“You’re funny, keep it up”

May 11, 2020January 4, 2022 / Robin Robinson, LLC / 1 Comment

A memorial tribute to Jerry Stiller: 5/11/2020

In the years before Seinfeld, I was performing a strange little comedy off-off-Bway called “Erpingham Camp” by Joe Orton. In the cast was Amy Stiller, Jerry’s daughter. One night her entire family showed up in support of her. We met them all in the dressing rooms afterwards and Jerry graciously invited me along for drinks afterwards with one or two fellow actors, Amy, her mom Anne Meara and her brother Ben. Ben mostly glowered at the table until he left early. He had just achieved a bit of stardom on Broadway in “House of Blue Leaves” by John Guare and maybe he didn’t like sharing attention with his sister; or maybe he considered off-off-Bway actors too low rent to be seen in public with. Mom Anne Meara was a bit cold to me and I think she thought I was interested in her daughter (I was not) and was already giving me the once over. But I got to sit next to Jerry at a big round table and it was one of the great experiences of my career. He was expansive, animated, interested in everyone’s story (and every actor has an extended version of it) and genuinely excited to be with us.

I grew up watching the comedy team of “Stiller and Meara” on TV, watched their countless appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and other variety programs. Like Nichols and May (and before them Burns and Allen & Lucy and Desi), they were the vanguard of domestic comedy routines; where Nichols and May were intellectually ironic and biting, Stiller and Meara was closer to The Honeymooners, with working class domestic issues, a running gag of mis-interpretations and man/woman differences in POV. They were masters of timing, the double take, the frustrated long burn, but most importantly, progenitors of the form of comedy at that time, ala Borscht Belt: quick, to-the-point, a predictable arc that was always buttoned up at the end. Its how I learned the form.

Throughout the evening I questioned Jerry about the early days in Greenwich Village, sharing the stage with Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Lord Buckley, Bob Dylan and peers like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Woody Allen. They played the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal, Folk City on W. 4th, Top of the Gate down the street from it and other venues that are long gone from the scene. It was an exhilarating walk through the time period that drew me to New York and I was laughing and drinking with the royalty that spawned it. The world of comedy had gotten sharper and younger at this point and Stiller and Meara weren’t seen as often as they were just a few years ago, perhaps they were considered corny and old school by comparison to Robin Williams’, Carlin’s and Pryor’s edgy push of the envelopes. So they were in a middle zone, with Frank Costanza waiting in the wings to emerge in just a few short years.

Of course the evening always comes to an end. Anne warmed up a little but was anxious to usher Jerry out of there lest we eat up his entire night. As we said goodbye, he gave me a quick look and said, “you’re funny, keep it up”.
If you play golf, you know that there’s one stroke you do in 18 holes that’s so perfect in form and movement, so exhilarating in its accuracy that you keep coming back to try to repeat it. That was the effect of those 5 words for me. I remember that look, that handshake and those words like it was yesterday and it was the psychic food I needed to keep pursuing my craft and career. The next day, before the show, Amy winked at me and said, “Dad liked you”.
See ya, Jerry, and thanks.

My Last Facebook Post: 12/31/17

December 31, 2017December 31, 2017 / Robin Robinson, LLC / Leave a comment

This is the last ride out. Its said that the chronometer, or the modern clock, was invented by ancient monks to keep track of their prayer cycle. Before that, the earth made its way around the sun as it spun on its own axis and ancient observers broke the long arc of life into years and days. The Greeks tracked the sun’s shadows and the Romans split the shadows into quarters, but throughout, time was fungible. It was manipulated around our human activities whether they be legal, cultural or social. In effect, we controlled what time did to our lives. But the monks changed that: as time became trackable, as the quarters were dissected down to hours and minutes and seconds, time became secular, agnostic and in a very real way, in control of us.

Chronos contemplating your destruction

As humans, we are split between living our lives in kairos time or chronos time. Inevitably, chronos time is imposed upon us or mostly, we impose it upon ourselves. We are pushed and punished and rewarded by the chronometer, we look back at the chapters of our own chronology and make assessments on our worth and invite others to join in: at this point I did this, at that point I did that. We impose deadlines, mark appointments and coordinate our calendars in an effort to meet expections determined or undetermined, expecting reward or fearing punishment for the slightest adherence or disobedience to the artificiality of it. But it is for naught. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare says: “time hath, my lord, a wallet at its back, wherein he puts alms for oblivion, a great sized monster of ingratitudes. Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour’d as fast as they are made, forgot as soon as done.” pink-floyd-dark-side-of-the-moon Hundreds of years later, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd at the tender age of 29 writes preciently: “…you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find, 10 years has got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.” And we run and we run to catch up with the sun but its sinking. Certainly John Lennon understood this futility when he said, “Life is what happens to you while you were making other plans”. Chronos time is road rage and impatience with others: you’ve interrupted my race with the clock and you are now my enemy.

The other part of time then is kairos time. This is the ancient time, the time of the Jews and early Christians, the time of the ancient Chinese lords, the Vedic shaman and sub-Saharan tribes. It is the time that is fashionably being recreated amongst the cognoscente as “mindfullness” (which in reality is a great business plan to separate people from their money by teaching them to sit still). But it is not that. Kairos is the space of time where lovers gaze, where mother and child become one, where you can hear your own heartbeat and in that, your own destiny. It is your silent vigil during the agony of a friend’s loss or your constantcy next to a loved one’s triumphful moment. It is the contemplation of your own mortality as a strategy for being alive. As Jerzy Kosinski knew of Chance the gardner, it is simply “Being There”, whether its sitting in the car with your child next to you or actively participating in play with your friends. Children live in kairos time because kairos makes the most out of the time that we are in: not the minute that just passed, not the day that is to come, but that exact moment we are living in, not peeking away at a smartphone, not responding to a bell, not allowing a gnat’s distraction to interrupt a meaningful conversation. Kairos time is its own reward, it doesn’t need likes or stars or the glowing embers of someone else’s clock. Actors are trained to “be in the moment”, open and receptive to immediate stimuli that allows them to respond in an appropriate way to find their way to a truth. If not, they’re caught “faking it”. An athlete must live in kairos or else she will falter. August | 2012

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden spends hours dragging driftwood logs into position on a beach in a seemingly futile action until: “What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatu-long and the thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he’d created himself. One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.”

