Lifestyle
'Emergency Quarters' are for pay phones (remember those?) in a new book by ‘90s kids
Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
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Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
A couple of years ago, Carlos Matias was living in Florida and feeling nostalgic for his hometown.
“I just started writing little short stories about New York,” Matias says. “And then I started submitting them to the New York Times Metropolitan Diary.”
His short story, Emergency Quarters, became a “Best of the Year” finalist in 2021 and this year, a children’s book.
“Growing up, when I first started to walk to school by myself, my mom would give me a quarter every single day,” Matias says. She’d tell him, “‘If you need me, or if you’re going to come home late, or if you’re going to hang out with your friends, give me a call and let me know.’ So I was a young Carlos running around with a bunch of quarters in his pockets back in Queens.”
Emergency Quarters is about a little boy named Ernesto who, like Matias, gets to walk to school without his parents for the first time.
Ernesto throws on his lucky kicks and his favorite Mets cap.
“Feelin’ freshhhh!” he says to the mirror.
But before he can sneak out the door, his mother stops him.
“For emergencies, Ernesto,” she whispers, covering his right hand with both of hers. “If you need me, look for a pay phone.”
A what?
“When I do story times and stuff, I have to always start off with asking the kid, ‘Do you know what a pay phone is?’ And I get the funniest answers,” laughs Matias.
If anyone reading this doesn’t know what a pay phone is — send a telegram to NPR headquarters and someone will get back to you. They might be few and far between now, but when Matias was growing up in the 1990s, payphones were on practically every street corner. At the peak, the FCC says there were more than two million in the United States. But by 2016, there were fewer than 100,000 in service.
Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
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Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
“This one was a really fun one to work on,” says Gracey Zhang, who illustrated Emergency Quarters. “I think because we’re both ’90s kids.”
To bring Matias’ childhood to life, Zhang worked traditionally, starting off with pencil sketches. Then, on huge pieces of paper, she used black ink for the line work and gouache paints for the color. “I like to work bigger than the book is actually being published,” Zhang explains. “So that when it’s scanned, the image is not blown up, but it’s shrunken down.”
Her guiding light for the color palette, the feel of the book, was another staple of the ’90s: the windbreaker. You know the kind. Shiny, swooshy. Bold, saturated colors.
“For each book that I work on, I kind of like to focus on a specific feeling or object that I want to evoke,” she explains. “This story has almost — think ’90s sitcom show colors. That kind of informed a lot of the clothing that the characters wear.”
For research, Zhang also did some — gentle — stalking of Matias’ childhood photos on the internet. And Matias sent along some shots of his neighborhood — Corona, Queens.
Emergency Quarters
Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
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Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
Queens is colorful — and detailed — in Zhang’s paintings. The streets are crowded, the arcade has purple-checkered floors, Señora Mayra’s fruit stand umbrellas are tropical blue, pay phones (of course) dot the landscape, and you can practically hear the 7 train roll through the neighborhood.
“Living in New York, I’m very particular about the subway train depictions,” says Zhang. “I spent like, way too long just making sure I had the right train — the model of the train, the line.”
“One thing people always mention that are from Queens are like, ‘Oh my god The Lemon Ice King, the Dominican fritura restaurants,” says Matias. “So the fact that those actually made it on there, these famous places, that was pretty cool.”
On Monday, Ernesto and his friends visit Señor José’s bodega. His friends buy cheese puffs and gummy worms, but Ernesto saves his emergency quarters. On Tuesday, they go to Manny’s Video Games, but Ernesto doesn’t play any games. That night, he asks his mom why he doesn’t have as many quarters as his friends. She tells him that fewer quarters means each one is special — kind of like limited-edition baseball cards.
Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
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Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
“On Wednesday morning, he can feel his three quarters jingling in his pocket all the way to school,” Matias writes.
“¡Jugos de frutas! Seventy-five cents!” Ernesto loves Señora Mayra’s fruit juices; they make him big and strong.
“¡Hola! ¿Jugo de chinola, Ernesto?”
The bright tropical drink reminds Ernesto of summers back in the Dominican Republic.
“Thanks, Señora Mayra, but I’m saving these limited-edition quarters.”
