The Luna Park Gazette

I wonder what made me think of Raymond last week. Every so often a name from my past will slide across my mind for no discernible reason. I’ll start to wonder, “whatever happened to…?” and then it’s off to Google to find out what this particular individual has been up to for the last few decades. The latest search was for a kid named Raymond whom I went to high school with in 1971 and have not seen—or thought about--since. Richard Nixon was president then. A gallon of gas cost 40 cents a gallon, a movie ticket went for a buck-fifty, and the average cost of a new house was $25,250. I was 14 years old, a graduate of Our Lady of Angels Catholic School in Bay Ridge, and starting freshman year of high school. There was no internet, of course, so you couldn’t Google someone’s history, and no smart phones to distract us, so I had to find other ways to avoid studying. And we didn’t have to wear masks and gloves because Covid-19 wouldn’t show up in our lives for another 50 years. ...

At least we have the guns. I ran into a man I know from the neighborhood a few weeks ago just as the quarantine was getting underway. He’s a nice enough guy, but he’s a bit of a right winger, which I am not, and, like a lot of right wingers, he likes to inject unsolicited editorial comments into the conversation. So, for example, when he told me he was out of work because his job had been shut down, he felt compelled to proudly inform me that he did not apply for unemployment benefits. Okay, so…what are you saying, exactly? That you’re not going to accept money that is rightfully yours because you don’t want no stinking government handout? Fine, give me your tax refund and then you can really feel good about yourself. And then he told me about the guns. “I moved my guns from my place in summer place,” he says. “I’ve got over 200 guns.” I knew he was a collector who liked to call himself “a gun guy,” but I was appalled at the size of his arsenal. I know he’s a collector, ...

When I woke up this morning, things were lookin' bad, Seem like total silence was the only friend I had…” --John Prine The text message I received this morning caught me completely by surprise. “Happy Easter,” it said. Those two words made no sense to me. Happy what? And what's with the cartoon rabbit image? And then I remembered: today is Easter Sunday. The text was from a woman I’ve been dating—or had been dating pre-pandemic. It was very thoughtful of her to contact me, especially since she’s Jewish. So, eight years of Catholic school, where I was terrorized into memorizing the Catechism under the threat of eternal damnation and a smack on the head, and I had somehow forgotten the most important day in the Christian calendar and had to be brought up to speed by somebody outside the church? I could almost hear my fifth-grade nun, Sister Frances, climbing out of her grave and heading toward my house with a ruler in her hand. Of course, in my defense ...

“The irony of life is that those who wear masks often tell us more truths than those with open faces.” ― Marie Lu When I was a child, my mother always warned me to bundle up in cold weather. “You don’t want to get the misery in the chest,” she’d say. My mother was talking about colds and the flu, of course, but today a much deadlier kind of misery has gripped the world in the form of Covid-19, a.k.a. the coronavirus. New York City remains the nation’s epicenter for this plague and life as we used to know it has pretty much evaporated. Today is Palm Sunday, usually a time of joy, as we look forward to Easter and its promise of hope and rebirth. But now we’re all wearing masks and gloves and the U.S. Surgeon General warned that “this will be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives.” God help us. I did another early morning shopping run yesterday, even earlier than last week’s sojourn. As I cruised the nearly empty aisles, I saw a young masked man holding his ...

I rolled through the Superfresh fruits and vegetables section early Saturday singing along with Dan Hartman. “ I can dream about you …” Normally I wouldn’t be singing in public, as I can’t carry a tune in my shopping cart. But there were so few people around I didn’t have to worry about frightening anyone with my impromptu karaoke hour. Normally I’d be at the gym at this time of the morning, getting a sound but controlled thrashing from my informal boxing coach before bouncing over to the cycling class for 45 minutes of sustained cardio abuse. “…if I can’t hold you tonight. ” And normally I’d do my grocery shopping on Sunday afternoon, when the store is so crowded and noisy you can barely hear yourself think, let alone decipher whatever the hell is playing on the sound system. But “normal” doesn’t count for much in today’s pandemic reality, now that the gyms are closed and the threat of Covid-19 means I need to get my rear-end up to the store before the crowds and their ge...

It took me a while, but I finally deleted the Girl from the North Country entry from my calendar last week. My family and I were supposed to see Conor McPherson’s fabulous play this afternoon, but after the coronavirus pulled the plug on Broadway, the show definitely wasn’t going on. I knew for a long time that it wasn’t going to happen, but I still couldn’t bring myself to clear the date on my I-phone. Maybe if I saved the date I could save the show. Girl from the North Country takes place in a rundown boarding house in 1934 Duluth, Minnesota, the birthplace of Bob Dylan, and the show makes extensive use of Dylan’s songs. That may sound strange—and it is—but it also works brilliantly. I first saw the play at the Old Vic in London three years ago and I loved it so much that I saw it again with my sister and auntie when it came to the Public Theater. And I was all set to see it again at the Belasco Theater until life as we know it came to an abrupt halt. The times, they ...

Everything seemed normal until I stepped off the elevator. I returned to my office on Friday morning after working from home for three days as our company—along with the rest of the world—ducks and covers from COVID-19. I didn’t want to be here. As a lifelong hypochondriac, the very mention of sickness has me diving under the bed and reaching for the Rosary beads. But I had an appointment with audiologist in the morning and then I planned to hit the gym after the work, do some shopping for my auntie and run like hell back to Brooklyn. The fact that this was Friday the 13th didn't help matters worth a damn. As I stood in the pouring rain waiting for my bus, I thought that I must be the only idiot in town going into the city during a plague. Yet the X27 was packed and traffic on the Belt Parkway was bumper to bumper. The ride into Manhattan seemed normal except, perhaps, when the bus driver cheerfully reminded us to wash our hands. The Oculus was crowded, as it always is...