Personally, I need to reclaim the kairos in my life and to better understand the work that goes into living and appreciating those perfect moments. I always tried to live in the balance, but to be honest the last few years in the face of social media have been too much, not only for me, but for those I’ve seen and heard around me. I believe with everything that’s in me that there is little inherent value in Facebook or Twitter on a personal level, but I’ve allowed myself to succumb to the mythology created by a 23-year old nerdy kid who just wanted to score with girls, I’ve let him convince me that I should sell him my soul to do so. I bought into it.

But now as I prepare to go through the pangs and spasms of withdrawal, I’ll invite you to do the same. There’s value in finding ways to communicate and keeping abreast of each other’s lives, but in reality, I don’t really deserve to have 1,335 friends. I’ve done nothing to earn that friendship other than to post some witty sayings, re-post NYT articles and rant about things I dislike. I’m a person who has always believed in the value and beauty of people, but Facebook especially has showed me sides I wish to no longer view as it has weakened my love for you all. There is a place in business for FB and other social media and I have to navigate that as best as possible, but from a personal level, I believe its more destructive than positive.

So, this is the last FB farewell, at the peak of the sun on the last day of the year. May your next chronological trip around the the glowing ball be filled with kairos; that you gather and fill as many perfect moments as possible and that each of those moments are shared with those who enhance your life. As William Saroyan instructs us, “In the time of your life, live — so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it”.

I am Jughead; We are Jughead

November 23, 2017November 28, 2024 / Robin Robinson, LLC / Leave a comment

Thanksgiving Day, somewhere in the mid-1980s: Making a living as an actor in NYC during the time of Andrew Lloyd Webber is a daunting task, especially if you’re gawky looking and not much of a song-and-dance man. Other than the actual living you’re making as a waiter/bartender/cabbie, you take some interesting side jobs just to keep your acting chops sharp.

I fell into a circuit of party performers, folks in and out of show-biz who hit on the private/corporate party circuit during the time of Wall Street’s crazy years. We would take on personas and make crazy costumes and perform all manner of carny tricks – fortune telling, fire eating, tightrope walking, juggling – at bar mitzvahs, sales meetings, corporate holiday parties, you name it. We were paid crazy amounts of cash and many of the performers abandoned their “legit” pursuits of acting and jumped into this area full time. Not me, I was trying to keep my purity. But money is money and the rent is always due.

So I got a call from a guy from the circuit the week before Thanksgiving who said that he had the rights to the Archie Gang of Riverdale and they typically march in the Macy’s Parade, but this year, neither his Jughead or Reggie could make it and was I interested in being Jughead? Ok, I’m curious, am I holding one of the balloons? Am I doing something like the Renaissance Festival and interacting with the crowds? I had just scored a good agent and we’re trying to put a career together, I don’t want to jeopardize my chance to play Hamlet for Joe Papp by bouncing down Broadway dressed up like, well…Jughead. But I found we’d be wearing these huge rubber heads of the characters and dressed similarly as them: Archie would have a pullover sweater with an “R” on the front (for Riverdale). And he had a sweater for me to wear, Jughead’s signature long-sleeve grey pull over mounted with a big “S” (for Stupid?). We’d be joined by Betty and Veronica and all we had to do is walk in line with each other the entire length of the parade route and wave to the crowd. The money was right, cash at the end of the parade, and no one knows that its me? I’ve been following this group of teen sensations since I learned to read. Hell yeah, I’m gonna march in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, bitches! I AM JUGHEAD.

Like any good actor, I do my prep work and research. I stopped by the local bodega and picked up a couple Archie comic books, carefully scanning them first to make sure Jughead had a healthy role in each (Reggie had a way of taking over in those days) and spent a few hours understanding Jughead: besides eating, what did he like? What was his upbringing, did he have siblings? Did he really not like Ethel or was he just playing her? What was his relationship to his father? Was that slouch because of his personality or was it a physical limitation? An actor needs to know these things if he is to really be that character. Also, I had done a fair amount of mask and mime work in commedia dell’ arte, clowning and Greek drama, so wearing a face covering was a different form of performance, much more about matching the body to the limitations of the mask in a more physically demanding style. Like any acting job, I’m both excited and nervous the night before and make a few quick calls to family and friends to alert them to watch before resting up.

I arrive on Columbus and 96th about 7:30 that morning and its a party, hundreds and hundreds of musicians, dancers, marchers, balloon wranglers stretching over to Central Park West where the parade route begins. I’m wearing a pair of Chuck Taylors on my feet and black jeans and I’m introduced to “Betty” and “Veronica”, each dressed in their doppelganger’s signature style, and “Archie” has those crazy orange plaid pants on. Apparently, he couldn’t cop a Reggie this late in the game, so its going to be just the four of us. Archie is really Bill, the owner of the rights to the costume heads. I met Bill a few times on the circuit, he’s an okay guy, not much of a personality and, I found out later, not actually a performer. He was a business guy, saw all of this party stuff as a business opportunity: he had others make the costumes and sometimes perform in them, and he would “perform” at events that he wanted to monitor. Which explained his lackluster approach to whatever he did, truly an uninspiring guy. But right now, he’s my boss and he’s my best friend Archie and he huddles us around him prior to the start with the rules: “Listen, we keep together in a line, Jughead and Betty on the outside, Veronica and me on the inside. We make sure we stay right behind the marching band in front of us. All we do is wave, just walk and wave. We can’t talk to each other, you won’t be able to hear, so don’t try to talk to each other. Do not take off the head, you have to keep it on no matter what, so don’t sneeze. When we get past Macy’s, make a right on 32nd street and then we can take them off. When I get them back into the plastic bag, I’ll give you each a check.”

I was staring deep into Jughead’s big rubber eyes. The mask and mime work I did taught me to understand the silent “voice” behind the mask, and that voice becomes the sound coming from the rest of your body. The mask will tell you how you are to move, how to interact, whether or not you’re shy or outward, healthy or ill. Be the mask. Be Jughead. Jughead has a look about him of sincere and permanent “whatever”. He fears nothing because he is above mere human travails. Jughead is beyond irony and has little interest in what you say about him. Jughead knows everything is going to work out in the end. Jughead is the epitome of cool. I am Jughead.

