Mr. Beller's Neighborhood>Straggling at the Guggenheim

Straggling at the Guggenheim

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 3, 2007

It’s a freezing Friday night at the Guggenheim, 8:00, and technically the museum closed 15 minutes ago. Two gallery guides, as their bright red tags indicate they’re called, are following Cate and I down the spiral that swoops around the building’s atrium like some giant half-stretched slinky. They are, at times during our forced march, some twenty or thirty feet behind us, and at other times they’re practically stepping on our heels. They’re sweepers, having started at the top of the loop, in the room with all the crucifixions, and corralled the remaining museum-goers toward the exit via the long, curving walk which ends at the door to the frigid pavement on Fifth Avenue.

Cate and I take a minute to admire a portrait of a young girl, her dark hair cut in a straight line across her chin—her bright brown eyes seem as if she’s looking right at you!—before resuming the walk. Cate and I don’t always agree when it comes to fine art, so many of our dalliances involve a painting that she likes and I don’t, or vice versa, disassembling what elements strike us for liking or not liking. When we stop to agree that neither of us likes a stuffy still life with food, the gallery guides catch up with us. “We’re still closed,” they say, but in a nice way. Footsteps and voices echo in the atrium.

The one on the right is named Vanessa Rubio, and it’s only her second week on the job. She arrived at the Guggenheim after working for several years at the Americas Society Art Gallery on Park Avenue and 68th Street, a job she described as much less busy, and “on Park Avenue, so you get those kind of people.” Rubio has the skin tone of white frosting dusted with cinnamon, or coffee with lots of cream, and her long, dark, curly hair is pulled back into a neat bun. She wears trendy purple titanium glasses. She is an artist—mostly a painter, but she does some cartooning, too—who chose this new job because it allows her more time to take classes in the evenings at the School of Visual Art. At 23, she recently graduated from NYU, where she majored in art and art history.

When I met Rubio, upstairs, Cate was admiring a crucifixion by Jusepe de Ribera, who lived in the Kingdom of Naples, then part of the Spanish empire, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The painting features a mostly-naked Jesus, nailed to a cross, with rivulets of blood, and a pained expression.

As a rule, I hate crucifixion paintings, and this was no exception. In my notebook, I noted that the paintings in this room are populated primarily by “draped and moaning people.” In fact, the one painting in this room that moved me is the one that seemed totally unrelated to the others, a tiny whimsical Goya canvas called “The Drunk Mason,” which depicts two men smirking at each other over the head of their friend, presumably the eponymous mason, who is too drunk to walk and who they are carrying between them, his stockings slouched down to his ankles. The sky, bright blue in the top left corner, melts to a white haze above their heads in the early morning.

“Look how sexual it is,” Cate said, indicating the Ribera, and I grunted uninterestedly. It didn’t look sexual to me, only boring. “There are no lines in his torso at all. He obviously loved the male form.” Rubio nodded, agreeing with Cate. “It’s definitely not boring,” she said. She said she has learned a lot from being around the masters here. She paints mostly people, herself, using acrylics to render paintings from photographs of herself and her friends, but her favorite in this room is a giant abstract charcoal drawing. “It’s going in all directions. I feel there’s a thousand stories in there,” she said. She was wearing a black sweater over a black shirt, with long rows of tiny white buttons on the sleeves. All of her paintings, so far, are untitled. “I’ve never named any of them because I don’t feel like they’re official enough to name,” she said. “I mostly just hang them in my house or in my family’s house. I’m not like, ‘this is “the Vase.” ’”

When Cate and I first arrived at the museum, at 7:20, a security guard in a blue shirt and tie with graying hair told us we could not come in, since the ticket window had closed at 7:15. We would simply have to come back another time. However, the ticket seller said that tickets were in fact available until 7:30 and grudgingly allowed us to pay $5 for the both of us. It was “pay what you wish” night, and after all, we only had 15 minutes before closing.

Then the woman behind us on the ticket line asked if she could get in free, and as Cate and I were rushing upstairs we heard the ticket seller ask whether she had any pocket change to contribute. Clearly he’d been told that this is “pay what you wish,” not “pay nothing at all” night, and everyone was expected to pay something. Immediately I wished I had given him a couple of quarters instead of a precious 5 dollar bill. “Oh,” said the blue shirt and tie man, with raised eyebrows, as we thrust our tickets toward him. “You got in.” I couldn’t tell if he was irritated or simply making an observation.

