[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the 80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: I am Jessica. Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school, and high school together here in New York City, where we still live.

[00:29] Meg: And where we now podcast about New York City in the 80s. I do ripped from the headlines.

[00:34] Jessica: And I handle pop culture. Hi, Meg.

[00:40] Meg: Hi, Jessica.

[00:41] Jessica: Are you as hot as I am in this office?

[00:44] Meg: One of those muggy days. Thank you, New York City.

[00:47] Jessica: We have to figure out how to get the air conditioner to work silently or, like, put egg crate all over this place.

[00:52] Meg: Every other day has been kind of brutal.

[00:59] Jessica: I'm a woman of a certain age. I'm very warm. Okay.

[01:10] Meg: All right. Well, maybe my engagement question will harken you back to a younger, fresher time.

[01:20] Jessica: Please don't edit that out. Look, it's true. I have that not so fresh feeling, so why don't you give it a shot?

[01:32] Meg: I was going to ask you whether you went to a lot of Bar Mitzvahs and Bat Mitzvahs when you were 13 years old.

[01:40] Jessica: Gee, Meg, what do you think?

[01:43] Meg: Well, I got to tell you, I didn't.

[01:44] Jessica: What am I, that you are not?

[01:47] Meg: I know, but, like, my kids, who are not Jewish went to a zillion of them.

[01:53] Jessica: Well, it's also because, like, you know, when we were kids, a Bar/Bat Mitzvah was like a normal party. It wasn't like the opening of a I don't know what the hell they do now, but they're very over the top, and they're all about, like, glitzy parties. I'm just saying. Nonsense.

[02:09] Meg: I wasn't invited.

[02:10] Jessica: Okay, you know what? Not a friend of the Jews. Obviously.

[02:16] Meg: I missed out. My kids are going to all these. I'm like, oh, sure, I know what it's like to go to a Bar Mitzvah. I grew up in New York. Nope. I wasn't invited.

[02:24] Jessica: It's exactly like a wedding. But the part that happens in the place of worship is different. Other than that, it's cocktail wieners and the electric slide.

[02:35] Meg: And you experienced that?

[02:37] Jessica: I did. Although, I'll tell you something. As usual, I have a vivid pop culture related memory. I cannot listen to the song My Angel is a Centerfold by the J. Geils Band without thinking about my dear friend Lori Els Bat Mitzvah in Connecticut. And I can't believe it. This just shows you what the brain does. I just remembered that she had a friend named Warren who was, like, a little tiny guy, and he was very amusing. Why do I remember Warren? Bat Mitzvahs and also, what I loved about Bat Mitzvahs and Bar Mitzvahs in the early 80s was that all the boys were in these three piece suits. They all looked like accountants. It was so bizarre. But anyway, the answer is yes.

[03:23] Meg: Okay, well, my sources this week are the Jewish Daily Forward.

[03:29] Jessica: Get out of town. I swear to God, I was about to say The Forward?

[03:38] Meg: A New Yorker article by Lawrence Wright, the Cleveland Jewish News Stat, which is a medical publication. And the documentary Three Identical Strangers. Have you seen it?

[03:55] Jessica: No, I have not seen it. I know the premise, but I'm very excited to experience it through your lens.

[04:02] Meg: Yeah. All right.

[04:03] Jessica: All right. I'm very excited.

[04:04] Meg: Early September 19, 1980 year old Bobby Shafran drove from his Long Island home to Sullivan County Community College in the Catskills. He was starting his first year. He didn't know anyone there, but as soon as he hit the campus, people started coming up to him. How was your summer? So glad you came back. Guys were bear hugging him, and girls were kissing him and high fiving him. Everyone was calling him Eddy. He had just put his bag down in his dorm room when a guy named Michael burst in.

[04:36] Jessica: What's your birthday?

[04:37] Meg: Were you adopted? Bobby answered yes. He was born on July 12, 1961, and was adopted. Michael said, I don't know how to tell you this, but you've got a twin. Michael's best friend was Eddy, who had attended Sullivan County Community College the previous year, but had decided not to return. Michael and Bobby then jumped in a car and raced back to Long Island, where Eddy lived and Bobby met Eddy for the first time. They were duplicates of each other.

