OUR CITY. OUR STORY. Podcast The Theatre: Patrick Hinds

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Patrick Hinds: Broadway suffered, Broadway really suffered. So many shows closed because of September 11th. For anybody who doesn't live in New York, Times Square is where the Theater District is. And Times Square for a very long time was the absolute most scary place on Earth for a lot of Americans, because it was what you would imagine to be where the terrorists would strike next.

00:00:28 But I think that eventually, the industry had to pick itself up and dust itself off, and it comes back. Broadway always survives, Broadway always rises to the occasion, and it certainly did.

Will Thwaites: From the 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.

Okay, so a little while back my cohost Jenny Pachucki . . .

Jenny Pachucki: We rolling? Awesome.

00:01:06 Will Thwaites: She sat down to interview a gentleman named Patrick Hinds.

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Jenny Pachucki: So, let's jump right into it. Patrick, would you please introduce yourself?

Patrick Hinds: My name is Patrick Hinds. I am the creator and host of three podcasts. One is called Theater People, one is called Broadway Backstory, and one is called BroadwayCon: The Podcast.

Will Thwaites: Hinds has gotten to interview some Broadway legends for these podcasts.

00:01:29 [Eden Espinoza]: Hi, I'm Eden Espinoza.

[Laura Osnis]: I'm Laura Osnis.

Will Thwaites: People like Lin Manuel-Miranda.

Lin Manuel-Miranda: I'm Lin Manuel-Miranda.

Will Thwaites: But even still -- and this is something I can empathize with -- he sometimes finds it difficult to describe what his job is.

Patrick Hinds: I always stumble when people ask me what I do. We were at a little family Christmas gathering, and my mom had a friend there and she asked me what I did. And I was like, I have a podcasting company. She was like, a what-now? And my sister was like, it's like a radio show for the computer. And I was like, I guess that's how you explain it.

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00:02:03 Will Thwaites: Hinds moved to New York City in the year 2000. He'd grown up on Cape Cod, gotten a theater degree in Boston, and then made the big leap to New York after he landed a news associate position at CNBC.

Patrick Hinds: I remember being so excited because they were going to pay me $29,000 a year. I thought that was so much money.

00:02:25 Will Thwaites: When Hinds was moving to the city, he found an apartment on Yahoo! -- this was before Craigslist -- then he packed up a U-Haul and drove to the Big Apple with a friend named Tyler.

Patrick Hinds: And I have a Polaroid still of me and Tyler driving over the George Washing Bridge. And I remember I had one -- this is so funny, this is just coming to me, and I'll be horrified if she ever hears this -- but we had one goal, was to meet and become friends with Martha Plimpton. That was like our big goal, and I did it.

00:03:01 Will Thwaites: Once Hinds was in New York, he started to explore the city. Obviously his love of theater drew him to Times Square, where all the Broadway shows were, but soon there was this other neighborhood that he gravitated toward.

Patrick Hinds: I remember I discovered the Village, and that changed my life, discovering the West Village. It was still a place you could go and just be around gay people. There was a great gay bookstore down there called the Oscar Wilde Bookshop -- it's no longer there. Hinds Final Page 4

00:03:28 There was a great bookstore called [Three Lives and Company] which still is there and you should go check out. And then on the weekends, there was this coffee shop on Christopher Street that I loved so much, and it was called Original Espresso Bar. And it was this kind of crappy little coffee shop that had a back patio, and I lived there. That was my early time in New York, was the West Village.

Jenny Pachucki: And that's how you found your community here, right?

Patrick Hinds: For sure, yeah. That was back when, it was a lot of people doing what I was doing, which was working in a restaurant but trying, I hung out with kids who were really into improve, or my friends were actors, I was a writer.

00:04:06 Everybody has so much ambition and promise, and no one's really been burned that bad yet, and it still seems like anything is possible. When I lived in the city, I would get up in the morning and just get a book and I would go and sit in that coffee shop on Christopher Street and read for an hour -- I made myself read for an hour every morning.

00:04:26 And then I would open my little laptop that was outdated and old and I had to plug it into the wall, and they would let me do it, and I would write as long as I possibly could make myself sit there and write. And yeah, that was really how I met all of my friends that I Hinds Final Page 5

had at that point in New York, and I'm still friends with a lot of those people.

