There are family secrets we inherit, family stories we repeat and family wounds we spend a lifetime trying to understand. In Crazy Mama: A True Story of Love and Madness, playwright Sharon Scott Williams turns her own family history into a theatrical examination of what happens when a child grows up loving someone she cannot save.

Rubicon Theatre Company will bring the Off-Broadway premiere of Williams’ autobiographical play to 59E59 Theaters this fall, with Linda Purl taking on an extraordinary 16 characters under the direction of Anson Williams. Will Huse joins her as The Blues Man.

For television audiences, the director Anson Williams remains instantly associated with Warren “Potsie” Weber on the iconic series Happy Days, but his career behind the camera has been extensive, directing hundreds of hours of television. There is also a delightful bit of Happy Days symmetry in his collaboration with Purl: she played Ashley Pfister, Fonzie’s girlfriend, during the series’ tenth season. Decades later, the two are reunited on considerably darker territory, with Williams directing Purl through a story in which comedy and heartbreak live uncomfortably close together.

The story begins just days after Sharon’s eighth birthday. Racing home from school to beat her teenage brother, Spikey, to the final piece of birthday cake, she walks into the kitchen and finds her mother holding a knife. The sheriff takes her mother away, and a deputy gives the little girl an explanation both brutally simple and wholly inadequate: her mama is “not right in the head.”

What follows is not simply a story about mental illness. It is the story of a daughter who spends decades believing that if she loves fiercely enough, tries hard enough or somehow finds the right answer, she can rescue her mother.

That distinction gives Crazy Mama its emotional center. Mental illness affects the person living with it, but its reach rarely stops there. It changes marriages, childhoods, siblings and entire families. Williams writes from the perspective of someone who knew both the love and the fear inside that experience.

“Mental illness affects one in four people, but all-too-often individuals and families don’t speak of their experience and hide their pain,” Williams says. “I was lucky. I had my family to help me through it, but there were times we were afraid to talk about it. Crazy Mama is a story that helps lift that stigma.”

Rather than treating its subject with unrelenting solemnity, the play is laced with humor as well as pathos. That matters. Families living through extraordinary circumstances still laugh, fight over birthday cake, irritate one another and get through Tuesday. Resilience isn’t always heroic. Sometimes it is simply continuing to love someone when love cannot fix what is wrong.

For Purl, whose career has moved easily between stage, film and television, Crazy Mama presents a formidable theatrical challenge. Sixteen characters pass through a single performer, requiring not merely vocal or physical transformation but the creation of an entire family and world around one woman’s memory.

The production arrives in New York following its world premiere at Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura, California, in March 2025. Rubicon Producing Artistic Directors Karyl Lynn Burns and Jonathan Drahos now bring the work east for its Off-Broadway debut.

The creative team includes Brian Gale, who provides lighting and projection design, and Lindsay Jones on sound design. Alexandrea Hess Rodriguez serves as production stage manager, with Stephanie Coltrin as associate producer.

At its heart, Crazy Mama asks a difficult question: What happens when the person you desperately want to save is someone you do not have the power to save?

Williams lived that question. Now Linda Purl will become the 16 people who helped her tell the story.

Performances begin September 16, with opening night set for September 22. The limited engagement runs through October 18 in Theater C.

Crazy Mama runs two hours and five minutes, including intermission, with performances Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $42, including the $2 fee, through 59E59 Theaters, by phone at 646-892-7999, or at the box office at 59 East 59th Street.

There are dates New Yorkers remember, and then there is September 11.

Today marks 25 years since the morning that changed New York City, America and, in ways we are still living with, the world. A quarter century has passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, killed 2,977 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93. Yet in New York, 25 years has never been enough distance to turn 9/11 completely into history.

Too many people remember exactly where they were. Too many families still live with an empty chair. Too many first responders and recovery workers have become sick or died because they went toward Ground Zero when everyone else was trying to get away.

On Friday, September 11, 2026, Manhattan will remember.

