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

[00:20] Jessica: And I am Jessica. And 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.

[00:28] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines.

[00:33] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:35] Meg: And we are at Ryan's Daughter.

[00:39] Jessica: On 85th Street between Second and First in New York City on the Upper East Side, which we frequently speak about in Yorkville. Yes

[00:50] Meg: The the amazing mean you. You grew up in Yorkville.

[00:56] Jessica: Yes, I did. Proud of it.

[00:59] Meg: Right. And today we are with Alex Smith who also grew up in Yorkville.

[01:05] Jessica: But he also grew up on Park Avenue, which is going to find its way into our story.

[01:11] Meg: I bet it will, because that was more my neighborhood. So yeah Alex you grew up, you started in my neighborhood and then at some point in your young life.

[01:24] Alex: I guess technically I was born in I think that neighborhood is still considered Carnegie Hill. I was born in 1967 and our apartment was on 90th Street between Park and Lex.

[01:42] Jessica: I lived on 90th and Lex.

[01:45] Alex: Did you? Right there. But then my mother and my father divorced upon the happy occasion of my birth. So then shortly after that, my mother met a gentleman whose name I shan't use, and they got married and then we decamped to 1172 Park Avenue, which by the way, doesn't suck. It was on 93rd Street. And we were there for probably about 15 years or so, most of my grade school years and half of my high school years. And then they split and my mom and I moved to 86th Street between York and East End. And that was resonant for me because my grandparents, my mother's parents had lived at Henderson House just down the block, so we knew that area kind of. And so then I was a Yorkville-ian from like 1984 until I moved well, then I went to college and I still was home. And then I wanted to go into journalism, which, as we all know is not the most lucrative of fields, but to pursue a career in journalism in New York City. I moved back home with mom and that worked out really well. And mom went away every weekend, so it's not like we were living on top of each other. But after a while it's not great for a guy in his 20's to be living with his mom. We love each other, but it was just like I had to go. So I moved downtown in like '96 or so, which was still longer then. I should have done it like two years earlier and then that was that. So I said goodbye to the Upper East Side and not that I never looked back, but I had nothing but fondness for both Yorkville and Carnegie Hill. I would love to be able to live in Carnegie Hill today.

[03:30] Jessica: So I have a question for you. How many blocks were there between your Park Avenue apartment and your 86th street residence?

[03:39] Alex: How many physical walking blocks? I was told there'd be no math. Well, but the thing is, like, I was on 93rd & Park and we moved to 86th street, which technically is only few blocks, but then I was on between York and East End. So anytime I wanted to go anywhere, which was invariably downtown across town, I had to go from York to First, from First to Second, from Second to Third to Third to Lex and then get on the subway.

[04:10] Jessica: You were on 86th street. You could have taken the crosstown like the lazy, lazy bum that I was.

[04:15] Alex: I hate buses. I hate the way they move. They lurch. If it comes to that, I'd rather walk.

[04:22] Jessica: You know what I loved about the bus? The 86th Street crosstown or the 79th when I was a kid. 18? No, it was the M86 or the M79. If you rode them at the same time every day to go to school, you knew all of the other people on the bus. Si you know, like, if some random ad man was not on the bus.

[04:46] Alex: Wait a minute, wait a minute. I did ride the bus. And I vividly, vividly, you're probably going to know her name remember frequently sharing the bus with a model who presumably lived in the neighborhood who later went on to date Rod Stewart. It was not Elle Macpherson because she's Australian.

[05:06] Jessica: Alana something.

[05:08] Alex: I would have to see a picture of her. But I remember, like, she was traffic stopping, good looking, like, oh, my God, I never said anything.

[05:17] Meg: The 13 year old you didn't?

[05:19] Alex: Right. I didn't drop a line on her. Would you like to see my collection of Advanced Dungeons & Dragon books?

[05:26] Jessica: Multi side and die for your delectation.

[05:29] Alex: We'll have you know, I'm a level three dungeon master.

