August 15, 2003

the blackout heard 'round the world

To be heard in the voice of Janice from Friends: "OH. MY. GAWD."

whee haw, it's a blackout! so at about 4:00 or so yesterday i was sitting at a piano in a practice room at my school in Manhattan when the lights went off. I thought it was just in my room, so i skulked out, irritated that my practicing was being interrupted and irritated because i have to break into the rooms with my hip to begin with, and my hip bones were both already sore from opening the other door by throwing myself against it earlier.

i digress.

so i opened my door and stepped into the hallway, which was black. another girl stuck her head out of a room down the way and we stared at each other, confused. i walked into the main hallway of the 4th floor, which seemed abandoned but for a janitor. i thought, oh well, and sat back down in my practice room and began practicing scales, which i didn't need to see the keyboard or sheet music to play. i text messaged kristen and told her the lights went out in my practice room and on the whole 4th floor and i was playing in the dark. i figured the lights would come back on in a few minutes.

about ten minutes later a lady came on a loudspeaker declaring herself part of the public safety department and asking us to "please evacuate the building in a timely and orderly fashion."

so i knocked on the doors of the other two people who were in practice rooms and told them, because they didn't hear the announcement. then i headed downstairs and sat down on a bench outside where tons of people were speculating on what had happened. kristen texted me back that the whole city was out, and soon a man told me power was out all the way up to canada and all the way west to detroit. kristen (who was coming from 19th St)and i decided to meet at 42nd & 6th because we still wanted to see our show, and we assumed everything would be up and running pretty soon. BIG MISTAKE.

had we headed home THEN we may have had a better shot of getting there before dark. but we were off, nonetheless. about 2 and a half hours later we finally found each other at 47th and Park. we realized there would be NO show, as there was no electricity of any kind. anywhere.

i have never seen so many people in my life.

we ended up backtracking up to 59th and saw that no buses were running to Queens. so we started walking across the queensborough bridge with about 6 million other commuters. i have never seen so many people in my life, i kept thinking.

by the time we got to the bridge we'd already walked about 4 miles or so (and don't think we were dressed for this occasion, either), and our feet were dying. i could have cut them off and been o.k., i thought. we made it across the bridge after about an hour, and it was dark by then. we stopped to sit down and have a drink and a bite of sugar to sustain us. we gave some apple jacks to an older lady who had a long way to go, too. there were so many older people who should not have been walking so far, and there was nothing anyone could do to help them. there were no trains, no busses, no cabs, no nothing. we were starting to worry we would have to walk all the way home. we couldn't get a hold of anyone, and we knew we wouldn't make it that far; about 4.5 miles. we saw a payphone after walking another mile or so off the bridge, and we stood in line. the lady in front of us told us she was there to pick up her sister but couldn't find her. she finally got a hold of her mother who said her sister was waiting at her car, and she called us "good luck," and said to come with her, she was giving us a ride home. miracle of miracles, i don't know what we would have done. if we could have found a spot less covered in broken glass and litter, i would have said we should just lay down and try to sleep. so god bless that woman, helen. and god bless our upstairs neighbor (also named helen, i just realized--that is kinda weird, isn't it?) who gave us an extra phone that doesn't use a power plug thingee. so we got to call people and tell them we were alive. always nice. regardless of feeling i've been kicked around a bit, i finally got my car from the parking lot where it was stuck today, and i'm thankful we had it so well. there were SO many people worse off than us. i'm thankful i wasn't in an elevator or in the subway. i'm thankful i'm young. what a nightmare. i hope everyone is o.k. that was a LONG story. i hope you didn't doze off too many times, whoever you are. i will never take for granted the subway again.

blueavenue at 8:08 p.m.

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