ABOUT LAURA

Guarding the cabanaI was born Laura Dee Toffler in a big hospital in New York City, but shortly thereafter moved  to the little town of Oceanside, Long Island. There I spent a good deal of my childhood (yes, you guessed it) not far from the ocean, nestled in a little beach cabana, not unlike a tiny, but fully equipped condominium. 

Highly desirably but hard to obtain, I often imagined that cabanas were owned by a secret elder underground cabana regime. I imagined tan senior citizens, shadowy in white, hooded terry cloth robes huddled furtively on deserted shuffle board courts, comparing surgical procedures, passing ownership papers from landsman to landsman, but only if you knew the secret password.  (I would tell you the secret password, but then I’d have to kill you.) Clearly, even as a child my strange imagination churned.   

So I loved when my grandmother took me to Manhattan, where nothing was ever the same. I remember her stepping boldly into the street, arm raised high, vigorously shouting “Yoo hoo! Taxi!” into the onslaught of oncoming traffic.  I remember buying Asian inspired trinkets at the store, ‘Azuma.’ I remember marveling at the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue, and I’ll never forget lunching at a special restaurant where all the tables were designed to look like the inside of cars and trains.

I also loved our speed boat, the way the icy water sprayed in my face as my Dad raced across the bay, the way the plain old tuna sandwiches were somehow enhanced by the boat cooler and briny air, the way my Mom, who couldn’t swim, sat anxiously in her parka sized life jacket and always shouted things like: “Alvin, slow down! You‘re gonna kill us!” even when the bay was as smooth as glass, and we were docked.  

During those early years, I attended School #4 (no, seriously, that’s what it was called), where I discovered that I liked art and could make cool projects out of cardboard, supermarket bags, toilet paper rolls, tissue paper or any old crap that was hoarded under the kitchen sink.

Mostly, though I liked to daydream and make up conversations in my head. At the age of four, I read (what my young sensibilities considered to be) a hilarious poem about a Leprechaun, and had an epiphany: I wanted to be a writer. So, I started writing. Poems. Stories. Plays. I wanted to make people laugh.

I read a lot too. I started with Dick and his wacky sister Jane, enjoyed the funny, poignant Peanuts strips books, moved on to the chaste, glamorous social inequities of Archie comics (come on, Betty, get a life), plowed through Judy Blume and then dove into the great classics of literature.

During those years, I also found a best friend and kindred spirit. We amused ourselves by writing each other funny letters and plays, about our lives: boys, friends, boys, neighbors, boys, school, dating, boys…well you get the picture. This activity actually continued way into college and became the inspiration for my upcoming book, The Life and Opinions of Amy Finawitz.

Hello world.After graduating high school, I pilgrimaged back to New York City, where I attended New York University and studied, among other things, literature acting, playwriting and screenwriting. I ran around Greenwich Village. I dyed my hair purple and had a darn good time.

Sometime after that I became a school psychologist (a weird ideas that made sense to my parents) but that career was short lived. It wasn’t long before I returned to NYU to study playwriting and screenwriting full time. 

Many years later, I discovered that no matter how old I got, or who I met, or where I went, I was still that misanthropic Oceanside kid who liked to observe quirky stuff about people, who loved Manhattan and wanted to make people laugh.

So Amy Finawitz was born, a girl my daughter, Hannah, refers to as “my alter ego.” To which I respond: “Not so alter.”