Red Room Where the Writers Are

 

*** East 28th Street, New York, NY   Apt **

Home

“The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind.”  --Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space

 

On the first night it was just me and an inexpensive halogen lamp, with a suitcase and a couple of boxes for company.  The kitchen floor hadn’t been finished yet.  I rolled out my sleeping bag in the corner by the window, and lay back staring at the lofty ceiling twelve feet above for about a minute before I crashed hard.  From then on, the night was spent hovering around the circumference of the ceiling with a very well dressed but silent man in a black suit.  We drifted in and out of the two rooms in the apartment, circling the living room a few times.   Eventually we settled at a small floating table and shared a cocktail.  I awoke the next morning feeling officially welcomed. 

 

A mutual friend introduced me to my apartment in 1990.  It was love at first sight.  With the huge French windows and the high ceilings I just had to have it, and I persuaded the landlord to let me move in immediately even though renovations weren’t finished yet.  In hindsight I think my apartment was begging me to save it from my landlord’s incompetent contractors.  (For more on the contracting wizardry of my landlord read “footsteps leading to my door”.)   It was a very nice situation because my friend lived above me and the whole thing felt very safe.  I had met Genki in Tokyo where I was living during my first year of college at Sophia (Jyoo-Chi) University. Hisao was his real name, but he was a champion kendo player as well as a late night partier, which earned him his nickname Genki: it can mean “healthy” or “excited” in Japanese. 

 

Freshman year in Tokyo was a bit of a fluke.  Before my mother died she had mentioned many times that she’d like me to enter an ivy-league women’s college or a Jesuit University.  Mom wasn’t religious but she was into Jesuits because they were inspired men who traveled the world in search of knowledge.  I was into them because I figured they must be punks if they got thrown out of the Catholic Church.  My mother was always impressed by intellect.  She met my father – a man she had nothing in common with – at a cocktail party and instantly fell for him when she heard him talking about the Peloponnesian Wars. 

 

By senior year of high school I had been accepted to Wellesley, Barnard and Georgetown but after visiting them on their orientation days I decided none of them were a perfect fit.  Obsessively combing the world for the most appropriate college, I eventually found a Jesuit School in Tokyo and signed myself up.  For a year I stayed in a new little “hachi-jo (eight tatami-mat) studio in Takanawa that my guarantor secured for my use.  During my stay, I learned more Japanese at work (an underground house dance club called “Tolos” on one corner of the Nishiazabu Kosaten) and from my boyfriend, than I learned at school, so after Freshman year I decided I would rather spend my time doing something more creative and dropped out.  I was a huge fan of Tokyo and the lifestyle, but the ex-patriots who chose to make a home there were an odd group that I didn’t care to join.  I came back to NY a few months after Genki moved here.   I had introduced him to a few people, and in return he let me know of the empty apartment in his building when I was searching for a place to live. I moved into the building during summer vacation and started classes at The New School the following September. 

 

 

 

***____**** East Twenty-Eighth Street was built in 1879 and has been described by Christopher Grey of the New York Times as “Neo-Grec” in style.  It was the first clubhouse designed for St. Anthony’s Hall – also known as Delta Psi.

 

In 1887 the New York Times described my building as “The Pretty Home of the St. Anthony Club…..with a façade of red and yellow brick in the style of the Renaissance and a churchlike roof, is often supposed by passers-by to be some religious institution connected with one of the churches in the neighborhood….”  One hundred twenty-one years later, the peaked roof is gone and a super-tacky neon sign has been added - advertising the Chinese restaurant on the main floor.  There are usually a few Asian delivery boys smoking out front or in the hallway giving it a nice Chinese-mafia kinda feel.  Sometimes it continues into the hallway with a couple guys from the restaurant fixing a bike or a cook making wontons, sitting in a chair during a break.  I never eat at the restaurant downstairs.  Great part of it is that I’ve never been robbed.  It does sometimes make guests a little uncomfortable. 

 

St. Anthony’s Hall commissioned the office of James Renwick to build their clubhouse (my new home). The name Renwick is best known for building St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 50th and 5th Avenue and Grace Church on lower Broadway.  As much as I would like to think St. Patrick’s and my home were connected, my building was actually designed by Renwick’s great-nephew William Hamilton Russell (1856-1907), who had recently joined the firm.  Russell was a member of St. Anthony Hall.  Later in life William Russell teamed up with Charles W. Clinton in the firm Clinton and Russell.  Many of the other buildings Russell created such as the Hudson Terminal or the 71st armory, have since been demolished, however a few still stand, like 25 Broad Street, (erected 1902). An Italian Renaissance style skyscraper, It is now being converted into luxury condominiums.  Although quite the contrast to my humble little home easily lost between tall office buildings, “like a tiny novel on a bookshelf of encyclopedias” -- (J.Lande), I’m proud of the association with greatness.  It’s good to know that my shabby little apartment with it’s crooked floors and leaky ceiling is a product of good breeding and has rich relations on Wall Street.

