The Night Before 9/11

Photo by Nikolett Emmert on Pexels.com

So much is always said about how beautiful the weather was on September 11, 2001. It was an absolute jewel of a day, sparkling and gorgeous. I remember walking to the subway absolutely astonished by the crystalline loveliness of it.

There was a reason for that, though most people who were in New York City then probably have forgotten about it. The night before, September 10th, there was a monumental deluge.

It was horrendous, too. It was the kind of driving rain that was falling practically sideways. Using an umbrella didn’t help. Nothing helped. I was waiting for maybe 20 minutes to half an hour for the express bus from Manhattan to Brooklyn, wearing a denim jacket over my blouse and slacks, and that didn’t help one bit either. I was totally saturated straight down to my underwear by the time I got on the bus.

Normally I made a habit of sitting on the right side of the bus every night since my stop was one of the first and there was always plenty of room. My reason for this was simple: I wanted to see the lights of the World Trade Center when we rode past it. Every night, that’s what I did, I looked up from whatever book I was reading when the bus reached lower Manhattan to check out those wonderful lights.

But that night was perhaps the very first time I didn’t bother to sit in a seat on the right-hand side of the bus aisle. That night I was soaked to the bone and sat, or rather dropped, in the first seat available – on the left. Well, I’ll just look at the lights when we pass the World Trade Center anyway, I thought. Meanwhile, air conditioning was blasting on the bus. It was freezing. Taking off my saturated denim jacket wasn’t going to help. It would only remove an extra layer. I kept it on and was in a rare state of weather-related misery. There are only one or two nights every year in New York when the weather is beyond unbearable and that was one of those nights. I tried to read my book but I was soaking wet and freezing cold and utterly uncomfortable…

And I missed the Trade Center.

I couldn’t believe it even as it happened because I always, always looked up to see it.

That night, though, I didn’t…

Well, I’ll be sure to sit on the right side and see it tomorrow, I thought to myself.

Except tomorrow was September 11, 2001…

The sun never shined so brightly as it did that morning because the city had been given a thorough cleansing the night before with all that torrential rain.

The beautiful morning didn’t stay beautiful for long.

World Trade Center Memorial. Photo by Fabiola Ulate on Pexels.com

Great Movie: THE WALK

THE WALK is beautifully done and well worth seeing!

What a treat it was to see the new Robert Zemeckis film THE WALK this weekend!

Do you remember where you were in early August of 1974?  I do.  I was rehearsing for a production of Mame at the Scotch Plains-Fanwood Summer Music Theater Workshop by day and riveted to the news at night.  President Nixon, everyone felt, was about to resign at any moment…or get indicted…or something.

Meanwhile, a few miles away in New York City, a French tightrope walker  named Phillipe Pettit did the impossible: he strung a tight rope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and walked between them…110 stories above the ground.  The day before the night Nixon resigned, the Watergate-weary public was absolutely delighted to see the news get dominated with this unbelievable story.

I never thought twice about how the tight rope managed to get strung up there, or how hard it must have been for this incredible man to pull off this stunt.  This movie goes into all of the behind-the-scenes preparations for the famous walk that captivated the world.  Petit had a team of helpers and their relationship, not to mention machinations for stringing that rope, are revealed in the movie.

As a New Yorker, and one who loved, loved, loved the Twin Towers, this movie was especially meaningful to me.  In the movie The Walk, our towers are back.  They were wonderful!  They are shown in all their glory, too: you get to see again the elegant simplicity of the snow-white lobby, the way the buildings would reflect the sky by day, changing colors with the weather or the sun’s rise and fall.  You get to see them at night, a spectacle that I tried never to miss.  I would ride the Express Bus home to Brooklyn every night and sit on the right-hand side because it provided the prettiest view of the towers when they were all lit up, amber lights glowing from inside so many, many offices.

You even get to see a bit of the lower sub-basement and loading dock floors of the towers, too.  Until the moment one of those scenes came onto the screen, I had forgotten that a childhood friend’s father had an office that was many floors under the lobby of one of the towers.  Seven floors down, maybe, if I remember it correctly.  I spent a day there once, hanging out in that company in the bowels of the building.  It wasn’t frightening, but I felt, at the time, it was kind of gloomy, and strange not to be able to see out the windows since, of course, there weren’t any.  Now I’d probably call it “creepy,” but I was young then, and so were the towers.  There’s the views from the top of the WTC, with all of New York spread out before them.  There’s even some shots visible, way down on the ground and shown from above, of the good old World Trade Center courtyard.  I used to sit out there in nice weather all the time.  There was a mall in the World Trade Center, and the best Borders Bookstore ever.  I used to go there every weekend…oh, how I miss the whole lovely complex!

The movie is based on Petit’s book, MAN ON WIRE, which I now want to read.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Petit, and he’s absolutely adorable – in addition to being a fantastically good actor.  As for the footage of the walk across the wire itself…hold onto your seats, folks!  It’s one of the scariest, most thrilling movie sequences you’ll ever see, and already knowing that it’s going to end well doesn’t take away the one-misstep-and-God-Almighty-he’ll-be-done-for bone-chilling terror of it.

Petit’s walk popularized the towers, which at first were not too well-received among New Yorkers.  They had at first seemed big and kind of characterless (though I never felt that way myself, believing them spectacular).  New Yorkers changed their minds after Philippe Petit came along.  As one character says, right after the walk, “Everybody loves the towers now!”

We did.

We still do.

I’d like to offer some special New York thanks to Philippe Petit and Robert Zemeckis for making this movie, for letting us see our Twin Towers again in all their splendiferous glory, and for dramatizing a true feat of daring.  I felt like this movie gave us a bit of our city’s history back, and a chance to feel, for the short while it was on the screen, like we were home.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit during his walk. Oh. My. God!

