MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: The Franklin Avenue Shuttle

The Times Square–Grand Central Shuttle train may have two major New York City landmarks as its termini, but the lesser-known Franklin Avenue Shuttle, which cuts across Crown Heights from Franklin Avenue to the eastern edge of Prospect Park, carries local commuters and offers a brief but idyllic, train trip along its five-mile, mostly outdoor track.

I board the train on a drizzly Wednesday morning, just pass rush hour, at the Franklin Avenue station. In front of the turnstiles, a man plays slow jazz on an electric guitar. A breeze greets me at the top of the escalator, and I step off onto the outdoor platform. A wall of stained-glass windows leads from an elevator bank onto the platform and creates a dancing rainbow path as the tree branches filter light through the colored panes. Through an opening in the platform fence, I can see a row of townhouses whose rain-darkened brownstone sets their painted lintels into bright relief.

Soon I feel a quickening of the breeze and hear the hiss of wheels on wet tracks. I am pleased to see the shuttle has orange seats and a dark speckled floor, my favorite combination. As we wait, I watch through the open doors as a Verizon employee empties the quarters from a platform pay phone with a rich, heavy rattle.

The last passenger squeezes in and the train lurches into motion. Leaves of passing trees brush the windows, making wet streaks. We pass an industrial linen laundry, a girl in red on a bike moving down a rain-slicked street, a roof with a folding chair set on it, apartment buildings with windows propped open with bottles of shampoo, walls of graffiti. The wheels make the crun-a-crun sound that trains make only on outdoor tracks. We pass over one bridge and under others, through tunnels and around bends. At the final stop, Prospect Park, an MTA employee boards and mops the train, refreshing its antiseptic cinnamony smell. Every eight minutes, another ending and another beginning.

TASTE: Reben Luncheonette’s morir soñando

From the door of Reben Luncheonette, you can watch the JMZ train catch the light as it rounds the bend in the elevated tracks and soars over the East River, hissing and clacking and clanging across the Williamsburg Bridge. Beneath, traffic jostles, fruit stands spill, nail salons reek through smudged doors. But it all seems like one harmonious urban symphony, because you’re holding a morir soñando, a drink whose name means “to die dreaming.”

The morir soñando is a Dominican version of the American orange Julius, and at Reben it consists of fresh-squeezed orange juice, milk, and sweetened condensed milk blended together into a frothy shake and poured over ice. The cheerful, aproned counter staff slap it down on the counter in a fluted ice-cream-soda glass, with a straw alongside. You can wedge yourself in between the mirror and the counter (the whole place is only about twelve feet wide) or, better, sip your drink just outside the door and take in the view.

It’s creamy, sweet, milky, with a faint fizz and acidic bite. Flakes of orange pulp drift up through the straw and offer discrete tangy bursts in the syrupy sweetness. The chilling clack of ice against the teeth only adds to the flavor, as the froth from the blender limns the cubes in a lacy foam. It must be consumed right away—and then, perhaps, immediately again, like a good novel. Last time I was there I had two or three in a row.

The Reben is not shy about advertising its house drink: the awning boasts Morir Sonañdo #1” beneath the luncheonette’s name. The name glows in neon in the window. Inside, a hand-painted sign above the counter offers: Morir Sonañdo: You taste it: If you don’t like it, don’t pay, and this sign abuts a painting of a man and a woman touching foreheads, gazing into each other’s eyes, and sipping a morir soñando from twin straws. Just beneath is a row of cardboard Advil and Tylenol dispensers—in case the dream doesn’t kick in right away, I suppose.

MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: Laughter yoga

First, let me make clear that I seldom laugh. Jokes, comedians, movies all fail even to make my lips twitch. So when I heard about laughter yoga, I thought I would put it to the test. That it was taught by a chiropractor in a basement office in Midtown only added to the appeal—and to my skepticism.

On a Monday evening, I arrived at Better Health Chiropractic, on the tails of two elderly women who were having trouble navigating the door buzzer. This confusion elicited the first laughter of the evening—the kind of nervous, conspiratorial chuckling that mitigates awkward urban encounters. As I waited for the class to begin, surrounded by brochures about back pain, I eavesdropped on my fellow laughter yogis. “So I’ll be laughing at the U.N. at noon tomorrow….” “I’m always happy to meet anyone who laughs.” “Oh, he’s a natural!” “Do you know Laughing Laura? She was on the World Laughter Tour.” There was talk of people named “Vishwa” and “Kitaria.” One man spontaneously stripped down to his LAUGHTER YOGA T-shirt and gave me an encouraging grin.

