The Luna Park Gazette

“The soldier above all prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” – Douglas MacArthur Connection with family is vital for my mental health, and even more so now that we’re living under the weight of Covid-19. Today I was fortunate enough to get a call from my niece Kristin that gave me such an emotional lift I’m still feeling it nearly 12 hours later. I was charging my phone in the living room when she called, so I had to do a mad dash from the bedroom to pick up, but it was worth the effort. Our conversation ran the gamut of family business, work, politics, and entertainment. At some point, I mentioned that I had just finished watching Band of Brothers , HBO’s fabulous World War II miniseries. Band of Brothers , which was made 20 years ago, tells the story of Easy Company of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division as they parachute behind enemy lines in the early hours of D-Day. My father was a veteran of the...

On January 29, 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on the Grover Cleveland Elementary School across the street from her house, killing the principal and a custodian, and wounding eight children and a police officer. Spencer barricaded herself in the house and when a reporter from the San Diego Union Tribune reached her by phone, the teenager said she shot up the school because "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." The line inspired Bob Geldof, leader singer of the Boomtown Rates, to write “ I Don’t Like Mondays ,” which was the number one song in 1979 in the U.K. for four weeks. That incident and those words came back to me last week after a mass shooting in the Atlanta area killed eight people, including six Asian women. A police spokesman told reporters at a press conference that the alleged shooter had claimed the shootings were not racially motivated and that “he was having a bad day.” A bad day? Really? We’ve all had plenty of bad da...

I wondered if Robert Jones ever got his shot. I got my first dose of the COVID vaccine on Saturday, a year to the day after I walked out my office for the last time, as the coronavirus rolled into our lives like a toxic fogbank. That was Friday the 13th and my floor was virtually empty, since most of the staff had taken advantage of our company’s offer to work from home. I wasn’t wearing a mask back then, which seems unbelievable today, but I was washing my hands every five minutes. Broadway was going dark, the St. Patrick’s Day parade had been cancelled, and the world was shutting down. I had entertained some bizarre notion of going to my boxing class after work that day, but my auntie scared me out of it. My gym recently reopened, but there are no classes yet and who knows when they’ll ever start up again. I miss all the people in that boxing class and I hope like hell they’re all healthy and safe. I left the office that day thinking I’d be back in a month or so. I mi...

So that really did happen. The 1971 film The Conspiracy and the Dybbuk concerns some Columbia University students who stood at the steps of the Federal Court in Foley Square many years ago and attempted to remove an evil spirit—a dybbuk—that they believed had taken possession of Judge Julius Hoffman, who, at the time, was presiding over the Chicago Seven trial. The 30-minute documentary features the defendants Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, their attorney, William Kunstler, and the French author Jean Genet. I have this vague memory of watching the actual event being covered on Eyewitness New s when I was 12 years old. There was a young man with glasses wearing a robe and some kind of headgear who called upon the evil spirit to vacate the jurist with all due haste. Julius Hoffman was roundly hated by the left back then and demonic possession apparently seemed like a logical explanation for his behavior to some people. I was starting to wander if I had imagined this bizarre...