In the evening we pushed our red shopping stroller along the five-minute walk from our hotel to Columbus Avenue, where crowded dining tables spilled out onto open terraces and tall mannequins in tight black dresses stared down at us through plate glass and neon. It was in New York, I decided, that we would be successful. It was there that we would work every evening until the crowds drifted away after midnight. It was there that we would have lots of glorious fun and return home with bags of money. There that we would live out the long, warm nights that would later complete the repertoire of my father’s stories, a repertoire of which I longed to be a part.
— by Mandy Sayer, Dreamtime Alice