[05:08] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[05:09] Meg: And the picture of the two of them meeting each other. Jessica, I don't know how anyone could see this and not start weeping. They just look so happy. And just like they'd met the love of their life. It's so beautiful. Anyway, I'm going to post that. I can't get teary so early on in this story.

[05:28] Jessica: I'm riveted.

[05:29] Meg: All right, it all checked out. They had the same birthday and had both been adopted from Louise Wise Services at 12 East 94th street, the preeminent adoption agency for primarily Jewish families. Newsday and the New York Post loved this feel good story and put the twins on their front pages. The next morning, David Kellman's mom picked up her newspaper and saw two boys who looked just like her son. Then her son David called Eddy's mom and explained that his birthday was also July 12, 1961, and he heard her call out to Eddy, they're coming out of the woodwork. It was just incredible. Triplets separated at birth, who had all grown up within a hundred miles of each other. The boys were ecstatic. They went on all the talk shows, Donahue, The Today show. They were in People magazine and Good Housekeeping, but their parents were pissed. How could this have happened? Why weren't they ever told that the sons they adopted were triplets? They went to Louise Wise Services for answers and were basically blown off. They were told it was necessary because placing triplets in one home was too difficult. David's father said that was horseshit, that his family would have taken all three had they known. But Louise Wise refused to give them more information. And they were an extremely powerful institution. When the parents tried to sue, no law firm would take the case because they were worried their associates would have a hard time adopting. What Louise Wise was covering up was that they had intentionally separated the triplets and placed them in three socioeconomically different homes in order to study them.

[07:26] Jessica: I just got chills. That is disgusting. Yeah, but she couldn't have been the architect of this plan. Who was?

[07:35] Meg: Ms. Wise.

[07:36] Jessica: Yes. Who was the sociologist behind it?

[07:39] Meg: We're getting there.

[07:40] Jessica: Okay, I'm excited. Go ahead.

[07:43] Meg: David was sent to a warm working class immigrant family. Eddy went to a middle class family with a very strict father. Bobby was placed in an upper class family with a workaholic doctor father. Each set of parents was told that they would be allowed to adopt a baby boy on the condition that they take part in a psychiatric study on adopted children. The parents had no clue that it was actually a twin study. And Louise Wise separated at least a dozen other sets of twin babies.

[08:16] Jessica: They were the only triplets. Yeah, but there are other two as.

[08:18] Meg: Far as we know it. Psychiatrists visited each of the triplets frequently as they were growing up and did a series of tests on them. The goal of the experiment was to determine which was more influential, nature or nurture. Peter Neubauer, to answer your question, was a child psychiatrist. He was Austrian and a Holocaust survivor who, with the Jewish Board of Family Services and Louise Wise, orchestrated the study in the 1950s and 60s. This was a period of time when psychoanalysis was treated like a religion by many and Freud was its god, and they did not see the ethical or moral problem with treating babies like lab rats. Shocking, given that in the wake of the Nazis horrific experiments on Jewish concentration camp prisoners, the Nuremberg Code requires doctors to obtain informed consent for any scientific study. Legally, the babies were wards of the state, so the consent was given by social workers and adoption agencies. The study was quickly shut down in 1980 when the triplets found each other.

[09:27] Jessica: Okay, my mouth is hanging down. I'm just giving our listeners the visual shock face. Go ahead.

[09:34] Meg: And the results were never published.

[09:37] Jessica: All that for nothing.

[09:40] Meg: All right, let's get back to David, Eddy, and Bobby. David, Eddy, and Bobby. Remember, they're 19 years old. They're like puppies with each other. And they were extremely close for many years. And they were the toast of the town. They were celebrities in New York City. They had a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan, how fun is that? And opened an Ashkenazi soul food restaurant in Soho that was fashioned after Famous Sammy's Roumanian Steakhouse restaurant on the Lower East Side.

[10:08] Jessica: What was it called?

[10:10] Meg: Triplets.

