Britta Lokting

Kaila Mullady wants to change all that.

“We are shaking a venue with sub-bass just like any huge DJ,” she said of beatboxing. “But it’s coming from our mouths.”

The first and only two-time winner of the Beatbox Battle World Championship, Mullady, 27, is known for incorporating singing, poetry and other theatrics into her performances. She was also the first woman to defeat a man in a national competition.

A Broadway director took notice, and she is now performing in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Freestyle Love Supreme.”

Mullady, a native of Long Island, is co-host and co-producer of the American Beatbox Championships, a national battle, in Brooklyn Nov. 8 through 10. The event is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

This is an edited and condensed version of a recent conversation with her.

Q: How did you get started?

A: I’ve been beatboxing since I can remember. I would watch videos on YouTube. In fifth grade, this kid told me: “You’re beatboxing. That’s what you’re doing.” It became the party trick. I would do it in the back of the bus or on the lunch table and people would rap to it.

Q: When did you realize you wanted to pursue it as a career?

A:After high school, I met this beatboxer named JFlo at a party. My friends were trying to get me to beatbox and I said, “I’m not your toy.”

Then my one friend got it out of me. JFlo came out of the backyard and everyone parted like the Red Sea. He said: “Was that you? Do it again.” So I beatboxed for him and he said, “OK you need to hang out with me.”

He introduced me to the New York City beatboxing community, where I met my mentor, Kid Lucky.

Q: What happened next?

A: At that time, I was doing a lot more improv and theater in the city, but I broke my back in 2012. There was no way for me to do improv unless I became a robot onstage or a cactus. If your back is broken, you can still beatbox.

I started coming into the city three or four days a week, street performing with Kid, doing open mic nights. At that point, I just really fell in love with it and by the time I could go back to work, I was like, “Nah, I’m going to give this a shot.”

Q: How did Kid Lucky work with you?

A: The first time I went to meet up with Kid, I had dropped out of college. The only classes I went to were acting, philosophy and social studies. Then I just stopped going. I was a little bit lost at the time.

He taught me about beat rhyming, which is when you sing or rap — tell a story — while you beatbox. He would put me on the street corner by myself and leave me and say, “If I don’t hear you using words, you’re going to be in trouble.” I started realizing if anyone stops on the street and they give you a dollar, that’s truly the best compliment.

Q: What does it take to become a professional beatboxer?

A: A lot of dedication and creativity. You constantly have to prove yourself. Beatboxing is still so new that I — and my friends — very much are chopping down doors to show that it is a great tool for education, a great tool for speech therapy, that it deserves to be on Broadway.

Q: You’re one of the few professional female beatboxers. What’s that like?

A: When I first started, the sexism online, it’s still bad now, but it was really bad then. They would be telling you what you should be doing with your mouth instead. Even my style of beat rhyming, when I first started that, everyone told me that’s not really beatboxing.

But now, the trend around the world is everyone is making full songs and using their voice. I think because I’m a woman, I won’t get credit for that contribution in the battle scene.

Q: Are there other female beatboxers you admire?

A: Butterscotch is amazing. She was the first woman to ever win the female World Championship. MC Beats was the girl who came in before me. She was the first woman that I saw that men really respected. They would call her the Beatbox Queen. She paved the way for me.

Q: How is the beatboxing scene in New York different from when you first started performing almost a decade ago? How is it the same?

A: It’s way bigger now. There are two new waves of generations of beatboxers who are now in New York killing it. There’s this energy and this respect. I would say that right now, New York City has the most amount of female beatboxers. When I first started, it was literally four of us, and I was the only one battling.

It’s the same because we have actual mentors here; people since the 1980s that started in New York City. Beatboxers in their 40s are teaching us what to do. Their whole thing is, “Be original.” In other parts of the world, it became more about, “How crazy of a sound can you do?” Here it was always, “What are you trying to say with it?”

Q: Can you earn enough money doing this?

A: I think it speaks for itself that I pay for a New York City apartment just beatboxing, have a savings account just beatboxing. I’m able to travel the world. I can take vacations. I can help my friends out if they need.

