PLaza-8-2272, and a Woody Allen Autograph
It’s been a scanning day here. I am feeling somewhat reflective since the brief hospital stay, reflective enough to scan away some ephemera and detritus, discarding the paper but scanning it away into the mountainous digital remains of my eternity. Here is a photo that has been in front of me for months. I only noticed after scanning it and placing it in the recycling can that it had an old Telephone Exchange Name formatted phone number. This card was printed in the early 1990s, long after the exchange name era had ended, making this is an example of using those old exchanges for nostalgia’s sake. The PLaza exchange was found mostly around midtown east. The only other PLaza I’ve seen in that area was at an apartment building on 60th Street. Another PLaza sighting, this one in Sunnyside, refers to the Turnbull Elevator company, which I guess used to be located in midtown east.
This photo, and Woody Allen’s autograph thereon, were obtained some time around 1993 or 1994, when I took my mother and a friend from college to a concert of Woody Allen and his Dixieland Jazz Band, or rather that is my memory of what the band was called at the time. The band used to play weekly at Michael’s Pub, moving on to the Bar Montparnasse at the Parker Meridien Hotel after Michael’s closed. This concert cost me a lot of money I did not have at the time but I felt proud to have treated my mother, who came up here from Florida, to something like this. I remember the concert for being somewhat anodyne, but innocuously positive in its presentation. All the performers smiled when they could, it seemed, except for Woody Allen. The maître d’ was unbelievably rude to me, though it’s been so long I cannot remember details of our brief, toxic encounter. I just remember thinking the dude was positively mean.
I am not saving this shred of paper for any reason. I don’t think it ever had any resale value, and now that the #MeToo moving is gaining traction in erasing his life’s work from the canon I can’t see it ever being worth anything.
