New York was first a place where people drove around in Lemosines. It was a place where children were driven everywhere and never seemed to go out to play in the street like I did. It was where people lived in apartments way up so high that the street was too far away for children to be allowed to go there.
I arrived at the bus stop at around twenty past four. I wanted to ride the bus while it got dark – my favourite time of day. I thought there might be added sense to taking it that late being that it was Marathon day. I hadn’t long to wait.
As a child I had no need of adults. I believed almost nothing they told me, insisting that the letter E had as many horizontal prongs as you could fit on it, and that they should be as long as possible, until I was well advanced at primary school. I didn’t watch much TV, but when I did I favoured shows about children. One of the earliest shows that drove my parents crazy, but that my siblings and I adored was Diff’rent Strokes.
Even as I got on the bus I was reminded of one of the things I most like about New York – how kind and helpful people are. It’s something I noticed particularly because it goes entirely against the stereotype so confidently held by people who’ve never been here. As I stood back to let an elderly woman climb onto the bus, she asked me to carry on her bag for her. I felt a little embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed and offered. Her bag was very heavy, she must have been very strong. Once on the bus she asked me to help her off with her bag at the next stop. She was a lovely lady – not afraid to ask for help, or tell the bus driver exactly where to leave her, but not at all demanding or bossy in her expectation that people would be happy to help her out.
One of the reasons we loved Diff’rent Strokes was that Arnold was so like my little brother – a crowd pleaser with chubby cheeks and a cheeky grin. We laughed at how Willis (suspect at 12, a little too grown up) could never best his vivacious brother.
We drive past a public playground where people were playing roller hockey. There are so many great public spaces in this city – Central Park, Prospect Park, the new park down by the piers, all the playgrounds and basketball courts and dog parks. Coming from a country where private ownership of land is an almost psychotic pursuit, and where 98% of the country is in private ownership, anything common that people can use impresses me. I wonder how the skaters organize their game? Do they have a schedule, a time slot? Who decides who gets to play when? So impressive that they manage to work it out.
#1. Movin' In (Pilot) (original airdate: 11/03/78 - #101)
Multi-millionaire Phillip Drummond, who has agreed to the death-bed wish of his housekeeper to raise her two small sons as his own, welcomes 8-year-old Arnold and 12-year-old Willis into his lavish penthouse. Anxious to make them feel at home, he showers them with gifts and love -- and is puzzled when he learns that the boys are planning to sneak from the lap of luxury back to Harlem. Aiding Drummond in his effort to make the street-wise, ghetto youngsters feel welcome in the affluent white world are Drummond's new housekeeper Mrs. Garrett and his 13-year-old daughter Kimberly.
Gliding past people dining at outdoor tables I wish I were among them. Few things are as enjoyable to me as eating a meal outdoors, particularly on a Sunday when there are no important jobs to do later constraining my wine consumption and feeling of nothing to do but just what I’m doing now. But I love taking the bus, so I’m happy where I am too.
#3. Mother's Last Visit (11/17/78 - #103)
Mr. Drummond's socialite and rather snobbish mother arrives and finds there's a lot she doesn't like about her son's new sons, but she soon learns a valuable lesson about what's really important in a person.
There is a couple behind me. Their conversation, as I can hear it, goes something like this:
HIM: What do I want to talk to old women for? I have nothing to say to old women?
HER: You want to talk to Eva
HIM: I don’t want to talk to crazy Eva! What do I want to talk to crazy Eva for? I have nothing to day to crazy Eva. Old women do not interest me.
HER: What about Monica?
HIM: I don't want to talk to Monica. Anyway she doesn’t like me, because she thinks I snubbed her.
During this exchange I scan the bus – it is full. All of the occupants apart from the couple and me are old ladies.
#44. Return of the Gooch (02/06/80 - #218)
The "Gooch" is back and this time he's terrorizing Arnold, but Arnold plans to be ready when the bully strikes. In building Arnold's confidence, Willis convinces him that his martial arts lesson has given him a "killer" foot.
We travel through the city and the couple starts talking about a church that is being sold by the Church even though its congregation wants it to stay open. I can’t quite follow the ins and outs of the tale, but it seems that there is high-level corruption taking place involving one of the bishops. The “mighty” are taking advantage of the ordinary people again. It’s the theme of this week. It seems that the doors to the church were locked and then the church was presented as being unused to justify its sale. This kind of hoodwinking disingenuous self-justification is too familiar.
#47. Skip Deep or True Blue (aka Guess Who?) (02/20/80 - #221)
Kimberly's new beau, Roger, suggests pairing his sister with Willis for a double-date, until he finds out the color of his true love's brother. When Kimberly discovers her new friend is a bigot, her face burns red and then a far darker shade.
As it’s New York Marathon day the bus is rerouted. I don’t know Manhattan well enough to work out exactly where we’re going (and I’m trying to eavesdrop), so I put my trust in the bus driver to take me all the way to George Washington Bridge. When I took the trip with Ben, James, Richard, and Jo for our group project we went straight up the island, so it’s nice to get a different perspective this time.
One of the more important themes in Diff’rent Strokes was entirely lost on us as children. Ireland in the 1970s and 80s was a very homogenous place – everyone was white and Irish and almost everyone was Catholic, and those who weren’t were almost certainly Protestant. We didn’t understand the race element in the show. We knew that Willis and Arnold had been poor, but we didn’t really know about different races or possible tensions between them.
#51. It's Magic (aka The Magician) (03/11/81 - #301)
Arnold's "famous" magic disappearing act, designed to impress a magazine reporter and special guest star Dallas Cowboys' defensive end Ed "Too Tall" Jones, leaves him dangerously high and dry, with no place to go but down -- about 30 stories.
