Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501060075
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
\ What a place to bring your dreams.
Noise, dirt, crime. All these high-rise buildings scratch out the sun, make the world a shadow at high noon.
It's expensive, too.
And New Yorkers can be so rude.
Ask anyone from Southwest Virginia.
"I hate the rudeness,'' says Stephanie Cummins, a Roanoke native who plays the cello at the Broadway show "An Inspector Calls."
"The winters are very, very depressing," says Meigra Nichols, an aspiring New York actress from Blacksburg, who has been in plays and commercials. "The summers are disgusting. You've got homeless people asking you for money every time you turn around."
"I don't think anyone who was born and raised in Roanoke could live in New York City and be happy," says Kit Bond. A Roanoke native, Bond is a free-lance theater production manager who has worked on Broadway. "You miss the mountains,'' Bond says. "You miss the people."
Sums up Cummins:
"It's grisly."
Yet, here they are.
Multiply them by a hundred, or a thousand - no one knows, because no one keeps track of such things - and you have the number of Southwest Virginians currently toiling in the arts in New York City.
There is the young actress Elizabeth Dressler, of Roanoke.
There are opera singer Joan Eubank; pianist Charles Jones; Bette Snapp, an ex-violist and now director of a musical venture called Bang on a Can - all Roanoke natives.
There is former Botetourt County cheerleader Cynthia Woodie - a commercial artist.
And the rest. Whatever the number, they came because, for them, art was the most important thing in the world.
And New York City is where art matters most.
"The city is always full of young worshipful beginners - young actors, young aspiring poets, ballerinas, painters, reporters, singers - each depending on his own brand of tonic to stay alive, each with his own stable of giants," wrote E.B. White of the Big Apple back in 1946.
As many a Southwest Virginian knows, it is no less true today.
"Even with all the crime, it [New York City] remains the magical Mecca" for people hoping to make it in the arts, said Richard Cummins, who is music director at Roanoke's Greene Memorial United Methodist Church. "People still go up there. Some are lucky. Most aren't."
His daughters are among the lucky ones.
Cenovia Cummins, a violinist, and her sister, Stephanie, a cellist, have both lived and worked as musicians in the New York area for a decade.
They play in symphonies. They play on Broadway. Last summer, they played Madison Square Garden with Barbra Streisand.
They even did a week-long gig together with Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts at The Blue Note.
Every now and then, Stephanie Cummins stops to thank her lucky stars.
"I know that I'm lucky," she said. "I know that."
And yet ...
\ Consider:
There are 7,322,564 people in New York City.
Central Park alone is larger than the principality of Monaco, according to Fodor's "New York City." New York features the world's most famous, and maybe most restless skyline.
"It's an overwhelming energy," explained Roanoke native Charles Jones, a Juilliard-trained classical pianist and professor at The Harlem School of the Arts. "One has to deal with that and not let it become a race."
Opera singer Joan Eubank came here and took up yoga. Now, "I can feel as at peace here as I can in any country setting," the former Roanoker said.
Eubank has lived in New York City five years - during which she has performed with the New York Philharmonic and worked with big-name conductors such as Zubin Mehta and Sir Colin Davis.
None of which, she said, means she has arrived.
"Nothing means you've arrived," she added gloomily over coffee at a cafe a block from Carnegie Hall. Eubank had just auditioned at Carnegie Hall for an internship with the Santa Fe Opera Company - her second audition of the day.
Outside, people were rushing by on the 57th Street sidewalk. It was a Friday in December, the evening of the annual Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center some eight blocks away, and the streets were filling rapidly with honking, unmoving yellow taxis.
"I know famous singers with the Metropolitan Opera who still are nurses," Eubank said.
Eubank makes ends meet by working in a financial-services office part-time, and by singing on weekends at a Madison Avenue church. "It's a lifesaver in many ways," she said of the church job.
She has no retirement plan, no health insurance, and no plans to quit.
"Maybe I'm just a cockeyed optimist," Eubank said. "I definitely believe sound is healing."
And she believes this:
"The secret to making it in this town is to never give up."
\ Cynthia Woodie certainly did not.
The former Lord Botetourt High School cheerleader came up here and slept on floors. She missed meals.
"I was broke and hungry. I didn't have an apartment. I really struggled here, but I was pretty determined," she recalled.
She spoke in her studio at the edge of Soho, several blocks from her $2,400-a-month apartment in Greenwich Village. Workers - her workers - sat at long tables carving models out of clay.
Woodie looked worried - maybe a perpetual state. Her fingers tugged at one another as she talked. Her smile was warm but tight.
"It's just not easy in New York," Woodie said. "The money's always tense. And New York. Living in New York is tense. Nobody comes here to retire."
A 5-foot-2-inch, blue-eyed blonde who once cheered at football games and dated athletes, Woodie had never even seen a big city before her graduation from Hollins College.
After several years of dues-paying in studios in Philadelphia, and several more working high-pressure jobs as a commercial artist in New York City, Woodie opened her own studio here, called Light and Form.
She sculpts toys.
