USA TODAY International Edition
Terror, ‘ Manhattan’ and Manhattan on a date
“‘ Did you hear about the explosion in Chelsea?’ There were 10 people in the elevator, and suddenly, we were neighbors — terrified neighbors.”
There are many reasons we love New York City, but this is near the top: From time to time, the New York Philharmonic plays the soundtracks of classic films as the movies screen on a giant backdrop at David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center.
We saw On the Waterfront last year, with Leonard Bernstein’s only original movie score, and it was a transcendent experience.
If you think New Yorkers are blasé, you should have heard the sobbing during Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” scene.
A few weeks ago, when we saw that the Philharmonic was going to do Woody Allen’s Manhattan, we bought tickets.
We love that movie, we love Gershwin — Allen said the music was the inspiration for the movie — and we love Manhattan.
At Allen’s request for his new movie in 1979, the Philharmonic, under Zubin Mehta, recorded the original soundtrack. This is the Philharmonic’s 175th anniversary and the final season of its music director, Alan Gilbert. What could be better?
Saturday night, we took a bus to dinner across the street from Lincoln Center at P. J. Clarke’s. We glanced over at the center for performing arts and its bustling plaza and talked about the Cha- galls, always a thrilling sight. We got lucky and snagged a table along the sidewalk. The windows were open, and it was one of those days — there are just about five of them all year in New York — where the weather was perfect: not too hot, not too cold. As usual, the parade of interesting people outside never stopped.
We warned our waitress, Nicole, that we’d be there for a long time, until the show was about to start. She told us she understood — that she had moved to New York to make it as an opera singer and had her first audition coming up. She was excited and nervous. We smiled. It’s a city of dreamers, all of us. We sipped a crisp bottle of Entre- Deux- Mers — Château Les Tuileries 2015 — as we watched the lights come on at Lincoln Center and finally had to rush out for the 8 p. m. show.
According to a lovely New York Times piece that ran just before the two Philharmonic performances, “The feast of Gershwin music, coupled with the elegant black and white cinematography of Gordon Willis, gave Manhattan a romanticized vision of New York that came as a tonic in an era of fiscal crisis, Son of Sam killings and looting during the blackout two years earlier.”
For us, the movie contains touchstones of our life. The rowboat scene in Central Park — we used to take those boats out on Sundays with the newspaper and a hidden pitcher of Bloody Marys. The scene next to the 59th Street bridge — John used to run across that bridge at lunchtime, going to Queens, then home again to Manhattan, all in a 5K. Zabar’s, the Russian Tea Room — it’s home. Manhattan is where we lived when we were young. And after we moved away, to Miami, and learned we were pregnant with our second child, it’s where we wanted to live again. We wanted our biracial daughters to grow up here, where there is no such thing as a typical family, and, well, we’d figure out later how to pay for it.
After watching this love letter to Manhattan, after the standing ovations and the tears of joy and understanding, we filed out and into an elevator. An older woman in a wheelchair said to no one in particular and everyone in the elevator, “Did you hear about the explosion in Chelsea?” There were 10 people in the elevator, and suddenly, we were neighbors — terrified neighbors.
We’d turned off our phones, so John immediately turned his back on. Our daughters, Media and Zoë, who also live in the city, had texted that they were OK. Were we? We texted back. It’s our protocol.
It’s a hell of a thing to have a protocol for this kind of thing. And no one could miss the irony: We’d just seen a movie about the resiliency of Manhattan, and that very resiliency was being tested again.
But you know what? John was blown out of the chair in his office at The Wall Street Journal across from the World Trade Center when it was first attacked in 1993. On 9/ 11, terrorists brought down the twin towers, killing so many people, including one of our dearest friends, and destroying our offices. ( Three months later, the Library of Congress selected Manhattan for preservation in the National Film Registry.) Fifteen years ago. The southern tip of Manhattan has come back stronger than ever. Would- be opera stars such as Nicole will never stop coming here.
As Allen said at the Oscars in 2002, “It’s still a thrilling and very, very exciting city.” A romantic one, too.
Just as in 1979, we face challenges. Our guess is that bad things will continue to happen. But this is our home. We will be careful. We will follow our protocols. But no one is going to make us love New York City less.