The Luna Park Gazette

I wish I could remember that young man’s name. I was just thinking of this fellow I met at the end of my vacation to Denver and Nebraska last October. It was quite a trip. I had finally kept a promise to myself by going out to the Cornhusker State, and I got to meet up with my family in the Mile High City. Not bad, I thought, reaching around to give myself an imaginary pat on the back. And now it was time to go home, which meant getting on an airplane, of course, which, in turn, meant I was a nervous wreck. Things had gotten off to a rickety start when the airport’s automated train system got stuck in the tunnel as I was heading to the JetBlue terminal. Being a New Yorker, I immediately had a flashback to far too many subway shutdowns I’d experienced over the years. Now that I work from home, those incidents are much less frequent, but the anger remains in the wings just waiting to take center stage. So, the one time I come to Denver, the goddamn train system goes down, ...

On June 21, 1968, Chief Justice Earl Warren submitted his resignation to President Lyndon Johnson after 15 years as the nation’s highest‑ranking judicial officer. On the same day, the St. Lawrence Seaway was closed after operating and maintenance workers went on strike. Hugo Vihlen, an airline pilot from Florida, ended his 4,100‑mile solo trans‑Atlantic voyage 25 miles from shore on this day and came home aboard a fishing yacht to a hero's reception. He had been within 6 miles of Miami the night before, when his six‑foot sailboat, April Fool , was pushed back to sea by offshore winds and the currents of the Gulf Stream. The single‑handed sailor had started his 84‑day voyage from Casablanca, Morocco, on March 29 of that year. Mort Sahl was appearing nightly—except Mondays—at the Village Gate through June 30, and My Fair Lady , starring Fritz Weaver and Inga Swenson, was showing at N.Y. City Center. In the world of fashion, Satori’s in Mamaroneck, NY, was selling Nehru ...

“Hey, do you remember Intercrime Island?” I ran the question by my brother Peter to see if he could recall a key element from 8th Man , one of our favorite cartoons when we were growing up. It was just another one of these strange memory flashes I have when something from my past pops into my head for no apparent reason and I can’t shake it out. Of course, I didn’t get an answer since Peter died nearly a year ago, but I was feeling pretty low and a bit isolated, so I addressed my question to an empty chair on the other side of my kitchen table. This is the first Easter without him, as the Curse of the First rolls along. I’ve written before about chair work, a method of processing trauma, grief or personal tensions where you speak to an empty chair and imagine it’s someone from your life who is no longer here. I’ve done this with my mother, and though I did a lot of sobbing, I found it to be quite helpful. Usually, I make my chair work practice a solemn occasion and do...

I like to think of myself as a man of many hats, but as of right now, I’m wearing one less. The chapeau in question is my father’s cap, which commemorates the 104th Infrantry Division in World War II. I think he had ordered two of them many years ago and given one to me, but in any case, I like wearing it to honor his service. Every so often people will ask me about it, and I’ll tell them about my dad’s time with "the Timberwolves," which was the division’s nickname. Usually though, people don’t even notice. But that all changed recently when my sister and I flew out to San Francisco for our family reunion. It started at JFK as we boarded the plane and the gate agent scanned my ticket. “Thank you for your service.” I was so twisted about flying that at first, his words didn’t register with me. That’s an expression of gratitude reserved for military veterans, but I’ve never been in the service. Why would he say that to me? And then I realized he was referrin...

My sister called that one right. I’m referring to a disagreement we had during our visit to San Francisco last week after we wrapped up our family reunion. Right wing media has working overtime to depict the Fog City as some kind of dystopian hellhole, but we saw very little evidence of that during our outings. It’s a big city with big city problems, okay? Give it a rest, dickwads. But one spooky thing that stood out to us was the overwhelming presence of Waymo robotaxis zipping up and down the streets seemingly every other second. Seriously, you’d get to an intersection and they’d buzz by--white driverless vehicles with LIDAR units mounted on the roof, often two or three at a time. I’m fascinated by the science behind these robots, but I am a bit creeped out by the lack of humanity. Still, I kept bugging my sister to take a ride in one of the things just to say we did it. However, she steadfastly refused, pointing to safety concerns and the human toll as people are l...

