Personal Yummy #37
Following my two o’clock ballroom dance lesson with my pro partner at Stepping Out Studios on 26th Street, I walk up Broadway to Herald Square and then get on the Q train at 34th Street. I am in one of the older, more roomy subway cars instead of the newer ones that usually run on this line. I’m not sure what the reason is, but, lately, more and more of these older cars have been appearing.
Fortunately, this subway car isn’t very crowded. So I sit down on one of the orangish-colored seats not too far from the end of the car, and then I get comfortable and take out the book that I am currently enjoying: Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress, by Debra Ginsberg. I had bought this book years and years ago whenever I had started working on my own book about waitressing, but I delayed reading it until just recently. Back then, I guess I thought that, if I read it while I was writing my book, it might influence my telling of what it meant to be a waitress.
Nonetheless, I am appreciating Ms. Ginsberg’s waitressing tales now, that’s for sure.
I open up the book and start reading where I left off, and I immediately feel perfectly at ease because I always look forward to reading novels on the subway. It is like a time-out that the universe grants me to devote to this love of mine.
However, before I am able to get too far—at this point, I have read only a few paragraphs—a young black man sitting in one of the two-seaters at the end of the car and to my right catches my interest. He stands up, turns around, and, with much intention, switches on the boom box that is resting beside his duffel bag in the seat beside him. What’s more, he turns the volume up high, as if he is in his bedroom and no one else is around.
Suddenly (and even though I knew it was coming), some rap music with a heavy bass—quite unfamiliar to me—makes itself known.
The young man proceeds to center himself in the small area that is between his seating section and mine—to his benefit, this older car does not have a metal pole running down the middle of this space, as most of the newer cars do—and he faces in my direction. But he doesn’t look at me—or at anyone, for that matter. Rather, his focus is on the subway doors, or, actually, through them, as if what lies beyond them is an audience full of spectators, and he is the one on stage…the absolute nexus of their world.
And then, just as natural as ever, he begins doing all kinds of hip-hop moves, trying out a multitude of different steps over and over again, starting and stopping, thinking, calculating, creating and inventing, inhibition absent, joy abounding.
He lets his cap roll all the way down the front of his body—over his bright red sweat suit with its distinct white stripes—until it gets to the pristine white athletic shoe on his left foot. He then kicks his cap up into the air and catches it, puts it back on his head full of dreadlocks that run about halfway down his cheeks, and starts all over again, this time allowing the cap to roll down the back of him and to the heel of his other foot. Next, he hunches over and throws his head forward and then back to match the heavy beat of the music, as the beads on his dreads snap in the air and clank together.
I’m not sure about anyone else, but I am enjoying this display of spontaneous creativity and abandon, as well as the bold music that is its inspiration.
Therefore, I look at the businessman sitting directly across from me, and he is totally absorbed in his cell phone. The young, sporty guy sitting to my left and facing me is bent forward and reading a thick, hardcover book. The dark-haired, dark-skinned young woman with long, fake lashes, who is sitting about halfway down the car, is listening to something on her headphones. And the blonde woman with the flashy hoop earrings, even farther down the car, is obviously lost in her thoughts.
In other words, if you’ll permit me to employ the use of an applicable idiom, no one is batting an eye.
So, you know…you just got to love New York—and New Yorkers.
And the subway…
The young choreographer and his loud music are free to thrive here, maybe more than anywhere else.
personalyummy.com 