I think anything that you’re passionate about, you can turn into a business, but it takes creativity, perseverance, because it won’t start off like that. I started street performing, making maybe $25. But it got me one gig and that gig, somebody saw me, and it got me another two gigs. I’ve been doing this for eight years now.

Q: What are your favorite places to perform in New York?

A: Astor Place, by the Cube, is my comfort zone. When Kid and me would be street performing, that’s where we would go. Every time I walk in that place it reminds me of how far I’ve come.

This article originally appeared in

You Have to Hear This: The Human Beatbox Champion

NEW YORK — In the early 1980s, beatboxers backed up rappers when drum machines were unaffordable. Today, the art form remains largely underground and misunderstood. Some people dismiss it as a gimmick.

Elliott found Colors, as she put it, “morally correct.” She recalled a Muslim cook who excused himself to pray in the locker area each day, even during peak hours. The staff, many of whom came from Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, came from more than 20 countries. They collaborated on a menu that reflected their ethnicities — pad Thai, risotto, a Japanese-style smoked tuna. “It was like the Queens of restaurants,” Elliott said. “I never worked anywhere that was nearly as diverse.”

Six weeks later, Elliott quit. She wasn’t getting paid on time.

Working at a restaurant is a rite of passage for many New Yorkers. For some it’s a way to finance their dance classes or startups. For countless others, it is simply a way to survive. But the model of working for cash in a restaurant is changing, as several businesses are doing away with tipping. There is also a campaign underway to raise the wages of tipped workers across the state and the country. Such changes could raise prices all around, affecting the entire food-service ecosystem in New York.

Raising wages for food service workers is certainly a noble cause, one that aligned with the ideals of Colors when it opened, in 2006. But good intentions are one thing; running a restaurant in a city as competitive as New York is quite another.

Colors was a fine-dining cooperative where employees had health benefits and made almost $10 over the tipped hourly rate. But there were other variables that hampered this lofty vision from working smoothly, like complex labor laws, fees from health department inspections and high overhead. Former employees described a restaurant strapped for cash and with no clear leadership. Clark Wolf, a food and restaurant consultant, described Colors as an “incredibly well intentioned but logically doomed-to-fail situation.”

Colors restaurant quietly closed in 2017.

Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, the nonprofit known as ROC that was the organizing force behind Colors,is still going strong, as it fights for what it calls One Fair Wage, which is to say, raising the minimum wage for all tipped workers across the country. It has also announced a new business model for Colors restaurant in New York, which is rescheduled to reopen on the Lower East Side next year.

One Fair Wage has its supporters and its detractors. In New York, employers can take a “tip credit” and pay servers a lower wage, if tips help meet or exceed the minimum wage. Restaurant Opportunities argues that this two-tiered wage system perpetuates sexual harassment, poverty, wage theft and workplace discrimination.

Others are concerned about a ripple effect. Restaurants will need to raise prices if the tip credit is eliminated, said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance. “Customers are currently constantly complaining that it’s so hard to go out and have a meal because it’s so expensive,” he explained. If prices increase, people could start to tip less.

This year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the state Labor Department to hold public hearings on the issue. The Manhattan hearing in June drew a fiery crowd of protesters on both sides of the debate. Behind the barricades, there were chants of “Better wages, better tips!” One sign read: “Cuomo, we don’t need saving.”

“It was the closest thing you can get to a riot on minimum wage,” said Louis Pechman, a labor lawyer in New York.

Danny Meyer, the founder and chief executive of the Union Square Hospitality Group, recently admitted that after putting a no-tipping policy into effect, he lost close to 40 percent of his front-of-house staff (including waiters, bartenders and hosts). Other restaurateurs who followed Meyer’s lead in 2015 — like Andrew Tarlow (Marlow &amp; Sons, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn)andClaus Meyer (Agern, in Grand Central Terminal) —ended up reversing course this year, citing an increase in pricing that was not sustainable. Marlow &amp; Sons returned to the tipping model last week.

“It’s become impossible to ignore that removing tips has created new challenges that we are unable to solve, chiefly that prices have hit a peak that the market cannot bear,” Tarlow wrote in a statement.

“I’d still like to see us get rid of tipping,” said Amanda Cohen, the chef and owner of Dirt Candy, a no-tipping restaurant in New York. She increased menu prices by about 20 percent, which allows her to pay her kitchen staff, who don’t receive tips, a higher wage.