Now the same man came upstairs to tell Vanessa Rubio that she should start herding the stragglers downstairs. “Oh,” he said, when he saw me. “Nice to see you again.” Rubio had just started telling me how Debbie Harry had come in that very afternoon, dressed all in ski boots and swishy pants like she’d been on her way to the slopes. “I tried not to look too much,” she said. And then I said, “I know you have to go,” which was going to be followed by “but,” and another question, when Rubio looked at me. “So do you,” she said, but in a nice way, and we commenced our forced march down the sloping hall and into the cold night.

FORWARD>Fast Forward>Home for the Holidays

Home for the Holidays

Beth Schwartzapfel
December 22, 2006

With the endless violence in the Middle East, it would be easy to say that my girlfriend, Shereen, and I — she is Muslim; I am Jewish — represent the potential for world peace. But of course, like the world, our story is a little more complicated than that.

Shereen’s father, Ahmed, is from the historically Muslim city of Hyderabad, in the south of India. Any inter-religious struggle in his family’s past would have been with Hindus, not Jews. Shereen’s mother, Pat, is blond and blue-eyed, born and raised in Connecticut by an Irish Catholic father and a Hungarian American mother. Pat and her sister grew up getting their knuckles smacked by nuns. Although Pat converted to Islam when she married Ahmed, Shereen and her sisters were raised with both cultures, studying the Quran at Sunday school and getting stuffed bunnies from their grandmother on Easter.

I grew up attending a Reform synagogue in suburban New Jersey. Which is to say, I derived most of my Jewish identity from cultural, not religious, observance. The highlight of Passover was banging the table while singing “Had Gadya” enthusiastically and with breakneck speed, to the exclusion of the less entertaining portions of the Seder. When I came out at 15, the Torah’s dictates on homosexuality were not part of the family conversation. We had a mezuza on our doorjamb, but only my Grandpa Sam kissed it on his way into the house. One of the defining characteristics of this particular brand of Judaism was that it was emphatically Not Christian. My Hebrew school teachers would upbraid those of my classmates who said, “I’m half-Jewish.” “You can’t be half-Jewish,” the teachers would reply. “You’re either Jewish, or you’re not.” When my family put an electric menorah in our window during Hanukkah, it was as much a defiant counterpoint to the neighborhood’s ubiquitous Christmas lights as it was a religious symbol.

You can imagine my relief, then, that the person with whom I wanted to spend my life was Not Christian. I was adamant that no home of mine ever would have a Christmas tree in it, and now I didn’t have to worry. Until I was invited to her parents’ house for Christmas. “What?” I said. “I thought you were Muslim!”

“We are, but my mom was raised Catholic,” Shereen said. “Christmas is something we always shared with my grandmother. What’s the big deal?”

It was a good question. Did it make me any less Jewish to share a holiday with my girlfriend and her family? During starry-eyed conversations about our imagined future, she and I had discussed both Arabic lessons and Hebrew school for our children. Why did it seem somehow more palatable for my hypothetical kids to participate in Muslim rituals than in Christian ones?

Shereen hypothesized that part of my disdain for All Things Christmas had to do with my identity as an outsider, a nonconformist. I derived pleasure from being the minority in a dominant culture, besieged by people who earnestly wished me a Merry Christmas; it was enough to make me want to appropriate one of the gay movement’s touchstone rallying cries — “Don’t Assume I’m Straight” — only with a slightly different wording: “Don’t Assume I’m Christian!” I had to admit that my righteous indignation did feel good at times. “Don’t worry,” Shereen said. “With two moms, our kids will have enough to make them feel different.”

I went to Shereen’s family’s house for Christmas that year, and I’ve gone for the seven years since. Pat makes dough for sugar cookies using her mother’s recipe, and then Shereen, her sisters and I use the cookie cutters to shape it into Christmas trees and holly sprigs, like they have always done. That first year, Pat also got out a handful of brand-new cookie cutters, shaped like dreidels, menorahs and Stars of David. She had picked them out for me, special. This has to be a first, I thought. The Jew and the Muslims making Christmas cookies in the shape of Hanukkah symbols. And although this was exactly the type of Jewish-people-coopting-Christmas-traditions-so-they-don’t-feel-left-out thing that might have driven me crazy in the past — like those families that string blue-and-white Christmas lights on their houses and call them “Hanukkah lights” — I decided to roll with it.

