Nancy Ruhling's Astoria Characters

It’s an ordinary white garage door, but when Lady Pink rolls it up, the eyes, surprisingly, are assaulted by a kaleidoscope of color. In this space, which was built to house two cars, Lady Pink, The Grandmother of Graffiti, makes her studio. Lady Pink, of course, is her artistic name. The name she was born with? It’s irrelevant — you wouldn’t ask Cher this question or expect Madonna to answer to anything other than the M word. “My friends call me Pink,” she says.…

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George Phillips is at the counter strumming an acoustic guitar. He’s sounding out its sound. In a back room, a piano student is scaling the scales. Up and down, down and up it goes like an aural escalator to nowhere. A young man walks in to buy some guitar strings, and George rushes to the other counter to ring up the sale. George, a fire hydrant with Einstein’s frizzled hair, is the owner of Astoria Music, but it’s more fitting to call him a one-man band because ever since he…

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It happened many moons ago, but when Shintaro Okamoto opens the door of the walk-in freezer and sees the tiger’s head, he remembers the swan. It was winter in Alaska, and Anchorage was as frozen as a pack of Popsicles when his father, Takeo, took Shintaro out to the lake to cut out the block of ice to sculpt the cygnet. Shintaro wasn’t even a teenager when this occurred, and he had no idea that that simple swan would change the course of his life, leading him to open the ice sculpture…

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‘Tis the month of Christmas, and I’m strolling along Steinway Street, when what do my wondering ears hear but “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I look left. I look right. Curiously, the carol isn’t coming from a car stereo. Or a store. I’m not Dorothy, but I stare at my shoes; will Santa and his sleigh go away if I click my bronze MBTs three times? And then I look to the sky and see the sound. Yes, Virginia, the song is singing itself silly out of a speaker strapped…

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Gurgle, gurglegurglegurgle, gurgle. Rich Buceta gets so excited when he hears this sound that you’d think he’d discovered a multi-million-dollar oil well gushing up through his factory floor. He walks over to a giant shiny silver tank that looks like a spaceship from a forbidden planet and points to a hose that’s snaking out of its nostrils. A bubbling amber liquid is flowing into a large white plastic bucket. “It’s the carbon dioxide being released from fermentation,”…

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