The Bell Curve:

I spent much of last week in New York City, my first visit there in five years.

What I brought home with me beyond some fond memories is a sense of business as usual.

The cab drivers are all still from eastern Europe, the arts are beyond the reach of those of us who aren’t chief executives or major league ball players (who mostly aren’t interested anyway) and crosstown streets are still better navigated on foot than wheels.

The locals down Wall Street way — those still standing — would have us believe that our current economic crisis is not a depression they helped create at all but rather a recession that will go away as soon as the last corporate mouth is fed from Washington, a conclusion that a visitor to New York, reading surface signs, might well support. It is when toting up New York bills over the summer that depression can set in.

That’s when the only effective antidote is remembering the burst of exhilaration New York has always stirred in me that didn‘t fail last week — and made palatable the price for business as usual.

The biggest changes I perceived were in the Cabbie Culture, which has deteriorated to the point of making it difficult to be sure you will arrive within a reasonable walking distance from the address you gave the driver.

Handing the cabbie a written address is fraught with danger, but shouting it up to him is an even greater risk.

The fear that he didn’t hear you or hadn’t the slightest notion how to find the address you gave him or didn’t speak the same English you did will be both expensive and irritating while he searches.

It has also evolved a whole new technique in communing with cab drivers. Instead of giving him an address, hip passengers now give the cabbie the nearest recognizable street intersection to where they are going. When you gratefully arrive there, you can then direct the cabbie the last few blocks or just get out and walk.

My favorite cab driver was an old guy with a thick mustache and a mouthful of something that he maintained throughout our ride. After several blocks he said over his shoulder that I’d better have small bills because he couldn’t change a twenty.

When I told him the smallest bill I had was a twenty, he got very upset and told me now that I had run up a bill, I’d have to pay by credit card on a machine he had mounted facing the back-seat passenger.

The machine didn’t work, of course, and he careened about, trying to fix it while he was dodging traffic. When it became clear that was hopeless, his meter hit 20 bucks, and I got out, grateful to be alive. If all this was theater, he deserved the twenty, and if it wasn’t, I was a country bumpkin in the big city.

In four days, my cabbie culture also included — among others — a driver from Sri Lanka who passed an iPod containing the Koran back to me for listening when the talk turned to religion.

A Georgian — the country, not the state — venting at the Russians. And a champion conversationalist who told me he had recently got so deep in talk with a passenger that he drove almost to his own home before he realized his destination was a midtown hotel.

I had two nights available for plays, the attraction that continues to draw me most powerfully, even though New York is no longer my writing beat.

The two shows I wanted badly to see — “West Side Story” and “Waiting for Godot” — were, of course, the toughest and most expensive tickets in town, a trend that hasn’t followed the economy into the tank. A ticket to a Broadway musical starts at $125 and goes up from there. Way up.

Bill Irwin, an old friend who stars in “Waiting for Godot” and got his start at Corona del Mar High School many years ago helped me score a good seat in a sold-out theater and managed time in a crowded schedule for some talk afterward. “West Side Story” just took money.

The contrast between the two shows — “Godot,” Samuel Beckett’s rich spare writing and evocative silences for four of our finest comic actors, and “West Side Story’s” magnificent choreography set to Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Berstein’s gritty and melodic music — turned out to add unexpected insights into both.

And then there was the subway. There’s no pressure greater than trying unsuccessfully to swipe a ticket to open a subway gate with an army of commuters closing in on you and clamoring from behind.

But once on the train, I gratefully saw deflated the myth of the hard-nosed behavior of New York subway passengers. Instead, not once did I grab an overhead strap that a seated passenger — male and female, young and old, sometimes several — didn’t get up and offer me their seats.

This was a mixed bag at first. But my dismay at clearly looking older than I felt was turned quickly into humility — not one of my strong suits — by the generosity of those offers.

That was a good note to end my trip on, but one surprise remained. There was a considerable time gap between security and departure after I arrived at the Newark airport, so I looked for a place to eat.

And lo and behold, the first restaurant to come into view was Ruby’s, which I had no awareness had taken up residence in New York. And so the bridge to home had been supplied by some providential hand, and to make the transition seem less abrupt, I bought a New York Times to share with my Ruby burger and memories.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.