The Luna Park Gazette

I got an e-mail the other day that I think really captured the true spirit of the holidays. " The best present on Christmas ," it said, " is penis enlargement ." I couldn't put it better myself. It kind of gives a whole new meaning to the expression "stocking stuffer" doesn't it? The e-mail came from a "Dr. Brandon Watson," who I suspect may not be a real person. I don't think he had anything to do with Sherlock Holmes' sidekick--"Watson, the game's afoot!" (More like a foot-and-a-half, old boy.... rim shot ). And I don't think this Dr. Watson is related to the guy who helped come up with the DNA model, along with Crick, but it does sound like the same field of study. I guess this really is the gift that keeps on giving. Maybe if one of the Christmas spirits had done this for old Ebeneezer Scrooge he wouldn't have been such a putz. There's a Tiny Tim joke here, but I refuse to go that low--which makes me...

I feel like I should be passing out cigars. A few weeks ago, I became the proud father of...myself. Allow to me explain. I'll try to make sense, but I make no guarantees. I have to take an airplane flight in the near future and I'm not handling it very well. I'm what you might call a fearful flier, a first-class white-knuckle loon who has left his hand prints in the cushions of a squadron of passenger jets over the years. The very thought of getting on to a plane makes my stomach turn upside down and inside out--all at the same time. The logical side of my brain tells me all about the statistics of car crashes versus airline crashes but my neurotic side won't answer the door. I wanted to do something positive, try and rid myself of this irrational fear that has plagued me since I took my first flight out to San Francisco nearly 30 years ago. So I did some research. I thought about behavioral therapy with a flight simulator. I've heard that there's some kind of f...

When I was in Catholic school, the nuns used to tell us about Limbo, where those souls still marked by original sin would go until Judgment Day. The list included babies who had died before being baptized and all those people who had passed on before the Resurrection. I always pictured it as a strange, gray world where people just waited and waited. I got my own taste of limbo today when I got stuck on the elevator. I had come in early because my colleague is off for the next two days and I have to do his job as well as my own. I had some feature stories to do as well and I wanted to go to the gym at lunch time. So naturally this was a perfect time for the elevator to crap out on me. Notice that I said "on me," as I take these kinds of things very personally. My building is being renovated and looks like 10 cents worth of God help us. I have to go around the corner to get in through the Pine Street entrance and there are temporary walls inside that have shrunk the lobby down ...

I don't know what to do with my evenings anymore. Well, that's not really true. I've got a steamer trunk full of half-finished scripts, short stories, oh, and yeah, that novel of mine that I started before the Internet came into our lives. Still, I feel a gap in my life. I did my 30-minute solo performance last night and I managed somehow to survive. This was the culmination of the Solo Performer 2 class that I took at the People's Improv Theater, better known as the Pit. Even though I signed up for the class, I was telling myself that there was no way in hell I could stand up before an audience-- by myself --and flap my gums for half-a-freaking hour. And yet...I did. And it went pretty damn well, if I do say so myself. I was the second feature of the night and while my colleague, Mary, did her act, I sat backstage in an old barber chair like Albert Anastasia waiting to get whacked at the Park Sheraton Hotel. My solo show is called "Breathe With Me," somethin...

Many years ago my mother used to sell life insurance at the old Lincoln Savings Bank in Bay Ridge. The bank had order forms where people could leave their phone numbers so a salesperson--like my mother--could call them at a later time. One day she told us how she picked up a card, dialed the number and asked to speak to Chester Drawers. But this was a number for a furniture store and that's when my mom looked at the calendar, saw it was April 1, and realized she had been punked. And then she and the woman at the end of the line burst out laughing. I thought about this story the other day after I looked through a bureau drawer in my parents' bedroom. I'll sleeping in that room now, in their bed, and I decided to clean out the bottom drawer to make room for some of my stuff. But some drawers should stayed closed. When I pulled it open, I saw that it was brimming with all my mother's summer blouses. I recognized all of them, I remember her wearing them, back when it was wa...

