Ambassador Al

Date: April 9, 2007
Time: 21:30
Place: Roosevelt Island's Queens Embassy

Aside from 2 years in Wisconsin and 6 years in Nassau County, for the first 42 years of my life I lived in Queens. I was born in Little Neck, the north-easternmost town in Queens and later I moved to Forest Hills in central Queens. For the past 14 years I've worked in the westernmost part of Queens, Long Island City. 3 years ago, feeling that the real estate market was topped off, I sold my Forest Hills condo and moved to a rental here on Roosevelt Island. Being only several dozen yards from Queens by the Welfare Island bridge, an extension of 36th Avenue, I expected it would be rather Queens like. Wrong.

Queens ends rather abruptly on Vernon Boulevard. I am pretty much of an ambassador from the mainland here. 50% of my apartment complex is occupied by UN delegates. The apartments are cheaper than Manhattan, it's very parklike, and the tram lets you off reasonably close to UN and the embassies. Nobody gets my references to old sitcoms. Diplomacy does indeed have a language all its own.

On the other side of the bridge, if I saw an African diplomat in flowing robes, his traditional hat barely fitting in the driver's ed car as he takes a driving lesson, I'd expect to see fellow Queens native Eddie Murphy nearby shooting a movie. Here, of course, the man is actually an African diplomat taking a driving lesson.

A lot of the Fiji diplomats are in my building. Oddly enough, Rugby is their national sport.