Natalia would suffer permanent injury to her upper spine. Physical therapy, massage, and acupuncture helped ease the pain, but her nascent career was over before it had even begun. “I feel fortunate because I can walk,” says Natalia. “But I can’t turn my head all the way to the left and right. I can’t bend backwards. And I can’t dance.”

To cheer up their grieving daughter, Natalia’s parents took her to Austria for a tour of the countryside where her favorite childhood movie, The Sound of Music, was filmed. One night, the family attended a concert featuring a musician playing, of all things, a carpenter’s hand saw. Natalia was entranced. The saw moved as if it was dancing. “It was the first time since the accident that I felt excited about something,” she says.

After the show, Natalia went backstage and asked the man if he would teach her how to play the saw.

He said no.

“He told me to go home, pick up any saw for carpentry, and figure it out.”

When Natalia returned to New York, she borrowed a rusty saw from a friend. She was able to make it sing, just a little, creating six distinct notes. Encouraged, she went to the hardware store and tested a few saws until she found one that played a full octave and a half.

Just like Maria in The Sound of Music, Natalia had found her calling. Within a few years, she excelled at this instrument, which produces a sound eerily like that of a soprano opera singer. “It’s amazing that a piece of metal can sound so human,” she says.

“The accident changed my life for the better. When God closed the door on dance, he opened a window into a whole new musical world for me,” she says, alluding to well-known words spoken by Maria in the popular film.

At first, playing the saw was just a hobby for Natalia. She would play the saw while on break from her job selling souvenirs in Broadway theaters. She practiced at home but always worried that neighbors would complain about the peculiar sounds coming from her apartment. Ironically it was one of these very same neighbors who referred Natalia for her first public appearance, playing for senior citizens at a local Salvation Army center.

“I was still new to the saw and I really didn’t know if I was good enough,” says Natalia. But her performance was a hit, and the Salvation Army center recommended her to another center, which in turn led to more referrals. Soon, Natalia was fielding invitations from all over the city.

Photo by Rod Goodman

Since those early days, Natalia has played the saw with some of the world’s greatest musicians, including the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by maestro Zubin Mehta and the Westchester Philharmonic Orchestra. She has been invited to play at Madison Square Garden, Carnegie Hall, and other New York institutions.

Natalia also works in the studio, recording music for television commercials, singer-songwriters, and movie soundtracks. She appeared as a saw player in the 2002 movie, Dummy, starring Adrien Brody. Garrison Keillor of the Prairie Home Companion radio show has named Natalia the show’s “official saw player.”

But her favorite venue is the cavernous New York City subway system, where she performs regularly. “It’s such an honor to fill the artery of this great city with my sound and provide the soundtrack to people’s lives,” says Natalia. [Visit sawlady.com for specific locations, dates, and times.]

In the subway, Natalia can see her audience and talk to them. Many people recognize her and call out, “Hey, Saw Lady!” when they stop to listen or pass by on their way to the trains. “I love the interaction you get in the subway,” she says. “I meet people that I would never get to meet any other way, from homeless to rich people.”

Natalia says it’s difficult to estimate the number of saw players worldwide—perhaps a few thousand—but more are emerging. When Natalia founded the New York City Musical Saw Festival in 2002, four saw players showed up. In 2009, 53 saw players from all over the world performed together at the annual festival and made the Guinness Book of World Records for being the “Largest Musical Saw Ensemble.”

“Most saw players are isolated from one another. The festival is the only place to meet others who share our enthusiasm for this art form, learn from one another, and be inspired by one another,” she says.

As for spreading the word, Natalia rarely teaches saw playing. Just as the Austrian musician told her to figure it out on her own, she encourages newcomers to start through trial and error. “If you succeeded in figuring it out, then you were meant to be a saw player,” she says.

Natalia not only learned saw playing, but she turned her life from tragedy to triumph. Second acts are possible. Just ask the Saw Lady, next time you’re catching a train in the City.

Visit the Saw Lady online at her official website, and check out this video of The Saw Lady story:

To watch more videos of Natalia, visit Play it Again, Saw Lady!

Hey, Saw Lady! The Saturday Evening Post

 
 
With the help of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Maurice Zolotow, known more for his Broadway and Hollywood articles than transportation, describes how rapid transit came to define New York City in this excerpt from a 1945 article in the Post.

[See also: "The Looming Crisis in Mass Transit" from our Jul/Aug 2012 issue.]

Manhattan’s Daily Riot

March 10, 1945—Anything and everybody can happen on the subway in New York. Like the Bowery in the old song, the subway is today the place where they do strange things and they say strange things.

For the visitor, the subway is a bewildering experience. His eyes will be confused by the murky yellowish dimness. His ears will be racked by the crashing, clashing, grating cacophony of the trains grinding against the tracks, a noise that is magnified into thunderous reverberations by the low tunnels.

But millions of New Yorkers stolidly ride the subway to and from their jobs, and they travel—many of them standing up—an average of eighty minutes a day. The New Yorker would be perplexed if the noise and the mobs were to vanish.

As Mayor La Guardia puts it, “New York didn’t build the subways. The subways built New York.” Then he tells you that Queens was just a cow country until the subway system was extended there, and that suddenly the population quadrupled, real-estate values boomed, small civic centers grew up around each subway station, schools were built and paving laid, and apartment houses and stores and churches sprang up.

When the IRT [Interborough Rapid Transit], first of the New York subways, opened in 1904, New Yorkers greeted the new vehicles with a mixture of enthusiasm, curiosity, and fear. A hundred thousand passengers rode the IRT on opening day, and many uproariously traveled back and forth all day, just for sheer pleasure.

La Guardia sits in his office in City Hall and smiles gently when you ask him about crowds in the subway during rush hour. He has been a subway rider himself for a long time. He points to a wall map of New York City. The map is veined by the subway lines. The mayor leans back in his chair and darts his fingers at the map.

“Let me tell you this,” he says:

“Any time we don’t have crowding during the rush hour, there’ll be a receiver sitting in the mayor’s chair and New York will be a ghost town. Why, they talk about the rush hours and the crush and the noise! Why, listen, don’t you see that’s the proof of our life and vitality? Why—why, that is New York City.”

Manhattan’s Daily Riot The Saturday Evening Post