[05:36] Meg: Well, it's interesting that know, we were neighbors when you were little and then you moved and you were neighbors with Jessica. And yet we didn't meet until very recently.

[05:49] Alex: I feel quite confident that we must have passed each other on the street and you had been like, who's that geek?

[05:56] Meg: And we hung out at Ninos. Kathy and I were at Nino's all the time.

[06:00] Alex: For your listening pleasure, Nino's was a pizzeria that was on Lexington Avenue towards the corner of 93rd street. The thing I remember most about it, beyond its video arcade aspect was that it was right next to a Chinese restaurant called Foo's Rush In which used to make me laugh. But yeah, I had a very telling episode in that Nino's when I was. It's a long story, but my friend Spike and I were in there playing Defender and a group of not very convivial youths who were bigger and older than us came in and wanted all our money. And we were rescued at the last minute by two gentlemen from our grade school and a very dramatic sort of Western style situation that we fled from with all speed. One of those gentlemen, it should be pointed out was Robert Chambers.

[06:58] Jessica: The last good thing he ever did. But the reason I asked you about how many blocks there were, and I see that you sidestepped the math. Okay. So that's 15 blocks. What I find fascinating, I still find fascinating is that in your experience, those 15 blocks made a massive difference. It's less than a mile, and I think if you were in a suburb, that would be like, it wouldn't even be noticeable. But think of how many different neighborhoods were you passing through with entirely different characters in those 15 blocks.

[07:37] Alex: Absolutely. And actually, Meg and I were discussing this before you got here. I don't know I can't speak for you guys when you're growing up growing up in your respective neighborhoods, but I was very strangely, especially when I got here, to Yorkville very, I guess, is provincial the word? Where there were certain areas I went, in certain areas I just did not go. They were right there, but I never went. Like, for example, last week you talked about a coffee shop on East End called Le Pedo. Right, right. I have no recollection that whatsoever. It was probably a stone's throw from my living room window, and I just never went. I would go to Carl Schurz Park, but I never went.

[08:24] Jessica: Nino's was directly across the street from the entrance to Carl Schurz.

[08:29] Alex: I have zero recollection.

[08:31] Jessica: Directly across the streets. The other way from Chapin.

[08:34] Alex: Chapin, right. I just never went to East End. I mean not never, but like, very rarely.

[08:40] Jessica: Unless you were going to the park, why would you?

[08:42] Alex: Right, exactly. I didn't go to the park then.

[08:44] Jessica: Unless you needed a Mister Softee ice cream.

[08:48] Alex: Right, there is that. I mean, also, you have to remember when I had gone to Carl Schurz Park when I was like a little kid with my grandparents, and it's beautiful if you've never been to this part of Manhattan. It is absolutely. This idyllic little park. When I first moved back to this neighborhood in 1984 or whatever, my friends Spike and I got pretty much roughed up by this gang that sort of this was their turf called the 84th Street Bombers. And I don't know if these were actual members or they were just sort of, as we called them, like satellite. They were like the wee blows to the boy scouts. They were like ancillary members. But after we got sort of messed up by these kids, I had very little inclination little inclination to ever go back to Carl Schurz Park. Right. I mean, I did eventually, but it leaves an impression getting mugged. When you watch a friend take a fist to the face, it's like, oh, we're not welcome here.

[09:53] Meg: I mean, as kids who grew up in the city, in the '80s, I do often think about, like, how was it different than being in the suburbs? I don't know if free range is a good way of saying it, but.

[10:08] Alex: It's such a term that's tossed around a lot. It's like, latchkey. When I was on living on 86th Street, my mom had become, like, a single mom, and she was a real estate agent. She worked at The Corcoran Group, and she was out and about. She went away every weekend. We had a house in Quoque. That was her passion, so she would do that, and I was left to my own devices in the city, which was great.

[10:32] Jessica: How old were you when she would leave you to your own devices?

