Let Us Sleep on the Subways!

“Don’t sleep in the subway, darling,” Petula Clark crooned, back in the sixties, leading the wonderful standup comedian Carol Leifer to ask, a couple of decades later, just what kind of men Petula might be dating. “What kind of guys is she going out with that she’s gotta tell them these things? You know, ‘Don’t wash your face with Clorox. Oh, hey, don’t shave with a Ginsu knife. . . .” Well, sleeping in the subway, in Petula’s time, was a sign of charming heedlessness, like walking barefoot in the park, the kind of thing eccentric and lovable characters might have done in a mid-sixties comedy. By the time Leifer was doing standup, in the eighties, the meaning had changed: only a fool would risk his health, or love life, by sleeping on the No. 6 train. (Clark’s hit, not entirely incidentally, was written by Tony Hatch, the British songwriter, and was one of several in that decade—“Downtown” was even more popular—in which Brits used a borrowed American vocabulary to describe a mostly mythical New York.)