Normally Depressing Laundrymat Undergoes Surprisingly Inoffensive Holiday Makeover

My local laundrymat is run by a squadron of short, broad Spanish women and one white-haired man. The women do the washing and folding in back, so you don't really see them. Instead, you see the man. He wanders silently around the front of the store, always in a pair of those high waisted farmer jeans, the kind with cuffs wide enough to cover work boots. He carries a spray bottle and wash rag. It's a little unclear what exactly his job is. He dusts the tops of the machines, mops the floors, and endlessly sprays the leaves of the robust spider plants hanging from the ceiling.

Today, after a good three weeks of procrastination, J and I finally bit the bullet and hauled our fifty pounds of laundry to the mat, only to discover that it had been completely transformed. It seems the silent man has another, more creative responsibility.

Decoration.

I mean, just look at this:

And this:

Here, he's hand-stringing Christmas bulbs onto fishing wire to tack in necklaces from the fluorescent lights:

I mean, have you ever seen a more focused, more detailed, more thorough seventy-year-old male Christmas decorator?

I'm not complaining though. I'm generally not a fan of cheesy Christmas decorations, but when done with such enthusiasm, such flourish, such stern-mouthed passion, they completely win me over.

So thank you, silent laundry man, for keeping depression at bay with your unsmiling Christmas cheer and extensive Santa collection.

There's Still So Much I Haven't Figured Out

Can we take a break from social commentary and heavy life stuff for a minute? I this problem, I've had it for years, and despite my best efforts I just can't figure out what to do about it. Maybe you can help.

What do you do with clothes that aren't dirty, but aren't clean either?

I rewear clothes. You might think I'm gross, but it's because I'm not a shopper. My closet is meager by any girl's standards, and my limited wardrobe and the five flights and two blocks between me and my laundry mat means I'll work a pair of jeans nice and good before I throw them in the hamper. I still shower regularly and everything, but I just can't bring myself to believe that that my favorite pants or the occasional t-shirt is unwearable after one round. Am I disgusting? Should I be embarrassed? I can't tell.

But that's not my problem. My problem is that, in any room I've ever inhabited since the age of 13, I accumulate these clothes in cleanliness purgatory, and they pile up on the biggest available surface. This time around, it's the cute little loveseat we have in our bedroom. I think I've sat in it twice, and the rest of the time it's served as a large, open-air hamper for clothes that I don't want to fold back up and put in my bureau but that aren't ready for the wash pile.

So maybe you have some advice. What do you do with your still-good clothes? Do you put them back in the drawers to mix indiscriminately with the Downy-fresh unworns? Some sort of rack or hooks on the wall? Or does anything you touch go straight to the hamper? Is it odd that after thirteen years I'm still finding this difficult?

GTD from 805***7317:
hihi it poois im a monkey ooahah hehe lol
rokmysox jobro

I Heart New York City Shoe Repair Shops

I've already told you about the joys of Uriel's, but I immediately felt bad about it because I really should have told you about St. Mark's Shoe Repair first. It's in my neighborhood, it's where I go to get all my shoes repaired, and it's absolute heaven.

First of all, it's impossibly small. Even smaller then Uriel's. You can see it here, but I'm not kidding when I tell you the photo makes it look bigger. After doing some internet research, I've come to realize that St. Marks Shoe Repair is actually famous for making custom shoes - I guess Kate Moss has a pair? - but my relationship with them is strictly repair related. It first started because I had this really perfectly fantastic pair of brown leather Kenneth Cole boots that I wore every day walking miles around the city for like two years, and needless to say I was constantly wearing the soles out.

I found St. Marks Shoe Repair when I snapped the heel of my boot off one day, leaving this horrific stagger of nails sticking out of the sole. I didn't have another pair of shoes on me, of course, because I was on foot and miles away from my apartment (although I usually don't miss owning a car, there's something to be said for always having a trunk with you at times like this, and in it shoes and shirts and purses and books and a herd of loose lip glosses rolling around).

