Harlem, even at its worst, has always been good to me. The first friend I made in New York after leaving my home in Germany lived in Harlem. We met in 1982 at an audition at La Mama. I was excited when Dana Jackson invited me to her house. She lived with her mother in East Harlem, not far from where my favorite writer, James Baldwin, was raised. In my German guidebook Manhattan ended at 96th Street and foreign visitors were warned not to venture beyond because they might not leave Harlem or Washington Heights alive. But I wasn’t afraid of Harlem. I already knew Harlem from James Baldwin’s novels, short stories and essays that I had read in the German translation.

As soon as I emerged from the No. 2 train at the corner of 125^th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, the air was full of danger and menace. The only white person on the street, I held my head high and walked with confidence east for a block, then turned right onto what Baldwin had called “wide, filthy, hostile Fifth Avenue.” I looked for the grocery store’s Jewish proprietor who had given the Baldwin family credit, the shoe repair store’s Negro proprietor, the Buy Black street corner meetings and the Holy Rollers Baldwin had described. I hoped to find the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly where James got his start as a youthful preacher.

Instead I found blocks of abandoned and burnt-out buildings that looked like Germany at the end of World War II. Street vendors aggressively hawked their wares and Black Israelite preachers pontificated to their street flock. One of them, looking extraterrestrial in his shiny silver headband and belt, suddenly spewed hatred in my direction. “Whites are the incarnation of evil. God will wipe out all the Christians and Muslims. Only we are his chosen people.” I hastened my pace. Shady characters lurked in doorways. Young men offered me drugs. A good number of people had collapsed on the pavement, strung out on potent liquor or drugs. I was relieved to finally arrive safely at Dana’s home.

The Jacksons’ residence was fortified like a medieval castle with window gates, burglar bars, slide bolts, deadbolts and impressive looking high-security police locks. Dana explained that they had been broken into plenty of times: from the roof, the backyard, the basement, and through the kitchen window. Once I passed the security barrier, I found three elegantly furnished floors, an entire brownstone just for Dana and her mother. There were bay windows, a graceful parlor, shiny parquet floors, fireplaces and a library with thousands of records and books. Miss Jackson could have started her own radio show with her outstanding R&B collection.

Dana’s mother felt sorry for me, all alone in New York, so far away from my own mother, and adopted me for Thanksgiving, Christmas and many Sunday dinners. On my first visit I stared in disbelief at the abundance of food, the visual and olfactory feast spread out before me. The rich burgundy tablecloth was covered with plates, bowls, terrines and glass candlesticks. There were three plates for each of us, rolled-up linen napkins and a confusing assortment of cutlery. Unsure about what to do with all those knives and forks, I waited for Miss Jackson to start. She wore a chic flower-print dress that clung to her curvaceous body. Her hair was done in the latest Jheri-curl fashion and the bright orange of her lipstick and perfectly manicured nails matched the colors of her dress. So different from my mother who always wore an apron or a housedress, never a stylish dress like Miss Jackson. My mother hated make-up. She had been indoctrinated by Hitler’s youth organization for girls. A German girl is a pure girl. A pure girl doesn’t smoke or paint her face. Only whores do.

“Child, are you hungry?” Miss Jackson asked me. Then she folded her hands neatly in front of her chest. “Dear Lord,” she said, “thank you for all the blessings you have bestowed upon us. And thank you for bringing us this nice visitor from Germany.” Overcome, I turned beet red. I was twenty-six and no one had called me Child in a very long time. At home saying grace was simply going through the motions, mumbling the words without thinking. Miss Jackson made up her own prayer. She spoke like a poet and infused each word with deep emotion. An atheist since forth grade, I was ready to join her flock.

I was taken with Miss Jackson’s grace, hospitality and her amazing culinary talents. She introduced me to new foods: black-eyed peas, mustard greens, okra and best of all sweet potato pie. Her collard greens looked and smelled similar to my mother’s Grünkohl, but tasted so much better. Her smothered pork chops were the best I ever had. I found that black people, like the Germans, devoured pig’s feet, ham hocks and tripe. What we called Saumagen, they called chitlins and maw. Our drinking habits, however, were worlds apart. The Jacksons did not drink beer or wine with dinner. They drank ginger ale with their meals and strange alcoholic concoctions before or after.