And so, the First Cousins Reunion is in the books. My sister and I are back home after a five-day get together with our father’s side of the family in Northern California. During that time, we got a tour of the Monterey Aquarium courtesy of my cousin Erin, explored San Francisco and Sausalito, met a ton of cool people (and a couple of twits) while reconnecting with the West Coast branch of our family. My cousin got us a bird’s eye view of the otter tank so we could watch the frisky little critters glide through the water with the greatest of ease. We hadn’t seen each other since my Uncle Joe’s memorial service Los Angeles, prompting my sister to suggest that we should get together for happier occasions. The fact was underscored in May when we lost our brother Peter. And, oh how I wish he could have been there with us. It still hurts to think I'll never see him again. We spent a couple of days at Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove before heading over to our Cou...

So who are you siding with—Odin or Mercury? Wednesday got started as “day of Woden”, reflecting the religion practiced by the Anglo-Saxons, the English equivalent to the Norse god Odin. In many Romance languages, such as the French mercredi , Spanish miércoles or Italian mercoledì , the day's name is a calque of the Latin dies Mercurii “Day of Mercury." In Japanese, the word for Wednesday means “water day” and is associated with the planet Mercury, literally meaning “water star”. In the mid-1950s, people started calling Wednesday “Hump Day”, which views the middle of the workweek as a mound you've got to climb over to reach the weekend. !975, JJ Cale featured the term in his song “Friday” and in 2013 the phrase saw a monstrous surge in popularity after a Geico commercial with an obnoxious talking camel walking around an office and asking people "what day is this?". And, of course, there’s Wednesday from The Addams Family , who has her TV show now. ...

I guess this was bound to happen. I had this tacit agreement with my gym, where I routinely forget my water bottle and they give it to me the next time I come in. I’m not a fan of this routine; in fact, it scares the screaming bejesus out of me since I’m a senior citizen and extremely concerned about the old memory banks going on the fritz. I liked to joke that the gym staff should find a special shelf for the damn thing so I could leave it there and fill it up every time I work out. Well, my luck finally ran out. Last week I left that water bottle somewhere in the gym—perhaps by the Stairmaster?—and when I got home, I went through the routine of calling to ask them to set it aside for me. Only this time nobody turned it in. I’m so used to the receptionists reaching under the counter and coming up with the water bottle that I was surprised when they told me they hadn’t seen it. It’s was pretty nice, too, which makes me wonder why I wasn’t more careful with it. I ...

So, where did I leave that briefcase? I lay in bed obscenely early one recent morning trying to remember where I had left my attaché case. I was so upset. How the hell could I lose something so important? God knows what I had in there, but it must have been vital or I wouldn’t have put it in the briefcase in the first place. And now it was gone. It took a few minutes for me to realize that the attaché case I was so attached to didn’t exist, and that it was, in fact, the stuff that dreams are made of. I haven't worked in an office in years and even then I didn't feel the need to use a briefcase. Why would I dream about one now? My mother bought me an attaché case for my birthday—or was it Christmas? —many years ago, when I first started working. It occurs to me that I haven’t laid eyes on that thing in years. I’m reasonably sure that it is somewhere in my house, I’m just not sure where. But this was not the briefcase in my dream. I had this delusion a fe...

I heard the guy before I even opened the door. It was Saturday night, bitter cold here in Brooklyn and I was starving. I had gone shopping at my local supermarket and now I just wanted to pick up something for dinner and go the hell home. I decided to pick up an order of spaghetti and meatballs at Rocky’s & Nicky’s Pizzeria on Colonial Road. It’s not fine dining and I don’t have it often since I’m watching my cholesterol, but it’s just the right thing for a cold winter night. The hideous arctic blast was so nasty that my aunt had called earlier in the day from Los Angeles to see how I was doing. I let her know in no uncertain terms that I was trapped in my house and miserable as hell. “It’s like Covid all over again,” she said. I guess I was feeling particularly masochistic because I asked my aunt what the weather was like in L.A. “Well…a young woman walked by a little while ago and she was wearing shorts,” she said. I had to ask. Worse yet, I called my ...

