Mark Your Calendar

It was a perfect day in New York City.

I love this time of year. The temperature is a cool 70 degrees, day and night. The trees have started to turn but there is still a flourish of green on the branches. It is so lovely now, but it will quickly come to an end. Soon the holiday crush will overwhelm the city. My office building on Sixth Avenue will join the festivities with their usual display of outlandishly oversized Christmas ornaments, a corporate staple of the Avenue of the Americas near Rockefeller Center, spurred on by the larger than life toy soldiers that adorn Radio City Music Hall across the street. With fifteen foot candy canes strewn about casually and three foot red glass balls stacked four high in pyramids, the street has the look of a late December living room floor in mid construction. Just half a block away, the massive Rockefeller Center Christmas tree awaits its missing ornaments.

But now the streets are just littered with people. During the day, the homeless are largely invisible, driven into the subways and their entrances to panhandle. On the street, business people scurry past the numerous tourists in a frenzied pace, like the squirrels at my house who madly dash about this time of year for nuts to store for the winter. The intense walking in the city is something that those of us who live there take for granted, but it is often too much for those who are just visiting. The tourists collapse along the sidewalks, unable to keep up with the breadth and width of our great city. Standpipes are for sitting, lamp posts are for leaning. True New Yorkers roll their eyes and brush brusquely past them on their way to Starbucks or other important meeting place.

After the show tonight, I too dodged tourists on the outskirts of Times Square as I dashed over to Therapy where Chris French and company were engulfed in Avalanche, the first mixer of the year for Ski Bums, the local gay ski club. We interviewed Chris on the show four years ago and he is still talking about it. I have been dying to do some ski activities with them, but my work schedule makes weekend trips to Whistler and elsewhere virtually impossible. Even the cocktail events from 7-10pm are largely out of the question. But I figured the alcohol and the boys would still be flowing when I dashed over there tonight and with winter coming, I am making a concerted effort to join in their fun this year.

The first person I ran into is my delightfully handsome friend Mark from Los Angeles. Back in the fall of 1995, I went to work at Sony Pictures in Culver City. The studio was on the old MGM backlot and also included David O. Selznick’s old studio, fronted by the famous “Mansion” so recognizable from the opening of all of his pictures, just down the road. I worked in the non-descript Tri-Star Building, on the far side of the lot that had once been home to Lorimar, the producers of Dallas and other television programs. Mark worked on the other side of the lot, first in the prestigious Thalberg Building, and then later in the old MGM school house where Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor once attended classes between scenes.

Mark was the only person who was ever really genuinely nice to me at that studio. Granted we became friends because I worked in Special Events, so I was the go-to guy from tickets to movie premieres and occasionally good swag, but even after I left the studio, he remained just as nice as always. Once I was having lunch with some other publicity people just outside the commissary. They asked me, if I could work anywhere at the studio, where would I want to work.

“At the Mansion!” I exclaimed, forever in awe of the tremendous Hollywood history under our own feet.

The other motion picture publicists were horrified. “You don’t want to work there. They do television there.”

The sin of the Hollywood hierarchy. No matter what you do in Motion Picture, it is infinitely better than anything in Television. It is almost as if the more profitable an industry in Hollywood, the more it is looked down upon. Movie people look down on TV people who look down on Music who look down on Home Video and so on. I never felt that same disdain from Mark, and later when he left motion picture for television and then online, it was only confirmed for me. Whatever. When I heard that Sony paved over what was left of the yellow brick road when they bought the studio, I knew it wasn’t the place for me anymore.

But now Mark is living in New York City and it is my chance to return the favor of kindness he showed me so many years ago on the Sony lot. I can introduce him to some of my friends that I think he will like, and probably a potential boyfriend or two. So it was a fortuitous jaunt I took to Therapy, spurred on by last night’s fleeting good weather. Today it is raining, and soon the candy canes will come out of hiding and the snow will fall, delicately covering the stained sidewalks in an all-too-brief splendor. And like the squirrels, I will be burrowed away somewhere for the winter, uninspired to leave my warm nook until the first signs of spring. But for one day, it was a perfect day in New York City.