At the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the 25th Anniversary Commemoration Ceremony begins at 8:40 a.m. The Memorial Plaza ceremony is private and reserved for family members of those killed in the September 11 attacks and the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing, although the ceremony will be streamed online. The Museum itself will be closed to the public for the day.

As it has for nearly a quarter century, the heart of the ceremony will remain remarkably simple: the reading of the names. Names rather than numbers.

Family members will read the names of those lost, interrupted by moments of silence marking the terrible chronology of that morning—the moments when the planes struck and when the towers fell. For the first time this year, the ceremony will add another moment of silence for those who survived September 11 itself but later died from illnesses and injuries associated with exposure to the toxic dust and debris. That addition matters.

September 11 did not end on September 11. Firefighters, police officers, construction workers, sanitation workers, volunteers and thousands of others spent days and months breathing the air around Ground Zero. Twenty-five years later, the consequences continue. The FDNY itself has marked this anniversary with Resilience, a film examining the continuing health toll among World Trade Center responders, alongside Remembering Judge, honoring beloved FDNY Chaplain Father Mychal Judge, officially recorded as Victim 0001.

Midtown will offer its own extraordinary remembrance.

At Bryant Park, 2,753 empty chairs will cover the lawn, representing the lives lost in New York on September 11. From 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., visitors can place a flower on one of the chairs. For the first 3,000 flowers placed by the public, Bank of America is scheduled to donate $25 per flower to organizations supporting New York’s first responders and their families.

There is something almost unbearably effective about an empty chair. We have seen the photographs of the towers. We know the number 2,753. But a chair represents the person who should still be sitting in it. That evening, Bryant Park will move from silence into music.

At 7 p.m., Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra in the free New York Resounds, created to commemorate the 25th anniversary. The program begins with Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and includes George Walker’s Lyric for Strings, Charles Ives’ The Gong on the Hook and Ladder, Haydn’s Symphony No. 44, the Trauersinfonie or “Mourning Symphony,” and the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Symphony No. 10.

There could hardly be a more appropriate opening than Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

For all the politicians and dignitaries who will attend commemorations Friday, the enduring story of September 11 belongs largely to ordinary people who behaved extraordinarily: firefighters climbing stairs while others descended them; police officers, paramedics and Port Authority officers running toward danger; strangers helping strangers; ferry crews evacuating Manhattan; taxi drivers carrying rescue workers home; sanitation workers clearing debris; doctors and nurses waiting for casualties; restaurant workers feeding exhausted responders.

New York City is also bringing some of those lesser-known stories back onto its streets through Memory Markers: 9/11, a new digital project appearing on LinkNYC kiosks across the five boroughs. The geographically placed stories recall the largely forgotten places that became part of the response—including the Midtown warehouse converted into an Emergency Operations Center after the original center was destroyed and the taxi drivers who gave first responders free rides home.

Even Times Square will stop. At precisely 9:11 a.m., dozens of its famous digital billboards are expected to suspend their advertising and display only the time. It is part of the National Day of Service and Remembrance, an effort founded by 9/11 family members to transform memory into acts of service. For a place designed never to stop selling, flashing, moving or demanding our attention, even a brief moment of visual silence carries weight.

Then, as darkness falls, New Yorkers will look upward. The Tribute in Light will once again send two immense blue columns into the night sky from Lower Manhattan. Eighty-eight 7,000-watt xenon lights arranged in two 48-foot squares create beams that can be seen from as far as 60 miles away. They will shine from dusk Friday until dawn Saturday, recreating not the buildings themselves but their absence.

This year, the Tribute in Light becomes part of a national live broadcast for the first time. Cyndi Lauper, Lainey Wilson and Five For Fighting’s John Ondrasik are scheduled to perform, with David Muir, Robin Roberts and Diane Sawyer hosting the 8 p.m. special from Lower Manhattan. Buildings throughout New York—including the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, David Geffen Hall, One Bryant Park, the Intrepid Museum, One World Observatory and PAC NYC—will also illuminate in blue.

