New York voyeurs often check out Overheard in New York, an online home for all the weird, wonderful and downright unclassifiable exchanges heard on the street and subway.

A friend pointed me in the direction of this charming exchange, which I was horrified to discover took place somewhere along my own street:

Hobo #1: Bitches is crazy, crazy. Had no choice but to f**k that squirrel.
Hobo #2 : Nooo, nooo.
Hobo #1: Yup, yup. That squirrel was worth five cents.
Hobo #2: Nooo, I’ll tell you how much that squirrel was worth. $15.98.

I don’t understand it, either.  

I’m delighted to announce two websites: one for my Bridge Literary Services client, novelist David Kowalski, and one dedicated to his novel, The Company of the Dead, which will be in Australian bookstores at the beginning of August. The book’s website includes a blog which David will use to describe the writing process, his experience of being a debut novelist, and to answer readers’ questions when the book is released.

July’s Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine has reviewed the book as “excellent”, giving it four out of a possible five stars. There’s also an interview with David, which I hope to reproduce here when I get my paws on a copy.

David’s websites were designed and built by the wonderfully creative Ruth Peyser, an Australian expatriate in New York with whom I regularly play tennis. My role was to help David work out his online strategy and devise a creative brief for Ruth to interpret. I would love to know what you think.

This is a big week for Apple Girl. I will reveal more by week’s end. In the meantime, I’m delighted to share this photograph of me with two of my pals from PlayGroup. They have been as elusive in my attempts to capture them as the Tasmanian Tiger.

The happy snap was taken on Friday night after a stellar performance by Debbie Workman (left) in a one-act play called “A Face Divided” by Edward Allen Baker. She was very convincing as a judgmental hospital nurse faced with handling the paperwork for a struggling young couple after the apparent fall down a flight of stairs of their baby daughter.

On the right is Susan Jerome, a singer and actress who has appeared in many Broadway musicals. She is finishing a one-woman show at the moment.

I feel really lucky to have met so many interesting people since coming to New York. It’s a place where creative pursuits are considered a crucial part of the social fabric that ties people together, and where there are multiple opportunities to pursue them.

Last Friday night Simi and I attended a fabulous production which I will write about shortly, but not now: I’m wrapping up for the day at Simi’s office and am heading uptown for a game of tennis at the 96th Street courts in Riverside Park. Sigh.

Reading through my scribbled notes I took that night, I had forgotten I’d written down some great lines from an anonymous gossip. He was talking about a young playwright he’d recently worked with as a dramaturg on his second play. He said to his friend, in a mock-simulation of a conversation with the young gun:

“OK, you’ve written your pot play, now we’ve got your crack play, now we need a heroin play.”

Apparently plays about addicts are SO twentieth century.

I’m a bit tardy with this theatrical report on Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles - another thrilling production in the Brits Off Broadway annual festival of theatre from “across the pond”, as the locals like to say.

In the award-winning one-man show, Christian McKay (above left) played Orson Welles (above right) from the age of 25 through to 70. His performance was comprehensively convincing, captivating - and a little exhausting to watch. God knows how the actor must have felt after each show. In capturing a figure who, in all respects, was larger than life, the production managed to squeeze in several lifetimes’ worth of anecdotes, self-obsession, disappointments and carbohydrates on a very small stage.

There’s a wonderful interview with the actor here (just scroll down the page a bit) in which he suggests that the show will be coming to Australia. Fingers crossed.

I’ve been busy with professional development in the last week or so, attending a few seminars at the Foundation Centre here in New York. They run many courses each month on proposal writing, budgeting, research and so on. I’m doing all these courses in order to help better advise my New York based non-profit clients, and also to understand current best practice in the US so as to share that knowledge upon my return to Australia in October.

Today I attended the very instructive “How to Approach a Foundation” led by the Centre’s own senior fundraiser. There were about 80 people at this lunchtime seminar, which was completely free and open to anyone as long as they had registered in advance. The Centre’s mission is to connect grant-seekers with US grant-making institutions, whether they are private or corporate foundations. The Foundation Centre practises what it preaches: its $20 million annual budget is funded from a variety of sources, including earned income from their publications and day-long courses and research. Australian philanthropists: did your eyes pop out of your head at that number?

