Funny to read a story like this and feel so connected to it. Not because I identify with the subjects, or because I’m fascinated with celebrity. Just because so much of it happened next door when I was little.. A short thread on why I have Dan Akroyd’s harmonica https://twitter.com/nymag/status/1343876684458684416

‘Carrie started including the SNLers at parties in her apartment—dazzling parties.’

Carrie lived in the apartment next to the one I grew up in. There were only two apartments on the floor. My parents used to go to those ‘dazzling parties.’

This article explains why names like Griffin Dunne and Penny Marshall were thrown about by my parents as the names of friends, they must have been around all the time.

Carrie was great to me as a kid, and to my family. She had a vcr before we did, and I remember watching the wizard of oz in her bedroom, because she let us is it when she was away.

For some reason she let us borrow her car. Mercedes. And so my dad would use is to shuttle me and my little friends to see icecapades or Sesame Street live at the Felt Forum. Of course a friend peed in the car, another puked. She still let us borrow it.

But anyway, back to the parties. I was too little to know much about them. My parents, in their early 30’s with kids were kind of surrogate parents for Carrie when she was home. Friends close in age but also more adult.

Anyway I was obsessed with the blues brothers when I was little, obsessed. There are pics of me with a fedora and sunglasses- and underpants.

So my memory is one night being woken up, I have a hazy memory of the shadows of my parents standing there with a man in sunglasses. Dan Akroyd was at one of carries parties, and my parents had brought him into my bedroom so I could meet my hero.

I don’t remember this part, but he gave me his harmonica. It’s a cherished family artifact.

Carrie moved when I was 8. We never saw her again. Sometimes we tried, but it wasn’t meant to be. A typical lost piece of childhood. A fragment of life for my parents. Family lore.