At 74th Street I lose the couple behind me. I think they might be Armenian. Well, the man is almost certainly American, but possibly of the Armenian community. As they turn to leave I look around to see what they looked like. The man looks just like my friend Mark! It’s odd to see a familiar, yet not familiar face attached to this now-familiar voice.
It’s definitely dark now – I hadn’t realized how early darkness falls now that the hour’s gone back, or remembered how quickly darkness falls at these latitudes.
The bus moves uptown, back on its own route now. We lose more and more people at each stop but they are not replaced.
#79. The Big Heist (11/26/81 - #405)
Arnold is elated when he's accepted into an "elite" club at school, but his membership could lead to consequences far beyond his wildest dreams when he learns he must commit a crime as part of his secret initiation.
By the time we pull onto Riverside Drive, “we” refers to just the bus driver and me. The beautiful buildings look so cosy inside. Each flat I can manage to see into has books, shelves of books. There is nobody on the street. Not one single person the whole way along this stretch of the route.
So now I really have time to think…
*about how Americans value the subjunctive, even as the Cambridge people who think of themselves as arbiters of a language have “abolished” it and it is no longer taught by their TEFL teachers. Although in England it is mostly still used by people who don’t speak RP English: northerners and such, here is it a mark of being educated. And as such I have heard people bemoan the fact that some people don’t use it. Why do people so enjoy using language as a means of exclusion rather than a means of inclusion? Part of the beauty and strength of English is that its rules are all provisional and it forgives all sorts of breakages
*about Linda Stone’s ideas of attention-span paradigms – how elegant and useful her ideas are, but yet how bound in time. I figure out that to me she has provided a useful conceptual model for understanding the preoccupations and habits of our time that are no longer working by siting them in relation to the past and the future. And yet the subject matter is so dependent on now. Once the new paradigm arrives, the next useful conceptual model of this type will most likely describe the history of something entirely different. Presumably the use of paradigms as explanatory models will sometime cease to be useful
*about how great it is to live in city where you can buy non-ultra washing-up liquid. To me words like ultra, New, super, applied to detergents are meaningless and assumed. It’s nice to see them given meaning
The bus is great for sorting out the ideas that float about in my head.
A beautiful African-American woman and her cute daughter get onto the bus. Hail fellow travellers.
#63. Roots (01/21/81 - #313)
Willis and Arnold turn the Drummond household upside down as they try to prove to their old Harlem neighbors -- and themselves -- that they haven't lost tough with their cultural roots.
We turn onto Broadway. If I got off the bus and walked straight down the road I would (eventually) get to school. This neighbourhood feels so far from lower Manhattan. It’s taken me nearly two hours to get here. Yet we’re back amongst crowds of people as we were downtown. And there’s this street that runs all the way down to where I normally go. And there’s me, and my valiant bus driver, here on the bus through the neighbourhoods through the two hours.
At a bus stop more elderly women get on the bus. The last of them hesitates about swiping her ticket. The rest of the women begin to yell: VENGA, VENGA, VENGA
as she vacillates
VENGA, VENGA, VENGA
In the end she decides against getting on and we leave without her.
“Mommy, what’s ‘Benga’?” the little girl asks.
MOORE, Okla. (AP - May 9th, 1999) - Actress Dana Plato, who like her fellow "Diff'rent Strokes" child co-stars had seen legal troubles since the show was canceled, has died of a drug overdose.
Ms. Plato, 34, apparently took the painkiller Lortab along with Valium on Saturday while visiting the home of her fiance's parents.
"The death appears to be an accidental overdose. We don't suspect suicide," police Sgt. Scott Singer said Sunday.
Ms. Plato played Kimberly Drummond on the NBC sitcom that ran from 1978 to 1985 (and ABC from 1985-1986).
She was arrested in 1991 for robbing a Las Vegas video store, and was placed on five years' probation. In 1992 she was given an additional five years' probation for forging prescriptions for Valium.
"If I hadn't gotten caught, it could have been the worst thing that happened to me because I could have died of a drug overdose," she told reporters in 1992.
Ms. Plato and her fiance, Robert Menchaca, had stopped at his parents' home in Moore for Mother's Day. Ms. Plato and Menchaca, 28, were en route to Los Angeles after she appeared on the Howard Stern's radio program in New York as part of an effort to jump-start her career.
She went on the show to deny the stories of a woman who claimed to know Ms. Plato well. The woman had called Stern's show, saying Ms. Plato was on drugs.
Ms. Plato acknowledged the woman had been a roommate, but said she had been sober for about 10 years. She also said she had her wisdom teeth out about four months ago and had to take pain killers for that.
Singer said Ms. Plato went to take a nap Saturday afternoon. After Menchaca realized that evening that there was a problem, his mother, who's a nurse, and his brother tried unsuccessfully to revive her with cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Singer says toxicology results aren't expected for about six weeks.
Ms. Plato's recent career had included mainly low-budget films such as 1992's ''Bikini Beach Race'' and the 1997 film "Different Strokes: A Story of Jack and Jill ... and Jill," a direct-to-video softcore tale about a sexual threesome.
Among her co-stars on "Diff'rent Strokes," Todd Bridges, who played Willis, has been arrested several times. In 1990, he was acquitted of assault with a deadly weapon in the near fatal shooting of a narcotics dealer in a Los Angeles drug den.
He once testified that he became depressed and turned to drugs after "Diff'rent Strokes" was canceled.
Gary Coleman, who played the lovable Arnold on the show, pleaded no contest in February to disturbing the peace for punching an autograph-seeker in the eye. He was ordered to attend anger management classes, fined and given a suspended jail sentence.
Ms. Plato has a 14-year-old son, Tyler Lambert of Tulsa, from a previous marriage.
At George Washington Bridge I hop off the bus and go home.