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What I Learned from Being a Beggar in New York City for an Hour
Whatever happened to the kindness of strangers?
I have never been fired from a job.
Except once — a week after the man I wrote 350 speeches for in two years — Donald J. Manes, the Borough President of Queens — committed suicide in his kitchen because he knew he was just about to get busted for stealing more than a million dollars from the City of New York in what is now affectionately known as the Parking Violations Bureau scandal.
I wasn’t fired because I had done anything wrong. I hadn’t.
I was fired because the successor to the Not-So-Honorable Donald J. Manes wanted to clean house in a “B” movie politically correct way to appease the irate public’s need for reform.
A new leaf. She was turning over a new leaf and a whole bunch of other metaphors being supplied to her by a newly hired PR advisor.
The bottom line? At 37, I was out of a job — unemployed— with an insanely exorbitant Upper West Side rent due in less than a month.
Having saved almost nothing from my speech writing gig and with absolutely no desire to write for yet another person with delusions of grandeur, I decided to go the artistic route and earn my…