Will Thwaites: Hinds had moved to New York in the summer of 2000, and by the end of that first year, he was already spending most of his time in the West Village. So, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that on September 10th, 2001, that's the neighborhood he was in.

00:04:58 Patrick Hinds: My boyfriend and I at the time were in the West Village, because that's where we always were, and I was to go home with him for Thanksgiving to meet his family. And I was trying to think of something nice to give his family. Somehow I'd been aware that his family doesn't keep photo albums, and photo albums were always really important to me. So, I always had those little FunSaver cameras, those disposable cameras, and all my friends knew it. So, everywhere we went, I would take pictures of him or us or whatever, and I was going to make a photo album and give it to his mom.

00:05:26 And on September 10th, we were in the Village and we ran into my roommates, and they were like, let's take a picture of you guys with one of your FunSaver cameras. And we stood at that little triangle on the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue with the Twin Towers as our backdrop. And I still have the picture, and it has -- you know, when pictures, you would print them and they would have the date stamp on it, and it says September 10th, 2001. It's crazy.

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00:05:55 Will Thwaites: The following morning, on September 11th, Hinds woke up a little late, around 10:00 AM. He was living in a Jersey City apartment at the time, across the water from Manhattan, and though the scale and nature weren't yet clear, he could immediately tell something was wrong from all the sirens he was hearing. Hinds decided he would try to head into the city, where he could figure out what was going on.

Patrick Hinds: I remember thinking okay, I'll just go -- there's little shuttle buses that would take you down to the train station that takes you into the city. And I was like, I'll go get on the shuttle bus, and I remember getting on the shuttle bus, and I just knew that something was -- of course, the idea of something of the magnitude of September 11th wasn't anywhere in my brain, but clearly something was off.

00:06:39 And we got down to the train station, it's called [Journal Square], and somebody told me that two buildings in New York had exploded. That was all I knew.

And I remember getting back on the bus to go back to my apartment, and I got back there and I turned on the TV just as they were replaying an image of one of the towers falling.

00:07:02 Jenny Pachucki: You had no idea before that?

Patrick Hinds: No idea, no idea.

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I remember the other awful thing was that I used to go to the World Trade Center all the time for theater tickets.

Will Thwaites: There was a TKTS window on the second floor there, which was a booth where you could buy discounted Broadway tickets.

Patrick Hinds: And I just knew my mom, she had just been here like a month before, and we had gone to see a show, and we had gone to the TKTS booth, and I remember telling her how I was there all the time.

00:07:33 And I just knew that my mom, who couldn't reach me, was sure that I was that morning in line at the TKTS booth -- you know, just one of those horrible things.

Will Thwaites: Like all New Yorkers, Hinds felt the impact of September 11th immediately, in these big, visceral ways.

00:07:54 Patrick Hinds: Because my life was so closely associated with the Village, the Twin Towers were kind of like, I don't know what the right word is, but you would know the right direction to go if you just looked toward the Twin Towers, you'd know you were going south. And they were just not there. But it's not that they were gone. They were replaced by this plume of smoke that was literally there for months. And so, I remember that being a really big thing, where oh my God, if you're trying to go south, look at the plume of smoke that's always there. It just was there, it was just there forever. It was what were the towers. Hinds Final Page 8

00:08:28 Will Thwaites: In addition to this tangible destruction and loss, New Yorkers felt the impact 9/11 had on their personal and professional lives.

Patrick Hinds: For me at that time, I remember I was trying to be a freelance writer, or just write books or whatever, and all of that industry shut down. The arts always suffer in times like that, because when people are watching their wallets, the first thing to go is any sort of recreational anything.

00:09:00 Jenny Pachucki: The theater community, the Broadway community, was so impacted by September 11th.

Patrick Hinds: So impacted, yeah. You know, Broadway suffered, Broadway really suffered. So many shows closed because of September 11th. And when a show closes, it doesn't just put actors out of work, but investors lose money, which means they're less likely to invest in new shows. It puts all of the behind the scenes people out of work.

