The Luna Park Gazette

I saw the old timer taking aim, but I couldn’t believe he was pointing that thing at me. And then he took my picture. I gave him a “what the hell?” look and he took another picture of me. This was London, 1993 and I was finally visiting the grand old city after threatening to make the trip for ages. Apparently someone had alerted the local media. The old fellow approached me and explained that he was a photographer who wanted me to have a memento of my trip to his hometown. It pains me to admit this but my appearance must have screamed “tourist” as I was bearing a camera, guidebook, and a rather clueless look on my face. New Yorkers are obsessed with being in the know so it was a little disheartening to be pegged so easily by one of the locals. The old guy wasn’t taking snaps of my mug out of the goodness of his heart, of course. He offered to send me copies of his work for a nominal fee. But instead of telling him to get lost and that no one had asked him to take my godda...

Who let the hogs out? I had another yet one of my carnival sideshow dreams last night and while portions of it actually made some kind of twisted sense, the sudden appearance of two randy porkers has got me rather confused—and a little worried. Okay, so in this latest psychotic episode, I’m riding a motorcycle, which by the way, I don’t own in real life, and I’m heading to my 9:30 AM cycling class at the New York Sports Club’s 86th Street gym. Now that part is real. I go to that class every Saturday morning and it’s great. The instructor is a talented young woman who manages to mix warmth and humor in with a punishing workout. She insists that we sing along with her musical selections, probably to take our minds off the abuse. She even had me gagging out “ Total Eclipse of the Heart ”—and I damn near had one. On top of that, she’s into astrology and, upon learning that we’re the same sign, she promptly dubbed me “Mr. Gemini.” Now in the dream I’m looking in vain for a parkin...

One night nearly 20 years ago, I got off the R train at Bay Ridge Avenue after a long day at work and saw that Hollywood had come to my neighborhood. A TV production crew was shooting an episode of Law & Order at a local carpet store on Fourth Avenue and 68th Street and when I looked across the street I could clearly see Jerry Orbach , who played the veteran detective Lennie Briscoe, talking to another actor inside the store. It was quite a thrill having one of my favorite TV shows being shot so close to home. I hung around for a little while, but it looked like the crew was going to be there for most of the evening and I finally went home. I’ve always been a Law & Order fan and I’ve come across a few of the “murder” scenes being shot throughout New York in the two decades that the show aired. It's such a New Yorky show and now it was in my backyard. I was thinking about this particular episode this week and realized that it would be rather difficult to track i...

And now the time has come when I must ask myself am I a man or a moose? No, that’s not a typo. I really do mean “moose” and I’ll tell you why. Many years ago I watched a TV news report that described how an alarming number of moose where being killed by freight trains in Alaska. The moose were walking on the railroad tracks to avoid struggling through the deep snow, which seemed logical, but they weren’t getting out of the way of oncoming trains, which seemed crazy. The poor moose couldn’t grasp that their lives were quite literally on the line--even as the trains were bearing down on them. The news crew actually filmed one of these tragic encounters and while the footage thankfully did not show a moose meeting its maker, it did feature the unmistakable sound of a body being struck by a massive object. I remember being quite amazed at just how dense the moose were. Here’s this mile-long line of railroad cars coming straight at them and they made no attempt to save themselves...