Luckily, that fateful day I was on St. Marks Place - a familiar street. I got my tongue pierced on St. Marks in 1999 when I first moved to New York (and spent a year lisping and enraging my father), and remembered that just across the from the piercing shop was a tiny little store that sold used Converse (gross), and housed a bent man working leather in the back. I hobbled over, and Boris, the nice Belarusian man who always wears a Tam and works the front, told me they could fix my boots while I waited.

As with Uriel at Uriel's, Boris is the soul of St. Marks Shoe Repair. He has a thick Eastern European accent, chain smokes in his shop with post-Giuliani abandon, and treats even my most desperate, embarrassing, neglected, swiss cheese-soled jobs with wonderful nonchalance. This? he seems to say with his shrug, squinting through the smoke at the fist-sized hole in the heel of my boot. I have repaired holes three times this size with an awl and the tendon of a rabbit in the dark of a Minsk February night with only the light of a quarter moon to see by. Of course I can repair your tame Manhattan walking boot.

"Twenty dollars for the whole thing, come back tomorrow," is all I actually get, but it's enough. I pay, he hands me a ticket. The work is always flawless.

And as if dramatic former-Soviet fantasies aren't reason enough to go, I have now been to St. Marks Shoe Repair enough times that Boris recognizes me and waves me up to the front of the line. It's a truly proud moment, to squeeze past the ass-crack leather and NYU ponytails of the browsers to Boris, who doesn't smile, doesn't chat, just takes my shoes and gives me my ticket with an easiness made sweet by repetition, by the simple act of sharing something with someone over and over.

Photos by Jefferson Siegel

I Heart New York 2

I bought the cutest purse the other day. It was $25, one of those cheap street deals that'll fall apart in a month. Well, I thought I had a month. Turned out, the zipper on the outside pocket broke the day after I bought it. Normally this wouldn't have fazed me (I get all my purses and earrings off the street, so I constantly have cheap Chinese hardware falling off me), but I really liked this purse and I'd just gotten it, so I wanted it fixed.

One of my responsibilities at my not-very-demanding job is to check the PO box once a week. It's three cross town blocks away, not a short walk, but not ridiculous. I usually just get into an iPod reverie and I'm there before I know it. This morning, though, a sign caught my eye - URIEL'S SHOE REPAIR SHOP. The place was open, so I went inside.

New York City shoe repair places tend to be impossibly small. Smaller than the smallest store you've ever been in, so small that two people can't stand next to each other without becoming embarrassingly intimate. Uriel's was no exception. I pushed open the door to find the place already filled to capacity with two Russian men in yarmulkes.

I asked if they could fix purse zippers and the man behind the counter said sure. While I waited. I just had to empty my purse.

They watched everything come out of it. Book, notebook, wallet, cinnamon gum, pens, Tide-to-Go, lipgloss, worry beads, Leatherman, the last piece of Nicorette I keep for emergencies. "What?" the second Russian said. "No candy?" And then, like magic, I reached into the very bottom of the bag and pulled out an M&M Kudos bar I'd completely forgotten about. "See," the guy said, triumphant, "I know women!"

I balanced on a narrow bench and opened my book. The second man inched aside to give my knees some room, and they resumed their conversation in Russian. My stuff sat in an embarrassing pile on the counter.

Suddenly, the door flew open, almost hitting me. A fourth person squeezed her way into the shop. She was stooped over, holding one of her pant legs by the cuff. "Uriel!" she called, even though he was not three feet away. "Help me!"

We all looked up, but the woman was staring at me, not Uriel. She was black, middle aged, and had on multicolored polkadot glasses. "Oh my god, those earrings are gorgeous." She let her pants leg fall. "Where in God's name did you get them because I am always looking for the perfect earrings."

I was disappointed to realize I didn't know. I liked this woman (I liked being flattered) and I wanted to help, but I stop at every one of those street stands I see looking for earrings and purses, and I couldn't begin to even guess if I'd found them in the Bronx or Morningside Heights or the Village.

