<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--Generated by Squarespace Site Server v5.11.81 (http://www.squarespace.com/) on Mon, 28 May 2012 11:29:26 GMT--><feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"><title>New York City Storyteller</title><subtitle>New York City Storyteller</subtitle><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/</id><link rel="alternate" type="application/xhtml+xml" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/"/><link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/atom.xml"/><updated>2012-05-26T07:00:00Z</updated><generator uri="http://www.squarespace.com/" version="Squarespace Site Server v5.11.81 (http://www.squarespace.com/)">Squarespace</generator><entry><title>A Tale Told By A Live Nerve Ending</title><category term="Bill of Rights"/><category term="City Hall"/><category term="Federal Hall Memorial"/><category term="Gerge Washington's inauguration"/><category term="John Peter Zenger"/><category term="Personal Philosophy"/><category term="Philosophy "/><category term="Robert R. Livingston"/><category term="the Stamp Act Congress"/><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/5/25/a-tale-told-by-a-live-nerve-ending.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/5/25/a-tale-told-by-a-live-nerve-ending.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-05-25T12:30:19Z</published><updated>2012-05-25T12:30:19Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA[I’m a speed freak. It’s not my fault. We inherit our energy.  I talk fast. I walk fast, I eat fast and I was prenatally curious. So there I was with my inherent traits, some admirable and some needing to be undone, guiding forty eighth graders and six teachers from a private school in the mid-west. Save for nine fourteen-year olds who clung to my side, asking me questions; the rest in the group frustrated me. They walked leisurely, stopped frequently, repositioned themselves often, chatted into their cell phones and let their mouths shape into yawns as they orginated or replied to texts. Many of their eyes remained in a singular fixed position, a blank stare, as if auditioning for a 1950s black and white zombie film, causing me to wonder whether they had all passed away leaving these resemblances, ambulating cadavers, in their stead.]]></summary></entry><entry><title>People Interest Me</title><category term="&quot;The Death and Life of Great American Cities&quot;"/><category term="84 Kent Street"/><category term="Jane Jacobs"/><category term="L train"/><category term="Municipal Art Society"/><category term="Williamsburg"/><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/5/8/people-interest-me.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/5/8/people-interest-me.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-05-09T01:31:17Z</published><updated>2012-05-09T01:31:17Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA[People interest me at first sight. There I was staring at a bunch of faces on the Number 6 train, at noon, May 5, getting on at 77th Street, headed for 14th Street to get on an L train and go to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was going to take a tour, on a weekend where the Municipal Art Society was sponsoring many of them all over the city, all in honor of the writer and activist, Jane Jacobs, who altered the way planners approached cities by proclaiming urban centers to be living ecosystems, synergistically dependent upon buildings, sidewalks, streets, parks, neighborhoods, in her book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." She died in 2006. At 68th Street, a woman sat next to a man who sat next to me and as he was descending he said, "Tell me if you have enough room" to which I responded, "This is public transportation. I can't tell you what to do, but presently your right posterior cheek is touching my left one."]]></summary></entry><entry><title>Your Patrimony</title><category term="Boxwood Hill Estate"/><category term="James Clinch Smith"/><category term="Madison Square Garden"/><category term="Madison Square Presbyterian Church"/><category term="O. Henry"/><category term="Stanford White"/><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/4/26/your-patrimony.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/4/26/your-patrimony.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-04-26T12:31:38Z</published><updated>2012-04-26T12:31:38Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA[While staring at the roofline of Box Hill, architect Stanford White's summer home, a rambling beach-pebble pressed into wet stucco covered multi-gable structure, with a one story verandah lined with fluted columns, I realized the Whites, with ancestors dating back to the 18th century and the Smiths, his wife's family with roots in the 17th century, were bequeathed land, houses and antiques; whereas I received nothing from my maternal grandfather’s side, disembarking in 1859 from Germany,as well as my ancestors from Austria, Lithuania and Poland, arriving in the beginning of the 20th century. I chewed on that while sitting on a capital that had once been atop a column on the outside of the Stanford White designed 1883 Madison Square Garden, at East 26th Street and Madison Avenue.]]