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It's like Chadstone, Daahling

Eleven years ago. My second week in Manhattan. My gay friend Nigel is giving me a personal tour of the city. Nigel is Australian and has already been in Manhattan for eight years.

We've been downtown, uptown, SoHo, NoHo, Tribeca, Central Park, Union Square, Fifth Avenue where we worked together. Nigel was telling me about Manhattan's Alphabet City.

We were walking down Broadway. "What's the Lincoln Center like, Nigel?" I interrupted, wide-eyed with the wonder of New York when it is new.

"Like Chadstone, Daahling," he replied, not missing a beat in either his long strides or his Alphabet City monologue.
For those of you who don't know Melbourne, you can see Chadstone Shopping Center top right. Built in the sixties before the Beatles became famous, it epitomizes the sad black and white days of Menzie's Australia. The Australia of film censorship, the White Australia Policy, the jailing of Namatjira, - the drabness of our mutual youth.

What charming hootzpah - comparing the home of The Metropolitan Opera, The New York City Ballet and The New York Philharmonic Orchestra ... with Melbourne's first suburban shopping mall.

Of course you can see what he meant - move your mouse over the photo top right, and back again.

And so, suggestible as I am, I decided to avoid the Lincoln Center. For eleven years I didn't step foot in New York's Chadstone. Until one night last week.

A good friend Margaret, is about to go home to Australia. Margaret has lived most of her adult like in Manhattan. So it's a big step.

For a goodbye to Manhattan experience, Margaret invited me to the New York City Ballet. At the Lincoln Center.

Being winter and night time, the Chadstone feel had diminished. Standing in the Center's plaza, one couldn't help but be influenced by that jewel-like quality of the surrounds which is so New York. I told Margaret about the Chadstone remark. She is a friend of Nigel's so she appreciated it. "That's SO Nigel," she laughed as we stood under the SO New York sky.

It was my first trip to a ballet in years. And I loved it.

Going to the theatre or ballet in New York is more than just fronting up to experience a performing art. It's people-watching, having a glass of wine with a friend, experiencing the buzz of the city.

It was a full house. The crowd was your usual New York mixture of people - kids in jeans with metal sticking out of their faces, sixtyish women - their faces with skin tightly drawn back by multiple face-lifts, people in furs, students with clipboards. You could turn up in your jarmies and no one would blink an eye.

I enjoyed the program, though I needed to look up the web the next day in order to understand the second performance, TÃ-LÃ- Gaisma. I think I enjoyed most, "Western Symphony - set to corny American western folk tunes and invoking images of Fourth of July parades and cheer leaders. A parody of America's past, camped up to the hilt.

Yes, I had a lovely evening. Thank you my good friend Margaret. Have a good trip home to Australia. You'll see Nigel again, enjoying his reunion with his home town. You can talk together. About your New York memories. And our visit to the ballet at Chadstone.

New York and I will miss you.

Till next time,
Kate Juliff
New York
February 2006