The Luna Park Gazette

The MTA is taking its act above ground. During my many years of commuting, I have often seen talented musicians and some memorable characters when I ride the subways. However, I do most of my traveling on the express bus now, where I don’t get any such entertainment or aggravation. That changed on Saturday, though, as my sister and I were Broadway bound to see a play and were treated to an unexpected warm-up act. We met on the X27 bus at around noon to see a new production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie . The show stars Cherry Jones, a fine actress whom we’ve seen several times, and Zachery Quinto, the new Mr. Spock in the Star Trek reboot. When the bus pulled into a stop on 69th Street, a rather haggard young man lurched aboard and climbed over some poor woman seated in front of us so he could sit by the window. We were getting a distinct odor of alcohol as we turned onto Third Avenue and the man was mumbling incoherently to the unfortunate lady next to him...

I stood outside the Brooks Brothers store on Liberty Plaza this morning and said a silent prayer. I’ve been doing this little ceremony every year on September 11 since the planes crashed into the World Trade Center 12 years ago. There’s some scaffolding outside the store obscuring the view of the Freedom Towers site, but I have no trouble recalling that beautiful late summer day in 2001 when I stood in the same spot as a jet slammed into the opposite side of the South Tower and sent a massive sheet of orange flame billowing across the street. I can still hear that plane streak through the air in the seconds before impact and the screams of the people around me as we saw the world we thought we knew come to a horrifying end. We all ran, ran like rats, terrified that we were going to be killed any second. People cried and screamed up to the heavens for mercy. Nobody knew what the hell was going on, why we were being attacked. I remember taking refuge in a senior’s home near the ...

And to think I almost went to Vegas. I just got back from a week in Toronto and I have to say that I had a fantastic time. The trip was a last minute decision, as I considered visiting my aunt in the Berkshires, flying out to Sin City or staying the hell home. I cut Las Vegas from the list when I realized that I have no great interest in gambling or seeing any of the live shows. I’d like to see Vegas some day, but you don’t have to spend an entire week in the circus to have a good time. I finally picked Toronto, a town that I’ve been interested in seeing for years. The name “Toronto” supposedly means “Place of Meetings” and that just what it was for me. While I saw several of the city’s major sites, undoubtedly the biggest moment of my trip was meeting the fabulous Jenni of Calamity Jen in the real world after something like seven years of communicating through our respective blogs and Facebook. I’ve “watched” Jenni as she got married and gave birth to her beautiful son, K...

I came home on a recent Friday night, picked up the remote and channel surfed until I came upon a classic fight program. The footage was grainy and I recognized the voices of Marv Albert and Ferdie Pacheco, the “Fight Doctor,” who had called a lot of fights together during the 1980s. I was a big boxing fan back then. Inspired by Rocky , Hard Times , and other movies, I imagined myself as some kind of junior badass putting up my dukes and taking on the world. Now, of course, I know much better. Boxing and mixed martial arts matches are about the only sporting events I watch, even though I know the fighters are risking brain damage with every blow they absorb. I must say it’s getting harder for me to enjoy these fights because, as I get older, I realize how fragile human beings really are, no matter how fearsome they may look. I’ve been around long enough to see talented young athletes battered into feeble, overgrown children from years of head trauma that they suffered in the ...

I read through the New York Times obituary for Julie Harris this morning in search of a reference to The Haunting , my nominee for the scariest movie of all time. Miss Harris, who died on Saturday, made her considerable mark in the theater, but I know her best for her work in Robert Wise’s 1963 classic that has been scaring the beejeezus out of me since I was eight years old. The movie is finally mentioned in one of the obit’s last paragraphs, where Miss Harris’ character is summed up as “a spinster beset by evil spirits.” I suppose that’s one way of putting it. The Haunting is a terrifying ghost story that manages to frighten us without blood, guts, CGI or buckets of flying pea soup. No, Wise combined good filmmaking, three-dimensional characters, and fine actors, to strike fear into the hearts of audiences. The spookiest thing about the film is what we don’t see. There are all kinds of ungodly noises—pounding on doors, hideously indecipherable chants and wailings, but the...

I walked down Houston Street Wednesday night mildly curious about the accident at West Broadway. There were plenty of cops and yellow tape, and traffic was shut down in both directions. Houston Street was eerily empty, except for a lone motorcycle rider who roared by me with his head cranked down over the handlebars. He stopped when a man stepped out from a group of cops and waved for him to hit the brakes. I assumed this was a fender bender that would be quickly cleared up and cars would soon be streaking up and down the street at their usual manic pace. And then I got closer a little and I saw a sheet-covered body in the middle of the street. “Damn,” I muttered, “that was a fatal ." It’s funny, but I’m certain those were the same words my editor at the Pocono Record said one cold winter night 25 years ago when I covered my first fatal accident. We were listening to the scanner when we heard the county corner being called out to an accident, which meant somebody wou...

My father did not believe in coincidence. Whenever he had run-ins with petty bureaucrats, dimwitted telephone operators, or terminally dense waitresses, he’d slowly shake his head and sarcastically say, “I get all the winners.” Dad, who was not the most patient of men, said those words a lot when I was growing up and I confess that I inherited his hostile attitude. Or at least that’s the excuse I give people. However, I know that this is no way to go through life and I’m making an effort to change. And change was the theme when I walked into my local supermarket last week--only this type of change was in the form of serious coin. I was standing on the checkout line listening to Billy Joel on the store’s sound system singing “ Tell Her About It, ” a tune from way back in 1983 that I always liked and hadn’t heard in ages. The video for the song was equally enjoyable as it was built around the old Ed Sullivan Show and featured an appearance by Rodney Dangerfield. A scene had ...