Dreaming of the Coma Baby

I love watching movies from the 70s and 80s that take place in New York City. Whether it's Panic in Needle Park, Brewster's Millions or Fame: they all automatically become period pieces. Time capsules of a city that once was.

Watched Bright Lights, Big City over the weekend. It came out in 1988 when I was a 12-year-old kid living in the cocoon of the suburbs...

In one scene, Kiefer Sutherland sidles up to a bar smoking a cigarette (indoors!), orders a drink and borrows the bartender's phone (landline!) to call his buddy Michael J. Fox at work, coaxing him out to play.

Let's just focus on the phone for now. I don't know anyone's number anymore. Growing up, I memorized numbers. (The number at my old childhood apartment: 642-1166.) Now, they're all just codes that I assign names to. If you put a gun to my head and handed me a landline that I could use to call ANY NUMBER TO SAVE MY LIFE, I'd be dead meat.

But let's get back to the story...

The adorably compact Michael J. Fox plays an aspiring NYC-based writer whose wife has left him. (So far, the story predicts my adult life.) He spends nights in neon-bathed clubs with his wingman, Kiefer Sutherland. Snorting coke in bathroom stalls with tall women. Mourning over his dead hot mom (played by Dianne Wiest, who was sooo hot back in the 80s before she became a therapist). Drinking too much wine and trying to make out with Swoosie Kurtz.

Basically, a perfect mirror of my adult life in New York City.

Seriously, I watched movies like this and Less Than Zero growing up and they almost seemed like glamorous fantasies of what adult life could be. Revisiting the movies, I've got a better critical eye for how and why they don't quite work.

BUT I STILL WANT THAT LIFE.

Cocktail parties. Scenes. I'm closer and to a certain degree have some access. But I haven't truly arrived. I've got some work to do before I get there.

Watch for David Hyde Pierce with his one-line role as "bartender at fashion show". (And check out the character-actor documentary, "The Face is Familiar".)