We mount them up, get used to the hollow emptiness of our voices inside, and line up behind the Watchung High School Marching Band and Drum Corp. The great balloons of Macy’s parades are silently floating above our heads, tethered down by their human guides, silently waiting. Bands are tuned up and making last minute head gear adjustments, flags are being positioned just right. At precisely 9:00 am, the Master of Ceremonies, dressed like P.T. Barnum, blows his whistle. The bands begin to play and the long train of Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade begins its march down Central Park West toward its flagship store on 34th Street. I’m excited as hell.

It all goes pretty smoothly for the first few blocks, except Archie wants us all to hold hands as we walk and I’m not excited about that. Nothing I know about Jughead says he’s holding anyone’s hand and so after a few blocks I sort of casually lose connection with Archie and I can see Veronica’s done the same thing. Jughead is an absolute independent, dude, Jughead’s his own man, he does not hold hands. The crowd’s are excited to see us in the upper stretches of the Nineties and Eighties and as we get closer to Columbus Circle, I can see ahead of me the enormity of what this parade is about: even through the rubber head, I can hear the cheering and shouts of the crowd as each of the balloons passes by. Now I’m kicking into full Jughead mode and have adopted his signature lean back. I cock my head to the left and wave at the crowd, they respond back with cheers. I walk a little further, cock my head again to the crowd with a wave, and they respond in kind. I have made the connection, I know where Jughead lives: Jughead is a man of the people. The people love Jughead and Jughead loves them back.

Around 75th Street, I get a touch on my right arm. “Don’t do that”, says Archie in a small but strained voice rolling around in a big rubber dome.
“Don’t do what?”
“That, don’t do that. That walk. That’s not Jughead.”
“You’re kidding me right?”
“No, I’m not, don’t do that, that’s not Jughead.”

Alright, so this is screwed up. I’m marching down a Manhattan street in the biggest event of the year wearing a rubber head and the guy next to me says I’m not doing it correctly. I want to be a good cast member and he’s the one paying me, so for a few blocks through Columbus Circle around to Broadway, I play it straight, just walk and wave. But this is bullshit because the people are crying out for us: “hey Archie! Hey Jughead, Jughead, hey, hey!” And all they’re getting back from us is a limp wave, and actually this is becoming terrifically boring: walk, stop, wave, wait, walk some more, wave, stop, wave, wait. What the fuck. We’re heading down Broadway and the crowds are going crazy, the street is narrower and they’re packed 10 deep on top of each other, hanging out of windows, on balconies. They want us and I can’t help but to respond. I resume my non-chalant strut and head-turn-wave and the crowds are responding to it, big time. Now there’s a whole cheering group at 52nd chanting “Jughead, Jughead” over and over, so not only do I give the signature move, but I break ranks and strut over to them. The crowd comes alive, Jughead’s here, and I’m high-fiving the front row as we move forward. People are getting out of their lawn chairs to greet me and I’ve got little kids pressing their candy into my hands. Jughead is real, Jughead is their friend and they love him.

I get back into formation and Archie is furious. “Hey, what did I say back there? Cut it out, cut this shit out, stay here with us. You’re doing it wrong, quit doing that”.

But I know Archie is wrong and that’s a tough thing to admit. Archie is never wrong, Archie’s the hero, he’s my best friend and this is an existential crisis I’m having. Archie’s paying me. So I ignore him. And I keep being the only Jughead I know how to be, mixing with the crowds, high-fiving and slouching down Broadway.

By the time we hit Times Square, Archie is accomplishing the preposterous: his big rubber head is marching down Broadway with a big goofy Archie grin and a big wave but inside he’s screaming at me: “you mutherfucker, cut it out, cut it out, you fucker” all the while with his tiny little wave and his ridiculous little Archie-steps on the pavement. Betty and Veronica, having seen this for decades at Pop’s Malt Shop, know how to side-step this and stay tuned to the right side of the square and the crowds there, always keeping within the Betty and Veronica boundaries that were assigned to them. And this is the way it goes all the way down till about 39th Street where Archie is still screaming at me through his hollow rubber dome and finally I stop and yell back: “Fuck you, I’ve done Euripedes and Shakespeare, mother fucker, I’m pretty fucking sure I can fucking do Jughead”. And the crowds love Jughead.

Finally, we get to the end of the parade, turn onto 32nd Street out of the view of the crowds. Bill rips off his Archie head and starts into me. But now, I’m not just Jughead, I am the Zen of Jughead. I keep the head on, slouch back with that cavalier, devil-may-care look on my rubber face, and just allow him to yell. Its actually a beautiful scene, this mere mortal screaming red-faced at a guy in a rubber jug head. “Give me back my head” he screams. I don’t move. “Give me the fucking head”, he screams louder. I respond back: “give me my money”. He starts in again and I have to get close for him to hear, so Jughead leans in: “give me my fucking money or you don’t get your jug head back. Hand it over to Betty”. So he pulls it out of an envelope, hands it to Betty and I gently part from my dear, dear persona who’ve I’ve grown so attached to. Betty hands me the money, I hand the rubber head over to Bill, and we go our separate ways.

But I looked back as Bill was puffing furiously as he is stuffing the mask into the bag, for one last look at my new pal. And Jughead winked.

Happy Thanksgiving. We are all Jughead.

Go to the mattress and get the sale

October 12, 2017June 25, 2023 / Robin Robinson, LLC / Leave a comment

In the middle of my acting career, I took two years out and committed to learning a new technique (for me) named after its founder, Sanford Meisner. He, along with Lee Strassberg and Stella Adler, studied with the Russian genius Stanislavski, the father of modern acting, and returned to train 2 generations of American actors that changed the art form forever.

During my 2-year stint, I was not allowed to pursue any work in the industry: no films, plays, commercials, voice overs, nothing. It was harsh but they demanded the commitment from you. Robert Duvall called his time learning the technique “worse than my time in the Korean War” because it is emotionally brutal. It is brutal in that it does not allow the bullshit tricks and shortcuts that actors fall into during their career, things that got them work in the past; things they’re known for in the industry; little bits of business they use over and over again: the eyebrow raise, the cocked smile, the walk or strut. It had one goal, emotional truth, played truthfully in the moment from your own imagination. You learn to listen actively, be in the moment and serve the script and your fellow players.

