“Whispers and Wildflowers, NYC” is a collection of stories, characters, and events based in NYC, notably during the nineteen fifties. The characters lived there, in the ephemeral American city between two rivers where ornamented old architecture existed in the shadow of smooth planed glass towers—reaching skyward within the ever-changing reflected light, dancing across the waters.

The characters move through the light of the changing seasons, the days, the nights, and new dawns and dusks.The sounds of the city’s voices echo old languages and “new” short words. Songs and music pulsate histories of multi-various cultures and pour forth back against the sky as prayers. Feet-pound familiar rhythms or tiptoe lightly across the rooftops. The excited delight of the playground children intermittently top angry voices from overcrowded apartments, and the shrill “dahling” clamor of fleeting glamor drown out the quiet whispers and hopes of those searching, searching and waiting, still waiting. Throughout the passage of several years in “Oncle Peter, Lucky Dog, and Les Sylphides,” Hannah Brandt transitions from a child into a young adult. Through her instinctive love of music and heartbreaking early losses, she is able to devote herself to her true calling.

“Spectre” introduces Kari and Jay as they enter the rarified world of dance to study the traditional techniques, joyfully dance together, embrace the physical rigors and conform their bodies to the demanded requirements. They meet at a time when America was creating its extended, unique style of dance and music, and they offer each other a passionate, inclusive love of their art, each other, and the friends they encounter along the way. Their relationship endures over the years and distances of each of their lives.

The old woman of “September Child” rides the bus of memories. She had unexpectedly reencountered the happiness of nurturing an infant into toddlerhood and then further into childhood. She must quietly resign herself to lonely despair as his inevitable loss draws closer. “Cakewalk”/ “La Vie en Rose on the Staten Island Ferry” are two short plays. Lenore and Dennis in “Cakewalk” meet again after ten years in a brownstone apartment on the upper west side of New York City. They seek resolution as they relive the years before the unexpected event that caused their separation from their past idyllic world.

The sudden refrain of a long-ago remembered song brings two people together after the passage of decades in “La Vie en Rose on the Staten Island Ferry.” Come, visit the city as wildflowers bloom across the meadows in the parks, where along the street perhaps, behind a door, two lovers sit across from each other and whisper, ”I love you.”