It was August 2015 in New York City, and my life was starting over by, as my sixth grade teacher once said to me, “the skin of my teeth” (in that case, she didn’t like a poem that I had written about her). Just months earlier, I’d packed up everything in Philadelphia and boarded a MegaBus to Manhattan with three suitcases, a painting wrapped in a bedsheet, and $5,000 to my name—a cushion for starting over in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
My friend Scottie saved me, offering the floor of his Hell’s Kitchen music studio as a makeshift bed. The catch? I had to be out by 8:00 AM every morning so he could coach vocal clients during marathon 12-hour days. Scottie had always championed me as an artist, so I jumped at the chance to escape a heartbreak in Philly and return to the city I’d briefly called home in 2006 and 2013.
Desperate for income, I used a staffing agency to secure a grueling, physical temp job running errands for a famous fashion designer. His headquarters were tucked inside the Hippodrome—a remarkably boring midcentury glass skyscraper built on the grave of the legendary theater where, in 1918, Houdini disappeared a 10,000 ton Asian elephant from the stage in one of the most celebrated stage magic illusions of all time.
To add insult to injury, my absolute favorite actress since her 2005 performance in Pride & Prejudice, Keira Knightley, was in town preparing to star on Broadway in Thérèse Raquin. Tickets were wildly out of my budget. Daily, I’d haul racks of designer clothes or baskets of mannequins through the muggy Midtown heat, staring up at Keira’s face towering over Times Square on massive billboards. I can always just rewatch Atonement or The Duchess tonight, I’d soothe myself.
Then came a particularly brutal day. At 5:00 PM, I was finally dismissed by a supervisor who took far too much pleasure in modeling herself after Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada. Exhausted, I stepped into an empty elevator. It swept straight down to the ground floor without stopping.
The Hippodrome’s lobby layout was tricky: the elevator bank sat tucked around a tight, blind corner right past the turnstiles. The doors slid open, and I stepped forward. Just as one foot hit the marble lobby and the other lingered in the elevator, a woman in a breezy summer dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat whipped through the turnstile, took the hard corner at top speed, and slammed directly into me.
It was a classic, chaotic New York moment.
“I’m so sorry!” I blurted, yet to look up.
“Oh, so sorry,” she replied.
My brain registered the distinct British cadence just as my head looked up and eyes met her face beneath the brim of the hat. Time completely stopped. Out of eight million people, thousands buildings, and endless streets, I had just collided shoulder-to-shoulder with Keira Knightley.
Her eyes caught my eyes: a wide-blue, utterly stunned expression. As she stepped past me into the elevator, she let out a quiet, melodic laugh and offered a warm smile. The heavy doors slid shut between us, ending the moment as fast as it began.
When I got back to the apartment that evening, an email from the staffing agency was waiting: I was being moved to a permanent role down on Wall Street starting the very next morning. I would never set foot in the Hippodrome again.
It was a fleeting, perfect goodbye from Midtown—and a reminder that in New York, magic hides right around the blind corners.
Montgomery Maxton 