Fidelity: faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support. My phone pinged late Friday morning and moments later I was traveling through time. I had just received a text message from my niece Kristin who had sent me a 1989 magazine ad that featured a photo of my brother Peter—Kristin’s father—when he became branch manager at Fidelity Investments’ Garden City office. “Dear Long Island,” the ad proclaims alongside a photo of Peter with a very serious look on his face. “When it comes to your investments, I’LL EARN YOUR FIDELITY…Instead of investment ‘advice’, I’ll give you useful, objective information. The facts and nothing but the facts.” It was such a jolt. I remember that advertisement so well. We had a copy mounted in a plexiglass frame that we used to keep on the dining room buffet. When our oldest brother Jim was visiting from California, he couldn’t resist making a wisecrack about insider trading. “Dear Long Island,” he said, ...

I remember hearing a story about two philosophy professors at a New England college. The men were bitter rivals and one winter day they came walking toward each other down a very narrow path in the snow. One professor, who was burly and quite aggressive, angrily declared, “I never step aside for fools!” The other professor, a much smaller fellow, quickly moved out of his way. “I always do,” he cheerfully replied. A week after the blizzard that slammed into New York, snow is still a large part of the conversation around these parts. We have long since moved away from the picturesque phase of snowfall and right to the yuk portion of the storm, where the snow is dirty, marked by dogs, stray cats and God knows what else, and very much in the way. And it’s cold as hell, too, and, like the snow, it’s still sticking around; day after day, we’re getting hammered with single digit temperatures. We’re supposed to reach a high of 30 degrees tomorrow, and I feel like breaking out...

If you only could watch one movie for the rest of your life, what would it be? In the 1971 dystopian science fiction film The Omega Man , Charlton Heston is stranded in a shattered world where just about everybody else is either dead or been turned into a nocturnal psychopath. Civilization has been destroyed, so Heston gets his entertainment by sitting in an empty theater and watching Woodstock so often that he can recite all the lines in the famed documentary. I’ve never seen Woodstock , but I’ve been wondering what movie I would want to watch for the rest of my days. As a diehard movie fan, I have so many candidates—Johnny Belinda, The Thief of Baghdad, High Noon—how could I possibly decide? God forbid that would ever I have to make such a choice, but I recently realized that I may have a candidate. Glengarry Glen Ross was a 1992 film adaptation of David Mamet’s Pulitizer Prize winning play. Directed by James Foley—who was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, just like you...

When I was a kid, I just loved monster movies. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, I couldn’t get enough of all the old Universal Studios horror contingent--much to my father's dismay. And then there was Godzilla and all the massive Japanese creatures stomping their way through Tokyo on a regular basis. But then horror flicks got gorier and I got older and, even though I still enjoy a good monster story, there’s a cynical side of me that believes these movies are giving humanity an undeserved break. Pick up a newspaper or switch on the TV and you’ll find countless examples of monstrous acts happening all over this world every single day—with no supernatural forces to blame. Last week, I sat down to watch Sinners , Ryan Coogler’s horror spectacular and while I do have some complaints, there is a sequence in the film that one of the most brilliant things I’ve seen in ages. The story takes place in the 1930s and concerns twin brothers—both portrayed by Micha...

Okay, so let’s try that again. The new year got off to a decidedly rocky start for me when I got a nasty cold just five days into 2026. As if that didn’t suck enough on its own, the torment was compounded by the fact that I had been sick just a month ago in early December. Nobody likes being sick, but I’ve had health problems for most of my adult life, so getting hammered by back-to-back illnesses really rocks my world. I have been absolutely miserable for the last several days, wallowing in a rancid stew of resentment, regret and rage. My subconscious mind has been working extra hard to replay all my mistakes and missteps in glorious technicolor. It started last Monday with a series of seemingly endless sneezing fits. I was hoping I was having some kind of allergy attack, but I had to finally throw in the tissue and admit that was I sick once again. I had been so high on starting the new year on the right foot and now I could barely stand up. I wound up taking two days o...

I limped through the snow with the words of Rudyard Kipling rolling through my skull. “ Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again! ” The poem, which was first published in the 1903 collection The Five Nations , imagines the repetitive thoughts of a British Army infantryman marching in South Africa during the Second Boer War. The 1915 spoken word recording of the poem by American actor Taylor Holmes has been used for its psychological effect in U.S. military Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape schools. That recording also makes an appearance in the horror film 28 Years Later and I can tell you from firsthand experience that it was as creepy as hell. And “Boots” came to mind last week when my family visited the New York Botanic Gardens to see the annual holiday train show. The event, which is more than 30 years old, features model trains navigating through miniatures of New York City’s most famous building made entirely out of plant parts. The display inclu...