“The Gals of the Other Broadway🎀🎀© 2017
… The also Stars of Broadway. 👑👑👑
Marlene, a once striking Broadway Beauty, Sandy author of the best seller, “I Married a Gangster”, & I, (a mere mortal) … shared sushi last night. 🍱🍣🍣
Let me tell you about our history before its erased.
Serendipity had played into my bumping into Marlene, when I shopped in Bloomingdales, recently, one Saturday afternoon. We chatted nonstop then planned to meet for dinner, with Sandy, too. So, I phoned Sandy who was available & excited to join us. Hurrah!
We warmly group hugged, 👩👩🦰👩🦳” Hello” … in “The Japanese Queen Sushi Palace”, in my neighborhood.
This was a reunion of comrades/ survivors of Broadway Star hood.
We hadn’t seen, or heard, or thought of any of us, in years (30+?) …at least.
It didn’t take but a few moments, as we absorbed each other’s appearance, we fibbed, in unison, “LOOK how we haven’t changed a bit”. 🙄🙄🙄
Lies! Lies! Lies! LOL!
All of us when younger, had been brown haired, now with our altered grey tresses, we were a blonde, a redhead & a silver-crowned matron.
Oh, how cute… our crows’ feet and marionettes’ lines were completely not noticed. 🙄🙄🙄
I was 77, & the other two had reached “the big 80”.
Sandy & Marlene had worked together many years ago…for the same…
* “Garmento” lowlife, Randy Sacco. 😎
They were “the Girls of his Showroom” at 1398 Broadway.
I too was “a Broadway Sales Babe”, for another *Garmento- Romeo, Andre Loehmann. 😎
We sold dresses & blouses to buyers from all over the USA. 👚👗👗
They came to New York’s other Broadway Show...Fashion… to see, then hopefully buy our company’s "rag-trade”, or “Shmattahs”, as we girls secretly called them.
As a part of the buyers’ perks, (bribes), were expensive dinners/with plenty bottles of wine, in Manhattans finest restaurants… & seats for the real "other Broadway’s” most popular stage shows… downtown. 🍷🍷🍷🍸
Our jobs included travel to regional apparel markets, to sell…sell… 💲 💲💲. That’s how we ladies knew each other… Marlene, Sandy, & a planeload of other Garment Center salespeople, who would leave from LaGuardia Airport to go the same marts, seasonally. Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, & Chicago.
With us were the heavy, bulky original showroom samples, in garment bags, with colorful labelled ties. Airport porters loaded them with us keeping a watchful eye. We were responsible for our collections’ samples. (Many a time, there were no duplicates of the precious samples, we were taking from the NY showplace).
Lost samples could mean a lost season. 😮😮😮NO! NO!
On “OUR Broadway” we worked in “the fashion center jungle” of clustered, old factory buildings, showrooms, & warehouses of garments. When ready, they’d be packed in huge hangar cartons, then trucked to the stores of America.
Squeezed in-between were many busy little “hole -in -the wall” Ethic family- run restaurants, fast food and delis that would feed the daily mass of people that filled the streets. Their pungent aromas congealed with the sweat of toil, and fumes of trucks, including Department of Sanitation crushing scraping monsters boiled… in the brew.
These eateries were in the street level storefronts, sprinkled amongst fabric, buttons, sewing machine suppliers, nail salons, barber shops, drycleaners, pharmacies and shoemakers.
“OUR Broadway” had a bustling, helter-skelter, pulsating Rythm of moving, rushing, racks of hand truckers wheeling patterns & samples, on the uneven sidewalks. What frantic pace and energy permeated its few blocks of garment production.
Beeping horns constant in frustration of clogged traffic & jay-walking pedestrians... added to the overstimulated atmosphere.
Boisterous voices rang out in New Yorkese, Spanish, Italian, & Yiddish… in this chorus of this bedlam.
Maneuvering its streets were the “dressed-to-the-nines” female buyers… in their fashion- best worn… to impress in their chic. Most travelled from small country-towns for their semi-annual fun trips to the Big Apple.
Many a love affair started & flourished on OUR Broadway.
“What happened on Our Broadway” (ala in Las Vegas) …stayed… (in OUR Broadway).
Thus, the slick garmentos/with the young out -town buyers, played on OUR Broadway Stage. It happened as our “horney”- garmentos, and the “hot- to -trot” ladies’ buyers… hit on one other.
Bang- Bang… Fireworks.
There was no place like it in all of America.
What prosperous, exciting time, & place, we gals shared…once upon a time.
Holy Showbiz!
The cast of the World-Famous Garment Center of OUR Broadway, were played out. Its manufacturing left for China, retailers shrunk & the buildings are now pricey condo-loft apartments.
- We the aged, retired Other Broadway Stars… never even received an “Oscar(s)de La Renda(s)”, or etc. … we felt we deserved! 🎭 🤣😛
Vanished…forever, OUR colorful, circus!
- **Garment Center slick male owners and male salesman, who “Fashioned Themselves as God’ Gifts to the Ladies”! 😍🥰😘🤩