But she had already moved on.

"I need a needle, Uriel. I need one in the worst way. Here I am on the way to work and I rip my goddamn seam out with my heel and it's only by the luck of the Lord that I did it across the street from you."

Uriel was bent over my purse, sewing my zipper back in. He didn't smile. "Needle's busy," he said.

"Oh for crissakes, Uriel."

Without looking up, Uriel pulled a magnetic needle holder out from under the counter and set a spool of dark blue thread next to it. The woman leaned against the Russian guy - who didn't seem to notice - crossed her foot over one knee, and began to sew.

That's all I needed. I was in love with the place. I wanted to be just like this woman, able to find a joke in Uriel's unsmiling face, to lean against the Russian without a word. I began running through all my purses in my mind, trying to remember which needed repairs. I wanted to be part of Uriel's in-crowd.

And then, as if just to drive the point home, a big gray cat weaved it's way out from the back and jumped into my lap.

"Do you know Masha?" the Russian asked.

"Know her?"

"Masha is famous. Everybody knows Masha."

The black woman eyed the cat. "I know Masha. Masha, you stay the hell away. I'm in navy."

Masha mewed.

"Are you married?" The Russian asked me.

"No."

"Do you have cats?"

"Two."

"Masha can always tell." He pointed at me, not accusingly, but with emphasis. "A women with cats needs babies."

Uriel looked up. "You can go ahead and tell him yourself," he said to me, gesturing at the Russian.

"I'm too young for babies."

The black woman snorted.

"All right, done." She used Uriel's long, heavy scissors to clip the thread and carefully placed her needle back in its holder. "A lifesaver."

I leaned back to let her open the door. Masha followed the woman out, twitching her tail with lazy confidence.

Uriel passed my purse back to me and I filled all its little pockets with the appropriate things. The charge was ten dollars. My $25 purse had become a $35 purse in just two days, but as Uriel and the Russian resumed their talk, barely nodding their heads as I said goodbye, I couldn't have minded less.

Sexy High-Waisted Jeans

A new trend has hit New York - the high-waisted jean. It's awful. Think of the jeans a 1980s mom might run around in. The foot-long zipper. The back pockets as big as paperbacks. The loose thigh tapering to a tight ankle.

I just don't get it.

I see it all the time now, and it's not flattering on anyone. But let me tell you, girls in the New York looove the sexy high-waisted jean. Can't get enough. Just go to any Saturday Brooklyn brunch and it's asymmetrical haircuts and nipple-high waistbands galore.

They say Scarlett Johansson is responsible. She's a good actress and everything? But now the streets of New York are overrun with hippy, corn-fed, transplanted Midwesterners in stomach-swelling, ass-magnifying navy. I hope she's happy.

GTD from 856***0353:
Go eagles hope your doin ok miss u

"I Have Found the Promised Land and It is Beautiful" or "Dad, You Can Skip This One"

I have huge breasts.
I'm not bragging, just narrating.
They're massive, heavy, and require industrial scaffolding to keep from swinging like the new century Barry Bonds.
I'm not alone. There's my mother. Her sisters. The women on my dad's side. And, since I come by my breasts honestly, I resent them.
Buying bras has always been an epic mission. As a teenager, I barreled through all the dainty bra sizes, never even owning an A or B cup and only briefly pausing at a C. My mother noted my progress (wearily, almost sadly, as I stood bare-chested at the dryer looking for a bra: "Oh, honey. Looks like you got 'em, too.") and took me to her "special shop" to get fitted.
The saleswoman was a five-foot tall Eastern European woman with a formidable shelf of her own. She stripped me, measured me, pinched the skin at my bra line and disappeared, only to come back with an armful of the ugliest, most matronly nineteenth-century corsets I'd ever seen. Each one was like a toy castle - if you fastened the back and set the bra down carefully on the floor, it could stand up on its own, cups arched like flying buttresses, straps hanging like flags, the bottom band as thick and sturdy as any fortress wall.
I put one on. It stretched from my bellybutton to my collarbone.
"Perfect," the saleswoman said.

