BROTHER CAN YOU SPARE A DIME? By Marcelline Block

A historical light-hearted sit-com “Kate and Allie” set an episode in a gritty 1980s ‘Scorsese-like’ New York City, tackling social issues and challenging themes such as feminism, class and especially the homeless crisis. The city looks very different in 2020, the homeless situation has improved, but these topics are still relevant today: the loss of life , the lack of resources and support during the Covid-19 pandemic affected the poorest population in the Big Apple the most.
- Fuori Modem

Here it’s an analysis of the episode “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (which originally aired on October 19, 1987) by Marcelline Block; an excerpt from the forthcoming book “Tonight, On a Very Special Episode: A History of Sitcoms that Sometimes Got Serious” by acclaimed author Lee Gambin, where she also analyzes an episode from the TV series “Blossom”

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” from Kate and Allie
The CBS situation comedy Kate and Allie (1984-1989) was considered ground-breaking television of its era due to its foregrounding of female friendship as part of its overtly feminist ethos. Central to Kate and Allie is the strong friendship of its two leading characters, Kate McArdle (Susan Saint James) and Allie Lowell (Jane Curtin of Saturday Night Live). The sitcom’s eponymous titular characters are two thirtysomething divorcées and best friends who, after each going through a divorce, share a brownstone in Greenwich Village in New York City. Together, Kate and Allie raise their children (Kate’s daughter Emma; Allie’s son Chip and daughter Jennie) while also fulfilling their own ambitions which had been thwarted, set aside, and/or interrupted by marriage and motherhood. Kate and Allie pursue educational, career, and life goals, including starting a catering business as well as searching for love again by re-entering the dating pool. Throughout the series, Kate and Allie support and encourage each other as they navigate their post-divorce “new normal” together.
Along with highlighting the issues faced by Kate and Allie as modern, independent, women who deal with and work through situations and problems that accompany their life circumstances as divorced, working single mothers, Kate and Allie also addresses other contemporary social issues of its day, such as homelessness. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, “the 1980s were marked by a dramatic increase New York City’s homeless population” (“About the Coalition for the Homeless,” n.d.). “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”, the October 19, 1987 episode of Kate and Allie (season 5, episode 6) sheds light upon the homelessness epidemic plaguing New York City during this time. Several months before the airing of this episode – whose title is taken from the iconic Depression-era song – the New York City “homeless shelter population peaked in March 1987 with 28,700 children and adults residing in shelters, while thousands more slept rough on city streets” (“About the Coalition for the Homeless,” n.d.).
In order to further draw attention to the plight of the homeless in New York City, this episode of Kate and Allie was made in partnership with the Coalition for the Homeless. The Coalition for the Homeless is the United States’ “oldest advocacy and direct service organization helping homeless men, women and children [which] has developed and implemented humane, cost-effective strategies to end mass homelessness in New York City” (“About the Coalition for the Homeless,” n.d.). As noted in the New York Times, the “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” episode of Kate and Allie “coincide[d] with the start of a national fund-raising campaign for the Coalition for the Homeless. Music written for the show will be used by the coalition as a theme song” (Belkin, 1987). Heard at the end of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”, this song’s significance is discussed further below.

In this episode, Allie travels from her home in downtown Manhattan’s Greenwich Village all the way uptown to Columbia University in order to pay her daughter’s tuition fees for the semester. However, when exiting a taxicab, Allie leaves her purse behind and finds herself suddenly without any means to pay for transportation back home. Allie is thus unwittingly thrust into a temporary state of “homelessness” for one day as she tries to return to the brownstone that she and Kate share by walking the seven miles home through Manhattan. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” portrays how Allie attempts to navigate her way home in an odyssey that takes her by foot from the top of Manhattan – Columbia University in Morningside Heights on the Upper West Side – all the way down to Greenwich Village.
Indeed, this episode of Kate and Allie is notable for being filmed almost entirely on location, featuring real neighborhoods throughout Manhattan as Allie journeys home. This lends the episode a realist, documentary-like aesthetic. The cinéma vérité quality of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” was remarked upon in a New York Times feature about this episode, which notes that it is “the first [episode] in the show’s five-year history to be set entirely out of doors” (Belkin, 1987).

