July 30, 2012 First Person Letter from India: Rajiv and the Potassium Parmanganate By Amie Barrodale The hotel was five stars but down-at-the-heels. It was the beginning of the off-season, so there were not many guests, and there were not going to be many guests for three months. For twenty dollars, we had arranged an upgrade to the best suite. It probably could have been done for less. The suite had a lot of switches on the walls. The following morning, when our breakfast came, someone from the kitchen called and said the waiter was outside because of our DO NOT DISTURB sign. We let him in. It was seven a.m., and we had a long program that day. We did not come back to the hotel until two, and only then to get our passports from the safe—they were required for admission to a place I wanted to go. We were waiting for the down elevator when Rajiv approached us. A member of the housekeeping staff, he was young and handsome, if a little short. His skin emitted light. He approached quickly, withdrawing a key from his vest, saying, “Are you in room 427?” Read More
July 23, 2012 First Person Letter from India: The Best Restaurant in the World By Amie Barrodale My friend edits a travel magazine. She lets me review hotels. This means that I can stay at nice hotels free in return for a short review. (The magazine doesn’t pay either; it’s done “on trade.”) I can write four or five hotel reviews a year. Whenever I suggest more, my friend (who is a close friend of more than ten years) goes silent. I recently arranged to stay at the Hotel in Delhi for two nights on trade. Rooms there start at six hundred dollars, and (uncharacteristically) they included everything—food, minibar, spa, airport pick-up and drop-off—in the trade. I mean it was all, to use their very polite and reassuring word, complimentary. Alcohol would have cost, they did say, but I am not a person who drinks anymore. I recently lost my privileges. The thing about a free hotel stay is that you pay in time, in tours, and in the unspoken requirement that you ask questions, feign amazement, and jot notes about wall hangings, historic meetings, and persons who have sat in so-and-so chair. (“How do you spell that name? So wonderful. So he really sat here? May I sit?”) Read More
July 5, 2012 First Person On Uncle Vanya: Part Three By Clancy Martin But the reason I was telling this story was because I was reminded of that night in St. Petersburg when I saw Annie Baker’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya. Like Vanya and Astrov, I am middle-aged, a drunk, often despondent—perhaps I am having a midlife crisis—and yes, I am an adulterer. (Vanya and Astrov are only would-be adulterers.) At the time I was trying to pick up this Russian waitress—sitting drunk in the snow-covered park, watching a bear dance at the end of a short rope—I was already an adulterer. Two years before, I had left my first wife for my assistant, who worked in my jewelry store. I drank my way into that affair, and I would drink my way through the divorce. But the sad fact was I did not get to sleep with the Russian waitress. This is what actually happened. The man with the bear would not leave me alone. Read More
July 3, 2012 First Person On Uncle Vanya: Part Two By Clancy Martin But how I got to thinking about my drunken love affair, years ago in Saint Petersburg, is Sam Gold’s new production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, playing now at the Soho Rep. It’s ninety-nine-cent Sunday, and the line of sweaty New Yorkers edging for shade outside the eighty-seat theater is long. They are bored and tired. It’s a muggy ninety degrees. “We’re never going to get in,” I hear one complain to another; later, outside the bathroom, where they sell vodka shots for three dollars a piece, I hear an excited woman say to her date: “I can’t believe we made it!” Most of the people who stood or sat in line (many since two P.M.) did not see the show. My own guests, who had driven in from the Bronx for the production, were turned away. “I’m the reviewer,” I tried to convince the guy at the door. “Man, we don’t get lines like this, even for the Sunday show. I’ll have a revolt. It wouldn’t be fair.” My friends went to see a movie, and my date and I went to our corner seats, right by the couch where the Professor would later be shot (and not). Read More
July 2, 2012 First Person On Uncle Vanya: Part 1 By Clancy Martin I was in Saint Petersburg, at a restaurant owned by a friend. It was in a strange building, a kind of old mansion. He took me back through several empty ballrooms—you could feel the springs beneath the wooden floors, installed many years ago, for dancing. We sat together in a small room. It had only two tables, and its windows were hung with heavy curtains. It was one of those private dining rooms that you read about in Russian novels, and my friend began to bring me different dishes. I recognized only the blini with black and red caviar; everything else was new to me. At this time, thirteen years ago, I was a wine drinker, but they did not have wine worth drinking in Saint Petersburg then, and he was pouring me glasses of vodka. Then several government officials arrived, important men, and he left me alone. I noticed my waitress was beautiful. She was taller than me, with high aristocratic cheekbones, pale skin, lips full of blood, big firm tits. Very much the woman you want, if you want a Russian beauty. The type that has since made exported Russian prostitutes famous throughout Europe, the Middle East, and (lately) even large cities in the U.S. I was determined to have sex with a Russian whom I did not have to pay. Read More
June 27, 2012 First Person House Proud By Katherine Lanpher Almost everyone loves my apartment, which is tucked away in a pocket of New York I think of as Dowager Brooklyn. Indie Brooklyn, with its musicians and lofts and filmmakers, gets all the press. But Dowager Brooklyn has what I want: a good butcher, a wine shop that delivers, and a hardware store. Still, even the hippest of my acquaintances walks through the wrought-iron hobbit door into my garden-level brownstone apartment and sighs with pleasure at the decorative marble fireplace, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the ivy-walled garden in the back. I think they half believe me when I joke that Edith Wharton drops by for tea. Inevitably, someone asks, “How did you get this place?’’ Sometimes, I tell them the truth: witchcraft. Read More