Reading Amanda’s excellent review of Iphigenia in Forest Hills, I was reminded of another tragic location in that strange neighborhood….
I went to high school in Flushing, and while returning to western Queens, I would switch from the bus to the E train at Forest Hills. Sometimes my friends would linger there, wandering among other groups of high school students, each stalling their transfers homeward. The locus of all these hormones was the 71st avenue Wendy’s, a resturaunt so drenched in the cruelties of adolescence, its meanness was miasmatic. You could breathe the resentment for oneself, ones friends, and the opposite sex as thick as the ranch dressing in which you dipped your five-piece spicy chicken nuggets. Its fluorescence, troubled employees, and the spectre of this event, made mid-winter Friday afternoons deeply unsettling.
The Wendy’s eventually closed, probably under the weight of its own abasement.
Check back next week for a way more uplifting memory- Dionysius in Rego Park: Anatomy of a Mall.
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