Author: ruhlwrite

Dancing, explains Laurie Scherer, is about connecting. Laurie is a native of New Jersey but a lifelong New Yorker at heart. With your brain, with your body, with your partner, with everybody around you. “When you dance,” she says, “it’s not just balance, rhythm and coordination. You literally are stepping into someone else’s shoes.” She demonstrates a simple Lindy Hop Charleston step in the street then kicks her foot into the air with the fervor and finesse of a Rockette. Laurie’s…

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A lot of stuff has happened to Wonmin Lee in the last five years. Read the list of stuff that’s happened to him. Wonmin (it is pronounced, he tells everyone, as “1 min,” the “min” like “minute”) didn’t plan any of it, and once you know his story, you’ll understand why it would have been impossible (and in some ways undesirable) to do so. He starts ticking off the list, casually, almost as if all these events had occurred to someone else: I quit my job as a corporate…

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It’s 2 below zero and the 25-minute wait at the subway necessitates an unintended Lyft ride, but Monica Cialona, so bundled up that you can barely see her double anti-Omicron masks, is ebullient. Dafney smiling through the cold. And it’s not only because she managed, despite the delays, to be on time. No, it’s because she knows – deep in her heart, down in her soul – that 2022 is going to be her breakout year, a period of great possibilities that she’s been rehearsing for her…

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Curled up in a corner of the couch, Kiesha Jenkins begins working her needle and thread through the fabric. Kiesha’s bagel-wearing pigeon was a big hit. The delicate design that is emerging, chain stitch by chain stitch, is of a female swimmer diving into the pool in Astoria Park in 1936, the year it opened. Kiesha, who has shiny, springy Goldilocks curls and buttoned-down horn-rims, stops stitching long enough to lament the fact that the diving pool is gone – it has been turned…

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In the kitchen at Coffee + Cake, Zaynab Abdullah is dipping donuts in a chai glaze, crowning each with a petite ball of dough. Zaynab glazing the donuts. When she’s finished, she ices the za’atar buns with yogurt. The cafe specializes in what Zaynab calls homey desserts, the kind of comfort food you nibble at while you’re waking up and sipping your morning coffee. Bathed in glaze. Buttermilk biscuits. Espresso. Cinnamon rolls. Cappuccino. Cherry Danish. Tea. Chocolate chip…

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