The Luna Park Gazette

“I've been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she'll kill me.” – Henny Youngman On December 6, 1980, a young comedian named Gilbert Gottfried appeared in a short film on Saturday Night Life portraying Pepe Gonzales, New York City’s only living bullfighter. The short film had Gottfried challenging taxis instead of bulls in the city’s financial district. I thought the bit was funnier than hell and if you can find it online, it’s definitely worth watching. Gottfried, who died earlier this month at age 67 after a long illness, was fired from SNL after a dozen episodes, but he went on to have a long and successful career. He made his name with highly offensive material, including 9/11 jokes two weeks after the World Trade Center came down, and a series of tweets about the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed 15,000 people and got him fired from his job as the voice of the Aflac duck. There’s been a lot of talk about...

I came bouncing up the stairs to my apartment Friday afternoon all set to start the holiday weekend when I made the mistake of looking at my mail. I had spent most of the afternoon in Manhattan for a real-world meeting my supervisors. I’ve been working with these people for a while, but we’ve always communicated through Slack or on the phone, thanks to the damn Covid. It felt good to finally put the faces to the voices. I took the express bus and from the city. It’s more expensive, but it’s also more comfortable, more convenient and more relaxing, especially in light of increasing crime, including a mass shooting last week at a subway station just 40 blocks from my house. An older gentleman at my bus station on Shore Road told me the express bus has been extremely crowded following the shooting, which is hardly surprising. We chatted about life in the city, why someone would do something like that, and then masked up and got on board the X27. I met up with supervisors...

“ If you want to fly, you have to give up everything that weighs you down.” - Buddha I sat alone in the dark and asked myself a simple question. “Why are you doing this?” For the last several years I’ve been getting up early to meditate. I set a timer for 20 minutes and try to remain in the present moment. It’s challenging, but when everything comes together, when I really focus on my breathing and nothing else, it’s the greatest feeling in the world. During these moments I reach a place I like to call “The Clearing,” where I clear all the junk out of my head and live in the here and now. Last week I hit a rough patch. While there is no such thing as a bad meditation, there were a couple of days when I wasn’t coming anywhere near the clearing. Buddhists call this “monkey mind” where random thoughts bounce all over the place like a wild chimpanzee. I was feeling stressed, I hadn’t been sleeping well, but I tried to accept this challenging period as part of life. ...

I stood shivering under the arch in Washington Square and waited for a 1957 Chevrolet to come get me. I was on an assignment on this very cold afternoon and that Chevy, which is as old as I am, was going to take me on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” tour, stopping at various New York locations that appear in the Amazon Prime show about a 1950s housewife who becomes a standup comedian. I have not watched the show yet, but I’ve certainly heard of it, and I thought the tour would make a good story. I had, of course, arrived ridiculously early and in effort to stave off pneumonia, I walked over to The Cozy Soup ‘n’ Burger on Broadway to get a bowl of chicken noodle soup. This place had opened in 1972, when I was a sophomore in high school, and, as I slurped my soup, I looked over their wall of fame, which included signed photos of Sylvester Stallone, Telly Savalas and Lynda Carter. And then it was back to the park, which had gotten even colder and I started to worry that this r...