[10:34] Alex: That's a good question, actually. I don't know, but I was pretty autonomous. By the time I got to 86th Street in pretty short order, I could do whatever do and go wherever I really wanted. It was weird, though, because I would go everything exciting for me was happening downtown. So if I was going to go see a band, like, hey, the Circle Jerks are playing at the Ritz, whatever, mom would be like, great, I hope I see you again. She had no way of getting in touch, didn't know who I was going with, didn't know where I was headed, had no way of contacting me. And that's just the way it was. I mean, she trusted me, and I had my street smarts or whatever you want to call it, but it wasn't like, today. Like, right now I have two teenage kids, and it's kind of Orwellian, but I can track both of their movements if I want to. I do. I certainly do. Hopefully they're not listening. But my mom didn't have that peace of mind, so she was just like, oh, I hope you're okay, and then she'd be relieved when I got home. And that was that.

[11:37] Meg: Interestingly, I would have very much minded if my parents knew where I was, and my kids don't seem to mind yeah. That I know exactly where they are, like, what block they're on.

[11:51] Alex: I don't think my son, who's now 17, cares necessarily. I think my daughter was a little more like, hey, get off my back about it.

[12:00] Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[12:07] Meg: I guess I've been thinking about what the three of us have in common and definitely why we started stalking you and your blog, and you were very generous to not think that we were creepy and weird.

[12:21] Jessica: I would say that he was receptive.

[12:25] Meg: I know. It's a humble, I'm trying to be humble.

[12:29] Jessica: Why?

[12:30] Alex: I think it was just a matter of recognizing kindred spirits with common experience. Obviously, you guys are girls, but I think our respective teenage years were spent in a very comparable way. And when you first tagged me and I started listening to your podcast, I was like, there was so much resonance there for me. I mean, even though you guys go off on tangents that I don't know anything about, I still understand the reference points, all that. But as I was saying earlier, I don't think the mic was on when I said this what you guys do and what I do are different in that I write behind the safety of a keyboard and I can copy edit it and refine whatever it is.

[13:16] Jessica: I say, blog what you do. Why don't you tell our listeners about what you write?

[13:22] Alex: I write a blog. Kept a blog, I guess is the way to put it, for almost holy crap, almost 18 years. And it's a stupid name. It's called Flaming Pablum. It reminds me, there used to be this band I liked from Australia called The Died Pretty. And someone once asked them, like, why are you guys called The Died Pretty? And they were like, It means nothing. All it is is a name that appears in a marquee. It means we're playing there. They disavowed any deeper meaning behind it. I think the original name of my blog was The House of Vassifer. And then someone convinced me in exceptionally short order that that was a ponderously pretentious name. And they were right.

[14:05] Meg: What is Vassifer?

[14:07] Alex: Well, I'm going to give a shout out to a childhood friend of mine. I'm going to use his actual name. His name is Ted Gardner. Ted Gardner. Ted and I used to be irretrievable geeks back in the late '70s and early '80s. And we played. He was one of a cabal of similarly inclined nerds that formed what we called the QGS, which was the Quogue Gaming Society. And we were avowed fans of games like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Gamma World and Boot Hill and Lords & Wizards and all this other deeply lamentable shit. And at one point we were sitting around Ted's living room and he needed to come up with a name for his character, and it was going to be a ranger. It's like, what's a good name for a ranger? So he took the word lone, as in Lone Ranger, messed around with the letters and came up with Elon. So Elon was his first name. And then he opened up a book about arachnids and found the word vasifer, which is a genus of spider. It has nothing to do with Vassar College and has nothing to do with Lucifer. It just the word vasifer. And I thought, that's a cool word. It had no deeper meaning for me than that. And at one point I just adopted it as an email handle. And then when it came time to name my blog, I used that and it's just like, Died Pretty. It means nothing. It's just something that's stuck with.

[15:35] Meg: I love that, it's like a tribute to your friend.

[15:38] Alex: And then Flaming Pablum is just very silly. Flaming used to be internet lingo for speaking ill of somebody. And then pablum basically means very simplistic writing. So it's sort of antagonistic simplistic writing.

[15:56] Jessica: You feel like that's less ponderous.