Last year, for Hanukkah, Shereen gave me a beautiful handmade cast-iron menorah. Each of the nine little candle holders is an individual puzzle piece that comes apart and fits back together. I had admired it years ago, when she and I first moved in together. We couldn’t afford it at the time, and opted instead for a cheap aluminum one. I brought my new menorah to her family’s house, and, after we made Christmas cookies, I scrawled out an English transliteration of the Hanukkah prayers so that we all could light candles together. Her whole family stumbled earnestly through them — her dad, with his Urdu accent, making out the Hebrew words written in English letters.

This past summer, Shereen and I had a small commitment ceremony at her family’s home, where we shared stories and exchanged rings. We still can’t agree about Christmas, though. With this year’s holiday season approaching, she recently tacked the following P.S. onto an e-mail: “I love Christmas trees. Now that I’ve gotten you to marry me, I can come clean and tell you that I intend to have one.”

We’ll see about that. But if we do, at least we’ll string it with Hanukkah lights.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood>Water, One Dollar

Water, One Dollar

By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 24, 2006

Mohammad B. Miah is a small man. He stands about five feet tall with his red and white and black leather hi-top sneakers on. He lives in Astoria, Queens, and he wants to know whether I work for the city. He motions in the direction of City Hall.

“You have a job?” he asks.

“I’m a writer,” I say, waving my notebook, which is green and skinny, and has spiral binding on top.

“You work for the city?” he asks.

“No, for a newspaper,” I answer, waving my notebook again. His English is not great, and I think ‘freelance’ will be too hard to explain.

Every morning, Mohammad spends two dollars to ride the subway to 293 Church Street, a garage-like space tucked between two fancy restaurants in a bustling corner of Tribeca. 293 Church Street is more like a not-place than a place. Mohammad calls it a “gar-iz.” It is run by a bristling man named John who has a grey mustache and a heavy Eastern European accent. For six months, Mohammed came to the gar-iz every morning to pick up a silver cart, which he would wheel here, to the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, and sell hot dogs. On a good day, he made about $60 profit. On a slow day, $40.

Mohammad has a vendor’s license, which he keeps in a dirty plastic sheath in his otherwise empty brown leather wallet, its tarnished beaded ball-chain necklace wrapped around it. The license cost him $60, plus $56 for a required 2-day class which taught him that he must wear plastic gloves to handle food, and offered guidance as to how to dress appropriately. The rent on the cart was approximately six hundred dollars per month. It varied, though. “If I am making good business,” he said, “rent go up.”

A vendor’s license allows you to sell food on the street, but a permit is necessary to own your own cart. One day, he showed up at the garage to find that the cart he was renting was no longer available. Permits expire every 7 months, so Mohammad speculates that the cart owner’s permit ran out, or that someone else laid claim to the cart. In any case, he says, pointing to a blue and yellow Sabrett umbrella on the other side of the approach to the bridge, “Maybe he have permit. I have no permit.” Which is to say, without his own permit, there’s nothing he can do.

So now he arrives at 293 Church Street each morning with two blue coolers and an old silver hand-truck. “Water! Cold things!” he says to a group of tourists walking by. “One dollar!” It comes out sounding like, “Wada! Coldings! Wandallah!”

He spends about $30 to fill up the coolers with water, soda, Gatorade, and ice. He wheels the hand truck down Church Street, weaving in and out of parked cars and traffic. The wheels on the truck squeak as he walks. The two coolers are stacked on top of each other, and the lid on the top cooler doesn’t fit quite right. Handfuls of ice cubes fall onto his feet and hit the pavement. His small frame moves quickly, and, struggling to keep up, I keep an eye on his blue and grey and yellow baseball cap, which is made from parachute material and Velcros in the back. He is like a compact little rectangle, with a tan fleece top and blue polyester pants.

He makes a left onto Chambers Street, passes a fruit vendor and a hot dog cart, passes Ralph’s Discount City, and tells me we’re going to the Blooklyn Biliz.

“The Blooklyn Biliz. You know the Blooklyn Biliz?”

I think he’s saying “Brooklyn Village,” so I shake my head no.

“I show you.” He tells me to walk on the sidewalk.

The sky is looking grey, and despite the temperature, which is only in the mid-50s, the haze and the humidity make the air feel hot and sticky.