But some servers are nervous about losing their tips. Alcieli Felipe, a waitress at the restaurant Lido Harlem, said immigrants might be the first to go if raised wages and no tipping are enforced at her restaurant. “Who are they going to cut first? The ones who don’t speak English who work at the back of the house.”

Laura Strauss, a waitress, said the pressure of pleasing customers existed even without working for tips, and the no-tip model she worked under for a while limited her income. Now working for tips, she makes about $200 a day, up from $120 before. If the tipped wage were eliminated, she said, “I would definitely not stay in the industry.”

This was one of several conflicts that Colors hoped to solve. Saru Jayaraman, the president of Restaurant Opportunities, says the no-tipping model is not what her organization is advocating. It wants — and has successfully established in seven states so far — a continually increasing minimum wage for tipped workers. The tips of servers in California, where such a practice exists, have remained consistent since wages were increased, Jayaraman said.

Many servers in Maine, however, successfully organized to have their salaries lowered in 2017 after a referendum the year before had increased their wages. The reason? Many had already noticed their tips were disappearing.

Barbara Sibley, the owner of La Palapa in the East Village, said she was torn when it came to raising wages. “The structural things Saru talks about — sexual harassment — are true, but I can’t change the experience for my guests here,” she said. “Regulatory things have a real impact on the ground floor.”

Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, a union leader for Windows on the World approached Jayaraman, who was then a young, ambitious lawyer, to help find jobs for the displaced workers. She had a fervor for workers’ rights and an impressive résumé: degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles; Harvard; and Yale. But she had never worked in a restaurant.

Still, she met with 250 former Windows employees. In 2002, she helped found Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. Its mission was “to organize workers to improve wages and working conditions throughout the restaurant industry,” Jayaraman wrote in her 2013 book, “Behind the Kitchen Door.”

Over the years, Jayaraman, now also the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, became a voice for minorities, immigrants and women in the industry, helping win back more than $10 million in stolen tips and wages. She’s known for her work ethic and ability to rally a room. Francesco Palmieri, a chef who worked at Colors when it first opened, called her a trailblazer.

Starting around 2003, Restaurant Opportunities raised more than $2.8 million to open Colors. Fekkak Mamdouh, a former Windows on the World worker and a co-founder of Restaurant Opportunities, had the idea for Colors. “With Windows on the World, we were like a family, a real family,” he said. “I was hoping to have a restaurant where all of us could work together and stay together.” A 6,000-square-foot space on Lafayette Street, next to the Public Theater, had been designated for the restaurant, and Restaurant Opportunities set up a corporate entity, 417 Lafayette LLC, to own and operate it. “Everyone had great hopes for the place,” said Raymond Mohan, the executive chef of Colors when it opened.

From the start, workers believed in the mission of the restaurant to lift them up and treat them fairly. Some Restaurant Opportunities members were even offered a stake in Colors in the planning stages, when the concept of the restaurant’s being a worker-owned cooperative had been discussed.

The momentum for wanting Colors to succeed was palpable. A Time Out review from 2006 started out with the restaurant’s “warm and fuzzy back story” and said it had “potential for a great new restaurant.” It brought up the international staff and described a “swank art deco” interior. But that was where the goodwill stopped. “Sadly, the feel-good restaurant of the year — the place we all want to root for — just does not seem ready for prime time,” the review said.

Among some Restaurant Opportunities members, there was conflict from the start, beginning with the logic of opening a cavernous space in a hot neighborhood like NoHo. “A lot of the people in Colors are minorities,” said Behzad Pasdar, a member of the committee helping to create Colors. “So why aren’t we going into Queens and opening a cool little Mexican restaurant?”

Just a year later, Pasdar and seven other Restaurant Opportunities members sued Restaurant Opportunities and Jayaraman. The members had performed what Jayaraman called “sweat equity” — fundraising, picketing restaurants, catering, meeting politicians — to become worker-owners of Colors when it opened. When some voiced fears that the co-op model they were promised might not pan out, they were expelled, according to the complaint. Jayaraman said Pasdar and the others involved in the lawsuit left the organization on their own accord, before the restaurant had even opened.

