Several years ago, on a Sunday morning, my girlfriend and I met writer Calvin Trillin on a corner in New York City, shook hands and set out to eat our way toward Brooklyn, walking through Greenwich Village, into Little Italy, then Chinatown.
Back then, it was the second year of The New Yorker Festival, which was sold as a weekend of interviews, panel discussions and tours, readings from authors and conversations between New Yorker journalists and their often revered subjects. It might sound at first like a weekend of C-SPAN, but it struck us as a good excuse to zip into the city and zip out. And it was.
Trillin (right), whose gluttony is well-documented in the magazine, sealed the deal. About two dozen people paid $35 a ticket, were given a time and a place to meet, then followed him on an anecdotal ramble of his favorite eats, block by block.
The man looks like a bowling pin wearing a windbreaker. Walking past the iron gates of a private club, he stopped to explain that the quality of the food in such places is inversely proportional to the exclusivity. I’d heard this before but laughed. On another corner, a man had a garbage bag full of chive-filled dumplings slung over his shoulder. As he approached Trillin, they shook hands and set to work. Trillin dug into the bag and passed out doughy treats while throwing around one-liners in a deadpan monotone, usually aimed at his own appetite. We stood there a few minutes, savoring each bite. Then it was off to a cheese shop.
During dim sum in Chinatown, my girlfriend chatted with Trillin about Kansas City, Mo., where they share roots.
Later, on our own, after a stroll through a book fair on Fifth Avenue and a pizza on the East Side, we hopped a plane home.
It was that pleasant and that casual, a perfect weekend in New York — one we have repeated every year since.
The New Yorker Festival, celebrating its 10th edition Oct. 16-18, started in 2000 as both a bit of branding (The New Yorker as a lifestyle) and a way to celebrate the magazine’s 75th anniversary. For us, however, and for an increasing number of out-of-towners, according to the organizers, it has become an annual pilgrimage, a self-imposed cultural retreat attended with thousands of other New Yorker fanatics, one in which we stand in line after line, always reading while waiting, furtively nudging each other that Jhumpa Lahiri is standing right over there, mournfully shaking our heads no, we don’t have a ticket to David Remnick’s interview with writer Roger Angell — but do you know if that thing with cartoonist Art Spiegelman is sold out (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text)?
Traveling to The New Yorker Festival is not like traveling to a book fair or even The New York Times’ Arts & Leisure Weekend. There is more mystique involved, plus more publicists shuttling through with clipboards, and everything’s just a bit more dramatically lit. The aura of the fabled magazine itself hangs in the air, and for a moment, literary authors are public figures again, and the average person can name a famous editor. And why not? Why not a festival celebrating a sensibility? Music has its pick of events. So do “Star Wars” fans and people who collect Civil War pins. But few festivals can offer the joy of sitting in a 19th century synagogue on the Lower East Side, listening to novelist and screenwriter Ian McEwan, then walking uptown to Shake Shack for a cheeseburger, autumn still undecided if it should retain a little summer heat or get crisp.
The New Yorker Festival also solves a problem I have with New York: It lends structure. Even when I lived there in the early 1990s, I found myself overwhelmed with choice. The festival, once you have tickets and a schedule in hand, forces you to make decisions — can we go to P.J. Harvey on the West Side and still make a 9 p.m. seating at Prune, 40 blocks south? It offers, for 72 hours, a to-do list and smart company, the illusion of being a New Yorker, of blending in and hurrying the hell up.
The year after our Trillin stroll, for instance, we sat in Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center late on a Friday night with maybe four dozen others, listening to Lorne Michaels and Tina Fey discuss life at “Saturday Night Live.” The next afternoon, we ran to the library on 42nd Street (the iconic one, with stone lions at the foot of the stairs) for a conversation with Woody Allen; then, an hour later, after a drink on a patio in Bryant Park, there was a chat with Steve Martin (right).
And there was the year I held my own beside a high-strung woman from Queens. We were in the austere Town Hall, just off Times Square, sitting through an afternoon of humor readings from Allen and Trillin and Martin and others, and I crossed my legs one too many times, and she exploded. She told me to stop and said, “I’m glad I’m not your wife,” to which I said, “She’s dead — I killed her.”
It felt like home.
Indeed, it provides a rare opportunity to see the city without the airbrushed sheen of tourism, from the vantage of the everyday. And you poke around in places you would never get invited. The Conde Nast Building, for example. There was the year Jeff Koons gave a tour of his art studio. This year, photo-artist Chuck Close is leading a tour of his studio with writer Adam Gopnik, and critic Peter Schjeldahl is giving a tour of the Frick Collection before the gallery opens. Last year, we were so busy we never had time for the bike ride on Governors Island, led by architecture critic Paul Goldberger, urban planners and architects.
Another problem with New York is that you rarely spend time doing nothing. So we have a routine. We don’t buy tickets to everything — not even close. We leave wandering time — a movie on the Upper West Side, a swing by Three Lives & Company, which is a corner bookstore in Greenwich Village so quaint it would make Woody Allen feel like Woody Allen.
All of which meshes perfectly with the festival. But planning is required. Tickets are a pain. Friday night author readings are the easiest to land; big conversations with zeitgeist phenoms (Stephen Colbert, Judd Apatow) can seem impossible to obtain.
Then again, if you get shut out of that Annie Proulx interview this year, there’s always New York and a burger. Which isn’t so bad, either.
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Planning required
Tickets ranging from $35 to $100 go on sale online (festival.newyorker.com) at noon Sept. 18. By 1 p.m., expect a handful of events to be sold out — actually, by 12:30 p.m., expect your choices to be limited. The schedule hasn’t been released, but you might find these on the list:
* A conversation with author Annie Proulx
* An interview and concert with singer Neko Case (below)
* A tour of photo-artist Chuck Close’s studio
* A panel discussion on advertising with Matthew Weiner, creator of TV’s “Mad Men” (scene at left with Jon Hamm)
The schedule will be released Sept. 14; study it, and if you plan to go, expect hard decisions.
— C.B.
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cborrelli@tribune.com
