When I was a kid I remember the now-legendary 1986 Mets World Series victory. There was something special, timeless and singular, about it, more than just another run-of-the-mill World Series, and it's fondly remember 40 years later.
I think it's fair to say that the 2026 Knicks NBA Championship will also go down in the history of NYC as a special, timeless and singular moment. This wasn't just a big victory by the city's basketball team: this was a moment where the city's spirit decided to sing -- and sing loudly.
In the wild heyday of the NYC adult film scene of the 1970s and '80s, no star shone brighter than that of Vanessa Del Rio's.
She was the Judy Garland, the Barbra Streisand, the Meryl Streep of that time and place -- quite simply, the best. She was famous and iconic in her time and remains so almost 40 years since she quit the business.
Born and raised in Harlem, Vanessa was the quintessential New Yorker -- and a striking contrast to most of the adult performers of her time and after. She was Latina, curvy, tough talking, odd-looking -- and a stunning, gorgeous ball of fire. From 1974 to 1986 she made roughly 80 movies, many of her as the star. And her various co-stars -- both male and female, and including some of the biggest names of the time -- were both the most fortunate of pepole as well as her helpless prey, so insatiable were her performances. She was amazing!
In the decades since she left the business, Vanessa has popped up here and there. She appeared on NYPD Blue and also had an entire Taschen book made about her. She's on social media and appreciates her fans. Now in her 70s, she lives quietly (I believe on Staten Island) and lives a fairly quiet life. But her legacy will never be quiet -- it will rage on forever.
The years 1986 to 1989 were quite formative for me: I was a kid becoming more aware of the wider world, I was switching schools between elementary and middle, I was doing The Nutcracker and other ballets at Lincoln Center -- and NYC was in tumult.
Crack, crime, corruption, and big personalities ruled the town -- Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump and others were in the news every day ... and even though Koch is long days, the others still (obviously) haunt us.
This moment in time is the subject of a new book by Jonathan Mahler called Gods of New York. Mahler wrote the classic early-aughts book Ladies and Gentleman the Bronx is Burning and he is a great NYC historian.
You should listen to this great conversations between Mahler and Chuck Todd about how late 1980s NYC seems to be more relevant than ever in 2020s America.
And while yours truly wasn't a "God" of New York at that time, I was, in a way, a very minor princeling.
The early 1990s were the Golden Age of the inner-city movie -- movies about the brutal, violent experience of black American city life in the time of crack and rampant police violence. This era last about five years, roughly from the time of Boyz in the Hood in 1991 to Dead Presidents in 1996.
In the interim three such movies were released, all written by a guy named Barry Michael Cooper. While many of these kinds of movies were set in Los Angeles, Cooper's movies were set in NYC, specifically in Harlem. The first and best of these was New Jack City (which made Wesley Snipes a star) followed by Sugar Hill and Above the Rim (featuring Tupac Shakur).
Before he turned to screenwriting, Cooper was a journalist covering the same territory. He actually wrote one of the first articles about the crack epidemic for otherwise lily-white Spin Magazine in 1986 with the brilliant, chilling title "Crack, a Tiffany Drug at Woolworth Prices." He also invented the term "New Jack Swing."
Cooper recently died at the age of 66, far too young. But he chronicled and contributed to an important, pivotal moment in American culture, and left a great legacy.
I've written extensively about the book and movie Slaves of New York over the years. The book by Tama Janowitz came out in 1986 and the movie version in 1989.
If you want to find the complete Mr NYC Slaves of New York archive, go here.
And even though I can't find a full version of the movie available anywhere, you can watch the end credits, with wonderful shots of late 1980s downtown Manhattan -- a place both very familiar and quite distant.
End credits for movies usually aren't that interesting but I suggest you read these for a few reasons:
1) The cast inludes, in minor roles, actors who would go on to big careers: Steve Buscemi, Stanley Tucci, Mercedes Ruehl, and Anthony LaPaglia. It's odd to see them next to people who ... wouldn't go on to big careers.