“It was a shame, because it was a great idea,” said Arthur Schwartz, the lawyer for the plaintiffs. “That they were behind putting together a worker-owned co-op gave ROC panache in the political world, but it never happened the way they said it would.” Jayaraman said Colors did indeed become a cooperative-owned restaurant for at least seven years.

The lawsuit was dismissed after a federal court ruled that the plaintiffs were not “employees” under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

All the while, Jayaraman effortlessly moved among the powerful, advocating restaurant workers’ rights.

In 2013, as Colors was still finding its footing, Restaurant Opportunities started One Fair Wage. The campaign has garnered an outpouring of celebrity and political backing in recent years. Hillary Clinton stopped by Colors during her presidential campaign. Mayor Bill de Blasio visited on Sept. 11, 2016. This year, Amy Poehler took Jayaraman to the Golden Globes. Sarah Jessica Parker auctioned her dress and jewelry at a Dolce &amp; Gabbana benefit for Restaurant Opportunities and also hosted a charity dinner for One Fair Wage. Most recently, Jane Fonda, who is campaigning for One Fair Wage, called Jayaraman “the Cesar Chavez of restaurant workers.”

Restaurant Opportunities is now urging people to sign a letter to Cuomo in support of One Fair Wage.

When Colors first opened on Lafayette Street, it offered training and gave restaurant novices hands-on experience. Chris Sciarrotta, a waiter from Long Island, needed serving experience in Manhattan. David Cardenas, who had emigrated from Cuba, wanted to learn how to tend bar. Ashley Ogogor, a waitress from Texas, learned about silverware placement. Working at Colors provided a foot in the door for them. “I was talking to the clients; I was handling money. They trusted me,” said Cardenas, who ended up working as a bartender at Colors.

Many of the staffers also became politically involved. In October 2014, Sciarrotta and Ogogor, while working for the restaurant, were also campaigning on behalf of One Fair Wage. They spoke at events like a wage board hearing in Harlem. But they were also noticing that their paychecks from Colors were arriving late.

For them, it was a convergence of idealism versus practicality.

“I was like, ‘Listen, I’m all about giving tipped workers who are sub-minimum-wage higher pay and better working practices,'” Sciarrotta said. “'I totally advocate it. But your point of view isn’t working right now, so I don’t want to be on a sinking ship when I also have bills to pay.’ I was all about helping them out, but when their ideologies weren’t on par with what I needed, I was just done.”

Workers at Colors were paid a fair wage, sometimes up to $13 an hour. But foot traffic in the restaurant was lacking, several servers said, so it was difficult to make decent tips.

“I’m sure mistakes were made, things were challenging,” said Jayaraman, who had moved to California by 2011. She said that she didn’t know Sciarrotta or Ogogor, but that the delayed checks issue was “unacceptable.”

Over the years, Colors had several makeovers. “It had become a restaurant in the wallpaper of New York,” said Stephen Zagor, the former dean of business and industries at the Institute of Culinary Education. “You never heard about it.”

In 2014, it even switched to gluten-free fare, the trend of the moment, but it made little difference. Wages fluctuated, Sciarrotta said, and paychecks were increasingly late. The bar couldn’t afford mint for cocktails and downgraded to a cheaper chardonnay. The kitchen was regularly running out of staples like fish and steak, servers said.

In 2017, the landlord of Colors died, and the restaurant’s rent skyrocketed. Colors relocated to the Lower East Side.

At its new location on Stanton Street, the restaurant lasted only a few months, as it waited on a liquor license and then the air-conditioner broke during a very hot summer. But Colors has continued as a training institute and sometimes holds special events. Jayaraman said that early into the Colors experiment, she realized that its true purpose was to teach restaurant skills and empower workers, which is what it has focused on since 2007. Training facilities, called CHOW (Colors Hospitality Opportunities for Workers), have expanded into nine states, she said.

And come next March, Colors 2.0 will open on Stanton Street. Workers will be paid fair wages, said Jayaraman, thanks to a new business partner. “We decided we’d focus on the training and work with experienced partners to run the restaurant,” Jayaraman said.