On the door to my apartment is a little lever that any visitor who has made it through the security door at the front of my building can depress to let me know they’ve made it up the stairs after I’ve buzzed them in. It’s excruciatingly loud. Visitors are not something I tend to have. But today was different. Today all of us in the building were forewarned of a visitor who would be coming into every apartment. Yes, today was my semi-regular appointment with The Exterminator.

It’s been a Big Week in the Big Apple for Apple Girl. In the past seven days I have:

1. sold another book to Pan Macmillan Australia on behalf of my Bridge Literary Services client Sally Cooper, for her hilarious memoir of two years in Afghanistan – yes, a book about Afghanistan that will make you laugh instead of cry;

2. learned that The Company of the Dead*, the first novel by my first client, David Kowalski*, has already doubled its originally scheduled print run ahead of its August publication because of the level of interest from booksellers and the enthusiasm of his publisher – again Pan Macmillan, who describe it as “a stunning debut” and have a lovely web page about the book; and

3. confirmed that an extract from my own work-in-progress, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, will be published in the Spring 2007 edition of The Griffith Review. This is the story “Sex and the Single Bed” I wrote about in an earlier post.

As you can imagine this is all very exciting, and slightly odd given that it’s all Australian-based literary activity that has originated from New York. Writing it down makes it all seem a bit more real, as mostly these things are a result of many phone calls and emails, and I sometimes wonder what I’m spending my time doing. Apart from writing my book, that is.

* Fabulous websites designed by my weekly tennis-pal Ruth Peyser – one for David and another for the book – will be live by the end of the month – stay tuned.

Last night I played host and tourist all at once, by having dinner at Tavern on the Green, a dining institution for more than 70 years, with friends of my parents who are visiting New York this week.

Located just inside Central Park at 67th Street, the entrance to the restaurant also happens to be the parking spot for the horses who dutifully pull carriages full of tourists. The consequent smell was not apparent for several hours, thankfully.

Although ours were the only Australian accents I heard, the venue is a wonderfully ornate tourist trap, complete with enormous chandeliers and gilt mirrors. We had the benefit of sitting al fresco in the topiary garden thanks to to the balmy weather and our early start (7pm, which to some New Yorkers constitutes a late lunch).

As I’ve said on these pages before, it’s great to “speak Australian” with people who undersand the language, and Lynn and Neville were great company. I can’t tell you their surname because they brought with them some precious contraband for me – a bottle of Vegemite, now considered an illegal substance by the Food & Drug Administration due to its high folate content.

Since attending a very useful MediaBistro class on writing the personal essay, two of my classmates have had their articles published. Have a read of this eye-opening and amusing piece by A. Pinsker, with an unexpected Australian connection.

As for my own efforts, I have an article on submission to a magazine here and am waiting on confirmation of an extract from my book appearing in an Australian magazine, so fingers and toes are crossed.

Thursday was an unusual but very interesting professional experience for me, when I was a film production assistant for the day. The film in question is a documentary by my client Simi Linton about war and disability, which is in the very early stages of its pre-production. Through her extensive network of contacts we had secured an appropriate room and two cameramen to shoot a few brief scenes in which Simi addresses the camera with a script that I had helped write. These will form part of a “trailer” that yours truly will use to help attract funding for the project.

“A few brief scenes” took almost ten hours due to things like the time it takes to set up the lights, the cameras, to rehearse, and to wait patiently while the construction noise from the roof of the building next door abates. It was fun to be away from a computer screen for a day and to be the “gofer” who organised coffees, lunch, and provided powder touch-ups to Simi’s face as required.

It’s been difficult to avoid Paris Hilton. Cable news channels had constant coverage of yesterday’s bizarre events – in which Paris was released into home arrest wearing an electronic monitor, then taken before another court which ruled that she must return to prison. The weeping face of the clearly traumatised heiress was broadcast repeatedly. Amid the relentless white noise of vox pops, so-called “expert commentators” and giggling co-anchors on the main broadcast networks, I was struck by how all of them refer blithely to the two-tiered system of justice in the US in which wealth and privilege give a select few options not available to the rest of us. But none of these talking heads propose any solution to this outrageous double standard. Just rueful smiles and a shaking of heads.

My prediction is that after she’s finally released, Paris will hold a press conference in which she will whinge about her treatment, claim she was a victim of “the system”, but offer just enough of a regretful tone to garner the forgiveness of a culture obsessed with sin and celebrity in equal measure. It will also ensure her a huge book deal.