2) At the end of the credits, they thank Mayor Ed Koch -- and this movie came out just a few short months before he was bounced out of office.
3) You will notice that two future Mr NYC interviewees are in these credits: Tama Janowitz herself and Barbara Nitke who served as an on-set photographer.
Enjoy! Watch these credits, go into the archive, and revisit the world of bohemian NYC!
As congestion pricing takes effect in NYC, we may very well be seeing the eclipse of the car in NYC -- or at least in lower Manhattan. Less cars, more money to public transit it music to the ears of any real New Yorker.
Take that Robert Moses!
But people still loves their cars -- I get it.
And even if you don't love cars (like me), you might have enjoyed theSaturday morning NPR show Car Talk (like me) that ran from 1986 to 2012 -- syndicated nationally from Boston and broadcast locally here on WNYC.
If you want to listen to some old Car Talk episodes, WNYC has a massive archive of old shows that are a pleasant diversion from the miseries of our time -- and love letter to the all-American automobile.
In 2018 I did a short review of the classic late 1970s adult film Debbie Does Dallas which, despite its title, was actually filmed in Brooklyn. It starred a woman named Bambi Woods who was catapulted to adult stardom by the film.
And in 2021 I interviewed the former adult star Lisa Cintrice who starred in Debbie Does Dallas 2 and had a scene in a bathtub with Ms Woods. After this, Bambi Woods vanished from the public eye, and in the forty-plus years since no one has been able to find her -- there have been rumors that she died in 1986, others that she moved and continues to live as a housewife in Iowa.
Either way, back in 1979, Bambi Woods was very much a star and she gave this short interview about the movie that had made her infamous. It's a moment in time when the adult films business in NYC was at the vanguard of popular culture -- a moment that, in retrospect, passed quickly.
The hottest thing in American popular culture today isn't superhero movies -- it's hours-long true crime podcasts, documentaries, and TV series.
In the last few years, tabloid scandals from the past about Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrew Cunan, Robert Chambers, OJ, and many others (more recently, the Menendez Brothers) have become massive hits in various multi-episode formats. And all of them seem to be about tabloid stories from the late 20th century.
But before the era of streaming and podcasts, where hours and hours could be devoted to telling these trashy tales, such stories would become network TV movies -- and instead of waiting years, these "ripped from the headlines" events became hastily-made, two-hour flicks.
One such story that, as far as I know, has yet to become a 21st-century multi-hour podcast/documentary/streaming series is about the June 1986 attack of Marla Hanson.
A Missouri-transplant and aspiring model, Marla Hanson was living in a Manhattan apartment, attending glamorous parties, pursuing romance, living the NYC dream, until one day her landlord, who was obsessed with her, slashed her face, ending her modeling dreams. It was a big, scary story about obsession, beauty, and the "face value" of human worth. Her attackers were eventually sentenced to prison, but not until she was, in her words, badly treated by the criminal justice system.
And this is why the 1991 TV-movie about the incident was called Face Value: The Marla Hanson Story.
This movie falls squarely into the now gone-and-forgotten sensationalist TV-movie with bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, and bad music. It's amazing to think anything this low-rent would get made today but, thirty-odd years ago, this was the stuff that millions of people watched when the big network TV hits went on hiatus.
There are, however, a few interesting things about this movie that make it worth watching (you can see the trailer and full movie below).
First, it's a real-NYC movie that, in its ways, captures the allure and danger of the late 20th century, pre-911 city.
Second, the cast.
Marla Hanson is played by an actress named Cheryl Pollack, who "had a moment" in the early 1990s. She was in the 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume, a memorable episode of Quantum Leap, and later on was on another show called The Heights. She continued to pop up in TV shows throughout the 1990s until, it appears, she left acting.
Marla's landlord/slasher was played by an odd-looking, odd-sounding actor named Kirk Baltz. And ironically, the very next year, he'd make movie history as the victim of a fictional slashing -- he's the guy who played the cop who memorably got his ear cut-off in Quentin Tarantino's directorial-debut Reservoir Dogs (while "Stuck in the Middle With You" played in the background). It must have been ironic for him to go, within a year or so, from playing a slasher in a totally forgettable TV movie to playing the most famous slashing victim in movie history -- and in a cinematic classic.