[10:11] Jessica: Oh, I know that. Okay. Okay.

[10:15] Meg: Now Famous Sammy's sadly closed in 2021.

[10:19] Jessica: Yes, it did, but and that prevented many a future heart attack and invasive surgery.

[10:27] Meg: Well, I never went, but they had.

[10:30] Jessica: On every table instead of butte, schmaltz. Do you know what schmaltz is?

[10:36] Meg: I think it's lard.

[10:37] Jessica: It's chicken fat. There you go. It's seasoned chicken fat. Okay, so go ahead.

[10:44] Meg: I read that going there with like a big Bar Mitzvah every night where everyone could be Jewish and where Jewish people could be themselves.

[10:53] Jessica: Nice tagline, right? Very good.

[10:55] Meg: Okay, so that was my engagement question, was about Bar Mitzvahs.

[10:58] Jessica: I actually made the connection.

[10:59] Meg: Okay, just in case. So David's father, who everyone called bubbeleh, now remember, he's the immigrant working class one.

[11:08] Jessica: I just want to hear your wouthern and wasp voice say bubbeleh one more time.

[11:13] Meg: Bubbeleh.

[11:14] Jessica: Bubbeleh. It started out as bubbeleh, so I'm just letting you know that that was the best thing so far. Bubbeleh. No, it's Bubbeleh. It doesn't just keep going. I love you. Go ahead.

[11:25] Meg: He was the glue that kept them together. Big teddy bear always hugging them. And he used to say he had three sons all. But behind all the celebration lurked the fact that these three boys had been traumatized as babies. All of their parents remembered them bashing their heads against walls when they were little and holding their breath until they passed out. They had clearly suffered from separation anxiety when they were split up at six months.

[11:56] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[11:58] Meg: And as much as they had in common, they liked the same colors, they smoked the same cigarettes. They were all three wrestlers. They were all these things people kept asking, like Donahue would ask them, like, "Oh, I hear you. All three liked the same kind of women. And they're like, yeah, we all like the same kind of women." It was kind of like bringing out a circus act or something. But actually the things that they had in common were just so minor. It was just like, oh, they all like the color green, I hear you.

[12:27] Jessica: The criticism dripping from your fangs.

[12:31] Meg: But see, the point was that they were also strangers when they met and when they began to have business squabbles because of the restaurant, they weren't able to muscle through them as they might have had they grown up together, because if they were actually siblings, they would have worked through all of that kind of stuff. Maybe, maybe not.

[12:50] Jessica: They would have known how to fight with each other.

[12:52] Meg: Exactly. And Eddy, as it turned out, suffered from a mood disorder, and I'm afraid he committed suicide in 1995. And David and Bobby, they have actually made amends. They are now close again. But they went through a lot of stuff together. You know, they were deeply disturbed by how they were experimented on. They never really recovered from that. And for what? The few psychiatrists who participated in the study who were still alive believe that heredity plays a heavier role in determining one's life than we'd like to believe. People want to have influence over their lives. They don't want to think that everything is predetermined. But David and Bobby and their families and Eddy's family, they all say, from their observation, that regardless of the cards you're dealt, nurture can overcome everything.

[13:47] Jessica: What a sad story. Well, so Triplets closed. Yeah. And where are they now?

[13:55] Meg: They are married. They have families, everything's okay. But for one of them, it wasn't. He wasn't able to overcome his demons. And David's aunt, very sweet woman who's in the documentary, my favorite quote from her is, "When you play with humans, you do something very wrong." You have to think that it had some sort of ongoing effect.

[14:17] Jessica: You had three babies who were independently banging their heads into the wall. Clearly there's a problem. Yeah. The irony of the Auschwitz survivor is that what you said?

[14:29] Meg: Holocaust. I don't know specifically.

[14:30] Jessica: Another example of how the situations that you're in will twist you and you will make some severely crazy decisions for reasons that seem genuinely unfathomable to anyone else. And, you know, his own trauma probably steered him in a particularly fucked up direction.

[14:51] Meg: You're talking about Peter Neubauer?

[14:52] Jessica: Yeah.

