Songs of Summer Songs of Summer Tuesday afternoon, ...

Tuesday afternoon, a couple of weeks ago. Manhattan is glinting under a bright blue sky, it's 70 degrees, and thousands of young adults in purple robes are pouring out of Madison Square Garden, with thousands more parents and grandparents and siblings, jamming the sidewalks, flowing like a purple river into 7th Ave., snarling the taxi traffic.

It's NYU graduation day. Small family groups clot the sidewalks for picture-taking: graduate alone, cradling a yellow bouquet, flipping her hair in the sunlight; graduate with parents, both a head shorter than she; graduate with grandmom, who comes up to her waist. Classic immigrant family growth curve. The crowd sends tendrils down the side streets, toward waiting charter buses. Commuters with their rolling luggage fight their way through the crush at the top of the Penn Station escalators. Cops and taxi drivers tussle, unable to stanch the human tide. It's graduation day, a day they'll remember, one way or another, for the rest of their lives. The traffic can wait.

We're across the street, getting a dog at Nathan's, when some of the crowd spills in. South Asian lad, looking prissy in his purple gown and freshly barbered hair, ordering for himself as his tiny, sari-wearing mom looks on dubiously. An Hispanic graduate leads her little boy in by the hand. "Mommy, why did we come here?" he complains. "Because I'm starving," Mom-the-graduate explains. Suburban white dad playing the patriarch, ordering for the whole family?purple-gowned daughter, wife, both grandmothers?and ballsing it all up in a basic language breakdown with the big, friendly, but first-day-on-the-job kid in the grease-spattered jersey behind the counter.

NYU graduation at MSG, topped by a dog across the street at Nathan's?the start of another summer in New York City. Or how about this:

Next evening, in the far north Bronx, the sun gently setting somewhere out over New Jersey, and Van Cortlandt Park is teeming with young bodies released from work, school?and most significantly, from the drawn-out winter. Girls' soccer teams, their ponytails bobbing; a couple of high school baseball games; runners circling the track; middle-aged couples on the tennis courts (the metronomic pock-pock of the ball echoing cleanly against the gritty rumble of buses on Broadway); teams of young Irishmen, gleaming white and hard as marble, chasing one another up and down the Gaelic football pitches; the murderous-sounding crack-crack-crack as other young Irishmen practice hurling nearby, the balls sizzling through the air in the lengthening shadows; a lone guy strolling by with a single golf putter over his shoulder...

It was a real flags-of-all-nations evening in a big, beautiful and thoroughly well-used New York City park. Another sign that summer's come.

But then, summer in New York has a million meanings. Buff guys in muscle t's and pretty girls gone braless. The granizadero on the corner selling flavored ices out of his pushcart. Fleet Week. The overpowering scent floating in through your window as one of your neighbors illicitly grills drumsticks or dogs on the balcony. Fireworks on the river. Go Yankees, go Mets. The sudden blossoming of sidewalk tables in front of every restaurant. (Or, as the old guy we just passed on the street was putting it to his friend, "Man, let me tell you something. Motherfuckers up where I live? Eating outside. Tables all over the sidewalk. Shee-it.") A different ethnicity celebrating itself every weekend in Madison Square Park. Road rage on the Merritt Parkway, the unmoving, all-weekend Holland Tunnel logjam. A Saturday afternoon at Coney. The funky stinks. Ballgames, the beaches, Shakespeare in the Park, opera under the stars.

Whatever summer means to you, our Summer Guide listings, prepared by listings editor Lisa LeeKing and her crew, can help you spend it well. If it's happening in New York City this summer, these exhaustive listings give you the 411 on the where-when-how. Also, since summer comes with its own special menu of eats and drinks, see our outdoor drinking and dining section following the Restaurant Guide. ("Tables all over the sidewalk...")

Summer also brings its own music and musical associations with it. We all have songs that are indelibly etched in our memories as songs of summer. The following personal essays address some of those songs and the often bittersweet memories they provoke. In addition to a number of our regular contributors?even MUGGER weighs in?we invited a few guests: Kathryn Jean Lopez, associate editor of National Review; Matt Labash, staff writer at The Weekly Standard; and, just for balance, former go-go dancer Bunny Blue. The songs run the gamut from Sinatra to DJ E-Z Rock to Lyle Lovett, from Jeep beats to Rodgers & Hammerstein, from "Theme from The Rockford Files" to "Start the Riot." Among other topics, the memories these songs evoke touch on youthful lust and longing, broken hearts and baseball, the waning of the 70s and the promise of high school graduation.

But enough of summers past. We hope you'll use this Summer Guide 2001 issue all season long, as an aid to getting out there and making some unforgettable summer memories of your own.