Marta Troicka

November 3, 1978 – East Village – Journal Entry Last night THE NEW WAVE VAUDEVILLE SHOW at Irving Plaza was a great success for the performers, but a debacle for me. Klaus Nomi was the headliner along with a horde of starry-eyed rockers and artists. My friends and I were asked to be the security. None of us were paid, but we were guaranteed free drinks. The night started slow, but by midnight the auditorium on Irving Place was packed with new wave aficionados. Klaus killed the crowd. He was a star.

Like 0 Google +1 0 Retweet 0 I’m sitting on the roof of a walk-up on East 11th Street, staring into the large glass windows of a penthouse apartment across the street. It’s an early evening in August, the perfect time of night for idling: not late enough to make you worry that you’ve wasted the night, but since the sun’s gone down, it’s no longer oppressively humid—cooler outside than in. It’s not a nice roof, this roof, littered with junk and surfaced unevenly.

Brad Pitt in Ad Astra. Image: © 20th Century Fox/ IMDb When I was a kid, my brother left his university astronomy textbook at my parents’ house one summer break. I was still in primary school, but I was determined to read it – and inspired, I assembled a space museum in a storage space attached to our garage, with drawings and facts about the planets pasted to the walls. Admission was ten cents, and the only visitors were my parents who swung by one time each.