Kaitlyn: On my way into the office Friday morning, I tripped on a bird. Or, I saw that a bird was underfoot, assumed it would move, got most of the way through the step before realizing it wouldn’t, then tried to avoid it by spinning my foot out at a 70-degree angle from my leg, which meant planting my ankle bone on the edge of the curb and falling sideways in slow motion—like a tree—into the middle of Madison Avenue. I was protected completely by my puffy coat, I texted Tamar, except from mortification. Two men who work in advertising asked if I was okay, then said “Are you sure?” and kept walking before I got even halfway through my explanation of what had happened with the bird.
In the process, I also ripped six inches of the seam in my one work skirt—up the back, creating a window through which one could quite easily see pharmacy control-top tights and an American Eagle thong. This part I did not realize until 5:30 PM.
I turned the skirt sideways and took the 6 down to Astor Place, where I nodded as I always do at St. Vincent’s K-Mart. Tamar met me at Ukrainian East Village Restaurant, which is where I intend to eat dinner every night for the rest of my life. We sat against the wall, one table over from the neon sign and a pair of large sons at dinner with their parents, who were asking them if they’d heard of “okay boomer” or Assassins, and we had delicious beige meals—chicken marsala, spinach pierogies, potato pancakes, apple sauce, a cheese blintz that made Tamar stop and stare at the ceiling in silence for a full 45 seconds, plus compote with fruit cocktail in the bottom. And coffee.
We looked like a twin-pack of off-brand Barbie dolls—same haircut, one brown and one fake blonde. Berkeley girl and suburban Protestant. Some women carrying a large star made of red and gold tinsel sang Christmas carols in I assume Ukrainian, which was made even more beautiful by the fact that we could also hear Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” coming from the back of the bar at the front of the building. “I can’t wait to see STOMP,” we said over and over, in the 90 minutes leading up to us seeing STOMP.
I wasn’t born wanting to see STOMP but I wasn’t born wanting to live in New York or blog about myself either. So, it has been one of my main wants for longer than I can recall—telling you why would be difficult and boring. All I know for sure is that my elementary school music teacher had a VHS of the TV movie from 1997 and played it whenever she was tired of us. The first time I saw the STOMP theater in person I was walking with the first boy I met on Tinder. Maybe that’s something? A different boy I met on Tinder offered to take me to STOMP for my birthday this year, and I labored all day over how to tell him without embarrassing him that it is not appropriate to accept a $90 birthday gift from someone you’ve been on five dates with.
Finally, my mother bought the tickets to STOMP. I let her spend money on me whenever she wants, really, but technically it was for Christmas. She’d been hoping I’d take a date, but when I told her I was taking Tamar she was even more excited. I think the idea of women being friends in New York is very romantic to her—something we have in common.
Anyway, does STOMP have a story? I asked at dinner, without bothering to look it up—I was busy staring at a boy Tamar met on Tinder, who was eating with his friends, who all looked like extras from Sing Street. Tamar pulled something up on her phone that didn’t say whether STOMP has a story but did say it premiered in London in 1991. (New York in 1994.)
You know what else premiered in 1991? Angels in America. Ha ha. The hundreds of Yelp reviews for STOMP are overwhelmingly positive, and they’re not all from tourists—I would say it’s an equal split between people from Florida and people from the Bronx. “Creative genius,” in their opinions. According to the New York Times, a “freak” accident in the late ‘90s resulted in a full cargo box of STOMP-specific trash cans sinking to the bottom of the North Sea. One cast member, Carlos Thomas, is 42 years old and has been in the show for over 20 years. These are the pieces of information about STOMP we entered STOMP with.
(I took a Susan Sontag book out of the library this week in an effort to be more like Harry Styles.) Susan Sontag says “the aim of theatre” is to “dissolve the distinction between the truth of artifice and the truth of life.” Well, the aim of STOMP is to be “THE RHYTHM OF NEW YORK.”
The Orpheum Theater smells like a Halloween store and is about the size of one of those creepy bodegas that go further back than you expect. Its official capacity is 347 and it was at most half full. It was the first audience I have been in that absolutely defied all generalization—I saw a man in a suit sitting with a woman who had a Mia Farrow haircut, a college-age boy sitting alone, half-a-dozen older East Village types with soul patches talking to some much older women in church clothes, several large bald men (one of whom was putting in eyedrops when we sat down), and maybe exactly two obvious tourists. Tamar and I had agreed beforehand to break “Dry January” with a wine sippy cup apiece at STOMP, but when she went to get them she was told, “We don’t have a bar. We only sell water.” This made sense, we had to admit. There wouldn’t have been a place to put a bar other than inside the bathroom, and as Lizzie observed when I told her about it later, “drunk stomp would probably be more than anyone could handle.”