“Maybe coming rain today,” he says, “people no buy cold things.” Mohammad looks up at the gathering cloud cover. “It’s hard making people like water.”

Mohammad picks a spot at the approach to the Bridge where there is a brass symbol of a walking person inlaid into the sidewalk, with matching brass arrows inlaid on either side, in each direction. The on-ramp for cars hugs the left side of the walkway, and the off-ramp hugs the right. Clumps of tourists walk by, holding cameras and guide books. Joggers and bikers pass, too, sweaty and fast. The Blooklyn Biliz looks dishwater grey on this cloudy day. Its usual majesty is dwarfed by all the taillights and the buildings, which, from this angle, seem at least as tall, if not taller. Even the buildings on the Brooklyn side of the bridge seem tall enough to jostle for the skyline’s attention.

“I set here,” says Mohammad. “People come across. They tired. They buy water.” He lays the two coolers side-by-side, takes their lids off, reaches into the ice, and pulls the bottles of Gatorade—which, at $2, are his most expensive item—to the top of the chilly pile.

“Wada! Coldings! Wandallah!” he calls to a passing blonde family.

“No thank you,” says one woman.

“OK,” says Mohammad, “have a nice day.”

His voice is slightly nasal, and he speaks quickly and confidently, as though he is not aware of the fact that he is often hard to understand. He has dark brown deep-set eyes and a square-shaped dark brown beard with a few grey hairs. Mohammad came to this country from his native Bangladesh when he was 34 years old. The lawlessness and random violence in his country had been wearing him down. “My country too much crazy people,” he says. “People gun. You have money, they take it.” He had been trying to get a visa through the lottery visa program since 1990. He hit the jackpot in 1998. “This country very nice. I like this country,” he says. “Here you have one thousand dollars in your pocket, nobody takes it.”

Mohammad has been here at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge for an hour. So far today, he has made $4.

“Gatorade, Miss?” he asks a passing woman. It sounds like “Gatorid.” “Want Gatorid? That’s good.”

Mohammad wonders if it’s too cold for people to want soda. “I looking for another job now,” he says. “Outside work, vendor, too headache.” Rain, cold, people’s whims—his living is too uncertain. “People buy water, I have money. People don’t buy water, I don’t have money.” When he wants to go to the bathroom, he must cart his coolers to a nearby bench and ask some people sitting there to watch them while he runs to Starbucks.

He lives in a 2-bedroom basement apartment which costs $800. I ask him if he lives alone.

“No, not a loan,” he says. “Rent. Monthly rent.”

He lives with a friend, another Bangladeshi. His wife is still in Bangladesh. He wants to bring her here, but it’s too expensive. “‘How come you no make America for me?’” he says she asks him. “I say no, maybe later.” When he goes to City Hall to try to get her a visa, they always ask about money, always money. “City say ‘how much you make money?’ If you have money, city give you visa.”

He interrupts himself. “Yes sir, wada?” He continues. “If you have no money, city says, ‘how can your wife eat?’”

The Urban Justice Center recently released a report about street vendors in lower Manhattan. They interviewed 100 vendors in 5 languages, and they found among them a median yearly income of $7,500. I cannot imagine Mohammad making even that much at this rate. “The typical vendor,” wrote the New York Times in an article about the report, “is a married immigrant man who is the sole provider for his family and has no health insurance.” That’s Mohammad. “Only 20 percent of the vendors reported English as their first language; forty percent said they were uncomfortable speaking it,” the Times went on to say.

Mohammad is a Muslim. He belongs to the Alamin Mosque on 36th Avenue in Long Island City. He prays five times a day. He might not get a chance to pray five times today, though. He looks at his watch. He sometimes goes to a mosque near here, if he can get away while he’s working. “You watch?” He gestures at his coolers.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll watch.”

“Really? No problem?” he asks? “You watch, I go?” I nod. “No problem.”

“You watch, I go.” He’s happy. I watch his little blue and grey and yellow hat bob through the crowd towards the Assata Islamic Center, a mile north, on Allen Street.