></summary></entry><entry><title>Fit to print in the New York Times</title><category term="George Jones"/><category term="Greenwood Cemetery"/><category term="Henry Jarvis Raymond"/><category term="Rose Elytinge"/><category term="Someone to admire"/><category term="The New York Daily-Times"/><category term="the New York Times"/><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/4/16/fit-to-print-in-the-new-york-times.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/4/16/fit-to-print-in-the-new-york-times.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-04-16T23:26:43Z</published><updated>2012-04-16T23:26:43Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA[Alice dated a married man for five years while attending services at the Ethical Culture Society. My comment, “Don’t go to any more meetings on Sunday since you don't seem to be learning anything"  elicited this remark,  “I’m sure his wife wouldn’t mind for they have separate bedrooms.” Alan lived in a walk-up on Sixth Avenue; from there he sold cocaine constantly declaring, “I'm not creating an addiction, just feeding one." When he had accumulated $300,000 he moved to a condo on Ludlow Street, bragging about his increased square footage, sending me into spasms of "Acquired by breaking the law." Abbey, owner of a nursery school in a row house on West 16th Street,smoked a joint in her office every morning minutes before her charges, twenty three-year olds, arrived. When I suggested, "Why don't you ingest marijuana at home?" she called me "A hard-nose who lacked compassion for her stress." She had a point. Three times in one week I had given my opinion to individuals who had not solicited it, when it would have been better if I had shut my mouth, content in the knowledge the only business that I need concern myself with is my own.]]></summary></entry><entry><title>That's All, Folks!</title><category term="&quot; Bugs Bunny"/><category term="&quot;A Tree Grows in Brooklyn&quot;"/><category term="&quot;Tree of Hope"/><category term="Survivor Tree"/><category term="World Trade Center Memorial Site"/><category term="ailanthus"/><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/4/8/thats-all-folks.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/4/8/thats-all-folks.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-04-08T04:31:13Z</published><updated>2012-04-08T04:31:13Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA[My right outstretched arm supported my palm as it felt the shallow furrows and scaly ridges on the grayish-brown bark of a 35 foot Callery pear tree that had been brought back to life and back to the World Trade Center Memorial Park December, 2010 by a flatbed truck. It had come from the Arthur Ross Nursery in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx where it had been replanted, November 11, 2001, one month after two Parks Department employees, while searching for living flora at ground zero found, between building four and five of the World Trade Center complex, covered in ash, missing its crown, its bark the hue of this side of midnight, and its root system exposed, a Pyrus calleryana planted in the 1970’s, with one living branch. Now there are many rising above its once burnt base, all covered with heart-shaped leaves and five-petaled white flowers. I, when I first saw it, tapped my finger tips on its outer shell, as if that way I could procure some of its strength, when Bugs Bunny jumped out of a drum, and in his Brooklyn-Bronx accent uttered “That’s all, folks! And dat’s the end!” and then disappeared.]]></summary></entry><entry><title>How You Dress Speaks of Who You Are</title><category term="Amelia Earhart"/><category term="George Palmer Putnam"/><category term="Judge Joseph Foce Crater"/><category term="Macy's"/><category term="Marshall Field"/><category term="Raymond Orteig"/><category term="Woman"/><category term="s Home Companion"/><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/3/24/how-you-dress-speaks-of-who-you-are.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/3/24/how-you-dress-speaks-of-who-you-are.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-03-24T23:44:37Z</published><updated>2012-03-24T23:44:37Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA[We admire people who display traits we wish to have. I was reminded of that March 20, 2012 when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that in July of this year, on the 75th anniversary of the disappearance of a woman who believed that courage was what life exacted from us if we wished to provide our soul peace, there would be an underwater search for Amelia Mary Earhart, and her fellow navigator in her Lockheed Electra, Fred Noonan. This time it would be in the waters off the reef of Gardner Island, now named Nikumaroro, in the Republic of Kiribati, in Earhart’s day part of the British Crown Colony of Gilbert and Ellice Islands. There in 1992, on a previous expedition, a shoe and a metal plate had been found, promoting this hypothesis: on July 2, 1937, 22 days before her 40th birthday, after completing two-thirds or 22,000 miles, in her attempt to circumnavigate the earth starting at the Equator, Earhart had landed there. I realized she had set a variety of speed and distance records, flying both the Atlantic and the Pacific solo, but I retained a singular interest, looking at the men's wear she garbed herself in, yet with a feminine fit, showing her independent spirit, her need for freedom of movement, reinforcing my belief, how you dress speaks of who you are.]]