I Can’t Tell You Why But I’m Trapped By Your Love And I’m Chained To Your Side
Astorians Coming Together to show that they are interesting, too:
Posted: March 28th, 2006 | Filed under: Crap Your Pants Say Yeah!, Queens, There Goes The NeighborhoodWhile taking a ride on the N or W trains to Astoria these days, one is likely to notice a musician hauling a guitar or an actor reading a script or maybe a young artist sketching the city views from the elevated tracks.
With proximity to Manhattan, public safety, good cuisine and still-affordable rents, Astoria and neighboring Long Island City have been seeing a migration of newcomers in recent years — many belonging to the creative set.
Now these artists have a place to congregate in the form of a monthly gathering that kicked off last week.
The idea is “to give people a nice chance, in an intimate setting, to meet each other and get to know each other,” said Andrea Reese, a writer, performer and one of the founders of the group B-QUACK, which stands for Borough of Queens United Artists Collective Kum-Ba-Ya.
The first meeting was held last Thursday night at Waltz, an artistic-minded coffee shop on Ditmars Blvd. More than two dozen artists, playwrights and musicians mingled at the inaugural event.
“There was a feeling of a lot of excitement,” said Reese, an actor in a one-woman show about Jackie O. “It was really a lot of fun.”
B-QUACK is the brainchild of five locals: Reese, performer Jen Ryan, director and theater editor Leonard Jacobs, designer Rik Sansone and David Gibbs, a publicist.
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“We’re a little tired of hearing about Brooklyn,” said Jacobs, who moved to Astoria from the Theater District three years ago after the notion of artists being able to afford Manhattan rents turned into “a laughingstock” and after many Brooklyn neighborhoods became nearly as expensive.
“It is time for us to say we are here, we are interesting,” Jacobs said.