-required cubes as springtime-esque weather provides the only source of cinematic color to otherwise monochromatic atmospheres.
Dir. Notes: TEXT EXCERPTED FROM FACEBOOK WALLS.

MOLL FRIE:
At approximately 2:02pm, debaucherous sneaker whore Bev Rey was overheard screaming, “I belong on a tour bus four months out of the year!” Somewhere high above Manhattan, Moll Frie, an eccentrically-monikered muppet, jotted down a note: “By the time I finish writing this, I will have fallen asleep in my risotto.”

BEV REY:
Moll awoke to find a furry creature dragging her across the newly appointed Archbishop's annexed section of Fifth Avenue, leading her towards a black van with the letters "D.E.A." scrawled on its SVU-But-No-Thank-You-esque apparatus in heartbreakingly hacked hues of J. Crew Ecru. For no apparent reason, the muppet looked up at the badge-appointed mutt with a sly smile, winked, and finally cooed, "I wasn't aware there was a Dior.Escada.Armani trunk show today."

[Pause as planet proceeds spinning.]

What are you actually doing?

MOLL FRIE:
I’m exchanging pleasantries with the guard dog in our lobby. You?

BEV REY:
I’m wrapping band-aids shaped like cupcakes around my fingers. I need a work flask.

MOLL FRIE:
"Excuse me, where do you keep your work flasks?"
"Ah, Aisle 7, alongside the other inordinate items designed for alcoholics."

BEV REY:
If I were a dog, I would play dead. Not fetch nor play.

MOLL FRIE:
Before leaving the office, Bev tapped her boss on the nose and transformed him into a happy meal, then asked the receptionist if she had any new messages. “The scrapes on your fingers are imaginary,” she replied. Bev considered this, and then wondered aloud "whosoeth knows whether anyone has ever had sex in the city of Portland before?” Moll gazed through her never-ending set of eyelashes at the mutt, once an orphaned APSCA pup now playing the role of Narconsense Wonder-Dog, and asked him why he looked so sad. “My foot. It sleeps,” said the furball, and Moll kindly corrected his carnal syntax.

Scene III: "Fireworks"

Set: Manhattan's post-millenial, Recessionist zeitgeist, as depicted with Depression-reminiscent, yellowing newspaper headlines. Script entirely VO over B-roll.

BEV REY:
NY Post's "Page Six" Column, Apr. 16th, 2009:
Friends and downtown debacles Moll Frie and Bev Rey found themselves shackled together for sidestepping The Law circa the "wee hours" of their collectively vintage and nostalgic vision of New York City when it never slept. Rey, the duo's doyenne, looked at her muppet and said, "Hi, babe. Did they find you in aisle 7?" Frie, the frisky ephemera of minds lost and laughing, nodded in the affirmative, then spoke of risotto, bestial dialogue, and the importance of always employing the vernacular. Before Frie could Rey about her night, lighter fluid and Metrocards fell from her pockets.
"Fireworks," Rey giggled.

MOLL FRIE:
Shizzle yo, gimme summadat Bucayne and a Metrocard? Bitch be happy as a mollfrey in an oprey, jigga wut. Check this fo' you wreck...

[Changes dialect from young, urban male to conservative, white lawkeeper.]

New York County Residents Be Advised:
NYPD Relinquish Myriad Policepeople On Quest To Capture And Straitjacket One Miss Bev Rey (Known Alias: "Debaucherous Sneaker Whore"), And Miss Moll Frie (Known Alias: "Eccentrically-Monikered Muppet") Across All Five Boros. BR Last Seen Procreating In Portland, Oregon; MF Last Seen Skipping Down Horatio With K-9 Unit. All Squadronauts On Fluorescent Alert. Over, Outsies.

"You Make Every Day Feel Like Kindergarten."

I took a Facebook Quiz today. It was called, "Which Crazy Bitch Are You?"

I'd taken two already. First, Facebook told me that Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" was the song that illustrated my life. Then Facebook told me that I should be living in Seattle. Anyone who really knows me (all three of you?) knows that any song with the chorus, "I'm still standing, yeah yeah yeah" has nothing to do with me. Twelve years of ballet did little to perfect my posture, I spend most of my time in repose, and the rare moments I do stand up, I'm usually akimbo. I don't think I've ever said "yeah" three times in a row, ever. "No, no, no," maybe.

As for Seattle, aside from spending four years at Southampton Intermediate in a permanent sartorial state of Kurt Cobain-esque cargo pants and flannel button-downs, searching for someone to be my Heart-Shaped Box and convincing myself that maybe I'm Dumb, the dreary epicenter of grunge never fully enticed me.

Third time? The charm. As it turns out:

Molly completed the quiz 'Which Crazy Bitch Are You?' with the result Mallory Knox.

"Sweet when you want to be but tough as nails when you need to be. You are disgusted by humanity and are not afraid to make them pay. You want revenge. You want infamy. Even if it means getting your hands dirty. You do have a sweet side and a fondness for unruly, angry, psycho badboy prince charming types. You would do anything for true love."

