The Luna Park Gazette

In 1968, Doris Day starred in a movie called Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? The film, which I’ve never seen, is set in New York City during the Northeast blackout that had taken place three years earlier. Based on a 1956 French play called Monsieur Masure , the movie also starred Patrick O’Neal, Robert Morse and Terry-Thomas. I had this vague memory of the ’65 blackout where I was walking down my street and getting this feeling that something was terribly wrong. While we didn’t lose power in my neighborhood, the blackout cut off all TV transmissions and I recall being so bummed because I couldn’t watch “F Troop.” Gregory Peck starred in a 1965 thriller called Mirage that opened with a blackout in New York. The film, which was pretty good, was directed by Edward Dmytryk and also starred Walter Matthau, Kevin McCarthy, George Kennedy and Diana Baker. New York had a blackout in 1977 that was marked by widespread looting and vandalism—quite until the Doris Da...

I was walking to the park a few blocks from my hotel room when I spotted the guy standing in the street. I was a little shaky, having just arrived in Montreal following a nearly sleepless night that was compounded by a Xanax haze that I endure every time I fly. But despite the fatigue and the shock at being in a new city, I noticed something unusual about this man, something a little off, and then I focused my bleary eyes and realized what was going on. He was naked. I looked again and saw that this fellow had joined a group of five other equally naked guys. Now Xanax is a powerful drug, but it ain’t that powerful, so I knew that I was not hallucinating. Those dudes were definitely nude, which seemed rather odd to me, but then I was new in town, and perhaps this was some local custom that the guidebooks hadn’t mentioned. I later learned that the naked guys were part of a climate change demonstration and I guess the message is that global warming is going to get so bad tha...

Some 40 years ago, I was working at a temp job in Manhattan shortly after I had graduated from college. I forget the name of the place--I seem to recall it was on the Upper East Side--but I do remember this older man who worked there. This was 1980 and Raging Bull , Martin Scorsese’s biopic about middleweight champion Jake LaMotta starring Robert DeNiro, was one of the top movies of the day. I had seen the film and while I was impressed with the acting and the stunning black and white photography, I was less keen on the film than most of the critics. The film seemed emotionally hollow to me and, in his review, a commentator on WCBS asked, “why is this guy raging?” One of the most memorable-and most violent--scene in the film occurs when DeNiro, who portrayed LaMotta, mercilessly pounds the up-and-coming fighter Tony Janiro after LaMotta’s wife, Vickie, mentions quite innocently that the guy was good looking. This drives the insanely jealous LaMotta to butcher the younger f...

So, like just Mark Twain, it seems that reports of my air conditioner’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The saga Five O’clock Charlie, my loudly ailing AC took another turn last week, and there was enough drama going on around here to power a week’s worth soap operas--most of which was my own doing. As mentioned in the previous post, I was forced to order a new air conditioner when my formerly reliable kitchen unit began making all manner of hideous sounds. I was less than thrilled about dropping 300 bucks, preferring to spend that dough on my upcoming vacation, but I couldn’t hack the godawful noise the thing was making, and I was genuinely concerned that it would explode and hurl shrapnel all over my home. In addition to the expense, a new air conditioner meant redoing a job I thought had been completed and bugging one of my neighbors to install the thing--something I had really hoped to avoid. He’s a great guy and very agreeable, but I hate bugging people if I ...

There’s an episode of the old M*A*S*H TV show where an inept North Korean pilot regularly drops a bomb near the army hospital. The doctors and nurses dubbed the guy “Five O’clock Charley” because he arrives every day at the same time. The pilot, described as a “washout from Kamikaze school,” never hits his intended target, an ammo dump, and his plane makes such a racket that everyone knows he’s coming. People start making bets on how far away from the target Charley's bomb will land. Only Frank Burns and Margaret think he’s a threat and they bug Henry, the C.O., to get an anti-aircraft gun. The episode was aired on Sept. 22, 1973, and I started thinking about it this week when the air conditioner in my kitchen started making godawful noise. I tried denial, telling myself that there was nothing unusual with the clanging and banging coming out the thing, but my logical side was telling me there was something very bad going on. I had bought two air conditions when I first ...

“The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature.” — Antoine François Prévost Whenever I went looking for a Father’s Day card, I tried to avoid the tool-themed cards. They usually show images of hammers and saws to nail down the idea that Dad is the guy who fixes stuff. Like a lot of men, my late father fancied himself a bit of handyman, and like a lot of men, he might have… overestimated his abilities. I remember when he replaced the bathroom light switch, only he put it in upside down, so you had to flick it up if you wanted to see what you were doing in there. And there was the time he rebuilt the cellar steps. I believe one of my brothers was supposed to help him, but Dad wound up doing it on his own. When he bragged about his achievement, my brother sarcastically claimed that even Phoebe, the family cat, was afraid to walk down those steps. I have absolutely no interest in the whole Mr. Fix-it schtick. If the job is anything beyond changing a light bulb, I quick...

I strolled down Comfort Road yesterday and in the process, I walked right out of the comfort zone. Allow me to unpack this gibberish for you. One of my Meetup groups had scheduled an outing to Governors Island, which is located in New York Harbor, roughly 800 yards from Manhattan and about 400 yards from Brooklyn. The island has been used for military purposes since the Revolutionary War and it is home to Fort Jay and Castle Williams. Over the years it has been used a military stockade and a U.S. Coast Guard installation until 1996. It has since been decommissioned and is now open for public use. I’ve been there several times and I always marvel at how you can see the skyscrapers in Manhattan a short distance away and yet I still feel as if you’re miles away from the city. The local Native Americans used to call the place “Nut Island”, probably because of the chestnut, hickory, and oak trees located there, although I suspect they named it after me. I always have fun when I ...