In this respect, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” evokes Martin Scorsese’s 1985 film After Hours, which was released just two years prior to this episode of Kate and Allie. Both Scorsese’s film and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” richly and vividly document the Manhattan of the mid to late 1980s, functioning as time capsules of this era. However, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” reverses the premise of After Hours. Whereas in this episode of Kate and Allie, Allie embarks on a daytime journey to return home downtown to Greenwich Village from Upper Manhattan, the protagonist of After Hours, Paul (Griffin Dunne), is stranded downtown in SoHo all night long without any money as he attempts to return to his Upper East Side residence.
Both After Hours and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” begin with the protagonists losing all of their money in a New York City taxicab (Paul’s $20 bill flies out the window; Allie leaves her purse on the backseat). Allie and Paul thus find themselves in the same unusual predicament: they are stranded far from home without any money – not even enough for a subway token. While trying to navigate their ways back home, Allie and Paul become increasingly more desperate as their quests are fraught with difficulty at every turn. During their picaresque journeys, they each encounter a series of characters and circumstances that take them far out of their comfort zones. These hazardous expeditions – which bring Allie and Paul to unfamiliar corners of the city in which they both reside – are not only encounters with the cityscape, but also, voyages inward that plumb the depths of each character’s psyche. Akin to Paul who gradually loses his sense of identity as he encounters bizarre people and absurd situations in his nightlong quest to leave SoHo and return home, Allie also loses her sense of self as her many efforts to obtain one dollar to take the subway home come to naught as she descends further downwards into “homelessness.”
The connection between the “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” episode of Kate and Allie and Scorsese’s After Hours is further enforced when Allie is conned out of her watch after she attempts to pawn it for one dollar. As the con artist runs away after stealing her watch, Allie states, “suddenly I’m beginning to understand all of Martin Scorsese’s movies.” One cannot help but wonder if Allie’s statement here is perhaps an intertextual reference to Scorsese’s film After Hours, in which some of the mishaps that Allie encounters during her day of homelessness also befall After Hours’ protagonist Paul. One such example is when he attempts to jump the subway turnstile before a police officer confronts him and chases him out of the subway station. This is similar to Allie’s experience of trying the jump the turnstile in “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”. In addition, both Paul in After Hours and Allie in “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” are exposed to the elements in the form of downpours from which they are unable to find shelter and thus are soaked by the rain.
As she embarks upon her perilous journey without even $1.00 for a subway token, Allie is perceived as homeless because she is wearing the dirty clothes that she wore earlier that morning while cleaning her house. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” portrays, through Allie’s eyes, how she experiences firsthand the social stigma, isolation, fear, invisibility, and vulnerability that accompanies homelessness.
At the start of the episode, Kate, Allie and Kate’s boyfriend Dennis (David Purdham) are cleaning up Kate and Allie’s Greenwich Village residence by placing their old clothes and other household items into cardboard boxes to donate to Goodwill for charitable purposes. Ironically, Allie’s fortune will soon be reversed when she finds herself in need of the kind of charity that Goodwill bestows upon the hungry and the homeless. Kate invites Allie to have lunch with her and Dennis, and Allie agrees, although states that she must first take a shower and change out of her grimy clothes (an old t-shirt under a plaid flannel button-down shirt) in order to make herself presentable after the long morning of housework.
Yet, Allie will not have the chance to do so, as her daughter Jennie (Allison Smith) calls from Columbia University with an emergency: her college registration fees are due that afternoon. Unless they are paid by 2:00 pm, Jennie will not be able to register for the semester. This situation reinforces how Allie, as a single mother, is responsible for every aspect of her household and her children’s care, from cleaning and maintaining her home to paying for her daughter’s college education. Allie agrees to go to the campus to pay Jennie’s tuition, despite declaring that “I’m a mess! I haven’t showered, I haven’t eaten, I’ll never make it” on time, since Columbia is at the other end of town from where she lives in Greenwich Village. In a gesture that prefigures her descent into homelessness, Allie attempts to cover her unwashed hair with an old pom-pom hat that she pulls out of a box of items meant for Goodwill before she rushes out to find a taxi.

