Main Character Energy

A week ago, I woke up in a 15th floor Manhattan apartment. The big windows faced east over Central Park. After I made coffee in the galley kitchen, I headed out for a walk. I crossed Central Park West at 95th. The moment I entered the park I heard a guy loud talking on his phone.

“I totally agree and I will look back on that time when I was producing Medea, MacBeth, and Hamlet all at the same time…”

I did not hear the end of the sentence because I burst out laughing and had to move away. Everyone in New York City is the main character.

It was a beautiful morning, warm and clear and the park was bursting with flowers. I looped around the paved walks past a playground with hippo sculptures, a guy singing kids songs to a group of toddlers and their parents, over a big rock that was a high point in the park, under a bridge, past a shingled cottage that hosted a marionette theater, and up to the former weather station.

The park was full of people playing tennis and riding bikes and doing Tai Chi and walking all manner of dogs. I turned around at the Museum of Natural History, back to my temporary home via the Whole Foods where I picked up some groceries. Then I took a nap, put on my fancy clothes, and went to the film festival kick off where I got a red carpet photo with the producer, director, and one of the lead actors in our film. I had a drink in a rooftop bar with a view of the Empire State Building and then, took a cab back to the Upper West Side where I tried to sleep.

This is hard to do — this business of getting some sleep — when you are having your own main character experience. Say you are a 60 year old woman who, after a five year Book of Job style run of bullshit, finds herself in New York City. You have written exactly one screenplay on your own and it’s now a film premiering in New York City. A giant moon is hanging over the Manhattan skyline. You’re staying in a classic building where the floors creak and there’s an elevator operator and those little hexagon tiles in the bathroom.

Of course you are not sleeping. You are levitating, resonating on the frequency of the 15th floor at Central Park West and 96th. Whatever the frequency is of a rattling elevator, distant sirens, a stage producer’s regret, the maze that is Penn Station. That’s what’s buzzing in your veins and it is not sleep.

I live alone with a socially reluctant dog and my life is very quiet. I did not realize how quiet it is until I got home after that week in New York City. I was quite overwhelmed by the crowded spaces, by the noise, by the schmoozing, which is not to say that I did not love everything about it.

While waiting for my cab on the sidewalk outside the opening night party, I talked again to the twins I’d met upstairs at the bar. They were charming, friendly young men. We were all leaving, they said, “fashionably early.” One of them was wearing all different patterns and his hair was turquoise on the ends, the other was dressed in a tweedy sort of vest covered in embroidered ducks. They wandered off through Chelsea, surely towards some main character adventure of their own.

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“It’s like you hit the big time,” my best friend said to me when we finally caught up.

“I KNOW,” I said. We were on the phone but I’m sure he heard the all caps tone to my voice.

I have had zero chill about all of it. “It’s absolutely like I was living in my own movie. I mean, I’m a first time screenwriter in New York! To see my OWN MOVIE.” I told him about how the subway station nearest me was closed, so I walked to get the bus downtown in my fancy clothes, how I wore a pink tag that said FILMMAKER with my name scrawled on it in sharpie. I told him about the loud talker in Central Park and how we did not win an award, but everything, every single minute of the time I was there felt like winning.

“Amazing,” he said, “all of it.”

“I KNOW,” I said, again.

This morning, when I was coming back from the pool — I swim laps to keep the entropy of aging at bay — I started laughing at the idea that just a week ago, I was a main character in Manhattan. And I remembered that about a decade ago, shortly after I turned 50, I played an absolute barn burner of a show in a now closed bar near my house. The place was full of metalheads in leather and boots and suburban lesbians having a birthday party. It was a great night, the bar was packed and we played well. I am enjoying aging contrary to the default model where you downshift, where your character is secondary, then tertiary, then some bit part dispensing age earned wisdom.

No to that.

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My hostess for the week was an 80 year old Jewish therapist; she has lived in her apartment since the 50s. She flew out the door after showing me around, she was late for a Passover Seder. She had big art on the walls and lots of books and was delighted to find that I was there for my screenplay work because she loved film. “It’s the highest form of storytelling,” she said. One morning, after I’d come in quite late, I apologized and told her I hoped I hadn’t woken her. “My niece lived with me for a while, she used to try to sneak in from late nights at Studio 54, but the floors are too noisy for that.” We talked about Israeli and Jewish politics, like me, she is a passionate lefty who punctuates her sentences with eff bombs. And one evening she asked me to help her decide which coat looked better with her outfit. “The gray or the black,” she said opening a closet that was stuffed with outerwear. “Which goes better?” Main character energy from this woman, big time.

It is nice to be back in my quiet home where it seems that the loudest noise is the hum of my refrigerator or the heat kicking on early in the morning. The last few years have made me increasingly introverted and I find intense socializing exhausting. But that feeling of New York, oh, what a vibe that is. To live your own spectacular story and still suspect that you are the least interesting person on the C train headed downtown.

How grand to be in a place where it seems that everyone is producing Medea and Hamlet and MacBeth all at the same time. But because you are also a main character you are diminished by that not at all.