MANHATTAN REVISITED: A JULY 2017 IMAGINARY EAVESDROPPER'S REPORT FROM NEW YORK CITY

---"July in New York is probably the one month of the year when I get excited about visiting upstate. As long as it's cooler up there, I rate my vacation a success. But it always helps to find a museum up there that actually appeals to me as being very special, something you can't get here in Manhattan. That upstate museum about Susan B. Anthony---I've always wanted to go, but 
haven't ."

---"Whenever I vacation in upstate New York, I expect to find lots of Mormons up there searching for what they believe to be lost sacred writings left behind by Joseph Smith. It's probably their hope to add it all to the Book of Mormon. I always find that fascinating, this special relationship between Utah and upstate New York. They probably even hold annual pilgrimages in which hundreds of Mormons from Utah travel together to upstate New York in order to retrace the footsteps of their religion's founders. Upstate is their Mecca. And now I'm wondering which denomination got started in New York City. It's probably the Jehovah's Witnesses, but I'm not sure."

---"I'm surprised we don't get more pilgrimages to New York City from Jehovah's Witnesses around the world. Or if we do, I haven't read about it in the New York Times."

---"I would love to see our mayor comment publicly on whether he feels very honored to have New York City serve as world headquarters for Jehovah's Witnesses."

---"You mention the LDS religion, or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. There are millions of New Yorkers who, if I told them about 'LDS' followers, would reply that I was obviously dyslexic, and had meant to say 'LSD' followers instead. 'LSD followers' are New Yorkers who have a one-track mind. Their mantra is 'getting high,' and you see them in the emergency rooms of hospitals."

---"To me, the biggest surprise is that we don't have a religion here that features rap music at every service. The only tough part would be when a rap performer gets gunned down in the church's sanctuary in the middle of a Sunday morning performance before the congregation. Our city's rap performers have a flair for turning up in the obit page of the New York Post every week."

--"If I owned a hotel in upstate New York and I was desperate for business during the summer time, I might re-name my hotel as 'Latter Day Saints Hotel' or 'Lost Pages Hotel' and hope it would get all the Mormon business. At least with the Mormons, you can be sure they won't be using fraudulent credit cards when they pay for their room."

--"To me, a better way to make some money out of the Mormons is if you were to set up a business that promises to ship a vial full of 'sacred soil' dug up very close to the site where the Mormon Church got started in western New York in the 19th Century. You could sell that vial for $500 each to Mormons all over the world, and you could then qualify to join the New York Millionaires Club. I'm just assuming that's the name of the club for New Yorkers who are very rich without being billionaires. But it's possible they came up with a more creative name than that for their group. So when you attend that club's meetings, you could propose a champagne toast to the Mormons around the world who made you filthy rich."

---"To me, it would be a massive rip-off if you tried to sell 'sacred soil' vials containing soil from western New York to Mormons all over the world for a price of $500 each.  They would accuse you of  treating Mormons like morons, and they might even file a lawsuit against you."


--"To live in New York is to inevitably ask yourself who first coined the term 'filthy rich', and what is the full story behind the coining of that term here in Manhattan? I cannot imagine living here for more than a month without asking those questions."

---"I wish they would do a new Hollywood movie about the tragic death of talk show host Art Linkletter's daughter after she got high on LSD and thought she could fly. Can you imagine a New Yorker high on LSD trying to fly off the top floor of the Empire State Building?"

--"The feature story I am always expecting to find in the New York Post is the most recently documented bizarre addiction that has been studied in great detail by the Columbia University Addictions Research Center. You can always count on New Yorkers to be the first ones to come up with an exotic and life-threatening new addiction."

--"Personally, I wish the Mayor would insist on a survey of City Hall employees to identify which of the dozens of addictions being studied at Columbia's Addictions Research Center are currently applicable to City Hall employees here. Results of that survey would make the front page of The Times, and they would trigger a citywide and nationwide controversy when the truth about our City Hall employees' lifestyle practices were finally exposed to the entire world."

---"My wife says she would like to invite our clergyman into our home for dinner, but she is not yet sure whether she trusts him. She has heard that some clergymen have ties to organized crime, so she wants to do lots of criminal-background checks on him before she invites him over. Personally, I find it very sad that she is willing to sit through lengthy sermons by that clergyman and put money into his collection plate every weekend without being completely sure whether he is or isn't a gangster. Personally, I wish my wife would just flip a coin to resolve her doubts. If it's heads, she invites him over. If it's tails, she permanently removes his name from our party invitation list."

--"I've heard worse horror stories than that. When my daughter got married, she didn't trust the presiding priest enough to tell him where she and her groom were going for their honeymoon. She was worried the priest might meddle in their honeymoon plans, if he found out where they were going."

