Sometimes, promoters and artists ask me to throw their events into this column. "Oh you have a nightlife column? Can you add my reading to it?" They clearly don't read the damn thing—Leave Your Apartment is meant to be a cross-section of a specific person's taste, the next couple weeks of city life through their eyes, the things on their particular calendar that they're excited about, because I think that's more interesting than me popping up every fortnight to tell you what to do in New York City.
I was thinking about this last night at the Public Theater, the location of our mayoral forum. I was at our merch table in the lobby, watching the crowds for the other shows in the other theaters. We, along with our cohosts New York Focus, were set up right in front of the entrance to Joe's Pub, where 77-year-old Betty Buckley was singing cabaret. I wondered what else the glittering older white ladies in pearls in line to see Buckley had planned for the weekend.
Doesn't that happen to you every once in a while? You're walking by a group of New Yorkers, and they're wearing outfits you've never seen before. They are, along with everyone in their whole world, spilling out of a bar you never even knew existed on a Saturday night—they're "West Village girls," you later read—and they're packing out a bar called "the Spaniard"? What? Who are they? What do they do for money? Is everything working out for them? How do they see the city? Where are they going next?
That's the idea for LYA—someone's hyper-specific map of their social life for the next two weeks. But every once in a while, we here at Hell Gate think it's worth giving you ours. Maybe you're one of those fancy ladies waiting to hear Buckley, and you were wondering what we're all about. What kind of people work at a place called "Hell Gate"? Where are they going next? Well, here's how we see it: