The Luna Park Gazette

Everybody took their seats at my kitchen table on Christmas Eve as I lit up the holiday candle. I looked around at my dinner guests: my parents, my Uncle Joe and my brother Peter. They have all died—Peter and Joe both this year, actually--but that didn’t slow down the proceedings. Years ago, my shrink introduced me to the concept of chair work therapy as a way of processing grief. The idea is that you imagine a deceased person “sitting” in an empty chair and speak to them as if they are alive. The empty chair technique was popularized by Gestalt therapists, but it was first developed and demonstrated by Jacob Levy Moreno, a student of Sigmund Freud’s, in 1921. Some possible positive effects of the method include reducing harmful thoughts toward yourself, experiencing greater insight into your own feelings and finding peace and acceptance. “Engaging in an empty chair session can often be emotionally intense,” according to PsychCentral , an online resource for health and...

Now there was a flashback I could’ve done without. Every so often—too often, come to think of it—Facebook resurrects photos from yesteryear. I do come across some pleasant memories, but then I’m quickly appalled at how much time has flown by since I’d taken the damn picture. Last week Zuckerberg’s time suck machine hacked up a selfie I had taken some eight years ago when I hospitalized for double-knee surgery following a slip on the ice. Yikes, I thought, why would in God’s holy name would I want to be reminded of that flaming fiasco? I clicked off and I forgot all about it. Until Thursday. I was walking home from the gym that morning and decided to take a different route to my house. Well, it was a different all right, as I took a sudden trip down Memory Lane, which felt a lot like the highway to Hell. It was cold and I was wearing my recently purchased facemask, which, while making me look like a bank robber, it does keep me warm. I was passing a house near N...

Okay, this is getting weird now. I’ve been on a wild journey down nightmare alley for the last several evenings while recuperating from a nasty cold. There was the David Letterman comedy show fiasco that I described in last week’s post. But prior to that I dreamed that I met up with an old frenemy I haven’t seen since the Eighties and another instance where I had a telephone chat with a long-lost girlfriend. I believe these are both straightforward examples of wish fulfillment. In the case of the frenemy, my subconscious mind wanted to bring back the friend part of this guy’s personality and ditch the enemy, the one who liked to mock me in front of other people and then claim it was all a joke. The ex-girlfriend call was a case of letting her know that I was okay, that I had recovered from that distant time when she quite rightly parted ways with me. I was a mess back then, to be honest, and I was doing nothing to climb out of the hole I had dug for myself. There was no ...

"I wouldn't give your troubles to a monkey on a rock.”--David Letterman Now that was a bad set. Over the years, I’ve been told many times that I’m funny, with several people even suggesting that I should give stand-up comedy a try. I never pursed the comedy route, though, favoring fiction over joke-telling. I’ve gone to a few comedy clubs, and I find them a bit tiresome after a while, where even laughter becomes a chore. And let’s be honest, fear is also a factor here because I dread the idea of facing a roomful of heckling drunks. I had a shrink who once gave a blunt assessment as to why I didn’t take the stage. “You’d be good at it,” he said. That observation hit a nerve, which, of course, is what I was paying the guy for. I do have a long and miserable history of self-sabotage, but I have also suffered from that most malicious malady known as the Disease to Please, where I crack jokes hoping—usually in vain—that people will like me. I also kid around wit...

It was the story I didn’t want to hear, but I’m so grateful that I did. As the years go by, I keep learning things about my late parents that amaze me. Of course, it’s not terribly surprising, since as kids we tend to worship our parents. We learn more about our folks as we move into adulthood and realize that they were just people, not superbeings who never knew fear or doubt, but mere mortals who were doing the best they could. A few years ago, my aunt told me that my mother had seen Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theater in the 1940s. I always knew that she was a fan of Ol’ Blue Eyes, but I had no idea she had been a bobby soxer, the name of Sinatra’s virtual army of teen-aged fangirls who were known to wear the ankle high hosiery. It’s hard to imagine my mom shrieking “ Frankie! ” along with an auditorium full of her swooning contemporaries, but she wasn’t my mother yet. She wasn’t even an adult, so she had every right to enjoy this moment. I got such a kick out of this...

"Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own." Did you ever wonder why paratroopers shout “Geronimo!” before they jump out an airplane? The question occurred to me while I was working on a story about golden parachutes, those hefty payouts that executives get on their way out the door. That name, by the way, comes from a 1961 attempt by creditors to oust Howard Hughes from control of Trans World Airlines. They provided Charles Tillinghast Jr. an employment contract that included a clause that would pay him money if he lost his job As far as invoking the name of Geronimo, that got started by U.S. paratroopers in 1940 who saw a movie about the Apache military and spiritual leader and yelled his name when they made that big step into the sky. I was thinking of working the Geronimo angle into my golden parachute story, but I didn't pursue it. However, while doing my research I came across a familiar name. We'll call him ...