OUR CITY. OUR STORY. Podcast Representing Brooklyn: Rosie Perez
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00:00:00 Rosie Perez: So on 9/11, I'm alone in the basement apartment of my home in Brooklyn with my two dogs. I just kept screaming to anyone that I could get through to, "I'm by myself, I'm by myself." But everybody else was frozen in their fear, as well.
But my neighbor, Rhonda Cohen, she had made the great exodus that people were making from Lower Manhattan Wall Street area over the bridge, back to Brooklyn, and she came to check up on me.
00:00:35 I said, "Rhonda, what are you doing here?" She goes, "I know you're all alone." I said, "What?" She goes, "I just had a feeling that you were alone, and I want you to come to my house." And I cried. I mean, I was just like, "Oh my God," you know?
That bit of Brooklyn is still there. Thank God.
00:01:04 Will Thwaites: From 9/11 Memorial Museum, this is "Our City. Our Story," a series where New Yorkers talk about their city and how September 11th changed that. I'm Will Thwaites, and this is my co-host, Jenny Pachucki.
Jenny Pachucki: All right, let's go. So, today is -- I have no idea. February 16th [crosstalk] -- Rosie Perez- Final Page 2
Will Thwaites: A little while back, Jenny sat down for an interview with Rosie Perez.
Jenny Pachucki: -- and I'm here with Rosie Perez for "Our City. Our Story." Rosie, what do you do for a living?
00:01:29 Rosie Perez: Oh, that's very interesting; what do I do for a living? I'm an activist, an actor, sometimes producer, sometimes director. I'm part of a charity I co-founded. I work at a charity, Urban Arts Partnership. And I am a fight fan.
Jenny Pachucki: So you just don't do anything. You just sit around and that's it. [Laughs]
Rosie Perez: I just sit around, eating bonbons all day. [Laughs]
00:01:56 Will Thwaites: Long before Rosie Perez was all of those things, before she was in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," before she was nominated for an Academy Award, before she served on President Obama's HIV/AIDS Advisory Council, Rosie Perez was just a Puerto Rican girl who grew up in Brooklyn.
Jenny Pachucki: What's it like to be part of the Puerto Rican community in New York?
00:02:18 Rosie Perez: It's wonderful. There was a pride that was instilled in you from day one. You know, people will yell out, Rosie Perez- Final Page 3
"Boricua!" and you're like, "Boricua, [foreign language]!" It's very supportive, and it's wonderful to grow up that way. And people always ask, "Why are Puerto Ricans so loud and proud?" I say, "Because we were taught that. We were taught that."
00:02:42 Jenny Pachucki: From kind of an identity perspective, when you're younger and sort of forming your idea about who you are and where you fit into your city and your community, when did you start to develop an awareness of being a New Yorker?
00:02:57 Rosie Perez: That's funny, because I never felt that I was a New Yorker when I was little. I always felt like I was a girl from Brooklyn. So, you know, when I saw "Saturday Night Fever," and I saw him crossing the bridge, my whole world opened up. I was like, "Oh my God, I want to go to the city" -- not just once a year to a buy a coat at Lord & Taylor's, if we could afford it, you know what I mean? "I'm cross the bridge."
00:03:26 So, I started to really feel like a New Yorker once I was probably like a teenager, you know, because I started to claim the city as part of my world.
Jenny Pachucki: What was the scene like? Where did you go? What did you do?
Rosie Perez: As a teenager?
Jenny Pachucki: Yeah.
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00:03:47 Rosie Perez: Oh, it was scary as hell. Oh my gosh. It was scary as hell, but it was also electrifying. The big thing -- it's so corny, it's so Brooklyn to go into the city, and to go to 40 Deuce -- oh, look at that; I call it 40 Deuce -- 42nd Street. And back then, it was like a den of inequity.
00:04:12 I was a prude, so I never went to like the peep shows. But I used to go to the Kung Fu theaters there. They would have these double- features of all these martial arts movies. I used to love that. And we were so corny. We thought it was really cool that we used to hang out in front of the McDonald's on Broadway. [Laughs] We used to hang out -- you know, you know, you know, we'd say, you know, "What's up, what's up?" You know?
Jenny Pachucki: [Laughs]
00:04:35 Rosie Perez: You know, or the 4th Street basketball court. And then, the night lift was out of this world.
Jenny Pachucki: Tell me about that.
