The Luna Park Gazette

Now it can be told... I was speaking with my niece in San Francisco the other day and she told me about an incident from her childhood that happened at Christmas time many years ago. She was just a little girl--she's a teen-ager now--and her father/my brother decided to do the Santa-Claus-coming-down-chimney routine for her. So he starts banging on the wall to make her think Old St. Nick is coming in for a landing. The only problem with this plan, she tells me, was that she was terrified by the noise and ran crying into her room. The next day she asked my brother who was making that awful racket. "He told me it was Uncle Robert," she said. Say what? How did I get left holding the Santa bag? I was 3,000 miles away minding my own business in Brooklyn and I have to take the rap for spooking small children? Why couldn't you just blame Santa? The guy doesn't exist anyway--sorry, kids--so he doesn't have to worry about adorable little girls hating his guts. It's...

My old Dell computer finally died on Saturday and as much I hated the damn thing, I have to admit I miss it. It seems the mother board went south and now I finally have to get that new computer I’ve been threatening to buy for over a year. The Dell had been giving me trouble for ages. There was a point where I was on the phone with tech support so often I could have run for prime minister of India. And that probably wouldn't have helped much. They pretty much rebuilt the thing from scratch and repair people were coming to my house more often than the mailman. I even threatened to sue them at one point I was so furious. On Friday I was uploading pictures from last Christmas when the thing crashed and refused to get back up. So now the thing is dead, but my holiday plans are going to prevent me from getting a replacement until early in January. I don’t think it will be a Dell. I went to an internet café in my neighborhood this weekend and it had this creepy kind of peep show feeling ...

Dillinger died for this? I finally got around to watching Manhattan Melodrama , an old movie I had recorded several weeks ago. The 1934 film stars Clark Gable and William Powell as lifelong friends who wind up on opposite sides of the law--something that seems to happen a lot in old movies. Myrna Loy plays the love interest and this is the first time she and Powell were paired up. The two would go on to make the "Thin Man" series, eventually starring in 14 movies together. The film is hardly a classic. The plot is creaky and contrived, even allowing for the passage of time, but it’s got so many great people in it that you really don’t care. But the reason that I really wanted to see this movie was because this was the last film that the infamous bank robber John Dillinger saw before being gunned down by FBI agents as he left the Biograph Theater in Chicago. FBI agents had staked out the theater, but they didn’t want to move in on Dillinger until the film was over. My first re...

The thing about buying a used book is that sometimes you can get two stories in one. The first, of course, is the book itself; the thousands of words the author has pulled together in an effort to enlighten, amuse, outrage, or otherwise entertain us. But another story--or at least traces of one--can come from the book’s previous owner—inscriptions, notes, doodles, and even the underlined sections that someone has put on the pages before they belonged to you. They are incredibly small pieces of other lives and that’s probably why I enjoy them so much. It's fun to imagine who these people were and what they were thinking when they decided to write in their book. A few years ago I picked up a copy of the “Spiritual Diary,” a book of a yoga master's inspirational sayings, at a used book stand on the Upper West Side. An inscription by the previous owner, dated Jan. 1, 2001, read “ As an art journal of sorts…all soul, babe, Love, D. ” It’s followed by something I can’t begin to make ...

Each year before I stuff myself on Thanksgiving Day I go to the gym and try to “earn the bird.” My goal is to work out like a psycho—more so than usual—so I’ll be able to enjoy a guilt-free holiday meal. It’s ridiculous, of course. The idea of me being free of guilt is kind of like an opera being free of music. Where's the fun in that? But I did my best this week and then I headed out to Long Island with my sister and auntie to have dinner with my cousin and her husband. There were relatively few glitches, even though I (naturally) worried about all sorts of mayhem, like miss train connections, psychotic parade-goes, runaway floats, terrorist elves. etc. We had one minor incident when we mistakenly got off a packed train at Jamaica Station only to learn that we didn’t have to switch trains. We charged back onto the train expecting to stand for the duration of our trip, but the three lovely people who had taken our seats immediately got up and insisted we sit back down. A few days h...

Illustration by Greg Bellamy One of the first things a reporter does when arriving at a major fire scene is find the guy in the white helmet. That’ll be the fire chief and he’s the one who will help you make some sense out of all the mayhem. Or at least you hope he will. I covered many fires during my five years as a police reporter in Pennsylvania. There were blazes where people died, where there was nothing left of the building but the foundation; one time a gas explosion destroyed an entire church in Stroudsburg. But I think the biggest fire I ever covered in all those years chasing sirens was the blaze that destroyed the Salvation Army Thrift Center in East Stroudsburg nearly 20 years ago. The building was huge and it was filled with old clothes, furniture and other second hand items. One night all of that stuff quiet literally went up in flames—and I was right there. Many of the fires I wrote about happened in some distant part of my coverage area. Often by the time I arrived the...

I’ve been a film addict ever since I saw “The Men Who Made the Movies” on PBS nearly 40 years ago. I can’t begin to guess how many hours—years—of my life I’ve spent in movie theaters. I like to think I have a variety of interests, but there’s something about film that just gets hold of me. I’ve always loved those few seconds when the lights go dim and the movie is just about to start. There's no drug in the world that can match that feeling of anticipation. When I was in high school and college, I used to plot my weekends around the movies. I was either going to see the latest foreign flick, or catching a classic at revival houses like the Elgin Theater or Carnegie Hall Cinema. Those theaters are gone now, thanks largely to VCRs and DVD players, and there are very few places that show old films—“retrospective cinemas,” as one of my film teachers called them in college--with a straight face no less. And yet as I write this, I am struggling to remember the last time I actually went t...