While Claire Danes concedes that she’s lost many friends to Brooklyn over the last decade, she’s only vaguely familiar with the borough. “I do love walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, I have to say,” she told us at the opening night of County of Kings, Lemon Andersen’s powerful one-man show about growing up rough near Greenwood Cemetery. After thinking about it for a moment, Danes realized that she never gets much farther into Brooklyn than Dumbo. “That’s terrible. I sound terrible,” she said. Husband Hugh Dancy chimed in: “Basically, you’re speaking to the most politely pro-Manhattanite person that you’ve ever met, right here,” he said.
Dancy says that as a newly minted New Yorker, he’s still trying to get his bearings within the three-block radius of his home, never mind the outer boroughs. If the couple were to ever consider moving to Brooklyn, we wondered, which area would suit them? Danes remained silent, and Dancy ventured, “By the, uh, what’s the park?” Prospect Park, we guessed? “Prospect Park, yeah. That’s literally how much I know Brooklyn; I know there’s a big patch of grass somewhere there,” the Brit said with a laugh. “Yeah,” added Danes. “The prospect of our moving there is obviously not so good.”
They didn’t have any fun stories about drunken evenings on Bedford Avenue, but attending a Lubavitch wedding was one of Danes’s most memorable Brooklyn evenings. “It was outside of a Lubavitch apartment, on the sidewalk, and it was in February, and it was really cold and very, um, stripped down, the ceremony,” she recalled. “And then we went to some rec hall afterwards and celebrated, but the women and the men celebrated in separate rooms, and the women were not allowed to drink, and it was quite sad.” Danes says she came to be at the wedding through a friend of a friend. “Shiksa did not belong, but shiksa was there,” she said, laughing.