 

The faded crest of the fraternity still remains out front above the second floor windows.  A few other reminders linger:  an electrical outlet hung askew, six feet off the ground in the middle of the wall, lets me know that my apartment was once an office with a wall clock.  The Tao Cross, a symbol associated with the club’s Egyptian patron St. Anthony, adorns the outer string on the staircases of the 3rd to fifth floors and one riser of the top floor.

 

Genki and I were the newest and youngest residents in the building.  Eileen had lived on the top floor since the start of WWII.  Marc had lived in the apartment directly above mine since ’64, with his husband Glenn Olson.  One hot afternoon I ran into Marc at the Laundromat on 27th.  As we sat sweating in the humid room, he began the first of a series of building-gossip sessions with me:  I learned all about Eileen and her cats, and our landlord George Che, with his strange management habits.  Marc gleefully told me that two murders had occurred on the premises:  One was a young singer by a piano teacher named Charles Yuki (immortalized by the book The Piano Teacher: the True story of a psychotic killer), and the other was an interior decorator named Carlos Mendoza who brought the wrong guy home after a night on the town; the murderer then tried to burn the remains, leaving minor damage to the building.  Marc was vague about exactly where the murders had taken place.  Charles Yuki was released early from prison and killed another woman in 1974.  After putting him away a second time, he took his own life while behind bars. 

 

The fraternity of St. Anthony Hall was founded January 17, 1847, at Columbia University.  Columbia used to be down the street at 49th and Madison, until it moved uptown in 1897.

 

I find it interesting to note, as the building is now Chinese owned, complete with restaurant --  that 1847 was also the year when the first Chinese immigrants entered the country, aboard the junk “Kee Ying”.

 

St. Anthony Hall began as a fraternity dedicated “to the love of education and the well being of its members”.  Columbia is known as the Alpha chapter. 

In 1899 a new undergraduate Chapterhouse was built at 434 Riverside Drive, but the old building was still kept for graduate members.  On the top floor under the peaked roof, was an Egyptian-styled meeting room, “conjuring images of Aida and St. Anthony cavorting in the Western Desert” with a white marble Altar, that now lives at the Riverside location. 

 

“The rules of the society of privacy and exclusiveness are suggested by the latch key required for admission.” Writes the New York Times in 1887.  Baird’s Manual (compendium of collegiate fraternities first published 1879) describes St. Anthony Hall as being the most secret of all college societies.  There are ten chapters in all, including such schools as Yale, MIT, and Princeton.  F. Scott Fitzgerald has references to St. Anthony Hall and the famed “pump-and-slipper dance”, (a Yale St. A party) throughout many of his short stories.

 

The ceilings of my apartment are 12 feet high.  I’m told this is common for the 2nd floor of a pre-war building.  Of course, hanging a trapeze was in order.  After obtaining permission from my landlord to hang one as long as I didn’t compromise the structure of the building, I hired a rigger from Lincoln Center named Andrew to install a freestanding I beam (attached to the walls and floor) where I could then hang my aerial apparatus.  It was done in 1994 and cost me $400.  For years I never used the thing (somehow the idea of practicing at home was a drag), but in 2005 I started inviting people into my home for aerial lessons.  I never liked working in a gym environment; however, working at home is great.  Training gives you the opportunity to have a moment completely outside yourself; whatever problems may be lingering in the back of your mind are gone as you are completely focused on the body and mind of the person you’re working on.  I always thought fitness should be kind of like a cocktail party without the alcohol.  It should be fun, it should be shared with someone you like, should include lots of good conversation, and leave you feeling happy and inspired afterward.  Sometimes I purposely schedule people so I can introduce them in passing.  It’s great to have a constant flux of different personalities coming through my home and I can confidently say that everyone leaves in a happier frame of mind after exerting themselves in various states of upside-down. 