Since then, I've been a bra migrant. Macy's, The Gap, Nordstrom's - for years I've wandered through their pretty lingerie sections to the back wall where they keep the ugly stuff. Large breasts, it seemed, were only to be found on fat women no longer interested in anything near the realm of attractive. Or on strippers, whose buoyant implants had no need for underwire. I tried on bra after bra, decided to believe the sixteen-year-old who fitted me at The Gap and insisted I was a 36 DD - a size that, while too big for the assholes at Victoria Secret to stock, was occasionally possible to find at some out-of-the-way department stores - and spent a decade fighting muffin-tops and peek-a-boos.

And then my life changed.

Earlier this summer, BKD (before Ky died), I went to a party and in walked Kristy, dear friend of Megan, who is a dear friend of Kate, who is a dear friend of mine, and we were all like, snap! The girl had it going on - thin, massive breasts, flawless silhouette. They're so perky, someone whispered. And they were. They were glorious and, after some backroom gossiping, confirmed to be real.
I grabbed Kristy's wrist, holding on maybe a little too tightly as I tore through my purse looking for a pen. "Kristy, sweetie, where do you buy your bras?"
Here, dear reader, I'll pause for you to run and get a pen of your own, because if you yourself are not a bra migrant, surely you know someone who is, and if they don't happen to live in the NYC metropolitan area, surely they'll find themselves here sometime or another in the years to come, and if so, they absolutely must visit this store:
Town Shop
I'm not fucking around. 2273 Broadway, btwn 81 and 82nd Sts. Write it down.

So today at around 12:30 pm, I went. I must've hit a lunchtime rush because the place was busy. In the front of the store, loud Jewish women pushed through racks of bras and panties with menopausal authority, shouting across the store to their daughters and friends, It's here! It's here in Wheat! and Cup size, darling! I need your cups!
The fitting counter was in the back. I wrote my name down on a waiting list while the Town Shop employees - unsmiling black women with dozens of bras looped around their arms - squeezed past me as if I wasn't there.
And then my name came up. I was shown to my fitting room, a curtained nook with a chair and full length mirror. In the room next to mine, I could hear another loud Jewish lady: "I don't want 'em minimized, I don't want 'em maximized. I want 'em to look how they should look, so you bring me the bra that's gonna do that."
My own saleswoman was petite and very pregnant. Not a promising sign. Even with a six-month belly, she barely pushed a B cup.
"What do you want?"
"I have nothing. My bras are all old, they don't fit, the underwire is snapped. I need something I can wear with a t-shirt."
"Take it off."
I undressed. She looked at me, turned me around once, and disappeared. She didn't even pull out a tape measure. When she came back, it was with one bra. One.
She held it out for me while I looped my arms through the straps.
"Lean forward."
I did, my ass pressing against her round belly as she reached around me to give each one of my breasts a firm jiggle. She turned me to face the mirror.
"Oh..."
I couldn't say anything more. My breasts, finally slung in cups large enough for them, actually looked smaller. The bra was cut attractively low, supportive but still V-neckable. My stomach remained bare. The band neither dug into my spine nor rode up to my shoulder blades. And it only had two hooks. Two!!
I tried a tentative bounce. Nothing. I jumped. They stayed where they were. No jaw-dropping heave. No busting out the top. I turned to the side and, at the sight of my smooth, seamless silhouette, burst into tears.
"What size is this?" I managed.
"34 FF."
Fuck The Gap.
"How could you possible have known? You didn't even measure me."
She just rolled her eyes and popped the tag off my brand new best friend.
"You should wear it out. That thing," she waved distastefully at my 36 DD, abandoned on the floor, "should be thrown away."

So thank you, Town Shop. Thank you, Kristy. My breasts look amazing. And even in the shittiest of times, the value of a good bra cannot be denied.