520. Nine Weird Things New Yorkers Are Doing

                    BROWDERBOOKS

Amazon's "Look inside" feature for my nonfiction title New Yorkers: A Feisty People shows the front cover large enough that you can take in all the details.  If you don't know the book, take a look.  It is the third title in my #Wild New York series of nonfiction works about New York and NewYorkers, past and present.

NINE  WEIRD  THINGS  NEW  YORKERS         ARE  DOING

So what are New Yorkers doing, as the pandemic hangs on?  Lots of things, many of them weird.

• An elderly Orthodox Jew in Chelsea, a onetime professional clown, playwright, and sidewalk juggler and mime, is making custom leather masks for actors  (Harlequin and the commedia dell’arte) and occasional wrestlers and rappers;
• Shakespeare in the Park is doing Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor set on 116th Street today, with a cast representing African immigrants from Ghana, Sierre Leon, Senegal, and Nigeria;
• The Metropolitan Museum’s first indigenous curator is reshaping the American Wing by including Native American art, past and present;
• At age 72, a woman born in India and fearful of drowning in deep water is learning to swim;
• New Yorkers are flocking to tattoo artists to get tattoos that commemorate the pandemic, which other New Yorkers want to forget;
• New Yorkers looking for rare spices are going to Kalustyan's, a specialty food shop on Lexington Avenue, to buy fresh turmeric from Fiji, holy basil from Ethiopia, black peppercorns from Ecuador, white peppercorns from Cameroon, and organic ghee from Turkey -- proof that, in New York, you can find anything, if you know where to look;
• People desperate for sleep, or just bored and curious, are putting lettuce leaves in boiling water and then drinking the result, a new sleep-inducing fad that doctors and sleep experts insist is unsubstantiated;
• Invited guests took buses provided by the African-American designer host to a historic mansion in Irvington, N.Y., where steady rain made him postpone the couture show, whereupon he invited the guests — African-American and Latino models, career coaches, prison activists, agents, and rappers — to booze and feast anyway and dance like crazy;
• A couple got married, having met years ago and anticipated a one night-stand that turned into a four-day hookup, followed by ten years of togetherness a belated engagement, and now, finally, a wedding.

New Yorkers are a busy crowd.  No pandemic can stop them.

Coming soon:  It's whoopee time in New York!  There's a wild party going on, and everyone is invited.

©  2021  Clifford Browder