PART 21 CITY LIGHTS

The spring of 1967 was when I became a happy man. Boy had met girl, and surmounted the obstacle of graduate school and parental static, with all its complex demands and restrictions. The only obstacles holding me back now were the internal ones.

The first date was, as a consequence, highly symbolic: Nancy and I spent our first four hours alone in my apartment collating my dissertation, which was almost as boring an afternoon as it sounds: it was a mechanical task that required no concentration, but we were free to talk. Nancy told me about growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Grand Rapids was and is the second largest city in the state, proud of its Calder stabile and of the eponymous rapids, sad that the furniture manufacturing business which had made it briefly famous had now fled. Within walking distance of Nancy’s house was Calvin College, a small girls’ school many of whose students were employed as live-in au pairs. Nancy’s family always had a Calvin Girl to help manage her and her three sisters. Originally, the city had grown up around the furniture industry, but when that moved south to the Carolinas, there were some hard times, even on the wishfully-named Wealthy Street that intersected Gladstone Avenue, on which she grew up. Her father owned a luggage store, passed down to him by his father, and we still have a couple of worn suitcases hand-built out of sturdy leather. They’re indestructible, but they weigh more than whatever could be packed in them, so we never use them for travel. Or for anything else.

And I told her about my peripatetic life. She had lived in only one house throughout her chldhood, and was amazed at the variety and locations of all those apartments of mine. We were both Jewish, but only on our parents’ side – though her family belonged to a temple and attended services, there were no bar- or bat mitzvahs, no yarmulkes and not much Hebrew at the seders. It was more a case of the 200 or so Jewish families in Grand Rapids circling the wagons to feel less out of place. I still held romantic notions about the authenticity of the Midwest’s claim on the identity of the country, and Nancy’s was an American girlhood, in my view, in the same way Jerry Ziegman’s youth in Omaha had been an American boyhood: they both attended large public high schools like the ones in Sixteen Candles and American Graffiti (which was set in 1962, the same year Nancy graduated from high school), where they were subjected to the same dating and hazing rituals, ate and drank burgers and shakes at drive-ins, and went to football games under the Friday night lights.

Nancy told me that, though Grand Rapids had been an acceptable place to grow up, it had been clear to her from the age of 14 that after college she would decamp to one of the coasts.   Because she had roles in all her high school plays, she was unfortunately under the impression when she got to  A² (University of Michigan slang for to Ann Arbor), she majored in Theater, but discovered that she couldn’t act after all, nor could she sing, and besides, she found theater people pretentious and cliquish and a bit odd, in a way she hadn’t encountered in Grand Rapids, where there were no gay people, or more likely, no gay people who were Out. If there was a little homophobia in her reaction, it quickly evaporated after she had become an expat and expanded her cultural horizons. She switched her major to Television, which was available in both New York and Hollywood; The question  was decided when her college roommate was accepted at Columbia Teachers College; Nancy went with her to New York and they rented an apartment -- where else? --on the UWS. She initially, and idealistically, thought she'd be happy in educational TV, but then she found out that the local PBS channel was across the river, in New Jersey, where there were no bright lights. So, with only a small sigh of regret, she cast her lot with commercial broadcasting.

She had known that in this and other ways, she was not fully prepared for life in New York. Girls who emigrate to the Big Apple, whatever their religious upbringing, have to come to terms with the fact that Jewish men are numerous and mingle freely with the rest of the population, from whom they’re often indistinguishable. Adrianne and Jane welcomed this feature of city life, for different reasons: Adrianne was fleeing the stultifying Wasp environment in which she’d grown up, and Jane, almost the only non-Jew in a Jewish high school (the mirror image of me, the only Jew in a non-Jewish high school), was in a largely Jewish social circle when she was in school and after, when she and all her friends moved into the city.

Nancy’s transition from Lutheran Grand Rapids to the Upper West Side was a little more difficult because, she told me, at the U of M, all the Jewish boys from New York were very short. She thought that’s what she’d find when she herself became a New Yorker, and regarded the fact that I and many of my friends were over six feet tall as an unlooked-for bonus.

