The Disruptor(c)2019

1948 It was a year of the disruption, dislocation, redecorating, anticipation, and beginning of a lifelong addiction.

Our apartment on Stone Avenue, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was to live through its revolution to modernity. Its status quo turned upside down and right side up to accommodate our new star border. This was no small feat since there was no extra space to maneuver.

My parents were forced to move their bedroom, with its bulky furniture into their 2 daughters’ much smaller former bedroom. The little girls had to leave their brown iron beds, relics from their own mother’s childhood. Even their beloved wooden radio with its goldfish dial was carried off somewhere.

We sisters were into moved into our father and mother’s larger bedroom. Now we were to sleep on the brand-new sofa bed. It would be opened at night to become our beds. During the day it would be dressed a burgundy slipcover, piped in forest green. Bolsters and throw pillows were arranged against the wall it paralleled. A pair of end tables with lamps appeared suddenly, too.

Above the sofa was hung a large round mirror, stylishly unframed. Two arm chairs touching on the were bought for addition seating.

Facing the sofa was my parents high chest of drawers where we sisters shared the drawer space.

New floral drapes framed the room’s windows in burgundy, beige and greens.

With the dark forest green walls, the print of the drapes and pillows we enthralled. (NO doubt my mother had been influenced by some movie set she had seen probably in the Loew’s Pitkin Theatre.

When you entered the newly named living room, (nee Papa and Mommy’s old bedroom), through the single glass paned door, all eyes were drawn to “The Piece Resistance”, the reason for the upheaval, the fresh paint job, for the new furniture, or as my father called it, “the pogrom”.

It was the arrival of our first television set, the star of our shabby, not quite chic apartment. It was a “Capart’ console television, with doors.

To think that because of it, we got ‘a special new living room’ magically carved out of the same square footage of our walk-up tenement quarters!

Imagine the world of entertainment that then beamed into our new oasis, in dreary Brownsville, from that miracle called …television!

Our family’s life was forever changed.