---"There may be a market for a new audiotape that exclusively features honking sounds from each hour of the day in Manhattan. I feel sure that when New Yorkers travel or relocate to other places, they will get homesick and want to listen to that type of audiotape to savor the good old days when they lived here. So there's a huge market for this type of audiotape, it could make someone a millionaire if they just put it together and marketed it in the right places."

---"Speaking of marketable items, what about Bottled Water from Niagra Falls? Wouldn't that make you a fast million dollars if you put that type of product on display in New York Chic gift shops that attract tourists? The bottled water would sell really well, especially if you printed a warning on the bottle that the water from Niagra Falls is so sacred you should not even think of drinking it. It is water that should be worshiped, and never, under any circumstances, sipped with the tongue of a mere mortal."

--"Personally, I'd love to find a coffee-table book dedicated to Classic Moments here. One of those classic moments would be a photograph of aspiring Democratic Party politician Geraldine Ferraro directing traffic during a traffic jam here. Do you remember the year when that happened? Maybe I can look that photo up and add it to a collection of Classic Moments from our city's history."

---"I find it very odd that I don't know the name of any world-famous Vegetarian Cooking School here in New York. You would expect there to be a highly prestigious Vegetarian-only cooking school here that gets lots of media publicity. Or did I somehow miss the issue of The Times that profiled that world-famous vegetarian cooking school here?"

----"I don't understand the point of the Sister Cities program, when 90 percent of New Yorkers would fail a pop quiz in which you asked them to please name at least one currently listed Sister City to New York City. If the program is not well-publicized, you have to blame the Mayor for that."

---"How many of those Sister Cities get profiled in The New York Times or The New York Post as being kindred-spirit cities of ours? You have to wonder why the news media here don't do more to promote them."

---"The movie theater here I dread the most is the one that promotes homemade pretzels to everyone. The movie fans who buy those pretzels get so thirsty from all the salt in those pretzels that they are always getting out of their seat in the middle of a movie to buy a huge drink. Then they return to their seat and proceed to spill their drink all over the floor. This can be very annoying, especially if you are watching a romantic movie and the romantic couple are just about to kiss each other on the screen."

---"Maybe there should be an Incorruptible New Yorkers Club. I would definitely qualify, if there were a club of that type. But the minute we elect a President, we find the very next day that The Daily News has done an expose on him revealing that he is, in fact, a scam artist. So our entire group might have to disband if our first president resigns in scandal."

---"If you want to play chess, you should visit the Russian Tea Room. The Russians love to play chess with anyone, and they play chess brilliantly. So it's obvious that Russian Tea Room is the place to go if you want to hang out with top chess players."

---"I find it very surprising that no one knows the name of that sailor who famously kissed a woman in Times Square a matter of minutes after World War II had ended. That is a world-famous photo, but I have never seen a follow-up story on the life of that sailor or the woman he kissed so passionately. Maybe this would make for a Hollywood movie updating the world on what happened to each of them after their world-famous kiss."

--"Personally, I would like to find out the name of the college in New York City that has the smallest number of students. If I attend that college, maybe I could finally get a chance to ask questions in class that actually get answered by the instructor."

--"To me, the best place to attend college would be in a designated Sister City of New York. There must be some type of special discount on tuition they offer if you're enrolled as a student at a college in one of our sister cities, so you could save lots of money if you attend college there. I don't know why there aren't more New Yorkers seeking to study in one of our Sister Cities. Anyone who's enterprising would have come up with that strategy for a reduced tuition rate in college."

--"I think so many of us believe that New York's turnaround began when Cadillac relocated its headquarters here. Or is that superficial of me to say?"

--"No matter what you say, I am among the millions of New Yorkers who could never afford a Cadillac. So the Cadillac factory, to me, is just another example of an elite club I couldn't qualify to join."

--"My boyfriend says he's been very depressed ever since he figured out how to refer to those of us who don't live in Upstate New York. 'We're downstaters', he says, and he is very sure it's quite a downer to be a downstater. 'No', I told Harry, 'it's a downer to live in Upstate New York. Be very grateful you live here in Manhattan. This is The Land, The Place, The City, and up there it's all just Hinterlands. Upstate is one big question mark, as in 'why bother to visit there?'. Our beloved Manhattan, by contrast, is the Radiant Exclamation Mark that makes our Empire State shine brightly!"

---"She is such a Celebrity Groupie that she plans to pursue a cookbook project in which she exclusively offers favorite recipes from famous celebrities here. She says she's sure she can make a million from it. I told Sally she she must be out of her mind. There are plenty of celebrity cookbooks already on the shelves of B. Dalton's, so she'll be lucky if she can pay one month's rent on her apartment from total income she earns from that project."