Name: Michael Cerveris
Age: “Stone”
Neighborhood: Flatiron
Occupation: “Playing pretend”
Who’s your favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional?
James Agee.
What’s the best meal you’ve eaten in New York?
The Hot Dog Française at Café Un Deux Trois.
In one sentence, what do you actually do all day in your job?
Battle the suspicion that my current job is my last job ever
while wearing someone else’s hair.
Would you still live here on a $35,000 salary?
I am working in a not-for-profit Broadway theater. I aspire to making a $35,000 salary.
What’s the last thing you saw on Broadway?
My dog Gibson, peeing.
Do you give money to panhandlers?
Sometimes.
What’s your drink?
If I want to feel good … a Sazerac. If I want to feel bad … Hendrick’s gin martini … with a cucumber.
How often do you prepare your own meals?
You can make them yourself?
What’s your favorite medication?
Love.
What’s hanging above your sofa?
The Sword of Damocles.
How much is too much to spend on a haircut?
All your hair.
When’s bedtime?
Whenever a lady says so.
Which do you prefer, the old Times Square or the new Times Square?
Old, like when it was called Longacre Square (eighteenth-nineteenth century).
What do you think of Donald Trump?
As little as possible.
What do you hate most about living in New York?
That it’s not farther from Los Angeles.
Who is your mortal enemy?
Well … myself.
When’s the last time you drove a car?
Last month in New Orleans.
How has the Wall Street crash affected you?
I believed for a moment that we might actually change the way we assigned value to things. The moment passed …
Times, Post, or Daily News?
Is that a riddle?
Where do you go to be alone?
My last relationship.
What makes someone a New Yorker?
If you’re not, nothing can make you.
Cerveris can currently be seen as “The Observer” on the TV show Fringe. His new play In the Next Room or the vibrator play opens tomorrow at the Lyceum Theater.