Twenty-five years is a strange anniversary. It is long enough that an entire generation of adults was not alive on September 11, 2001. Children now entering college know the Twin Towers only from photographs and video. To them, September 11 belongs to history in the way Pearl Harbor once belonged to ours.

New York still carries the physical memory of that morning. Those of us who were here remember the missing-person posters. We remember the photographs taped to walls and fences. We remember the smoke. We remember the firehouses covered in flowers. We remember looking at strangers differently because, for one extraordinary period of time, strangers weren’t quite strangers anymore.

That may be the part of September 11 worth remembering most carefully 25 years later. The terrorists destroyed buildings and murdered thousands of innocent people. What they did not destroy was New York. For a time, they actually revealed it.

Tomorrow there will be 2,753 empty chairs in Bryant Park. There will be names spoken aloud at Ground Zero. There will be flowers, moments of silence and music. At 9:11 a.m., Times Square will stop selling us things. And after the sun goes down, two blue beams will rise into the Manhattan sky.

Twenty-five years later, New York is still keeping its promise.

We remember.

25th Anniversary Commemoration Ceremony and livestream

American Symphony Orchestra: New York Resounds

Times Square smelled considerably better than usual Wednesday afternoon as Taste of Times Square returned September 9, turning Broadway and Restaurant Row into one enormous outdoor dining room. More than 30 neighborhood restaurants participated in the annual Times Square Alliance food and music festival, which stretched along 46th Street from Seventh to Ninth Avenues and across the Broadway plazas between 45th and 47th Streets.

For four hours, the neighborhood became a tasting menu of itself. Italian, Mexican, Caribbean, Cuban, Indian and classic American dishes appeared within steps of one another, with longtime Theatre District institutions joining newer arrivals and giving New Yorkers and visitors the chance to graze their way through the neighborhood without committing to a full dinner. Most tastes were priced at $5, with several larger offerings at $10.

Among the participating favorites were Bond 45 NY, Brooklyn Chop House, Ellen’s Stardust Diner, Hard Rock Cafe, Carmine’s, Becco, Havana Central, Le Rivage, Junior’s, Serendipity 3, Toloache, Tony’s Di Napoli and Virgil’s Real Barbecue. It was a rather wonderful reminder of something those of us who actually live and work here already know: Times Square may be famous for its lights and Broadway theatres, but there is an extraordinary amount of food tucked into these blocks.

Toffee Sticky Pudding from The Long Room

We started with dessert—or at least made very certain we didn’t miss it. The Toffee Sticky Pudding from The Long Room proved one of our happiest discoveries of the day. Sweets were surprisingly scarce, particularly compared with the number of savory offerings, making that pudding even more welcome. Between it, Serendipity 3’s Frozen Hot Chocolate and Junior’s cheesecake, the neighborhood’s sweet tooth was represented, but only just.

Toloache’s pork taco

Then came Toloache. Their pork taco was delicious enough to accomplish exactly what an event like Taste of Times Square is supposed to accomplish: it made us want to go back and review the restaurant properly. A few bites can be a far more persuasive advertisement than any press release.

Palermo Argentinian Bistro Steak and cheese bread

We already knew what Palermo Argentinian Bistro could do, having previously reviewed and loved the restaurant, but its steak and cheese bread provided a useful reminder. The steak was quite simply melt-in-your-mouth tender. There is also another Mexican restaurant, Rosa Mexican, preparing to enter the neighborhood, and we are more than ready to see what it brings to the increasingly interesting Theatre District dining scene.

Food, however, was only half the atmosphere. Music spilled through the plazas, including TSQ LIVE + MTA Music performer Bella Breen at Broadway and 47th Street, while the Broadway Dreams Foundation and Ellen’s Stardust Diner’s Stardusters were among the scheduled performers farther downtown. Street musicians filled in the spaces between, and at one point models were being filmed in the middle of it all. It was Times Square doing what Times Square does best: food, theatre, fashion, music and complete visual chaos somehow occupying the same few blocks without asking one another’s permission.