Owning a restaurant is not for wimps. Those who work in the industry “have chosen to do a very hard thing, with a very limited statistical probability of ever making any real money: serving food to people,” Anthony Bourdain once wrote. With over 25,000 restaurants across all five boroughs, staying relevant and popular — while swimming with real estate sharks and fickle consumers — is a serious challenge. Arguably, a restaurant such as the original Colors on Lafayette, may have aimed a bit too high for a first try.

Others think Colors was simply ahead of its time. “In point of fact, it might work better now than it did then,” said Wolf, the restaurant consultant. “We’re seeing the minimum wage thing and the #MeToo thing, and the tip-credit thing all be focused on semblance of fairness for people who work in restaurants.”

Emma’s Torch, a nonprofit restaurant that employs and trains refugees, for example, opened in Carroll Gardens in May.

“More and more the notion of a restaurant as fancy people being served by their lessers is anachronistic,” Wolf said. “And I think we’ll see some of the things evident of Colors come back again and again.”

We’re already seeing it: Colors New York is preparing to make its comeback as a full-service restaurant next year, while One Fair Wage is gaining steam, with campaigns underway across the country. In New York, backers and opponents of the tip credit are anxious to hear the Department of Labor’s recommendation.

Jayaraman says she thinks that the restaurant industry is resistant to change — in particular, to increased wages for all — but that it’s doable, and the time is now. “Portraying it as doom and gloom doesn’t match with the data,” she said, citing thriving restaurant scenes in California and Oregon, which have embraced One Fair Wage. “I think the real concern is if New York moves to One Fair Wage, the National Restaurant Association knows what we already know: that other states will follow.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/nyregion/the-misadventures-of-an-idealistic-restaurant-in-a-cut-throat-city.html" id="054ee0cb-d231-37cd-a778-d87253f99962">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — When Emily Elliott moved to New York from North Carolina almost 12 years ago, she handed out résumés and slept on her sister’s couch. Weeks went by and no one hired her. Just as she was starting to feel desperate, Colors, a new restaurant cooperative in NoHo focusing on fair wages and equality, offered her a job as a line cook.

The Misadventures of an Idealistic Restaurant in a Cut-Throat City

Revived two years ago to provide some comic relief during the “summer of hell,” the pageant is now open to all gender identities and seems to be based on sheer chutzpah.

Unlike the original Miss Subways contest, which ran for 35 years until 1976, winners generally do not look like the girl next door nor are their photographs displayed on trains. But they do get to have their say.

“We use it as a rallying cry,” said Alex Low, a transit activist and organizer of the pageant, along with City Reliquary, a community museum in Williamsburg.

Parker MacLure, the reigning Miss Subways, opened the evening, held at the event space Littlefield in Gowanus, with a lip sync of Cher’s “Miss Subway of 1952.” About 130 people were in attendance.

Contestants were judged on congeniality and talent. To that end, performer Samara Dunn of Queens, dressed as the Wicked Witch of the Upper East Side and an immigrant from Oz, was up first. The music from “Rich Girl” by Hall and Oates began to play. “I’m a witch girl,” belted Dunn to loud cheers. She flung off her black velvet cape to reveal a purple leopard print bodysuit.

Next, Robert Coover, 41, a medical writer from New Jersey, strummed a song on the mandolin about subway proselytizers. Traci Cappiello, 37, a program manager at Google from Brooklyn, sang an ode to the subway stops, most notably the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue terminal.

Marissa Gutierrez-Vicario, 34, who works in arts education and lives in Brooklyn, walked onstage wearing a Dalmatian mask and a blue Ikea bag wrapped around her like a large diaper. “I love all the subways,” she said. “My favorite is the G. The G has the highest amount of dogs in bags. Don’t look that up, it’s a fact.”

Dylan Greenberg, 22, a film director from Brooklyn, came onstage with her band, Theophobia. Greenberg, a trans woman, wore a leopard crop top and low-cut leather pants. She said that if she were presented the crown, she would melt it and smear it on her body.

At some point, Lisa Levy, Miss Subways 2017, arrived carrying a clear plastic handbag with L train stress balls that she sells for $3. Levy, 63, won the title two years ago after she implored the judges to crown a postmenopausal queen.

