The Luna Park Gazette

If You Can Walk, You Can Dance If You Can Talk, You Can Sing --Zimbabwean Proverb I made my theatrical debut this evening, starring in my one-man show "The Memory Mill." This was the culmination of the eight week class I took at the People's Improv Theater, or PIT for short. I can't believe how quickly the time went by. And I can't believe I actually stood up before a group of people and did my six-minute piece. Earlier in the day, I got an e-mail from a fiction magazine rejecting a short story I had sent to them several weeks ago. That meant I'd really have to do great things on stage. I was nervous about the show, but not as much as I thought I would be. Of course, it's a friendly crowd and the venue is pretty small. Our class show began at 5:30 p.m. on a Monday night, so we didn't have to worry about overflow crowds. But no matter--we did it and I'm very glad we did. I had been rehearsing every night for about two weeks, reciting my piece aloud ...

Did any truly insane person ever claim to be Napoleon? That was the standard image of lunacy in so many movies and TV shows for so many years that I'm wondering how it got started. Most cliches have an origin in reality, so maybe somewhere, someplace, many years ago, some poor bugger slipped his hand under his jacket and shouted " Vive la France! " I got to thinking about Napoleon the other night as I rode home on the subway. A group of rather large young men got on the N train at 36 Street and stood by the door near me. One of them was carrying a shoulder bag and a baseball bat, which made me a little nervous. Back in the Seventies, when New York was a real hellhole, these young punks used to walk around with baseball bats. Anyone could see that they had no intention of enjoying the national pastime, but it would be impossible to prove otherwise. I'm sure had they been stopped by a cop, the little dirt bags would whine about being on their way to the park right now, ...

Sometimes a phrase that has absolutely nothing to do with you can hit you like a freight train. I had that happen today as I was doing story about a restaurant chain that was in the middle of a proxy fight. One of these takeover artists wanted to shake the company's board and he issued a press release declaring the outfit was "a study in stagnation." Wasn't that a Sherlock Holmes mystery? Or is it the story of my life? I feel like it's the latter some days because it just seems I'm getting nowhere--career, love life, writing, pretty much across the board. I'm in the same house I grew up in and a few weeks short of the half-century mark. Stagnating? Elementary, my dear Watson. Many years ago, I had a "friend" (please note the quotation marks) who felt it necessary to tell me that I was stagnating. Well, I certainly was when it came to choosing my friends. And I'm happy to report that this particular putz is out of my life. But that word-- stag...

I learned a new word the other day: matanza. That’s Spanish for “massacre.” I saw it the other day at my local newsstand, on the front page of El Diario. There it was, just above a photo of the slaughter in Virginia. Matanza . I wasn't quite sure what it meant, but I figured it out from the context. Another Spanish paper made it a little easier. Their headline ran “ Tragedia en Virginia." Pretty hard to misinterpret that. All along the news rack, foreign language papers carried the story about Cho Seung-Hui, who gunned down 32 innocent people before killing himself. Russian, Chinese, Greek, a virtual U.N. of headlines, dedicated to what seems to be that most American phenomenon, the mass shooting. Yes, I know this kind of thing happens in other countries, but with nowhere near the same horrifying frequency. And, yes, the guy wasn't born in America, but he spent 14 years of his life here, so the illegal alien hysteria doesn't apply. If you lived here long enough, you kn...

I'll never get the chance to tell Kurt Vonnegut how much I loved his work. He died Wednesday from injuries he suffered in a fall at his home in Manhattan. His death was similar to my father's back in January--he fell, hit his head, and a short time later he died. And like my father, Kurt Vonnegut was a veteran of World War II. The similarity pretty much ends there, but it's tough to see another member of that generation fade away. There was a time in my life when it seemed I was reading nothing but Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five, The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater , I read them all and wanted more. He had a book of short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House , that really showed how he evolved as a writer. It's been a long time, but I remember reading a few stories that I would be tempted to call clunkers. One was about American POW's in the Korean War who are forced to play in a human chess match where they are the pieces. Each time they lose a ma...

I’ve got to stop to dreaming like this. It was Monday night into Tuesday morning. In this dream I’m sitting on a crowded subway train during the morning rush, and squeezed into one of the benches. I’m on my way to work…in my pajamas. They were my pajamas, too. I looked down and I recognized the pattern. I could feel the subway floor against my bare feet and I was panicking: how the hell did I leave my house like this? And what am I going to do about it? No one else on the train seemed to notice my bizarre attire. These are New Yorkers, after all, and even dream New Yorkers mind their own business and pretend nothing’s wrong no matter what's going on. Still, these people were like zombies. They all had their noses buried in magazines and newspapers and steadfastly refused to acknowledge me, which was probably a good thing given my clothing, but it really creeped me out. Say something, damn it. Don't pretend this is normal. People in dreams can be so dense. For some reason I had...

You call this Easter? I'm freezing my ass off over here. What happened to Spring, rebirth, renewal? What happened to the goddamn temperature? By now you've probably guessed that it's unseasonably cold in New York and I'm kind of pissed. A year ago it was 67 degrees on Easter Sunday while the weather idiots are calling for highs of 45 degrees tomorrow. Come on, people, we can do better than this. This weather blows especially hard because my brother and his family are in from San Francisco. It's been great seeing them over the last week--they're going back on Monday--but we've had to curtail a lot of the walking around that we had planned back when the weather was legitimately cold. It's been a crazy week. I took a few days off from work and we've all been doing New York like tourists. We saw Inherit the Wind on Wednesday--a horribly cold and rainy day--with Brian Dennehy and Christopher Plummer. It was great seeing two fine actors in the flesh, thou...