Lucking Out - James Wolcott [116]
After the performance, everyone was chatting madly away like song sparrows about Darci’s return, how she moved and looked, the condition her condition was in. I can’t remember whom I talked to, must have been someone. Here and there were coveys of young female dancers, all legs shooting upward and pony manes and wrist flicks, most of them students of the School of American Ballet dressed in their afternoon best, cliqued together going over Darci’s performance with their own method of instant replay, imitating and mimicking her turns and combinations, how she extended her arms, positioned her pinkie fingers, came to a stop that was never a complete stop, the next step pouring out of it. Some of these ballet students would have flourished and entered the corps ranks of NYCB or some other company, they may have already come and gone in their dancing careers by now, had their shot and taken it. But on that afternoon they were loose bracelets of girls uninterrupted, still sprouting, graceful and ungainly, half-sophisticated, half-creaturely, chatting and laughing, their tiny pocketbooks slung over their shoulders, the bracelets breaking up as the bell-tones sounded the end of intermission. I go to the ballet now, I’m married to a dance critic, something that just had to be, and in the corridors and lobby and on the balcony overlooking the Lincoln Center square and geysering fountain, there are different girl dancers shadowboxing now, marking what they’ve just seen, and yet they’re the same girls, replenished. I love being able to look at them with unwanting eyes and careful not to look too long, looks being so easily mislaid.
PART V:
What Are You Doing Here?
For those of us who lived in New York in the seventies and felt as if this is where our real lives began despite wherever it was we were marking time before, the opening montage of Woody Allen’s Manhattan—the city photographed by Gordon Willis in a black-and-white panorama of enshrining shadows and blinking signs; the elevated subway inching like a Lionel model train past Yankee Stadium, whose lights glow like birthday-cake candles; the mute mosaic of skyscrapers, silhouetted bridges, billowy steam clouds, snow-laden streets, thronged sidewalks, and traffic honks silenced as George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue builds to a fireworks climax—is more than a beautiful overture, a midnight valentine. It carries ambiguous undernotes, emotional motes that never quite settle. When the film came out in 1979, the montage appeared to soar with nostalgia for the present, the sense that (to quote the Carly Simon lyric) “these are the good old days.” Even with the surefire laugh line in Allen’s narrative voice-over about the city being “a metaphor for the decay of contemporary society,” the Gershwin-Willis opening was a balm for every bruise that New York had taken in the seventies, a relieved sigh from the trenches signaling that perhaps the worst was over, somehow we had come through. To some, this relief had a tincture of wishful thinking. “In the most wry way, to anyone who knows the Manhattan of potholes and poverty and rudeness, the film is a fable—written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman—about a city of smooth rides and riches and thoughtfulness,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker. To others, it was an ironic fable, the grandeur of the cityscape, the vertical climb of the arrow-topped towers and Gershwin score, being so much grander a stage than its characters with their scratchy dilemmas and violin-tuned neuroses deserved.
Nineteen seventy-nine was also the year of the publication of John Leonard’s Private Lives in the Imperial City, its title the perfect subhead for Allen’s Manhattan. A collection of Leonard’s columns from the New York Times, a weekly report from the bay window of Leonard’s Zeitgeist receptor, Private Lives in the Imperial City was to the needily narcissistic seventies