Dancing in Chelsea with Willy and Dylan

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I’ve just had an amazing weekend in New York, which is what people come to New York for, to experience life in ways they didn’t find likely in Anoka, Minnesota. I love Anoka but it has its limits.

My weekend: Friday I was writing a book, and that night my love and I went to see “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway. Saturday, I worked. I got a call from my doctor saying the CT scan showed that my right hip wasn’t broken when I fell on it but only had a huge hematoma that would ache for a few weeks, and that night we went to a wedding of a friend’s daughter at the famous Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street and a dinner and dancing that followed. A hundred guests, and I looked around as the DJ started spinning the discs with a walloping bass beat I could feel in my butt and I was the oldest person in the room at 83 and I was in a state of delight and started swaying and twisting with my love. Sunday, I slept until 12:30 p.m.

The book is about enjoying a happy old age, which is another good reason to live in New York, a city with excellent public transportation. You do not want to spend your declining years driving around looking for a place to park. If you want a quiet cozy day, just stay home. We live on the 12th floor, where you can hear the sirens but not the rumble of the subway. Eight floors above us is the former apartment of a Hollywood star who broke up with her Italian heartthrob because he wouldn’t divorce his wife back in Italy and marry her. He loved colorful shirts and she grabbed armloads of them and threw them off her balcony and they fluttered down onto the brownstones below like dying butterflies. She would’ve thrown him too but he caught the elevator in time.

Arthur Miller wrote “Death of a Salesman,” which I saw when I was in college and it’s a great play but it’s also showing its age. It has great lines, like “A salesman is a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake. A salesman has got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

The women on stage were awfully good, especially the wife, but the men were very busy acting, yelling, running around, being actors, and I didn’t believe a word of it. It’s supposed to break your heart but my heart just burned.

But the wedding. Oh my goodness. A Presbyterian bride marrying into a Mexican family. This is a whole new vision of human existence. I have loved the English language all my life and plan to go on using it, but English has its limits and that’s the time to break into dance. The mother of the groom approached me and I took her in my arms, despite my aching hematoma, and it made me very happy. I saw the father of the bride dancing like a wild man. The music was so loud I sang along at the top of my voice and nobody could tell that I didn’t know the words.

I’d never been in the Chelsea Hotel before because Dylan Thomas’s death there in 1953 made it a literary landmark and I despise that sort of landmark. Thomas was a great poet who drank himself to death while living at the Chelsea and having an affair with a lady who took him to her doctor who shot him up with cortisone and morphine and he was taken comatose to St. Vincent’s where the combination of whiskey and bad medicine killed him.

From this comes the legend of the self-destructive genius that has been the ruin of so many. When I saw the kids in fancy clothes jumping around to “Dancing Queen” and joined by their elders and my love dancing with the mother of the bride, I saw Willy Loman dancing with Dylan Thomas and life turning into the brave comedy it is meant to be. The damn fool wrote “Do not go gentle into that good night,” that old age should “rage against the dying of the light” — he wrote that when he was blind drunk, the freaking idiot, and died at age 39. I wish long life to the couple. Make each other laugh. No need to be a troubled genius. Be grateful for each other.

Garrison Keillor © 05.11.26