QUEENS: the personal and the global

Yes, it's Roxie!  Last week we passsed the test:  baby-sat for 2 hours while her parents took in an afternoon movie.  It was easy and reassured all of us that we are up to the challenge.

The hat is another of the basic baby models in Cascade Fixation, a cotton yarn with a  tiny bit of elastic that helps to keep it on her head.  Knit on #6 needles.  She's set for a fashionable Spring in Queens, a mellower borough than Manhattan.

Two activities have kept me from blogging lately.  Responding to my concern about more focus on Emergency Preparedness, the board of our 1,000-apartment development set up a committee about it.  Luckily for me, a recent retiree in my building, Mike Davidson, shared my concern.  The challenge is how to get New Yorkers to work on both individual and collaborative plans.  More later.

Writing Outside the Blog has been a category on this blog for but not addressed.  Last year I wrote a three-act play about older women in New York.  Finding a playwriting class had eluded me till this semester.  Over the past couple of months, I've worked on a one-act play with Jennifer Camp, a young playwright, and four other students.  Learned a lot.

Another of Nick Bloom's productions for Winter 2007 was GLOBAL NEW YORK, a one-day, interdisciplinary conference at New York Institute of Technology where he teaches.  Judith Adler Hellman, York University (Toronto), presented a fascinating paper based on recent research for a forthcoming book, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The 'Competitive Advantages' of Undocumented Mexicans in NYC."  Basically, her thesis is that employers and realtors particularly abuse Mexicans because they are considered both reliable and long-suffering. 

Before the afternoon presentations, a multi-media performance, illuminated changes emerging in Queens, the neighborhood favored by many Mexicans and numerous other recent immigrants.  Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer livened the post-lunch time with slides, music commentary, their melange, Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America.  Visiting their colorful website gives an almost-there experience of the work.  Documentary artists, they're also married, and have put together research and art in an immediately accessible way.  The hardcover version of their book (above) has a soundscape of "Crossing..." with appearances by several people profiled in the larger work. 

Make a reservation at The Tenement Museum on the lower east side for an April 19 performance.  I'd like to know your response to what the New York Times calls, "An offbeat ethicnic tour" of the City's most diverse borough. 

Comments

[claude]

What a lovely baby Roxie is! She is even posing for you ;)
I wish I had seen that Tenement museum. It'll be for a next visit if I can arrange one.

[Xtreme English]

wow...congratulations!! you leave most of us in the DUST with your creativity and productivity. would love to hit the tenement museum on april 19. fear i shall be toiling away in the old cubicle. but maybe not.