The Minute with History In It: Thank You, Navy SEAL Team 6

 

World Trade Center’s new Freedom Tower. Photo Copyright 2013 by Carolyn Quinn

There is a line in a Jerry Herman song called “It’s Today” that has been replaying in my heart all week.

“It’s Today” is from the Broadway musical Mame. The song is sung by a woman who is throwing a party without having any real reason to celebrate. The line goes:

“Though it may not be anyone’s birthday, and though it’s far from the first of the year, I know that this very minute has history in it – we’re here!”

This very minute has history in it. A week ago, on Sunday, May 1st, 2011, I was sitting in the Orchestra of Broadway’s Longacre Theater, enjoying the last performance of another Jerry Herman show, La Cage aux Folles, which was playing its closing performance. It’s usually not too easy to enjoy a closing. The actors often break down in tears and so do the diehard fans who all hate to see a show they love play for the last time. The La Cage cast was amazing, though: if they wanted to cry, most of them held it in and gave one of the best closing performances I’ve every seen, upbeat and joyous. That particular cast, it should be noted, was amazing all the way through their run. That they gave an amazing closing performance, too, was in synch with just how fabulous they all are.

So where was I on the minute that had history in it on May 1, 2011? At the very moment when Navy Seal Team 6 was making their surprise landing atop Osama Bin Laden’s million buck hidey-hole, I was watching one of the finest ensemble casts Broadway has ever assembled. I would estimate that the Navy Seals landed just about when A.J. Shively began to sing “With Anne on My Arm,” about the girl his character wants to marry, or perhaps when Christopher Sieber and Harvey Fierstein sang the next number, “With You on My Arm.” Both songs are two of my all-time Broadway favorites.

If you have to be clueless while history is in the making on the other side of the world, I cannot think of a better way to have spent such a historic moment.

On September 11, 2001, I arrived at my old job and received the news, while still in the elevator, that a “small plane,” or so it was said, had crashed into the World Trade Center. I worked on the 28th floor of a skyscraper and assembled with other employees at the window. Something was wrong, I felt, with the way the fire was burning in the affected tower, and I said so aloud. There were streams of flames coming from several stories above and several stories below the crash area, six streams in all. It didn’t seem right, somehow, for a small plane to have caused pockets of fire to emerge from so many stories of the building. Something was weird, off about it. “I’m no forensic expert on fires,” I remember saying, “but something’s really wrong with this one.” Right after I said it, we all found out why. Another plane hit the second tower. This one, we could see, was a jet, and that’s when we knew the first one had not been a small plane or an accident, either. It was a terrorist attack, deliberate and lethal.

That day changed the New Yorkers who were there forever. My worst moment came after my building had been evacuated. I went out on the street with no way to get home because New York was in “lockdown mode,” the bridges and tunnels were closed, the buses and subways had been stopped, and the TV had said eight planes were unaccounted for and probably “incoming,” maybe headed for more high-profile buildings. All of the planes over American airspace had been grounded, except for those eight. Out on the street under these unprecedented conditions, two loud planes could be heard overhead. People began to scream. I wondered what would be better: to try and take cover by a car or in a doorway? In a split second I decided that the doorway was my best bet. Cars had gasoline and that could explode; doorways didn’t. Welcome to the new world of targets and terror.

I braced myself for the plane attack that was surely coming if all the planes had been grounded and these two were somehow overhead.

Then I saw them, as did the rest of the screaming people on the street: not missiles of hijacked destruction at all but two beautiful F16’s, there to defend us from any further attacks. Everyone’s screams turned to cheers. Our military had arrived, and we were all safe, though to this day I can still jump several feet in the air if I hear too loud and unexpected a noise and am reminded of those first moments of panic.

The idea that the mastermind of this attack somehow never got caught made me feel like we were all living through a particularly bad movie. Bin Laden would periodically issue videos of himself to the media, taunting Americans further. That made it seem even more like we were all trapped in a wretched film. I was always reminded of The Joker in the Bat Man movie, taking over TV air time with his crazed pontificating.

It’s particularly delicious to note that it was the courier who delivered those videos to the media that brought about Bin Laden’s eventual downfall. That tracking down the messenger led to the man who created the message.

I wish it were possible to know which of our armed forces members comprised Navy Seal Team 6. I understand that keeping their identities under wraps is probably for their own protection and to prevent reprisals, but for how long will they really remain incognito? Sooner or later, we’ll all find out who they were. It would be so much nicer to know their names already so that we could thank them. While I was happily watching a beloved show, they were flying into the compound of Public Enemy Number One. They didn’t know what they would find. They didn’t even know if they would come out of the ugly modified fortress alive – yet in they went.

In some ways I wish they had been able to bring Bin Laden out alive so that he could have been put on trial for what he did to us. Yet that was not to be.

Someday I hope we New Yorkers will be able to give these brave team members a ticker tape parade, a celebration to show our pride in them in the same area of Manhattan that, nearly ten years ago, was hit so hard – on an achingly beautiful day – with such terror. In the meantime, thank you, Navy Seal Team 6! Thank you for going where nobody in their right mind would ever want to voluntarily tread. Thank you for giving us some closure. Thank you for the fact that red, white and blue lights now victoriously adorn the half-built Freedom Tower on the site where we lost so many people when we lost the other towers. We are grateful to you in more ways than we could ever express. And while the rest of us were enjoying our Sunday and didn’t know that particular moment had history in it, you certainly did, and went forward anyway.

Excelsior!