It was Wednesday, October 19, 1988. My first “working” day in New York.<\/p>\n
And I was going to have to figure out New York’s transit system now. <\/em>I had an interview at a little talk station in White Plains. I got up at 6AM and caught the subway up to Grand Central Station. I caught a train, next, and watched as the city, eventually, morphed into the leafy ‘burbs of Westchester County; Scarsdale and points north.<\/p>\n The interview?<\/p>\n I should have stayed in Manhattan. The program director – a tired-looking fellow in his late thirties – spent about an hour telling me that White Plains was too expensive for anyone to live in on the salary he was willing and able to pay.<\/p>\n My actual suitability for the job – mid-day talk show host – never really came up.<\/p>\n Two hours later, I was on the train back into Manhattan.<\/p>\n I got back to 12th and Broadway around three in the afternoon, and spent about two hours browsing around the Strand. I picked up a copy of Warsaw Diaries <\/em>by Kasimierz Brandys – the story of the Solidarnosc<\/em> uprising and the attendant crackdown in 1981 as told by someone who witnessed the whole thing from a table in front of a coffee shop where he and his graduate students debated the whole thing in the context of post-existential literature. I bought it because…well, it seemed like a Greenwich Village-y thing to do.<\/p>\n ———–<\/p>\n My cousins and I left the baby at the apartment (with the nanny, natch) and walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner. The sights and sounds of the Village (and the smells – whole blocks reeked of burned hemp) put a spring in my step. I figured I could learn to love this.<\/p>\n Tomorrow – the busiest day of the bunch. Two <\/em>interviews. I laid out a clean shirt and got ready.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Wednesday, October 19, 1988. My first “working” day in New York. And I was going to have to figure out New York’s transit system now. I had an interview at a little talk station in White Plains. I got up at 6AM and caught the subway up to Grand Central Station. I caught […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}