So let's call a truce, Facebook. Go ahead and clog my home page with all the mind-numbing status updates from "friends" telling me how "way-sted" they are, which "honey pot" my ex-boyfriend's index finger is currently "fingerbanging," and what exactly some girl I haven't seen in 10 years is wearing at 6am ("a t-shirt and jeans!!*!"). Now that you've outed my Mallory esprit de corps, I forgive you.

"Meet Me At The Playground. Let's See How Far We Can Run." ~Sia

Last night I found myself walking up Fifth Avenue with an old friend. I wasn't wearing tights, my hair was in a ponytail, and I spent most of the walk smiling. We were walking in that part of the 60s where getting inside Central Park means climbing over very tall rusty gates. The last time I'd spent a springtime evening in Central Park, I wound up thrusting my body against one of the Met's glass walls, barefoot, arms outstretched, in an effort to "hug the museum." But that was an April night. And I'd ridden there on a motorcycle.

New York nights change in April. Part of it means bare legs, messy ponytails, and suddenly deciding that climbing a 10-foot rusty gate with gothically sharp tips isn't such a bad idea. But most of it has to do with that "kind of magic" Freddie Mercury and other folks like Jonathan Richman and Shakespeare and Vonnegut tried putting into words.

Richman sang,

"Say what you want, but I feel my heart beating. Cause I love springtime in New York. Springtime is wild, New York is exciting."

Vonnegut informed us,

"To whom it may concern. It is springtime. It is late afternoon."

Shakespeare wrote,

"The April winds are magical, and thrill our tuneful frames. The garden-walks are passional, to bachelors and dames."

Even T.S. Eliot insisted April is the "cruelest month," but had to admit,

It "breeds lilacs" and "mixes memory with desire."

All I know is this:

1) My favorite New Yorker covers always seem to come out in April.
2) I've fallen in love three times, and every time I fell, it was springtime.
3) Those impossibly pink flowers that suddenly show up on every Manhattan street? They blossom on the same day every year: April 26th. It's my father's birthday.

"Some Pretty, Bright and Bubbly Terrible Scene." ~Neutral Milk Hotel

I've just spent what felt like the coldest winter playing a far less glamorous, but still eerily similar, type of Edie alongside a far more talented, and eerily more captivating, type of Andy. Consider these bits of dialogue from the so-bad-it-was-good "Factory Girl":

Edie: To me, New York was Jackson Pollock sipping vodka and dripping paint onto a raw canvas.

Edie: And what would I have to do in one of your movies?
Andy: Just be yourself.
Edie: Well, which me?

Andy: I wonder if people are going to remember us?
Edie: What, when we're dead?
Andy: Yeah.
Edie: Well I think people will talk about how you changed the world.
Andy: I wonder what they'll say about you... in your obituary. I like that word.
Edie: Nothing nice, I don't think.
Andy: No no, come on. They'd say, "Edith Minturn Sedgwick: beautiful artist and actress...
Edie: ...and all around loon.
Andy: ...Remembered for setting the world on fire. Made friends with eeeeverybody, and anybody...
Edie: ...creating chaos and uproar wherever she went. Divorced as many times as she married, she leaves only good wishes behind. That's nice, isn't it?

I am no Edie. I'm still here. Among our infinite differences, I'm pretty sure the reason we took opposite exit routes from the kind of purgatory only an artist whose ego overwhelms his art can place you in, has to do with family. Edie notoriously spoke of her parents as "horrifying," and despite how obvious her deterioration became, her elevator-inventing grandfather may have thrown cash her way, but buckets of money can't cure Stockholm syndrome. My dad can.

I will never again dismiss a single token of my father's advice, including those most recently given and ignored:

"Do not marry a writer."

"Be charming, but not too charming."

"No man should ever keep you waiting. By the phone, in a restaurant, or anywhere at all."

"Love means loving being able to love them with wrinkles." *

"You usually know the first time you see him whether or not he likes the same Broadway songs as you. Different productions is one thing; it's the songs you'll see when he smiles."

"Only boring people get bored."

"Men are not good or bad. They are either good to you, or bad to you."

"Be wary of wactors [waiter/actors]."

"If you hear the line, 'I'd like to get to know you as a person,' he might as well be asking if you're a Capricorn. Anyone you want to get to know as a person will not ask you that." *

"Try not to make promises." *

"So what?"

My mother had her appendix taken out a few years ago. My father and I left whatever it was we were doing to be there when she woke up in the East 30s, dizzy from painkillers. The doctor had given us only one strict instruction: we were not allowed to make her laugh. As soon as we walked into her sad little corner of the ER, she burst out laughing. We did too. My father said:

"I will listen to absolutely everything a doctor tells me to do. But I will not stop this woman from laughing."

* From a BJF book or story.