Miss Jackson taught me about Black history, about Harlem as “the capital of Black America,” the excitement of the Civil Rights Movement, the riots and the devastation caused by drugs that followed. “The middle class moved to the suburbs and left nothing but poor people behind. Harlem turned into a slum.” A supervisor at AT&T, she purchased her brownstone on East 122^nd Street during that time and was very proud to have made it on her own. Smart women buy low and sell high.

A legendary beauty, Miss Jackson had enjoyed many suitors in her youth, but never married. She had banished Dana’s father, “the sperm donor,” from her life. He drank too much and “was a heap of trouble.” She had a steady boyfriend, but would not let him move in with her. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Hank, the owner of a trucking company, was a perfect gentleman. He took her to fine restaurants, Broadway musicals and weekend trips to Atlantic City. For her birthday, he bought her serious jewelry. He let her pick out his clothes at SYMS and agreed to have the rims of his hats taken in, since he, a native of South Carolina, looked “too country” for her taste. I thought of Miss Jackson as a feminist icon and tried to follow her advice. Don’t let a man treat your ass like a comfort station. My mother, afraid to be on her own, had stayed in a loveless marriage with an irascible husband. She could have learned a thing or two from Miss Jackson’s chutzpa.

In Berlin I lived in a spacious, sunny apartment with a beautiful desk and hundreds of books, but in New York my room was sparse like a prison cell. Leaving Harlem, the warmth and comfort of the Jacksons’ home, was tough. I was not looking forward to my dingy Alphabet City sublet. Emboldened by all the whiskey sours, I rejected Dana’s offer to walk me to the subway: “Don’t worry, I’ll get a cab.”

There were no yellow cabs in Harlem, but I was hoping for a livery cab to come my way. For a long time I waved my arms frantically, but all the cars passed me by. When I got fortunate and one car stopped, the driver, a mean expression on his face, sped away as soon as I tried to open the rear door. Sometime later, pathetic like a dog caught in the rain, I rang the Jacksons’ doorbell again. Dana smiled at my foolishness, then escorted me to the street, and hailed a cab. The drivers always stopped for her.

When I was nine, the newspaper brought disturbing images into our living room. Young black children marching through the streets of Birmingham had been knocked unconscious by blasts of water jets and mauled by German shepherds unleashed by the police. Feeling sorry for the little girl my age in the picture, I became a champion of justice for black people and sent a letter to John F. Kennedy. I begged him to do something about the grave injustice in the United States of America. Later, in high school, I joined a radical students’ group and got arrested for plastering the town with flyers proclaiming Solidarität mit dem Schwarzen Panther.

I admired many black artists. Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughn, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Black people seemed to possess a greater capacity for emotion and compassion. In Germany, I had been surrounded by anger, envy and bitterness, but sadness was a forbidden feeling. You pretended that everything was fine, that you were brave and tough, that you didn’t need help or sympathy. You let no one know that you cried yourself to sleep at night. The concerts of American Blues musicians I attended as a teenager showed me a different way of being in the world. Champion Jack Dupree, Big Joe Williams, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Joe Turner and all the others made it okay to moan and grown, to wail and cry. They made it okay to be human, warts, flaws, tears and all.

In 1986 I married a handsome black man who had moved to New York from Baltimore. He owned his own fashion company and lived in a posh seventeen-story doorman building on the Upper West Side where he was the only black tenant. Many evenings, attempting to return home from his SoHo store or a downtown party, empty taxis sped by us. I remembered leaving the Jacksons’ house and not being able to get a cab on 125th Street. Those drivers must have been retaliating for all the times they, their mothers or sisters were left out in the rain.

When Miss Jackson passed away I had no reason to go back to Harlem. The two cassettes she made for me became my most sacred possessions. Twenty-five years later, in the age of CDs and i-Pods, I refuse to retire my Walkman, so I can visit Nathan Jones, the Rubber Band Man and Mustang Sally whenever I need to lighten up. Dana and I drifted apart. She sold the house and moved to the East Village, took on a pen name and supported her artist’s life with the money from the sale. Her investment paid off. She became an accomplished playwright who portrayed the Black and White divide in her writing and performed her work in a raw and unsettling manner. The public and critics took notice. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won an Obie Award for her one-woman show. I did not stay with theater. I got a real job as a school counselor instead.

