The Luna Park Gazette

“You can testify, but you can’t win because I’m here to tell you, you’re guilty as sin.” –the Right Honorable Samuel Davis Jr. So, how did I get to be this old? Just lucky, I guess. No, no guesswork, I’m lucky as hell, and it’s about time I acknowledged that fact. I turned 67 years on Friday and, as mentioned many times before, I share a birthday with Bob Dylan, Patti LaBelle and the Brooklyn. I’m younger than all three but not by much. I had a fabulous birthday celebration on Saturday with my sister and auntie, where we spent the day in Central Park before having dinner at Guantanamera, a Cuban restaurant on Eighth Avenue. I’d rather not think about my intake cholesterol during this particular meal, but, hell, it was my birthday and my cardiologist said I can go off the trail every now and then. This one should hold me for a while. I’ve been focusing on the gratitude more lately in a bid to free myself from this knee-jerk misery that sneaks up on me if I’m not careful. A...

In 1944, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello played a pair of plumbers in a film called In Society . I haven’t seen the movie in years, but I do recall the famous Bagel Street scene , where Lou is assailed by a series of lunatics in a disastrous attempt to deliver a container full of straw hats to the Susquehanna Hat Co. The picture also introduced the song “My Dreams are Getting Better All the Time,” which was written by Vic Mizzy and Manny Curtis, and which has taken on a special meaning for me given some of my recent REM sleep experiences. “ Well, what do you know ,” the song begins. “ He smiled at me in my dreams last night. My dreams are getting better all the time. ” I can’t honestly say my dreams are getting any better, but they are certainly getting weirder. A few weeks back, I described a dream where I was living in Boise, Idaho--yeah, I don’t get it, either--and falling in love with a woman who coached a high school basketball team. And then I dreamed I’d had lunch with ...

Sometime during 1930s, film director Howard Hawks was hosting a dinner party when the subject of dialogue came up. Hawks, who director such classics as The Big Sleep, Red River , and Bringing Up Baby , took out a copy of The Front Page , a 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, to demonstrate the snappy exchanges between characters. The director, according to IMDB, read the part of newspaper editor Walter Burns, while a female guest read the part of Hildy Johnson—even though the character was a man. Hawks realized the dialogue sounded much better coming from a woman and so he nailed down the film rights, switched the genders and created His Girl Friday , a 1940 comedy classic starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. I’ve seen this film countless times on TV, but I only just found out that after my mother saw the movie in the theater, she wanted to become a reporter just like Rosalind Russell. I discovered this latest fact about my mother yesterday when we were out ce...

So, what was I doing in Boise? Boise is the capital city of The Gem State, as well as the county seat of Ada County. Founded in 1863, Boise has roughly 236,000 residents and the downtown area is 2,704 feet above sea level. Downtown Boise’s attractions include the Idaho State Capital,the Egyptian Theatre, and the Boise Art Museum. Sister City to Guernica, Spain, Boise’s most notable people include the actor William Petersen, the musician Paul Revere and the baseball player Bill Buckner. I’ve never been to Boise and I’ve no immediate plans to visit—nothing personal, of course. But Boise has been on my subconscious mind apparently, as The City of Trees played a part in one of two rather weird dreams I had this week. In the first, I was a reporter on a Boise newspaper, and I was friends with a woman who coached a local high school basketball team. I was under the mistaken impression that she was gay and, thus would remain a friend. Only it turned out I was wrong. We wound...

Back in the Eighties I used to work at an insurance company on Park Avenue South in New York. Today that area has plenty of restaurants and clubs, but back then it was mostly gray office buildings that emptied out at 5 p.m. and turned the area into a ghost town. Or at least that’s how I remember it. I became friends with my supervisor—we’ll call him Harry--and he used to hang out a local watering hole on E. 18th Street called the Old Town . One Friday night after work he introduced me to the place and for that I will be forever in his debt. Walking into the Old Town is liking traveling through time. The place has been operating continuously since 1892, back when Grover Cleveland was President of the United States and Hugh John Grant was the Mayor of New York. The Old Town has preserved many of its original 19th Century fixtures. The bar is 55 feet long and made of marble and mahogany and the 16-foot high ceiling is made of pressed steel tiles. Other original furnishings ...

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” — Anaïs Nin The message came up on my phone on Saturday morning and caught me completely by surprise. “Heather 420 party .” It was just a brief note I had put in my calendar to remind myself about my friend Heather’s upcoming 420 party. The number, of course, refers to April 20, the official stoner holiday, where marijuana smokers celebrate their love of weed. Heather had lost her partner, Jen, a few years ago. I rarely smoke weed, but I was really looking forward to seeing Heather again. But I didn’t go to Heather’s on Saturday night because she is no longer with us. I can’t believe I’m writing these words, but Heather died earlier this month and now these two bright lights in my life—and so many other people’s lives--are gone. I met Jen and Heather years ago when they came to a solo performance I was doing with a friend at a pe...

I know the name Gideon mostly because of the Bibles that I used to find in hotel rooms. Gideon International, which put distributes bibles in hotel rooms, was formed in 1899 when two Christian sales wound up sharing a hotel room. Nearly every single hotel in the country put a Bible in their rooms, but that number has been coming down. However, Travel + Leisure reported in 2017 that bibles have been disappearing from hotels because Millennials are the least religious generation in the U.S., according to a study by San Diego State University. Still, if you really want to read Scripture, you can access the good word on your phone as roughly 98% of hotels off in-room Wi-Fi. Gideon gets a mention in Beatles 1968 song “Rocky Raccoon,” which Paul McCartney started writing in Rishikesh, India, where the band was studying Transcendental Meditation. The song was originally called “Rocky Sassoon,” but McCartney reportedly changed the title to because he though “Rocky Raccoon” sou...