I met a woman on the elevator today who had finally had enough. "Going to lunch?" I asked her as we rode down to the lobby. "No," she declared. "I'm going home!" "Really?" "Yes," she continued. "Did you ever have one of those days when you just can't take it anymore?" One of those of days? Jesus, I've been having one of those days every day since the day I was born. If I had this woman's attitude, I would have gone back into the womb years ago. "Well, good for you," I said. "Instead of going berserk in the office, you're going home so you won't have to kill anybody." So we got down to the first floor, I went to the gym for my lunch time boxing workout and my elevator companion went home. I wonder how many office shoot-outs could have been avoided if people had done what she was now doing--going the hell home. Maybe we all need to get in touch with our inner Snagglepuss. Clearly that...

It's almost 10 o'clock and Thanksgiving is nearly over. My relatives and I did the restaurant thing in our neighborhood and it worked out fairly well. It was a beautiful day here in New York and I went for a nice long walk before stuffing my face. It has turned much colder and I can hear the oil burner coming to life as I type this. Oy, that oil bill... It's hard to believe that neither one of my parents is here with us on this day that celebrates families. With my father's death in January, my siblings and I are officially orphans. I actually had to ask my sister what we did last year since I kept drawing a blank. She reminded me that we first went to visit my dad at the nursing home in Coney Island then took the train to my aunt's place in Manhattan for dinner. Ah, yes, I remember it well. It was raining something fierce that day and we took the bus to the Stillwell Avenue train station. I remember going by Nathan's and seeing the place was open and serving cu...

I stood outside Lundy's the other night peering through the dusty window. At one time, this seafood place on Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay was the supposedly the largest restaurant in America. My father told me that he walked in there one night and there were over 2,000 people in the place. But that was years ago and now Lundy's is just an empty shell. I was coming from a family birthday party and I stopped by to look at the place before walking back to the train station. It was hard to imagine all those bodies in this empty place. I googled "Lundy's" tonight and in addition to getting hits about the famous restaurant, I also came across web sites devoted to an apparently fierce conflict in Canada called the Battle of Lundy's Lane that took place during the War of 1812. While I'm certainly no historian, it bothered me that I had never heard of this particular encounter, which one site described as "the battle bloodiest ever fought on Canadian soil....

My state senator sent me a birthday card last week. "Wishing you the best on your special day," it said. My birthday was back in May, so I was a little confused by my senator's card. Apparently the day was so special, no one told me about it. The guy used to be a cop prior to his political career and seeing how slow he is on the birthday beat I'm glad he wasn't a fireman. I'll be sure to vote for him...in August. Actually, I could use a friend in high places right now to help me get my truck back. When I say "my truck," I don't mean a real truck, naturally, I mean the huge billboard of a truck that once loomed over the West Side Highway. It belonged to Yale Express System, but when I was growing up it was known as "Robert's truck." Whenever we went up to Bear Mountain or to my Aunt Loretta's place in Upper Manhattan, I made sure to look for my truck. The thing was monstrous and it looked like it was going to fly off its moorings...

Mom always said I should get a good night's sleep and I'm starting to see why. I'm on the Netflix routine, so every weekend, I jam a couple of DVD's into the old player piano and catch up on the movies and TV shows that I've been missing. For the last few weeks I've been watching an HBO series called Carnivale , a enjoyably bizarre little tale that got canned a couple of years ago. It has one of the most entertaining opening credit sequences that I've ever seen, with a swooping camera that goes into tarot card images which then morph into Depression Era newsreel footage. The show's got all sorts of weird, supernatural elements that I enjoy and, while I've heard the program ended with a lot of loose ends hanging, I still intend to ride down this dead end street until I run out of blacktop. I watched an episode last week where the hero, a young man with a mysterious past--naturally--is being tortured by strange dreams. I was watching late Saturday nigh...

Well, I did it again. Tonight, I participated in the class show for the Solo Performer 2 course I'm taking at the People's Improv Theater, or The PIT, as we like to call it. I took the first class earlier this year and we had our class show in May. I am not a natural actor and I don't speak in public, so these classes push me in ways I never thought possible. In the theater they like to say "break a leg." Last night I damn near busted a toe walking into my room. I let out such a yelp I must have frightened people two zip codes away. But the show must go on. I wasn't happy with my performance tonight, to be honest. I stuttered a couple of times, but I also think I "acted" better this time around. I was conveying emotion, and not just reading. I spoke about losing my parents and how difficult it was dealing with my dad, who suffered from Alzheimer's, so there is no shortage of emotion here. One of my classmate's had invited sever...