In the first year you never work with a script; for an actor, this is madness. It’s nothing but exercises designed to strip you of your ego, to strip you of your pride and strip you of any falsity you may harbor: all the enemy of truth. These are exercises based on repetition: 2 students facing each other, and one repeating what the other one says. Its madness and that was the point. The repetitions were designed to evoke a true response from you: not one you think might work, not one that seemed funny or dramatic (indeed, there was no “acting” going on at all here), but what was true based on your response to your partner. It was always 2 things: frustration and anger. One quarter of the class dropped out in the first year and in the commission of the exercises, you could tell who would be next: the ones who actively resisted, the ones who put up the walls, that clung tight to a reverie of themselves in the past, that tried to pull out their safety net of tricks. One by one, we all got called on it and it infuriated us, it made no sense why we were being castigated and harangued by our teacher. It was humiliating because each one of us was being stripped down to our emotional core in front of the entire class, we were being called on our bullshit, our insincerity, our falseness, our ruses that we all use in our everyday life to shield us from the harshness of it. There’s no place for that in the theatre, in the service of a character you may play. There is only truth. We would have rather shown up disrobed and naked (which happened a few times) than to be robbed of the persona mask we wore as protection and have the real us shown glaring in a spotlight. And yet that was what the work demanded. Our fragility was being exposed, each one different than the other. We, the class as a whole and guided by our teacher, came face to face with each other’s weaknesses, neuroses and secrets.

And here’s the secret you learn, the one you take with you your whole life after its reve

aled: that when you get stripped of the layers of sophistication that you adopt to hide your insecurities, you get angry, very, very angry, sometimes a rage. Its the first line of defense, the first impulse, its very primal, the engagement of fight/flight at a higher level. I’ve seen nuclear bursts of rage coming from the tiniest of people that made me frightened in that moment: it was real, it was enormous and it was locked inside them their entire lives before this exercise released it. Its why there is a mattress hanging on the wall of every Meisner studio in the country, because in the course of the exercises when that anger got so big and had to be exorcised, the teacher would yell, “go to the mattress” and you would leap at it flailing, crying, screaming, pounding and kicking until the anger was purged like a toxin from your blood. Then you would return to your partner and continue the exercise. And what happened in that moment, over and over, with each person in their own unique way, was why I was committed to being an actor, to pursuing art in this form for what I thought would be the rest of my life. You saw an almost transcendent human transformation happen in front of your eyes. With the anger purged, the emotional truth of that person was revealed, and I’m not kidding, as if it came down from heaven. You saw into that person’s soul, in the context of this repetitive dialogue, and you could not believe it transpired in front of you. It was scary, sexy and huge, it attracted us like flies to sugar in that we all wanted it, we all wanted what we saw to happen to us. So we came back day after day, week after week, filled with the homework assigned to us, ready to go to the mattress for our art. I did not go to war like Duvall did, but I have a sense of what he was talking about. At the end of 2 years, I was forever changed as an artist. And not surprisingly, its when I began to actually make a living at it.

I teach sales techniques to spirits industry salespeople and brand narratives to small brands. I’m bringing a lifetime of content mastery and methodologies I learned through 3 different businesses: acting, technology and liquor. But what I’m really doing is a modified Meisner technique. Sales is difficult, its one of the most demanding careers anyone can pursue, and as a result, its easy to fall into a host of tiny traps that prevent you from growth that end up as a barrier to sales. What I’m hoping to do is challenge each person to purge those habits from themselves, to re-educate themselves as to what the customer and the brand may need, and in turn, what they may need. With the narrative work, I’m hoping to strip away the ego from the entrepreneur to get to that transcendent light inside their brand, the unique glow that separates it from other similar ones on the shelf. They have to commit to some time with me to do it, but I think it pays off for them.

Let me know if you have any leads: robin@robinrobinsonllc.com

Bodega Stories

September 14, 2017September 14, 2017 / Robin Robinson, LLC / 1 Comment

bodega-paul-small There’s a rush of righteous verdicts around an absolutely horrendous idea, concocted by 2 Google-twits, to replace real neighborhood bodegas around the country with automated kiosks filled with limited and generic items. Its a bad idea from every angle, not least of which is that bodegas are the heart of the neighborhoods they find themselves in, filled with stories like this:

I was living on Grand Street in the Lower East Side of New York City at a time before it became fashionably hip and was still filled with the dark dangers of a city knocked off its center and careening like a broken top. The bodega around the corner on Eldridge St. was the only light on, the only oasis that served up cuchifritos, beer, mystery meat sandwiches and “loosies” until 11pm. After dark, the streets were deserted except for the sea of girls that appeared to ply their trade on the corners and the flotilla of New Jersey licence plates that circled them like sharks drunk on chum. And yeah, the shop had a cat, maybe a few of them. When its the neighborhood shop, they get to know their customers, their habits and their likes. Mine was cheap, bad food, ice cream, cigarettes and beer at the time, and they had plenty of all of it: Coke and Twinkies and ice cream sandwiches and Budweiser chilling next to the Colt 45s, and the guys behind the counter could almost have the change ready when I walked in, I was so regular and consistent in what I bought late at night. Most of the street girls knew I was local and we had a silent agreement that I wasn’t “dating”, so we would glide easily past each other in the aisles, each aware of the other’s presence while looking for a quick sugar or carbo fix before resuming our everyday cadences on the other side of the doorway.

I was trying to quit smoking cigarettes so I decided to go the “loosies” route, hoping that the trouble and time it took me to get dressed, go downstairs and around the corner to buy a single Newport for a dime apiece (they were always Newports and I hated menthols) would be enough to deter me and break the habit. Consequently, I visited my neighborhood bodega 5 or 6 times a day in my futile quest.

I’m in there one night and there’s two guys, a little tough looking, standing at the counter talking to the owner behind it in a semi-serious tone. They notice my nod to him, my trip around the aisles looking for nothing in particular and then my approach to the counter. “I’ll take 2 tonight” and he knocks two Newports out of the bottom of the pack, where, for some reason, he would always rip a hole right through the cellophane and foil instead of opening it at the top. On my way out, one of two speaks to me.

“Hey, you live around here, right?” This doesn’t sound good already and I’m on the defense.

