http://www.nyrp.org/About/New_Leaf_Restaurant_Bar

Nice Tallulah zingers here and there, but they could have left out the rest of the play and just forwarded the zingers in email.

Valerie Harper mangles the Tallulah style.  She plays her all drunk and vulgar.  If you go to YouTube and check out a few clips of the real Tallulah, you’ll see the real woman may have been drunk, and may have had some salty things on her mind, but she was a very graceful, classy presence.  Which is exactly why – hellooo! – she could pull off being loose and addicted and still be interesting.  Somehow that little gem of characterization got lost on this team.

But that isn’t the worst of it.  The worst is that, for no reason except that it may apparently be a gay fantasy, Act 2 of the play melts into a squishy meatloaf thick scene of gay confessions of gay repression to Tallulah.  Well isn’t that just every gay man’s fantasy: If you were in the closet, to be able to come out strong to a loving and caring Tallulah Bankhead??

I thought I was coming to see a play about Tallulah Bankhead, her times, the issues she dealt with… Instead I get yet another play about a guy who wants to come out.  Why?  Tallulah wasn’t interesting enough?  Is a play not a play anymore if a guy doesn’t reveal he’s gay?

No such luck.  On my first visit, they ripped me off and still didn’t fix the problem.  The kicker is, the problem turned out to be so simple, I ended up fixing it myself, and am stunned and disappointed they didn’t find it themselves.

I was driving across midtown and a coolant hose blew, a hose that takes coolant from the engine block into the bulkhead.  The hose didn’t break, it just burst off its fitting.  I didn’t realize this until I had already called the tow truck.  ( I was on 51st Street, right by St. Patrick’s, at 9 AM.  The best thing to do was get out of traffic fast).

I got a tow to Cybert, who had done my annual inspection.  The owner assigned a mechanic to the truck, and told me they would call me to tell me what they had found and give me an estimate of the repairs.

The mechanic called that afternoon, and in barely intelligible English (he was African) said he had replaced the hose and that with a coolant flush and radiator pressure test it was going to cost $275 or thereabouts.

“Well, what had been the problem?” I asked.

“Bad hose.  Replaced hose.”

“That sounds like the symptom.”

“Hmm?”

“I’m saying, what would cause pressure to build up to the point that a hose would pop off its fitting?”

“It’s a old hose.  You want coolant flush?”

“Can I talk to the owner?”

“Ok, one minute.”

The owner got on the phone, I started to ask him what he thought the root of the problem might be.

“Look, it’s gotten really busy.  I understand George has got it fixed.  He’ll tell you about it.”  Seriously.  I was smelling the snow job.

George was back on the line.

“You want the flush and pressure test? $275?”

“I’m trying to understand what the problem was.”

“Is an old hose.  That’s it.  Somethin always gonna break.  That was it.”

“That was it?”

“Yeah!”

“Ok.”

What else am I suppose to do over the phone?  Apparently $275 is not enough to allow for a discussion of causes and symptoms.

I got the flush and pressure test done, and picked up the truck that evening, for $284.85.

I was suspicious, so I drove it around midtown traffic for an hour, half hoping the hose would burst again, or the temperature gauge would shoot up, as it had right before the hose burst.  No such luck, everything was fine, and I took the truck back to its garage, with a lingering feeling of auto-angst.

The following weekend on a Saturday evening, I took the truck out for a road trip to Hofstra, in Long Island,  to go see a friend in a concert.  Had to be there by 8PM.  Never made it.

I was on 495 going past LeFrak city in Queens (one of the ugliest landscapes in NYC) and the temperature gauge  – which had been suspiciously high — shot up into the red.  I pulled over to the shoulder and had no choice but to let the engine cool down.   When it was cool I drove off again.  Within six miles, the gauge shot up again.  I pulled over.  It went on like this until I managed to pull into a gas station and, with nothing else to try, decided to buy some antifreeze and see if the level was low.  I really couldn’t think of any other explanation.

Turns out it was low.  I ended up adding a gallon of antifreeze to the system.  Now, why was it low?  Cybert had just filled it earlier in the week.  They had pressure tested it, and found no leaks.  I never saw any leaks beneath the truck where I parked.

Turns out, believe it or not, that the culprit was the seal on the radiator cap.  Yes.  A little rubber seal the size of a silver dollar.  It was not broken.  It was just bent over itself.  So it wasn’t sealing well.  I was at wits end, and didn’t think that unbending the seal would solve this problem, but I had to try something.  So I unbent the seal,  set it right in the cap, and haven’t had a problem since.