[14:52] Meg: Newberg. The people who were still alive were assistants. So they were very young. They were in their 20s when he was a grown man doing these. But they don't really feel bad about it either. No one really seems to feel all that bad about it.

[15:07] Jessica: Well, you know what they say about psychiatrists. They're always the crazy ones.

[15:11] Meg: Well, it's interesting. There's this privilege that's given to science over these actual human beings.

[15:18] Jessica: I don't think that there's a privilege given to science. I think that you're touching on the God complex of what is the personality type that is going to want to open up a body and muck around in there. What's the personality type of the person who says, you know what? I can shape the way you view the world. I can shape your emotion. There's a double edged sword to having that kind of interest and proclivity.

[15:47] Meg: And do you have a memory about psychoanalysis and psychiatry and Freud being lauded? I do. When I was growing up, maybe because my father was very good friends with Henriette Klein, who was in Psychoanalytic Institute, so they and all their friends were at the house a lot.

[16:07] Jessica: Well, I'll tell you, because this is another installment of my family isn't normal. Like all good Jews, upper East Side Jews. There's therapy going on. My mom went to therapy. Eventually I realized that I was an insane person. Therapy, as one does. My mom had a very wicked sense of humor, very dark and very wicked sense of humor. And when you entered my parents apartment, you immediately came upon a Victorian wooden chest of drawers that had a marble top. And on that marble top were all of these beautifully framed family photos and silver frames and all of that photos that went back to the 19th century. And invariably it was so enticing. People would come in and look at the photos, and my mom and then I and my brother as well, would sit and wait to see how long it took them to see that one of them was Freud.

[17:11] Meg: So you had that going on in your house? I had a little something going on in my I mean, maybe it's just New York in the 80s, I don't know.

[17:18] Jessica: Well, it's also when was Freud really attacked and debunked?

[17:24] Meg: I feel like it was after our use.

[17:26] Jessica: I think it was during our like the 80s, I think it was during that time.

[17:31] Meg: The other thought that I was having was about Louise Wise Services and how powerful that institution was. And, like, we were talking in previous episodes about these bubbles of power and what happens when you're in this little bubble of power? You just start justifying things that should not be justified. You lose perspective.

[17:54] Jessica: Well, I mean, think about all of the stuff that we learned over the last several years about the shenanigans excuse me in the entertainment industry. I will never get over Matt Lauer's under the desk buttons. And that was like someone went and installed that, and that was normal, and that was a thing, and okay, well, we're just going to that normalization. That you're talking about is chilling. And what I think you said that's most telling about her power was that the lawyers were afraid they wouldn't be able to adopt.

[18:27] Meg: Exactly.

[18:28] Jessica: It says so many bad things about everybody in that equation. It is chilling. And by the by, Louise Wise agency was a mere four blocks from this office, so I know we can feel her negative vibes.

[18:45] Meg: It's now a single person dwelling. Not a single person, single family dwelling. It was apartments. After Louise Wise, it went out of business.

[18:54] Jessica: Single person, like bosom buddies, and we're back to the Barbizon Hotel.

[18:57] Meg: No, sorry. So Louise Wise went out of business because there were a few scandals, because it wasn't just the twin and the triplet separation that was going on. There was also some financial stuff happening.

[19:11] Jessica: Funny you should say that, because I was convinced before I realized what was going on with this story that she wanted to separate them so she could get three commissions instead of all the kids going to one family. If only it had been that benign.

[19:27] Meg: So much more insidious than that. So closed down, and then they turned that beautiful building into apartments, and then somebody just a few years ago turned it back into a single family dwelling. So now it must be friggin amazing.

[19:45] Jessica: And yet it's haunted by the bad deeds of Louise, what's her last name?

[19:51] Meg: Wise. Louise Wise, actually, like her granddaughter, but still, I mean, it was a generational thing. It was started in 1916 or something. The actual Louise Wise, long dead.

[20:03] Jessica: Oh. So who was the person who was in charge of this?

[20:07] Meg: Granddaughter or something?

[20:08] Jessica: All right. Well, that is fascinating.

[20:11] Meg: Poor little boys.

