Updated, 7:58 a.m.
Good morning on this moody Friday.
It’s a summer Friday. One of the last. So today we bring you a column on the lighter side.
In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Madonna documentary “Truth or Dare,” the Metrograph theater in Chinatown is running a retrospective of the performer’s film career, beginning on Saturday.
New York wasn’t easy for Madonna Louise Ciccone, according to J. Randy Taraborrelli, the author of “Madonna: An Intimate Biography.”
“It gave her the kind of draining experience that creates great artists,” he said. “She’s a product of the New York experience.”
We decided to take a tour of the Queen of Pop’s New York:
• We started in our apartment, in front of the iPad, and watched the city age alongside the singer in her videos for “Papa Don’t Preach” and “Secret.”
• Then we headed to Times Square, where, as legend has it, she arrived in 1978 with $35 in her pocket. She ate garbage out of trash cans. (We fact-checked: “Probably all mythology,” Mr. Taraborrelli said.)
• Madge’s first apartment, at 232 E. Fourth Street in the East Village, was “a roach motel,” according to her father. (No, we didn’t go there.)
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• She worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts on West 57th Street and at the Russian Tea Room, where she had a job in coat check and was fired, we were told. (We skipped the doughnut shop.)
• We read an essay in Harper’s Bazaar, in which she wrote that moving to the city was harsh at first. But like any proud New Yorker, she learned to love it:
“The sizzling-hot sidewalks and the noise of the traffic and the electricity of the people rushing by me on the streets was a shock to my neurotransmitters.”
“Blood pumping through my veins, I was poised for survival. I felt alive.”
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