“Yeah. So?” A quick glance to the owner to get my bearings on this and determine my next move. And then the guy pulls his badge from under his shirt, mounted on a leather back and hanging from a chain around his neck. He’s undercover NYPD and he’s on the job.

“So, we got a guy that’s doing bad stuff around the area, holding up bodegas, messing with the girls, bad stuff.” I’m stopped cold and thinking things like ‘did I change my underwear’, ‘do my roommates know where I’m at’ and ‘do I even know a lawyer?’

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, we think we have him, he’s at the station house. He was robbing a store nearby. And we have an eyewitness. We need to put him in a lineup to make sure he’s the guy”.

“Oh, yeah? So?” Because I’m so articulate when confronted with the possibility of jail time.

“Yeah, well, you kind of fit his description a little, he’s got bushy hair, he’s tall. So we were wondering, would you be interested in being in on the lineup so we can pin him. Don’t worry, it ain’t you, we got the guy, but we need to do this for the witness to make it stick. We’ll give you five bucks”.

Suddenly, its a whole new ballgame and I light up. I’m an experiential person, I like cop shows on TV, I’ve never been inside the deep end of a police station, all kinds of possibilities are open. And this cop could be Serpico! And yeah, five bucks, I’m a broke-ass actor in New York, subway tokens are still only 35 cents and a slice of pizza is a buck twenty-five at Ray’s. This has some legs. “Oh yeah? That sounds pretty cool, what do I have to do?” And before you know it, I’m in the back seat of the unmarked car out front on my way down to the 5th Precinct on Mott Street in Chinatown.

Its all amiable chatter with the cops, my new best friends, and we head upstairs to where the booking rooms are and I’m looking around thinking, “fuck, this is real live Barney-fucking-Miller in here”. There’s a guy that looks like Abe Vigoda hanging around the water cooler, there’s coffee-stained cups on a table with packets of sugar lost in a white spray of spilled CoffeeMate next to them. The walls are a dingy sea-foam green, there’s the smell of mustiness hanging from every chair merged with old coffee grounds and cigarette smoke and a sense of languid restlessness on the faces of every cop in the station. I’m an actor: this is paydirt!

More small talk, I make a joke, one cop chuckles and I’m joined by other “volunteers” who kind of amble in with other cops over a period of 30 minutes and the truth is, we don’t look anything like each other, I mean one guy was short and blond! But one of these guys is “the guy”, I’m thinking, and there’s a sudden rush of sanity that flows out of my ears for the first time: “what the fuck was I thinking?” This could end up being some bullshit, New York at that time was a weird place, I have no idea what they could know about me and I have an big audition in 2 days…

police lineup When we’re all assembled, we walk into some narrow little room with only enough room for us to sit on small stools like we’re taking a crap (“what, we’re not standing? and where’s the lines on the back wall?”) and for fuck’s sake, I could be sitting next to “the guy” and I don’t see handcuffs on anyone and what the fuck is going on here? But there’s the glass panel in front of us (with Jerry Orbach or Richard Belzer or Dennis Franz behind it) and we stare dumbly at it like we don’t really know what’s going on, but in the tradition of all lineups, no smiling, please. And then we get up and leave.

All of us “volunteers” are kind of hanging around, looking around at the walls, trying to stay out of everyone’s way as the rhythm of the station keeps in time as if we weren’t there. But we all want our five bucks. We ask some “procedural questions” that we learned on TV much to the annoyance of the real police we’re talking to and its all pretty much boring and listless and we want to go home and we’re afraid we’re going to get stiffed. But one of the cops comes up with an envelope and hands us either crumpled fives or a handful of ones and a low-moan “thanks” and we’re on our way out to the street.

The next night at the bodega I come in for my fix of two Newports. The owner’s behind the counter, taps two out of the bottom, takes a quarter, gives me back a nickel, shakes his head and says, “you crazy, man”.

#bodegastories

Not all statues are made the same

August 19, 2017June 23, 2023 / Robin Robinson, LLC / 3 Comments

photo posted on post-gazette.com — “Hunky Steelworker” Luis Jimenez, 1990

I come from a small steel town in western Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh who’s very name conjures up the history of steel in America: Homestead. A plot of land on the Monongahela River that was home to a glass factory but grew a facility owned by a poor immigrant, Andrew Carnegie, managed by a wealthy elitist, Henry Clay Frick, and eventually transformed into US Steel by an emperor, J.P. Morgan. Every time I see pictures in books of WWII Navy Destroyers or mid-century Buicks and Chevys; or look up at the Empire State Building or glimpse the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, I see the steel that came from my hometown. The first graphic picture I remember is a circle containing the letters “USS” that evolved into the three star symbol that adorns the helmets of my beloved Steelers and was on the mill gates I passed every day on my bike. I inhaled the smoke from those smokestacks that produced it, briefly worked in the belly of the beast that churned it and grew up in a time that benefited from it. For a while the Homestead Works was the largest steel making facility in the world and it was also the site of one of the most significant labor strikes in history in 1892. We knew a lot about steel in Homestead. We knew a lot about rich guys in Homestead and we knew a lot about being star-struck and let down by them as well.

In my family, I was the kid that showed promise, that read early and often, that had the dazzling vocabulary and wit not typical of the mill household. I had interests in art and music and the science that sent men to the moon and my Dad once told me, “you ain’t going into the mill with the rest of those hunks”. And by “hunks”, he didn’t mean centerfolds with six-packs and dreamy eyes. He meant “mill hunky” a term of derision so vile it could provoke a saloon fight. My mother re-iterated the same thing: “you’re not going to be a mill hunky, you’re going to college and become someone important”.