During the interview portion of the night, Roger Clark, one of the judges and a reporter for NY1, asked Cappiello what she would do if she saw someone’s bag taking up a seat. “I would get closer and closer,” she said, inching toward a stool onstage. “And say, ‘Excuse me?’ and then I take it and put it on the floor.”

After a drawn-out deliberation from the judges, Greenberg was crowned Miss Subways 2019. Cappiello was named Miss Congeniality.

Artist Jennifer Miller, also known as Reverend Jen, presented Greenberg with a crown she had made. It featured angel dolls from her troll collection.

Later, when Greenberg was asked about her agenda as the new Miss Subways, she said, “I’m going to release rabid wolves into the subway.”

Miss Subways Is Back. This Year, a New Wave Rocker Takes the Crown.

NEW YORK — Just over a week ago in Brooklyn, Miss Subways 2019 was crowned with a wreath of plastic rats, troll dolls and rhinestone unicorns.

“There’s no more clubs,” said Boria, organizer of a weekly guys’ knitting night, which welcomes men and teenagers no matter how they identify (as well as crocheters).

“So now we’re left with the bar scene and all those people are packed into the bar.” Boria tried to remember the name of a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen and asked the seven men sitting at the table with him if they knew.

The other knitters, drinking rosé from disposable cups, stared blankly at Boria. He offered a few more details. “The guys get up on the bars,” he said. Then someone figured it out: “Flaming Saddles!”

“Clearly we’re not the clubby types,” said Jaime Andrade, who was diligently stitching a teal short-sleeved sweater fringed by lace, a birthday present for his sister.

The conversation shifted to industry gossip. Drew Ariana, a designer, divulged a yarn shop’s financial trouble. Felicia Eve, the owner of String Thing and an honorary female member that night, said a woman dissed someone’s swatch on Instagram. Eve wore a T-shirt that said, “I Knit Before It Was Cool.”

Soon, Jonathan Requillo, a store designer for Clinique, arrived with another bottle of rosé. And finally, toward the end of the night, Joe Major, a photographer, slipped in.

Major was having a rough week and wanted to be around people. Going out for drinks is too expensive and he’s sick of everyone glued to their phones, he said, so he decided to come to the guys’ knit night instead.

As Major stitched a black beanie, Cairo Romaguera, who works in HIV prevention, took out his cellphone and began taking pictures of Boria through a filter. The men laughed loudly at the resulting image, which transformed Boria into a woman. With all the excitement, Major dropped a stitch. His mistake didn’t matter though. “The social interaction is priceless,” he said.

Fed up with awkward small talk and impersonal interactions at bars, some gay men in New York are looking for alternative ways to connect. You couldn’t call it a knitting explosion, exactly, but in small pockets — at yarn shops, apartments and gay bars throughout the city — a new kind of knitting circle is emerging.

“I don’t feel like being in a bar or a club is conducive to getting to know people,” said Michael Richman, who has a business knitting jockstraps and harnesses and began a monthly nude knit night in an apartment in Harlem last year. Richman described the bar scene as “sensory deprivation,” meaning no one truly sees or hears one another.

Still, some groups do meet at bars in the city, like the bimonthly knit circle at the Holler, a queer bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. But the intention is to bond over a shared interest, not alcohol. After all, it can be challenging to stop for a sip when you’re casting on stitches with both hands.

This makes knitting circles especially appealing for those who don’t drink.

“The more anxious and uncomfortable you feel, the more you drink,” said Alan Montes, who attends Richman’s nude knit night and is in recovery. “At the knitting night, there’s no evidence or example of that excess.” Several men at Richman’s event said knitting in the nude fostered intimate conversation. The men have discussed their coming out stories and their childhood experiences being gay, topics that don’t tend to arise in bars. Richman said several men have even started dating.

“We’ve reached a tipping point,” Erik Heitz, one attendee, said about the bar scene. “You get dolled up and spend a ton of money and New York City is costly, and you’re like, ‘Gosh, I spent $100, and did I get what I wanted out of this? Could I spend $10 at Michael’s and bring a bottle of wine to this house party and get a more genuine experience?’ Maybe so.”

