I’ve been in New York for two weeks, where the unthinkable has happened. Even for a city accustomed to extremes, it is so hot, so humid, so reminiscent of Mobile in Alabama, or Mumbai that, all over New York, people have been forced to break persona to talk about the weather. If the south of England feels like Riyadh, with its oven-blast of dry heat, New York comes with total humidity.
It is so dense, so impenetrable, so vastly more furnace-like than any previous summer that it makes you angry just walking down the street. Air conditioning takes the edge off, but it’s like trying to disguise medicine with a mouthful of Coke; it only goes so far. Meanwhile, the sweat pours down your back and the sky burns white.
New Yorkers are about as keen to complain about the weather as they are to point out a celebrity, but in these conditions you can’t not talk about it. While the mayor’s office discusses plans to extend cooling systems to subway platforms, individuals devise strategies to be outside for as little time as possible – like Minnesotans planning a trip across town in a snowstorm. At least the hospitals are temperature-controlled.
In Britain, where nurses keel over with heat exhaustion, it can feel, at times, as if the single adequately air-conditioned space is the Apple Store; only the iPhones stay cool. Current trends in New York that may or may not make it over here: frozen yoghurt is having a resurgence but it’s the posh kind – Greek, not Pinkberry. The newest snack craze is “dot cake”, an $11 cube of dry sponge topped with icing and hundreds and thousands and served in a cup, which, according to the New York Times, New Yorkers have been lining up at 6am all summer to buy.
Not at our local Gourmet Garage, I will say). Beyond food, two things worth mentioning: “dog Crocs”, seen on several pets in the street to protect their paws from the punishing heat of the pavement and, as the name implies, tiny canine versions of their owner’s shoes, only these come in a four-pack. And on Broadway, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, a heartbreakingly brilliant interpretation of the original show in which a tired-seeming vehicle, badly damaged by the terrible film version, gets a radical makeover.
Jellicle Ball is set in the Black and Latino drag pageants of the 1980s ballroom scene and is led by two legendary performers, André De Shields, who at 80 still brings it, and Junior LaBeija, who many will recognise from the classic 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning. The costumes, by Qween Jean, and choreography by Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, all rightfully won Tony’s. As Andrew Lloyd Webber says, it’s criminal the show closed early last week.
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