Dorothy Parker and me: Our adventures in New York City

I had planned to live in New York. All aspiring writers do, I suppose.

I was 14 when we moved to Arizona. The daughter of a Marine, I was used to moving every two years or so, but I would arrive at each new destination a little out of sorts, faced with starting over. A new school. New friends.

In the closet of my new bedroom on the second floor over the garage, someone had left behind a stack of Bonnie Raitt albums and a copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker, both fuel and salve for an angsty teenage girl.

I already knew I’d be a writer. As a kid, I filled composition books with stories I’d illustrate with color-pencil drawings. I signed up for Journalism 1 and Typing 1 at registration for freshman year.

I’d put the “Give It Up” album on, sit cross-legged on my bed and read the collection of Parker’s poems, short stories, magazine articles and theater reviews.

She was clever and confident, two things I wasn’t.

I wanted to write like her, though I’d later read that she had said, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

I thought the best place to write would be New York, where Parker grew up on the Upper West Side, where writers like Harper Lee and Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald and E.B. White traded bon mots in well-appointed salons.

By 16, I had a plan. After I graduated from college, I would travel in Europe, and then live for a year in New York City, where I would write the next great American novel.

It didn’t work out that way of course. I graduated from college and went straight to work at a newspaper here in Arizona.

Almost 30 years later, I still love what I do, though a decade or so into my career, I could understand what Parker meant when she said, “I hate writing. I love having written.”

I still have Parker’s book, next to my copy of The Elements of Style.

But I had never made it to New York.

Come on and meet those dancing feet

Then one Saturday in June after tap class, Regina asked if I wanted to go to the Big Apple Tap Festival in New York in November. We could take classes with some of the nation’s top teachers.

Regina is from New Jersey, so she grew up going into New York City. We could do whatever I wanted, she said. See the Statue of Liberty and Times Square. Go to a Broadway show. Get a slice of pizza.

I thought about my teenage plans. And for the first time in years, I pulled The Portable Dorothy Parker from my bookshelf and read it again.

At John F. Kennedy International Airport, Regina took my picture in front of the “Welcome to New York” sign in the airport and then we crammed into a shuttle.

It was rush hour, and we inched along in real bumper-to-bumper traffic. “Welcome to New York,” the driver muttered. I vowed to never complain again about my 20-minute commute home on Loop 202.

For the three hours it took us to get the 17 miles to the hotel, I looked at New York through the window. The Statue of Liberty, lit up in the dark. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

When we arrived at our hotel, I stood outside, looked up and turned slowly in a circle, marveling at the mechanics that kept buildings that tall and narrow from toppling over.

Regina laughed. I’m sure it was obvious it was my first time in the city.

Her sister, Sue, who lives in New Jersey still, met us there.

The desk clerk recommended a tiny Italian restaurant down the street called Mercato, where the tables were so close we talked with the locals sitting at the next table as if they were seated at ours.

They recommended shows and places to eat. They weren’t rude at all.

We ate freshly made pasta and drank Italian Prosecco with raspberry puree.

I itched to take notes on the exposed brick walls, the mirrored bar and the whispered conversation of a couple sharing a plate of ravioli.

Before I crawled into bed that night, I looked out the window at the streets below, still as busy as they had been earlier in the evening. The sound of sirens and shouts floated up 18 stories, a murmur at that height, and lulled me to sleep.

It's the song I love the melody of

In the morning, the city looked as if it hadn’t slept at all — the trash bags piled up on the sidewalk outside the hotel were gone, the taxis were still there.

The sidewalks teemed with people clutching coffee cups, briefcases and shopping bags, all in a hurry and jostling for elbow room. There was a rhythm to the flow — stop and go, walk, don’t walk.

There are more people in New York City than in the whole state of Arizona. Where had they come from? Where were they going?

“Keep an eye on her,” I heard Sue say to Regina as we walked along Eighth Avenue.

The city was somehow bigger than I imagined and smaller. I could smell it: a bakery door propped open, cigarette smoke, hot pretzels and sewer.

In Times Square, we climbed the red risers and people watched, a show in itself.