I guess the bad seal was letting some coolant evaporate off the top, thereby bringing the level down too low to cool well, etc….  That’s  the only explanation I can think of.

Now, why couldn’t the guys at Cybert have just taken a look at that radiator cap?  Isn’t that the first thing one does, the first thing a pro does, with radiator issues?   They didn’t do it because they just don’t give a damn.  They just want to charge for big ticket service (radiator flush, pressure test), get you out, and move on.

I have moved on.  I will never be back.

receipt from Cybert Tire for experience described above

Why not just charge $1579 for all 12 months?  The following reasons come up:

1. When it comes time to renew the lease, the landlord is going present the assumption that negotiations are starting from the listed rental price, $1895. But that makes for an effective rent increase of ~17%, even if the rent doesn’t go up past $1895.  Most rent increases are of %5. If the economy doesn’t shoot back up in a year’s time for all boats, people are just gonna move again.
2. Landlords are trying to preserve the appearance of higher rents on their rent rolls, which they have to present to banks in order to obtain or maintain financing.  This is what a real estate broker told me.  But when I pressed the broker about the charade that this is setting up, I didn’t get much of an answer.

Reason 2 is a charade.  A loan officer worth his title is now going to look past the rent rolls, to the balance sheet for the period of the lease, and see that there are two big holes for the free months.   This is going to make the loan officer hesitate, just as he would if he saw steady rents of $1579.

That is, assuming the loan officer isn’t in on the charade.  Because maybe he is in on it.  Maybe he is the one telling the landlord:  ”Just keep the rent rolls steady.”  The bank’s goal may be to repackage the loan into high quality bonds.  And if that is the goal, then the loan officer will be happy to see rent rolls that say $1895, and ignore the two free months.  The loan will be described as high quality to some derivatives packaging house, and we’re back to 2007, with junky real estate based bonds being sold off to unwitting investors as high quality paper.  Because aren’t the two free months pretty much equivalent to two missed mortgage payments?

Somebody please explain this to me in a way that puts it in a more positive light.

Parking in Manhattan: Good Luck!

If you own a car in Manhattan, or are bringing a car into Manhattan, you might find this useful: http://nyc.bestparking.com/

You cannot live and work in Manhattan, and park on the street.  The parking rules and regulations make it impossible.  You’d spend all your free time looking for a  spot for the following day.  You need to keep the car in a garage.

If you are driving into Manhattan for a weekend, an event, or anything for which you want peace of mind and don’t want to be thinking about the fate of your car, you need to keep it in a garage during your visit.  My father drove into the Financial District one weekend for a few hours in the mid-nineties, to visit the WTC towers, and  promptly got his car window smashed and car phone stolen while he was up in the towers.

Much more recently, my cousin drove into the city for a three day visit from Boston, and parked her car on Riverside Drive.  It was mistakenly towed away by the DoT.  One of their tow truck operators thought she was in a bus stop.  She spent the better part of her visit with the police and the DoT.  She eventually found her car in the impound lot, and spent months fighting the towing fees and ticket by mail from Boston.  She did eventually win, and got all her money back.  But she sure as hell didn’t get her vacation back.

If you’ve come back to your street parking spot and find yourself asking “Where’s my car?”, like my cousin did, you can check if your car was towed by the DoT. You just enter your license plate and state. The results will also tell you which impound lot the DoT took it to. It generally takes an hour from the time of towing for this information to be loaded into the DOT database.

So, um, no, my family doesn’t visit by car much anymore, and yes, I recommend a garage.  Now, you say, that’s going to be expensive.  Yes, if you go around midtown looking at parking rates, you’ll see monthly rates around $400 ~ $500, plus $100 more for an SUV or luxury car.  And the rates only go up on the East Side, in the West Village, or on the Upper West Side.

I have a pickup truck.  I thought I was going to have to garage it in Brooklyn or upper Manhattan and only see it twice a year.  I can’t afford $500/month to park.  But then I came across this site: http://nyc.bestparking.com/.  The prices here are much, much lower.  Like $160/month for the first year, $200/month thereafter.  Much more affordable.  I ended up parking in an Icon lot in midtown, 2 blocks from work, for $200/month — for a 4×4 pickup.  That’s a good deal.  If you know of a better one, tell me about it.

