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I work at a music hall in the East Village, sitting in the bar at the back door to the stage with a list of people allowed through. There’s live music every night, so I’m in charge of directing the constant stream of musicians and their groupies, and stopping anybody trying to sneak in to get a peek at their favorite band without buying a ticket. The waitresses and I don’t talk much. Not at all, really. I guess you could say they intimidate me. A lot of people do.

But one night I cracked the shell a bit and had a chat with a short friendly server named Alley. She asked what I did and I said I studied English. That line of conversation died pretty quickly. I asked her about herself and she said she was a model. She’d flown out to California when she turned 18 to find work, gotten manipulated and scammed by a handful of agents, treated like an object, treated like something that served a purpose and didn’t have dreams and goals and a home back in Brooklyn and a mother whose arthritis was getting bad in her left knee. She lasted in L.A. for three years before she came back here. Now she was twenty-one and waited tables in the East Village, but still liked to tell people she was a model, because it sounded a whole lot more glamorous than telling them she was a waitress.

I liked that. I thought about the folder on my desktop full of half finished short stories and the scrapings together of poems I’d started in yesteryear. I thought about what I said when people asked what I did – that I did ticketing at a music hall in the East Village. And something in me, somewhere deep down inside, started to whisper. Whisper about dreams of fame and beauty and magic that I’d buried under essays and theses a long time ago. Whisper about art and love and God and a child who used to like to make stop motion movies with Lego bricks and clay. A child who was still sitting up in my room, fumbling with the Super 8 camera, trying to tell a story. And for the first time in too long, sitting near that door, talking to a model in the dusky shade of a music hall, I started to listen. And I heard something scary. A calling from yesterday, the dull throb of a shattered dream. The sound of a hope that I thought was lost. The quiet hum of New York.

Robert Mayo