“I had just
been in Tom's, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have a song called 'Tom's
Diner' about alienation, where you're not connected to anything you see. Lately
on the Internet I've been reading people saying this song is really random and
it's about nothing. It’s not about nothing! It’s about something! Every single
scene has been set up to show that this person is alienated from life in
general.”—Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega quoted in David Honigman, “The Life of
a Song: ‘Tom’s Diner,’” The Financial Times, Feb. 1-2, 2020
Vega and I were on Morningside Heights—she at
Barnard, me across Broadway at Columbia—in the late Seventies and early
Eighties, and were both even English majors (or to be exact, in my case,
English-History double-major).
But we never bumped into each other, in no small
part because I was a commuter. Only seldom did I venture down to the corner of
112th Street and Broadway where Tom’s was located.
Since then, of course, this eatery has become a
worldwide landmark, in no small part due to its exterior being featured in numerous
episodes of Seinfeld. Maybe for that
reason, it occurs to me, some listeners might feel that, as the sitcom is “a
show about nothing,” everything associated with its locales might be, too.
I’m glad to see that Vega is trying to put that
notion to rest.
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