Donna Ross

[first lines]

Erica: [voiceover, doing her radio show] I'm Erica Bain. And as *you* know, I walk the city. I bitch and moan about it. I walk and watch and listen, a witness to all the beauty and ugliness that is disappearing from our beloved city. Last week took me to the gray depths of the East River where Dmitri Panchenko swims his morning laps, like he has every morning since the 1960s. And today I walked by the acres of scaffolding outside what used to be the Plaza Hotel. And I thought about Eloise. Remember Kay Thompson's Eloise? Eloise who lived in the Plaza Hotel with her dog Weenie, and her parents were always away, and her English nanny who had eight hair pins made out of bones. That Eloise. The adored brat of my childhood.

[indistinct overdubs for a few lines here]

Erica: ... li'l punk kids... Sid Vicious spewing beer from his teeth in the Chelsea Hotel... Andy Warhol, his sunglasses reflecting... Edgar Allan Poe, freeing live monkeys from the crates of a crumbling schooner on the oily slips of South Street. Stories of a city that is disappearing before our eyes, its people swept over the Williamsburg of those stories. So what are we left of those stories? Are we going to have to construct an imaginary city to house our memories? Because when you love something, every time a bit goes, you lose a piece of yourself. Where's Eloise going to sleep tonight? Can you hear her ghost wandering around the collapsing corridors of her beloved Plaza, trying to find her nanny's room? Calling out to the construction workers, in a voice that nobody hears, "Has anyone seen my turtle, Skipperdee?" This is Erica Bain, and you've been listening to Streetwalk, on WKNW.