I’m still waiting for Donald Trump to show up like the Saviour and redeem Paris, like he did with the “fallen” Miss America 2006 after her tearful revelations of partying as a wide-eyed mid-Westerner in big bad New York City. Trump, owner of the Miss USA Pageant, swept the young former maiden up off the floor and reinstated the crown upon her tarnished head. In the US anyone can offer redemption if they have enough money and fame, and there’s a blonde and blue-eyed Mary Magdalene who wants saving.

OK, I suspect some of you have too much time on your hands. Otherwise how to explain the 538 unique visitors to this website in the month of May alone? That’s just under 50 of you every day. Monday is the most popular day to visit (I see that coffee on the desk beside you). It’s also a thrill to see so many returning readers – 93% of visitors have either bookmarked this site as a favourite or have typed in the address directly, which means that very few people land here without intending to do so.

For a site designed as an online journal to record my observations of living in New York for the benefit of friends and family, it has exceeded my expectations in terms of sustaining my own interest, let alone yours. Writing this blog has been an education in being concise and in identifying noteworthy topics to write home about. Thank you for your return visits. I am very grateful for your continued interest in the adventures of Apple Girl.

(If you suspect that my own keyboard tinkerings skew the total, you might be surprised to learn that no matter how often I visit my own site to update its contents, the statistics only count the same computer once in a 24-hour period.)

A dear friend called me from Sydney this morning. Well, it was late last night his time. During our survey of the usual topics – work, family, professional gossip, our shared neighbourhood – my friend (who wishes to remain unnamed) revealed that he had been doing the 7km Bay Walk so regularly that he had dropped 10 kilos (22 pounds in local parlance) since the beginning of the year.

“You’re half the man you used to be,” I told him.

“No, I’m half the man I never was,” he said. How I miss the Australian sense of humour.

Steven Poole’s recent book Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality contains an interesting riff on that most overused word “community”. It’s a word that I encountered with increasing frequency while working in corporate-community engagement at Freehills, inevitably began using it myself, then started hearing it so often out of my own and others’ mouths it started to make me nervous.

For those readers for whom “community” is a linguistic tool of your trade, have a read of this Slate review by Jack Shafer, from which I quote below:

“We’re drawn to the ‘semantically promiscuous’ word, Poole writes, because it allows us to simultaneously express our tolerance for a group and our discomfort. For example: the homosexual community and the black community. People rarely refer to the heterosexual community, the white community, or even the Christian community, because in the United States and Britain, they are the ‘default’ positions and carry the ‘privilege of not having to be defined by a limiting identity’. Likewise, a group defined by the majority as transgressive, say, the Ku Klux Klan, would never qualify as a ‘community’ even though it organizes itself with the same conscious effort as the ‘anti-war community’.

What do you think? Is “community” in the eye of the beholder?

Americans love to complain about the price of gas. When Australians complain about it, we call it petrol. With the weather fast hotting up, the SUVs are coming out of their garaged hiberation and onto the open road. The regular chorus of “news” stories about gas prices on radio and TV here leaves me with the impression that there would be little to report were it not for fuel cost and shark attack stories.

Page 66 of June’s Wired magazine was a useful antidote to this mild hysteria. An illustration of the globe pinpoints about two dozen cities around the world, from which a line leads to a boxed dollar amount of the respective price per gallon (3.79 litres) in US dollars. Sydney comes in at $3.57, about halfway between London ($6.65) and Riyadh ($0.45). And New York? A relatively moderate $2.76, especially for a city in which not having to drive a car to get to where you want to go is one of its most liveable features.

What a thrill to see a first read-through of a draft play by my pal Suzanne Renaud, whom I met at the playwrights’ course last year. Richard Caliban, our teacher from last year’s course, is now conducting more intensive workshops which culminate after 10 weeks in a reading by professional actors. Suzanne invited some of her friends along to watch, which I thought was very brave. The taking-off-all-your-clothes-in-public sort of brave.

“The Green Box” is a very strong first draft of a one-act play. The actors had lots of fun and there were plenty of laughs. The attendees discussed the play afterwards, making suggestions that Suzanne scribbled furiously in her notepad. Wherever there’s creative effort there will be critics close to hand, I thought. At least in this environment they are constructive ones.