The school was located in Flatbush, a predominantly black neighborhood. It was the height of the crack epidemic and the devastation caused by drugs, the danger in the air, reminded me of my first visits to Harlem. But the inhabitants of Flatbush, immigrants from the Caribbean islands, not only looked and dressed differently from their African-American brothers and sisters, but had a different cuisine and spoke a different kind of English.

Inside the school, teachers and students were safe from the gang wars and shootouts in the streets. We did not venture out to get lunch at the Roti stand for fear of not making it back alive. Most of the students were Haitian. Gladimir, age ten, was my favorite. He had lost his mother to cancer and was mad at his father for bringing his girlfriend to live with them while his mother lay dying in the hospital. Gladimir’s fantasy was to be adopted by me. We’d live happily ever after in a big suburban home, drive to the mall in a station wagon and go on camping trips. He was disappointed that I didn’t own a car or a house like the white people on TV, but stayed my biggest fan. He called me the light-skinned lady and told his classmates: “Ms. Steegmann, she’s not white, she’s German.”

In June of 1998 my friend Agnes, a veteran of all sorts of house-and-garden tours, asked me to join her on a tour of historic homes in Hamilton Heights.

“Hamilton Heights?“ I asked. “Where is that?” I was afraid it might be in Westchester or Long Island.

“In West Harlem, between 135^th and 155^th Streets, Edgecomb Avenue to the Hudson River.”

“In Harlem? Are you sure?

“Positive. It’s an area where well-to-do and famous black people live.”

Agnes, born in Harleem, Holland, had a special fondness for Harlem. She took all her visiting cousins there. I had never heard of a Harlem beyond 125^th Street, but let her talk me into joining her for the 10th Annual Hamilton Heights House and Garden Tour. As soon as we got off the A train at St. Nicholas Avenue, she started to lecture me:

“The street was named after our Dutch patron saint. Saint Nicholas was the masthead of the ship that brought the first Dutch colonists to Manhattan Island.”

“When was that?” I asked.

“In 1669,” she said, beaming with pride.

I was stunned when we turned left onto Convent Avenue. This was a jewel of a neighborhood. There was at least one church on every block. The picturesque houses in an eclectic mix of styles with their high stoops and charming stepped gables, reminded me of Holland. The roofs with their towers, gables, dormers and chimneys were exceptionally exuberant. Inside, the buildings held treasures like parlor floors, Corinthian columns, fireplaces, marble mantelpieces and mahogany railings with delicate latticework. The double master bedrooms with their twin dressing rooms and matching his and hers marble or wooden vanities, were an enchanting time capsule. These beautiful homes were occupied by black professionals, interracial couples, and white gay men, many of whom were employed in the arts. They lived next to Dominican immigrants and welfare recipients. I had not encountered neighborhoods in Manhattan with such a mix of class.

Curious, I asked a gay white lawyer: “How do you like living here?”

“We love it. It’s marvelous.”

“But is it safe?”

“Don’t worry. This is mostly a middle-class neighborhood.”

None of the immaculately dressed people streaming out of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church turned their heads when a very tall, white, platinum blonde transvestite in hot pants crossed the street. For a moment, I felt as if I had never left the West Village. I recalled my friend David, an art dealer, who had recently passed away. In the Fifties, he had moved to New York from rural Pennsylvania. He found the gay balls in Harlem exciting and inclusive.

The grand finale of the tour was our visit to St. Nick’s Pub. Once we walked down the steps under the red awning, we found ourselves in a delightful dive. The red-checkered tablecloth felt sticky, so we opted to sit at the bar. The bartender, around sixty-five, with an impressive wig and too much pancake make-up, flirted with all her male customers. Many of them took an interest in us. Bayard Jones, old enough to be my grandfather, bought us a drink.

“Look at the photographs on the wall. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, they all hung out here in the old days,” he said.

“You’re kidding,” Agnes and I said in unison.

“What about Billie Holiday,” I asked. Billie, a gardenia in her hair, looked melancholy-lovely, in the faded photograph on the wall.

“Billie got her start here,” Bayard said. “Remember, St. Nick’s Pub has been in business since 1940.”

How I wished I could have met Billie Holiday here at St. Nick’s Pub. I imagined her getting off the stage, sitting down next to Bayard and ordering herself a whiskey. The barmaid, who had overheard our conversation, came over.

“St. Nick’s is the oldest continuously operating jazz club in Harlem,” she said.

