Not Ready to Say Goodbye in Long Island City

Still trying to find the next promised land, Miss Cheapist spent a Saturday afternoon with her two male friends, P. and E., hoping to catch up at PS 1’s weekly Warm Up event and see the disco throwback group, Escort, perform. E. had just enrolled in an urban boot camp with the hope that if he woke up at five AM for two weeks, and allowed three women to scream orders at him, he would be shaken from his routine. A better body was only secondary to being rescued from inevitable feelings of ordinariness. Several young professionals had already dropped out of the program, and E. was still hanging on.
With pride, P. announced that after living in the city for over ten years, he was going to leave New York. He came to realize that he could probably continue to maintain his personal artistic projects, earn money being a free-lance web designer, and remain self-employed at home in any other city. So why not move to Oakland, a place where many of their New England educated peers seemed to escape to and thrive? When Miss Cheapist asked what made him finally take the big leap, after talking wistfully about California for years, he responded, “I never really liked New York. My friends were all here, and now they’re gone. It’s just not the same.” Although she had just returned from a vacation in Hawaii, and was seriously reconsidering the value of being a New Yorker, Miss Cheapist believed that he had oversimplified the issues. She had loved the city once, and occasionally could still see its charm. Yes, many of her closest female friends had moved away and found tremendous opportunities elsewhere, but she could still tally up a significant number of acquaintances who lived there and could be counted on for good times. There would always be familiar people and places; yet it was so easy to feel left out of it all.

“Warm-up” is a dance party and beer fest set against the backdrop of pre-war architecture, bad contemporary art, and tribal house music. The three of them moved shoulder to shoulder with crowds of sweaty, enthusiastic outer borough hipsters and their European friends. There were even Black and Latino participants, a surprisingly diverse group so close to Bedford Avenue, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves equally. Quickly the trio became aware that there was something special taking place at P.S. 1, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the exhibit. E., often reluctant to admit that he spent much of the late 80s at the Limelight and other haunts with his Persian elite friends, was the first to comment on the fact that this party was actually fun. It had been a long time since he felt the urge to move with such abandon in a public space. What’s going on here, he kept murmuring. Am I still in New York? Miss Cheapist shared E.’s enthusiasm. They danced with nostalgia, and both of them felt for the first time in a while that they could belong to something, even if it was temporary and somewhat superficial. It was unusual to feel a tone of inclusion in a space intended for people to gather in the name of art and leisure. As trite as it may be to assign so much meaning to a makeshift dancefloor, under fuschia plastic architecture, the group was offered a place for anyone willing to participate.

A scene like this may not have convinced P. to stay longer than the autumn in New York, but it did give Miss Cheapist some hope that she could hold on a bit more.