The Luna Park Gazette

There was a time in my life when going to the park meant I was going to have fun. In the winter I’d ride my sled down this big hill in Owl’s Head Park and in the spring and summer there was softball and all sorts of kid-fueled insanity to keep me occupied. As I grew older, I looked forward to going to the park only in the warm weather to read, work on my tan, and happily sit on my rear end. My childhood park romps were over. That all changed, however, when I signed up for a group exercise class at the New York Sports Club that trades the confinement of the gym for the freedom of the great outdoors. At an age when the only things I should be doing at the park is leering at the scantily clad girls and cursing at the pigeons, I’m doing push-ups and squats off benches, punching focus mitts, swinging a sledge hammer, repeatedly flipping a truck tire and running up that very same hill I used to sled on. And I’m loving every minute of it. I’ve always had this problem with going to...

“ The man who has confidence in himself gains the confidence of others. ” -- Hasidic saying In my junior year of high school I watched a public television show that changed my life. It was called “The Men Who Made the Movies” and after viewing the biographies of such filmmaking legends as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Raoul Walsh, Frank Capra and Vincent Minnelli, I decided that I wanted to be film director. And now, here I am, many, many years later, and I’m… not a film director. Okay, I’ve made mistakes along the way, allowed myself to be distracted by things like holding a job and trying to maintain my health, which caused me a lot of trouble over the years. But the biggest obstacle was myself. Deep down I don’t think I ever really believed that I could make it. I wanted it to happen, I wished it would happen, but I didn’t do enough to make it happen. Of course it’s an incredibly long shot and only a fraction of the people who try for it actually succeed. But if you ...

I’ve been thinking about a Ray Bradbury story I read as a teen-ager ago about a man who wakes up in a future where there is no fear. All I remember is that people weren't afraid of the dark, didn't believe in ghosts or anything supernatural, and the main character, who has no place in this strange land, meets a grisly end that is straight out of Edgar Allen Poe. I grew up reading Ray Bradbury and his death last week was so upsetting . I can remember getting happily lost in such works as “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles,” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” It seems like every other week I was heading down to the Brooklyn Public Library in Bay Ridge to take out another one of his books. When my seventh grade teacher was trying to encourage us to read, he said that we could go anywhere with books. Ray Bradbury proved that by taking us to places that didn’t even exist. But this particular Bradbury story came to my mind after I went for a moonlight walking tou...

Fifty years ago last week, an underground coal fire erupted beneath the town of Centralia, Pa. and it’s been burning ever since. Roads have buckled and houses have collapsed in the borough that once was home to 1,400 people. News reports say the town is virtually empty now. The Post Office has eliminated Centralia's ZIP code, but there are still a handful of people who have refused to leave and are suing to keep the state of Pennsylvania from evicting them. When I first heard this story, I thought I was imagining things. Who in their right mind would want to live in a place that sounds an awful lot like the backdoor to hell? But then I started looking inwardly, examining how I react to difficulties, how I lose my temper so easily, how I dredge up ugly memories, and how I constantly find the negative side of anything. I realized I’m in no position to point fingers at anybody. I’m living in my own private Centralia. Instead of coal fires burning underground, I have rage and ...

I’m starting to feel like the Flying Dutchman of television. It seems like every time I get hooked on a new TV show and recommend it to friends and family, the program is promptly canceled and driven off the air like a plague. I first noticed this phenomenon back in 1992 when I stumbled across “ The Ben Stiller Show ” on Fox. It’s been a while, but I remember the show having some excellent sketches, including a medieval version of “ Cops ” and a take-off on “ A Few Good Men ” that featured Stiller cross-examining himself as both the Tom Cruise and the Jack Nicholson characters. I told my friends at work that the show was funny and they should watch it. And it got canceled. Twenty years later, I still haven’t lost my touch. The latest victim was “ Awake ,” a brilliant show on NBC that starred Jason Isaacs as Michael Britten, an L.A. cop who finds himself living two different lives after a fatal car crash. In one version of reality, Britten’s wife has been killed in the accid...

When I was a young man I used go to a local karate school in hopes of becoming a fearless killer. Our sensei was a stocky Italian-American man who would routinely ream us out for being so pathetically out of shape. “I am fifty-five years old ,” he roared at us one night, “and I can do this!” I was about 20 at the time and I remember thinking, fifty-five? God, that’s so old! I can't imagine being 55! Well, as of today, I’m fifty-five years old. The karate school, which had been located over an old bingo hall, is now a New York Sports Club and I still go there. I never did earn that black belt, and I'm no fearless killer, but I feel like I deserve some kind of award for making it this far. I know a number of people who didn’t, so I am extremely thankful that I’m still around. “This is my special day,” I thought as I walked to get my bus this morning. I had planned to write about how I haven’t reached a lot of my goals or seen many of my dreams come true, but then it...

I was relaxing in the park this afternoon when I heard the angelic voice of a little girl floating over me. “Why is he sleeping on the bench ?” It took a second for me to realize that “he” was “me” and that this innocent child was referring to yours truly. And not very nicely. I was indeed stretched out on a park bench on Shore Road, enjoying the warm weather—and minding my own business, I might add, and I suppose to the untrained eye I might have looked like a homeless bum in need of a shave and a career—as opposed to the soon-to-be-world-renown literary and cinematic genius I really and truly am. I opened my eyes in time to see a man walking away from me with a cute little blond girl perched on his shoulders. I gave her a smile and threw her a wave but she turned away, clearly unimpressed. Give me a break, kid , I thought, I’m having a rough time here. How rough? Well, for starters I feel like crap. I’ve got a cold or a virus or a sinus infection or a voodoo curse or yell...