NYC Adventure -- Part Three: My Reading at Bluestockings Bookstore

All Photos by Sandy Shelonchik

The morning after the play -- the day of my big reading at Bluestockings Bookstore (I hoped it would be big!) -- dawned bright and brisk.  Dressing in a variation of the comfortable new designer threads I'd brought with me (jeans, Hilfiger shirt, Champion sneakers, which turned out being more comfortable then I'd imagined once they were walked in), I wandered to an all-night eatery next door to my hotel called Danny's and took an enormous breakfast and iced coffee to go. Following the difficult trip into the city and the debacle at the reception desk, I was somewhat exhausted and opted to dine in my room, once more in my very comfortable Perry Ellis blue flannel checked jammies.  After breakfast, I uncapped my fountain pen, opened to a fresh page in the full notebook of tear-out sheets I'd brought with me as a backup, and began to write the short ten-minute play "Chat" that's been haunting my card catalog of unwritten story ideas since Y2K.  "Chat" is set in that same year, and explores the politics of an old-school chat room where few, if any, of the attendees are really what they claim or who they appear to be.  I figured the timing to long last complete #62 from my list of unwritten ideas was perfect; though the play format isn't one I'm entirely comfortable with, I found the pages flying past and finished the longhand draft while seated in the hotel's lobby, waiting for my two fantastic New York City pals to arrive for dinner prior to the reading.

David Bernstein and I

You couldn't hope to meet nicer -- or read better -- than David Bernstein.  I'd appeared with David in numerous short fiction anthologies previous to our first meeting in the flesh at November 2011's wonderful conference, Anthocon.  A few weeks prior, I'd enjoyed his unnerving lead story "From Under the Bed" in Blood Bound Books' Night Terrors collection. Since the conference, David has notched five book deals with such great presses as Samhain, Severed, and EJP.  So it was a real treat when he and his gorgeous gal-friend Sandy Shelonchik suggested we meet up for a nibble before the reading, which they planned to take in. 

There's a loft over at Danny's, very comfortable seating, great food, so that's where we went.  While talking the writing life and enjoying our fare, numerous cartoon characters sauntered in, led by Smurfette.  Among the parade: Puss-in-Boots, Minnie Mouse, Hello Kitty, and Elmo from Sesame Street.  Seriously, you can't make this stuff up...nor did I when I tell you that Smurfette removed her white apron, flashing us her blue ta-tas.  She then also removed her head and she, it turns out, was really a he.  As our unintentional dinner theater commenced with even more cartoon guests arriving in ones and twos, it dawned on me that we weren't far from the flagship Toys-R-Us store in Times Square.  Mystery solved.  Retinal damage done, perhaps permanently.  Blue, I tell you.  They were blue.

We jumped into their car and David drove us into the East Village.  He found the best parking spot right across from the bookstore, and there we were.  Bluestockings is a fantastic venue, bright and energetic, perfumed by the delicious fair-trade coffee they serve, the sort of place I'd want to write and sip my Joe daily by the gallon if I lived in the neighborhood. There, I met our hostess, the formidable Kathleen Warnock, who edits for both John Wiley & Sons and Cleis Press and organizes many of the fine and fun readings around the city, including this annual event.  The place was already frenetic and filled with what I hoped would be the audience when we arrived -- they were, and continued to grow as chairs were set out and ever more floor space vanished.  By the time the first reader, the divine Sinclair Sexsmith took to the mic, there wasn't an empty seat in the bookstore.  Nor was there much room to navigate the aisles, which was just too cool.  Richard Labonte, one of my favorite editors and the man who had invited me to read at the event, would have been proud.  The place was packed!

Going in alphabetical order according to author's last name, the crowd enjoyed the elegant, unapologetic offerings of seven breathtakingly brilliant authors.  When my turn came, my bio was read and one audience member remarked, "My God, we have a celebrity reader among us tonight!"

