NYC

Snow Days! #blizzard2016 #NYCadventures

January 27, 2016 by admin

Growing up as I did in the Midwest, winter snow was a common occurrence. So was getting up at night to start my car in subzero weather so it would start the next day, or needing help on occasion to remove snow drifts from my front door so I could get out of my apartment.

In those days, I would gaze out my window at night and wonder, why am I here? I couldn’t wait to leave the Midwest.

When I got the chance to move to Houston, a city I’d never seen before, this small-town Midwestern girl headed out happily to embrace endless heat and summer sun.

Fast forward many years. My husband Henry and I started traveling more as his kids went off to college. We discovered a life outdoors, including hiking in Switzerland in the wintertime and taking a bike tour outside of Amsterdam. When we paid for our tour the guy said, “We don’t cancel because of weather. This is The Netherlands. We put on a coat.”

That advice stayed with me as we moved to the Pacific Northwest and learned not to let a little inclement weather keep us indoors.

This year, as some of you know, we’re spending the fall and winter in New York City. Through December we wondered if winter would come at all! It was 70 degrees on Christmas Day.

I needn’t have worried. Winter has come, and all at once! We were treated to 25 inches of snow that fell between Friday and Saturday nights.

We don’t have a car in Manhattan, so unlike many poor souls we don’t need to dig it out. We also don’t have to shovel. The apartment is toasty warm. So…we get to just enjoy the snow!

Here’s a video of some guys we saw “skiing” down the avenues as the car ban went into effect.

An intrepid -- and solo -- vendor at the Sunday farmers market. — An intrepid — and solo — vendor at the Sunday farmers market.

I’m sure if the entire winter were like this, we wouldn’t enjoy it. But for now, we’re having a great time!

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What She Knew is now available for pre-order! The ebook version is available February 29, and the paperback release date is March 29. Foreword Clarion Reviews calls is “a poignant, personal read.”

Lady Liberty #adventures #NYC

November 27, 2015 by admin

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! If you’re just joining me, Friday posts concern our extended NYC visit (five months).

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We’ve been coming to NYC regularly since 2006, but until now have not visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, which is part of the Statue of Liberty National Park system. This time around, we weren’t going to miss it!

If you plan to go to NYC and want to see Lady Liberty, make your plans well in advance — especially if you want to go up into the crown (there’s more scheduling flexibility if you just want to go to the pedestal). We ordered our tickets about 60 days ahead of time.

You’ll need to provide photo I.D. and go through two airport-style security lines to get to see her.

As the ferry took us over to Liberty Island, I couldn’t help but think of my great-grandfather, who arrived in 1896 at the ripe old age of 20 and would have seen the Statue of Liberty while she was just a youngster, having herself arrived from France in 1886. What a sight, both for him and for me!

I recommend visiting the museum first, because if you go into the statue as we did, you’ll have to surrender your audioguide and get another one later.

You can reach the pedestal via wide, easy stairs, and the views of the city from there are incredible. We went up into the crown, but the path up there is a narrow, spiral staircase (one stair for going up, the other for going down). I had to stop on one of the landings because my claustrophobia kicked in.

Frankly, the crown isn’t that big of a deal. The windows looking out are tiny, and we spent all of about five minutes up there. Plus, if you go up in the summer, it’s stifling hot.

Turns out that product placement and merchandising aren’t recent innovations. Both were used to raise funds to build and transport the statue!

As we moved on to Ellis Island, I learned that it served as the main immigration portal for a relatively short time — 1892 to 1954. Most of my ancestors had spent generations in America, so the number of my ancestors who passed through Ellis Island is fairly small.

Also, the building my great-grandfather would have seen upon his arrival burned to the ground in 1897, so my view upon the ferry’s approach is very different from what his would have been.

For a small fee, you can research your family’s arrival to Ellis Island, but this information is also available online for free.

Though I was excited about seeing both the Statue and Ellis Island, I was ill-prepared for how emotional it would be for me. Millions came, many after long and arduous journeys on crowded ships with poor conditions. They came with little or no money, some with no knowledge of English, and they made a life here.

Nadine Galinsky Feldman is the author of The Foreign Language of Friends and the upcoming What She Knew, available March 2016. If you enjoy this blog, please consider purchasing a book or signing up for the newsletter to learn about upcoming promotions and giveaways.

New City, New Friends #newyork #adventures

November 20, 2015 by admin

After bellyaching the other day about the downside of the Internet and social media, I thought I’d write about the plus side of it today.

Over the years, I’ve “met” many authors and bloggers online, and I consider several of them my friends. When I have the opportunity to meet one in person, I will take it if at all possible.

This week I met Carol of Buttercup Counts Her Blessings. Carol initiated a get-together, and I’m so glad she did! She’s warm, funny, and intelligent…of course you know that if you read her blog, but it’s always fun to meet the person behind the blog. If you’re not reading her blog, you’re missing out!

We stood near the skating rink at Rockefeller Center for a while, watching the skaters as we got to know each other better. Later we got coffee and talked some more, and she generously shared some money-saving tips for plays and other cultural events.

I’m a shy person, and sometimes it takes me a while to warm up to someone. I had no such trouble with Carol…our conversation was relaxed and comfortable, as though I had known her for a long time.

Thanks, Carol, for your hospitality and generous spirit! It’s always great to make new friends. For that reason, I am on balance grateful for the Internet.

Next week I’m going to write about Gilbert, Rhimes, and Strayed: The Badass Trinity. Stay tuned! This will be a fun post.

In Search of Story #newyorkadventure #theater

November 6, 2015 by admin

A few days ago we were sitting outside at Cafe Orlin, enjoying our weekly “date lunch.” Sitting next to us were two young men talking business. Their voices threatened to drown out our quiet conversation.

As a writer, though, my ears perked up during a brief exchange that sounded like a faint, uncertain gay proposition. “Oooh, I thought. Material.”

About that time, a bicyclist had a confrontation with a car. He seemed more shaken up than injured, though his bike didn’t fare so well. Someone noticed he had dropped his cell phone in the street during the melee, and the cafe customers mustered their voices in unison to tell him.

Stories, stories, stories everywhere. In my daily East Village adventures, they jump out at me from street corners, drop down from the sky, swirl among the fallen autumn leaves. Some are funny, some are sad, all are interesting, and my creative well is filling more and more each day.

We’re always looking for good stories, and that includes those found in the theater. Having visited many times in the last several years since our daughter moved here, we have enjoyed many productions. Over time, though, I’ve grown restless with Broadway, which is forced for economic reasons to play it safe. There are always the shows that poke fun at the Broadway beast, self-conscious musicals that, like Kardashian mirror selfies, get tiresome after the first thousand or so.

Because we’re spending five months in NYC, we are looking for off-Broadway productions, good stories, works in development, the hidden gems of a city with boundless creative energy.

Our first show did not disappoint. Barbeque is a dysfunctional family drama with a big twist that’s revealed just before intermission. It begins with parallel stories of a black family and a white family having barbeques in the park. The barbeques are a subterfuge, though, with the real intention to stage interventions for a drug-addicted sister. The rest of the family members are ill-qualified to conduct the interventions, patterning them from a television show.

At first, I struggled to accept the concept of intervention as fodder for comedy. The story comes across, at first, as more sad than anything, and not funny at all. However, when the cast reveals its twist, things get interesting, and the second half amps up the volume. Our laughter is sometimes painful and often self-conscious…but we laugh nonetheless.

Barbeque, performed at The Public Theater, is quirky, strange, and fun — a worthy first outing in search of good, original work.