Riding downtown to the cowboys

The Column: 04.14.25

The family took the subway downtown to a dance performance as a favor to the one dance fan in our midst and she thanked us for it afterward. “Thank you for indulging me, I really loved this,” she said. People ought to do that more often. Me, for one. My wife and daughter leave the apartment for hours, leaving me to work in silence. It seems awkward to say, “Thank you for going away,” so I don’t.

I didn’t care for the modernist pieces on the program, the rattly shrieky unmelodic music, the grievous angular movements suggesting despair and panic. The Dow Jones had been crashing all day and I was imagining the three of us losing the apartment and having to sleep in the bus depot so I was more in the mood for tap dancing and tangos, dancing less attitudinal, more aspirational. But the subway ride was worth it.

We went downtown on the Broadway Local and the conductor was a guy who liked his job, you could tell by the rhythms of his voice as he called out the stops, and the cheerful “Watch for the closing doors, please” and now and then a “Thanks for riding” and tossing in notable sites, “Columbus Circle” and “Lincoln Center” and “Port Authority Bus Terminal,” the one where we’d be sleeping someday when the portfolio crashes.

Crime is down in the city, which my relatives in the Heartland don’t want to believe, but we have a terrific new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a Harvard grad who spent a few years as sanitation commissioner, if you can imagine that. Harvard grads are supposed to work in the Brookings Institution; she made the city cleaner by picking up trash at midnight instead of 6 a.m., frustrating the rat population. She’s spent 16 years in the NYPD — “I know it like the back of my hand” — and she uses the word “recidivism” easily, the revolving door, a handful of persons responsible for hundreds of crimes.

You hear it in her voice, the sense of nobility in plain old public service. So we notice more cops in subway stations and on trains, not parked in squad cars on their cellphones. Squad cars aren’t so useful in Manhattan as in, say, Manhattan, Kansas: the number of speeding tickets is rather slight, given the congestion, but it is reassuring to us citizens to come across cops on the street and in the subway, visible, good guys, maybe a little overdressed with cop gear, but still. The woman is an honor to the Tisch family.

The police presence makes us less wary, more aware of the sights, the little shops, the odd attractions, food wagons, historic plaques, passers-by expressing their individuality, the occasional historic hippie with a headful of Seventies hair, and then you come to the marquee for the dance and duck in, find your seats, and wait for the lights to dim.

They did Aaron Copland’s friendly old “Rodeo” choreographed by Agnes de Mille, with the fiddle tunes and the cowboys and ladies and the cowgirl outcast, and that was a hit, and then the woman next to me asked, “Are you a Martha Graham fan?” I said, stupidly, “I grew up more of a Billy Graham fan,” and asked her what brought her and she said quietly, “My daughter is in the next dance.”

And right there, that made the evening for me. The pride in her voice. “How did she get into dance?” I asked.

“She did it on her own, when she was a teenager. She loved it.”

“No orthopedic problems along the way?” She laughed. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she said.

And then the daughter came out in a flowing white silk gown that when she did high kicks made dramatic geometric impressions and she interacted with a railing and did some jittery and jumpy things, but when it ended, I stood up and clapped and yelled, along with everyone else. A person believes that the discipline and passion that go into creating those memorable twelve minutes, or creating memorable music or poetry or theater, will see us through the gyrations of the Dow. These days I’m a fan of journalism and I’ve read commentary on the current guy that made me laugh so hard I couldn’t talk. We have a deranged president. Republicans elected him and they need to find a home for him. Assisted living. Florida. A big patio looking at the Gulf of America.

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