Word: skid
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...moment is palpable. The Reagan Administration did not invent the poor, but it has largely ignored them. "We've dug deep pits in this country in the past eight years," says Tanya Tull, a Los Angeles housewife who founded Para Los Ninos, a family-service facility on Skid Row. "People are falling into them -- and we've taken away the ladders too." Reagan's policies, argues Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, have "created a set of social problems that simply were not there in 1980. We're going to be paying for them for a long...
...hard work for this retired advertising account executive, handing out 300 pairs of gloves every year on New York's infamous skid row, which runs from Chinatown a dozen or so blocks north to Cooper Square. "Oh, if I just wanted to stand here and give them away, I could get rid of 1,000 in an hour. Easy. But I prefer to go looking for the people I want. The ones who avoid eye contact. It is not so much the gloves, but telling people they count...
Greenberg has witnessed a parade of defeated humanity in his quarter-century of giving on skid row. He has offered gloves to his former professor at Brooklyn College and to a once famous baritone at the Metropolitan Opera, recognized by Greenberg from his days as a youthful walk-on at the Met. Most of the people he meets are confused, seemingly uncertain of where they are or what they are doing. The more frightened refuse the gloves, and he will follow them for several blocks, insisting, "They're a gift. I really want you to have them." One elderly...
...with names like the Prince and the Sunshine. But most of the 82 bars and dozens of flophouses that once served a floating population of aging, mostly white, casual laborers and alcoholics, have gone. Instead the area now boasts expensive apartments and chic restaurants. The newer homeless inhabitants of skid row are more likely to be young, unemployed men who clean car windows at intersections or mill in groups on street corners. Drugs have become a perennial problem on the Bowery. "It's a fearful place," says Greenberg. "The men are a lot younger, a lot tougher...
...talented cast is led by Mo Rocca as Seymour, a schlemiel who works in a skid-row flower shop owned by Mushnik (Adam Schwartz). Seymour finds a strange plant, which he names Audrey II, after the Audrey who is the object of his affections (Sibel Ergener). Seymour discovers that the plant flourishes only when fed human blood--and it talks, to boot. He must struggle with the Faustian bargain Audrey II offers him: fame and success for the store and Seymour himself, in return for fresh flesh...