Madonna and Me (32 page)

My friend Mark recently attended a 25th anniversary screening of
Desperately Seeking Susan
held by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I got the full report via texts throughout the evening—it’s the least he could do, seeing as how he gets a free calendar every year. He told me everyone was all a-quiver the entire night—there were rumors Susan herself would show up.

She never did. But she might have. And if I had been in New York that night, I would’ve been at the screening with Mark. It’s quite possible that I might have walked out at the same time Madonna was walking in, or out, on water. And it would be the perfect opportunity to say, “Oh. Oh, geez. Hi. I admire you so much. Thank you.” But I like my relationship with Madonna the way it is: entirely abstract. I don’t want to break the spell. The way I see it, I’ve got two options: Either I do something so incredible with my life that Madonna wants to meet
me
, or I keep walking.

All right, maybe there’s a third option. As soon as she turns away, I’ll get out my phone and take a picture of her as she walks the other direction. It’ll be a spot of blonde in a fuzzy mobile image, proof that she lives, and that I can live another day.

Jamie Beckman

 

 

 

 

 

FOR THOSE WHO have never lived in New York City, all the rumors you’ve heard about insanely high rents and the exhausting hunt for an apartment that (fingers crossed) doesn’t have a shower in the kitchen are true. Those of us without trust funds sandwich ourselves into the cheaper areas of town, bunking with three or four roommates on the Lower East Side, in Murray Hill, or deep in Washington Heights.

At age twenty-seven, when I’d had enough of my headmistress of a roommate in Midtown, I found my very own studio apartment in a neighborhood called Yorkville. On the far east side of the Upper East Side, my new apartment was three hundred square feet, max, recently renovated, with sparkling white-painted cabinets and new black-and-white tile, just like the ideal of a New York City apartment that often made an appearance in my teenage dreams.

Yorkville is a strange, quiet place, but I felt at home there. I was neither rich nor very glamorous, so I was among my people. Average-looking, somewhat melancholy couples with hand-me-down strollers
meander down the sidewalks alongside recovering sorority girls still wearing their Greek letters. There are a few little old ladies waiting at bus stations and some low-rent nail salons, plus a riverside park that’s a mecca for weekend joggers sweating it out over the sparkling water. The best restaurants have been around for ages—Elio’s in particular, a white-tablecloth Italian place where I once saw Bob Costas.

Anyone who would describe herself as “cutting edge,” a “club kid,” or a “fashionista” would not be caught dead living here. It is, however, the perfect place to walk homeward after work from the 6 train, eat a piping-hot slice of pizza at Arturo’s, grab a sixer of Bud Light at the incongruous 7-Eleven on the corner of 84th and York, curl up in your apartment, and plot your next career move. At least that’s what I did. I loved perching there and listening to every second of my rich twentysomething life reverberate, keeping time with the bony tree branches right next to my orange fire escape.

And then something strange happened: Madonna decided to move to my neighborhood.

She didn’t just plan to move in my general geographic direction. She literally purchased a home a few blocks from me, on 81st Street—a $32 million, four-story townhouse. What’s even weirder is that Madonna chose the “cheap” side of Lexington Avenue—the decidedly unsexy side. Why? The tabloids lunged at the gossip:

I, however, was giddy. It was Madonna!
Madonna
was coming!

I had to go check out her new digs. I made plans to go see the place the very first Saturday after I heard the news. Pictures of the interior posted online showed opulent accoutrements: chandeliers, Oriental rugs, staircases with pristine carved banisters. Perfect for Her Madgesty. I couldn’t wait to see what the outside looked like. I did some Internet research from my Madonna-adjacent headquarters at 84th and York. The address was plastered all over the newspapers, so it wasn’t hard to find. I jotted the coordinates down on a Post-It note and told my boyfriend about my mission. He gamely agreed to tag along (as if he had a choice).

I shrugged on my khaki trench coat, he his navy-blue windbreaker, and we set off, Post-It in hand, to check out Madonna’s magic kingdom.

We wound through the streets, past plain-looking groups of people wearing North Face fleece and brunching al fresco at cheap bistros on First and Second Avenues. After we had walked a few blocks, we stopped on an unassuming street full of unassuming townhouses.

“That’s it . . . I think,” I said, looking from my Post-It to the address across the way.

We stood, squinting in the afternoon sun at a big brick building four stories high. The plot of residential real estate was palatial by New York standards, but without context, it was just a brown brick box with painted brown wood accents. After all of the newspaper ballyhoo, it was a little underwhelming.

I was fascinated, however, by the two-car garage. I imagined shiny Benzes zipping in and out of there, her then-boyfriend Jesus Luz and
her children inside the house, playing board games on one of those Oriental rugs, a piano tinkling in the background. The idea of Madonna setting up shop here—even if she were to turn the living room into a giant black-onyx disco, à la
Confessions on a Dance Floor
—felt cozy and familial.