[20:12] Jessica: Poor little baby boys don't cry, don't cry.

[20:16] Meg: I am going to post pictures of them when they were super happy when they found each other because it is.

[20:23] Jessica: We have a crossover.

[20:27] Meg: Oh, really?

[20:27] Jessica: We do.

[20:28] Meg: Gosh, what could it be?

[20:30] Jessica: Well, I didn't know what it was going to be either until I started, I don't know, listening to you. Yes. And there is a location in the city that you mentioned that is below 14th street.

[20:44] Meg: Soho.

[20:45] Jessica: Yes.

[20:46] Meg: Today I'm talking about Soho in the 80s.

[20:50] Jessica: Yes.

[20:51] Meg: So different from now.

[20:52] Jessica: Oh, yes, indeed. I remember our dear friend BFF of the podcast Sasha.

[20:59] Meg: That was the first thing that popped into my head.

[21:02] Jessica: Yes.

[21:02] Meg: Sasha.

[21:03] Jessica: Her parents had the most incredible loft on Broome Street. And I remember going there. It was like the most magical, it was even better than going to the mall. It was 1000% different from anyone else's house. Exactly. And it was so cool and it was so filled with art, and it was so completely of that moment. And so I was thinking about Soho and how has it changed? And why was it important in the 80s and how do we even know that it was important in the 80s? So what I then remembered was one of Martin Scorsese's lesser known movies, After Hours.

[21:49] Meg: One of my favorite movies ever.

[21:52] Jessica: It is a fantastic movie. And it was so brilliant because it really did, in the most heightened, horrific way, exemplify what it was like for an uptown person to go downtown to that area. And I looked through the description of that film today and was laughing to realize that. What's his name? Dunne

[22:22] Meg: Griffin.

[22:23] Jessica: Griffin Dunne's character Paul, lives on East 91st street.

[22:28] Meg: Do you remember where he gets dumped out at the very end?

[22:30] Jessica: In front of the Metropolitan Life? Yes.

[22:35] Meg: Which is like three blocks from where I live.

[22:38] Jessica: Yeah. Yeah.

[22:38] Meg: So that's the dividing point between uptown and downtown.

[22:42] Jessica: Yes, exactly. So for those of you who have not seen it, I really recommend it. If you want a slice of New York in the 80s, it's as evocative as Desperately Seeking Susan.

[22:55] Meg: It's a nightmare, though. I mean, he's in a nightmare.

[22:58] Jessica: That the premise of the film is that this yuppie who has a really terrible job that doesn't even exist anymore, he's a data entry person or like a word processor, something like that, meets a girl played by Rosanna Arquette, also of Desperately Seeking Susan.

[23:17] Meg: And she's so mysterious and glamorous.

[23:20] Jessica: And he meets her at a diner uptown and she gives him her number and says, I'm going to be at my friend Kiki's downtown. And that's how it all begins. And the story is this hapless guy in his suit going from location to location, being constantly stymied in his attempts to get back uptown, and he meets crazies and artists and unhinged people and goes to clubs and everything that is just out of his comfort zone, but really sinister and like he could die at any moment. At one point, he's chased by a vigilante mob that's set on him by one of the women who's disappointed with his behavior. It's very, very funny. I do have to say, reading the description, that it did smack just a tiny bit of misogyny, because every character in it who he has to deal with, who is either totally insane or possibly a killer, is a woman. Interesting. Every single one.

[24:29] Meg: We got to watch it again.

