Nancy Ruhling's Astoria Characters

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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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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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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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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With Charlie Brown, his large, lovable black lab leading the way, Mike-171 heads toward his museum. Mike-171 and Charlie Brown. A big guy with close-cropped reddish hair and bright blue eyes, Mike-171 climbs the front steps of his fourth-floor walkup at a cardio-pumping clip. “It’s better than going to the gym,” he says, pausing only long enough to point out the art along the way. Mike-171 grew up in Washington Heights. In the entry, there are a pair of landscapes in gilded…

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