[16:00] Alex: It is, but it's like I'm frequently coming from a place. It's a defense mechanism, I would say, of being self deprecating. So I have to couch things in deeply silly or stupid terminology in order to be able to continue to do it. I deliberately wanted it to be something open ended so I didn't have to be defined by anything. Oh, thanks.

[16:24] Jessica: We are massive fans and everyone else should be, too. What's the URL? How can people find it?

[16:27] Alex: That's a good question. https://vassifer.blogs.com/

[16:38} Meg: I will post that.

[16:39] Jessica: Field trip. Field trip, field trip, field trip.

[16:46] Meg: One thing that the three of us have in common is that our parents decided to live in New York City in the '70s. Are the children of those people, like, do we automatically have something in common because we come from, even though I'm sure our parents are very different from each other, is that decision alone something that makes us, I don't know.

[17:13] Alex: I think regardless of whatever your social status or class or whatever would be. There's a common experience of New York City kids in that this is where you live so whatever the conditions of the city, are, you're beholden to them. So, like, there's a point where my grade school mandated that boys of a certain age had to walk themselves to school. Like, they could no longer be dropped off. I forget what age that know, that was. It that's like, all right, from now on, I had to walk the five or six or four or five blocks from my front door to my school by myself, which is like, this is the same era as Son of Sam and the blackouts and all this other crap that was going on. Not that that really touched the Upper East Side, but that's just the way it was. And I'm sure there are kids who lived in much rougher neighborhoods who had to deal with lots of awful shit. Although I did do a post several years ago about like, you can get mugged on the Upper East Side. Don't be fooled.

[18:15] Meg: Absolutely I was mugged on the Upper East Side but that's another story.

[18:19] Jessica: Under very different circumstances.

[18:23] Alex: You know it wasn't Mean Streets but you could certainly get into trouble if your number was up.

[18:30] Jessica: Meg, what you said about our parents deciding to live in New York. I think it's really interesting because I wonder if my parents would have said that they made a decision because they were born and raised in Brooklyn and if you were you know upwardly mobile middle class Jews at the time if you didn't move to Manhattan there was something wrong with you. Like that was just what you did. From where we sit right now, it's obvious that that's a decision. Nonetheless, I think that it would not have been felt that way for my parents and their peers. Whereas your parents came from a different state.

[19:12] Meg: Right. My parents came from well, they were high school sweethearts in Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah, they were high school sweethearts. But at the time, we were living in Austin, Texas, and my father was a professor, and he got a job at Columbia University, and that's why we came here in 1976, which was a decision, but it was also a job.

[19:35] Alex: How old were you in 1976? You were really little.

[19:39] Meg: I was seven.

[19:40] Alex: What?

[19:41] Meg: Seven.

[19:42] Alex: Seven. Wow. All right. Yeah. I don't know. You hear all this sort of hysterical talk now about the bad old days and how rough it was. I don't think at the time, necessarily people who lived here thought of it that way. They were like, this is just the way it is. This is where we live. This is what we do. And people just got on with it. I don't know.

[20:05] Meg: Absolutely. Even though my brother and I were coming from I mean, it was like Leave It to Beaver in Austin, Texas.

[20:14] Alex: You must have had, like, total culture shock, right?

[20:17] Meg: I was seven. Seven year olds just adapt.

[20:21] Alex: Yeah, no, I suppose, right? I mean, a lot of people I remember going to visit a friend of mine in, like, 1980. I had a friend who had moved from the city to Bozeman, Montana. Right. Crazy. And I remember I used to go during the summer and visit him, and he introduced me to his neighbors and stuff, and they'd be like, Where do you live? And I was like, I live in New York City. Like, no, you don't. I was like, no, I really do. In fact, Sean lived there too. Like, well, I didn't think anybody lived in a city. It's all business. No, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of businesses there, but there's also residential areas. There's a lot of preconceptions about New York. I know a lot of people who left New York and decided not to raise their kids here, and my wife and I just thought, like, well, we don't want to move to Westchester. I'm not knocking Westchester, but we didn't want to do that.

