It's My Resume by Rhonda Hansome

The look on her face clearly said she was at a loss without a hieroglyphics to English dictionary at hand.  The fact that Twinkie* stared at the object I’d placed on her desk with prolonged bewilderment, prompted my outburst. “It’s my resume.” I offered with my voice slightly cracking. Twinkie raised her eyes with sphinx like inscrutability and said without a blink, “I’m just taking it all in.”  

So my mind races as the casting director stares at my resume.  It took me three months to construct a new/fresh/now resume of my comedy driven career.  If she can take it all in, more power to her.  Damn, that resume doesn’t tell half the story of my life onstage.  And off stage you ask?    Well, both on stage and off, it feels like I'm starting all over from the middle. 

Divorced in 2005 from several decades of marriage to my high school sweetheart, I moved from our neighborhood, the center of the universe, Tribeca.  When hubby (now my ex) and I arrived, the Washington Market Area was barely maintaining daytime activity as a food distribution center.  At night it was a no man’s land unfamiliar to even New York cab drivers.  No stores, no street lights, we were pioneers settling on the windy far west of New York’s lower west side.  The abundant loft living space drew the adventurous; hubby and I were game for the hulking subsidized project that had real-people sized apartments and desperately needed residents.  As the area developed Washington Market became SoCa (South of Canal), but really hit its stride with the moniker Tribeca; and the ensuing gourmet restaurants, designer boutiques, lines of limos and film festival. It was literally Hollywood on the Hudson. Came the time, I could not go to Bubby’s on the corner for coffee without a hello to Robert Di Nero, John Kennedy or Lorraine Bracco, my neighbors.

I came of age in the shadow of burned out shells, and litter strewn lots, the aftermath of insurrection aka “the riots”.  As a pre-pubescent aspirant to the middle-class, I wanted nothing more than to leave the gritty bleakness of the ghetto behind.  Hubby made that possible albeit with stops along the way in a ghetto of a different hue - Spanish Harlem (in the Young Lords' building) and a stint as sextons of a Lutheran church in Flatbush.  I’d made it all the way to the disco dotted, star cluttered streets of Tribeca and now I was back with head bowed on my original stomping ground.  It was a big adjustment returning to the place of my birth Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy.  

To be continued...

*A real life, big time casting director