Then there's Marla's love interest. He's played by a very handsome actor named Dale Midkiff. His career caught fire in the 1980s when he played Elvis in a TV-mini-series, and then was in the 1989 hit movie Pet Semetary. But big screen stardom elluded him and it was back to TV. Not long after making this Marla Hanson TV movie, Dale starred in a very silly but massively entertaining show called Time Trax. It was about a cop from the year 2193 who is sent back in time to 1993 to find criminals who escaped from his time, hiding out the past, and sending them back to the future -- and justice. After Quantum Leap, it was my favorite time-travel show ever (although nowhere as good as QL), and he was really good in it. It only ran for two-years but it was fun to watch (interestingly, Time Trax premiered on January 20th, 1993, the same day that Bill Clinton became president).
As for Marla Hanson, after this horrible incident, she appears to have gone on and lived a nice quiet life. She married, had a child, worked briefly as a screenwirter, and seems to have had no interest in having a public profile in the almost 40-years after she was thrust into the headlines. And good for her!
These days the network TV movie seems to be a thing of the past. But this movie capture an era of TV, and NYC, that seems both far in the past and very familiar.
Before the 21st century Golden Age of Television, the 1970s through the 1990s was the Golden Age of the Television Mini-Series.
Whenever regular TV shows went on vacation, the networks would broadcast these multi-episodes series that were a little less than a movie but a little more than a regular TV show. Some of these mini-series, like Roots from 1977 or the 1980s civil war drama North & South, were great, classic TV. But a lot of it was stuff like the 1987 soapy mini-series I'll Take Manhattan, based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Judith Krantz (who wrote a lot of these kinds of books that then became mini-series).
The show's IMDB description tells you everything you need to know about it: "Maxi Amberville tries to save the magazine empire her father built, but her treacherous uncle stands in the way." The Amberville's are supposed to be a Murdoch-like, more like Sy Hersch-like, family running a magazine company very much like Conde Nast. The spirit of this show -- family members battle for control of a media empire -- is basically Succession thiry-years earlier, although nowhere near as funny, well-written, well-acted or well ... everything ... as the HBO show. The story is formulaic, the acting hammy, the dialogue stupid, everything's predictable and dopey.
So why does Mr NYC choose to remember it?
Because it's a relic,a time-stamp, of its age -- the Go-Go 1980s Reagan-era business drama that was very popular at the time. And because it's a very NYC story -- Money! Sex! Publishing! Betrayal! Donald Trump! Lots of shots of the World Trade Centers! Lots of music with saxapohones! Secretative calls being made in phone booths in the pouring rain in at nighttime! It's all there.
The most interesting thing about it is the cast -- it's truly a time capsule of actors and actresses whose careers were either on the way up or on the way down.
Valerie Bertinelli plays the heroic Maxi. She had just finished her long run on the hit TV show One Day At A Time and this show, one gueses, was supposed to demonstrate her great acting chops. She is a great actress but this show was clearly not the right vehicle in which to do so.
The always wonderful Barry Bostwick plays her father, the company's founder, and he's probably the best thing in it. A just-about-to-be James Bond Timothy Dalton is in it as are veteran TV actors Jack Scalia and Perry King who plays the no-good rotten scheming villanous uncle as a no-good rotten scheming villanous uncle.
There's also a few actors who went on to greatness: Jane Kaczmarek, thirteen years before Macolm in the Middle, Chris Noth a few years before Law & Order and Sex and the City, a pre-My Two Dads/Step-by-Step Staci Keanan, and, most notably, future Oscar-winner Julianne Moore ten years before Boogie Nights.
Also, future President and aspiring fascist dictator Donald Trump has a cameo because they filmed some of it at Trump Tower and gave him an obligatory cameo. You might otherwise call this show Trump's Bedtime for Bonzo.
