Small Towns

New York is the largest small town in the world.

You can tell this because people talk about their neighbors, just like they do in Carnegie or Hickory or Woodward or Bugtussle.

The difference is that other people, out in the big world, know about these people, too, because some of them happen to be famous.

Over the New Year’s weekend we were in NYC visiting some of our friends. While there, we saw Susan Sarandon a block from his house, dragging a tired Christmas Tree out.

Well, she wasn’t actually doing the dragging herself – it was a very large tree – but she was directing the man who was doing the dragging, while she stood on the sidewalk and shivered. It was REALLY cold out and she was not dressed for the occasion!

I have to offer a disclaimer – although I recognized the name Susan Sarandon, I wouldn’t have recognized her without a movie marquis that told me who she was and what she played in. I didn’t get that gene, so I can’t rattle off all the movies someone was in, or all the songs they sang, or the awards they got. Only after she was pointed out and something about that auburn hair clicked did I recognize, “Oh, that’s who she is.”

It's why I can never be a contestant on a game show.

I still couldn’t tell you what she was in, but at least I recognized her as someone famous.

Our friend, who lives just a block from her 15th Street apartment, started talking about how that answered the questions of several people in the neighborhood.

Apparently, she’s recently gone through a breakup with long-term partner Tim Robbins and the buzz was about who got their apartment, or maybe whether it would become available.  Cruising break-up notices in the paper seems to be similar to reading the obituaries to look for available property in a hot market.

In NYC, I surmise that custody of the apartment sometimes exceeds the battles over custody of children. Thinking back, though, I guess that also may be somewhat universal as well. I’ve been in some nasty disputes over possession of a single-wide trailer several times during my career.

The intricacies of this breakup had to be explained to me, of course, because the only time that I read People magazine is when trapped in the doctor’s office, already in the examining room and in a state of undress that makes returning to the lobby to find something with more redeeming value inappropriate.

It’s exactly the same as in a small town, though, because those conversations happen about people we know from work or church or Rotary or whatever. It’s just that the voyeuristic audience is much larger in New York City than in some sleepy little hamlet and we have the illusion of knowing these people because of the publicity they get.

Who gets the house, who gets the cars, who gets the dog? In this case, the issue of the kids is somewhat moot – after 23 years together, their sons are almost grown at 20 and 17.

That leads to another discussion, probably to be had over dark liquor and in hushed tones, about how a 63 year old woman manages to have a 17 year old son!

The point is, we’re all in each other’s business. Does it give us an excuse not to examine our own lives? Is it just human nature to be curious about others? Do we like a peephole into someone else’s life, so we can decide whether it’s better or worse than our own lot?

I’m not sure. We never got to finish our discussion because about then we got to the block where Anderson Cooper walks his dog.