 

Other than a small website, I never advertised or sought publicity.  People find me through word-of-mouth.  Occasionally I may donate sessions to charities like Mind’s Matter to auction off. This is how I met the infamous Simon Hammerstein and eventually worked at The Box when the club first opened.  I believe that everyone has a latent coordination and will-to-move hidden inside.  Unlike magicians with their “tricks”, I love sharing my magical sky with those who believe they could never execute aerial feats, and I love showing people what their bodies are actually capable of doing.  My favorite thing is to take a 6-foot, 200-pound guy, and teach him to climb, hang up side down, and stretch his split in the silks.  I also enjoy working with timid women who inevitably gain lots of confidence from the sense of accomplishment of working on a trapeze or rope.  As the aggressive mama-bird, I lovingly coax my clients to the end of the branch and then,  while they are momentarily distracted, I give them a big strong push - knowing that they will fly. 

 

Clients only use the main room, which I have tried to decorate in an eclectic fashion, with a variety of antique mirrors on the walls, striped curtains and old-time black and white photos of circus contortionists.  My bedroom is not as spacious; but in it I have, in addition to my bed, an old wardrobe, dresser, and (new) wooden file cabinet.  The ceilings are now covered with a draped bamboo curtain because my bedroom is where Carlos Mendoza once lived – and died – a fact that hit me one day along with the poorly-laid tiles of the drop-ceiling my landlord had put up.    The ceiling revealed above still showed the charred remains of the horrible crime. 

 St. Anthony Hall became the earliest Yale society to accept women as members after the college went co-ed in ’69.

 My first job out of college was with the International Rescue Committee – a company founded by Robert P. DeVecchi – a member of St. Anthony Hall.  My most recent unexpected job is that of an aerial-fitness teacher at Barnard College (the Women’s College at Columbia).  Both of these jobs came to me completely out of the blue. Probably just a New York Coincidence, but I like to think my apartment is looking out for me.

 

When people come to my home to train, they invariably take one lesson never to return; or they remain stuck in my addicting and hypnotic, up-side-down world for years.  The following interview is with one woman who stayed.

 

Sarah Sophie Flicker—

Actress, Impresario, Burgeoning Aerialist and all around Character: One of those people that you’re just happy to know exist in the world.  Chelsea Bacon referred her to me for aerial lessons in October of 2007.

 

June 2, 2008

 

“…in my little world that exists in my head, you know I’m definitely out there fighting for humanity and being a fairy at the same time.”

 

 

NA:     The first thing I ask of everybody is “How would you describe yourself?” 

 

SSF:       I am a -- well, first and foremost a performer.  I’ve been dancing and in theater and film my whole life.  But now also I would say I’m a director – and – an aerialist kind of – and a film maker.  I’m one of the founders, and I’m the creative director of the Citizen’s Band.. 

 

NA:     How many people founded Citizen’s Band?

 

SSF:                  Chelsea, Karen, Georgi, Me, Paul, Angela – there’s seven of us who really got the thing off its feet and got it going. 

 

NA:     Did Citizen’s Band start in New York?

 

SSF:       Well my friend Georgi and I actually, tried it in LA and it fell flat on its face.  It wasn’t until we came to New York that it really flourished and was embraced by people. 

 

NA:     Why do you think it worked here and not in LA?

 

SSF:       For a lot of reasons.  I think LA is not a very supportive climate for things that are outside of the box – you know the entertainment box.  Coming from San Francisco I felt like I was really supported and I could try different things, and like the weirder and more cross disciplinary the better and then I moved to LA and people were like “You’re weird!  Get out of here!  And – “Get a tan!” I feel like that really changed when I moved to New York. 

 

NA:     When did you move to New York?

 

SSF:       I actually moved to New York in September of 2001.  Not a very good time to move to New York!  I had shipped my stuff out before 911, and then Jesse and I had gone to France for a film festival he was in and 911 happened while we were in France.  (Jesse is Sarah’s present husband).   The first flight we could get back on – we came back.  We were living on Canal Street when it happened.  It was insane.  I mean I can’t imagine what it must have been like to BE here (when it happened), but just living in such close proximity to it and having that be my first real week as a New Yorker definitely made my first year here really difficult.  I mean it was a difficult year for everybody, so I was just one of many people having a difficult year. 

 

Everyone says moving to New York is difficult, and then finally after a few years have this big love affair with it but for me, I think I fell in love right away because - it was so impressive the way people were so caring towards each other and helpful and it seemed like a really human climate to come to.  It was just scary – for obvious reasons. 

 

NA:     Are you from San Francisco?

 

SSF:       I was born in Copenhagen, Denmark.  I moved to Palo Alto when I started kindergarten, and then when I was fifteen I moved to San Francisco.  I spent two years in LA, which were miserable.  I kinda consider myself a bay-area slash Danish person. 