Mill hunky. Chances are you never heard this word but I heard it a million times. While the mill hunkies built the industry, they were forever castigated as the ruffians and underclass, the unwashed hordes that landed on the banks of the Mon’ and forever changed America. They were the vast majority of workers in the mills – in Homestead, South Side, McKeesport, Rankin, Braddock, Duquesne, and Clairton – that were recruited from the declining Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires of Europe during the early years of steelworking in America. Andrew Carnegie first established a meritocracy of artisans to create steel from pig iron and coke in the 1880s, pulling them from the Northern European countries of England, Scotland, Wales and Germany. They looked like and for the most part acted like him, a native Scot. But as steel making progressed -from the old open hearth Bessemer furnaces of the 19th century to the blast furnaces of the early 20th -it became more complex and steel became more in demand. More workers were needed to fill in the heavy labor jobs that these new “artisans” now felt were beneath them: ditch digging, flume-cleaning and the hundreds of other dirty and dangerous jobs that attended the manufacturing process. So Frick opened the mill up to immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe that were fleeing the region in the throes of political and cultural upheaval, areas we now know as Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Macedonia, Turkey and Syria. Their names ended in “-ski”, and “-vitch” and “-stan” and “-ko”, and all manner of strange spellings with too many consonants and not enough vowels. These men would be recruited as a cheap labor force and would fill in the labor pool of a now expanding steel empire, while at the same time undercut the growing union movement spurred by the existing “white” workers. These new immigrants were mostly illiterate, unschooled and backwards rural dwellers, many of them brown and tawny castoffs looking for a better life in a promised land. The Austro-Hungarian empire was the largest area of recruitment, so they and their families were all thought to be “Hungarian”, with their strange languages, odd foods and clothing and bizarre cultural rituals, dances and religions. It wasn’t long until “those Hungarians” who cleaned the scrap pits, dug the ditches, worked for low wages, who lived low and bred like rabbits in the tenement flatlands next to the expanding mill became objects of derision, defamation and fear. Those Hungarians soon became “those hunkys” and the class-divide in working class Pittsburgh now had a vocabulary, imagery and social order that fit in with the rest of America in the denigration of “the other”. The “mill hunky” was born.

The events that led up to the Homestead Strike pull all this together. Carnegie’s steel making artisans were getting increasingly frustrated with the 24/7 schedule demands of Frick (Carnegie at this point became an absentee landlord and spent most of his time hunting pheasant in Scotland) and had pressed for guild organization. They had joined forces with these “hunkys” to gain a larger force to aid in negotiations for these trade unions, and in 2 separate instances, had prevailed in winning better conditions and wages. But it all came to a head when Frick countered to use these new immigrants as a wedge to shut down negotiations. He followed this with an attempt to lock the workers out of the mill and bring in hired Pinkerton security goons to take it over in the dead of night.

These actions caused the events of July 6, 1892. The townspeople and workers learned of the plan to float the guards up the Monongahela River in the middle of the night to effect the takeover and instead met them on the banks, and the next 12 hours were a barrage of gunshots and rioting. The Pennsylvania militia was eventually called in to put down the “rebellion”, and the unions were banished from the American labor landscape for the next 40 years. But the role of the “hunky” was burnished as a divisive group that, while being caught in the middle, were blamed for the poor fortunes of workers from that time on.

As the decades of the 20th century rolled into the second world war with the wartime expansion of the mill, the hunky became institutionalized. They mixed uneasily at first with the rural blacks of the Great Migration of the 1920s and then settled into a grudging respect as the economy grew enough to provide all of them with meat on their tables. All through this time their understanding of second class status was also embedded in their psyches and by the time I was born the word hunky could cause a fist fight and break open old wounds. It was always delivered behind someone’s back like a curse, with a curled lip and twisted face, while at the same time it inspired camaraderie among those who wore it. In some ways, it was as bad or worse than the “n” word, and I often heard older black men curse each other with it. Like the black man, the hunky occupied a solid place in the economic fortunes of Pittsburgh while at the same time brought a strange cultural identity that integrated itself in similar ways. At one point in time in the 60s and 70s, before the industry fell in on itself, there was a brief convergence, where we all danced to Motown, ate pierogies and dressed like Ziggy Stardust; and affected the latest Afro-inspired clothing while dancing to “Roll Out the Barrel” in 3/4 time. At the same time we felt these were both somehow forbidden in mixed adult company.

The mills all but closed down in the eighties because of collusion between management and unions: both of them fattened by the pre and post-war building boom, failed to upgrade the technology and the processes to keep them competitive. After WWII, America rebuilt the Japanese and German mills with the latest in both and ironically they put us out of business. Many of the once bustling towns along the river fell into the ruin that they find themselves in today: Homestead, Munhall, Braddock, Rankin are all a mix of uneasiness, despair and methadone. The mills of Homestead are the one bright spot and the miles of river flatland where blast furnaces once prevailed have been replaced by an upbeat mix of retail, commercial, entertainment and residential development. They catch bass in the same rivers that were once a parent’s caution for skin rashes and dissolved flesh if you touched it. Pittsburgh as a whole has shown the world what vision and commitment from the duality of government and private industry can build and is surprising us daily with its technological innovation, cultural savvy and educational leadership.

The word hunky has now softened to a kind of self-referential badge of honor, a way to memorialize and honor your immigrant roots and the sacrifices of your forebearers. Pittsburgher’s all wear that badge in the same way we all wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. In Pittsburgh, everyone’s a hunky in the same way that we’re all Yinzers, eat Primantis and bleed black and yellow during the fall while waving a Terrible Towel above our heads.

Except one time. In 1990 the commissioners of Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Arts Festival had commissioned a statue to commemorate the city’s place in the industrial history of America. The winning proposal was from Mexican-American sculptor Luis Jimenez. Everyone was excited about its unveiling on the first day of the festival. When the tarp was pulled from the 15 foot tall full-body statue of a steelworker, in full steel-making garb, the audience was thrilled with power it conveyed. Then they noticed the title: “The Hunky-Steel Worker”. The whole town erupted into arguments and meetings, and reluctantly, after a year of litigation, the word “hunky” was ground off the base of the statue and the statue itself was eventually moved to its current location on the U of Mass campus in Boston.

This was one case where they should have kept it.

Things Lost

October 2, 2016September 11, 2021 / Robin Robinson, LLC / Leave a comment

On 9/11.

Just to show you what kind of a weird day it was, a day full of contradictions in the ether of the unreal, the tragic and the absurd: my sales team was looking to close a $1.2M technology deal with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter that morning at 9:30am at their offices on 50th and 8^th Avenue. Myself, my regional and national sales VPs and 2 partners from an allied technology in from Baltimore had gathered in New York City to make this happen. We stayed overnight at the Sheraton on Broadway to finalize our close strategy and button up our final presentation. Early that morning, we were having breakfast in the lobby restaurant when Andy got a call on his cell phone from his wife about an airplane that hit the World Trade Center. In our minds it was a weird event, maybe a Piper Cub that got lost (“didn’t something like that happen with the Empire State Building back in the ‘30s”?), but we were engrossed in the discussion of the upcoming meeting. Suddenly, around us, other phones were ringing and looks of concern grew on the faces that answered them. Neither the restaurant nor lobby had TVs mounted. We paid the bill and were getting ready to walk over to the offices when utterances, phrases and words started to erupt from diners about “explosion”, “huge fireball”, “terror”. Then my wife called, watching it all on TV and relating it over my phone, which in those days, was just a phone. She was upset and scared and worried.

