Clean Shop/Learn Trade

Do you remember Mr. McFeely’s speedily delivered video messages to Mr. Rogers? I remember them all being set in industrial factories somewhere in the bowels of New York City. Everything was painted in different shades of grey and the only things visible through the square grid windows were spans of concrete and the occasional train—as of today, that’s where I work. Remember the obviously irritable, vaguely ethnic man with a weighty dialect who takes time out of his busy schedule to give Mr. Rogers detailed instructions as to his industrious routine? That man spent a better part of the day showing me how to perform minor tasks in the frame shop of a local custom upholstery company. Only, I remember him being a lot more polite towards Mr. Rogers (may he rest in peace).

I’ll make an attempt at brevity as I recap the events of the last several months that have led me to this new and incredibly exciting chapter of my New York adventure. Seven months ago I packed two suitcases, one oversized backpack, and my best friend and hopped aboard a plane to my future. As fate would have it I was sent right back to Oklahoma in order to perform in Summer of ’42, the Musical under the direction of the incomparable Greg White. A month and a half later I was back on a plane looking down as the Big Apple’s incomparable cityscape rose to welcome me home.

In the next few weeks I made a few decisions, the biggest being the resolution not to pursue a career in music theatre (at least at this moment in time). If you want to know the reasons behind this revelation, I’ll cover that in a later posting—however (as we are attempting to achieve some form of brevity) we must continue on. With the glamorous musical-theatre-as-career no longer pulling focus on the stage of my occupational aspirations, I realized something standing quietly stage center (forgive me the cheesy visual metaphor). Upholstery. It’s been hiding there my whole life—I can remember acquiring an old leather wingback chair when I was in middle school and tearing it down to its frame and doing my best to repurpose it. I was so proud of that ugly, Frankenstein’s monster of a chair. In junior high my brother was working hard at restoring a VW Karmann Ghia to working order, and although I was hardly interested in helping him drop an engine, I was ecstatic to carpet the floor and the dash and sew a new ceiling cover.

From my apartment in New York I googled “upholstery class NYC” and found the only course offered. I paid $500 for a four-session course at the furniture shop of the self-proclaimed “upholsterer to the stars.” At the end of the fourth class I had a simply upholstered box and an intense desire to learn more complex ways of covering furniture, but I was also left without any idea of how to obtain such knowledge. I had asked the celebrated teacher of the class how one would “break in” to a career in upholstery, and he basically told me there was no hope. He said that any shop that had the funds to take on a helper would doubtless just pick up an immigrant and pay them next to nothing to do any grunt work necessary. He said he himself has had such a helper for three years and that this helper only knows how do the most rudimentary tasks. This saves him and the other upholsterers time as they work hard and fast to make enough revenue to make ends meet—nobody has any time to train anybody else, and frankly, their little immigrant worker doesn’t care to learn how to do anything more than those easy tasks he has already mastered. If he did learn how to tuft a couch it would just mean more work for him with no guarantee of a raise in pay. Needless to say, I was in a pretty confounded way after this discussion. I would have been more than happy to work for nothing if I was also learning how to do what I love, but, after researching on the internet for several weeks it became very apparent that there are very few opportunities to learn the craft. I had found several comments from current upholsterers in the states who said they gave up searching for suitable training and just taught themselves the trade from books and youtube videos. I was just about ready to fly back home to Oklahoma, fake a resume and start tooling on customer’s couches when I found a job listing on craigslist.

The ad read “clean shop/learn trade” and sounded too good to be true. Despite all the typos and lack of proper names or contact information indicating that this was a scam, I sent in my resume and a short email describing my interest in upholstery. Every day for two and a half weeks my dream of one day making my way in the world making comfy, beautiful furniture grew dimmer and dimmer and I was just about to take drastic measures (involving the kidnapping of a very renowned Italian furniture maker) I woke up to a reply email from craigslist. It was a very short notification that the shop owner would be holding open interviews for the next two days and that the first qualified applicant with a valid drivers license would be hired. I shot out of bed, called to get my shift at the restaurant covered, checked online to make sure the place actually existed (though I probably would have gone even if I hadn’t found a website), got dressed, and ran out the door following directions to the industrial cave of Long Island City.

I found the factory building, climbed to the second floor, and hauled open the sliding iron fire door marked “upholstery.” There were chairs in various levels of construction and three people working on a few of the items—but none of them looked up from their work. After a really long awkward period one of them finally noticed me, but didn’t say anything to me. After finishing what he was doing he walked calmly through a door and a few moments later a man came out and took me back into the office. There I met with the owner of the company and had to explain (as I have had to explain to the rest of the incredulous staff) why I would want to work here doing hard, menial labor when I have a college degree and a well paying job in Times Square. The owner at least understood my motivations and told me that I could clean the shop in fifteen or twenty minutes and then come to him for other tasks around the shop. He also told me that his company was growing and that if I had a good head on my shoulders and good hands that he would make sure I learned how to use them to upholster furniture. He also said that after a while I’ll have enough training to work for a larger corporation if I was interested in working for someplace more structured, or if I wanted to go somewhere and start my own thing. I could have cried, but I did my best to act cool, calm and collected.