Here, Allie’s appearance is in diametric opposition to how she looked in the opening sequence of this episode (prior to the housecleaning scene) when Kate and Allie take a stroll during which they possibly encounter the iconic actress Greta Garbo – or at least, the elegant Manhattan apartment building in which she resides. In that earlier scene, both Kate and Allie are well-dressed and put-together, each wearing a fashionable blazer and with clean, well-groomed hair, as opposed to Allie’s unkempt appearance and wardrobe throughout the rest of the episode. Allie’s unwashed clothing and hair are key factors in how she is perceived and subsequently mistreated as a “homeless” person. As Allie runs out of her home and leaves for the campus without showering, changing her clothes or washing her hair, Kate and Dennis joke that when she arrives at Columbia, the university will award Jennie a full scholarship because of Allie’s slovenly demeanor. By presenting herself in this manner, it appears that Allie needs extensive amounts of financial aid for her daughter to attend an expensive, elite, private, Ivy League University such as Columbia. Throughout the episode, Allie’s dirty clothes and dingy hair peeking out from underneath her cap – which will eventually be stolen – emblematize her “homelessness.”
In other words, one of the episode’s leitmotifs is “clothes make the (wo)man” (as opposed to the French saying “l’habit ne fait pas le moine”). This underscores how the lack of access to shower and toilet facilities as well as clean clothing and shoes is one of the main barriers preventing the homeless from transcending their circumstances. In fact, since “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” was first shown in 1987, numerous organizations have been founded which are devoted to addressing the need for professional clothing for the poor and the homeless in order to help them seek and obtain employment. One such example is Dress for Success, created in 1996 as an organization that “empowers women to achieve economic independence by providing a network of support, professional attire and the development tools to help women thrive in work and in life” (“I Support Dress for Success,” n.d.). Since 1999, Career Gear provides “professional clothing, mentoring and life-skills to help men in poverty become stronger contributors to their families and communities” (“About Us – Career Gear,” n.d.). Yet these organizations did not exist at the time that “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” was aired.
The shabbily-dressed Allie arrives by taxi at Columbia University’s 116th Street Gates in the Morningside Heights neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Allie exits the cab after paying and is in such a hurry to pay Jennie’s tuition fees that she does not wait to collect her change from the cab driver before accidentally leaving her purse behind in the cab. By not thinking twice about leaving her change with the cabbie, Allie’s class privilege is evident. This moment also foreshadows how Allie will soon be begging for money, rooting through the trash for empty cans and bottles to exchange for coins, and scrounging for loose change in a public fountain. After realizing that she left her purse in the backseat of the car, she runs in vain after the taxi, but cannot catch up; instead, she finds herself lost in an unfamiliar, seedy area of the city covered with piles of garbage bags. She then tries to phone home, despite not having the required quarter (twenty-five cents) for the pay phone. She attempts to call home collect (where the recipient of the call will pay for the charges), but cannot reach Kate, who is in the shower and does not hear the phone ring. Indeed, there are numerous missed connections throughout the episode: every time that Allie calls home, no one is there to take her call or someone was using the phone and therefore the line was busy. At one point, she also misses, by a matter of seconds, Kate and Dennis who are riding in Dennis’ taxi, since he, ironically, happens to be a cab driver.
As Allie wanders down Broadway while wearing her grungy outfit consisting of a pom-pom cap, a flannel shirt, baggy jeans, an old t-shirt, and scuffed-up shoes, she attempts to find the one “kindhearted soul” in New York City who will give her subway fare – a grand total of one dollar. Yet instead, Allie finds mostly the opposite: throughout her experience of “homelessness,” she is ignored, dismissed or insulted as she seeks help from those around her, including a well-dressed woman who is wearing the same designer sweater that Allie also owns.
Through portraying Allie’s travails as she struggles to secure subway fare home, this episode of Kate and Allie highlights the invisibility of the homeless, who are ever-present in the city yet more often than not are avoided as people rush past them. This is demonstrated by how Allie is almost universally ignored, rejected and rebuffed when she appeals to the kindness of non-homeless strangers, whether figures of authority such as police officers or passerby who appear able to spare her the one dollar she requests. This opens Allie’s eyes to the many barriers in place that prevent homeless New Yorkers from overcoming their circumstances or even continuing to seek help after being repeatedly discouraged from doing so.
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” also explores and dismantles the stereotype of the homeless as criminals. On several occasions in the episode, Allie breaks the law, such as by singing on a street corner for spare change without having the proper authorization, which attracts the attention of the police. Later, in a desperate attempt to return home, she tries to jump the subway turnstile, but a police officer chases her out of the subway station. Allie’s (unsuccessful) forays into criminal behavior are due to desperation, because she is unable to find anyone willing to help her. Rather than being a source of assistance, the police are hostile towards her: she goes from seeking their help at the start of the episode to running away from them.
Not only does Allie engage in the illegal activities noted above, but she also becomes a crime victim, such as when her pompom hat is stolen. Later, when she attempts to pawn her watch – a present from her father – she is robbed of it. Thus “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” highlights the serious problem of the vulnerability of the homeless population to being preyed upon.
Along with these aspects of homelessness – being victimized, committing criminal activity out of desperation, being treated as if one were invisible, being harshly judged for one’s appearance and deemed unworthy of receiving basic decency and consideration – “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” explores the physical indignities of being homeless. Allie walks until the point of exhaustion which is compounded by her hunger, and she cannot find a bathroom when she needs to use one; she is turned away from a restaurant whose restrooms are for customers only, since she cannot afford to buy anything to eat. Again, Allie’s daylong plight as a homeless person draws attention to how the homeless are often deprived of the ability to care for their basic hygienic needs and the chance to achieve even a modicum of dignity.
