It was the summer of 1976
It was the summer of 1976, we had celebrated our country’s 200th birthday, and I was headed to graduate school in New York City. My friend moved me from college in his family’s station wagon. I rebuilt my bookcases, set up the Smith Corona typewriter my parents had just given me, and was back in business. Not that studying was my strong suit: I am a dreamer and a wanderer, so there is no more interesting spot on the planet for the likes of me than the Big Apple. The school is mall, modeled on a college of Oxford or Cambridge – a grassy haven with great trees, squirrels and park benches along the walkways between dormitories and classroom buildings. The city grabbed my eye like Marlow Thomas in “That Girl” walking down the street wearing an astonished, upward gaze. Entertainment was cheap and always available: we watched episodes of “Kojak” being filmed, rode the subways with a “Nut in Every Car” a la Bill Cosby, went for sunny walks in Greenwich Village. Pizza was fifty cents a slice, the Italian grocery sold three miniature pastries for a dollar, and for a quarter we took moonlit round trips on the Staten Island Ferry. Everyone came home at night with a story: once my roommate arrived breathless, saying she knew the gorilla jumping up and down on top of the VW beetle wasn’t real because she looked carefully at the nails on its feet. Graduate school is the best place in the world for making friends, too. Everyone shared the same interests, and we ate and worshipped together daily, too. I made a best friend for life because I really liked a speech we all heard and he came to find out why since no one else had approved of it. There was tremendous administrative upheaval going on that beclouded the older students when I arrived. So a group of us formed what we tagged, “The Committee” and put ourselves in charge of surprises, parties, pranks, and various other elements of good cheer.