I’m a few days behind in finishing this post, so I have now been working here for three days and it’s going well… I think. I’ve never worked this hard in my life; I’ve never been challenged like this before, and I’m terrified that I’m going to screw up a $1,200 chair because I’m being thrown in the deep end and my boss is sitting in a lounge chair at the side of the pool with no obvious intention of coming to my rescue. I couldn’t ask for more… but maybe I shouldn’t have asked for so much in the first place? More on that later.

Next time I’ll try to be more brief.

A Brief Update

Instead of apologizing for the extreme lack of updates to this newborn blog I’m just going to dive in and give a general update as to my adventure in New York.

I’m coming home—or, more appropriately, I’m returning for a visit—seeing as legally New York is my home now. I signed a lease. All right—this whole overview thing isn’t working. I’ll start from the beginning. Bear with me—I have trouble being brief in anything I do.

I have a home! Erin and I are now the proud leasers of an apartment in New York City. We recently adopted our 2^nd floor prewar walkup and couldn’t be more proud to rent such a fine place. I fell in love immediately and after a suitable period of courtship Erin grew to love him as well. We lucked out (as seems to be the trend here in the big apple) and met an awesome broker who took us around Astoria. Her name was Rashida and ten minutes after meeting her she taught us how to trick the parking meters in Astoria into thinking a penny was actually a dollar worth of quarters. With her help (and perhaps slightly questionable morals…) we haggled the price of our apartment down from an already discounted price to an even lower monthly rate. Also, we are in a rent controlled building, which means that even if the real estate market recovers soon and rents return to what they have been in the past (or even more seeing as our neighborhood is “up and coming”) ours won’t increase as long as we hold the lease. The apartment has 2.5 bedrooms (the .5 room will easily fit a desk and a full-size futon for guests) with lots of closet space, 10-foot tall ceilings and crown molding everywhere. It is truly beautiful.

I built a bed! I went online and found platform beds that would run me upwards of $300, so I built my own for half the price. I hitched a ride on the subway to Home Depot, had them cut down the lumber to my specifications at the store, and then hired Julio in the parking lot to take my material and me to my apartment in his white windowless van. I then went to the discount fabric store at the end of my street and bought some padding and fabric to go over the platform, and then I bought a memory foam mattress online that shipped in three large boxes. I then decided to build drawers to facilitate storage under the bed, so I took another trip to home depot. This time I hired Cesar and his Jimmy. He was a lot cheaper than Julio, and much more talkative. He was also slightly racist. I have his business card, and the next time I need something hauled across town, I’m calling Cesar the racist Peruvian.

I got a job! This actually happened before the apartment and the bed—I’m currently working as a host at Ruby Tuesday on Times Square. I’m the only male host among a sea of hostesses, but it makes me money and this city is expensive. I like to look at it as me doing my part to power through gender barriers still left standing in the twenty-first century. After I get a little more settled I’m going to try to find a reupholstering shop that will let me hang out and learn the trade, but for now I’m contented showing people to their seats.

I’m coming home! I got another job—an acting job! Of course, I had to move to New York to get a paying gig in Oklahoma, but c’est la vie. Greg White and UCO’s Broadway Tonight are flying me in to star in their in-house production of the musical Summer of ’42. Rehearsals start in late April and the show itself runs May 20-23 at Mitchell Hall. I already have a sublet for my apartment and am excited to spend a month with friends and family, though I’ve hardly been gone long enough for any of them to miss me back on the homefront.

That wasn’t too painfully long. I’ll try to be more communicative—there’s just so much to do in this humongous city. Until next time, happy trails.

Okie-Turned-Yorkie Does Karaoke...

Move to New York City. Check. Get a job. Check. Figure out what to do with my life… well… at least it made the list.

Exactly one week ago my best friend and I moved to New York City—she following a lifelong dream to immigrate to the central hub of art and culture in the United States and I to follow the promise of adventure. I have yet to be disappointed. In my experience (limited though it may be), even a simple trip to the corner supermarket can turn into an adventure here in the big apple. The inventory at our local “Fair Trade” proportionately mirrors the diversity found locally on the sidewalks of our new neighborhood. It is a little more difficult to find an economy sized bottle of ranch, however, there is an entire wall devoted to vats of all different kinds and combinations of olives. The majority of the cashiers are of Greek descent—a demographic that makes up a very large portion of the inhabitants of Astoria.