[24:30] Jessica: We do have to watch this again. But has Catherine O'Hara and Teri Garr and Linda Fiorentino in her first role, anyway. But it is a great movie. So yeah. Sasha's, her parents apartment made me think of After Hours. And then I remembered what it was like when Soho first started being really gentrified, when all of the really high end clothing stores started going in there and jewelry stores and Chanel and Balenciaga and what have you. And I remember that we were all really pissed about it. And I was thinking about how on this podcast, we've talked about how people get up in arms whenever there's a change in New York, even if it's for the better. And that, you know, now we look back on people, people's outcry about, you know, Times Square, and even our own irritation with the disnefication of it. But it was not a good, safe place before, it was bad. I think that I'm going to do a little tour of Soho and revisit whether or not my impression in my teens and 20s that the gentrification was a truly bad thing and that it was a new thing. So we're going to do a little talk about, a little walk through the history of Soho, and we're going to wind up in Soho in the 80s. Here are a few factoids about Soho. Soho, as you well know, has a very distinctive look to it. I always thought that it was all just because it was factories, but that's not true, and I'm about to tell you why. Anyway, so Soho became a neighborhood, not called Soho in the 1700's. And it was basically a drained swamp. It continued to be built up. Canal Street was interestingly and unsurprisingly, a canal.

[26:24] Meg: Okay.

[26:25] Jessica: And it was eventually filled in and made into a street because the residents said that it smelled so disgusting that it had you can imagine.

[26:33] Meg: Right? Yeah.

[26:34] Jessica: As this area was built up in the early 1800's, it started to become a place of commerce and stores, and it was just building and building. And then in 1820, guess who built an enormous building and made the first foray into what it turns out is the original history of Soho, which is luxury goods guess who was there? Tiffany & Co. Oh. Tiffany & Co started out. Where? Broadway. Between Prince and Spring.

[27:08] Meg: No way.

[27:11] Jessica: It's where Banana Republic is right now. Okay. And the clock that is above Tiffany & Co now on 57th street was actually the clock that was on the original 1820 building.

[27:23] Meg: Very cool.

[27:24] Jessica: Yes. So then it became a very fashionable area, and sorry, when are we, 1820's. okay? And between 1820s and 1880s, it was the most fashionable place to be. New York City didn't have any parks, so pleasure gardens were a thing, sort of like a cross between dance halls and beer gardens and amusement halls, and it was just a place for recreation and lounging around.

[27:57] Meg: So people were not living there.

[28:00] Jessica: People were going there. Exactly. And those pleasure gardens started to fall out of favor when public parks started getting put in place. But in the 1850s, all of the side streets became the red light district, and all of the side streets were brothels. And then, as with most things in New York, things took a pretty bad turn during the depression, and whatever luster was left on Soho went bye bye. And it was filled with shanty towns. And if you've ever seen the musical annie, you'll remember the Hooverville lights. The Hoovervilles were shanty towns set up in urban areas because people had lost everything. But before that happened excuse me. Between the 1880s and the 1930s and 40s, up until the war, all of those buildings that had been so fashionable, these cast iron facade buildings, were abandoned because it was much more fashionable to be further uptown. The buildings were taken over, and they had very, very cheap rent because no one wanted them. They were taken over by manufacturers, and that's why we think of them as factory buildings. Okay.

[29:16] Meg: Interesting.

[29:16] Jessica: And there was a very robust rag trade there. So that was what was going on for a long time as the textile industry. And then by the time the war was over, again, these places were abandoned. And that was when the Soho that we know came into existence, in the 1950s, the artists started moving in, and they lived in those buildings until the 70s, essentially illegally. They weren't quite squatters, but they were not zoned as residential buildings. And our frenemy, I guess, the evil nemesis of New York's preservation Robert Moses, tried to build a ten lane freeway through Soho, displacing the artists, and the artists created a collective and fought back. And they won eventually, but that was also what got that artist's community even deeper entrenched, because they had never had to come together for a common cause before. So it went from being people sort of scattered through the area, finding places that they could that had they had gigantic windows and light, and it was all very conducive for an artist's work, because it was a work/live space. Right. It went from being this individual experience to being a community. And so by the time Sasha's parents were there, now, coming back to the 80s and we were going there, it was still that time, and it was about to explode and go away again. So we were there for the tail end of this 1950s through the 1980s, reclaiming sort of the grittier side of Soho. And we also talked about Clubland and we talked about Area. Now, I did a little more research on Area because there was something bothering me. I had a memory, and I couldn't recall what the deal was. And Area, which was only around for like, four years, and I think it was on Houston, it remade itself every four or six weeks as a new art installation. And I had no memory of this at all. And I'm sure that in my extreme.

