The Luna Park Gazette

Back in the Eighties I used to work at an insurance company on Park Avenue South in New York. Today that area has plenty of restaurants and clubs, but back then it was mostly gray office buildings that emptied out at 5 p.m. and turned the area into a ghost town. Or at least that’s how I remember it. I became friends with my supervisor—we’ll call him Harry--and he used to hang out a local watering hole on E. 18th Street called the Old Town . One Friday night after work he introduced me to the place and for that I will be forever in his debt. Walking into the Old Town is liking traveling through time. The place has been operating continuously since 1892, back when Grover Cleveland was President of the United States and Hugh John Grant was the Mayor of New York. The Old Town has preserved many of its original 19th Century fixtures. The bar is 55 feet long and made of marble and mahogany and the 16-foot high ceiling is made of pressed steel tiles. Other original furnishings ...

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” — Anaïs Nin The message came up on my phone on Saturday morning and caught me completely by surprise. “Heather 420 party .” It was just a brief note I had put in my calendar to remind myself about my friend Heather’s upcoming 420 party. The number, of course, refers to April 20, the official stoner holiday, where marijuana smokers celebrate their love of weed. Heather had lost her partner, Jen, a few years ago. I rarely smoke weed, but I was really looking forward to seeing Heather again. But I didn’t go to Heather’s on Saturday night because she is no longer with us. I can’t believe I’m writing these words, but Heather died earlier this month and now these two bright lights in my life—and so many other people’s lives--are gone. I met Jen and Heather years ago when they came to a solo performance I was doing with a friend at a pe...

I know the name Gideon mostly because of the Bibles that I used to find in hotel rooms. Gideon International, which put distributes bibles in hotel rooms, was formed in 1899 when two Christian sales wound up sharing a hotel room. Nearly every single hotel in the country put a Bible in their rooms, but that number has been coming down. However, Travel + Leisure reported in 2017 that bibles have been disappearing from hotels because Millennials are the least religious generation in the U.S., according to a study by San Diego State University. Still, if you really want to read Scripture, you can access the good word on your phone as roughly 98% of hotels off in-room Wi-Fi. Gideon gets a mention in Beatles 1968 song “Rocky Raccoon,” which Paul McCartney started writing in Rishikesh, India, where the band was studying Transcendental Meditation. The song was originally called “Rocky Sassoon,” but McCartney reportedly changed the title to because he though “Rocky Raccoon” sou...

And now the t-shirt: “I Survived the New York Earthquake.” So, there I was Friday morning, sitting at my kitchen table and working on a story when a whole lotta shaking started going on. At first, I thought it was a helicopter flying overhead, and not just some news station traffic chopper, but a massive military monstrosity coming in low and mean. But it kept getting louder and my building started vibrating, and I decided it might be a good idea to put my ass in gear and get the hell out. I was halfway across my living room when the shaking stopped, but I decided to keep going to see if anybody else saw or felt what I did. “What the f*ck was that?” I asked no one, even though I sort of knew the answer already. Everything seemed normal when I went outside, and I thought for a moment that perhaps I was overreacting. But then a few of my neighbors start to emerge from their homes, all looking quite bewildered. “I thought it was just me,” one guy said. “I was thinki...