NYCB Dancers on Lay-Off (The Little Things in Life): Food-Shopping Edition
|
JUSTIN PECK |
To those of you who aren’t familiar with New York, Fairway Market is as much an NYC staple as Tompkins Square Park, STEPS on broadway, the Chelsea Piers, and Time Square (Okay fine, definitely not as well-known as time square—but that’s probably a good thing, as Time Square is simply one giant cesspool that is tourism). For those of you who are familiar with New York, you might know how frantic, chaotic, and jam-packed Fairway Market on 74th street of the Upper West Side can be (we all know not to even bother with going on a Sunday, as Fairway then feels very much like Time Square during its rush hour—and what true New Yorker would have any interest in experiencing that?).
The truth is, everyone simultaneously wants a bargain as well as quality. That’s exactly the idea behind the creation of Fairway, to provide quality food products for cheap. Unfortunately, this combination causes every New Yorker [and their mother] to aggressively flock to it like pigeons around a crazy homeless man with plenty of stale bread to spare. (In fact, I’ve even heard stories of little old ladies coming to Fairway on Sundays with brick in their purses to use as combat weapons against the vast seas of people. Truthful? Who knows…)
New Yorkers: have no fear, because I have found the solution—the market surreptitiously placed a few subway stops north that is FAIRWAY UPTOWN!! (cue the heroic music). I discovered it one glorious day while accompanying one of my fellow dancers of the New York City Ballet (Tess Reichlen) to do some down-home grocery shoppin’.
Now, contrary to popular belief, 1 in every 5 dancers do eat! I know, I know, comes as a shock to many, but its very much true. So therefore, grocery shopping for me, and Tess, and any other dancer out there is an obvious necessity. The beauty that is Fairway Uptown is that it maintains having all the great quality food for cheap, AND is about 3 times as big with about half the amount of people as the normal Fairway on the Upper West Side. Let me just put it this way: its big enough and empty enough to accommodate a perfect execution of coupé-jeté leaps down the cereal aisle. Which gave plenty of space for some crafty dancer photo-ops…
Headline: New York City Ballet dancer tour-jetés into a sea of bagels, inspiring a series of reworked full lengths: Bagel Lake, Romeo and Bagelette, and La Bageldere
The infamous Freezer Room—an entire room that is refrigerated. I loved how they provide coats for walking through it
Barefoot conTESSa??
A Fairway Tendu Derrière
Beauty. Grace. Line. Heal-click.
That’s about it for now. What I meant by this post was just to let y’all know that I’m currently enjoying all the little things in life, thanks to the long summer lay-off that comes with dancing for City Ballet. Also, these past 2 weeks I have participated in the New York Choreographic Institute, which I feel was very well received by its private audience. I had a lot of fun collaborating on a new ballet created by Stuttgart Ballet dancer Douglas Lee. The NYCB rehearsal period officially starts back tomorrow, thus resulting in the rate of my life to shift from horse-and-buggy pace to NASCAR pace. Deep breathes…