></summary></entry><entry><title>Ours and Ours Alone</title><category term="Carrere and Hastings"/><category term="Donn Barber"/><category term="Karl Bitter"/><category term="Lawrence Grant White"/><category term="New York Public Library"/><category term="Pomona"/><category term="Pulitzer Fountain"/><category term="Stanford White"/><category term="subways"/><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/3/11/ours-and-ours-alone.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/3/11/ours-and-ours-alone.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-03-11T20:50:18Z</published><updated>2012-03-11T20:50:18Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA["I have no memory of what happened. I just woke up in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and the nurse told me I had fallen onto the tracks at the 145th Street subway station. A witness told the EMT's that I had twitched several times and then tumbled. Another person had yelled at the clerk 'shut off the electricity,' but by the time that was done, I had already been hit by the train. The doctor said I also had a heart attack. I lost my right leg. I wear a prosthetic device. My left leg is my anchor, otherwise I'd be confined to a wheelchair." That's what a 6'2," gray-haired balding man, with a crutch under each arm, elastic wrappings on each wrist said when I asked, "What happened to you?" as I held the door, watching him maneuver one leg and then another into the lobby of New York Law School where we were both attending a conference on public spaces and private places. There I could have easily mentioned, but chose not to, the time when I had downed two Contact cold capsules while drinking a White Russian and ended up on the bar-room floor, also not knowing how I got there.]]></summary></entry><entry><title>As the Full Moon Was Once New</title><category term="Dylan Thomas"/><category term="Jack the Ripper"/><category term="Juliet Corson"/><category term="New York Cooking School"/><category term="St. Marks Place"/><category term="World Columbia Exposition"/><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/3/5/as-the-full-moon-was-once-new.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/3/5/as-the-full-moon-was-once-new.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-03-05T18:05:21Z</published><updated>2012-03-05T18:05:21Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA[I spent enough time inside my imagination circumventing reality I felt now was the right moment to get rid of all remaining illusions.  Therefore, I purchased a mirror with ten times the magnification to see myself as those subway riders do, the ones who get up and offer me their seat as soon I appear in their view. And while I was looking at myself I had an epiphany; using baby oil and iodine and a reflector to catch the sun’s rays from childhood through my adult years produced craggy lines, perfect preparation for having my image sculpted directly onto the side of Mt. Rushmore.  Then a new coda seeped into my consciousness.  “Age is energy” and youthful zest is “curiosity coupled with enthusiasm" and I realized my direction, the same one advised by Dylan Thomas. "Do not go gentle into that good night…burn and rave…; … rage against the dying of the light."]]></summary></entry><entry><title>You Are Your Own Star</title><category term="John Fletcher"/><category term="LaureltonT"/><category term="Lural"/><category term="Michel de Montaigne"/><category term="Tura Lura"/><category term="retinitis pigmentosis"/><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/2/29/you-are-your-own-star.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/2/29/you-are-your-own-star.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-02-29T23:59:59Z</published><updated>2012-02-29T23:59:59Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA[At the corner of 79th Street and First Avenue, I knew the light was red but I took three steps into the street anyway, ready to dart across when I saw an unending stream of cars headed in my direction. I thought, "I'm resilient, but my DNA may not be able to withstand an onslaught of vehicles running over my body and still give me the ability to get up." So, I stopped. That's when I noticed to my left a short, balding man with white hair; his shoulders were back and at arm's length he held a white metal stick with a silver tip. I said, "Get back onto the sidewalk. The light's red. I'm here because I like to be on the move and when I saw the traffic I thought better of it." He replied, "Oh, I can see the light alright. It's in front of me. I can't see what's on either side. I have retinitis pigmentosis and it's getting worse. It's hereditary. I'm glad my mother's not here to see me now." Then water welled up in his eyes and mine were on the verge when I added, "You can't take it personally. We're all prisoners of our gene pool" and with that comment a specific incident came to mind.]]></summary></entry><entry><title>To the Point</title><id>http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/2/24/to-the-point.html</id><link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.nytourgoddess.com/blog/2012/2/24/to-the-point.html"/><author><name>jane</name></author><published>2012-02-24T15:00:43Z</published><updated>2012-02-24T15:00:43Z</updated><summary type="html" xml:lang="en-US"><![CDATA[Here's the youtube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up3ZhVOoD64 to see me on The Oscar website video]]></summary></entry></feed>
