The Luna Park Gazette

There’s no such thing as time travel, but a trip to the International Vintage Poster Fair comes awfully close. The event is really meant for serious collectors, which rules me out, but I enjoy looking at these fabulous images that can combine art, history, politics, and advertising all on a single sheet of paper. This may be hard for young people to believe, but posters were a primary method of getting your message out back in the days before TV and the Internet. They’ve been called the "seven-second medium," since that's about all the time they had to catch the eye of a speeding pedestrian. The artists who created these illustrations did so knowing that they wouldn’t last long. The posters would go up on a wall or fence where they might be stolen or defaced and eventually covered up by another poster. But that didn’t stop these people from doing great work. I got interested in vintage posters a few years ago when I did a story for TheStreet.com . The economy was booming...

I came out of my house this afternoon to dump some trash and walked right into the middle of a neighborhood drama. I had the day off from work and I thought I’d relax and enjoy the lovely weather. But things didn’t go according to plan. I was about to go back into my house when I saw some people standing in a semi-circle around an Asian woman who was stretched out on the ground a few houses away from mine. She was barefoot, clad in pajamas, and rolling her head from side to side, sobbing and moaning unintelligibly. One of my neighbors told me that he had seen her walk up the block, sit down on the ground near his house and lay down on the pavement. She continued to roll her head and wail, while one man dialed 911 and the rest of tried to figure out what the hell was going on. I spoke to her softly to calm her down, but I don’t think she heard me. I wondered if she had gotten out of a mental hospital, given the pajamas and the lack of shoes. If she lived around here, then somebody shoul...

“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” I was speaking with my aunt recently and I told her I had just rented The Wolfman , a remake of the old horror movie classic that our family had enjoyed for so many years. “Why?” she asked me with gentle exasperation. Struck for answer, I reverted to my standard adolescent response. “Uh…I don’t know.” Actually, I did know. I was hoping for an easy night at the movies where I could sit back and relax with some enjoyable junk cinema. As it turned out, the only thing I got right was the “junk” part. This wolf was a dog and the enjoyment for me came when I dumped the DVD into the mailbox and shipped it back to Netflix. What was I thinking? That today’s filmmakers could actually create something that would rival the old 1941 Universal creepy starring Lon Chaney, Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi, and the incredible Maria Ouspenskaya? No one could top Ouspenskay...

I’m always a little surprised when I walk into my dentist’s office and see that computer on his desk. He’s had the thing for years, of course, but I don’t go to the dentist as often as I should, so it takes me a while to get used to changes around the office. I was in Dr. Cohen’s office on Saturday for this tooth ache that was lighting up whenever I drank cold liquids. I decided to break with my tradition of letting problems go until they mutate into irreversible catastrophes and actually do something about this particular issue right in the here and now. As I walked into his office I started thinking about how long I've been his patient. I was literally a child, a grammar school student, when I first came here. Back then the only place you could find desk top computers was on Star Trek . I believe I was an eighth grader when I had my first appointment with Dr. Cohen. I went straight from class at Our Lady of Angeles to his office a few blocks away. Naturally, I was a nervous wreck...

My late father always had a strong dislike for the word “interesting.” It was his unshakeable belief—and he had many of those—that this word meant absolutely nothing. If you told him that anything from a movie to a plate of food was “interesting” he maintained that you hadn’t told him a damn thing. I think of the times I've used this word and it's usually when I don't want to come out and say something negative. So, I went to my grammar school reunion on Saturday and it was really… interesting . I hadn’t been to this Catholic school in Brooklyn in years and I decided I would join my sister and some friends and revisit the place where I spent eight years of my childhood. The event was held in the gymnasium, where the school used to put on dances and where Mr. Keating, my gym teacher, once ruled with an iron whistle. I still remember him walking up and down the rows of boys twirling his whistle on a long cord, which would wrap around his index finger and then promptly unwind...

When you’re a police reporter, the scanner becomes your constant companion. That’s where so many stories begin. You’re sitting at your desk, making the daily phone calls to the various police departments you cover, looking for news. And then that scanner starts beeping over your shoulder. The dispatcher calls out the numbers, the codified mayhem that tells you if there’s a fire, car wreck, or armed robbery happening somewhere in your coverage area. You listen for the location, who is responding, and then decide if it’s worth going out there yourself. Some days that scanner can feel a lot like a ball and chain. I was a police reporter at the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, PA for five years starting in 1988 and it didn’t take me long to memorize the important numbers. Back then an armed robbery was a page one story—“page one all the way,” as my editor used to say; but, given the way the Poconos have grown, I don’t think a stick-up rates more than a fewer paragraphs today. There was a brie...

I was making breakfast this morning when I heard a plane fly overhead and I felt a chill go up my spine. That happened a lot in the weeks after 9/11, when every jet coming in for a landing sounded like a missile attack. Of course it was crazy; the plane traveling over my house this morning was flying too high and moving too slowly. It wasn’t like on 9/11, when the jets streaked through the sky and exploded right in front of me. For weeks after that I would look up whenever I heard a jet, half-wondering if it was going to happen again. The feeling gradually faded, but I guess that since this is the ninth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, I shouldn’t be too surprised that I get a little jumpy. Today is also my late father’s birthday; he turned 80 on that terrible day and all I had planned to do that morning was to go home after work and celebrate with him and my sister. Of course we all had no idea that just getting home that day would be such a struggle, that our cit...