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By Root 875 0

collective inconvenience and erupted into what Time magazine would call an “orgy of looting,” with residents in minority neighborhoods streaming out in the streets to engage in five-finger shopping on an epic scale: “Roving bands of determined men, women and even little children wrenched steel shutters and grilles from storefronts with crowbars, shattered plate-glass windows, scooped up everything they could carry, and destroyed what they could not. First they went for clothing, TV sets, jewelry, liquor; when that was cleaned out, they picked up food, furniture and drugs.” Clothes were stripped from store-window mannequins and the mannequins knocked silly, their arms and legs strewn like amputee spare parts. Car dealerships had their new inventories commandeered, hot-wired, and taken for one-way test drives. What freaked out New Yorkers and the rest of the country was not only the hurricane strength and speed of the ransacking hordes hitting the streets, as if on cue, but their merriment, the cries of “It’s Christmastime! It’s Christmastime!” as the orange glow in the city of fires big and small suggested wartime London following a bombing raid. Rickety-ribbed liberal platitudes about poverty and unequal opportunity would be wheelbarrowed out in the days and weeks ahead, but they were no match for pictures of jolly teenagers considerately helping their elders carry large appliances home during this special one-time-only all-you-can-steal sale.

In the West Village, the atmosphere was charged with the radio-static apprehension that was citywide, but windows went unshattered and streets unmobbed, although there was word of a gay orgy breaking out like a Broadway musical on one popular corner, a rumor later confirmed in Jonathan Mahler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, which placed the party on Weehawken Street. While others robbed and raged, the West Village had its own way of celebrating Christmas in July.

If this wasn’t the last hurrah, however, there weren’t too many hurrahs left. No one could have known the magnitude of what was heading down the tracks, the epidemic that by the late eighties would give the West Village a haggard, ghost-ravaged air, a ground zero of loss created not in a single morning but over the toll of years. It amounted to a slow, unmerciful massacre that was both a human tragedy and a cultural catastrophe, depriving the future of more than can ever be measured and properly mourned, a mass grave of unfulfilled promise. The creative ranks were skeletonized by what was first labeled a “gay plague.” Choreographers, designers, playwrights, artists, dancers, actors, photographers, and so many other creatives whose names we knew made the obituary pages: Michael Bennett, the choreographer and deviser of A Chorus Line, the musical about aspiring dance gypsies going through the peeling exposure of the audition process that started downtown at Joe Papp’s Public Theater and became such a public sensation that it was transplanted to Broadway, doing more to save Times Square from fatal rot than any other single production; the actor-playwright-director-impresario Charles Ludlam, whose Ridiculous Theatrical Company was the bedlam gingerbread cottage of camp; the fashion designer Halston, whose handsome rectangularity recalled Michael Rennie’s distinguished interplanetary delegate in The Day the Earth Stood Still; the graffiti artist Keith Haring. Maybe I’m telling you what you already know, but I don’t know what anyone knows anymore, those who came to the city after have no idea, they breathe a brighter air. As Fran Lebowitz points out in the documentary Public Speaking (it’s the best monologue in the movie), it wasn’t simply the talent lost to AIDS that was so calamitous; it was the devastation of an audience equally brilliant and alive. “An audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists,” she said. “That audience died in five minutes.” A discriminating, demanding, wit-appreciative audience for the performing arts that has never been regrown, replaced by a shipment