Rosie Perez: The night life was fun. There was probably 50 million night clubs in New York. I would say that more than half of them were illegal night clubs.
Jenny Pachucki: Where were they? Like, what part of the city?
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Rosie Perez: Whew! Jeez, it was in the Westside highway -- you know, on 12th Street, Lower East Side, the Bronx. And we would bounce around.
00:05:05 The term "backpackers" in the hip-hop community actually comes from people from the boroughs and Long Island, because what you would do is that you would go into the city early evening, and you would bring a second pair of clothes, because you would go and dance at these various different night clubs, and you would sweat out your clothes. So, you needed something else to put on, or else you were going to get sick.
00:05:29 And so, that was fun. And we used to club hop maybe -- I'm not exaggerating -- maybe six to eight different clubs a night.
Jenny Pachucki: This was the '80s, right?
Rosie Perez: This was the '80s. And we used to get in night clubs free because, after a while, the crew that I would hang with, we were known to get the party stated. I used to think I was a rock star. I used to walk right up, pass the velvet rope. They're like, "Oh, hi." You know, they always used to call me Little Rose. "Come in, Little Rose. How many you got?" I used to strut like, "I got four," you know? [Laughs]
00:06:10 There was one night club on the Lower East Side called Choices. And they knew all of us kids didn't really have any money. You know, it was like $5, $10 to get in. And they would have a punch Rosie Perez- Final Page 6
bowl full of just punch. And oranges and apples on the counter, on the bar. And the punch was free. And so were the fruit.
Jenny Pachucki: Replenish your energy a little bit?
00:06:30 Rosie Perez: Yeah. And you would just dance all night. It was just so much fun. I can't explain it. And I feel sorry for young kids today, where they got to go to night clubs where there's bottle services, and they can't sit at a table unless they buy $100 bottle of whatever. When I was a kid, I didn't drink, I didn't smoke; I just danced.
00:06:56 Will Thwaites: I am so jealous that Perez's teenage years were defined by her clubbing in New York City. I feel like mine were defined by me getting half-priced appetizers at Applebee's. Anyways, the more important thing is that the rest of Perez's career, maybe even life, would end up being defined by a single evening at a night club.
00:07:18 Okay. It's 1988. She's in her 20s. She's a dancer on the TV show "Soul Train." But still, she's nowhere near famous at this point. And one night, her and her friends, including the actress Holly Robinson Peete, they go out to a club in New York called Funky Reggae.
00:07:34 Rosie Perez: And Holly Robinson Peete's brother, Matt Robinson, was spinning there, and we all knew him. So, we knew we were going to get in free. [Laughs] And it just so happened that it was a Spike Lee party for "School Days." And when I walked in, Rosie Perez- Final Page 7
they were having a butt contest to see which black woman had the biggest butt in the night club.
00:08:02 So I jumped on the speaker and made a spectacle of the whole thing, because I just thought it was really degrading and sad. And the bouncers came by with this little man and said, "Get off." And I thought they were going to kick me out of the club, and I was really, really scared. And I was on the verge of tears, because everyone in the club stopped and was looking at me. And I put on my good old-fashioned Brooklynese false bravado and started, you know, twisting my neck and sucking my teeth, and putting my hand on my hip, and cursing them out.
00:08:42 And this man just kept laughing, and I said, "What's so funny?" He goes, "This is fate. Tonight is fate." And I replied, "You wish." And he kept laughing, and he held his hand out. He said, "My name is Spike Lee." I was like, "Oh," and my whole life changed.
00:09:00 Will Thwaites: Shortly after this incident, Spike Lee cast her as Tina in "Do the Right Thing." The film launched her career. And what I love about this story is that Rosie's big break came because she stood up for people. She does this a lot, actually; stand up for people. Sometimes in big ways like with her HIV/AIDS advocacy, but also in small ways. She's got this great little story from the days right after September 11th that feels a little bit like that Spike Lee encounter.
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00:09:33 Rosie Perez: It was about a couple of days after 9/11, and I had to go get dog food for my pets, God rest their souls. And the local pet food store was closed. So I had to go to Brooklyn Heights. I go into the pet food store there. It's a Middle Eastern guy behind the counter, so it's a Middle Eastern family-run place. And somebody just came in there and started just shouting out the most hateful, racist things, saying that, "You should be killed."
