RIP Christopher Reeve

I was sad to hear Christopher Reeve died this morning. He used to be my neighbor when I lived in NYC in the late 1970s, so this celebrity death was especially difficult. We lived in a small 10 apartment brownstone on West 83rd Street, he on the 5th and I lived on the 3rd floor. He stayed there until he made Superman II and then he left for more luxurious surroundings. In fact I read an interview with him saying he lived in a dingy walk up - I wanted to kill that person. It wasn't dingy at all - not a luxury building but not dingy. It was right off Central Park West. And Christopher was so quiet and nice. I had a window facing the front so when I'd see him coming back in a taxi with all his luggage I'd grab my garbage and take it to the trash bin in front of our house - just at that moment to help him with the door and say hello. Never made those stupid superman cracks like why don't you just fly up with those damn heavy bags. He partied some times with Ron Wood of the Stones, which I never knew until years later, at Ron's LA place. He never threw any wild parties in his NY pad. You never heard a peep from his apartment. Not like my neighbor who used to say "Ohmmmmmmms" real loud in the bathroom and I could hear him as if there was no wall there. When he moved out his dad moved in with some much younger woman and my friend and I would laugh as they would come back from their jog - he would be sweating bricks and she was just flushed with nary a bead of sweat to be found. I loved that place in NYC. I moved there in 1977 just as the neighborhood was becoming yuppie-land. My parents had a difficult time with it. "It's ugly" they would tell me. No matter how nicely I decorated it, they hated it, because I wasn't living with them or I wasn't living with a husband. I worked for Sire Records in 1978 for a couple of years - pre-Madonna. It was a 10 minute walk from my home so I was able to keep partying hours which meant going to sleep at 3 am and waking up at 9:00 am, feeding the cat and getting to work on time at 10:00 am. We worked from 10:00 - 6:00 pm. Not only did we get the usual record company perks like free passes to the Capitol theatre (which was useless because cool New Yorkers hardly ever went to "Joisey"). I remember going there twice, once for a Bruce Springsteen concert in 1978 and once for a Ramones concert. Peter Tork from the 1960s band the Monkees did a demo at Sire's tiny basement recording studio and was stark broke. They couldn't afford a hotel. I was the one who hoarded his band Cotton Mouth for a couple of nights while they recorded. He was so Californian. He made fun of my 5 inch stiletto heels and admonished me saying I should be wearing Birkenstocks. Yuck. Shoes of hippies. Never. I'm from Manhattan. I'm into sleek duds. Fuck Birkenstocks. My livingroom looked like a refugee camp but it was thrilling nevertheless, as I made them all dinner and actually had some magazines from the 1960s, which we perused and laughed over. If someone had told me in 1966 when I was 10 that Peter Tork would one day crash over at my house, I would have laughed. I introduced him to my friend, whom he slept with the next day. They really got along great, hey - I thought a relationship would be in the works for them. But she never did hear from him. She was so disappointed, she was all set - at a Monkees reunion a couple of years later - to have her young son wear a t-shirt saying "Peter is my dad". Thank God she never did do it. So there's a small glimpse of my rather exciting life 25 years ago...