In a more clothed and public setting downtown, about 10 men and women waited for the doors to open at Club Cumming in the East Village. By the time Knit@Nite, the bar’s weekly knitting social, started at 6, all of the seats had been taken. Brini Maxwell, one of the event’s hosts, showed off her handmade 1970s-inspired suit and yellow blouse.

Alan Cumming, the bar’s co-owner and a knitter himself, came up with the idea for Knit@Nite. Sam Benedict, manager at Club Cumming, organized it. He tapped Josh Bennett, a knitwear designer whom he described as “the hunk of the knit world” and Maxwell, who is known as “the Martha Stewart of drag,” to be the hosts.

The evening consists of raffle prizes, a potluck dessert, and special guests, who tend to be celebrities of the fiber world like editors at “Vogue Knitting” and London Kaye, the Yarn Bomber, whose knitted street art has appeared on fences and water pipes all over the city.

On June 25, during Pride Week, the special guest will be Frank DeCaro, the actor and TV personality, to talk about his new book, “Drag: Combing Through the Big Wigs of Show Business.” Additionally, the knitted hearts that attendees made for Valentine’s Day and donated to the Peyton Heart Project, a nonprofit that raises awareness about suicide and bullying, will be given out during the NYC Pride March, on June 30.

Several of the men from Boria’s knit night at String Thing were also at Club Cumming. Richard Shen, who said he has been turned away from women’s knitting circles, wore a headlamp while he knit. Major took a selfie with Maxwell. And Romaguera arrived with a plastic bag full of projects.

Standing back near the DJ, Romaguera pulled out a pair of short shorts. They had a purple band, a knit drawstring, and a brightly colored body in orange, blue, green, and hot pink. “I told myself I wouldn’t knit this here,” he said, looping his needles through the yarn. He had a crochet piece he needed to finish.

Later, Romaguera walked over to a group of women sitting at a table to show them the shorts. “There’s a pouch for the butt,” he said. The women cooed. “Are you going to wear them without underwear?” asked Kalliopi Aronis, who had come that night just to hang out.

Romaguera noted that they were acrylic, and that he would be wearing underwear. He figured he would use the shorts for the gym.

But Aronis had another idea. “You should come pole dancing with me,” she said. “And wear those.”

Trading the Noisy Gay Bar Scene for the Knitting Circle

NEW YORK — The conversation had just turned to night life in the city when Louis Boria, an administrative assistant at Mount Sinai Hospital, groaned. He sat in the back of the yarn shop, String Thing Studio, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, knitting the beginnings of a yoke sweater.

Trading the noisy gay bar scene for the knitting circle

When he got there, the elevator to the basement pharmacy was broken, and 40 people were in line ahead of him, he said. After waiting for an hour, the pharmacist told him they were out of stock. His phone had died, so he couldn’t ask his doctor to send the prescription elsewhere.

“It was so miserable,” said Kinariwala, 36, who left the drugstore that day without antibiotics. “I’m a pinball in the middle of this thing.”

Shortly after this experience, Kinariwala, who has a background in finance, introduced Capsule, an app-based service that delivers same-day medicine throughout New York City’s five boroughs. Since it started in 2016, Capsule has grown to 260 employees, most of whom work at the company’s headquarters in Manhattan.

The company works with 31 pharmacists who verify prescriptions and field customer phone calls, on such issues as concerns about a lost birth control pill or frequent urination. Though Capsule is set up to be mobile-first, it has a storefront pharmacy in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, which stocks 5,100 different medications and uses technology to track inventory. It receives deliveries from wholesale suppliers several times a day.

Drugstore chains have been considered an aesthetic scourge on the city for decades. In a 1999 New York Times article about Duane Reade’s takeover of the city, New Yorkers called the pharmacy’s expansion a “plague” and “insane.” Duane Reade has 126 stores in Manhattan alone, including locations owned by Walgreens, which purchased Duane Reade in 2010 and has started to spread its own tentacles. Walgreens has 88 locations across the city, including its Rite-Aid-owned stores. CVS has 150.

But if delivery services like Capsule continue to expand, Kinariwala said chain pharmacies in New York might succumb to technology in a similar way that Barnes &amp; Noble and Borders were pushed aside by Amazon or the taxi industry has been challenged by Uber and Lyft.