00:10:08 And that New York feeling came erupting up from my belly, and I pointed my finger at that man, and I said, "You are wrong. You are wrong. You are part of the problem. This man is a good man. You are so wrong, and you should be ashamed of yourself, you should be ashamed of yourself." And the guy was like, "[Unintelligible]." I was like, "Yeah, whatever." And he left the shop. And that store owner -- he was a grown man; he was about a middle-aged man -- was reduced to tears.
00:10:44 He was shaking. He was trembling. And he said, "Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. I appreciate you. I appreciate you. I'm American. I'm American." I said, "It doesn't matter if you're American or not. You're here. No one should be treated that way."
00:11:05 And that, to me, is an example of how New Yorkers felt after 9/11 - - majority of them. Some of them were idiots like that guy that walked into the shop. You know, but majority of us New Yorkers were like, "Hey, we're all in this together, and we will rise up from the ashes," and we did.
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00:11:34 Jenny Pachucki: How did your morning start on September 11th, 2001?
Rosie Perez: September 11th, I was awakened by my dogs. They were barking and yapping uncontrollably. And I had felt kind of a rumble, so I thought we were experiencing an earthquake.
Jenny Pachucki: Where were you? What neighborhood?
Rosie Perez: I was in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. So, the sound of the plane crashing into the building -- you can ask anybody who lived around the water in Brooklyn -- you heard it.
00:12:14 It was startling. And I called my cousin Sixto upstairs in my house -- because I'm lazy [laughs] -- and he was on the fourth floor, and I was on the basement floor -- because he had moved in with me after my husband and I broke up, to be supportive. And I said, "There's an earthquake, there's an earthquake." And he said, "You crazy bitch, go back to bed." [Laughs]
00:12:44 And I turned on the television. And when I saw what was happening, before I could scream, I could hear him scream from the fourth floor. It was such a deep, in-your-soul type of scream. And I heard him -- bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump -- going down the stairs. And then the dogs started barking again. And he comes down, and I start screaming, and he's screaming, and we're looking at each other going, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God." Rosie Perez- Final Page 10
00:13:17 We couldn't stop screaming, and we were just holding onto each other in just utter shock. And then, he says, "I'll be right back." And I'm like, "What?" Because then we see the second plane hit. And he said, "I'm going to go get a gun." So he left me.
00:13:38 So on 9/11, I'm alone in the basement apartment of my home in Brooklyn with my two dogs. And I'm trying to call people. You know, the cell phones were all out. And I was just hysterical. I just kept screaming to anyone that I could get through to, "I'm by myself, I'm by myself." But everybody else was frozen in their fear, as well, so they didn't want to come outside of their homes.
00:14:06 But my neighbor -- and this personifies Brooklyn, before the gentrification -- my neighbor Rhonda Cohen, she had made the great exodus that people were making from Lower Manhattan Wall Street area over the bridge, back to Brooklyn, and she came to check up on me.
00:14:27 I said, "Rhonda, what are you doing here?" She goes, "I know you're all alone." I said, "What?" She goes, "I just had a feeling that you were alone, and I want you to come to my house." And I cried. I mean, I was just like, "Oh my God," you know?
That bit of Brooklyn is still there. Thank God. You know? But yeah, that was a heavy day.
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00:15:04 Jenny Pachucki: In 2003, a short film came out that was based on a poem written by a young women who wrote this poem from the perspective of somebody who was trapped in the north tower on the 104th floor. And you're the voice narrating this poem.
Rosie Perez: "When the plane hit, the building rocked first, to the right then to the left."
Jenny Pachucki: What was it like to think about that role and to put yourself in the place of what woman?
00:15:33 Rosie Perez: Well, later, I was very depressed after that.
Jenny Pachucki: Really?
Rosie Perez: I was. Because I knew the height of my fear that day -- it's unimaginable what that woman was feeling and experiencing.
"I look out at the blue morning. I expect to see God there. But what I see is another plane. And I know what it means. But I don't know why."
00:16:01 I've rarely seen someone be so poetic in their fear, in their thoughts, and that broke my heart. It just broke my heart. You just can't believe that we went through that. You know, we lost a lot of people in New York that day. And we had a lot of New Yorkers suffer for hours in fear that day. It's just . . . it's unimaginable.
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Jenny Pachucki: Did it feel cathartic to you to be able to be that woman and serve that role? Did it help you at all kind of deal with it?