A sign above my head reads “AREA UNDER NYPD VIDEO SURVEILLANCE.” I watch the twin yellow lights flash at the off-ramp. Bottomtop. Bottomtop. Bottomtop. I write in my skinny green notebook. I wait. A red double-decker Gray Line bus drives by, people spilling off the roof with their cameras. Bottomtop. Bottomtop. I look at the Bridge. Some 27 people died during its construction, most of them immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. One tourist in an orange Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt passes, doubles back, asks for a beer. When I tell him it’s only water, soda, and Gatorade, he leaves. While Mohammad is gone, I sell two sodas and one water. It’s been about two hours, and Mohammad’s total is now $7.

He returns in about 20 minutes. He smiles at me when I hand him the crumpled dollar bills. “Oh,” he says. “You sell?”

Mohammad has four children. The oldest is 17, the youngest—he has to count forwards on his hand from 1997—is 9. They live in Queens, too, with their mother, his first wife. She’s Bangladeshi but they met here. She divorced him a few years back when she fell in love with another man. After that, Mohammad went back to Bangladesh “to make another marriage.” It sounds like he says “mat-iz.” He gives his first wife money for their children.

“Wada?” He pauses to ask a passerby. “Cold dlink?”

“No thank you.”

“OK, bye.”

He turns to me. “You matiz?”

I’m wearing a wedding ring. I am, for all intents and purposes, married, although my partnership is not valid in 46 states and, until 1993, was flatly illegal in 14. For simplicity’s sake, I shake my head. No. It’s not a lie, not exactly.

“No?” he asks. “What happen?”

I just shrug silently. He leaves it alone.

Mohammad says he has tried to get a job in a restaurant, but he can’t because of his beard. The weather is getting cold, and he knows he won’t be able to sell cold drinks for much longer. So he has decided to try to get a job with the City. His options are limited because he can’t read or write much English. But he wouldn’t mind working with trash. “I make cleaning job,” he says, “OK. No problem. Garbage OK. I like this.” He looks appraisingly towards City Hall.

“Wada?” he asks the next person, and the next. “Wandallah."

Curve>Travel>Taking the Long Rhode Home

Taking the Long Rhode Home

By Beth Schwartzapfel
September 2006

I’ll admit it. I’m one of those people who refer to New York City as “the City.” I grew up in Jersey, and all the years of telling people I was from “right outside the City” really ingrain themselves in a person. I’ll also admit that I agree with Edward Norton’s character in “Keeping the Faith” when he says that anyone who does not live in New York City must be, to some extent, joking. I guess I’ve been joking for some time now. I’ve lived in Providence, Rhode Island – affectionately known to locals as ‘Little Rhody,’ ‘The Biggest Little,’ and other nicknames that include the word ‘little’ – for almost 10 years. In those 10 years, I’ve come to love the Ocean State with a fierceness that I’d previously reserved for New Jersey. I know, I said New York City is my one and only, and it is – but let me explain.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the Garden State is the butt of many jokes. If you’ve ever driven down the Jersey Turnpike, through the foul smoke that hangs in the air over the city of Elizabeth, you understand why many call New Jersey the armpit of the east coast. My use of the phrase “right outside the City” artfully dodged any need to count myself among those who live in the armpit. But soon I began to feel I was betraying my home state. New Jersey is home to 830,000 acres of farmland, not to mention Philip Roth, Albert Einstein, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Springsteen. I grew up in a town where I could walk to school and knew my neighbors, yet I was only 15 minutes from Manhattan. And though I would never have chosen to live in Jersey, the fact is, that’s where I was from.

So I began to say it proudly. “I’m from Jersey.” My voice was feeble at first, but it slowly gained in strength as I practiced. And while I do love New York City – to this day, I would probably prefer to live in Brooklyn than anywhere else– the truth is, New York City doesn’t need me. Everyone loves New York City. If other people were going to talk trash about New Jersey, I was going to love it double in order to compensate. Yeah. I do [heart] NJ.

Which brings us to Rhode Island. At 1500 square miles, Little Rhody is the smallest state in the Union. The whole state is only slightly larger than the acreage of farmland in New Jersey. For many, the Biggest Little is nothing more than a 40-mile stretch on the road from New York to Boston, or the place where you turn off 95 to head east towards Cape Cod. It takes exactly one hour to drive from one end of the state to the other. We have 39 cities and towns, one area code, and no major league sports teams. But what we don’t have in size, we more than make up for in personality. Perhaps you’ve heard of our former mayor, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci? He was mayor for 10 years before serving a 5-year suspended sentence for beating his estranged wife’s lover. He was then re-elected and served as mayor for another 10 years before being convicted of conspiracy to run a criminal enterprise out of City Hall. He’s now 4 years into his federal racketeering sentence in – of all places – Fort Dix, New Jersey. Despite these transgressions – or perhaps because of them – Rhode Islanders love Buddy. Buddy was a symbol of the scrappy-ness that Rhode Islanders are famous for. ‘You fancy people from DC think you can come in here and tell us what to do? We have our own way of doing things, thank you very much.’