It has to be seen to believed. But I'll give this show credit -- 1987 was the era of Bonfire of the Vanities NYC, the start of the crack epidemic, when people loved to hate this city -- and this show, at that time, dared to celebrate it.
Here are a couple of episodes (you can find the rest on YouTube) as well as some clips and promos. It was truly part of a TV era we probably will never see again.
I've been to London, England many times, most recently in 2008 (I even blogged about it at the time). But I never really took a lot of pictures when I was there until I travelled there quite recently and did just that.
I didn't have a lot of time or energy to do anything too ambitious so I did the typically tourist route of walking from the Houses of Parliament up to Buckingham Palace (making a stop at the National Gallery along the way). Here are some of the pictures of my walk, starting at Big Ben and walking up Whitehall, the enormous city block that contains many of the government ministries including Number 10 Downing Street, the residence and workplace of the British Prime Minister:
Along Whitehall there is a giant arch leading to the House Guard Parade which is a massive field, right in the heart of central London, where you can see where the royal horses are trained and "paraded" around (most recently for the King Charles III coronation).
Then up to the palace, crossing under the Admiralty arch, where I caught the tail's end of the changing of the guard, and saw the outgoing regiment march along the Mall and vanish into nearby St. James' Palace:
Around the palace, in the nearby parks, are some other interesting things to see, including the Canada Gate (a gift from the Great White North to its imperial masters), Clarence House (where the King and Queen currently live, and which is interestingly not on any public maps of the area), the rather dull and old pile of St James' Palace, statues of King George VI and his wife, the Queen Mother, and a huge monument to a forgotten 19th century Duke of York (the Prince Andrew of his day) who was a great battlefield commander -- and the joke of why his monument is so high up is because he had huge debts so he didn't want his creditors to be able to get to him:
I went back to Trafalgar Square, the very center of London, where I stopped for a bite to eat a Pret'a'Manger (there are Pret'a'Mangers EVERYWHERE in London) and I saw a rally of sorts of Iranian dissidents who seem to want to bring back the Shah:
Right off Trafalgar Square is the beautiful small church St Martin's-in-the-Field (an interesting name for a place that's in the heart of a huge city). It's shockingly small and intimate, and not crowded at all -- and very beautiful and quiet (it also has a restaurant downstairs in its old crypt and it holds outdoor concerts during the summer):
I especially love this somewhat hokey, somewhat profound public art structure that contains the words, "Here times leaps up, and strikes eternity."
Then I went to the National Gallery which will be a whole other blog post.
Afterwards, I walked north and stopped at Sicilian Avenue, a small little side-street with a restaurant that I remember going to with my mom on my first night in London with her 1986 (I even remember what I ordered -- fish). It was nice to go back and check it out 37 years later:
Finally, I stopped off and had some gelato in Russell Square, a big park-like place with a beautiful fields and restaurant and benches -- and right next to it is a huge gorgeous (and expensive) hotel called the Hotel Russell (my mom and I had dinner there one night in 1986 where I ate more food in one sit-down then any other time in my life):
And that was my day! I always enjoy going to London and hope to be back there someday -- although I'd like to see many other cities in the UK sometime soon. Hope you enjoyed the pictures!
The streets of NYC have so much romance attached to them that there have literally been great songs written in their honor -- "The Sidewalks of New York", "Across 110th Street", and "Positively 4th Street" just to name a few.
Right now, and until the end of October, there's an exhibit in Greenwich Village called Village Voices 2002 where, on the streets of the beloved neighborhood, there are boxes with small exhibits and recordings that tell you the history of the streets their located on.
The streets of NYC have a magic to them, representing the limitless possibilities of this city in concrete and steel.
But the streets of NYC also have an obvious menace. Danger lurks on them, intertwined with the glamour and excitement of the city. And while the streets of NYC are always fascinating to traverse, it's another thing if that's where you have to live, where you are forced to make your home. The expression "out on the streets" is as scary a threat as there is.