We weaved our way through makeshift covered walkways and under scaffolding, holding our breath against the dust. I laughed, thinking about how Parker had suggested “Excuse my dust” as her epitaph. The construction didn’t bother me because it meant the city was being cared for, repaired and updated.

We circled the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center, ducked into the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the art deco skyscraper that houses NBC television, and then got in line to ride an elevator 70 floors up to the observation deck, the Top of the Rock.

I read on my cellphone that Boni and Liveright, the publishing company which had printed Parker’s first book, Enough Rope, in 1926, had been destroyed in 1930 to make way for Rockefeller Center, along with her favorite speakeasies, Jack and Charlie’s Puncheon Club and Tony Soma’s, where Parker sipped Johnny Walker, neat.​

The views were breathtaking. The trees in Central Park were turning gold and red. The sun glinted off the windows of the Empire State Building.

We watched a couple get married there.

And then we rode the old wooden escalators in Macy’s on 34th Street and bought black-and-white cookies as big as our faces in Penn Station. I ate five slices of pizza.

We saw "Chicago," now in its 20th year, at the Ambassador Theatre, where a vendor sold me a double serving of Chardonnay in a keepsake sippy cup for $23, right at my seat.

“Welcome to New York,” I said to Regina.

Where the underworld can meet the elite

The next night we went off Broadway and saw "Cagney," a musical about tough guy (and tap dancer) James Cagney at Westside Theatre, a renovated 1890s church in Hell’s Kitchen.

The audience itself was like something from Central Casting. The row of men in neat suits in front of us, each wearing kippah set precariously on the backs of their heads, did an accounting of the people they knew in common. A husband and wife with thick New York accents argued in increasingly louder tones until she stamped out, saying, “I can’t take it anymore.”

“Is this real?” I whispered to Regina.

I imagined what Parker, the only female theater critic on Broadway when she worked at Vanity Fair and then later at The New Yorker, would have written.

“Welcome to New York,” Regina whispered back to me.

We walked narrow streets filled with fabric shops, wider streets lined with food vendors. Every doorway and stairwell offered something: a bar, a restaurant, a shop. I could imagine Dorothy Parker even better here, meeting with other writers at the Algonquin Hotel and drinking at speakeasies.

“I suppose that is the thing about New York. It is always a little more than you had hoped for," Parker wrote in “My Hometown” for McCall's magazine in 1928.

"Each day, there is so definitely a new day. ‘Now we’ll start all over,’ it seems to say every morning, 'and come on, let’s hurry like anything.’ London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful.”

New York seemed hopeful to me, too, from the guys in thick coats selling bus tours on the sidewalk to the dancers in the tap classes with dreams of making it on Broadway.

I suspect that hope is what calls writers to the city.

Going back to Arizona

For me, New York City was more of an idea than an actual place, fueled by teenage dreams and Dorothy Parker.

I imagined I would have loved New York City when I was young, just out of college and fresh from a year backpacking across Europe. The crowded sidewalks. The open-all-night bars. The bumper-to-bumper traffic.

As for me now, well, maybe I got too old for the city.

None of the people we met actually lived in the city. Too expensive, Divinity told me in tap class.

I love New York, as the shirts in every souvenir shop said. I’ll come back, for sure. I just don’t want to live there. Not anymore. I've been in love with Arizona for a lot longer now. It feels like where I was meant to be. I find plenty to write about.

On the way back to the hotel, we darted across a narrow street to a tiny 24-hour liquor store to buy a bottle of champagne. It felt very like something Dorothy Parker would do. Something I would do while I was still under the spell of New York City. I knew the spell was temporary, and it would lift from me as my plane home left the ground.

I suppose my life now — a bungalow in Tempe, two cars in the driveway, not even owning a decent winter coat, driving in the carpool lane with Richard, shopping at mostly chain stores and writing about the things I write about — wouldn't have impressed 16-year-old me.

But 51-year-old me is pretty darn happy. And the things Dorothy Parker wrote about New York City? About how every day is new and filled with hope? I know what she means.

Reach Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8614. Read her blog.