Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots
Tales of Nights I Shouldn’t Have Made it Home Alive
Andrea Janov
Earth Island Books
I’ve been reading a lot about music scenes and the communities that support them. This Must Be the Place by Jesse Rifkin (read the Ink 19 review) gives a really good account of how music scenes and communities in New York have changed over the past 60 years. That book is why, when I came across Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots by Andrea Janov, I took notice. Janov’s book is a collection of poetry about living on the Lower East Side of New York during the early 2000s. I read this collection because I was eager to see New York from a personal perspective. What was it like living in the scene back then?
Janov writes about life as a young woman, living through her college years waiting tables in swanky clubs, partying too hard with the industry types in the dive bars and VIP rooms, and dating the wrong people. She writes about watching the sunrise from her tenement fire escape. She writes about dancing on bars, drinking Jameson neat. She writes about waking up with hellacious hangovers, with only a vague idea of what happened the night before and no idea how she wound up on this couch.
This passage really resonates with me: “This apartment is the kind of place you can only live in your 20s when you are young, broke and stupid.” It reminds me of apartments I’ve had and places I’ve visited, when we were all trying to become something. Janov uses creative typography to establish the cadence and meter of her poems. The line spacing takes the place of rhyme.
The last section of Short Skirts deals with leaving the reckless years behind, finding the right partner in the uncool part of town (who lives on Wall Street?), and inevitable changes. The last few poems are about how the city moves on at its own pace, leaving you behind as the next group of college kids move into newly constructed dorms and set out on their own adventures as the “young, broke, and stupid.”
