Speaking with the artist Ellen Grossman about her chance encounter
The video shows Jay-Z was on his way to the last of his
eight shows to open the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn (Jewcy reports that Hova
actually lit a menorah for each of the eight nights). As Grossman explained to
me, she was simply on her way to visit a friend in Brooklyn when a large crush
of people unexpectedly entered her subway car at Canal Street. Grossman ended up
having a chat with the rapper. Adorable caveat:
“I hope this doesn’t sound canned,” she apologized. “I’ve spoken to a lot of people this morning.”
The scene:
“It was a fairly sparsely populated subway car and I was alone on three seats,” she explained. “There was a surge of people at Canal Street and my son was in the World Trade Center disaster…but he survived, it’s alright, but we didn’t know that for several hours so that’s kind of present in our consciousness. So, at first, I thought ‘Oh God, something terrible has happened up on the street.’ But everyone was laughing and smiling so I thought, ‘What a relief!’ And I thought perhaps it was a flash mob.”
When Jay-Z sat down:
“Jay-Z sat down next to me and I did not recognize him, but everyone was taking his picture. But I thought, because I didn’t recognize him, that it still could have been a flash mob. I know people do fake celebrity stuff. So I said what was on the video ‘Are you famous?’ and he said ‘Yes’ and I believed him. I asked what his name was and he said ‘Jay’ and I didn’t catch that it was Jay-Z and after we were talking for a while I thought ‘He’s pretty famous,’ I noticed his security people and we were in a little bubble because they were around us and then I asked ‘What’s your name again?’ and he said ‘Jay-Z.’ We had a really great conversation, it felt really genuine.”
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