A Frantic City, NJ

Dear Atlantic City,

Oh, how you've changed.

I grew up visiting you during all my childhood summers. My family even spent some Thanksgivings and Easters with you.  You were my first seashore love.  I was blind to all other towns to the north and south of you.  

You've always been a city to me because before casino gambling rolled into town, you contained intimate, vibrant neighborhoods.  You were rough around the edges but pulsed with ethnic life.

We've been estranged over the years, but the most recent news of casino closings, large layoffs, and double-digit unemployment feels like a betrayal.  We were so good together before Resorts first opened its casino doors. In the sixties and early seventies, we romped gloriously and then you ruined things and went for the shinier strangers who came to town in 1978. 

Before becoming a gambling town, you truly were a resort town, albeit in a cityfied way.  My adolescent vacation memories are marked on your wide beaches, 4-mile-long boardwalk, Million Dollar Pier, Steel Pier, old-time blue jitneys, Miss America parade, Ice Capades show, Funcade pinball house, and watching taffy being made and wrapped at James' window. 


LBJ & family on the Convention Hall
balcony in Atlantic City, 1968

In August 1964, you hosted the Democratic National Convention.  I vividly remember standing outside the boardwalk Convention Hall with my grandmother, gazing up at the pillared balcony to see Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey wave to us below. 

My grandmother's excitement spilled onto my eight-year-old sensibilities, making me very aware of the moment's importance.

Jackie Kennedy stayed at the Deauville Hotel on your boardwalk during the convention. For years after, as we strolled past its Miami-esque front with a pool and cabana, my little girl brain fantasized about "how close" I had come to see her.


My grandparents Elizabeth
& Vincent Labate in front
of their AC home (circa 1975)

 My brothers and I also raced back to Convention Hall for another glimpse of infamy when the Beatles rolled into town that same month.  Our precious view was of their black limousine as it rode to an underground entrance, but our excitement pounded as though we had front-row seats inside!

My grandparents owned a small row house in a neighborhood that replicated their Italian and South Philly roots.  As my dad would say walking down the street on a Sunday morning, "you can smell the gravy being made all the way down the block."  Our neighbor played Mario Lanza records each morning as he made breakfast, often singing along in full tenor voice.

There was a house on the block with a "La Cosa Nostra" sign by their front door.  Of course, it roughly translates into "Our House" but something tells me they were not singing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young songs there. Families spilled out onto stoops to see the neighborhood's comings and goings - it was a constant reminder that la famiglia stretched beyond the front door.

Best of all, we lived on a beach block.  How little I understood the prized value in that geography until years later when I began spending my own money on beach house rentals with friends in Sea Isle City!  The real estate axiom - location, location, location - became all too clear to my wallet.



AC house, 2014

Oh, Atlantic City, when I visited you this year I ached to feel what I felt years ago, but too much has changed.  Our Texas Avenue house still stands alongside its two adjoining partners on little Chelsea Terrace.

The front porch where my grandfather and friends would meet and play cards is now gone. So is the abundant vegetable garden he lovingly tended which served us and softened its surroundings.  

Texas Ave. view from the boardwalk, 2014

Now, there's a girlie bar at the end of the street, painted hot pink with oversized images of exotic dancers plastered on the exterior walls.  My dear seaside city, you are 160 years old!  Is this your mid-life crisis? 
 
We've clearly gone our separate ways. I watch you from afar, limping along as you struggle with your not-so-new mistress. You are trying the Las Vegas model offering more family-friendly packages at your hotels, but you and I know you are chasing windmills. 

So, like a jilted lover, I sigh thinking of what could have been. I wish you well as you try to re-invent yourself in your odd, gloomy-glitz world. 

We'll always have Steel Pier.  Ciao.

My mom, me (2 years old) & my brother, Joe, on the AC beach

Easter on the AC boardwalk (circa 1966) with some Labate and
Mina family members.  I am the one rockin' the red Easter bonnet,
pink coat, and white gloves! In fact, my sister, mom, and aunt are
also wearing dress gloves - so precious.

Oh No! It's FOMO!

It seems like an dilemma tailor made for adolescence - that bumpy time when feeling included begins to really matter.

But, the truth is, this concern knows no age, gender, culture.  It is an equal opportunity ache.  It's FOMO: Fear of Missing Out.

You know, that hollow moment when you realize you are on the outside looking in.  Hearing about things you missed out on came via word of mouth before the digital age.  There was a certain sting but it was singular, infrequent.  Today, information is flowing so rapidly and fully toward us that things which would have been on the edges  of our world pop up like those tireless little critters in the carnival game Whack-A-Mole - quickly, unexpectedly.