My boyfriend and I stared at the place in silence for a few minutes.

“Well,” he said. “Wanna go get brunch?”

When I signed the lease on my Upper East Side apartment, I was in search of a home. Somewhere to hunker down—a private enclave to shut out traffic noise, my roommate’s chore list, and other people’s opinions. If Madonna wants a retreat, a tragically un-hip cocoon where she can be herself without anyone watching, Yorkville has that on lock. Around Thanksgiving 2009, I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn: a place thick with self-described artists and supposed rebels—young, doll-faced hipsters wearing thick smears of red lipstick and torn-up black tights.

But forget any cultural superiority I’m supposed to feel living in Brooklyn; during the time that Madonna and I overlapped on the Upper East Side, my heart swelled with a bit more pride than usual about the neighborhood that I called home. In fact, I hijacked my fair share of conversations to tell people, if they weren’t aware, that
Madonna
was my neighbor. I loved the area before, but now that she deemed it hers, too, it lent the entire area more legitimacy, as though the rest of the world had discovered how great it was to hang out that close to the East River. And it was great.

Sadly, I never saw Madonna casing out her new joint while I lived in the neighborhood, but I heard she recently put up an iron gate around the place to keep out peeping toms and the paparazzi. So much for mingling with the little people. Still, when I think back on my gem of a place on the Upper East Side, I’ll always think of Madonna—and the fact that she followed in my footsteps. Literally.

Kate Harding

 

 

 

 

 

“SO, I SAID I’d write an essay about Madonna,” I tell my friend Anna, an editor who used to work at glossy magazines and celebrity weeklies, and thus knows from Her Madgesty.

“What’s your angle?”

“I don’t know yet. I was thinking of doing something about her ability to bounce back from failure-—”

“Reinvention, etcetera, etcetera,” Anna interjects, sounding relieved that she’s not the one who has to tell me, “Thanks, but we’ve already got something similar.”

“No, I know everyone in the world has written about her reinventing herself. I’m talking about maintaining your ambition and self-confidence in the wake of abject fucking failure. Like,
Shanghai Surprise
–level failure.”

Anna laughs. “I forgot about
Shanghai Surprise.
”

“Everyone has! That’s my point! But I don’t know—I feel like I have about two paragraphs’ worth of material on that subject, and
then I’m back to not knowing what to say. Because my dirty little secret is, I just don’t have strong feelings about Madonna, one way or another.”

“There’s your angle,” says Anna. “That’s one I’ve actually never seen before.”

As a thirty-six-year-old feminist, I’ve come to feel the same way about Madonna as I do about porn. To wit, I get why some feminists will argue in favor of it, and I get why others insist it’s degrading to women. I get that it’s had a profound impact on our cultural expectations for women’s behavior and appearance. I get that its enduring popularity across lines of class, race, and sexuality makes it a rich topic, worthy of serious discussion—and I get that it’s really pretty weird for someone who writes about female oppression and empowerment to have no strong opinions on the subject.

And still, it’s just sort of . . . not my issue.

I’ve found that most people will accept that dodge when it comes to discussing porn; when it comes to Madonna, though, folks want answers. How is it even possible to be neutral about one of the most influential and provocative women of the last three decades?

I don’t know.
Shrug.

In the interest of writing something more insightful, I visited Madonna’s official website, looking for anything that might inspire passionate engagement, or even reignite the sincere appreciation I had for Ms. Ciccone circa 1986, when “Where’s the Party?” was my favorite hairbrush-in-front-of-the-mirror jam. (Sure, I was eleven at the time, and my version of “losing control” was knocking back a Jolt cola and eating gummy bears until my stomach hurt, but when I sang “If you show me how/I’m ready now!” you’d better believe I meant it.)

Do you know what, out of all the elements of
Madonna.com
—photos and videos that once scandalized a nation, now-classic pop songs, a dissertation’s worth of religious imagery, etcetera—actually caused me to gasp?

“Children’s books! She writes best-fucking-selling children’s books!” I holler angrily at my friend Gigi, who also happens to be my favorite local bartender and, in both capacities, often helps me work through writer’s block.

“Everybody writes children’s books now,” says Gigi. “Jamie Lee Curtis, Katie Couric, Julianne Moore, Kelly Ripa, I think. They have a kid, and suddenly they’re qualified to be authors.”

And there it is, the root source of my uncharacteristically strong feelings about something Madonna’s done: She’s encroaching on my territory! I was fine when her umpteen self-reinventions only involved pursuits I have no real interest in, like acting and Jewish mysticism and going to the gym. But writing? I’ve spent the last twenty years learning how to be a writer, and all I’ve really got to show for it is one cowritten book and a handful of mostly defunct blogs. Madonna has written more than a dozen children’s books in her spare time—like, as a hobby. I can’t even finish crocheting a baby hat.