I moved here in 1997 to attend college. “I’m moving to Rhode Island,” I used to say, like I was testing out an unfamiliar phrase from a foreign language. What a random place to move to. But it is precisely its randomness, in part, that makes Rhode Island lovable. The longer you live here, the more you understand about the place and its many quirks. You start to accumulate stories that exemplify Rhode Island, stories that could only happen here. You start to feel like you’re in on a secret. Like the time we went to drop my girlfriend’s car off at the mechanic. One of the garage’s employees was writing her name on the little yellow tag that attaches to her keys. My girlfriend began to spell out her last name as he wrote. “M-O-H-I-U-,” she said. “M-O-H-R-U-,” he wrote. “No,” she said. “I-U.” He looked up at her like she was crazy, and wrote the letters over again. R-U. “No,” she said again. “I-U.” Finally he put the pen down. “I don’t know!” he roared. “Am I?” You see, in Rhode Island, “I-U” and “are you” sound the same.

Boston may be only 50 miles up the road, but it might as well be a world away. ‘You’re going to Newport?,’ the old joke goes. ‘Did you pack a bag?’ I have a friend who jokes that she gets a nosebleed when she crosses into Woonsocket, a city which abuts Rhode Island’s border with Massachusetts. It’s just too far north. And though my heart has long pitter-pattered for the City, I’ll take Providence over Boston any day. As the biggest city in New England, Boston is home to more museums, bars, music venues and educational institutions than any other nearby city. But it’s too proud of itself. Any city that talks a big talk raises expectations. And when I’m deciding whether a city meets my expectations, I always pull out my handy city yardstick: New York. And Boston, I’m afraid, is so not New York. Rhode Island, on the other hand, makes no claims. It is what it is. If you don’t like it, don’t come.

My girlfriend and I live in the first floor of a big old Victorian house on the city’s West Side. The West Side is what real estate agents would call “up and coming.” Our discomfort at being a force for gentrification notwithstanding, we love our neighborhood. At the Hudson Street Market, the neighborhood corner store, the owners are in a band and they know everyone by name. They’ll write your name on a New York Times for you and put it aside if you’re not going to be there early enough to snag one on Sunday. The neighborhood is built around a big park, and in the park is a dog run. There is no better way to get to know your neighbors than to hang out in the dog run. Well, sort of. We have a growing handful of fun, hipped-out places to hang out – restaurants, bars, and coffeeshops. We have old mill buildings which have been converted into loft space, galleries, and studios. We can bike to downtown in less than 10 minutes, and to most other neighborhoods within 20 minutes. And while the retail establishments haven’t settled quite as thickly as I hope they will one day– it’s a pain to walk from one to the other, for the most part – they are so much cooler than comparable places in other neighborhoods because everyone is so excited to be a part of the West Side. Some of the bars have teams in the neighborhood’s summer kickball league. When one of the restaurants needed extensive renovations to meet fire code, other bars and restaurants actually held fundraisers to help the owner back on his feet again. The West Side is a microcosm of the small-town feel that pervades the rest of the state.

I may have mentioned that I love cities. My girlfriend, on the other hand, loves the country. If it weren’t for me, she’d live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, delivering calves and riding horses. (Remember how I said I’d rather live in Brooklyn than anywhere else? Did you wonder why I don’t live there?) Providence is a nice compromise, because although our neighborhood feels relatively urban, we can be in the middle of nowhere in less than an hour. Rhode Island isn’t called the Ocean State for nothing.

We have over 400 miles of coastline which includes some of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen, and none is more than an hour away by car. On a summer day, we can drive down to one of Newport’s famed beaches, spend the day swimming and sunning, go to Flo’s Clam Shack for a fried shrimp dinner, for dessert stop by a farmstand which makes its own ice cream, and still be home by sunset. Much of the state is rural – half of its million residents live within the boundaries of its 6 cities, which means that outside of the city the population thins out considerably – so there are many places to go for scenic walks.