“Such restraint at a young age,” laughs illustrator Gracey Zhang. “My mom did not trust me with any coins. I would just like, rummage through the house for whatever spare coins to buy myself my own snacks.”
Nevertheless, Zhang says she felt a connection to Ernesto. Before she lived in New York City, she grew up in a small town outside of Vancouver, Canada, where she also walked to school on her own, just like Ernesto. Except they didn’t even have any pay phones. “There was just this period where kids almost had less distractions,” she says. “So this sort of young independence really spoke to me.”
“True,” adds author Carlos Matias. But — he points out — what Ernesto has is actually the best of both worlds. Because, as he writes in the book, the mother is never very far away. Ernesto can be independent and experience the world while also knowing that his parents are only an emergency quarter call away.
And if it happens to be an empanada emergency…
Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
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Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang
Jeremy Allen White in The Bear.
FX/Hulu
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FX/Hulu
Jeremy Allen White in The Bear.
FX/Hulu
The Bear just returned for its third season and it’s still one of the most stressful and most interesting shows on TV. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) are launching their new fine dining restaurant, but he’s estranged from some of the people who are closest to him just as he sneaks up on a new level of success. The series is streaming now on Hulu.
Prince Harry has key figures in his corner amid the outrage over ESPN’s decision to honor him with the Pat Tillman Award for Service — at least 2 former winners say Harry is definitely deserving.
Jake Wood, a U.S. Marine and former college football player who won the award in 2018, tells TMZ … the Duke of Sussex is a natural fit for the Tillman honor because of Harry’s military service and his dedication to veterans.
Jake feels Prince Harry is a good choice because he’s dedicated his life to serving and supporting the military and veterans — Harry served 2 tours in Afghanistan — and that should be commended because there are hundreds of different ways a British royal could live his life.
Remember, Pat’s mom, Mary Tillman, set off the controversy when she slammed ESPN for its plan to give the award named after her son to “a controversial and divisive individual” at this month’s ESPY Awards ceremony.
Even ESPN personality Pat McAfee is publicly supporting Mary’s viewpoint, claiming his network is purposely trying to create a controversy … allegedly for better TV ratings.
Another previous winner, U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Israel Del Toro Jr., received the Tillman award in 2017, and totally disagrees with McAfee and Mary Tillman.
He says Harry’s work with wounded and injured veterans makes him a worthy recipient, and for what it’s worth … he’s looking forward to watching Harry follow in his footsteps.
That’s ESPN’s take too, as it insists Harry was chosen specifically because of his work as the founder of The Invictus Games for wounded and injured vets. Harry’s foundation is celebrating 10 years of service.
The notion ESPN selected Harry purely for publicity doesn’t make sense to Jake, who points out … the ESPYs and ESPN aren’t hurting for celebs and the ceremony is always chock-full of famous athletes.
Of course, Harry’s the first celeb to win the Pat Tillman Award for Service — in the past, it’s been reserved for unsung heroes, but Jake says Harry’s military background makes him unlike most celebs.
While Jake’s defending Harry here, don’t get it twisted … he says Pat’s mother has every right to defend her son’s legacy however she sees fit, and, obviously, he does not speak for the Tillman family.
Likewise, Israel has sympathy for Mary, but says the award boils down to service … and, for him at least, Prince Harry more than checks that box.
Nicole Kidman as Brooke Harwood and Zac Efron as Chris Cole in A Family Affair.
Aaron Epstein/Netflix
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Aaron Epstein/Netflix
About seven minutes into the new Netflix romantic comedy A Family Affair, Zac Efron, playing a conceited, not-too-bright movie star who’s just broken up with his girlfriend, is whining to his assistant (played by Joey King) that she needs to pick up his stuff from the ex-girlfriend’s place. He left treasured items there, he explains. He left his autographed Jordans! He left his Himalayan t-shirt! And then he says, gravely, as if it shows the urgency of the mission, “I left my copy of The Courage to be Disliked.” And I said, in my living room, “Ha!”
The Courage to be Disliked is a real book. It doesn’t actually endorse the practice of being a jerk; it’s more nuanced than that. But this character, without a pinch of self-awareness, bemoaning the disappearance of a book called The Courage to be Disliked? That’s a very solid joke, very solidly delivered by Efron. He follows it up with, “I have several underwears there. And people sell those.”