We’re standing in the lobby of the Sheraton by the revolving door and it looks like any other day in the life of New York City: people making mad dashes, tipping doormen, catching cabs, conversing in groups, paying the bill, laughing, etc. We realize something of importance and tragic significance has happened downtown but we have no idea what, there is no TV, no newsfeeds, but we’re all on phones getting different stories from the other end. It’s around 9:15 and it’s a 5 minute walk and another 5 through the building to the 37th floor and a signed contract and time started to move very slow as we stood there, each of us pondering the same question in our minds as we felt the pressure of the tick of the clock and the enervating pulse of the conversations, growing looks of panic and increasingly rapid movements of those around us. We paused briefly, which was an odd thing to do for 5 sales guys on the way to close a deal. Finally, Kevin, our national sales VP, broke the silence, turns to me and asks the worst question possible: “Robin, it’s your deal. What do we do?”

Snapped out of my own paralysis I suddenly realized what was at stake: we worked for a tiny technology startup out of Mountainview, CA, a company like many others that needed every single revenue source; I was the sole Eastern Region Account Executive and I guided this highly complex deal from its inception from a hot lead and through 3 competitors over 10 months to emerge with favored vendor status, which meant that we survived the competition and only pricing and services stood in the way of victory, two items we were clearly ready to be creative with; that this was Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and the prestige behind this win was huge beyond belief for the company; that I was about to be lauded as a superstar because of the way I brought the business in, not to mention the financial remuneration behind this for me; that I had my good friend, Andy who was my immediate boss, here with his good friend Kevin, who we all reported to and who ran sales for the company; that he, in turn, brought in the 2 partner guys from Baltimore as our aces in the hole; that I had just lost another large deal a few months before that hurt me and the company; that we all needed this win.

“We’re going”, I said, and we took our briefcases, suits and ties through the revolving door, out into the clear, warm and bright sunny morning of September 11, 2001 and crossed Broadway towards Eighth Avenue to do business.

In the crosswalk over the avenue, one of the partners from Baltimore, increasingly agitated about being out in the streets, was asking me, “what are we going to say, what are we going to do there”? Everyone listened in and I stopped. “I don’t know what we’re going to say, I don’t know what we’re going to do; we’re just going to go there.” Andy jumped in: “We have no idea what their state of mind is, what their expectations are. We know we have a plan, we’re going to go in with that”. And that broke open the silence and then the plans started to emerge as we walked, the strategies and tactics and contingencies and all the reasons why this deal should go through, and we pumped ourselves with confidence. Traffic coming down 7^th Avenue was heavy as usual with Yellow Cabs, thousands of people crossing the street, clogging the sidewalk, vendors with their kiosks and carts gabbing with customers. It was suddenly normal, another day as we rode up the elevator to meet our Morgan Stanley contact, Stephen.

In the upstairs lobby we saw Eddie the guard, with whom we had fashioned a casual friendship during our many visits to the office. Eddie looked at us, stone faced and asked “what can I do for you?” in a stone dead voice. The first sense of dread started to flow. “We’re here to see Stephen, we have a 9:30”. We never had to go through this formality before, it was weird and awkward. I used to show up, Eddie would smile or at least recognize me and just say ‘have a seat, I’ll call him”; sometimes we would pass the moments with idle chat and there was always a smile with the goodbye as I left after a meeting. “Does he know you’re coming”? “Well, yes…we have a 9:30.” And with that, he disappeared through the door as we stood rooted into the carpet, unable to move, unable to talk. Over the ceiling and around the walls a darkness began to creep over me; it filmed over my eyes, it ran down my head into my mouth and dried out my throat and began to burn my stomach. We stood silent, unmoving, stone-like in our own personal sense of right and wrong as Stephen came out to meet us.

“What are you doing here?”, he asked and with that the world started to change in ways I wasn’t yet sure of, but the look on his face and the tone of his voice told me that nothing would ever be the same again. “I…don’t know, we were all here…for the meeting…and…we felt we should just come over… .” “Do you know what just happened?” he asked incredulously and as I stammered out a response he blurted out, “the Tower got hit. The World Trade Center was hit by an airplane and our affiliate Dean Witter has the 2^nd largest trading floor in the building and all our people were in it and the building’s been hit, it got hit by an airplane…it was terrorists…” I started to respond, then we all chorused our shock, dismay, sadness, how sorry we were. We offered help, assistance, support, we vomited words out into the lobby as a pathetic balm and because we were all businessmen, because we were all salesmen, because we were trained to kill and never lose sight of the win, we put together the shell of “next steps” as a way to navigate our minds through the dark fire of this most horrible reality. Stephen disappeared back behind the door to the inner office and as we rode the elevator back downstairs to a new reality.

Still ignorant of the information that millions of others were witnessing live on television, we got back to the hotel and stood at the lobby doors, talking on mobile phones to loved ones and listening with the other ear to the flood of comments from those nearby: the 2^nd tower had been hit, they were both on fire, they were large airliners, passenger planes, terrorists were on board. We’re in a panic, figuring out an exit, how to get home, where would the next planes hit. If this was a terrorist attack, then it still might still be going on and considering we’re in midtown, only one thing crossed my mind: the Empire State Building, which during the dark days of the Cold War and the Nuclear Watch of the Reagan era always stood out to me as Ground Zero in an attack, a spot where not only would the most damage be done but would stand as the most symbolic of targets.

We all heard the next piece of news at the same time: a plane has struck the Pentagon. Kevin dropped his cell phone down and looked up: “Fuck, we’re under attack. We’re at war”. Not knowing what to think or where to go, not knowing if we should panic or proceed calmly somewhere – we still had not seen a TV – I guessed that if that were the case, they’re going to lock Manhattan down by closing the bridges and tunnels. Before breakfast, we all checked out of our rooms, left our luggage with the bellmen. Now we had to check back in indefinitely so that we’d at least have a place to stay to ride this out, even if we were just blocks away from a possible next strike. We extended our stay at the front desk where the agents exhibited a strange, otherworldly calm about the entire proceeding, as if none of this were happening. On the other side of their desk the world was all still about hospitality and efficiency and the number of keys you’d like to your room.

