Go totally B & T

I grew up in the West, home of wide-open spaces, orange groves and concrete jungles. What enchanted me most about New York was its verticality—the way everything was stacked up, layer upon layer, the stories of a family friend who described his relatives making pasta in tiny Little Italy tenements by stretching the dough across starched white sheets. Everywhere you looked—and places where you didn’t—there was so much history.

My first few years in New York, I got to see the city as a member of various film crews, fanning out from Queens to Brighton Beach to the Village, everywhere searching for the perfect location to capture the malaise of a perpetual grad student, an inspiring sunrise, or a scary dark alley. In my mind, I could never stray from the deep canyons of lower Manhattan, where I hoofed it from river to river, hardly ever taking the subway or cab. That is, until I got a film job at the St. Augustine Church on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn.

I’d never been so enchanted before; this landmark block of leafy trees and row houses, towering spires in the distance, and the sound of the church bells filtering down. So when, two or three years, I had an opportunity to move into this totally ramshackle brownsone shared with two other women, three men and a child, just a few doors down from the magnificent St. Augustine with her beautiful spires, I took it as a sign. Except I didn’t, not exactly. For this, I would have to leave the vertical density of the city and accept a different kind of life in Brooklyn.

Certainly, if I had secret hippie proclivities, if I enjoyed strumming a guitar over vegetarian goulash, practicing free love, or not having to shave my legs, it might have come more naturally to me, this quasi-commune thing. It would be easier to explain, at least.

The church bells rang each day, the sound filtering through the house, four floors of hardwood, huge closets, sturdy banisters. Where we might intersect in the shared kitchen, impromptu dinner parties or late-night poker games where we wrapped ourselves in blankets to combat the cold. We’d play host to people passing through, musicians, radical puppeteers, organic farmers. This was a big change for me, the space, the camaraderie, the compromise. But as I adapted to life amongst so many others, I learned to make it work, coming out on the other side, a different sort of person.