Astoria is awesome. A twenty-minute ride on the NW gets you to Times Square, and there are no bars on windows and no menacing dark allies (due to the gold-paved streets). It’s nicknamed “Actoria” thanks to the recent influx of young, handsome, talented young people following their dreams to pursue a career in the noblest—and oldest—of professions. There is also a fair amount of “Oklahomians” living in this neck of New York’s concrete woods. Day 2 of my immigration I was invited to karaoke by an okie-turned-yorkie at a bar around the corner from my temporary home. We reconnected with several UCO grads and, much to our surprise, met a few new ones. After overhearing our heated conversations over the broncho’s upcoming season, the owner/bartender showed her true bronze and blue colors by joining us in singing the alma mater while sipping cordials and smoking cigars in our smoking jackets—a theatre grad, nonetheless. We truly are everywhere.

I am currently getting a dose of easterly winter weather—they’re expecting one or two feet accumulation by tomorrow morning. Thankfully it’s only a short walk (or, more appropriately, trudge) to the subway.

re: wonderful smelling New York. I smelled my first rotten subway car today. The following description (while completely accurate) is quite graphic. Those faint of stomach or easily disturbed by horrific visualizations please skip to the final paragraph. At first wiff, it smelled as if a wet dog had trotted into the car, defecated on the floor, and was then gutted by a commuter suffering from untreated hyperhydrosis. After a few more moments of savoring this heady aroma, I recognized a more complex scent hiding underneath the previous as if someone had proceeded to eat the disemboweled dog, partially digested it, and then regurgitated that recent meal all over the train.

On a brighter, less gruesome note, my allergies have practically disappeared since moving here. Tragically, had I been stuffed up today I may have been spared this traumatic olfactory assault. It’s going to take my nose a while to recover from that attack—my eyes watered constantly through the writing of that last paragraph. And on that stinky note, I bid you adieu. May your days be filled with pleasant smells.

...To My Future.

Waking Up (to my future) at 5:00 in the morning two stories above a chilly lake in rural western Oklahoma to the sound of geese laying eggs, pooping on things, and flying south to terrorize small children, I came to the sudden realization that later that evening for the first time in my life I would live in a place where human beings wholly outnumber resident populations of geese.

Erin and I met up at the airport an hour before our flight. The goodbyes were short but sweet, and to clear up any teary eyes that might linger after we passed into airport security I made sure to yell back “you all better not get mugged while we’re gone” just before being asked to remove my belt by an older man wearing plastic gloves and a polite smile. After a short chemical analysis of the peculiar red substance covering the bottom of my shoes, Erin and I were riding the moving sidewalk (to our future) and shortly thereafter boarded the plane (to our future) where we encountered the first hiccup in our so far successful sojourn. We boarded the plane, careful to remember the numbers printed on our boarding passes—A37 and A38. We moved diligently down the aisle past rows 1 through 21 and abruptly came to the butt end of the plane. Hundreds of scenarios lit through my brain—we were on the wrong flight, there was some sort of error with the computers and they sent the wrong plane, the internet had sold us two seats that did not exist—however, the correct explanation was not among them. Thankfully, a kind man sitting in the middle of the plane took note of our panicked expressions as we walked up and down the aisles checking for alternate seat numbering systems and told us it was open seating—those numbers were just the order on which we boarded the plane. Relieved to be on the correct plane, I sat down, buckled in, and taxied down the tarmac (to my future). The yells and cries of the children in the seat in front of us provided a sharp contrast to my grinning and ecstatic mood throughout the flight. After a quick layover in Baltimore we were again airborne. Cinematically the clouds parted and there was Manhattan—my future home. As the city rose to greet us, the heavens opened and bathed the big apple in a golden glow. It was the golden glow of my future.

The taxi driver from the airport defied all stereotypes as he spoke English quite well, helped us with our bags, was extremely cordial, and did not smell at all unpleasant. In fact, New York City does not smell unpleasant in the least—on the contrary, almost every corner smells like Asian food. I am in heaven. After dropping our bags off at our apartment we bought our metro cards and hopped onto the N train (to our future). Subways are rapture. Where Daniel loved planes, I loved trains—however I have never ridden on one until yesterday. It is all that I had hoped it would be and more. Soon I will submit a blog entry entirely devoted to the subway, but I feel that I am reaching that critical point in a blog where everything needs to be tied up before the reader gives up and skips to the final paragraph.

In some future blog I will describe in great detail our first subway ride, our first coffee shop, and our first grocery-shopping excursion—but now I must say goodnight. This city is all I have ever dreamed it would be and more. Thank you all for being part of my journey here.