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actually turn a profit. There would be fashion shows and maybe “an environmental thing that needs glitz and mirrors and strobe lighting.” The Big Top Cabaret would become a classy lounge–cum–sports bar. “If you’re coming here as a businessman,” Marc explained, “you want to see sports, you get a free cocktail, which is a beautiful cocktail glass full of scallops and shrimps and cocktail sauce which will be free to you upon two drinks.” Marc, too, dreamed of turning Show World into a scene; but it wasn’t quite the scene Aaron had in mind. “If Times Square Entertainment Center becomes a stigma,” Marc explained—he used the word “stigma” as if it meant its exact opposite—“if it’s the meeting place for theater, all the photographers are here, all the show people are here, all the people in the know are here, why would I want to remain from the sixties image in the lobby, when I know that the people that are visiting the peep shows are visiting them on a regular basis, basically it is what it is what it is what it is?” This was Marc’s way of expressing the idea that perhaps someday Show World could dispense with pornography altogether. It was Josh Alan Friedman’s worst nightmare.

ACT IV

THE FOLLOWING WEEK I met Aaron for lunch at Joe Franklin’s Memory Lane Restaurant. Aaron had a fedora perched on the back of his head like an old press agent. He was not, I discovered, any kind of a vegan: he had a filet mignon and two glasses of red wine. Marc had suspended Aaron’s entire theatrical schedule while construction continued, but Aaron was serene and upbeat, as always. Marc appealed to his sense of irony. “He’s an amazing English stylist,” Aaron said. “He goes, ‘Hey look, guy, I’m no Darth Nader from Star World.’” But Aaron also insisted that he and Marc “have a nice synergy together.” They were both “salespeople.” Aaron still believed that the No Live Girls booths, the art gallery, and much of the theatrical schedule were going to happen. But he also conceded, “I exist within the bubble”—within, that is, a transitional moment in the history of Times Square, in which the marketplace had not yet definitively dealt some in and others out. Aaron might well turn out to be too outré for the new Times Square. But, of course, that was the larger pattern of his life: create a new thing, and then watch it be appropriated and subsumed. There would always be the next venue. “I wanted,” he said, “to leave a template of ideas that, even if I was a failure, they could be picked up at a later date.”

Aaron had, it turned out, misread the tea leaves once again. The next time we spoke, in mid-July, Aaron said that Marc had booted him, and Todo Con Nada, out of Show World. Aaron was welcome to book either of the GoGo rooms, but with rentals set at $600 and $1,000 a night, Marc had, Aaron said, “priced out the world of alternative Broadway.” I mentioned that that seemed to be pretty much the idea, and Aaron said, “Well, the philosophy at Show World has always been, ‘Accentuate the negative.’” It was a rare moment of bitterness. But no matter. Aaron had already moved his operation to an old Broadway curtain factory on 45th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. The place was saturated in Times Square lore: it overlooked the park where the notorious “Capeman murders” of 1959, which Paul Simon had dramatized in a play, had taken place. Todo Con Nada Times Square would be opening soon with a few solo shows. Aaron would be mounting productions in abandoned storefronts, as he had on Ludlow Street. He wasn’t defeated in the least; if he had to move the locus of Alternative Broadway to a new site, then so be it. Big things were in the offing. Aaron was working with a collaborator on a new production, titled Icarus and Aria. It would be, he said, “Romeo and Juliet meets Any Given Sunday meets Traffic—in verse.”

ACT V

BY EARLY 2003, the renovation of the Times Square Entertainment Center was complete, and Marc Barbanell was eager to show off his new $2 million baby. Marc was still occupying his teeny-tiny windowless cubicle, though he had doffed