Mr Toadhead at Surf Reality
Slice of Life from 1990s New York
The essential guide for native New Yorkers planning an evening out has always been the Village Voice. However, as an expat Londoner I was delighted to find that Time Out had established a New York operation shortly before my arrival. The big difference was clarity and ease of use. Two things contributed to this. One was the familiarity of the different sections. The other was that, as a relative newcomer to the New York publishing world, Time Out wasn’t yet clogged up with advertising. So every week I would grab a copy of Time Out New York and scrutinize it for suitable entertainment.
There were only two criteria that mattered. One was location — I didn’t want to go much further North than Greenwich Village. The second was unusualness — I couldn’t be bothered to turn out to watch anything that was too run of the mill. So I routinely turned to the off-off-Broadway theater section to see what was going on in any of the performance spaces and basements which inhabited the area below an arbitrary line which stretched between Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village and Thompson Square Park in the East Village.
The result of my nocturnal rambles was that I became far more familiar with the alternative downtown scene than my be-suited Wall Street colleagues, who dipped down to the World Trade…
