But it was all right for women to go out and earn wages, since they had no important creative endeavors to be distracted from. The great accomplishment was to avoid actual employment for as long as possible and by whatever means. A steady gig (really a contradiction in terms) was valued chiefly as a means of getting unemployment insurance. The newcomers to the neighborhood regarded jobs the way jazz musicians regarded gigs- brief engagements. Nomads without rucksacks, they joyfully camped out among the gloomy Ukrainians, the suspicious Poles, the Italian fruit vendors, the retired Jewish garment workers dying in their fourth- floor walkups. Their children grew up and fled to Queens or Jersey, leaving room in the tenements for middle- class children loosely defined as "artists, who believed for a while, under the influence of all the new philosophy and rejecting the values of their own parents, that they had no use for money. The original poor of the Lower East Side had scuffled without hope, of course, selling their labor for low wages. Scuffling was what you did in my new neighborhood, soon to be called the East Village.
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