One Year, a podcast series that chronicles little-known or forgotten news stories from years past (recent seasons were 1977 and 1995) is currently doing a season on 1986. Their latest and last episode from this season is called "The Man From Fifth Avenue" about a movie of the same name that none of us have ever or will ever see but that became something a scandal in that summer 36 years ago. It follows a man named Joe being evicted from his apartment on the Upper West Side -- he faces life "on the streets", hurtling towards certain death in penury. This episode, which is a must-listen, tells the story of this man and his predicament, a fascinating NYC story that is way more complicated and with a much more unbelievable backstory than any of us could have imagined.
So why was the The Man From Fifth Avenue a scandal? Because it was -- ready for this? -- a piece of communist Soviet propaganda. This "movie" was created, with Joe as the willing tool, to demonstrate the greed and cruelty of American capitalism to Soviet citizens, to make them appreciate their "workers paradise" -- never mind that their country had many homeless people "on the streets" too. The problem for the USSR was that this movie came out around the same time as the Chernobyl disaster that would expose the venal dishonesty and incompetence of the Soviet system -- and that would lead to its demise five years later.
There's another way to think about this movie and how it relates to our lives today: it was an early piece of disinformation -- although this time targeted at the Russians and not Americans -- that would eventually come back to haunt us in our presidential election 30 years later. It's also a reminder that while communism fell in the Soviet Union/Russia, what came afterwards was equally scary. And, closer to home, it was an example of dislocation and gentrification that have rocked NYC in the decades since. This propagandistic movie was a giant lie that also exposed certain uncomfortable truths.
The streets of NYC have always held, and always will hold, so much promise and so much danger.
As the clock ticks down to 2022, something occurred to moi: some of my best, or at least my favorite, posts are ones that I wrote at the end of various years. They were, as you might imagine, posts full of ruminations of the year gone by and the one right over the horizon but not always -- sometimes they were interviews or reports of odd things.
So here are my favorite end of the year blog posts that you might enjoy going back and reading again:
On the last day of 2013, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg was leaving office and Mayor-Elect Bill De Blasio was preparing to assume it, I wrote a blog post about how the Bloomberg years had marked a "farewell to funky town", how the wild city of the 20th century had became the much tamer one of the 21st. I also wrote about the recent deaths of some prominent New Yorkers who, in their way, defined "funky town". Now Mayor De Blasio is leaving and Mayor-Elect Eric Adams will be taking over and, it's fair to say, funky town, especially in a COVID world, is well and truly gone forever.
Then, in 2018, a strange event happened in NYC -- a huge blue burst of light exploded over the sky of NYC, literally electrifying it. It was a strange yet amazing thing to happen in those quiet days between Christmas and New Year's, a reminder that this city is always full of surprises.
In 2019, in my last post of the year, I did an extensive interview with Hyapatia Lee, the former adult actress and current Native-American activist. She was, and remains, a fascinating person with an amazing life story. It was a real honor to interview her.
Finally, last year, after a year-from-hell and another year-from-hell coming up, I wrote about my distinct memories of December 31, 1986 which remains my favorite New Year's Eve ever.
And now 2021 is in the history books and 2022 beckons. Fingers crossed that things get better but, even if they do, we have a long way to go.
The Year of Our Lord 1986 A.D. was a memorable one in 1986 for NYC -- and for me personally.
The city was bursting with renewal. The Beastie Boys were reinventing rap music out of Brooklyn; in Manhattan, Woody Allen was at the height of his career with Hannah and Her Sisters while nightclubs likes Tunnel and Limelight were the hottest places in the world. And out in Queens the Mets played the most memorable season in its history.
In 1986 NYC was in a period of transition -- from the dark days of the "Bronx is Burning" 1970s to the "luxury product" of the 21st century. A new documentary from ESPN called Once Upon a Time in Queens covers the '86 Mets on the way to their World Series victory -- and how the city embraced and related to the team.
The players on the '86 Mets are on the tip of any New Yorker's tongue who was alive at the time -- Doc Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, Keith Hernandez, Lenny Dykstra, Gary Carter, and others. They played hard and, oh boy, they lived harder too!