We decided to use my room as our base and on the way across the lobby to the elevators I dialed up my friend Keith who I knew had an office in Tribeca near the attack and whether or not he knew something. I had one of those Nextel walky-talky phones and he was on speaker, standing on the roof of his building looking straight at the twin towers, flaming, smoldering, smoking. He’s telling me people were jumping out of the windows, the constant sound of sirens in the back against the angst and terror in his voice. We’re all standing around my phone looking at each other trying to process this and just as the elevator door closed behind us he started screaming “they’re falling, the World Trade Center is falling, its falling” over and over and over “its falling”, then “I gotta go, I gotta go, gotta get home, get home, you get home, you hear me? Get home” and he went silent.

Back in my room, 90 minutes after it all began, we saw what the world had been watching from the beginning: the close-up of the remaining tower, burning alone on a clear blue background, not a cloud anywhere except from the smoke; the replay, over and over of the North tower falling, crumbling, belching smoke at it collapsed. The endless replay of footage of the first plane, now available on newsfeed, crashing into the first tower, scenes of panicked people on the ground, covered in dust, moving aimlessly in every direction.

Then, as the Baltimore guys made panicked calls on the room phone, talking to family; as I made plans with my wife to pick up our daughter from school and where I would meet them when I got back, assuring her I was alright, we saw the TV image of the 2^nd tower, following the first, evaporating in mid-air; the stunned, panicked voice of the news announcer trying to maintain composure as he presided over an event more tragic and horrifying than one can imagine. All 5 of us were yelling, shocked and horrified, with the one Baltimore guy pleading with his wife to stay calm as his face got redder with fear and frustration. We were trapped in the false security of a hotel room, 7 miles away from Armageddon, one part real, one part a simple TV image and no one knew how to act. Like the rest of the world, we were frozen in time, trying to understand and comprehend.

We were 5 adult men in suits and briefcases in a small hotel room, and the anxiety was so thick we were smothering each other, exacerbated by the panicky call the Baltimore guy was making. Finally, Andy pulled me into the bathroom and said, “look, I don’t know if this is my last moment on this earth or not, but those (Baltimore) guys are driving me fucking crazy and I’m not going out like this. We have to get out of here. We have to eat something, no matter what happens, we have to eat something.” And in a dumb haze over all that was going on, I instinctively said, “the Carnegie Deli is up the street, let’s go there.” And so we pulled the Baltimore guys away from the TV and the phone, got in the elevator and out into the street.

Broadway at that point was blocked from traffic, empty, eerie, the bright sun overhead. Now, the first of the “walkers”, the eye-witnesses at the site, covered in dust and ash, were making a slow, zombie-like shuffle up from their origin point downtown, miles away. Men and women with jackets off or around their arms, holding shoes and pocketbooks and briefcases, heads down, exhausted and beaten, moving north up an empty street.

Here’s what a lot of people don’t know about New York City: at any given moment, it exists on several different geometric/time planes, it’s so dense and so massive that multiple events occur and overlap each other with a juxtaposition that can be sometimes unnerving and jarring, other times amusing and surreal. The stream of workers passed by a sidewalk café next to our hotel and there sat a young couple, oblivious to what was going on, smoking cigarettes and drinking mimosas. So when we opened the door of the Carnegie Deli, coming from the sunlit, empty fearfulness and panic of Broadway there was no way of knowing we would enter a darkened, lively, noisy and buzzing environment. Deli workers were cutting and serving meats behind the counter; waitresses and busboys cutting in between tables with arms full of platters and water tumblers. People were talking, there was some mild, personal laughter between some, waitresses were calling “honey” this and “sweetie” that, taking orders, cutting sandwiches, wrapping the rest, asking for more Coke, clearing tables, all the sounds and feelings of another day in pastrami paradise surrounded by TVs mounted on walls that showed a smoking ruin where tall buildings once stood. No one was really sure of exactly how many people died, we had no way to assess what we now know as the cruelty of that day. I actually was very hungry and I finished that corned beef. It may have been the best sandwich I had ever eaten.

How surreal, the tiny crumb of normalcy that everyone in that restaurant forged with each other out of a pure human need to make a small connection in the face of enormous fear and tragedy. Both the WTC and Carnegie were world famous icons; the towers gone now for 20 years, and the Carnegie now empty for 2. I can get a good pastrami in a lot of places, but I don’t think many can deliver what that deli did that afternoon.

We made a new plan: get across the river to New Jersey. Andy and I lived there; Kevin, from California, could stay with Andy and the Baltimore guys could rent a car to get back. We would go back to the hotel, grab a cab and, hearing that the Hudson River bridges and tunnels were closed, would steer over to the Bronx and head north until one of the other upstate bridges were open. We would cross over and come back south to New Jersey to get our cars, and where the Baltimore guys could get the rental. On our way back to the hotel, we saw a limo sitting at the curb, and in another one of those two different planes of reality moments, the driver was purchasing black socks from a corner street vendor. In the middle of this disaster, one needs to be well dressed. One of the Baltimore guys approaches him, they talk for a moment and he turns to us to say, “get in”. He struck a deal: $500 in cash up front and $1000 on his American Express for a ride back to Baltimore, dropping us off in Teaneck for our cars.

We headed uptown and over to the FDR with the intent of crossing the Willis Avenue bridge to the Bronx over the East River. But the driver heard on the radio that the George Washington Bridge had just reopened, so we kept going to the east side approach to the bridge. This would be easier than we thought, and I made a quick phone call to my wife to let her know I was coming home soon. As we spoke, we crossed over the upper level span of the bridge. I looked south and dropped the phone down. On this bright, blue, beautiful, late summer day, at the tip of Manhattan in a view I took for granted just the day before, the twin World Trade Centers were gone, replaced by two white clouds that were being pulled by the wind over Brooklyn.

May we never forget.

Robin Robinson
September 11, 2XXX

Bile

Rants, some musings, lots of commentary

Memoir