The one kind soul that Allie eventually does find is the manager of a food cart who is happy to give her orange juice. He tells her that he can recognize the difference between a con artist and someone such as herself who is down on their luck. Allie is overwhelmed by gratitude for his generosity and says that she will pay him back next week what she owes him for the juice. Rather than accept, he tells her to “pay me back by doing somebody else a good turn someday.”
This is a request that Allie takes to heart in the next scene when she looks for loose change in a fountain where people throw pennies for wishes. This recalls how at the start of the episode, she refused the change due to her that the cab driver tried to give her. It is here in the fountain that she finds the elusive dollar that will buy her a subway ride home. At the fountain, she encounters a young homeless man, Charles (Jesse Corti), who is also fishing for change in the water but cannot find more than five cents (presumably because Allie has taken most of the coins out of the fountain). After striking up a conversation, he asks if she is also going to the homeless shelter and offers to walk her there. Seeing his tragic circumstances – such as that his last meal was the night before, whereas she ate that morning, and that he spent his last $1.50 on cigarettes in order to stave off his hunger – Allie decides to take the cart manager’s advice. Recognizing that her circumstances are only temporary as opposed to Charles’, she gives him the coins adding up to one dollar that she found in the fountain. When Charles thanks her, Allie thanks him instead.
From a shot of Charles sitting at the edge of the fountain with his shoes off (as he was wading into the water for spare change) while gripping the coins that Allie gave him, the episode then segues into a powerful montage, set to the song about homelessness in New York that was specifically written for this episode of Kate and Allie. The montage features black and white still images of homeless people on the streets of New York City, including men, women and children, thus depicting the broad range of the city’s homeless population. The song’s mournful refrain, “this Big Apple’s got me down to the core/well I don’t know for sure/but doesn’t anybody care anymore?” is heard before concluding with the image of Charles at the fountain. After this, the episode moves to its closing moments where Kate and Allie are reunited in their comfortable residence and together rehash the events of the day. This song’s refrain is then played once again as the end credits roll over the image of Charles at the fountain.
Like Paul, who in the final scene of Scorcese’s After Hours has managed to return to the desk of his office job, by the end of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Allie has also returned to the cozy home she shares with Kate and everything appears to have returned to normal. Yet as opposed to Paul, who is still covered in plaster of Paris – a remnant of his all-night downtown misadventures – and thus retains some outward vestiges of his nightlong ordeal in SoHo, Allie is shown as having showered and cleansed herself of the filth and grime from her daylong descent into homelessness. With her wet hair wrapped in a pink towel and wearing a plush blue bathrobe, Allie recounts her arduous journey to her best friend and housemate Kate while they sit on the comfortably overstuffed couches in their living room. Despite enjoying these creature comforts – and having sated her hunger with three sandwiches – Allie will not soon forget her temporary experience of hunger, poverty and humiliation after having been part of the seemingly nameless and faceless horde of the homeless denizens of New York City.
Indeed, according to Bill Persky, the director and co-writer of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”, after undergoing this ordeal, Allie’s character has evolved to the extent that, “‘she has learned that there isn’t that much difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’’” (Persky as cited in Belkin, 1987). By exploring – and dismantling – the fine line separating the homeless from the housed, Kate and Allie’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” demonstrates how homelessness can happen to anyone at any time as well as how swiftly one can fall into this circumstance and how difficult this predicament is to overcome once one descends into homelessness, all of which Allie experienced firsthand. Despite the ubiquitousness of the homeless in New York City in the 1980s, Allie has now been made much more aware of their plight after having lived one day among them, and sees that rather than being a monolithic entity, each homeless person has a unique story and set of circumstances. Due to this experience, Allie is truly grateful for all that she has in her life: her children; her friendship with Kate, and their home in Greenwich Village. After hearing about what Allie went through all day, Kate calls her “you poor thing,” a characterization which Allie rejects, stating that she is “not poor, [but] rich” when compared to the people that she encountered who had nowhere to go and no one to help them. Furthermore, Allie has come to realize that the urban poor, hungry, and homeless people among whom she spent her day are actually no different than her: she observes to Kate that “they’re just regular people, just down on their luck.”
Thus, Kate and Allie find that Allie, despite her frightening experiences of having been homeless and hungry all day long, ultimately had a “better day” than Kate, who enjoyed lunch with her boyfriend Dennis. This is because of what Allie has learned about the urgent need to help the homeless of New York City as well as the importance of dispelling the many prevailing, incorrect myths and stereotypes about the homeless, such as that it is their fault that they are homeless because they are lazy, degenerate, or criminals undeserving of help or empathy. Rather, this episode of Kate and Allie demonstrates how homeless people are more often than not victims of circumstances beyond their control who lack the resources or assistance to climb out of poverty or homelessness, and how one bad break can lead to a descent into homelessness.
After her brief spell of homelessness, Allie understands the crucial importance of empathy and listening to the homeless, since when she tried to explain to people what happened to her that led to her situation, she was mostly ignored, yelled at, judged, or mocked. For one day, Allie was made to understand how New York City’s homeless citizens are rejected, avoided, or discouraged at nearly every turn when they seek help. Out of all of her encounters during her one-day period of homelessness, Allie found only two people – the food cart manager and Charles, the homeless man at the fountain – who were willing to fully help her without judgment, whereas others rebuffed her, were incapable or unwilling to help, or further victimized her by stealing her hat and her watch. Most of all, then, the lesson imparted by the “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” episode is to “do someone a good turn” rather than judge, berate, or ignore another human being who is down on their luck, suffering and in need of assistance. Indeed, by partnering with the Coalition for the Homeless, this episode of Kate and Allie does just that.