In between outings, they'd snork coke and bang chicks. They trashed hotel rooms and many of them got arrested. It's amazing that anyone playing on the '86 Mets was able even to swing a bat or throw or catch a ball, let alone win a World Series. The amount of wildness they engaged in, the all consuming debauchery -- the drugs, the booze, the broads, the fights, you name it -- must have exhausted them. And yet ... they played amazing baseball and achieved greatness.
If you want to read more Mr NYC coverage about NYC in 1986, go here.
Recently I blogged about a failed Broadway musical called Teddy & Alice. It ran for about two months in late 1987 and early 1988 and has been forgotten and never revived since. Another show that also had a brief run around that time has had a more interesting afterlife -- Chess.
Chess was the brainchild of the musical savant Tim Rice (former partner of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the scribes of Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita) who wrote it with Bjorn Ulvaeus, the genius who wrote most of ABBA's big hit songs. The concept of Chess was certainly of its time: set in the depths of the 1980s Cold War, it's about American and Soviet chess masters, facing each other down in world-wide competitions, with money, women, and international politics getting in their way.
Summarizing the plot is hard because originally the musical started out as a concept album in 1984 and, once staged, apparently the 1986 London stage show in the West End had a different story than the 1988 Broadway version. The plot was constantly being re-written and revised. In its original previews on Broadway in 1988, Chess had running time of 4 hours and then was cut-down to 3 hours 15 minutes when it finally opened in late April. Needless to say the length made it less than appealing to ticket-buyers. Chess also failed quickly because it cost a fortune to stage, full of fancy lighting and special effects and moving stages. It needed to gross a ton of money each week to stay afloat -- and didn't. The 1980s was the era of spectacle musicals like Starlight Express that aimed to dazzle the auidences' eyes as much as satisfy their ears. Chess was another entry in this genre that has mostly faded away -- people just didn't want to spend their time seeing a show of German opera-like legnth that assaulted their senses all night long.
The reviews in London in '86 had been mixed but the reviews in NYC in 1988 were scathing -- Frank Rich in the Times said it had an "ostensible story ... the evening has the threatrical consistency of quicksand", and that the show just hammers home the analogy that the world is basically one big chess game and we are all its pawns. The show-stopping song is called "Nobody's Side" where the heroic lady chessmaster manager, who works for the American player but is in love with the Russian player (c'est la guerre!), croons away "And when he gives me reasons/To justify each move ... Everbody's playing the games/But nobody's rules are the same/Nobody's on nobody's side."
Ya' dig?
Some other deep meaning, powerful lyrics: "I cross over borders but I'm still there now ... Let man's petty nations tear themselves apart/My land's only borders lie around my heart."
Huh? (Still, you get chills when you actually hear it sung.)
In the 30+ years since Chess bombed on Broadway, it has actually had a rich afterlife with revivals and "concert musicals" done around the world. In 2009 I saw a concert version on TV that had been recorded in London in 2008, featuring Idina Menzel, Josh Groban and Adam Pascal from Rent. They were brilliant but my impression, even from this version, was that while the show had some powerful, beautiful, really great songs, the story was a confusing boring mess.
I can't resist: musically, Chess is great; plotwise, Chess is ... a mess!
So far Chess has never been revived on Broadway -- besides its story problems, the show became immeadiately and painfully dated in the 1990s when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Maybe one day it'll come back to Broadway, if the plot can be brought under control and if there is interest in a show about something that clearly is now a historical era.
And it does have some great songs that stand the test of time so, in many ways, Chess will continue playing (haha get it?) for decades to come.
P.S. The big opening song to the second act, "One Night in Bangkok" was actually turned into a music video that got some play on MTV and as a radio single. That was always the problem with the show -- it was a bunch of singles strung together to tell some kind of story ... that no one understands to this day.
It's hard to imagine that an episode of Saturday Night Live like this would ever air today -- one hosted by the most outrageous comedian of his time and, as the musical guest, one of the darkest and most groundbreaking musicians in rock history.