Dressed in my new favorite shirt, the one bearing an image of a typewriter that may be the best Christmas gift ever, I handed out the stunning promotional cards for Muse, opened my brandy-new copy of Best Gay Romance 2012, and read from my longish short story, "The Bachelors."  The response to my work was so positive, the applause that followed, too kind. I signed autographs, mingled with the audience, noticed a few Muse cards left behind on seats, and told myself they would make great free swag for the bookstore to insert in customers' bags the following day.  I and my two lovely pals sauntered out and returned to the heart of the city for dessert and coffee.  Later the night, I reluctantly bid them goodbye and walked back to the hotel, eager to put down more pages.  The reading inspired me to the Nth!

The gorgeous Sandy, beneath a sign that made us chortle!

Friday morning, I was up super early, grabbed more breakfast and iced coffee from the all-nighter, ate it in my room, and worked on a novel chapter and a short story, eager to pack up and return home as soon as possible. While seated at the desk, I heard the doorknob tested not once but several times.  Finally, I got up and peered through the peephole at the very narrow corridor outside my hotel room, where, a cleaning woman in a pink and white housekeeping uniform moved up and down the hallway, waving her hands and chanting.  I had left the 'Do Not Disturb' tag on my door and gathered she was testing the lock, for whatever reason.  I also realized she was doing some sort of religious blessing, which struck me as so odd, so askew, that I knew it would appear in a story.  I didn't expect the story to materialize so quickly. Packed up, I checked out of the hotel, returned to the Port Authority, and waited for the first in a long string of buses to ferry me home to New Hampshire.  At the terminal and then on the ride back, I wrote most of "Veneer," a short story about that odd encounter (I would finish it the following day, camped out in my living room).  The ride north was arduous and unpleasant, but by 6:40 PM it was over, and I returned home, my series of adventures and misadventures to New York City concluded.

My New York City (Mis)Adventure -- Part One

I grew up in a tiny enchanted cottage, 780-square feet according to the Zillow report (they have the date of construction wrong by seven years). The house was located deep in the dark woods of then-remote Windham, New Hampshire.  Though I was routinely forced to eat liver for dinner and a horrific concoction referred to as 'hot dog stew' (with carrots, potatoes, and too much paprika) and always showered standing up because the house wasn't equipped with a bathtub, I never thought of myself as poor or some kind of second-class passenger through life until a well-to-do princess cousin from the sprawling town of Salem told me I was.  The princess lived in a big cape that always left me feeling illish when forced to visit.  There was no lake in her backyard, far fewer cool green shade trees, and an air of pretentiousness permeated the place, recognizable even then. When I was thirteen, my parents sold the enchanted cottage and forced me to live in that same town, where the elitist atmosphere was inescapable, as was the dividing line between the Haves and Have-Nots. Quite a few of the locals made my teenage life miserable, my cousin the princess among them.  But I discovered writing and I began to write with a seriousness of purpose and, despite numerous obstacles, transcended what they and I thought myself capable of becoming.

I haven't eaten liver or hot dog stew in a very long time.  Though I still live, by choice, in a small New Hampshire town, as an adult and a professional writer I have traveled the country, often visiting America's biggest destinations because of my writing.  I've been on the sets of various television shows, watching as they were filmed or taped.  I've interviewed some of the most talented celebrities in TV, Film, and Music; have been interviewed; have pitched and sold TV episodes; signed books; written books from rooms in New York City to Los Angeles.  I prefer the peace and solitude of my home and home office, but function well in big crowds, whether working them to get a story (my visit to cover the X-Games in '96 comes to mind) or at a podium, reading my work.

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

So when I was personally invited to New York City to read from the 2012 edition of Best Gay Romance by the fine folk at Cleis Press, edited by the stellar Richard Labonte, I was thrilled (BGR 2012 contains my long short story, "The Bachelors").  I also decided that if I was going to venture out of my comfort zone, I'd make a real adventure of the trip.  In addition to the reading, I was comped tickets to review the Broadway show Love, Loss, and What I Wore, written by Nora Ephron and starring a massive revolving cast of well-known women actors, five at a time, that has boasted in productions past such luminaries as Barbara Feldon ("Agent 99" from Get Smart); "Frenchy" from Grease, Didi Conn; Knots Landing alum Michelle Lee; Susan Sullivan of Falcon Crest and Castle fame; Two and a Half Men's Conchetta Ferrell; and the incomparable Kate Mulgrew, "Captain Janeway" from Star Trek: Voyager, who penned the fabulous book blurb for my forthcoming collection, The Fierce and Unforgiving Muse: Twenty-Six Tales from the Terrifying Mind of Gregory L. Norris (Evil Jester Press, March 2012). What made this particular cast run so fantastic, in addition to the delightful Dawn Wells, aka "Mary Ann" from Gilligan's Island, was that it would also feature none other than the Robin Strasser, "Dorian Lord" from my late, beloved soap, One Life to Live.  The opportunity to rub elbows with La Strasser, whose riveting performance as the regal spitfire of fictional Llanview, PA one afternoon in 1983 would lead to twenty-nine years of devoted afternoon viewing, was more of a highlight to me than the reading.  After so many years of interviewing celebrities for numerous magazines, rarely any more do I get starstruck.

