What the?

As reported by Lost City: NYU Thinks Up the Unthinkable

I grew up in the West Village. I had several jobs before I finally got around to going to college. I worked as a bike messenger. For a while I lived on MacDougal Street and worked in a now gone jewelry store across the street from Mamoons.

Later, I lived on the corner of Bleeker Street and MacDougal doing odd jobs. I sold balloons for a guy named Paul who hasn't been around for a while. I sold egg creams for The New York Egg Cream Company, which is long gone. I worked as a not very good usher for The Cherry Lane Theater during the run of a great play about Woody Guthrie and a strange musical about New York and Mayor Koch. There was another play about somebodies dead Uncle. I'll be darned if I can remember what it was. Cherry Lane still stands today.

I think that I even worked for Tom Hanks for a short period of time at an off Broadway Church/Theater up around 57th Street. At the time, Tom had a different last name for his theater manager job, probably to protect himself from people like me who might think that they remember him before he became a big star. I did help him pick out his head shots though.

I was only at the Provincetown Playhouse a couple of times. I remember one time that was at the behest of this Tom guy, whoever he was. I don't really remember what the play was about, I remember that the word "Class" was in it and maybe it was a play about a schoolroom class but a double play on economic class. Something like that.

Everything is connected. Yiddish actor Luther Adler, father of Stella Adler performed there, as did Richard Gere, who starred in the play "Philadelphia", which became an Oscar winning movie that Hanks starred in later. Adler's daughter was married for a time to David Oppenheim, who was the Dean of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. NYU reopened Provincetown Playhouse as a part of the theater department and NYU is now planning on demolishing this theater.