Specifically, Woodie sculpts the figurines from which the toy manufacturers will make the plastic action heroes and comic book characters and Disney animals you can buy on the toy store shelf.
She has done Spider Man. She has done Minnie Mouse.
She has done Kermit the Frog.
And she has come far from the days when, unable to afford an apartment, and sometimes a meal, she slept on a piece of foam on an office floor.
Not that it's easy still.
Fortune magazine recently profiled Woodie and her husband, free-lance photographer Marcus Tullis, in an article on the struggling urban upper middle class.
The couple, according to Fortune, are scrambling to make it in Manhattan on their combined income of $155,000 a year.
"We're often late on the rent," Woodie told the writer then.
\ A few facts:
There are more than 200 legitimate theaters in New York City.
New York City has the Metropolitan Opera, Madison Square Garden, the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.
It has the Metropolitan Museum of Art - the biggest art museum in the Western world, at least until the recent expansion of the Louvre in Paris - not to mention dozens of other galleries and museums.
It has hundreds of nightclubs, music bars and pubs, thousands of restaurants.
Stephanie Cummins is aware of all of this.
"I try not to take that part of it for granted," Cummins said of the critical mass of culture.
And yet ...
She sat at her dining room table in North Bergen, N.J., apartment, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
The topic of conversation was Why I Hate New York.
"New York is like, every man for himself," Cummins said. "Sometimes I feel myself getting the same mentality."
To be fair, it isn't as if her memories of Roanoke are all rosy.
Cummins and her sister, Cenovia, both attended Patrick Henry High School - where as classical musicians they ranked low in the social hierarchy, they said. Stephanie Cummins fared worse than her sister due to the added burden of having to wear a back brace to correct a curvature of the spine. "I got called names. 'Bionic woman,' '' she recalled. "I didn't go to the prom.
"But we can laugh all the way to whatever now," Cummins added, "because we played with Charlie Watts."
In any event, Stephanie Cummins escaped after graduation to the North Carolina School of the Arts. Her sister soon followed her there.
"Of course I had to go where she did," explained Cenovia Cummins. The violinist, who lives downstairs from her sister, had arrived midway through the conversation. The sisters say they are as close as twins.
On living in New York, Cenovia Cummins said this:
"It's a big compromise. Of course, you can go see anything you want. You can have your instrument fixed by the best person. There's museums. There's everything."
And yet ...
"I miss the mountains," Cenovia Cummins said. "Living in a house. Having dogs in the back yard. Going for a walk at night. Having a place to park."
Said her sister, Stephanie, "You always have to watch your back."
\ Is it worth it?
Well, is anything? As the saying goes, there is no free lunch.
Meanwhile, listen to Bette Snapp.
"New York City is just a wonderful place to be."
It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, and Snapp was not in New York City at all, but in Roanoke on a visit home.
She has lived in New York City for 25 years now - during which she has gone from taking viola lessons to directing Bang on a Can.
Which says something, surely, about New York.
"There's a lot that you give up to be there," Snapp admitted. "But it is so thrilling. Especially in the arts."
Snapp is a New York fan.
She believes there is no place like it in the world - which is certainly true.
On the other hand, even in New York, not everyone can have a life like Snapp's. A former publicist for a music publisher, and later a free-lance agent for composers, Snapp has worked with some of the most famous names in late 20th-century music: Leonard Bernstein; Samuel Barber; Elliott Carter - who once wrote a ballet entitled "Pocahontas"; Gian Carlo Menotti, who wrote "Amahl and the Night Visitors."
Snapp now runs the musical venture known as Bang on a Can. BOC is an offbeat concert series, often featuring the Bang on a Can All Stars, that features the work of composers who have trouble getting their work performed elsewhere.
For example, program notes for a concert last spring detail such offerings as "Mountain Goat File" by Eleanor Hovda - ("holds a magnifying glass up to a world of mystical scratchiness"), and "The Anvil Chorus" by David Lang, in which "medieval blacksmiths hammer their way back from the dead."
"To me, it's not a job with great perks," said Snapp. But, "it feels like a mission. I feel very fulfilled."
And what about the city itself? Snapp, for one, does not worry about crime, noting she has never been mugged herself or felt unsafe. "You learn how to handle yourself," she said.
Or not. For the record, in the first six months of 1990 alone there were 1,077 murders, 1,633 rapes, 48,036 robberies, 58,026 burglaries and 70,998 cases of motor-vehicle theft in New York City, according to FBI statistics.
Even E.B. White, the long-time New Yorker magazine writer who died in 1985, revised his opinion after writing his essay - claiming in his later years the city suffered from "a brain tumor as yet undetected."
"Times have changed everywhere,'' agrees Snapp. "And New York reflects those changes.
"It's definitely hard," said Snapp, who works in an office in Manhattan's East Village, on the edge of the Bowery - a two-hour commute from her Glen Cove home. "It's grimy. It's aggressive. You are certainly confronted with the misery of the late 20th century in New York. There's no question about that.
"But it is the most exciting place in the world."
by CNB