“And it hasn’t changed a bit,” Bayard added. He turned to me. “So, how do you ladies like Sugar Hill?”

I finished my second beer and declared enthusiastically: “I love it here. I think I could live here.”

Agnes rolled her eyes and crinkled her nose at my foolishness. “You’d be back downtown in no time,” she said.

My marriage to the handsome black man did not last. I found a handsome Ukrainian man instead. Living downtown with my new love in one room (for eight years!) choked my creativity. I had given up on theater and then I gave up on writing, too. My English wasn’t good enough, and my German wasn’t great any longer. I had lost the fluency and elegance of my mother tongue. Anyhow, how could I be a writer if I didn’t even have my own desk?

We could not afford to rent a bigger place. We could not afford to buy a place either. Not anywhere below 23rd Street, our preferred stomping ground. I agonized every time I wrote the monthly rent check. One thousand-two-hundred-and-forty-eight dollars. Friends told me how lucky I was to have found a rent-stabilized apartment in the West Village, but I wasn’t so sure. In Berlin, I might live in a gigantic Art Nouveau apartment for the same rent. I worried that I might not be able to stay in my beloved New York in my old age. Most people couldn’t even afford Manhattan in their prime. Many of my friends were seeking more favorable surroundings elsewhere. They moved to Pittsburgh, upstate New York or back to Europe. Theater and dance companies, painters and sculptors all were leaving New York and stockbrokers happily snapped up their lofts. My first apartment, for which I had paid $334.56 rent in 1980, was now on the market for $775,000.

I yearned to own a home, to have my own desk, in a way some women yearn for a child. It was irrational and all-consuming. Miss Jackson had told me over and over: Only a fool pays rent. At forty-five, I did not want to live like a college student any longer. I haunted stationary stores and bought inkpots, writing paraphernalia and decorative objects for a desk I had yet to own. I started to investigate foreclosures’the only way to realize my real estate dreams on my salary. In November 1998, in the week before Thanksgiving, The New York Times advertised a few places in Harlem. The agent on the phone was suspicious. “Do you know the neighborhood? Have you ever been to Harlem?”

I fell in love with the duplex he showed me. Overlooking St. Nicholas Park, in walking distance from St. Nick’s Pub, it had spacious rooms, a separate office (a space to put a desk!), lots of light, great closets, a laundry room and storage for our bikes in the basement. Most of all it had good karma and promised me the life of a civilized person. A writer maybe?

My husband refused to look at the gem I had discovered.

“Harlem is a slum. You want to move to a crime-ridden area?”

“It’s a neighborhood in transition and nowhere near as bad as you think,” I pleaded.

Ivan grew up in Newark, New Jersey and had witnessed the 1967 riots. He had seen his parents’ house lose value; he had experienced white people’s fear and their ultimate flight.

“There’s nothing going on in Harlem. We’ll be away from all the action. I bet you can’t even get a baguette or a decent bottle of wine in Harlem,” he complained.

He was right, but I begged, pleaded, threatened, and finally got him to come up to Harlem. As soon as we left the subway station he was pleasantly surprised by the wide boulevards, the architectural gems and the friendliness of the people. Just as I had expected, he fell in love with the apartment, too.

We bargained M&T Mortgage Corporation down, borrowed money from my mother and scraped together the ten percent deposit of the $95,000 sale price. When we moved in February of 1999, good things started to happen right away. Bringing down the garbage for the first time, I met our middle-aged super.

“Hi, I’m Angela. They call me the Clean Nazi. I really appreciate how you separate your garbage. You do a great job tying up your recyclable newspapers and cardboard boxes,” she said.

After my initial shock of witnessing a black woman calling herself a Nazi, I answered: “Hi, my name is Anna. Thanks for the compliment. I’m from Germany. Recycling is a religion in my homeland. You might go to jail if you don’t separate your brown from your green and white glass.”

“My kind of country. Welcome to Harlem. How do you like it so far?”

While I stuffed my laundry into the dryer, we talked. Angela, from Trinidad, didn’t mind white people moving to her Harlem. “We have too many people with poor breeding the way it is now.” Our conversation turned personal. We found out we were the same age.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you menopausal?” she said.

“I stopped menstruating a year ago.”

“A drag, isn’t it?

“I wake up at four every morning and can’t go back to sleep.”

“Do you take hormones?”