[21:14] Jessica: Where are your parents from?

[21:15] Alex: My mother was born here in New York. Her father lived in he grew up in, like, Washington Heights. Irish guy, one of six kids. And my father was originally from Shaker Heights, Ohio. And he I guess I don't know when he moved here, to be honest. But yeah. So we have the sort of tenuous Buckeye connection in my past, which may explain why I went to college there. I love Ohio. I had a great time at Denison University. I was pleasantly surprised by Columbus because mostly as a music geek, I found that when I would go see bands in Columbus, it was such a different experience than seeing them in New York. In New York, everybody's too cool for school and stand there with their arms folded. In Columbus, they're just happy you fucking showed up. So the band is happier because the crowd is happier and they put on a better, longer show. And I was like, hey, this is actually kind of cool.

[22:17] Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[22:24] Meg: I mean, you reference yourself as a geek or I think you've said nerd.

[22:33] Alex: I'm sure lots of people would make this. There's a distinction between nerd and geek. I don't claim to be an expert. I mean, nerd is basically a pejorative. We live in a post geek chic world where certain things are given sort of post ironic appreciation. But let me tell you, when you were a kid that read comic books and played Dungeons & Dragons and listened to Devo in 1981, you were a nerd. And you are not held in high regard. Geek implies in today's parlance, I think geek implies that you're super versed in some subcultural discipline. It's like become a sort of compliment in a weird way. But back then I was an unapologetic. It's not that I wanted to be a nerd or a geek or any of that stuff, I just was.

[23:23] Meg: And that's kind of my point, that I think the '80s were unforgiving. That being weird. I was weird. Jessica was definitely weird. I can attest to that.

[23:34] Alex: I love you guys. Birds of a feather.

[23:38] Meg: And it wasn't fun to be weird in the '80s.

[23:41] Jessica: Okay, wait, I have to say something about that. I have been asked many, many times about going to an all girls school, and clearly I was not stopping traffic like Rod Stewart's, whatever, and I was kind of mouthy and all of that, but I never felt like I was a nerd or a geek at school. Because if you were smart or funny and we've talked about this, that was what was good. Your social interaction was positive.

[24:18] Meg: If we had grown up in Shaker Heights, we probably would have had a worse time of it.

[24:23] Jessica: We would have been Sarah Jessica Parker and the other one in Square Pegs. Like 110%.

[24:29] Alex: I remember watching Square Pegs, and being like, oh, it's not like that at all. At the time, I didn't enjoy my status as a geek or a nerd or whatever.

[24:43] Jessica: But it's different for boys and girls.

[24:46] Alex: Totally, it is.

[24:47] Jessica: The nerdliness for girls was I don't think it was an issue. It was the after school and that's why I brought up the diner thing. It wasn't like we were all going to Dorian's, right? It was definitely like, oh, shit, what are we going to do on a Friday night? I don't know. I guess we're going to Panos and having endless cups of coffee because that doesn't bother our sleep when we're 14.

[25:19] Alex: I think you guys went to Dorian's. That was another topic that we talked about way back, was for those of you who haven't keeping up. Dorian's is this storied bar on Second Avenue and 84th street and it was a mainstay for a lot of people, but I was never one of them. I certainly went on occasion. But as a recovering geek turned, scowly, petulant, punk rock loving teenager, we didn't feel necessarily that that was our terf, so we were more inclined to I talked about some of my blog. We used to go and hang out on the stoop. Not the stoop, but on the edifice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you look directly at the at the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are two pedestals on either side of the stairs. I don't know if it was true on the right one, but on the left one you can't access it today, but circa 1983, '84, '85, you could actually climb up. And there was a small alcove behind that left pedestal. And a friend of mine a delightful, lovely, best friend in the world friend of mine who's sadly, no longer with us. Danny Choi and I used to hang out there and of an evening and talk about our respective grievances or whatever. Or then some friends of mine in high school formed this place called what we called Club 79. I can't take credit for that. That was a cat named Brendan. If you entered Central Park just at 79th street, there was a little alcove of benches, and so somebody would bring a boombox, somebody would bring a contraband six pack of beer, and we'd listen to Rush and Run DMC. And I remember everybody would throw their beer cans, and if your beer can landed with a thud, that means you didn't finish it. Like, for those of us who didn't necessarily feel entirely welcome at Dorian's, which of course was ridiculous because Dorian's is perfectly fine..