 

NA:     One of my favorite things about you is that you are a lawyer.

 

SSF:       Mm hmm.  I went to Mills College, which is like a super-feminist all-women’s college – while I was going out with Kirk from Metallica, which was pretty funny.  – Just like a funny juxtaposition, and then I went to law school at USF.

 

NA:     How did you manage that?

 

SSF:       I didn’t go on tour with them or anything.  If I had a winter break or a summer break I would go hang out and do whatever they were doing. 

It was weird.  But in a way it kept me really grounded and Kirk was great.  I mean, he’s a total feminist and super-political.  He’s still a great supportive friend.  But, just that whole touring environment, and being on tour with Guns and Roses sort of at the height -- well, they were already on the decline but, still, they didn’t realize that --  just, saw some crazy stuff, so having a good feminist backbone really helped.

 

NA:     Why did you decide to go to Law School?

 

SSF:       I’ve always been super-passionate about civil rights and just really interested in politics and the justice system; my dad was a lawyer in the Justice Department in the late fifties and sixties.  He was really involved in the Civil Right Movement.  My mom went to law school as well.  I don’t know, it seemed like the more legitimate thing to do than make art.  When I actually got there I realized that I didn’t really have any business trying to do that.  But I felt like it was important to see it through.  I knew in the first six months that I didn’t want to practice.  But, I really loved the education and I loved learning how to research things, and I had a really cool teacher named Stephanie Wildman, who became my writing mentor.  We did all these writing projects together….for class credits I would do all these major papers, like, 30, 40 page papers on things.  I did one on “lesbians in the sex industry”, I did a whole thing on gay marriage – I was living in San Francisco.  You know, they were kinda like – whatever!  So it ended up being really cool for me.  It’s a great education, no matter – I mean, I use the stuff I learned every day:  Critical thinking, Research, Writing, pinpointing the argument in a situation, – it was great.  I loved it.

 

NA:     How do your lawyer parents feel about your various performance and film projects?

 

SSF:       They’re SO into everything I do.  My mom’s really creative and my dad is too and they would go on tour with Metallica in the summers and stuff.  They’re just wildly into the arts.  They go to more performance and dance than I do.

 

 

 NA:    What was your first gig?

 

SSF:       It depends what you mean by gig.  I mean, I’ve been performing since I was seven or eight.  And then when I was in my pre-teens and teens I did a lot of commercials and films and stuff like that.  The first Citizen’s Band show was in November of 2004.  But then I also have a film-making partner; this girl Maximilla and so we’ve been making films as “The Belles of the Black Diamond Fields” for six years.

 

NA:     Does your film company have a mission statement?

 

SSF:       We have a vulnerability manifesto.  The first film we ever made together was after I moved to New York.  Jesse broke up with me in 2002.  – he flatly broke up with me!  I found myself in New York with no moneymaking ability, no place to live, and heartbroken.  I bumped into Maximilla who I knew from California, and we met this producer and told him this idea we had of making a sort of narrative, surrealistic poem about love lost and celebration.  She got into it and all of a sudden we were making this film.  It was so personal for both of us.  We realized that the only films we were interested in making are sort of finding the most vulnerable place in yourself, and then exposing it and researching it, and talking to other people about it, and making little capsules about it.  So I guess its this really selfish way of trying to learn about yourself and mature. 

You kind of have to see it.  It’s hard to explain, except they’re real pretty.

 

NA:     If you were to make a feature film, what would it be about?

 

SSF:       There’s a lot of historical ladies that we’re super-into, so it would maybe be about one of them.  We’ve had so many ideas in the past, but I think we would probably keep it rooted in something historical and a little bit political and super-emotional.

 

NA:     Where would you say your ideas normally come from? What gets you excited and makes you say okay this is the story that we’re going to do next?

 

SSF:       I don’t know - really, from all over the place.  Sometimes the way the light comes through the window really inspires me and makes me think of something.  Especially after having a child, I’m really bad at going to see all the great arts and performance stuff that New York has to offer, so – not really from there so much.  I love poetry and I really love old films and music.  I definitely feel that that’s where a lot of ideas come from.  But a lot of the things that inspire me are just the feelings that certain things evoke.  It’s not anything specific.

My daughter inspires me all the time.  It’s been so cool to see the world from a child’s perspective.

 

NA:     Do you have any influences or idols?

