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During my eleven years as a New York City public school teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that poverty has on the classroom. In low-income neighborhoods like Sunset Park, where I taught, students as young as five years old enter school affected by the stresses often created by poverty: domestic violence, drug abuse, gang activity.
One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.
Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now, that may be a bit much for those who don't come from New York, but clearly we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advantages.
Every song brings back memories, like I remember where I wrote all these songs. 'Universal Heartbeat' was my apartment in New York City. 'My Sister' was at my apartment in Boston. I remember places and I remember what I was thinking when I wrote it.
I find it ironic how New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is so focused on such small issues as drink sizes, while ignoring the massive infrastructure challenges in New York - lousy roads, third-world airports, traffic jams, etc.
I grew up in New York City, where we played highly unorganized sports: stick ball, stoop ball, and the occasional game of baseball with no adult supervision.
In Toronto, I grew up taking a subway, I grew up taking a bus. I spent my formative adult years in New York City, walking the streets, taking the subway. You're connected to the larger whole. L.A. is so spread out, and you're so incubated inside those cars and it's so exhausting to deal with the traffic, without really having the human contact.
From my first days in Washington D.C., where I rolled a whole four downtown blocks without seeing a single shop, cafe, bar or restaurant I could not access, to the beautifully accessible buses in New York City, I was in heaven.
Well, first of all, I grew up in New York City, going to first a public school, then a private school, and when I got to the private school in Manhattan, I learned of what we called 'The Promised Land,' which are the Hamptons. I've always had an affinity for the Hamptons.
The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.