by Pat Arnow

Photo by Steve Giles

hen the city installs new bike lanes, as they did on Grand Street last year, I picture a cartoon of truck drivers and cabbies jumping up and down, high fiving each other. In cartoon balloons, they’re saying, "The city is so good to us. They give us special super-duper double parking lanes! Yay!"

On the next panel, I see a hapless bicycle rider (me), veering into traffic because a FedEx truck is blocking the bike lane. A cellphone-yapping driver thumps right over me, leaving cartoon tire tracks on the flattened me and my bike. Splat! Next panel: A cabby veers into the bike lane to drop off a passenger and doors another biker. Kaboom! The biker twirls through the air. Doh!

Biking around New York is my most reckless activity. People think I’m nuts to do it. I think I’m nuts to do it. As a grownup of the gray-haired persuasion, if I get in a minor accident, I’m going to limp for months. Every time I go out, I think about how I could get maimed or killed. But I love it so, and it’s such a fast way to get around.

It wouldn’t be such a dangerous activity if the police stopped vehicles from hanging out in bike lanes. But they like to idle in the bike lanes themselves. When I go to City Hall for photo jobs, which I’ve been doing a few times a week for five summers, I bike down Centre, which curves into Park Row (the J&R street). The other day, for the first time, I saw that section had a bike lane. I had never seen the stenciled bicycles because there have always been so many police vans, TV trucks and official vehicles parked over them.

Last month I visited Nuremberg, Germany. The city was charming with intact medieval town walls, towers and turrets, a castle, half-timbered buildings, cobblestone streets, fountains, and beer gardens. Our friends took us around on bicycles. There are bike paths everywhere in town and out in the country, with riders everywhere, and hardly anyone wears a helmet. That’s because it’s safe to ride bikes there. A biker won’t get smushed like a bug.

There’s supposedly a commitment in this city to bike lanes, and they’re a wonderful idea. Keeping them clear would make biking safer. So would protected (curbed) lanes. Biking is easy on the joints, and lots more older people could do it, but I think many people just don’t want to play in traffic the way you have to in New York City.

Time Out Replies, or: Social Engineering Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Dear Pat Arnow,

hanks for your insightful piece ("Box Office Poison," May ‘08) reacting to my recent essay in Time Out New York ("Causing a scene," April 2-8). I am aware that my modest proposal to start a new theater that would not accept subscribers over age 35 smacks of ageism, but let me explain. I have nothing against older theatergoers and in fact I cherish them and hope to join their ranks in 20 or so years. But I am very concerned about future audiences in New York. In my dream theater, I would not bar anyone of any age from attending any show, but... would build a healthy subscriber base on people 35 years and younger. For the first five years. After that I would open it up to anyone. The idea is to cultivate a dedicated foundation of young subscribers who would stay with the company for decades.

… My main complaint is that [nonprofit theaters] companies aren’t doing enough to attract new subscribers, the sorts of people who will be supporting theater for years to come and who are hungry for new voices, new forms. … I’m not entirely sure that subscribers 50 to 80 years old are receptive to younger playwrights and edgier work. Some are, no doubt. But if the art is to evolve, audiences need to evolve with them.

I’m sorry that my essay came across like a callow call to lower theater demographics. But unlike TV or movies, theater isn’t always going to have a young, self-renewing, innovation-hungry audience. It doesn’t have one right now. Theater is a delicate institution and it needs careful tending and long-term thinking. I don’t want it to become a museum or worse, a mausoleum.

David Cote
Theater Editor
Time Out New York

Dear David,

Though I appreciate that younger people are likely to be more receptive to experimental theater, I’m having trouble picturing the subscribers. It just seems like you’d have to be well-to-do to afford a theater subscription, and when I picture young rich people in New York, I see a bunch of white professionals tripping around the outdoor bar at Bryant Park after work. They’re not on their way to see weird plays downtown. Admittedly, their older counterparts aren’t heading downtown to see out-on-a-limb plays either.

Government support is the kind of fertilizer that new theater needs to grow. If you want to cultivate the next electrifying theater—and an audience to go with it—subsidized artists and cheap, subsidized tickets would help, not culling the old folks out of the herd.

Pat