New York: a city I've visited dozens of times.  A city I've said that I love for almost two decades, because I always have such great literary adventures there.  Oh Giant Red Macintosh, how you tested my love during this most recent voyage to your avenues and event centers.

I should have known the day would challenge me when, at four on this brisk past Wednesday morning, I woke to find a rejection letter on a story and project I'd been told I was most-likely a shoe-in for. No sweat; after some 4,000 acceptances, I handle rejection well. It was the timing of the thing. Got dressed.  Met my ride. Picked up the bus a few towns over.  I told myself the foul odor of ammonia on said bus was likely some cleaning fluid.  It worked enough to get me through to the next connection, which smelled much better.  One bus later, I was finally en route to New York City, with this month's issue of The Writer opened, a wide smile on my face.  We entered the city.  At West 66th Street, the bus passed the ABC TV studios where, until December, OLTL had been filmed dating back to the late 1960s.  My breath hitched.  My smile evaporated.  Another bad omen, surely. But I soldiered on, through the Port Authority, onto Broadway, and from there to 47th Street and my hotel, the Edison.

I won't even begin to relate the ridiculous nightmare that happened after I found I would not be allowed into my room due to a snafu regarding my reservation.  There I stood at the reception desk, surrounded by original Diego Rivera murals and acres of black and serpentine marble, in my new designer sneakers, jeans, T-shirt, and winter pullover, looking every bit the upscale traveler, only suddenly I broke in an icy sweat, dealing with a frigid manager and his unsympathetic (read: downright rude) cadre who had zero interest in ironing out the issue -- the adult versions of all those popular kids in high school who delighted in making my life miserable.  Luckily, as a citizen of the Granite State, I am rock-solid in a crisis.  It took four hours, but I resolved the issue and moseyed up to my room on the ninth floor, forced once again to remember that just because someone lives in a cosmopolitan mecca doesn't automatically make them more sophisticated or better than I; nor does living in an expensive zip code entitle an individual to class.

My room in one of the city's finest hotels greeted me cold, and the water never ran more than lukewarm at best.  Still, I unpacked, decompressed, called home, and decided it was best to move past the afternoon's aggravating chain of events.  I had a night at the theater to look forward to.  I showered, dressed well, and headed out into the icy snow falling over the city, my destination the Westside Theatre at 407 West 43rd Street.

The snow fell.  I stopped and bought a dozen long-stemmed coral-colored roses for Ms. Strasser, inserted one of the promotional cards from Muse, arrived an hour early.  A gorgeous, intimate theater with elegant acanthus leaf lamps and sconces (originally built as a German Baptist church), the Westside was like a sauna, so I stepped back outside into the snow, feeling bedraggled and beaten down, more than exhausted by my trip and the travails upon arriving to the city.

And then, as I shook my head, chuckling humorlessly at the image of myself, a small town hick in designer threads wondering what the hell business he had standing in the heart of New York City, the Universe smiled down upon me with a glimpse at an event as rare and elegant as the arrival of Haley's Comet. Gliding down 43rd, looking as gorgeous in person as she always did on the small screen, came Robin Strasser, the one and only -- a clear reminder that I had earned my right to stand right where I was standing.

As stated, I'm rarely starstruck anymore.  But Robin Strasser is a super-star and long ago earned a rare place of magnitude among the best and brightest.  She stole my breath, truly.

To Be Continued...