She was also aware, and a little self-conscious about, her accent – that flat “a” that turns the sentence “Barry and Jerry and Mary made merry” into “Berry and Jerry and Merry made merry.” The first time I met her family, her sisters laughed at me not because I have a Noo Yawk accent, but because they’d never heard so many vowels. Nothing has changed; a couple of years ago, I was introduced to a young woman from Chicago whom everyone was calling Kerry, but whose name, I found out later, was Carrie.

And there were the food issues.  Nancy had never eaten a crisp green bean or a piece of meat that wasn't either brown or gray, either at home or in a restaurant, and though there  must have been rare, juicy burgers available in Ann Arbor, she had been conditioned to order them medium-well. As for ethnic foods, forget it. When we had put the five piles we had made of Marriage and Money aside, I took her to a Chinese restaurant (they were all Cantonese in those days) and she had her first experience of snow peas, bok choi, shrimp toast, and crispy duck. She was thrilled. On our second date we went to the little hole-in-the-wall bistro at 1 West 67th that blossomed years later into the Café des Artistes, and I persuaded her to taste my entrecote, which I had ordered medium rare. She tentatively bit into the chunk of oozing flesh on my fork, closed her eyes, and chewed. Her eyes opened. “Oh, my God!” she said.

In those days, people our age could afford to go to plays; off-Broadway was thriving and even Broadway tickets cost under ten dollars if you were willing to suffer nosebleeds. I had been a theater buff since my play-crashing days with Jeff, and of course it was one my academic fields. Thus began our lifelong habit of playgoing, which, professionally speaking, we approached from opposite directions: when she went to work for soap operas, I held forth on dramatic theory in my classroom and she practiced its nuts and bolts in her studio. When Reach for the Stars folded, after just 13 weeks, she moved into the world of “daytime,” as soap operas were known in the trade (I liked to call them gynocentric serial dramas; no one knew what I was talking about), and she worked for a number of start-ups that gave her valuable experience in the area of production but didn’t earn their network stripes. First there was The Best of Everything, which was memorable because, at one point during its first season, three of its young female leads became pregnant. In real life, that is. This was a challenge for the writers and directors; as their baby bumps turned into beach balls, they had to be shot carrying baskets of laundry or bundles of newspapers in front of them, and eventually, it was all facial closeups all the time. (The sequel to this story took place in 2005, when I was the dramaturg of a production of Hamlet at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton, and the actress playing Ophelia announced, during the first rehearsal, that the old question of whether Hamlet and Ophelia have slept together was settled: yes, they had, she told us, and moreover, Ophelia was carrying his child. The director and I exchanged a look. “Well, we can talk about that,” he told her. “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said. “Ophelia is pregnant.” Only gradually did we realize that she had neglected to tell us, at her audition, that she was pregnant. After eight weeks of rehearsal and a three-week run, no one in the audience was unaware of that fact.)

Nancy was the production assistant on The Best of Everything, which meant that she timed each show to the second (the beautiful old analog Tag Heuer stopwatch that she always wore around her neck is still in our house somewhere), gave the director’s notes to the actors, and ordered everybody’s lunch. She quickly learned how to fold her own order into all the others, eating gratis in order to save her meager salary for Saks, right across the street from NBC. So good was she at her job that over the next few years she trained several of her successors, who proudly listed her on their resumés – “trained by Nancy Horwich” opened doors for a number of young women in the business. Eventually, with a detour back into quiz shows, this time as a question writer (“What’s the only state that ends with the letter K?”), she went back to soaps and moved up to the level of associate producer and eventually, producer. I enjoyed telling people, “My wife produces All My Children” because it sometimes produced comical reactions. At NYU, the chairman looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked me how many children I had. He was very disappointed to learn both that I only had one and that I wasn’t talking about actual progeny, of which he had 13.  Nancy and I had only one, and that sufficed for us.