References

About the Coalition for the Homeless. (n.d.). Retrieved March 1, 2019, from
http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/about-cfh/.

About Us – Career Gear. (n.d.). Retrieved March 1, 2019, from https://careergear.org/about/.

Belkin, L. (1987, September 12). A TV sitcom takes to the streets. Retrieved March 1, 2019,
from https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/12/arts/a-tv-sitcom-takes-to-the-streets.html.

I support Dress for Success. (n.d.). Retrieved March 1, 2019, from
https://dressforsuccess.org/about-us/who-we-are/.

Persky, B. (Director). (1987, October 19). Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? [Television series
episode]. In Kate and Allie. CBS. Retrieved February 28, 2019, from https://youtu.be/fPPZfBXxiI8.

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Marcelline Block’s publications include Le Grain de la voix dans le monde anglophone et francophone
(2019); An Anthology of French Singers from A to Z: Singin’ in French (2018); the first English translation of Propaganda Documentaries in France, 1940–1944 by Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit (2016); French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation (2016); French Cinema in Close-up: La vie d’un acteur pour moi (2015; named a Best Reference Book of 2015 by Library Journal); Fan Phenomena: Marilyn Monroe (2014); World Film Locations: Boston (2014); World Film Locations: Prague (2013); World Film Locations: Marseilles (2013) and its French version, Filmer Marseille (2013), which she co-translated into French; World Film Locations: Las Vegas (2011); World Film Locations: Paris (2011; translated into Korean, 2014), and Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema (2009). Her writing appears in Afterall, Art Decades, The Big Picture Magazine, Cahiers Tristan Corbière, Cineaste, The Guardian, The Harvard French Review, Periodical, Soledad, and Women in French Studies, and is translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, and Russian.