[31:41] Meg: Youth going in there, did they redesign the whole thing?

[31:43] Jessica: They gutted it and started it all.

[31:45] Meg: Over again, or gee, yes.

[31:48] Jessica: And all of the artists from the neighborhood would come in and be part of whatever the installation was. And there's this great photo of a busboy or a cocktail waiter holding a tray, standing in what looks like an enormous bowl of alphabet soup, which I'm sure was a dig at Warhol. But I looked at who the owners were and I have an engagement question for you.

[32:19] Meg: Okay.

[32:20] Jessica: Do you remember that at Nightingale we had a headmistress, but we also had two other women?

[32:27] Meg: Yes. Ms. Goode and Miss Hamilton.

[32:29] Jessica: Right. And what were their jobs, do you recall?

[32:32] Meg: They were just very important.

[32:34] Jessica: Yes, they were important and scary. But they had those cute little dogs that went back and forth. Holly and what was the other one?

[32:39] Meg: I can't remember the names of that anyway, but they were like vice principals in that position.

[32:46] Jessica: They were head of Upper School, vice principal something. And both of these women looked like Miss Hamilton kind of looked like the Quaker Oats man. And Miss Goode looked like the ultimate aquiline British school marm. And they both had like their hair was still very sculpted. Very sculpted. Ms. Good's nephew, how I know this, I do not know. His name was Eric Goode. And Eric Goode was responsible for a whole lot of clubs in New York City. Really? And Area was one of his Eric. Eric Goode and his brother Christian. Interesting. Right. So back to Soho in the 80s, it was one of the places in the city that was still at that time, kind of weirdly, magical, without being.

[33:41] Meg: Like a pleasure garden.

[33:43] Jessica: Like a pleasure garden. It was a playground. And it was a playground very different from the Lower East Side and from Alphabet City, where that was mostly musicians and it was grittier. There was more out and out, just junkies and danger. And Soho what was so scary about it, really, was that it was so desolate at night. And that's why that movie captured it so well, that he just anything could happen. Anything could come around the corner. And I neglected to say in After Hours. The reason that he's in this terrible situation is that he takes a taxi as a good Upper East Sider will down to Soho, and while in the cab, his $20 bill flies out of his hand and he stiffs the driver who dumps him out. And hilariously, I looked this up. The fare for that ride from East 91st street down to presumably like Prince and Broadway, $6.50. I love that. Which is now like $30 at least. So he is left with no money, but he is .97 and he can't get into the subway because that at midnight, they changed the fare to a $1.50. Oh my God. That is the worse. Remember that the MTA would be like, oh yeah, by the way, we changed the fares. And you're always short twenty five cents now and back to because there can't be an episode without Regina. Regina. Our dear friend Regina George is evidence that the MTA was constantly changing the fares. Because on my way home from school, I would, if lazy, take the bus and invariably ask Regina, and I know she's listening and she's going to write in, hey, Reg, can I borrow a quarter? That was every day. Reg, do you have a quarter? So there he was with ninety seven cents and he couldn't get back. And the way he gets back is in a completely psychotic, not his own free will kind of way. Soho was still magical. It was weird. You knew that there were artists living there and artists who maybe didn't want you to know that they were there. And it was cooler than cool and hipper than hip. And the style that we think of as the downtown style, with like really over the top jewelry and like the Tama Janowitz look, that's all Soho. So that's a little tiny slice of what I remember and what I loved, loved, loved about. It was like going to the Emerald City in this really weird way, and you could feel a little like dangerous and naughty, but you probably weren't going to actually get killed, which would happen in other areas.

[36:45] Meg: I've got two memories that I will share very quickly. One was I was coming back from hanging out with Sasha and I thought I had a subway fare home. And in fact, I did not have subway fare.

[37:02] Jessica: Did you jump the turnstile?

[37:03] Meg: I didn't, but I asked a woman as she was going down, she seemed like a nice woman, if she would spot me, and she harumphed at me and then gave me a dollar. And I was like, thank you so much. And then I got on the wrong train.

[37:20] Jessica: Your specialty.

[37:21] Meg: Oh my God.

