The Luna Park Gazette

Shirley Chisholm, we need you now more than ever. Forty-five years ago this month, an African-American woman from Brooklyn announced that she was running for President of the United States. I have this faint memory of seeing Shirley Chisholm on the old Eyewitness News show calling upon her fellow Americans to join her in “an effort to reshape our society and regain control of our destiny as we go down the Chisholm Trail for 1972.” Obviously she didn’t have a prayer of winning, but the fact that a minority woman had stepped forward and declared her candidacy for the highest office in the land was an incredible moment in this country’s history. I had the distinct privileged of interviewing Shirley Chisholm sometime around 1990 when I was a reporter at the Pocono Record. She was staying at one of the area resorts and I was lucky enough to be sent down there to speak with her. I’m from Brooklyn and I had grown up watching her on TV, so it was a thrill to meet her. I reminded her...

It was the first day of school, the rain was falling, and a little girl named Patricia was crying her eyes out. That random recollection came floating through my mind the other day, possibly roused by a recent review of my Catholic school posts. Apparently I knocked it off a shelf in my memory and it just started playing. Patricia was a classmate of mine, a scrawny, pale child who seemed to be getting into trouble throughout the entire first grade. She pulled some stunt on me once—pushed my crayons to the floor or some such childhood version of a capital offense--and I decided that she was evil incarnate and could never be forgiven. We had all heard she had been left back and would have to repeat the first grade, and yet there she was, sitting with the rest of us in our second year at Our Lady of Angels Catholic School. And then the voices started. One of the girls told the sister that Patricia had been left back and several other kids quickly joined the chorus. “She’s not...

Imagine a world where the air is so foul that people are forced to live underground. And imagine that America is a fascist state run like a corporation with a slew of vice-presidents. In 1971 author Philip Wylie imagined such a world in a script for the NBC series The Name of the Game . The show centered on a magazine publisher, an editor, and a crusading reporter, but this particular episode took a sharp turn into science fiction. And what was the title of this show? “ LA: 2017 .” Yes, exactly, the hideous world depicted in the program takes place…now. I watched the show when it was first broadcast on January 15, 1971—46 flipping years ago today --and it floated back into my memory last week when I should’ve been doing something else. I immediately began searching for some background on the show and I learned this episode was directed by a young man named Steven Spielberg , who I believe has been fairly successful in the movie business. The story involves the magazin...

I thought the library was supposed to be quiet. I went to the Bay Ridge Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on Friday in search of some heat. Not in the form of racy novels, mind you, but real heat, as in the hot air that keeps you from freezing your ass off. The heat in my building had gone belly up the night before and since I work from home, my office was getting chillier by the moment. The repair guy got it running for a short time early Friday morning and I made the mistake of celebrating too soon, thus encouraging Fate, Karma, or whoever the hell controls the eternal thermostat to snort and shout “that’s what you think, skinhead!” before promptly shutting the boiler down again. No problem, I told myself. I’ll just grab my laptop, skedaddle over to the neighborhood reading room and do my job on the fly. Hell, I’ve written stories in airport terminals and hotel lobbies and conducted phone interviews in speeding taxies. The library is also where I developed my reading hab...

“What do you is what counts and not what you had the intention of doing.” – Pablo Picasso I’m not going to waste any time listing my New Year’s resolutions. I truly love the idea of making all these annual promises to change, clean up my act, eat better, work harder, learn a foreign language, and solve all the world’s problems in the next 12 months. But I’m thinking I might tone it down a little. I already know what I want and what I have to do to get what I want. So this is a tune-up, a check-in to see how far off the path I’ve wandered (pretty far) and what I have to do to get back on track. I just can’t take the cynic’s route and dismiss the potential for change. I know that I’ve slipped up pretty seriously in several areas and it’s all for the same reason—a lack of discipline. For one thing, I’ve been wasting far too much time screwing around on YouTube. I do love the site, but I’ve allowed it to take over my life. There’s always an old song or instructional video, or ...