New York Moments

From where, I beg someone to tell me, did the laudable custom of through shoes on street cables germinate? My mother informed me that her Queens childhood was filled with unburdened cables, but also realized that mine was not. That narrows the scope to about twenty years. The impetus for asking this, is of course, a shoe cable incident. As I was ambled over to the neighborhood drugstore I was almost impaled and knocked over by a clunky object, that soon revealed itself to be a pair of heavy black shoes fell out of the sky. While I regained my footing, the proud tosser of the shoes expressed his disappointment in missing his target to his cohort. They tried- and missed again. This time I knew to stay clear. I went inside the drug store, purchased by breath right strips, which my doctor assured me would cure any sleeping ailments I might have, and prayed that the shoe tossers would be gone when I left the store. No such luck. Now, of course, a small, male only crowd had gather to discuss the best shoe tossing techniques. One man left the movie trailer he was working from that was shooting on the street to come over and suggest using the tape from a cassette- he testified that it always worked for him. Oh, the tosser said, and tried (and failed) again. This time though, the failure to attach was surely due to the lack of cassette tape. As an unwitting passerby, I wondered how many times in life one sees a crowd gathered to singly focus on throwing shoes on a cable on a street closed to traffic due to a movie being shot? Not often, and only in New York.