Eventually, the movie star, whose name is Chris, has one too many fights with the assistant, whose name is Zara, and he has to go find her to make amends. But when he goes to her house, he finds her mother, Brooke (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful widowed author who lives in the kind of gorgeous and classy house that starred in most of the best Nancy Meyers movies. (It’s sharply different from Chris’ house, which is equally fancy but also ugly and impractical, as seen in an effective little bit about his absurd front door.) Brooke and Chris start drinking tequila, they hit it off, and Zara, who lives at home and observes few boundaries with her mom, eventually walks in on them upstairs in Brooke’s bedroom.
Zara’s dismay over her mother’s relationship with Chris is not about the age difference (which goes mostly undiscussed), but about the fact that she’s seen Chris go through his girlfriend-dumping routine enough times to fear that her mother might get hurt. What follows in the script from Carrie Solomon is one part romance between Chris and Brooke, one part ongoing clash between Chris and Zara, and one part mother-daughter story about Zara and Brooke. And honestly, in this film from director Richard LaGravenese, it all works pretty well!
Joey King as Zara Ford and Zac Efron as Chris Cole in A Family Affair.
Tina Rowden/Netflix
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Tina Rowden/Netflix
Some of this — particularly an older woman getting involved with a younger male celebrity — may call to mind the recent movie The Idea of You, in which Anne Hathaway fell for a boy band member played by Nicholas Galitzine. I didn’t care for that movie at all, in part because it wasn’t funny enough, in part because the romance was unconvincing, and in part because the ending lacked emotional resonance. (It was based on a book with a completely different ending, and it turns out you can’t just take a carefully built story and flip the ending on its head and have the result make sense.) That book wasn’t written to be a romcom, but was adapted and wedged into the romcom box. This, on the other hand, is meant to be one — and it shows.
Efron is a much more successful, charismatic, and (especially) funny lead than Galitzine (whom I’d liked in Red, White & Royal Blue) opposite Hathaway in The Idea of You. And it’s refreshing to see Kidman happily making out with somebody, at least temporarily making her way out of the haunted-sad-person rut she’s been in for the past few years. Chris’ relationship with Brooke feels real and brings out nice things in them both, beginning when she explains the Icarus myth so he can understand its connections to his movie franchise, Icarus Rush, which she’s never seen. He certainly seems like a dope at first (“I’m Australian.” “Oh, do you know Margot Robbie?” “…No.” “I do.”), but as he gets comfortable, he grows on Brooke, in addition to being, you know, very hot.
All the way back in 2012, I wrote that Efron was making an interesting play to follow in the footsteps of somebody like Ryan Gosling. (At that time, in his mid-twenties, Efron was appearing in a Nicholas Sparks film.) Gosling was also once a Disney kid, and he managed to grow into a very good dramatic actor, a very good comic actor, and a very swoony romantic lead. Efron doesn’t have the Oscar nominations just yet, but he was excellent in a pure dramatic role in The Iron Claw in 2023, and he’s funny enough here as the willfully goofy hunk that he might have been a pretty terrific Ken if Gosling hadn’t been available — or a good Fall Guy.
King is an established Netflix romcom lead herself, but she does a very nice job here, too. Besides the romance, particularly welcome is the strand of the story about Zara figuring out that the world is not all about her, even in her relationship with her mother. In a scene with her grandmother, played (skillfully as ever) by Kathy Bates, Zara starts to figure out what we all eventually must: Your parents are not only your parents, they are also human beings with lives and thoughts and wants that have nothing to do with you. She has a truth-telling moment with her best friend (Liza Koshy), too, about her problems not lying at the center of the universe, which gives the whole last act a very nice “What if somebody had forcefully told Rory Gilmore to get over herself?” quality.
Nicole Kidman as Brooke Harwood in A Family Affair.
Tina Rowden/Netflix
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Tina Rowden/Netflix
It’s too early to declare some golden age of streaming romcoms, because the ones we get are still wildly uneven, and because on cable, it’s not as if they ever went away. But there’s some star power here, and some budget, and some writing and directing, that suggests interest in the genre is picking up steam and getting good results.
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