Astoria Characters: The Ballet Pianist

For pianist Maria Kaushansky, music is about making connections that go far beyond the sounds that emanate from her keyboard. Maria is a pianist. “When I’m playing and I meet people for the first time, we may not speak the same language, but we know the same songs,” she says. “That’s really special.” This is not to say that language usually is a barrier for Maria – she speaks English, Russian, French and Italian – but music always eases the introduction. Maria, who has…

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Astoria Characters: The Ditmars Dawners

In a city that never sleeps, I’m a dawner. I get up at 5 in the morning all seven days of the week. It’s a habit I established about a decade ago when I got a puppy who was endowed with an adorably tiny bladder, and I took an administrative job at a university that required me to be at my desk at 8 a.m. The puppy grew up – Zora will be 10 on the 21st of January – and the job dissolved when my boss unexpectedly died. But for no plausible reason that I can come up with,…

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Astoria Characters: The New-Boutique Owner

Vanessa Gonzalez is in the front window of her new shop, Anoria Boutique, dressing a couple of mannequins. Vanessa is the owner of Anoria Boutique. She apologizes because her display is not finished; she likes to have everything perfect at all times. She didn’t close the shop until 11:30 last night because some customers came in at the last minute for party dresses. They bought two in the window. She’s replacing them with a long, lacy black gown and a delicate, diaphanous beaded…

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Astoria Characters: The 90-Year-Old Songstress

Miss Marie makes her grand entrance on Broadway (Astoria’s not Manhattan’s). Miss Marie is a singer/songwriter. When she’s a block from the subway corner, she stops, adjusts her eyeglasses and starts crooning her anthem, “Where the Boys Are.” The sweetheart song, from the award-winning 1960 teen rom-com of the same name, was sung in the film by the then-23-year-old Connie Francis. In the six decades since, Miss Marie, who is 90, has made it her own. Her son, Elvis impersonator…

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Astoria Characters: The Balloon Sculptor

There is an art to breathing life into a balloon. Hampton Keith Bishop selects one of the 600,000 unblown balloons that are hanging on the wall in a rainbow of color. Hampton started HKBalloons NYC at the end of 2015. It happens to be a pretty pearl lemon chiffon hue. He attaches it to a precision air inflator, the black box that can be carefully calibrated to release .1 to 9.9 seconds of air in a single instance. He sets the buttons — .5 of a second, 1 second, 1.5 seconds –…

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