The thing to do on this site, is to not just take the listed prices at their word.  Fill in one of the forms, telling them how much you’re willing to pay.  Someone will call you with an offer.  It’ll be better than anything you saw driving around.

Of course, I only have experience with monthly parking deals.  A colleague who lives in New Jersey tells me he uses the site when driving in for Rangers games.  He uses it to make a reservation for a spot in advance.  That way he doesn’t get hosed when driving up to a lot.

They also have a mobile web site: http://mobile.bestparking.com which lets you check prices while your on your way.

And there you have it, folks.  The little nitty gritty about parking in Manhattan.

The Cafe des Artistes has closed, and the Parlor Bar closed with it.

The last time I was in the Bar, the owner was sitting next to us, having dinner with his daughter.   He was very nice, very friendly, and happy to share a little history.  He told us about the night Clinton bought out the whole dining room (the menus for that dinner are framed on the wall), and how Rumsfeld would always reserve a window table.  Maybe he thought that was the kind of stuff we wanted to hear.

But everyone retires sometime, and I suppose he picked a pretty good moment.  Struggling through this economy at his age – as a restaurant owner, why?

Hopefully the Cafe won’t disappear, and a new owner will be able to take it on.

——————-

The Parlor Bar at the Cafe des Artistes, 1 West 67th Street, New York, NY.

The smallest bar that I know of, except for a closet in Key West on Duval Street, but that’s another review.  The Parlor Bar is very, very cozy.  5 small tables for two, and maybe room for three at the bar itself.  The whole room is about the size of a large elevator, dark, with no music, very nice flowers, and the day’s newspapers.  You can just have a drink, or order dinner from the Cafe menu.  Very cozy, very intimate, very charming on a date.  Very fun after a show at Lincoln Center.  Not recommended if you intend to discuss secret business.  Everyone will hear you.

You come away regretting that no one had argued against it so well while it was happening, but greatly relieved that now that it may be over, if you can’t laugh at yourself for not having been able to stop it, you can at least laugh at the idiots who did it.

But the play isn’t one long browbeating review of the war on terror, it’s a great comedy built on:  woman wakes up to discover she married a stranger the night before.  He is muslim, very skeevy, and gets threatening at the mention of annulment or divorce.  Not allowed to go to the police, she does convince him that they should go meet her parents, who are wealthy.  The groom is deluded enough to think he may be marrying into money.   The father is a conservative crackpot, the mother is a delusional housewife in denial.

Sounds crazy, absurd, and none too pleasant.  But Durang is a master at pulling humour out of the absurd and gross and painful.  Nothing is ever too painful for more than a second, just long enough to get to the absurdity.

The play could have ended before the “rewind” sequence.  The rewind sequence tries to tell us how things might have turned out if the characters had acted with, well, I guess more honesty.  It gets boring and long. We know we can’t go back and fix anything.  We can only move forward and pay the consequences.  The play would have been stronger, had it been left at that.  Go see it, tell me if you agree.

Maybe this play does, in fact answer my question, “if there were no taboos, would theatre exist?”  Apparently,  yes.  This is now the longest running comedy on Broadway, and it doesn’t try to expose any taboo at all.

It’s a wonderfully clever stage version of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie by the same name.  Only four actors play dozens of roles, and they manage, with brilliant use of lighting, props, and lightning fast costume changes, to take the audience along on every scene/setting that was in the movie:  lonely apartment, music hall, overnight train, Scottish highlands, farmer’s house, castle, moores, bridges, car chase — really terrific stuff.  I found myself gasping that I actually believed I was watching a man jump off a bridge in Scotland. 

But I didn’t really care too much if he survived.  The only device the play has that I think might get one hooked is this:  an innocent man is declared wanted for murder by the police, and he must prove himself innocent by finding the criminals himself, or else be unjustly imprisoned or worse.

I suppose that’s it; the well known plot device:  falsely accused, must prove oneself innocent against all odds.

It’s a great device for building tension, great for creating a fast paced rythm.  But it doesn’t address any polemic.  These issues are pretty much settled, in principle, in nations presenting themselves as democratic:  innocent until proven guilty, false imprisonment is a terrible mistake.

Anyways, for a fun evening out that won’t make anyone uncomfortable, you can’t go wrong with this one.

Really a great play – and one of the cheapest on Broadway this season.