Of Vain Subtleties, or Subtle Devices

I have never been a New Yorker, not really. Though I was born there. But not really. I was born across the river. And not the East River, where lots of real New Yorkers are born. The Hudson, which isn’t really a river. It, or at least that part of it, the Lower Hudson, is an estuary. The sea washes through it back and forth with the tide well past the Tappan Zee Bridge, only part of which is an actual bridge. The rest is a causeway, or maybe a viaduct. And the Tappan Zee is not really a zee, just a widening of the river, really an estuary, where the bridge, or causeway, or viaduct, connects the village of Nyack to the village of Tarrytown. Neither is really a village, if by “village” we mean the sort of place where, for many people born in a great city like New York, great-great-grandparents lived, pounded the dirt road, milked the cow, spent all day with everyone they had ever met staring at the tailor’s new sewing machine, so that someday an enterprising descendant in New York might write a musical about it, though, in its way, it’s really about how much better New York is than the village was. They didn’t know from musicals, not really, though they sang their prayers pretty much all the time, and their prayer-songs contained the stories of their people, so they were kind of like musicals. Edward Hopper was from Nyack, and Joseph Cornell, and no one would speak seriously of their village upbringing, not really, and don’t even get me started on Stephen Baldwin, a famous actor, but “famous” is really a judgment call and, in any case, and in this one in particular, ephemeral. And “actor”? I often feel like an actor, a real method actor, at least insofar as I, never having acted, not really, can make such a claim, genuinely believing I am what I am pretending to be before an audience. But that’s not me, not really, and I am usually acting quite far from New York, which is the acting capital of the world, or at least that part of the world. The point is, New York is fine, I’m a great actor, and art is everywhere.