Post One. Hello.

Hello, blogging world!

Here I am. This is me, realizing something that I've been meaning to do from the moment I moved here four years ago. Literally - I even have an earlier incarnation of this blog floating around the internet from my first three or four months of living here. I posted faithful, novelesque entries for a month or two, and then... stopped. Life took over.

What I want to do - what I've always wanted to do - with this project is find an outlet for my various musings about theater and about the city of New York. Sometimes the subjects run together, sometimes they are entirely separate, but between the two they comprise the most fitful, most intense, most trying love affair of my few years. They fill my head, my heart, my mouth every our of every day; they could fill a book.

To start then, I'll tell a short story that is, to me, demonstrative of the city that I love:

In New York, in many parts of Manhattan, there are fruit stands on every corner. During my first year living here, I was shocked and delighted to discover that the fruit from these stands is actually good. Fresh, delicious, cheap. Stopping at the chance corner fruit stand for an orange or a banana is my favorite way to procure a quick, cheap snack.

Once, at a fruit stand, while buying oranges, the owner asked me, in broken English, "What mean 'conducive'?"

"Conducive?" I said, struggling to define the word. "Well, ah.... I mean, I know what it means. It's like.... agreeable... but not quite? Hmmm. Okay, I can use it in a sentence. Like... 'This weather is not conducive to having a picnic.'"

"If it were raining?"

"Yes!" I said happily. "If it were raining, the weather would not be conducive to picnicking."

"Ah, okay, I understand," he said, bagging my oranges. "These oranges..." he offered, "conducive to you have good heath?"

"Yes! Exactly! You've got it!"

Vocabulary tutorials with the guy at the fruit stand on the corner. I ask you, truly, what in the world could be better?