It is the year 2000 and today my office is 2 blocks from the Winter Garden. But the last time I saw Cats was 15 years ago when I was 17 and had no idea I would ever live in New York. In 1985 I came here to audition for Juilliard. My mother and I spent 2 nights at the Empire Hotel, and after today I find myself remembering every minute of that stay in this city as if it just happened.

Walking into the Winter Garden at 2:33 pm this afternoon those days in 1985 came back instantly: the cheap ($65) seats with the obstructed view; the lights and the spectacle making up for the piss-poor music; the gaping teenage lust I had for certain of the big-busted solo dancers in the white tights.

Cats was the sensation back then, but today it is pretty dated stuff, and I reserved telling friends about my excitement for seeing it again in the same space as I reserve my equally unfashionable comments regarding my admiration for Tipper Gore and how f*ing cool I think she is.

During intermission I got into a conversation with the woman sitting next to me in N 102. I asked if this was the first time she had seen Cats. As usual when I try to talk to a woman, she tried to get out of the conversation as soon as possible, in this case by appearing very importantly occupied with an apparently fascinating issue of Playbill.

She said she'd never seen Cats before.

Period.

I blurted out that I had seen this show in this theater 15 years ago, and that I could still remember everything about that night, every detail from where I sat to what dancers I liked to the light bulbs which all seemed to be in the same precise location as in 1985. It was hard to believe, I told her, that I knew even then that I wanted to live in New York, and that I wished even then that I had lived in New York since birth so I could feel the beat of the city in that way you can only do if you were born here.

"I am still a tourist here," I told her.

I tried to ask her where she was from and what she was doing in town but she cut me off with questions about my own self. I tried to reciprocally interrupt her questions with questions about herself, but in an instant saw such rigorous formalities going back and forth into infinity. She being the more formal I told her that I first visited New York in 1985.

She asked if I got in to Juilliard, and I said no, but for some reason I tried to impress her by adding that I got into all the other music schools I tried out for that year. She asked if I got what I was looking for by moving to New York, she at that point not unreasonably assuming I had intended for myself a career in Broadway theater. I told her that I didn't play theater music, I played classical piano. "Concerts and recitals, that kind of thing. I practiced 5 hours yesterday."

She delivered a very puzzled look which reminded me of a time I told a friend "Five people live in the apartment next door to me, and one of them is an infant."

The person I told this to was clearly puzzled that I had referred to an infant as a "person."

"15 years?" she asked incredulously, looking right at me.

"I was a kid," I added. She snickered. I guessed her to be about 50. "My mother and I sat right over there," I pointed to the left side of the theater. "I can't get over how much of it I remember. How familiar it all feels."

Act II started and we didn't talk again.

Act II was much less familiar to me, but something inside me made me like the show anyway. Well, it was not "something." I know exactly what it is. For as much as I remember Cats in 1985, what I remembered today was arriving in New York in 1990 and sitting in room 317 of the Parc Lincoln Hotel and thinking "Now that I live in New York I'll be able to go see Cats every week!"

Leaving the theater this afternoon was when I tried hardest to re-create that night in 1985. In 1985 my mother and I left the Winter Garden at around 11:00 pm, and for whatever reason we decided to walk the 10 or so blocks north to the Empire Hotel at Lincoln Center.

By today's standards the walk up Broadway is pretty sane, but in 1985 midtown Manhattan was a hell-hole and we were pretty naïve to think we could just take a leisurely stroll for a half mile at such an hour.

We crossed over to the west side of Broadway and I saw a group of nondescript men huddled behind a beam which supported a large office building. They were muttering among themselves and as I glanced back at them my mother and I saw one of them start to follow after us. He got close enough that I could hear him make a snorting sound. At that point my mother grabbed my arm and said "Let's go over here." I mumbled "OK," and we walked right out onto Broadway into the path of an oncoming bus and in between a few taxi cabs that were doing at least 50 mph.

I looked back and saw that the guy who had attempted to follow us turned back toward the sidewalk, shaking his head in a gesture I have always interpreted as "You two are crazier than me."