 

SSF:       Oh yeah.  So many. I love Tom Waits, I love Patty Smith, I obviously never saw the Ballet Russe, but all the pictures I’ve seen and the documentation of it leads me to believe that I would have been really into it.  I love Susanne Farrell.  Her style of dancing is one of my favorites.  I love all the 20’s flapper ladies like Helen Cane and Ruth Edding.

 

NA:     How did you meet Chelsea Bacon?

 

SSF:       I was in Denmark with Maximilla at a film festival and my mom got us tickets to see a circus.  We had no idea what it was – and we went to this tiny little theater and saw Aurelia Thierree.  She’s Charlie Chaplin’s great granddaughter.  it was her two-person circus.  It was so beautiful and I was so inspired!

 

When I first moved to New York I worked a lot with Paper Magazine.  I was writing for them and styling for them -- they’re still sorta like my family. Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper, has this incredible ability to connect the absolute right people together!  I went to a party and found myself sitting across the table at this Paper dinner from a girl who looked really familiar and then I realized that it was Aurelia.  We started talking, and really hit it off.  I said I would love so much to learn aerial.  Is there anyone in New York that you could recommend?  And she was like – “yeah, Chelsea Bacon.”  She gave me her email address and her phone number that day and said, “Really pursue her because she’s not gonna call you back.  For a while.  It might take a while.”  I’m not usually very aggressive with people but I really pursued Chelsea.  I had my first class with her at the Chelsea Piers, and I walked out and I was like, “ I really want her to be my friend.” I really had to pursue Chelsea.  I feel like I chased her throughout New York for a year and then finally won her over. Now we’re quite close, we’re like sisters really.  She came to my wedding in Spain, and a month after that we were doing the Citizen’s Band together. 

 

NA:     What are you trying to tell people with the Citizen’s Band?

 

SSF:       Well, mostly we’re trying to entertain.  And to bring beauty and thought and politics and dance and aerial stuff and fashion and everything all together and highlight how if you don’t look at your history, you certainly won’t understand your present and you won’t make progress in the future.   We look at history through song and lyrics and music and aesthetic to make a statement about now.  With everything I do I’m obsessed with the idea of the universal drama; we just repeat the same mistakes over and over again unless we stop and really take a close look at them.  That’s really what the Citizen’s Band is all about.  We are also trying to be political, and critical of what’s going on in the world right now without being dogmatic about it.  I think that it’s the aesthetic of all of it, and the humor sort of gives it a lighter touch which I think is important.  My friend Georgi and I have always had this sort of really specific aesthetic that I wouldn’t know how to describe completely.  It’s kind of twenties and kind of thirties but kind of seventies but kind of Victorian and I don’t know…..Sort of a fantastic Never Never Land somewhere between 1880 and 1945.  Some of the music goes past 1945 - Not so many standards, mostly like really obscure songs - but aesthetically we don’t really go past that.  Even if you’re not political you can go and really enjoy it.  I’ve had so many people not even realize that it’s political – which is kind of sad. 

 

I wish that we could be on a stage big enough where I could be in point shoes and have different apparatuses hung all over the stage that I could sort of, swing back and forth to, but also hit the floor and do point-work on the floor.  Also, set-wise I would love to have major set pieces hanging from the ceiling.  We want to do albums – we want to make movies, we would love to have a long run theatrically – and we really want to work with Obama in the election if he is the nominee.

 

NA:     Can you name a few of the most memorable or glamorous performances?

 

SSF:                  Citizen’s Band opened Miami Art Basel a few years ago.  It’s a continuation of the “Art Basel Festival” in Europe.  It was insanely glamorous because we had a huge stage that was built just for us on the ocean.  M. A. B. was a party for thousands of people on the beach.  There was free-flowing champagne everywhere! We performed at Jann Wenner’s birthday party – the dude from Rolling Stone.  Looking out into the audience it was like, David Bowie!! Bruce Springstein!! I was personally most excited about Joan Dideon; It was just like this tiny roomful of like everyone you ever wished that you could meet in your entire life.

Ciprianis was the scariest place I’ve ever performed – the one downtown. 

 

NA:     What effect are you trying to achieve when you’re up there performing; whether it’s on your lyra or singing a song?

 

SSF:       I just really love the idea of transporting people into this fantasy world that definitely exists in my head. And in my little world that exists in my head, I’m definitely out there fighting for humanity and being a fairy at the same time.  Being an only child, I’ve always had this really rich imaginary world and fantasy life and it just never seemed possible to make it tangible.  So I’m just trying to put it out there.