My column next week will be about New York City, and the allure it has always had for the ambitious and the hopeful. Writing it, I was reminded of a something said in an interview by performance artist Laurie Anderson. She, like me, grew up in the Illinois of the 1950s and ‘60s. (Anderson was raised in Glen Ellyn; it’s in Illinois — you could look it up.)
New York then still was the
big time, the acme, the top of world for those in show biz, the arts, sports,
finance, media. Like so many of us, the child Anderson watched the news with Huntley and Brinkley every night. She decided
that New Yorkers were hip because, since they were an hour ahead of us, they
already knew everything that we in the Midwest were just hearing about.
This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2014.
