In senior year of high school two things happened. The first was getting into Mrs. Rosen’s creative writing class. When handing back our first assignment she asked me to stay after class. I expected to be told that my story was terrible, but instead she said the opposite and we talked about writing, my first “writer to writer” conversation. She advised to “let my characters tell me what they wanted to do.” The second was becoming an editor on the school paper with my friend Henry, who was the chief editor. In 1973 at a national high school press convention the Wantagh Warrior won best in show, beating out Deerfield Academy, whose paper was edited by Chip Cronkite (Son of Walter. Take that you, blue-blazered, repp tie wearing preppies!). It gave me some much-needed confidence. Henry and I both won scholarships to Syracuse University. (Henry ended up attending Georgetown – he was brilliant – if he was in Mrs. Shaw’s class he would been at the Very Smart table). I was relieved at not having to apply anywhere else. But in the end Syracuse was a poor match for me and I dropped out after my freshman year.

Higher Education

When I told my folks I wasn’t going back to Syracuse (and forfeiting a four-year scholarship), they had the same reaction as if I had revealed that I was a drug dealing murderer. Needless to say, my relationship with them deteriorated but I did have a back-up plan. My grandmother died and left me a small inheritance restricted for college tuition.

I saw an ad for Parsons School of Design. I threw together a portfolio (heavy on collages of torn construction paper) and was accepted. Those were the days when New York City was in serious decline and Parsons was less than picky in accepting students.

There were 30 of us enrolled in the Environmental Design department – a sort of architecture, interior, and product design mashup. New York City, especially downtown in the 1970s, was as pretty close to Weimar Germany as it gets and I had some colorful classmates and went to some great parties (and discos). I was a mediocre art student, spending more time writing short stories that I entered into competitions that I never won. When I graduated I worked for an architect, waited tables and saved money to go to Europe. I was a middle-class kid and knew no one on the Continent. Arriving in Paris, I bought a notebook, a pack of Gitanes and sat in cafes trying to be cool.

I may have written a paragraph or two but most of the time I hung out with other kids who used Let’s Go Europe as their Bible. My plan was to go south as the weather got colder and end up in Israel and then on to Iran for a flight back to States. Well, after the Shah fell my Air Iran ticket was worthless so I made my way to London. My father wired me money so I could fly Laker Airways (the “subway in the sky”) back to the States.

An Adult?

I had no job and no skills. I did have an apartment on the Upper West Side in the rundown Windermere Chateau, whose residents included a bookie who lived in the pay phone booth in the lobby; twentysomethings without trust funds; and Holocaust survivors with reparation checks. (When Milo, who lived across the hall from me, got his check each month from the German government, he invited me over for schnaps and regaled me with drunken tales of Berlin, circa 1929.)

Based on my knowledge of red-sauce Italian restaurants in Astoria, I got a job as one of the first hires of the Queens Economic Development Corporation (where I have worked on and off since – and will eventually retire from someday). As a community organizer I was tasked with doing surveys and writing reports about Queens neighborhoods. I let my creative juices flow. My epic 1980 study of Jackson Heights began with “Tawdry at the edges…” My boss asked if I was writing a Victorian novel. I may have been influenced by Trollope.

In those pre-Tinder days one took classes to meet people, so I enrolled in an acting workshop offered at Hunter College. There was another student in the class who wrote plays and who I suspected was sleeping with the instructor. He was asked to do a reading. It was a turgid piece about the Civil War with a great deal of incest and rape. I recall thinking that I could write better than that, and funnier, too.

Playwright

And so, I did. Between 1978 and 1983 I wrote a number of plays. Three were produced off-off Broadway. Hanging On opened at the 13^th Street Theater. Changing Palettes at the long-gone Richard Allen Center was a cult hit (the cult being my friends and family). Sam n’ Andy previewed in a basement at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, and received a glowing four-line review in the Village Voice. I enjoyed My Life in the Theater period: casting, working with directors and actors, opening nights, and schmoozing late into the evening in smoky bars. I thought I would become a household name in households other than mine, but that never happened. I did spend a debauched week in LA where my friend Gerson “knew people,” but they were mostly people fueling themselves with various substances at parties in Venice Beach.

Village Nights & Nebraska Morns

I met Diane in 1983 on a bus traveling to Moscow (part of a low-end ten-day tour of Eastern Europe featuring the last gasp of the Iron Curtain). We lived in the heart of Greenwich Village in the home of Catherine Maldonado, who discounted the rent of our fourth-floor studio to $400 a month because I was a “literary person.” She was of Southern aristocracy and every writer south of the Mason-Dixon line who rolled through the Village made a pit stop at 18 Grove Street. One afternoon as I was coming home I saw her chatting up a tall distinguished man with white hair. As I walked up she introduced me, “Bill, this is my tenant Seth, he’s a writer too.” And for a fleeting moment I was in the same league as William Styron.  We lived there until we got married and then made the mistake of moving uptown and hated it. Six months later our dear friend Elana who lived next us on the fourth floor called and told us the parlor floor was available and we moved right back to 18 Grove.

Kerry and Madeline made their appearance in 1990. The population of our little apartment doubled. Needing extra hands and space, we moved west to Nebraska where Diane’s family took us in with open arms. Parents of infant twins barely have time to blow their nose and my writing during those first years of fatherhood was limited to shopping lists. We lived hand-to-mouth in Omaha in a house we bought by taking out a cash advance on our Master Card. I took a job at a Brookstone Gift and Useless Hardware shop. If I played my cards right I could have been the Upper Midwest Regional Manager.

I did have a play produced in Omaha (Ostriches opened and closed after a very limited run – two nights – at the Diner Theater). My only other output were letters I sent back East describing life in the Midwest. Letters From the Interior were tales of your basic All-American family (if the dad were a neurotic New York Jew and the mom a well-educated Midwestern woman who married one, plus their adorable twin daughters who insisted on watching the Farm Report at five in the morning every day, and all four lived in a house with a roof that no matter how many times was repaired, leaked in a strong mist).

Back in New York

Though Omaha was an easy place to live and we were surrounded by a loving extended family, it was tough on our careers so we moved back to New York City. We landed in Queens: I back at Queens Borough Hall and Diane at the United Nations. We bought a charming Tudor townhouse in Forest Hills Gardens that also leaked. At work, I became the office poet laurate, penning edgy poems and proclamations for staff events. As Executive Director of the Queens Economic Development Corporation I started writing a monthly newsletter – sometimes serious, sometimes irreverent – but always punchy. Over the years I took a few writing workshops and what began with a jumble of ideas in my head transformed into – not surprisingly – a story about a family in Queens living in a leaky Tudor townhouse.