But this actually happened on the night of November 15, 1986 when bad boy comic Sam Kinison -- riding high as a comedy king and coming off the success of his movie Back to School -- hosted the show for the second time. He was his usual over-the-top self, jamming with the band, performing an over-the-top monologue, and yelling and blazing his way through several sketches. There was no comedian quite like Sam Kinison before or since. Sadly he died in 1992 in a car accident, but his comedic legacy lives on.
I can't find any clips of Lou Reed from this show but, according to the information I have, he perfomed the songs "I Love You, Suzanne" and "The Original Wrapper." I've posted those songs here.
This was just one of many shows in the long, long history of SNL -- but it was also a moment in time when the rebels, the contrarians, the lunatics of comedy and music crashed the gates and ran the asylum ... at least for this one night.
In retrospect it was a miracle that a show like Head of the Class ever aired on American television -- let alone for five seasons. A show about a bunch of New York City high schoolers, centered around their honors history class -- where learning and intellect along with the challenges of youth and personal growth were the main subjects, not teen cliches like parties and sex and "first love" -- doesn't exactly sound like the makings of a big hit.
Yet hit it was -- Head of the Class regularly appeared in the Top 25 most watch shows between 1986 and 1991, with an average audience of 14-17 million people.
Set at the fictional Millard Filmore High School in Manhattan (apparently based on Washington Irving High School near Union Square), the show starred Howard Hesseman (from WKRP in Cincinnati) as Charlie Moore, an out of work actor working as a teacher who is especially good at motivating and helping his honors history students succeed. Other characters included the lovable if sometimes buffoonish Dr. Samuels as well as an assistant principal who Moore often flirts with. But the focus of the show was the students. Long before it was fashionable, the cast of students was highly diverse -- racially, ethnically, even different ages and body types were represented. Probably more than any other show set in NYC, Head of the Class truly reflected the city it was set it.
And the show emphasized the joys of learning along with the stresses of trying to achieve academically and develop into a well-rounded adult. The show enjoyed concentrating on the kids' minds and souls and not on their looks and groins. In its third season, they even did a very special episode in the then-Soviet Union, the first American show to do so.
I remember when this show was on the air. I didn't watch it regularly, the kids were a little older than me, but the times I saw it I thought it was funny. If I recall correctly, my brother watched it regularly -- a bunch of smart kids going to a special NYC high school at the same time as him certainly had its appeal.
Head of the Class was one of those shows that was great -- until it wasn't. Eventually it hit a big wall in its last seasons. Cast member Robin Givens had a short, very public and tumultuous marriage to boxer Mike Tyson. Some cast members were replaced. And Howard Hesseman left after the fourth season because of "creative differences". He was replaced by Scottish comedian Billy Connolly which was an unconventional but doomed experiment. It also faced the problem all high school shows face -- eventually the kids grow up and either need to graduate (meaning other kids need to replace them) or the show has to cease being a high school show or the viewers need to suspend disbelief that these kids are spending the better part of a decade in high school. The final episode aired in the summer of 1991, almost 30 years ago.
And yet ... Head of the Class is coming back! A reboot is in the works at HBO Max although it's unclear when it will air. Hopefully it will retain the spirit and smarts of the original while also giving it a distinctly 21st centry edge. And, as always, NYC will be the constant.
In 1981 New York City Mayor Ed Koch was overwhelming re-elected to a second term. He was so popular that he received the nomination of both the Republican and Democratic parties. His landslide win established him as a formidable political figure and higher office called.
Koch answered it by running for Governor of New York State -- and failed spectacularly.
He gave an interview to a journalist named Peter Manso -- who has just died at the age of 84 -- in Playboy magazine. With his deft interviewing skills, Manso got Koch to admit what he thought about upstate New York, and the same thing that made Koch so popular in NYC -- his brashness, his "tell-it-like-it-is", no-holds-barred instinct to speak his mind -- terminated his campaign for governor. Koch told Manso about upstate, "It's sterile. It's nothing. It's wasting your life … a joke … you have to drive 20 miles to buy a gingham dress or a Sears Roebuck suit … [Albany is] small town life at its worst.”