The chiropractor, a cheerful gray-haired man in a white lab coat, ushered about a dozen of us into a small exercise room. We stood in a circle and introduced ourselves. Most were white professionals in their mid-thirties. There were three rules: (1) make eye contact, (2) go with the flow, and (3) “fake it till you make it.”

After an introductory speech, the class began. We were set loose in the room to interact with our fellow yogis. The exercises involved building from a giggle to a full-blown laugh, producing a snort-laugh, pretending to laugh and then pretending to suppress it, walking like a penguin, and speaking gibberish. I tried to avoid looking at myself in the mirror. At the end of each exercise we chanted, “Ho ho ho, ha ha ha!” in unison and returned to the circle to receive instructions on the next exercise and information on the health benefits of laughter—which kind of killed any levity the exercises may have kindled.

I definitely felt self-conscious and was happy to be able to resort to the common vocabulary of fake-laughter gestures to ease my path around the room: raised eyebrows, sidelong knowing looks, throwing back the head in a “gale” of laughter, leaning forward conspiratorially, clapping each other on the shoulder, holding one’s stomach or slapping one’s knee, jabbing an elbow. At first it was hard to tell whether my classmates were “faking it” or “making it.” But then I noticed heads turning toward one woman, who was obviously overcome with real laughter: tears streamed down her cheeks, she had to lean against the wall to stay upright, and she couldn’t suppress her giggles even during the statistics. The sight of her was the only thing that brought a genuine smile to my lips.

I was relieved when the class was over. Laughter is indeed a full-body workout. My neck and stomach ached, my cheeks hurt, I felt a quiver in my chest, and my throat was raw. But I didn’t feel the adrenaline rush that comes with exercise or that follows a bout of real laughter. Instead, I felt the exhaustion of insincerity—and relief at being free to shrug on my coat and return to my usual, humorless self.

N.B. A few weeks later, I read a column in the New York Times: A FAKE SMILE CAN BE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH.

SIGHT & SOUND: Plane View Park

It was one of those startlingly bright winter days when metal gleams and everything in the city seems hard and sharp: the perfect day for plane-viewing.


Plane View Park, in Astoria, overlooks the takeoff runway at LaGuardia Airport. It consists of a curved path of cracked asphalt, a semicircle of parched grass, and a few benches affording a view of the airport through a chain-link fence; next door is Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, and close by is the airport control tower. The air is heady with the smell of jet fuel, and the BQE roars past between the park and the tarmac.

Looming over the highway, through the diamonds of the chain-link fence, I saw the gleaming hulks of American planes queuing up for takeoff, their tailfins lurking above the sound-barrier wall like a line of hungry sharks. One Delta 747 inched forward, then rounded the bend at the end of the runway, near a red and white striped wall. The heat waves from its exhaust pipes blurred the low-slung Queens skyline in the distance. It waited again, wings spread, and a few moments later came the roar as the wheels spun, burning rubber, and it was off—into the startling blue day, with a high-pitched whine.

The planes didn’t seem to be moving as fast as it feels when you are a passenger. In fact, from the vantage of Plane View Park, it seemed improbable that the plane would actually make it off the ground. As I stood in the frostbitten snow at the edge of the park, I thought of the passengers encased in these planes and that feeling of no-going-back that you get as your plane taxis up the runway. There they all were, just meters before me, buckled into their seats by their scratched plastic windows, screens glowing in the seatbacks before them, perhaps pretending to relax or read, but really thinking about the impending rise into the air, the lurch, the sucking back into the seat, the impossible speed, the captive feeling of fatalism—and then the sudden silence as the wheels leave the ground and there is just tilted blue sky: a violent departure for a more peaceful place.

As I walked back to my car, a flock of winter birds swooped over my head and scattered into the day.

N.B.: I later realized that a much better “plane view park” is just feet from the park proper, parked alongside the chain-link fence on Ditmars Boulevard, where the view of the runway is closer and less obstructed. Apparently, the livery cabs knew this already, as I took my place in the queue of napping drivers.