[27:19] Jessica: The number of people who were entirely welcome at Dorian's was very small. So what's the thing about if you said you were a Woodstock, you probably weren't remembered Woodstock.

[27:33] Alex: Yeah, exactly.

[27:33] Meg: Having teenagers now in New York City, I do kind of feel like weirdness is valued more.

[27:42] Alex: First of all, my kids seem, like, completely different. Neither of them seem even remotely interested in drinking, which is a good thing, but I don't know what they do, to be honest in that respect. But nobody's drinking furtive beers as far as we know. And there seems to be no desire to. I don't think being messed up in that capacity is necessarily as appealing as it may have once been. I'm sure there's something else that I would probably find equally disturbing, but I don't know, it's different. When my kids were little, I took great pains to familiarize them with byways of Manhattan, like how to get to places, how to get from places. This is this neighborhood. This is that neighborhood. What are your landmarks, you know? And so I think both of them are pretty savvy when it comes to just the basic geography and topography of getting around. And that has served them really well. Now, in terms of how they conduct themselves as teenagers, my wife and I are very lucky. They're both very smart, lovely kids, but I'm sure they'll get into their own variants of trouble, and I can only hope for the best.

[28:55] Meg: It's so interesting. When Alice was little, I would quiz her and I would say, look, around you. Where would you go if you were in trouble? Oh, Sophie's dad lives right around the corner, making her recognize where the safe spaces were that she could just go to the doorman and say, I'm a friend of Sophie, for example.

[29:16] Alex: I did that in a much more unwittingly traumatic way. Like, all right, kids, here we are in Chinatown. If Daddy suddenly had a cardiac arrest, how would you get home and be like, follow the Empire State Building, that sort of thing.

[29:29] Jessica: I remember vividly on one occasion standing on the corner of 79th and Madison, and she would say, okay, what's the next street over? What's the next street over? What's the next street over? Keep going. What about that direction? What about that direction? And until I could rattle it off perfectly, it was like learning my multiplication tables. Until I could rattle it off, I was not ever on my own.

[29:53] Meg: And in the suburbs, I assume kids learn how to drive in that way, but in the city, it's about geography.

[30:01] Alex: All right, so I know you're not a New York City native, but when you moved here, you were seven, so you obviously couldn't drive yet. When did you get your driver's license?

[30:08] Meg: I do not have a driver's license. I do not know how to drive.

[30:11] Alex: Wow. How about you?

[30:13] Jessica: I got it when I was 16. I did driver's ed at Dalton, as we all did at Nightingale. I got my license, and when I was 37, I let it lapse. And I have never had a driver's license since.

[30:31] Alex: So neither of you can legally drive now. Wow, you guys are hardcore. I had a permit, I guess, when I was a senior in high school and didn't really do anything with it because I didn't need to do anything with it. And then when my daughter was born in 2004, I figured, well, I should probably learn how to drive. So I got a license in 2005, and I would say, now, I'm not exactly a, I'm a competent driver. I can get you from A to B, but I'm never going to be like, did you take a course? My older sister, who's comparable to me in this capacity, had gone to this driving school on 23rd Street, not too far from your place, and I think it was called the Driving School of the Americas, and it was up a flight of stairs. And I had a very patient and easily abused teacher named Ray. And Ray would take me in one of those cars with the two steering wheels, and for some reason, we'd always do our test driving around the Lower East Side, like the lowest portion to the Lower East Side, what is today considered like? And I was like, Ray, why do we always come down to the Lower East Side? And he's, you know, life is cheaper here, as if to suggest that if I hit somebody. It wouldn't be as big a deal.

