LAST FRIDAY NIGHT AT THE PLAZA HOTEL -- Dan Kennedy Alan Manevitz, a psychiatrist specializing in anxiety at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, has been granted a suite on the ninth floor of The Plaza hotel for its last night of operation. And so he's invited a few friends up for a sort of going away party for the famous New York landmark. "Oh, it's nothing to be too anxious about," we tell ourselves in suite 901 drinking Champagne and trying to keep things celebratory. Or even drinking soda water, those friends of Alan's who have come to realize that alcohol only increases their anxiety. I'm standing in the corner talking to a woman who has just dealt with suddenly losing her mother in a freak accident. We're interrupted briefly when Alan steps over to open one of the windows nine stories above Central Park South. Duly noted by our little group: an open window in a ninth floor Plaza Suite on its last night. "I'll keep these open for a little fresh air if you promise not to jump," Alan says, and the room is filled instantly once again with conversation and laughter. One of the gentlemen in my corner -- the corner with a congregation of mildly-depressive, socially anxious types who tend to use dour humor to cover things up --- agrees with the woman whose mother has recently died. "Even though the developers buying this place have to maintain a certain amount of hotel service with the condominiums, the fact is, The Plaza is dead. And death is a very permanent thing." And I guess they're right...and after talking with them for just fifteen minutes, perfectly suited for each other, I might add. But the truth is, tonight will the last night of the original Plaza as it was when The Beatles stayed here on their first trip to America in 1964 to play The Ed Sullivan Show, or when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald would stay here. Everyone says Hemingway hung out at The Plaza, but in A Moveable Feast he says he told everyone he would stay there but then secretly stayed across the street at the Sherry Netherland to ditch the press. I get a little sidetracked hoping they don't turn The Sherry Netherland into condos. Mark Twain stayed at The Plaza a lot. Frank Lloyd Wright lived here for six years while the Guggenheim was being built. Marilyn Monroe stayed here, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,...I consider all of this while I find my well-adjusted girlfriend Maria across the room talking with a woman who describes herself as an extroverted agoraphobic. Another Champagne for Maria, another soda water for me, so it goes until we finally make the rounds saying our goodbyes. On the way out at around midnight, the two of us step out of the elevator and start walking alone down the long marble corridor that will take us from the mezzanine to the ground floor and finally to the front door. Billy Joel's New York State of Mind quietly echoes into the hall from somewhere in the hotel, and everything seems so sleepy, this big beautiful thing going to bed for the last time. As we walk down the hall, the music gets louder. We turn the corner to take the stairs down to the ground floor, and notice a janitor in old blue coveralls sitting at a black piano strapped to boards and wheels that was apparently being moved from the Grand Ballroom. A mop leaning up against the wall, keys hanging from the side of his waist that will open every room here that you've ever heard or read about somebody staying in during the last century and change. His last shift on the last night of an era, and he's just sitting there hidden away quietly playing New York State of Mind on this piano before they load it up in the morning; that is the way that song was meant to be played.
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THE BOOK, THE AUDIO, THE TYPING ABOUT BOTH
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