At first, I was very serious about taking notes. I wrote down that STOMP opens with a man sweeping up a dirty floor, and tried to draw an Annie Baker parallel in my Moleskine in the dark. Then I started writing down things like “muscle tanks” and “muscles.” “One guy keeps breaking his brooms.” “The hot one nodded at a baby.”
I wanted to know everything about the five or six men and two women of STOMP. Are they best friends? Do they get a $2 beer at Sly Fox once in awhile? Do they spot each other when they can’t make the credit card minimum? Do they have trouble dating because of their demanding schedules in STOMP? Is STOMP considered a good “get,” job-wise, in the fields of percussion and dance? Tamar said that her friend Lake says STOMP used to be embarrassing because white people in the ‘90s thought it was black culture, but is that true now? Do they talk about this in the dressing room? Do some of them have bad opinions that the other ones hate?
The cast was not exactly “diverse” but it was black people and white people. They were wearing cool clothes arranged in uncool ways: linen pants with work boots, faded cargo pants with Chelsea boots. The Chelsea boots were also tap shoes. If there is a story in STOMP it is about the cast of STOMP, who are performing in a show, which is STOMP, but committing tiny acts of sabotage and exacerbating petty rivalries in the midst of that show. The cast of STOMP trip each other, or steal each other’s props, or glare at each other when they make some loud noises but not others. Often they are charmed by the audience and offer them fist bumps. Other times they are annoyed by the audience and mock their excited faces with exaggerated impressions. It took me almost the entire show to figure out that this was the show. The actors almost never spoke.
There were more dick jokes than you might think, usually involving rubber tubing. In a number featuring the male members of the cast wearing industrial-size sinks as necklaces, there was also a pee joke, the same one as in Austin Powers. There were very interesting safety measures, including stretching just one waist-high bungee cord across the front of the stage to prevent anything bad happening during the routine in which the two women glided past each other on shopping carts.
Obviously, there were moments where STOMP approached the surreal: At one point, the entire cast sat on the floor in a circle and ripped up a copy of the New York Times. The hot guy gagged himself with a Bic pen while the others used the Travel and Sports sections to make sounds that distracted and irritated him. The man with very long hair (who was in the show the least) cut holes in his sheet of newspaper and then stuck his tongue through one and made crazy noises like Hannibal Lecter. This reference must have killed in 1994! Then he rolled it up and pretended it was a selfie stick, which made the large men in the front row roar like they were in a strip club.
The whole cast lined up and flicked a bunch of lighters on and off and I was struck by a deep fear that the show was about to become about something.
It was not! The hot guy let the baby touch his trash can lid.
In the midst of so much noise for noise’s sake, I felt like my whole life up to that point had been a silent retreat, and it had “worked.” The show would go like: CRASH CRASH CRASH!!! Everybody is on the floor!!! And I would think: And? Actually, I wouldn’t think. Every time someone walked out from backstage holding an object, I knew exactly what it was for: It was going to be hit by something until it made a ruckus. If anything went wrong, I wouldn’t have any idea, because it would still be loud. Not since the first five minutes had anyone broken a broom handle and in retrospect that was part of the show. I felt like I was mowing the lawn or beating meringue. I felt like that Bible verse where they tell you God loves every hair on your head and every sparrow in the sky—he is just that undiscerning and he has just that much time. It was exactly as disappointing. It was exactly as comforting. I was like bluhhhhh. My mouth was open. I emerged from this state only once, when the men of STOMP came out with metal garbage cans strapped to their boots. This reminded me of the TikTok meme in which kids put their feet in or on things that aren’t shoes—7/11 slushies, chocolate cakes, traffic cones—and try to walk around while a clip of an Iggy Azalea song plays in the background. As soon as it crossed my mind I wanted to cry.
For the encore, the men led us in a series of follow-the-leader clapping exercises, like the ones they make you do in elementary school to return you to your body. You clap your hands and then you just want to be present and alert. Where is the pedagogical research on this? I thought. How do I do the opposite of it? Next to me, the college-aged boy breathed the slow, spitty breaths of deep sleep, and I was genuinely thrilled.
Tamar tried to buy us hot chocolates afterwards at a store called GEM SPA, but they were out. I said “we’ll find you a hot chocolate” and she said no, she’d only wanted one if she could have it impulsively at GEM SPA. She loved STOMP. She said it felt like a lobotomy, and that I should write about that. How it felt like a lobotomy.
“But was it the rhythm of New York?” I asked her. She laughed and said “No! It was like a lobotomy.”