Long-Islandy

November 18th, 2018, looking down Park Avenue

When uncertainty surges, it helps to read something funny. For many, New Yorker cartoons restore balance. For others, Wodehouse or Jonathan Coe do the trick. On Twitter lately, Up the Down Staircase has been touted as hilarious. 

In early spring, in March, I read Henry Alford for the first time in book form. His pieces have appeared for years in various New York periodicals. Now I was going to try him in bulk, in Boulder. 

For stressed-out go-go New Yorkers or transplanted ones who sometimes ache for the material city, Municipal Bondage: One Man’s Anxiety-Producing Adventures in the Big City (Random House, 1993) covers ample ground — including the existence of the Doral Tuscany.*

I had to read the piece “Drive, He Said” because it’s about Alford driving the then governor of Colorado around New York City during the 1992 Democratic National Convention,  

I, a pedestrian, laughed out loud several times.

So, from “Drive, He Said” (italics mine):

My heart started hammering. A Long-Islandy woman in her fifties got out of the driver’s seat of the car. I could see only a small scrape.

Long-Islandy** strikes me as Alfordian; on the page Alford is a gentle sort. (I’ve not met him in person.) Where others might fleeringly drop the Long Island reference, Alford turns it into something kicky, something up-tempo. When I first encountered it, my mind thought Lindy, though the phrase visually summoned the Jitterbug. 

There are many good pieces in Municipal Bondage, which is broken up with fun Q&As like what if your mother were a form of interactive media?

I’ve wondered if the piece In Search of . . . Nubbins somehow penetrated the consciousness of super-baker Erin Jeanne McDonnell or if nubbins is just part of her everyday vocabulary (forward to 5:15 in this NYT Cooking video about gluten-free chocolate chip cookies).  

Mr. Alford has a funny and somewhat sad piece in a different book, one he didn’t write: the nonfiction collection Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Break the Final Taboo — How Money Transforms Families, Tests Marriages, Destroys Friendships, and Sometimes Manages To Make People Happy (Doubleday, 2007). Definitely worth reading (as well as other pieces in that book).

I’d like to think that Amy Sherman-Palladino’s casting people will audition Mr. Alford for a bit part in the Palladinos’ upcoming Amazon series based on Mary Gabriel’s 2017 book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (Little Brown). What role might suit Mr. Alford? Maybe . . . lanes attendant at the Frick mansion bowling alley, or typist for Clement Greenberg. Personally I’d like to watch a scene shot in the bowling alley — physics in action, for one thing.

* A joy of the piece is seeing the word TelePrompTer spelt correctly.

** Why this is hyphenated I have no idea. (Why is this hyphenated?)