“No, I believe in really good quality dark chocolate.”

“You’re my kind of woman.”

On my next trip down to the basement I brought her some of the Novesia Goldnuss Schokolade from my mother’s care package. Angela inspected the green and gold wrapping, the see-through window revealing dark chocolate with gigantic hazelnuts. “Hmm, that looks different,” she said as she ripped the package open. She put the first piece in her mouth and closed her eyes in blissful surrender. I have never had sex with a woman, but Angela looked positively orgasmic. I felt like a voyeur watching the chocolate and hazelnut dance around in her mouth. Finally she opened her eyes.

“Good Lord, this is divine. I’ll throw my Hershey’s away for this. What makes this so good?”

“The right kind of fat. Nothing but cocoa butter. No fillers and additives,” I said.

Angela licked her lips. “How can I make it up to you?”

“No need,” I said, “I just wanted to give you something to take the edge off those menopausal mood swings.”

Then I threw the bright yellow Ikea bags with my freshly laundered clothes over my shoulders and made my way up the stairs.

“Wait a minute,” she stopped me. “Do you have any plans for Saturday night?”

“No, not really.”

“Want to come to my birthday party? We’ll have a male stripper to entertain a crowd of menopausal woman.”

Of course I wanted to go.

Harlem amazed me in many ways. Downtown, I had become invisible to men. At forty-five, no one stared at me, flirted with me, or complimented me any longer. The store clerks called me Ma'am. In an entire year, the only man to hit on me was a smelly homeless guy who sat across from me in the subway.

“You are some fine babe,” he said.

“Thank you,” I replied. “I appreciate that.”

Stepping outside in Harlem, I could always count on male attention of the “Hello, Gorgeous,” “God bless you, Sister,” “Have a marvelous day, Lovely Lady” variety. Some men broke out in song at the sight of me in unshapely sweatpants, my hair unwashed and untamed. Once waiting for the bus, a black BMW stopped in front of me. The driver, a black man in his twenties, decked out in hip-hop attire, rolled down his tinted window and said with tremendous urgency in his voice:

“I have to get to know you!”

“Don’t waste your time with a woman old enough to be your mother."

“Wait a minute. You are married?”

“Very much so.”

“Happily married?”

“I’d say so.”

“Listen, he doesn’t have to know.”

Not everything was that rosy in Harlem. Couples aired their relationship drama under my window at four in the morning. Drivers parked their cars, opened the windows, turned the music all the way up and forced everyone to listen to Mary J. Blige. There were plenty of examples of bad parenting: mothers who cursed at their two-year-olds and fed them Pepsi and potato chips. The cheerful children’s birthday parties in the park started with hundreds of balloons and large tables loaded with fried chicken, potato salad and all kind of delicacies, then continued half of the night. The deafening rap music made me feel as if the loudspeakers were in my bedroom. Ignoring the rules, people barbequed, stank up the entire block and left enormous heaps of garbage. High school students murdered the daffodils in the park. On my way to the subway, I passed a mural. Owning a condo on 116th Street doesn’t make you a Harlemite. It told me I wasn’t welcomed by everyone.

I did not dwell on these negative aspects of Harlem life. I chose to overlook the abandoned buildings, the old man living in his car, the empty garbage-filled lots and liquor stores where I had to make my purchase through a bulletproof window. Most people were welcoming. Our white friends felt it, too. When they parked their cars too far away from us, our neighbors gave them proper directions and reassured them: “Your friends live three houses down. Don’t forget to turn off your lights. Don’t worry we’ll watch your car.” Some of our European friends fell in love with Harlem, too, and moved uptown.

I enjoyed practicing my high school French with my Senegalese neighbors. I took pleasure in the soothing view of the steep and rocky slopes of St. Nicholas Park, the early morning sparrow concerts and the children on the swings shrieking with delight. At night, I looked up at City College’s Shephard Hall in all its illuminated splendor. I walked on St. Nicholas Terrace startled by the magnificent view of the Harlem and Bronx skyline. I passed by the YMCA where Langston Hughes had stayed for seven dollars a week when he first came to New York to study at Columbia. The Harlem pace was slow and gentle, like a European city. One day, marching at frantic Manhattan speed, an older gentleman scolded me: “Don’t rush, young lady. It’s not allowed up here.”