My favorite hiking guide is called “Walks and Rambles in Rhode Island,” and it’s true, we have more in the way of walks and rambles than we do in the way of hikes. (Our highest point is Jerimoth Hill, elevation 812 feet.) But the walks and rambles are beautiful. The North-South Trail runs the length of the western part of the state, starting at the Connecticut border and continuing through woods, past stone fences and rocky outcroppings, lakes and streams, and over old dirt roads all the way to the Massachusetts border (it’s only 40 miles, but still). In the fall, the leaves are magnificent, and in the winter, these same places are perfect spots to throw down your cross-country skis.

And so, we radiate Rhode Island pride. We have Providence posters in our apartment, Rhode Island sweatshirts, hats, and t-shirts. One of my favorites has a cartoon drawing of our illustrious ex-mayor. “Free Buddy,” it says. “Providence RI.” My best friend has a tattoo of the state seal. The state motto is “Hope,” but for a moment, she considered changing it to “Home.”

My girlfriend and I are moving next year. She has applied to medical school, and we’re waiting with bated breath to find out in what direction we’re going to be pointing the old U-Haul. She’s applied to several New York schools just for me, and while I’m thrilled about the possibility of finally living in the City, I think we’ll be back here before long.
My love for the Ocean State is more pure than my love for either New York or New Jersey. It’s not cool to live here the way it’s cool to live in New York. You don’t get any points for being from here. But unlike my love for New Jersey, I don’t love Rhode Island in defiance of its naysayers, either. I don’t love it because I need to overcompensate for those who don’t. I love it because it is what it is. Home.

MS.>National>XX-Rated Rockers

XX-Rated Rockers
Women Play It Loud at Ladies' Rock Camp

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Summer 2006

“Drums are supposed to be loud!” It’s the first day of Ladies Rock Camp, and the three of us in the beginning drum class are tapping timidly at our snare drums. Our instructor, Shawna, is trying to dissuade us from this un-rock-’n’-roll approach. “Go ahead and hit them!” she tells us. “Hard!”

Ladies Rock Camp (LRC) is the grown-up version of, and a fundraiser for, the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls (www.girlsrockcamp.org), a 5-year-old Portland-based nonprofit that seeks to enhance girls’ self-esteem through music. The girls attend for a full week each summer, but we ladies—38 women ranging in age from 24 to 61—had only a weekend in May to live out our rock-star fantasies.

After two hours of instrument instruction on Friday, it was time for band formation. Around the room hung signs naming musical genres: Indie Rock. Punk. Hip-Hop/Soul. We gravitated toward our genre of choice, then coalesced into bands. That is, everyone else did. As the lonely volunteer under the “Country” sign, I hoped fellow campers would know I was thinking of indie country-rocker Neko Case, not chart-topper Faith Hill. Finally, along came one kindred spirit, an aspiring bassist and fellow journalist, who suggested adding the prefix “alt-” to the sign. Then others found us: a pharmacist (guitar), database engineer (lead vocals) and software development engineer (guitar and drums). We called ourselves Dry County, and together wrote two songs with as many country images as we could muster: pickup trucks, whiskey, porches, mamas, dogs and railroad tracks.

“The story of women in rock ’n’ roll is a story of struggle,” singer-songwriter and Portland State University professor Sarah Dougher told us at a Saturday workshop. Witness, she said, Big Mama Thornton’s saucy, swinging 1953 version of Hound Dog,” then compare it to the rhythmically simpler, decidedly more vanilla rendition that made Elvis a household name three years later. “To say Elvis ‘stole’ Big Mama Thornton’s song is not correct,” said Dougher. To say Big Mama Thornton was the victim of racism and sexism in the music industry is correct.”

During the rest of the weekend, we practiced until our voices cracked and our arms ached. (“This blister,” said Becca, our bass player, holding her pointer finger aloft, “is a badge of honor!”) No matter that most of us had never picked up our instruments before Friday: On Sunday afternoon, Dry County and nine other camper bands performed original songs before a packed crowd at the Portland club Nocturnal. Between ticket and merchandise sales, camp tuition and camper donations, the weekend raised some $10,000 for the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls.

At the showcase, I met family members of my fellow campers. “Your wife rocks,” I told several. “Your mom rocks,” I told others. Whether we returned home as guitar aficionados or simply women who had learned to make some noise, that night we were rock stars, every one.