Catherine Russell

One of our favorite encounters was with Catherine Russell, who has spent nearly four decades playing Margaret Thorne Brent in the Off-Broadway thriller Perfect Crime. Russell isn’t simply part of Theatre District history; she is one of those people who actually makes the neighborhood feel like a neighborhood. She owns The Theater Center and Patzeria Perfect Pizza, and there she was Wednesday, not posing beside the booth but serving pasta to the people who stopped by.

That accessibility is part of what made Taste of Times Square work. For one afternoon, the barrier between restaurant and customer, performer and audience, Broadway and sidewalk largely disappeared. Restaurant owners and workers served food in the street while musicians performed a few feet away and thousands of people wandered from table to table deciding what smelled too good to pass up.

New York has an unnerving ability to place celebration and violence almost side by side.

Just a block from Restaurant Row, two people were stabbed Wednesday afternoon inside a West 47th Street building. Early reports differed on the precise address, ages and conditions of the victims, but police confirmed that a man and woman suffered stab wounds in the incident at approximately 2:45 p.m. Later reporting said both victims had been taken to Mount Sinai West and were in stable condition, while police were searching for a suspect. Contrary to some initial information circulating Wednesday, the latest reporting I found does not confirm that the male victim died or that a person of interest was in custody.

The contrast was impossible to ignore. A block away, people were eating tacos, listening to music and celebrating the restaurants that make Hell’s Kitchen and Times Square feel like home. Nearby, police were investigating a bloody act of violence.

That, too, is New York: glorious and maddening, communal and frightening, sometimes within a single city block.

For most of Wednesday, though, Taste of Times Square offered the version of the neighborhood worth fighting to preserve. Restaurants opened themselves to strangers, performers turned sidewalks into stages, Catherine Russell handed out pizza, and thousands of people ate their way through a community that is far richer and more local than the flashing billboards sometimes allow the rest of the world to see.

Somewhere in all of that, we discovered a sticky toffee pudding worth going back for.

Apple has finally folded. After years of watching Samsung, Google and other manufacturers experiment with foldable smartphones, Apple used its September 9 event to introduce the iPhone Duo, the company’s first foldable iPhone—and easily the most consequential product unveiled during a morning that also brought the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4 and AirPods 5.

The iPhone Duo is not simply an iPhone with a hinge. Opened, it reveals a 7.6-inch Super Retina XDR display, 50 percent larger than the display on the iPhone 18 Pro Max. Closed, its outer display retains more than 90 percent of the screen area of the iPhone 18 Pro, making it usable as a conventional phone without constantly unfolding it. Apple has also designed iOS 27 specifically around the new format, allowing the Duo to work open, closed, seated at an angle or standing on its own.

That creates some genuinely useful possibilities rather than merely providing a technological party trick. Two apps can operate side by side through Split View; FaceTime can be used hands-free while the phone stands on its own; movies can be watched at an adjustable angle without propping the phone against the nearest coffee cup; and the outer display can show the person being photographed exactly what the camera is seeing. A particularly clever feature called Smart Take detects when everyone is ready and takes the picture, eliminating the familiar sprint from camera to group before the timer goes off.

The Duo gets a titanium frame and hinge cover, Ceramic Shield on the front and back and an IP68 water- and dust-resistance rating. Inside is Apple’s new vapor-cooled A20 Pro chip, along with something Apple has never put into an iPhone before: a dual-battery system. The company claims up to 31 hours of video playback using the inner display and 44 hours using the outer screen. Cameras include 48MP Fusion Main and Ultra Wide cameras, plus both a 12MP Center Stage front camera and an under-display FaceTime camera.

