In CHARACTER

A PREVIEW of fall's BEST CLOTHES, worn by a CAST of SINGULAR PERFORMERS and PERSONALITIES who always BRING THE ENTIRETY of themselves to everything they do in ART, FASHION, and LIFE

- KAITLYN GREENIDGE

This past year, whenever I've felt like I've needed an escape from our current reality, which is often, I've dived into reading histories of 20th-century New York City. I love this genre in part for the fleeting glimpses it provides of the types of people we used to call characters: people who convey an entire life story in a single gesture or turn of phrase or biographical detail. In Smash Cut, a memoir of falling in love at the brink of the AIDS crisis in the late 1970s, Brad Gooch mentions, in passing, his therapist, Sister Mary Michael, a nun at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, whose office is in a tower in the church and who gives sage relationship advice, like: Over the years, in relationships, partners change roles. In February House, the Sherill Tippins book about the group house where Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, W.H. Auden, and other famous writers lived in the early 1940s, we briefly learn about Miss Middagh, a descendant of a founding Brooklyn family who fights to democratize the street names of Brooklyn Heights in the 1850s. According to legend, Miss Middagh, appalled that her neighboring streets bore the names of only prominent families, tore the signs down until the city finally renamed them for fruits: "Pineapple, Orange, Cranberry Street, and so on." And in My Soul Looks Back, a memoir of 1970s Black bohemia by culinary powerhouse Jessica B. Harris, the author mentions a late night at literary haunt Paparazzi