We called our company Old New York. We specialized in re-creating experiences from New York City’s past. Appleby lined up the clients, Xan put together a crew to scout venues, and Bobby and I recruited the talent.

            We started off with what we knew and what could sell a lot of tickets—re-creating club scenes. Our first request was for the Cotton Club during the golden age of jazz. Bobby and I lined up impersonators of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, and George Gershwin. We even managed to find someone who looked like boxing champion Jack Johnson to wander the audience. Appleby insisted that we be as authentic as possible, that perfection was the only thing our clients would accept. So that’s what we provided. It was a real bitch, but after seeing the take for the week of Cotton Club shows, it was all worth it.

Next, we did The Palladium at the suggestion of the daughter of a real estate mogul from North Carolina. The girl and her friends had grown up watching Club MTV and wanted to see what it was like to rub elbows with Downtown Julie Brown while Cathy Dennis and Information Society played on stage.

            We did Saturday Night Fever, charging a premium for whoever wanted to be John Travolta or part of his gang.

            For a specialized gig, a guy wanted to be Lenny Bruce doing stand-up at the Café Au Go Go the night the police arrested the comedian for obscenity. We did our best to reconstruct the 1964 Greenwich Village hipster scene, but the guy couldn’t remember his lines, and the whole night was a long grind of flubs and false starts. That was the first time I realized that not all of these events were going to be fun.

            We got a lot of requests for the night the gay bar Stonewall was raided and set off riots in the West Village. The only snag with that one was that we couldn’t call the location Stonewall, because the original bar is still in operation. This was the same problem we had with orders for Studio 54—in the early days it was our most requested re-creation. Because somebody still owns the rights to the name Studio 54, we couldn’t call the place that. And without the name, it was pretty much a generic night club full of hedonism.

            Which gave Appleby an idea. That idea led to us mocking up Plato’s Retreat. It was the first event that had to be sold very discretely since there was no way we were going to get a permit to run a sex club. But our customers understood, and even kept quiet when we had to turn people away because we just couldn’t fit everyone into the place.

The things I saw that night . . . I shudder just thinking about it. Some people should never take their clothes off.

Individual requests came in from the kind of people who can afford to elaborately indulge a nostalgia kick.

Two brothers wanted to restage the premiere of Saturday Night Live, with them playing host George Carlin and comedy guest Andy Kaufman (doing the Mighty Mouse record bit). A week later, their older brother approached us wanting to be Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. My first thought was, there’s no way we could do the Marshmallow Man. But he was understanding, and was happy just to do the scene where they try to jump a ghost in the library basement. It was the first time we had to work with special effects, but once Appleby decided something was going to get done, it got done.

            We did a lot of movie scenes. They were maybe the most fun out of everything. It was easier to get the re-creation right when there were fewer customers involved. We did selected scenes from Rear Window, On the Waterfront, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Warriors. A young couple with money to burn paid us to star in West Side Story. The location production was great. It’s too bad neither of them could sing for shit.

The scale of West Side Story made Appleby more ambitious. Our next client got to drive the car chase from The French Connection. Unfortunately, he got injured when the car crashed into a subway track support. After that incident, Appleby decided to cool things off a bit. He didn’t even consider somebody’s ridiculous request to do the original King Kong. Instead, he put us to work on scenes from Midnight Cowboy. One guy just wanted to do the Dustin Hoffman "I’m walking here!" bit. This other guy—a real twitchy, nervous sort—wanted the full Joe Buck experience. Appleby loved anyone looking to explore their repression because they paid more than any other clients for the opportunity.

Case in point, a married couple with an open relationship who wanted to be Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner, and they brought in the husband’s mistress to play Peggy Guggenheim. I was never really sure why they needed us to help them out. Did they really need our company to find locations and provide costumes?

Sometimes it felt like we were just being paid to watch.

Not every client was easy. Several clients came in and told us they wanted to be Andy Warhol. Our only question was, "But what are you going to do, sit around and come up with ‘ideas’ while other people do the work for you?" It wasn’t until the third or fourth request when someone in the office mumbled, "Didn’t that guy get shot?" And so, we staged Valerie Solanas’s shooting of Andy Warhol and Mario Amaya. What surprised me was that we were able to sell the re-creation to three people who wanted to play each of the three characters. The same thing happened with John Gotti whacking Gambino crime boss Paul Castellano and with Mark David Chapman shooting John Lennon. With the Lennon kill, we even found someone who fantasized about being Yoko.

            Murders were big for a while. A few orders came in for Son of Sam: some to play investigating officers, some to play victims, and, of course, some to play David Berkowitz.

            We also did generic muggings. People wanted the "real New York" experience of walking down a rough street in the Bronx or the Lower East Side or Brooklyn and getting their purses stolen or getting cracked over the head with a bottle. (We used candy glass.)

            One really disturbed couple even wanted to reenact the episode of All in the Family where Edith was raped, with the husband playing both Archie and the rapist.

There were sales to be made from every angle.

Out of all of them, my favorite, being from Massachusetts, was a rich Bostonian who just wanted a chance to set right a particularly horrible moment in history. And because he had enough money, we were able to rent out Shea Stadium and set him up as Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series between the Red Sox and the Mets—and this time, Buckner caught the ball.

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