Someone is dining at that new, hip restaurant? Someone is travelling fabulously? Someone is viewing a sunset, sunrise, their suntan?  Yep, FOMO rises up rapidly. 

FOMO's engine, fueled by the numbers, i.e. tweets, retweets, likes, rumbles along ceaselessly daring us to trend; to be on the up side of the seesaw, instead of the down. 

Rain Room - 2013

 I first heard the fear-based phrase when reading about an unusual art installation at New York's Museum of Modern Art last summer titled "Rain Room."  Described as an immersive environment, the exhibit was a room of falling water where visitors did not get wet.  Sensors detected where people were roaming and the rain paused just in those spots.

Weekend wait times in line lasted as long as nine hours (for non-members.) There were those who were singing in the rain with bragging rights, (seesaw up) vs. the detractors who noted it was just another fit of FOMO (seesaw down.)   "Rain Room" became a waiting room.  Yet, I sure wish I saw the exhibit!

Whether it is a teeny pang or full blown envy, FOMO tells us less about the doer and more about the receiver.  All envy exposes our insides. No one likes feeling their nose pressed up against the window, which is why I found "Rain Room's" intention to be precious. 

Technology limited the number of folks visiting the room at any one time.  But, the creators also strictly enforced a 'no time limit' on those inside the room.  Once you were in, you could stay as long as you liked.  This made for those insane wait times. 

Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, members of the London based rAndom International studio (creators of the exhibit) addressed the wait time dilemma with aplomb. In a NYTimes article, Mr. Koch noted the “meditative” aspect of the piece," and "firmly opposed a mandatory time limit; and in the end, MoMA did not make any official changes."
       

“The queue should be part of the work; it should be a social experience,” Mr. Koch added.  My snarky side says, "tell that to the guy in line at the end of hour nine." 

Social media breeds social anxiety when FOMO awakens. How can we tame this rascally itch?  Laying off social media probably helps, though that is more avoidance than real work. The idiom "Live And Let Live" (LALL?) comes to mind.  It's not sexy but it has endured for a reason and it scrapes off the little green eyed barnacles fixed to our psyches. I say the opposite of FOMO is LALL.  

Yes, that feels a little better.

Link to 2013 NYTimes article re: Rain Room: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/arts/steamy-wait-before-a-walk-in-a-museums-rain.html

Robin Williams

Robin Williams' jarring death has become a shared experience.  His audience has loved him in life and now aches over his departure.

Over 1,000 comments sit aside the NYTimes article announcing his passing, like pallbearers trying to hold him up; trying to switch roles and keep the comedian in a suspended state of love.  He was the morphing face behind the comedy/tragedy mask. 

After my first glimpse of him as an alien introduced on the TV show Happy Days, I was hooked.  Quick, hilarious, facile with language - he was truly from another planet where time vaporized against his wit.

I saw him perform in October, 2009 at Upper Darby's Tower Theatre.  Here is what I recall:  laughing so hard my cheeks ached as did my stomach.  I cannot remember one joke he delivered, but know each was fired machine gun style for 90 minutes.  No intermission.  I wish there had been one so the comedy snippets could settle in somewhere in my overloaded brain instead of skimming off. There was no rest for him or the audience.   He had returned from heart surgery like a rocket.

His tour was titled the "Weapons of Self-Destruction." 

My favorite Robin Williams bit is during his appearance on Inside the Actors Studio when he asks to use an audience member's "little shawl" and proceeds to give four minutes and thirty seconds of manic improv, with shawl in hand, as a Bollywood director, an Irani woman, a rabbi, a contestant on Iron Chef,  a matador, a police officer making an Amish house arrest, and as a car wash soap brush   Here is the YouTube link - the shawl portion begins at the 5:00 mark.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGhfxKUH80M

He made sure comedy did its job in grabbing the laugh and then dropping it for the next laugh.  Old material had no space in his world.  Yet, old demons set up shop and apparently dug in within his life.  Who lifts up those who lift us up?  Jimmy Kimmel's tweet touches this:  "Robin was as sweet a man as he was funny. If you're sad, please tell someone." 

We play roles in our lives.  We typecast ourselves.  But when we get boxed in, do we have a safe exit strategy? I bet each one of us mourning Robin's death would gladly reach for his hand to keep him with us.  Ultimately, though, I believe the first hand to reach out must be our own.

I love to laugh and am sad to feel the end of Robin's humor.  He made sure we craved more.  Thanks, Robin, for your generous gift. 
 
Link to "Weapons of Self Destruction" performance in Washington DC - full concert:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiCxqbT2Ru8