  Home Last night, I sat in a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue waiting for my friends' show to finish. I had a very engaging book, but the rain kept drawing my gaze outside. One window opening to the avenue, the other to 52nd Street. I remembered that this place used to be a little neighborhood restaurant called King Crab. It was the place where Pongo and I once splurged on their lobster dinner and the place where I had discovered I liked salad if there was red onion and honey mustard dressing.
A girl had served us who I had been in a group with at the Actors' Fund. I could see across the street the deli street where I used to drag poor Thurber on our nightly quest for the newest Ben & Jerry flavor, and the Ray's Pizza where I had pizza the one and only night I went out in drag. I was about 20 and my friend Kevin and I went to Studio 54 as Krystl and Alexis (I was Alexis). At the corner, an apartment building where I once looked at an apartment.
Top floor with roof access, which I liked because you could gaze down at the stage door of the Uris. And across 51st from that building, the funny old hotel-turned-condos with all the explorers' names where I once saw Wanda Richert. Must've been '83 and she was probably doing Nine, replacing Anita Morris. Though I couldn't see it from the coffee shop, I thought about that next corner, 50th Street and Eighth Avenue.
When I moved here, two of those corners were parking lots and the third hosted the infamous Adonis Theatre, the first blue movie theatre I ever visited and a building that, learning it was to be torn down, made me cry, because it had once been a silent movie theatre and in the hot months I'd heard they'd shown the movies on the roof, the Eighth Avenue El interfering hardly at all. The idea of that was/is so romantic to me. Practically every block houses some memory for me, some connection of my life, the life that truly began that day in August I stepped off the bus at Port Authority.
Squares of concrete stand sentinel to moments in time that live only in my weird memory. I sat with my book and my coffee and suddenly I was crying. After six months, it hit me that I'm finally home. My home. The place in the world I truly belong. A little later, walking up 45th Street towards Broadway, past my old friends the Golden, the Booth, the Music Box I found myself smiling, then laughing, then just smiling again. Knowing, knowing , where home is and being there. At last. I could cry and laugh at the same time. 
