June 12, 2017.
"Agosto reminded me not long ago of the way he and his friends used to go see a movie or a play, or someone reading a few poems in a park or an old cemetery at night, and then afterwards they'd all go sit in a café to talk about what they'd just seen. We both had the feeling that doesn't happen so much anymore, or if it does, we somehow just don't know. Does it happen still? I would be happy to think it does, and I remember spending whole afternoons in a café, sometimes with a friend, sometimes by myself. I remember the way it felt, on a day of pouring rain, to take a book and a notebook and a pen and go to an old fashioned café, order a coffee and sit there reading and writing. I wrote lots of poems in the '80s, most of them awful and lost, but the feeling of sitting there writing them is something delicious that I can still conjure up, right now. I still remember some of the funny little plays I saw in little basement theaters and how great they were even when they were terrible. They were wonderful because people found props on the street and made their own crazy costumes with fabric from garment district trash bins, and ingenuity reigned with dazzling effect. You didn't need much money to put on a show, and there was not yet a peril attached to having very little money in certain old neighborhoods of Manhattan, where nobody had any and life was possible anyway." - Greg E.
Before our meeting at Bus Stop Cafe, 1:30pm, June 10th