00:16:46 Rosie Perez: Well, I always felt lucky, extremely lucky that I wasn't in that area or in the buildings that day. And I always used to feel selfish about that, until I read that poem.
Jenny Pachucki: So flash forward 15 years or so, and you recently came to the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
00:17:16 Rosie Perez: Mm-hmm.
Jenny Pachucki: What was it like for you to be in that place? And what feelings -- I mean, I guess I'm asking about the complicated feelings that maybe New Yorkers have about 9/11 and revisiting some of these memories.
Rosie Perez: Prior to being invited to come down, I never ever, ever wanted to go down there.
Jenny Pachucki: Why?
00:17:37 Rosie Perez: Because it was a reminder of that day. You know, it felt like I'm going to be walking into just a grave, really, to be honest. Even if you would just drive down Chambers Street, I wouldn't even turn my head in that direction. And you know, and tourists -- you know, my friends from California or other states are like, "I want to go to the 9/11 Museum" -- I'm like, "Go ahead. Rosie Perez- Final Page 13
Have fun. Good luck." "You don't want to go?" "No." "Oh, you already been?" "No." "Oh, you don't want to go?" "I'm never going there. I'm never ever, ever, ever going there."
00:18:10 And some of my friends in the entertainment industry, they were like, "I went to the 9/11 Memorial, and I'm so glad. I just felt so patriotic." I'm like, "Yeah, whatever, shut up. I'm not going." Right? [Laughs] You know, I'm just not going.
So when I decided to go, I remember calling my cousin Sixto, and he goes, "You're going to go?" I go, "Yeah, I was wondering if you wanted to go with me." "Hell no. I don't want to go there. You're crazy. Good luck." And I said, "Wow."
00:18:39 So, I put on a brave face, but I was shaking inside. Even just getting out of the car and walking, and you see how it dips down -- I just froze, and I just kept breathing and breathing, and just trying to be as brave as possible, and thinking, "Well, this is nothing compared to what people had to endure."
And we go down in, and we start looking around. And I was just holding back the tears. I was just like, "Wow, this is incredible. This is so incredibly sad, yet so incredibly necessary. Why didn't I come here sooner? Why didn't I come here sooner?"
00:19:24 I disrespected that woman who wrote that poem. I disrespected all the first responders that went in on that day. I disrespected all the people that died. I disrespected all the people that were running in Rosie Perez- Final Page 14
fear, covered in debris. I disrespected them all by not paying my respects. As a New Yorker, it is your duty do that, because those people that died, those people that gave their lives, they're part of your New York family, you know?
00:20:05 You pay your respects when a family member dies. You need to pay your respect for the ones that died for us, you know? And the innocent ones. And I felt . . . I felt ashamed. I really did. I really felt ashamed.
00:20:23 And then, as the day went by, and I saw the people that were visiting the museum, I was imagining in my head who was a New Yorker and who was a tourist. Because you could see the different reactions from people. And I looked at one person, and they looked at me and they nodded, and I knew that person was a New Yorker because they were one of the few people there that were crying.
00:20:57 Because with tourists, they were like, "Oh, wow, I can't believe this happened. Oh my goodness, this is so beautifully done. Oh, this is so touching." And they meant it, and you could see that they meant it. And they were very moved. But you could tell who was the New Yorker, because those tears were just streaming.
00:21:16 And there was a lot of pride behind that. You know? And I know that people say that pride is a sin, but it was just a deep feeling of feeling so good of being a part of it. And I was proud of New York. I Rosie Perez- Final Page 15
was proud of New York, really was very, very proud of New York. So I think that it's good.
00:21:45 And I think -- I know this sounds strange, but I think that people who were here on that day, specifically New Yorkers born and bred, we stand a bit taller. We do. We stand a bit taller, and that's a nice thing, you know? We got to have something good come out of this destruction. So, it's good.
00:22:27 Will Thwaites: From the 9/11 Museum, this is "Our City. Our Story." I'm Will Thwaites. I host and produce this series alongside Jenny Pachucki. This episode was also produced by Elizabeth Bistro and written by me, Will Thwaites. Our executive producers are Michael Frazier and Carl Cricco. Sound editing is done by Sam Barrens.
00:22:47 If you want more from Rosie Perez, grab her recent memoir, "Handbook for an Unpredictable Life." As for us, "Our City. Our Story," we're available on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our website is 911memorial.org. Thanks for listening.
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