The Luna Park Gazette

In 1968, Doris Day starred in a movie called Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? The film, which I’ve never seen, is set in New York City during the Northeast blackout that had taken place three years earlier. Based on a 1956 French play called Monsieur Masure , the movie also starred Patrick O’Neal, Robert Morse and Terry-Thomas. I had this vague memory of the ’65 blackout where I was walking down my street and getting this feeling that something was terribly wrong. While we didn’t lose power in my neighborhood, the blackout cut off all TV transmissions and I recall being so bummed because I couldn’t watch “F Troop.” Gregory Peck starred in a 1965 thriller called Mirage that opened with a blackout in New York. The film, which was pretty good, was directed by Edward Dmytryk and also starred Walter Matthau, Kevin McCarthy, George Kennedy and Diana Baker. New York had a blackout in 1977 that was marked by widespread looting and vandalism—quite until the Doris Da...

I was walking to the park a few blocks from my hotel room when I spotted the guy standing in the street. I was a little shaky, having just arrived in Montreal following a nearly sleepless night that was compounded by a Xanax haze that I endure every time I fly. But despite the fatigue and the shock at being in a new city, I noticed something unusual about this man, something a little off, and then I focused my bleary eyes and realized what was going on. He was naked. I looked again and saw that this fellow had joined a group of five other equally naked guys. Now Xanax is a powerful drug, but it ain’t that powerful, so I knew that I was not hallucinating. Those dudes were definitely nude, which seemed rather odd to me, but then I was new in town, and perhaps this was some local custom that the guidebooks hadn’t mentioned. I later learned that the naked guys were part of a climate change demonstration and I guess the message is that global warming is going to get so bad tha...

Some 40 years ago, I was working at a temp job in Manhattan shortly after I had graduated from college. I forget the name of the place--I seem to recall it was on the Upper East Side--but I do remember this older man who worked there. This was 1980 and Raging Bull , Martin Scorsese’s biopic about middleweight champion Jake LaMotta starring Robert DeNiro, was one of the top movies of the day. I had seen the film and while I was impressed with the acting and the stunning black and white photography, I was less keen on the film than most of the critics. The film seemed emotionally hollow to me and, in his review, a commentator on WCBS asked, “why is this guy raging?” One of the most memorable-and most violent--scene in the film occurs when DeNiro, who portrayed LaMotta, mercilessly pounds the up-and-coming fighter Tony Janiro after LaMotta’s wife, Vickie, mentions quite innocently that the guy was good looking. This drives the insanely jealous LaMotta to butcher the younger f...