00:09:25 And then, fewer people are going to Times Square, which really affects the restaurants. Times Square, for anybody who doesn't live in New York, Times Square is where the Theater District is, and Times Square for a very long time was the absolute most scary place on Earth for a lot of Americans, because it was what you would imagine to be where the terrorists would strike next.

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But I think that like, eventually the industry had to pick itself up and dust itself off, and it comes back. Broadway always survives, Broadway always rises to the occasion. And it certainly did.

00:10:07 I think that it's popularly known that Hairspray was the first show to come in the wake of September 11th that was a big hit that really lifted people up. It was great escapist theater, which is what we needed.

Female Voice: [Singing] You can't stop the avalanche as it races down the hill.

00:10:29 Patrick Hinds: And it's interesting -- and I'm actually just thinking about this for the first time -- that Hairspray was written by and starred Harvey Fierstein, who was also, when I think about the great tragedies that have hit New York City, you can't not talk about the AIDS crisis that decimated the artistic community. And Harvey Fierstein came out of that as well, and created so much work and art that was transporting for people during that really dark time.

00:11:02 Will Thwaites: Like Broadway, New York as a whole started to rejuvenate in the months and years after September 11th. And encouragement would sometimes come from this unexpected places -- like, giant companies who would typically be focused on advertising their products, they stopped just to say something encouraging.

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Patrick Hinds: You would drive through Times Square, and there would be all these ads of, like, Apple -- I can't think of the actual products now, but I remember it'd be like, New York, we're proud of you.

00:11:30 And it was really meaningful. It was like, as a New Yorker, you really did feel like you were a part of something.

Will Thwaites: And then on top of all of that, there were politicians, ones you might not personally agree with, that made these gestures, gestures that would prove invaluable as New York was trying to rebuild.

00:11:56 Patrick Hinds: George W. Bush, I remember him saying to people, go to New York, spend your money. And that was really meaningful for people. I remember being a bartender at that time, and I'd be meeting people from wherever, all over the country, and it was like, what brings you to New York? Well, my President told me to come here and spend my money. Oh my God, I'm totally going to cry. And so they did, they came to the scariest place in the first world at that time, they came and they spent their money because the President told them to do that.

00:12:29 And that was like, you know, that was amazing. There was so much of George Bush's administration made me not feel like an American -- I found him to be very marginalizing in that way for me. But I remember -- this was before all of that -- and I remember feeling patriotic in moments like that.

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Jenny Pachucki: And that was a time, New Yorkers aren't necessarily known -- I'm not saying New Yorkers aren't patriotic, but New Yorkers' patriotism usually doesn't come out the way it may in other parts of the country. And that was a time when the city was covered in flags.

00:13:05 Patrick Hinds: Yes, yeah, absolutely.

Jenny Pachucki: Do you think September 11th and some of the things you were talking about helped you form your identity as a New Yorker?

Patrick Hinds: Yeah, for sure. I remember -- and this is maybe a little morbid -- but I remember in 2009, my husband and I, long before we had a kid, moved to Boston for a year.

00:13:27 We were kind of done with New York, and we were kind of like, gay marriage was legal in Boston but it wasn't legal here. We wanted to get married, we thought we'd go there and whatever. And we were not happy. We missed New York so much. And I remember nights he'd be at work and I'd be at home by myself, I would watch news clips from September 11th. Because I knew where I was when those news clips were being filmed. You could see Jersey City. I was like, oh my God, I'm in my apartment right there watching.

00:13:56 And it made me feel slightly nostalgic, and God, I hope that doesn't sound disrespectful in any way, because I full appreciate the loss of life that happened on that day. But, it is something that I can say Hinds Final Page 12

was very emotional for me, and when I really miss New York, for some reason that was what I wanted to pay attention to.

Jenny Pachucki: I think there's something about being in a place during a time where a tragic event happens that somehow makes you more aware of being alive.

00:14:44 Will Thwaites: From the 9/11 Memorial 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 Cricko], sound editing is done by [Sam Barrens].

If you want to hear more from Patrick Hinds, visit TheaterPodcastProductions.com. You can hear episodes of all his great podcasts there.

00:15:15 As for us, Our City, Our Story, we're available on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our website is 911Memorial.org.

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