The catch for anyone who immediately wants one is patience. Unlike the rest of the new hardware, the iPhone Duo doesn’t arrive next week. Preorders begin October 16, with availability October 23. It comes in Night Sky and Star White.

For those who don’t particularly want their phone folding in half, Apple also introduced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. Here the revolution is less visual, but some of the improvements are significant. The new A20 Pro chip delivers Apple’s most powerful iPhone performance yet, with a new Dual 16-core Neural Engine designed to handle increasingly complex on-device AI workloads. Apple says graphics performance can be as much as 40 percent faster than the iPhone 17 Pro.

The camera may be the more interesting upgrade for photographers. The 48MP Fusion Main camera now gets a variable aperture, providing considerably greater control over depth of field and light. Battery life has also jumped: Apple says the iPhone 18 Pro Max can deliver up to 45 hours of video playback and up to 30 hours of general use per charge, while faster wired charging can bring the battery to 50 percent in approximately 15 minutes with a compatible adapter.

But hardware wasn’t really the only story Apple was telling. Siri AI is moving much closer to the AI assistant Apple has been promising. It is designed for natural back-and-forth conversations, can use personal context to locate information buried in photos, emails and notes, take actions inside apps and draw upon broader online knowledge. Apple is also introducing a dedicated Siri app where conversations can be continued and revisited.

The Apple Watch Series 12 may actually contain some of the day’s most useful technology. Its new Health Sensing System measures heart rate every five seconds throughout the day and dramatically increases the frequency of heart-rate-variability measurements. A new Readiness feature combines activity, training load, sleep and vital signs into a 0-to-10 daily score accompanied by recommendations ranging from “Recover” to “Go For It.”

Apple is also redesigning the iPhone Health app later this year with a Longevity section and a particularly intriguing feature called Health Age, which compares certain health metrics with a user’s chronological age. Series 12 begins at $399 and will be available September 18.

Then there is something that deserves more attention than it will probably receive amid all the shiny hardware. Apple Watch’s forthcoming Audio Intelligence can recognize important sounds, provide a text version of the previous 15 seconds of a conversation through Live Rewind, and create Siri Recap summaries to help users remember what was discussed. Apple says Live Rewind gives both an audible chime and visible indication when activated, while saved snippets and summaries are end-to-end encrypted.

For serious athletes and adventurers, Apple Watch Ultra 4 receives the same new Health Sensing System and S11 chip while extending workout battery life to as much as 45 hours. Apple is also claiming its most accurate on-device GPS and heart-rate sensing yet. Ultra 4 starts at $799 and arrives September 18.

Finally, AirPods 5 arrive with Apple’s latest attempt to solve one of the inherent problems with open-ear earbuds: blocking unwanted sound without sealing the ear canal. Apple says Active Noise Cancellation can remove up to 50 percent more external noise than AirPods 4 with ANC. There is also a new acoustic architecture, improved Adaptive EQ, hands-free access to Siri AI and Live Translation. They, too, arrive September 18.

What made this Apple event more interesting than several recent ones was that it wasn’t entirely about making familiar objects incrementally faster. The iPhone Duo changes the physical vocabulary of Apple’s most important product. Siri AI changes how Apple expects us to interact with those products. And the increasingly sophisticated health technology inside Apple Watch suggests the watch is quietly evolving from an accessory into something much closer to a continuous personal health monitor.

Some of it is undoubtedly Apple doing what Apple does brilliantly: convincing us that the perfectly functional device already sitting in our hand suddenly belongs to another geological era.

The iPhone Duo is different. After nearly two decades of teaching the world what an iPhone looks like, Apple has finally decided the iPhone itself can change shape.

Explore Apple’s new iPhone Duo

Explore iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max

New York Fashion Week has its models, its designers, its celebrities and its front rows. But last night, September 8, some of the most irresistible models walking into the spotlight had four legs—and some of them were looking for homes.

