Just When You Think You Can Get Away With A Subtle Heart String-Pulling Literary Device, There’s Reality To Bitchslap You
Which is the post-modern existential condition of our 21st century city:
Posted: April 11th, 2008 | Filed under: Crap Your Pants Say Yeah!, I Don't Care If You're Filming, You're In My Goddamn WayOf all days, Jane Pollicino chose Thursday to show up for volunteer work at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center opposite ground zero. The tribute center seeks “people whose lives were profoundly changed by September 11th” to lead visitors around the site and convey the personal dimension of the story. (Mrs. Pollicino’s husband, Steve, was a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald’s office in the World Trade Center, where he died.)
And of all places, Mrs. Pollicino came up from the subway at the exit on Church Street adjoining the yard of St. Paul’s Chapel.
“It took my breath away,” she said.
For there, on one corner of the great iron fence around St. Paul’s, were hundreds of tributes to the dead: photos, flowers, candles, stuffed animals, American flags by the dozen, Mass cards, F.D.N.Y. T-shirts and a firefighter’s turnout coat, interspersed with handwritten valedictories. Two nearby trees were even in leaf. It was as if seven years had rolled back all at once.
Closer inspection showed a few signs taped to the fence. They said, “Film set.” This remarkable evocation turned out to be a matter of stagecraft: an art-directed simulation for a location shot in the movie “Julie and Julia,” based on a book by Julie Powell in which she sets out to make every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The brief scene on Church Street involves Amy Adams, as Ms. Powell, emerging from the subway and walking by the memorial-draped fence.