“I think you’ll see, in every industry, people that don’t serve the consumer don’t deserve to exist,” Kinariwala said. “New York is all about faster, better, stronger.”

Linda Green, professor of health care management at the Columbia Business School, is skeptical of that claim. “I think it’s not obvious that a stand-alone pharmacy prescription service is going to make big inroads, particularly in a metropolitan area where you have a Duane Reade on every other street corner,” she said. “The idea of delivering prescriptions is actually old. It’s not clear to me what problem they’re solving here.”

Capsule is not the first pharmacy to offer delivery and app services. C.O. Bigelow, a family-owned pharmacy in the West Village that dates to 1838, has a delivery driver, a messenger and an app. Unsurprisingly, Ian Ginsberg, the owner, isn’t impressed by Capsule. “They’re not doing anything we haven’t done for 100 years,” he said. “All they’ve done is taken the human element out of it. They’re trying to scale as fast as possible.”

Deliveries, he suggested, can also be dangerous. “Patients don’t have a face-to-face opportunity with the pharmacist, so there could be subpar education regarding the medication,” said Arash Dabestani, senior director of pharmacy at New York University Langone Health. Walgreens declined to comment but noted that it also delivers same-day in the city for a fee. And it takes two weeks for the first package from PillPack, a national pharmacy and Amazon subsidiary, to arrive.

“PillPack is a mail-order pharmacy,” Kinariwala said. “It’s a totally different thing. I think of the competition as people who continue to tolerate a bad pharmacy experience.”

PillPack did not respond to a request for comment.

Even though several independent pharmacies in New York offer deliveries, they might not have the means to do so outside their own neighborhoods. C.O. Bigelow charges $13 to deliver beyond its surrounding area, which is from the Battery to Chelsea. Another pharmacy, Apotheco, with two locations in Midtown, delivers within a 50-mile radius, but patients outside Manhattan have to call early in the morning to secure a same-day arrival.

Paul Hudson, chief investment officer at Glade Brook Capital, which has invested in the company, along with Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm founded by Josh Kushner, Jared Kushner’s brother, said New York was “a great market for Capsule because it is such a dense city.”

“There’s a lot of dual-income households,” Hudson added, “and the pharmacy experience in New York really hasn’t been modernized as far as infrastructure and tech in a long time.”

Dr. Seth Finkelstein, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Manhattan who has become frustrated with traditional pharmacies, has been suggesting Capsule to his patients. “Every time a patient calls me telling me a prescription can’t be filled, or I have to call insurance for preauthorization, that’s my time or my staff’s time, and that’s money and time diverted to taking care of other people,” he said. “The pharmacy should be taking care of this.”

Capsule’s “insurance specialists,” who help doctors with preauthorizations, are better at dealing with insurance companies than the pharmacists at chain stores, Finkelstein said. (But he added that the process is not perfect: Sometimes confused Capsule specialists call his office for guidance.)

Merlin Chowkwanyun, a professor at Columbia, was drawn to the service after losing his cool waiting in a CVS line for 30 minutes. He found, however, that the deliveries often arrived late. And one time, Capsule dropped off the wrong generic brand of a migraine medication he had requested.

For some people, it’s still much easier to run into one of the hundreds of chain drugstores across the city than to wait two hours or more for a delivery. “If I wake up with a sty in my eye, I can walk two blocks and pick up a prescription,” said Green, the health care management professor. “This is all about convenience, and there’s already a lot of other ways in which these things have become convenient.”

But in the age of Seamless and Amazon Prime Now, Kinariwala seems up to the challenge. He said he wants to see Capsule become the “flip of Duane Reade” within five years. “It’s everywhere, and everyone knows about it and uses it,” he said. “But everyone loves it.”

Technology takes aim at your local pharmacy

NEW YORK — Four years ago, Eric Kinariwala woke up with a throbbing headache from a sinus infection. So he did what most New Yorkers do. He called his doctor, got a prescription for a Z-Pak and walked to the Duane Reade pharmacy near his apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

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Britta Lokting

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Technology takes aim at your local pharmacy

Technology takes aim at your local pharmacy