By April 1, 1991, I have moved to Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, to live in a house with Anya, my friend from Dance Theater Workshop. A real house! A duplex! I hire a “Man with Van” whose number has been posted on the bulletin board at the Screen Actors Guild.
The Man with Van is in his fifties, and he looks like someone’s dad except that he’s wearing a beret. We have only five boxes to carry, plus the purple board and two milk crates that make up my “desk” and the extra milk crate, aka my “dresser.” During the drive, when I mention that I’m an aspiring actress and that I’ve begun writing, he gives me advice on dialogue. At this point, I have no idea that I will wind up a playwright, and I think his advice is a strange gift, but I take it nonetheless. He tells me to listen in to conversations and write them down— every day. He says, go to public places, take a notebook, and write down what people say verbatim. It is quite a gift for an hour and a half’s move to Brooklyn. By the time we hit Flatbush Avenue, I have ammunition for a career that I don’t yet know is in my future.
The house on Bergen is spacious— a relief after East Village walk- ups. My room is upstairs, next to the kitchen and bathroom, while the other bedrooms (and thus roommates) are on the main floor. The room is furnished with a twin bed and a dresser. It has an enormous closet. I am subletting from a Village Voice writer who will, years later, disappear on Mount Rainier in a surreal accident— he goes bird- watching and never comes back! But in 1991 the writer is on a fellowship in Mississippi. He has left Anya, who lives in the big room downstairs, in charge of finding the right subletter, and Anya insists that person is me.
Anya can do anything with a glue gun and some glitter. And most of her friends live in the neighborhood, so weekends in Brooklyn are always full of activity. Plus, Anya has been initiating me into the subculture of Lower East Side dance and performance art since I was in college. She takes me to Veselka, a Ukrainian diner on Ninth Street where the artists hang out eating the most amazing poppy- seed cake ever, and to symposiums and workshops at Movement Research and parties full of the most interesting new people— and now, she initiates me into Brooklyn.
My mother is horrified. “Brooklyn” makes her think of gangsters and old Russian Jews on the boardwalk— A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Coney Island, Radio Days. She insists that this is retrograde motion, not understanding how gentrified parts of Brooklyn have become, or how many young people are claiming these neighborhoods. If she only knew. If I only kept the lease. If only there were a lease.
Reprinted from No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 Apartments Copyright (c) 2010 by Brooke Berman. Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
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