7/4/2023 0 Comments Saint mazie by jami attenberg![]() ![]() As seen and heard through Mitchell's discerning eyes and bent ears, she had a frightening voice, kept two tightly rolled copies of the trashy True Romance magazine rubber-banded together to thwack drunks caught snoring during a picture, and worked a day-into-night shift that "would kill most women." She was close friends with two nuns and a monsignor in Lower Manhattan and did everything she could to aid and care for the broke, unemployed, homeless, and discarded men whom hard times had deposited on the Bowery's skid row. She was the proprietor of and ticket taker for the Venice Theater in Manhattan's Bowery neighborhood in the 1920s and '30s, and one of the colorful city characters captured by The New Yorker's Joseph Mitchell in a 1940 profile simply titled "Mazie" (later collected in the Mitchell anthology Up in the Old Hotel). The friends and family of Mazie Phillips Gordon, however, are no longer of this earth. Neighbor, sister, lover-these are the people Jami Attenberg dreamed of chatting with while writing her new novel, Saint Mazie (Grand Central, 2015). ![]()
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