[37:23] Jessica: So where did you wind up in Hoboken?

[37:28] Meg: I was definitely in an outer borough, and I ended up having to call my parents from a payphone. They shouldn't have let me out of the house.

[37:36] Jessica: No.

[37:36] Meg: And then the other thing I was going to say is this isn't 80s, but the wonderful Ohio Theater existed in the 90s in New York City. And that's where I did a lot of theater when I came back after school and when it had to close because of the New York economy, saying that I don't know what's there now, like a Bulgari or whatever was more important than theater. It was cu-rushing.

[38:09] Jessica: Well, funny you should talk about theater and Soho. You just reminded me of one of the weirder coincidences in the late 90s, there was a big burlesque boom. And it was also like in the early aughts. You remember this?

[38:24] Meg: Oh, sure. Well, I know some of prior to.

[38:27] Jessica: That big thing happening there, it was like the little rumblings existed. And I had a friend from college who was looked like the preppiest guy on the planet. He was the most interested in avant garde person you've ever met. And one day he's like, hey, come with me. I think it was White Street. I can't remember. I think it was White Street. Come with me. We're going to go to a performance. I'm just praying that it's not like some experimental silent theater or something like that. So I'm like, okay, let's go. So we go. We get to this building with the steel or iron what did I say it is? Facade. And he's like, no, don't go up, go down. So we go into the basement of this dank place. Like it's just dark and dank. And there is a little bar set up that's like essentially someone's desk from home. And they're pouring out cups of juice because they don't have a liquor license. But they're like, well, we'll give you something to drink. And a lot of people already knew to bring booze to put in the juice, which of course my friend did. So there we are. And I see that there's no stage. This is just a basement. There are two concentric circles of folding chairs with a space in the middle. I'm invited to take a seat. I sit down and hardcore burlesque begins.

[39:52] Meg: Right in your face.

[39:54] Jessica: Right in my face. And in fact, one of the burlesque performers whose boobs were like resting on my chin, turned to my friend and said, you really take your girlfriend to the nicest place? And I was like, yeah, not my boyfriend. But still, amazingly, because this was so early in the burlesque thing, one of the performers was about 900 years old and from the original 1930s burlesque world and everything. All of I mean, bless her and it will happen to us, I know this, but every appendage was on the floor. It was unreal. And she had flaming batons and she did her thing. And the name of this joint was Fallen Angel. Well, cut to around 2007. I'm a book packager, and I am invited to go to meet a potential client who wants to have a book done that shows all of his work. And I find out that this is, in fact, the very famous costume designer William Ivey Long. Yes, I know you know who that is. So I was like, okay, great. Let's do this. So I go to his house, which is many lofts, and his studio, and I go down like, all of the costumes are out on the upper floors. And he said, look at the work room. I go downstairs, and I was like, I've been here?

[41:26] Meg: No way.

[41:28] Jessica: I've been here? No way. And I said, please don't think me rude. Was this an unlicensed strip club? And he goes, oh, my God, how do you know that? And I was like I was there. Well, that was a riveting episode. Yeah.

[41:52] Meg: I can't wait to see After Hours now. Yes, Billy will be very I mean, I've been telling Billy that he has to see After Hours, and now he really has to.

[42:01] Jessica: Okay, well, I'm coming over to your house, and let's get in the pit and watch it with you.

[42:04] Meg: Yes. Film festival.

[42:06] Jessica: Yay. So you know what's really nice? I have been getting unsolicited phone calls and texts from friends of mine who have finally started listening to the podcast. That's lovely and hilariously. They all have this sort of shocked demeanor, like, I'm really enjoying it. This is really good. So this is a shout out to all of our friends who have been so sweet and kind and told us personally how much you're enjoying the podcast. Do us a favor. Go on Apple podcast and give us the glowing review that you've already given us, but do it there so that more people will know to listen. And even if you haven't already texted us personally, do the same.

[42:55] Meg: That would be amazing. It really makes a huge difference.

[42:58] Jessica: It does. Anyway, this was really fun. Thanks, Meg. Thank you, Jessica.