[31:57] Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip. Yes. This is totally the lightning round. Lean in. No, I was thinking what's so interesting about talking to you is that our ability to ramble is only matched by yours.

[32:19] Alex: I was really concerned. I was talking to a colleague before coming here and I was like, I'm really concerned that I'm going to start babbling like a brook of idiocy.

[32:30] Jessica: You came to the right place. What I love about this discussion so far is it is exactly what this podcast is about. It's about sort of recognizing each other and by getting into the minutiae, sharing with our listeners who have not grown up here. What is it that we care about that was so huge when we were kids and now is just like the warm fuzzies because we're super weird. If we had to pick a theme or a thread for this discussion, let's do a lightning round. What do you think it would be? Alex, you go.

[33:09] Meg: This is like a tie in. Like, what's our tie in today?

[33:12] Alex: I was struck by when you guys first tagged me and we first started exploring each other's web presence or whatever, there was so much of a feverish rush to, oh, do you remember this? Like so there was the combination of the warm fuzzies of the common experience, but also the I seem to remember this place or this pop cultural element. Do you remember that? And then to have that verified or somebody to say like, oh, you're talking about XYZ.

[33:40] Jessica: Fact checked each other's childhoods.

[33:43] Alex: That to me, I find. And it's not just with you guys. There are certain people that I'll tag when I post. Like, there's this woman, Caroline, who had reached out to me years before, again, about the 84th Street gang and she and I become friends and she went to Spence and so she has her own sort of experience. You and she interacted today. Right. And she is delightful. And she also knows our friend Sean Wilsey. Strange small world, but yeah, no, we did that same game. Like, do you remember this place on Third Avenue? And it was just like, I don't know, there was a real exciting element of, oh, it wasn't just me, or oh, I had these same vivid experiences in this place.

[34:27] Meg: I can't begin to tell you how talking about Ninos just for incidental pizzeria. Yeah, this little hole in the wall pizzeria that had a lot of video games and that Kathy and I spent untold hours at and that I hadn't thought about for years, but actually was like really an important part of my life.

[34:49] Alex: Mean, it's going to say like Jessica's magisterial rumination on diners and coffee shops last week. More often than not we were at like pizzerias, like Nino's or like Mimi's on Mimi's was problematic because problematic. Although it was also Paul McCartney's favorite pizzeria as anybody who worked there was very happy to tell you about. But yeah, pizzerias are where we spent just a stupid amount of time.

[35:15] Jessica: What occurs to as you were just speaking, both of you, what occurred to me is the thing about growing up here is that it's wonderful that there were so many options, things to do and so many available distractions and things to explore. But as a result, I think all of our memories are very murky because the upload was massive. And I think that that's one of the reasons that this kind of reminiscing is so important. It's not just fact checking. It's not just, hey, I was there too. It's like a sorting and filing of all of this stuff. You walk out the door and there's this proliferation of information that you're constantly processing and having to make sense of. And as a child, your ability to make sense of it is pretty low. And then as you age and you're seeing the same things over and over and understanding it differently, you sort of refile it. And in a way, that's what this podcast really is and this discussion really is. It's just a continuation, a continuation of us revisiting, making sense of this influx.

[36:39] Alex: I remember when Peggy and I first had kids, so we had Charlote. Everyone's like, well, why aren't you going to move to once again, to Westchester or the suburbs or whatever? I was like, well, because we don't want to. Because even though we're not going clubbing or barring or whatever, as you say, every time you walk out the door, if I'm pushing a stroller, I'm still getting inundated with so much stimuli and all these different places we didn't want to leave that. We also wanted to share that with our kids in much the same way that we'd all experienced. I'll walk around Manhattan with my dear, lovely wife who grew up all over the place. So she's in London, everywhere else, but she's always amazed that I have some stupid anecdote for virtually every other block. I go, oh, here's where Danny kicked me in the shins. Or Here where I was dumped by that girl or whatever. Or here's where I threw up. But to find people who provide the other side of that conversation, somebody who was here in 1982 in New York City and remembers that dumb place I'm talking about.

[37:43] Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.