Even in an age before social media, these comments sparked widespread outrage -- and Koch ended up losing the Democratic primary to then-Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo. The history speaks for itself -- Cuomo wound up serving as governor for three terms, from 1983 to 1995, and now his son Andrew Cuomo is governor, having been in office since 2011 (whether he'll make it to the end of his term in 2022 remains to be seen).
So Peter Manso changed the course of New York City and New York State history. But for him -- and it's a big "what if" -- Ed Koch might have wound up as governor and the Cuomo dynasty that has ruled New York off-and-on for 40 years might never have gotten off the ground.
Then there's Doyle, Popeye Doyle.
You might recognize the name if you've ever seen the 1971 classic The French Connection and the 1975 sequel. Doyle is the quintessential OG rough-and-gruff police detective, a sort of NYC Dirty Harry -- he doesn't play-by-the-rules or conform in order to deliver justice to his benighted city. In the mid-1980s, a decade of so after the second movie, someone got the idea that a TV show about Popeye Doyle might be a idea -- so a pilot was made starring Ed O'Neill called, quite brilliantly, Popeye Doyle. The plot is fairly basic -- a model is murdered, and Doyle tracks the case which gets him involved with a drug cartel and terrorists.
But only the pilot was made -- the TV show, to quote Pulp Fiction, "became nothing." It was broadcast in the fall of 1986 and shortly thereafter Ed O'Neill went on to star in Married ... with Children for a decade and then, years later, the great Modern Family for another decade. So another big "what if" is that had Popeye Doyle been picked up and run for even one season, O'Neill probably would never have done Married ... or Modern Family and the history of television would be very different.
Both "what ifs" are reminders that the course of history -- whether political or cultural -- is made by the decisions we make, by seemingly random choices and transient events or desires, or by unforced errors (like Koch's) or aesthetic judgments (like Popeye Doyle). We live with the results, for better or worse, of the decisions that we and others make that affect our lives and those of us around us.
Life in NYC and everywhere is determined and altered by people's choices, and everything else lives on in the realm of the "what ifs."
In NYC the ultimate New Year's Eve tradition is the ball drop in Times Square. In Europe, there's another grand tradition -- a performance of Johann Strauss's comic operreta Die Fledermaus.
Roughly translated as"The Bat", the operetta is about a Viennese gentlemen who is sentenced to a few days in jail for having insulted a public official. Before going to jail, he sneaks out to party held by a mysterious prince, dressed in a bat costume. Little does he know that his wife and maid are also at this party, disguised. He tries to seduce his own wife at the party and then, after hilarity ensues, winds up where he belongs -- in jail. The operrata is a silly, raucous piece of fun, the perfect New Year's Eve show.
It's also has a really wonderful score, including an overture that is one of the greatest in history.
Even though New Year's Eve performances of Die Fledermaus is a mostly European thing, on occassion the Metropolitan Opera will stage one (most recently, I believe, in 2013). In 1986 the Met unveiled a new production of the operretta that it hadn't performed in 20 years and, on December 31, 1986, it was performed on national television on the PBS show "Live from the Met."
Memories of watching television aren't the most interesting to share but I have one unique memory from that December 31, 1986 -- the first New Year's Eve I can remember celebrating, watching Die Fledermaus with my parents. I was also performing that night, doing the "The Nutracker" at NYCB, across the Lincoln Center plaza from the Metropolitan Opera house where Die Fledermaus was being performed. After my performance, my mother picked me up and took me home -- and I clearly remember our neighborhood being completely shut down, the streets deserted. We got home and my dad was watching and recording -- on the good ol' VCR -- the broadcast of Die Fledermaus. I started watching it with him, and fell in love with the music and gaity of this operreta (marveling that only a couple of hours earlier I was myself performing from just across the plaza where this show was being broadcast). Later, I re-watched Die Fledermaus and loved it all the more. The entire broadcast was a classy, beautiful affair.
Afterwards, midnight struck and I had my first glass of sparkling cider to rin in 1987. Then I went to bed.
A great memory and, to this day, my favorite New Year's ever.
