Ex-Hot Press columnist Lorraine Freeney reflects on writing at large from New York in the '90s

Guest Writer: Lorraine Freeney

For a short while in the mid-'90s, Tara McCarthy and I co-wrote a column about New York. I deleted the words “our adventures in” just there, as that would imply something more dazzling than we usually got up to. We saw bands, comedy shows, and plays, and went to bars (a lot), and wrote about those and other assorted pop culture ephemera. If I was on the cutting edge of anything, it was more likely to be a broken seat on the subway than a vibrant cultural scene, and I felt a little fraudulent writing about a city I’d just arrived in and barely knew.

Back then, Williamsburg and the Lower East Side were affordable, cellphones didn’t exist, and a stranger talking loudly into thin air was a reason to cross the street. The World Trade Centre still stood, and on taxi rides back over the Brooklyn Bridge after a night out I’d crane my head to watch it fade from view. It was that idea of New York – glistening off in the distance – that appealed to me, rather than its specifics.

That hasn’t changed much. Possibly neither have I. If I was writing the same column now, there’d be something in it about finally seeing The Book Of Mormon last night (hilarious and absolutely filthy), or the Enda Walsh play that’s on this weekend, or the live taping of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that we’ll attend next week. All things I’d likely have loved 20 years ago, if they’d existed then.

That’s one benefit of middle age – knowing exactly what you like, along with realising what you no longer need to search out. The bars and clubs get along without me very well, and vice versa. But though that part of the past is less like a foreign country than an old neighbourhood I rarely need to venture into anymore, it’s sometimes nice to wander through. As I was having dinner with a friend in Boston over the weekend, The Jayhawks’ Blue started playing in the background. On impulse I pulled out my phone and texted Tara – we used to play that song so often on the Brooklyn Inn’s jukebox that the bartender finally begged us to stop. Tara, settling in for game night with her family, replied that she would queue it up.

A few minutes later another message arrived: her daughter had just asked her what a jukebox was.