CatWalk FurBaby, presented by ELYSIANImpact and Seven Runway returns for its fourth year at Sony Hall in Times Square, bringing together fashion and animal rescue for an evening appropriately billed as “Where Fashion Meets Compassion.” Created by ELYSIAN founder and publisher Karen Floyd, the event pairs designers with animal rescue organizations, transforming the traditional Fashion Week runway into something considerably more meaningful.

Karen Floyd, Marc Bouwer, his dog and friend

This year’s show brought together 11 designers and ateliers supporting ten rescue organizations, with Anne Fontaine, Bless by Bless, L’Agence, Cate Brown, Hot Girl Quilting, Marc Bouwer, Magpies & Peacocks,

Victor De Souza

Victor De Souza, Halyna Shunevych, Any Old Iron and D’Marsh Couture taking part.

Prince Mario Max and Karen Floyd

Yes, there was couture. Yes, there were celebrity judges and Fashion Week glamour. But it was the rescue dogs that were the point.

Lessa Roland

That distinction is what has allowed CatWalk FurBaby to become more than another event competing for attention during an increasingly overcrowded Fashion Week calendar. Each designer walked in support of a participating rescue, giving animal welfare organizations something extraordinarily valuable during NYFW: visibility.

Here comes the dog

The concept comes from Floyd’s passion for animal welfare and her belief that philanthropy and fashion don’t need to occupy separate worlds. CatWalk FurBaby uses the spectacle of a runway show to direct attention toward rescue, adoption and the organizations doing the decidedly less glamorous work of caring for abandoned and vulnerable animals every day.

Karen Floyd, Jean Shafiroff

The formula has already attracted formidable names in fashion. Previous CatWalk FurBaby participants and guests have included NYFW founder Fern Mallis, supermodel Carol Alt, philanthropist Jean Shafiroff who was a judge this year and designer Nicole Miller, while DJ Chloe Jane has appeared wearing Tommy Hilfiger. The event has also earned national attention, including coverage in Forbes.

Carmen D’Alessio and guest

There is something particularly clever about putting rescue animals into the middle of Fashion Week. Fashion is built upon desire: the dress we suddenly need, the bag everyone wants, the image we imagine ourselves becoming. Animal adoption asks us to look at desire differently. Instead of asking, Do I want this?, it asks, Can I give this animal a life? Unlike a handbag, that decision loves you back.

Gizmo was one of the lucky dogs to be rescued. Sitting in the front row with his human

The evening also reflects a larger movement within fashion toward purpose. Consumers increasingly want to know what the brands they support stand for, where things come from and whether all that beauty is attached to anything beyond commerce. CatWalk FurBaby doesn’t pretend a runway can solve the enormous problem of animal abandonment. It does something more practical: it puts the organizations trying to solve it in front of people who might donate, adopt, volunteer or simply pay attention.

The host for the night was Charles Charlii Sebunya

Behind the event is ELYSIAN Impact, the philanthropic arm of ELYSIAN, which focuses its charitable work across five areas: women, children, service, animals and the environment. According to the organization, ELYSIAN Impact has disbursed more than $17.5 million over the past decade, with donations going directly to nonprofit organizations.

 Dr. Christina Rahm

For the participating rescues, however, the impact of the evening isn’t measured only in dollars. Every animal placed before an audience becomes an individual rather than a statistic. One face can accomplish what thousands of numbers cannot. Someone sees a dog. Someone falls in love. Someone decides there is room in the apartment after all.

That is where CatWalk FurBaby gets this exactly right.

Eliza

Fashion Week gives New York plenty of beautiful things to look at over the coming days. There will be extraordinary clothes, impossible shoes, parties, celebrities and enough photographers to make crossing certain blocks of Manhattan nearly impossible.

Opening it with compassion isn’t a bad statement about what beauty ought to mean.

The best thing walking the runway this Fashion Week might not be wearing the clothes at all.

CatWalk FurBaby took place September 8 at Sony Hall, inside the Paramount Hotel in Times Square.

Look for Part 2 on who was adopted and who won the awards.