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It’s a cage and you know it. You’re putting me in prison.
    He said: Tell me what I ever ask you for.
    Rosie said: He gives you everything!
    I could not argue with either of them about anything. I know they were right. They had me cornered. Finally, Rosie had me.
    I said: Death is upon me.
    They laughed at me like chickens.
    Rosie: It’s good that you’re funny. It’s good that you find things so funny. You’ll be needing that sense of humor.
    But I wasn’t kidding around. That ticket booth! All day, hours and hours, the whole world going on around me. I’m going to miss everything. The world will pass me by. I will grow old and then die in that cage.

2
Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography of Mazie Phillips-Gordon
     
     
     
    I chose only to help the men, not the children. Men, I can help. I can give them some change, a place to sleep. I can call an ambulance. Their needs are simpler. And if they still fail, there’s no one they can blame but themselves. But the kids I steer clear of. There’s people better at it than me, who have the time to give. I’ve got a jar full of lollies for them, and that’ll do. I got nothing to say to them. Every kid on the Bowery knows they can come to me and I’ll give them a treat, and that’s all. Give them a treat and then shoo them away.

Lydia Wallach
     
    So she and my great-grandfather Rudy Wallach worked together for two decades at the Venice Theater. I have seen pictures of the theater, both the interior and the exterior, but none of these pictures are in particularly good condition. I know that the theater was beneath the tracks of the Second Avenue elevated train line, which I imagine made it quite noisy. I can also tell you the theater was in the style of the era, which is to say it was a classical-style movie palace, with European design influences. There were velvet seats—I presume they were red, though it was obviously impossible to tell from the photos I saw—and high ceilings with some ornate decor. The theater seated approximately six hundred people, and there was a ground floor as well as a balcony level. In its initial conception, it was, for lack of a better description, a very classy joint.

Mazie’s Diary, February 1, 1918
    Today was my first day at the ticket booth in the theater. Glass cage is more like it. Prisoners would complain if it were their cell, that’s how small it is. A chicken would squawk if it were his coop.
    I said: A dead man would complain if he knew this was his coffin.
    Rosie was moving things around lightning quick, a lockbox, a roll of tickets, a tin can full of sharpened pencils. She slapped a notebook on the counter.
    She said: Then I guess you’d better rest in peace.
    She stepped outside of it and ushered me inside. I bruised my hip on the countertop squeezing in there. That countertop had already marked me for life.
    I flopped down on the swivel chair and spun myself slowly around. There was just enough room for that. There was a heater in one corner, already blowing like it had been waiting for me all along. A clock ticking off the minutes before nine in the morning. A calendar on the wall. One month gone, February lay blank. Life was going to happen all around me. The truth of the moment struck me. I started to tear up like a stupid baby girl.
    Rosie said: Oh, you poor thing, putting in a hard day’s work
    I said: It ain’t that. I’m not afraid of work.
    She knew I was telling the truth. I’d always done what Louis had asked me to do.
    I said: It’s just that I’ll be all alone in here, and everyone else will be out there.
    I suppose I was being a little dramatic and I flung my arms out. Of course they bumped right up against the window, only proving my point further.
    Rosie started laughing at me, and it just sounded so good, to hear her laughing. I almost didn’t care what she was going to say. Even if she was teasing me, I was happy to hear her laugh.
    She said: Mazie, there’s one thing you’ll never