Author: ruhlwrite

The colorful cardboard art on the walls is dwarfed by the baby grand piano. Dave Smith, who made the paintings, plays his rhapsodies religiously. For the last year, his fingers have been feeling their way through Bach; the black-dotted sheet music from his latest recital is still spread open on the stand. Dave shows his art on street signs. Actually, music was Dave’s first love, the one he fell for before he started posting poemed pictures on Astoria street signs over the summer. “I…

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Colette Conlon and Jenny Lando, moms on a mission, are sitting at the kitchen table. Its white-tile top holds coffee, cookies and croissants, but their attention is momentarily focused on a pint-sized voice coming from the living room. Shane, Colette’s son, is trying to be quiet, but he’s only 5 so sometimes he forgets. Shane doesn’t know about the Christmastime massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Neither do 8-year-old Nora and 4-year-old Josie, Jenny’s…

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The garage door is up, and Pierre Zimmerli is sitting on a stool playing a hand of solitaire. This is what he does when he doesn’t have anything else to do. When you get up at 3:30 in the morning, as Pierre does, you have to learn to amuse yourself. He’s already had two cups of coffee — one from home, one from the shop across the street — and a bowl of cold cereal. His first cigarettes have gone up in smoke, and when the mom-and-pops roll up their gates, Pierre will take to…

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There ought to be a sign that says, “Watch your head.” Instead, what you see straight in front of you — before you see stars — when you enter Bill Conroy Lindsay‘s subterranean shotgun-style studio are these words: Gay Ahead. Before you get the joke, you realize that there’s no wiggle room in Bill’s squiggle space. The walls in his white-rabbit hole are lined with heating pipes and paintings that showcase his signature squiggles — life lines that twist…

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In a squeezed-in space the size of an SUV’s backseat, Lou Farina is perched on an ancient chair manning the phone. “It’s the red, white and blue building on the corner,” he tells a customer. “You can’t miss it.”Lou’s the owner of L&M Auto Service. He’s right about that. L&M Auto Service is striped like an American flag; when the breeze blows, you’d swear it’s waving hello. Peeling linoleum, grimy knotty-pine paneling and…

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