5
I moved to New York City after graduating college and into my first apartment on 76th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue in 1982. The neighborhood, known as the Upper West Side, stretches from 59th Street, south of Lincoln Center, to 110th Street, and from Riverside Drive to Central Park West, both of which, like the smaller cross streets, are purely residential. Running parallel to the latter two north-south streets are West End Avenue （also only residential）， Broadway, Amsterdam Avenue, and Columbus Avenue. It is on these last three streets where shops, restaurants, gyms, and other places of business occupy the ground floor of countless apartment buildings. For generations the Upper West Side was home to a great many Jewish families, and the number of Jewish delis and bakeries was proof of that. It was also inhabited by mostly working-and middle-class families as well as gaggles of actors （particularly those who worked in the theater, as the Great White Way was at most a thirty-minute walk downtown）， many of whom resided in large rent-controlled apartments. I had a small one-bedroom apartment on the first floor, and I shared the space and the $660-a-month rent with my girlfriend at the time and a college friend of ours. （Yes, we all slept in the same bedroom. That’s bedroom, not bed.） The place had a living area off which there were a tiny galley kitchen and a small bathroom, neither of which had been updated since the midsixties, and the aforementioned bedroom. The living and kitchen area received no natural light at all, as its large window overlooked an airshaft. To make matters worse, this window was protected by an accordion safety gate, making the space feel even more oppressive. The bedroom looked onto the backs of the apartment buildings on Seventy-Fifth Street, and although it received lots of lovely natural light, because of its proximity to the ground floor, it too had a safety gate. So basically, apartment 2D at 107 West Seventy-Sixth Street was like a large prison cell for the three of us in which we could barely afford to incarcerate ourselves.
Eventually our college friend moved out, and soon afterward my girlfriend and I split up and I was left there on my own. I rather liked living alone at that time, until I went through a long stint of unemployment and was unable to afford the rent one month, which had risen to over $750. I had been receiving unemployment checks of around $170 a week and painting apartments whenever I could for cash. But this particular month had been a bad one and I was strapped for dough. Refusing to ask anyone for money, I made my way to the Actors’ Equity offices and applied for money from the Actors Fund, which a colleague told me I had a right to do. It was not a loan. It was money available to union actors who were struggling to make ends meet. All you needed to prove was that you were a member in good standing and that you had participated in Equity productions fairly consistently. I was told to bring playbills of shows I had been in and reviews of performances as proof of my past employment. The whole idea made me sick to my stomach, but I was desperate. I was too prideful to ask my parents for money even though I know they would have given it to me happily. I knew that the next month I was to start a job and money would be coming in; however, this month I had no other option but to swallow my dignity and go begging, as it were.
The Actors’ Equity office was appropriately located in Times Square, the hub of Broadway. I showed the kind fellow behind the desk the necessary documents and he approved the funds straightaway. I was extremely embarrassed and humbled but very relieved. I thanked him profusely, and as I stood up to leave he asked me if I needed any shoes.
“Shoes?” I asked.
“Yes, shoes,” he said.
“Um, no. Why?”
“Because you are entitled to a pair, if you need them,” he said softly.
“Oh, um, well, no, I don’t. But thank you.”
He nodded and smiled, and I left.
Later, I discovered that this offer of free footwear was a remnant of a time when people basically had one pair of shoes that they wore every day. If you were an actor walking from audition to audition day in and day out trying to get a job, you may well have worn out your shoes in doing so and might have been in need of a new pair, so the Actors Fund had instituted this policy. I don’t know if the offer is still made, but I find its thoughtful practicality incredibly moving. A few years later, when I started to make a little money consistently, I made a donation to the Actors Fund of double the amount that had been given me. The Actors Fund is a wonderful and necessary thing that helps Equity members through hard times and in their dotage. If ever you attend a Broadway show at the end of which the cast asks the audience for a donation, please give generously. You never know, a performer you may come to admire in the future might not be able to pay their rent today.