Where the girls are reading: Detective Camp, The Invisible Tree, and The Ninth Nugget.

Where a man stops to watch a woman doing yoga poses in the storefront widow of Lululemon.

Where early on a Friday afternoon a woman begs an employee of the just-closed Kosher Marketplace to let her in for just one thing.

Where on the downtown 3 express a girl with curly blond hair and chipped black nail polish highlights a xerox of "Feminism" from Feminist Theory with a pink highlighter.

Where, on the uptown 2 express, a man accepts a bag of food from a stranger, walks to the other end of the car, looks into the bag and loudly berates the philanthropist: "I thought there was a cookie in here you said there was a cookie in here long nose hey LONG NOSE there ain't NO cookie in here! you hear me? got hair all over your body have to leave the city with hair all over your body Piccalo ain't NO cookie in here at all!"

Where parents of four year olds chatter nervously in the PS 166 auditorium and discretely and self-satisfidely ignore the sound from the hallway of a small voice crying, "I don't want to!!" and his mother's soft pleading.

Where two men wearing lady liberty costumes enjoy slices at Famiglia.

Where, as he maneuvered the 90 degree turn onto 97th Street, the tough-looking, bald-headed trucker belted out, "Don't care if it's Chinatown or on Riverside..." as he blasted Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind"from the cab of his big rig.

Where the white plastic chair seems to have lost.

Where the boy says into his red plastic cellphone, "Are you trying to be mean to me?... Well then what is healthy?... So then use apples!... Yeah, fight them with apples!... 'Common, are you Punisher or not? Then act like it!"

Where in the window of the newest cupcake shop on the cupcake-shop-saturated Upper West Side one man sits alone.

Where a boy, inspired by nature, reinvents a phrase he's never heard: "It's so cold it hurts... yeah, it hurts."

 

 

Where on Amsterdam Avenue a boy points to a piece of cold, uneaten pizza, peeking out of its grease-stained bag lying on the sidewalk outside of the CVS that used to be a bank and says, "That pizza is DEAD."