Strolling through the City College campus, I admired the five Collegiate Gothic buildings. A sign explained that they were built with Manhattan schist, stone quarried from the excavation of the subway tunnels. The grey stone buildings were decorated with terra cotta ornaments and hundreds of grotesque figures, which seemed to represent the fine, applied and mechanical arts. Shephard Hall was the most spectacular of all the buildings. The security guard was kind enough to let me in without an ID. I was enchanted by the work displayed by the architecture students. The Great Hall was an awe-inspiring cathedral-like space. It must have been at least four stories high. I looked up at the splendid stained glass windows, and not watching my way I bumped into a professor. “Marvelous, isn’t it,” he said. “Just imagine Mark Twain and Albert Einstein lecturing here.” He rushed off before I had a chance to ask him about it. How lucky he was to work in a space like this.

Maybe I could be a college student again and return to that time of promise and hope in indefinite future possibilities. My alma mater, the Freie Universität Berlin, had been built by the Americans after World War II. The university was spread all over town. Many of the buildings were shabbily constructed and already rusting or falling apart when I was a student. This time around, I’d study in a much more splendid temple of learning, a college with a real campus. I looked up to the mural showing Wisdom looking down on Alma Mater and the Graduate. In that moment, when I contemplated my life’s journey, Miss Jackson whispered in my ear: Ain’t nobody holding you back, but yourself.

I fell in love with a charming desk. Made in Indonesia, it had an exotic aura and seemed perfect for a travel writer or well-traveled writer. Graham Greene, Bruce Chatwin and Rudyard Kipling would have loved it. I really couldn’t afford it, but treated myself to it anyway. Once I had my own desk, my love for writing returned. I wrote a story, “The Wrong Country,” and on a whim sent it off to the Cornelia Street Café. A week later I found a message on my answering machine. “You know, your piece is quite brilliant. We have an opening in three weeks. Would you like to read.” I saved the message for the next three months and was devastated when my husband accidentally erased it.

At the reading, middle-aged women, Angela among them, applauded enthusiastically. Invitations to read at other venues followed. Encouraged, I applied and was accepted to the Creative Writing Program at City College. Three years later, my story had swelled to a book of two-hundred-twenty-five pages. When The New York Times accepted one of my essays for publication, I took it as an omen to leave my job as a school counselor.

Now I teach freshmen at City College the finer points of writing. Last fall I even taught a class in Shephard Hall. Make room for the Lord to work his magic, Miss Jackson used to say. As usual, she was right. I don’t have to leave Harlem any longer to go to work. I just climb the stairs of St. Nicholas Park where youthful contenders challenge senior citizens to a match of speed chess, Mexican and African-American boys play basketball next to each other, but not with each other.

Eight years after moving uptown, I still delight in Harlem. Uplifting gospel music spills out of the churches on Sundays. Old people at the bus stop tell me about Harlem in its heyday, the Mother’s Day celebrations, First Communion processions, fabulous dances and musical performances. A retired gentleman at the Showman’s Lounge (in business since 1942) invites us to his sister’s house for Thanksgiving. I often treat myself to lunch at The United House of Prayers for All People. Their cornbread and meatloaf is almost as good as Miss Jackson’s. On my way over, the plaque at the Lionel Hampton Houses reminds me of how much the people here love and admire their artists. God gave me the talent. Gladys gave me the inspiration.

I am amazed by the countless hair salons. Many stay open seven days a week until late at night. Veronica’s Beauty-Rama is my favorite. She has won the Kiss 98.7 Choice Award for Best Beauty Shop, made first place at Hair Battle Royale, the Ladies Avant Garde Hair competition and many other hair shows. In the store window, her plaques sit next to photographs of her prizewinning creations. They show women with green, fire-engine red and blue hair, hair with rhinestones and glitter, hair sculpted into elaborate creations that remind me of peacocks and Mardi Gras revelers. Getting my bangs cut (for $3 as opposed to $15 on the Upper West Side), I study Veronica, all dressed in purple, with purple hair and false purple eyelashes, as she performs her magic on other illustrious customers. I’m amused by the signs posted throughout the store. If you can’t grow it, Veronica will sow it. In this salon we provide many services. Recess time for your kids is not one of them. Let God take care of it. Miss Jackson would have loved it. Smiling down from heaven, she gives me the thumbs-up: The Lord has turned your setbacks into comebacks. Bless your little heart, Child.