The Luna Park Gazette

I was riding home on the R train the other night when a man came walking through my car playing “Quando, Quando, Quando” on the trumpet. He was doing a pretty good job and I was impressed by the way he pushed his beat box with one hand and blew his horn with the other. I tossed him a dollar as he went by. “Quando” means “when” in Italian and that seems like a fair question to ask at this time of the year, as in “when, when, when will this goddamn winter be over?” There’s snow all around me. I’ve spent so much money on that de-icing crap I should buy stock in the company. I can’t step foot out of the house without putting on the parka and strapping on these Frankenstein clodhopper boots. But then I’m hardly going out at all thanks to this hideous weather. Thank God for Netflix. And now another storm is on the way… These never-ending blizzards remind me of a story my father told us about a particularly harsh winter he experienced when he was a young man. My father, who lived in Upper Man...

Whoever said Sunday was a day of rest should have seen me yesterday. I was leaving my house at about 10:30 AM, gym bag over my shoulder, sack of laundry in one hand, and a fistful of mail in the other. It was cold as hell and I was in a hurry—which I see now was the cause of all this grief. My plan was to drop off the laundry, mail my letters, and head for the gym. That’s my usual Sunday routine, except that this time after I dropped off the laundry, I saw that one of my letters was missing. And it wasn’t just any letter, oh, no: this was the one to my credit card company that contained a rather sizeable check. I know, I know, why don’t I just pay my bills online? I’ve got no excuse except that I’m worried some hacking geek in a dank basement will clean me out with a few clicks off his keyboard. I ran up and down the block a few times with my head down to the pavement like a bloodhound, looked around my house, and interrogated the laundry guy, who must’ve thought I’d gone through the ...

I was walking through Washington Square Park on Sunday when I saw a young man playing a piano. It was freezing cold, there were piles of snow all over the place and here was this guy hitting the keys like he was making his debut at Carnegie Hall. I was pretty tired, but I was reasonably certain that I was not hallucinating. Musicians are hardly an unusual sight here when the weather is warm. On a summer weekend you have your pick of performers, along with the jugglers, magicians, sword swallowers, capoeiristas , comedians, and the guys who pose like famous sculptures. But tickling the ivories outdoors in January? That takes nerve. The guy had a decent crowd around him, too, considering the rotten weather. Maybe he was out there now because he didn’t want to compete with other musicians. In fact the only thing resembling a rival for the small group of gawkers that I could see was a fellow sitting on a nearby park bench with several pigeons balanced on his head and arms. A few people wer...

When I was reporter working at newspapers in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, I would come back to Brooklyn most weekends and stay at my parents’ house. I wanted to see my folks, escape the small towns I was working in, and enjoy New York like a tourist. We had this little routine where, on the night before I had to back to work, we’d rent a movie from a local video store and watch it after dinner. Since I was the guest I had the honor of picking the flick. One day I took out an old movie called Johnny Belinda . I can’t say why I happened to choose this 1948 film. I had heard of the movie, but I didn’t know much about it besides the title. But I like old movies, as did my parents, so I thought it would be a good choice. When I got home from the video store and announced this week’s movie, my mother immediately turned to my dad and gave him a sharp look. “Do you know this movie?” she demanded. “Yes,” my father said quickly, “yes, I do.” It turns out that my parents had seen ...

“With the opening of the New Year, all the closed portals of limitations will be thrown open and I shall move through them to vaster fields, where my worthwhile dreams of life will be fulfilled.” -- Paramahansa Yogananda It’s the first day of 2011 and I’m starting things off right with a new computer. This has been a somewhat challenging holiday season, what with aborted travel plans, a wicked sinus infection, a busted computer, and a blizzard that had me wondering if penguins would come waddling down my block. There was a moment when I ready to declare this the worst Christmas of all time. But I’m feeling better, the new machine is up and running, the snow is (sort of) melting, and I’ve been enjoying a seriously needed stay-cation. I lounged around the house, tossed my diet out the window, and watch hours of stunningly bad TV. It was great. I’m trying to be realistically positive for this new year. I want to make changes but I’m willing to accept that they won’t happen in the first ...

Now it can be told... I was speaking with my niece in San Francisco the other day and she told me about an incident from her childhood that happened at Christmas time many years ago. She was just a little girl--she's a teen-ager now--and her father/my brother decided to do the Santa-Claus-coming-down-chimney routine for her. So he starts banging on the wall to make her think Old St. Nick is coming in for a landing. The only problem with this plan, she tells me, was that she was terrified by the noise and ran crying into her room. The next day she asked my brother who was making that awful racket. "He told me it was Uncle Robert," she said. Say what? How did I get left holding the Santa bag? I was 3,000 miles away minding my own business in Brooklyn and I have to take the rap for spooking small children? Why couldn't you just blame Santa? The guy doesn't exist anyway--sorry, kids--so he doesn't have to worry about adorable little girls hating his guts. It's...

My old Dell computer finally died on Saturday and as much I hated the damn thing, I have to admit I miss it. It seems the mother board went south and now I finally have to get that new computer I’ve been threatening to buy for over a year. The Dell had been giving me trouble for ages. There was a point where I was on the phone with tech support so often I could have run for prime minister of India. And that probably wouldn't have helped much. They pretty much rebuilt the thing from scratch and repair people were coming to my house more often than the mailman. I even threatened to sue them at one point I was so furious. On Friday I was uploading pictures from last Christmas when the thing crashed and refused to get back up. So now the thing is dead, but my holiday plans are going to prevent me from getting a replacement until early in January. I don’t think it will be a Dell. I went to an internet café in my neighborhood this weekend and it had this creepy kind of peep show feeling ...