The Luna Park Gazette

Somewhere back in the Eighties my brother came in from California for a visit one year and we went to see a Broadway musical called “A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine.” The first half of the show featured several song and dance numbers staged outside Grauman’s Chinese theater. I don’t remember much of this show after all this time, but one tune called “I Love A Film Cliché” still stands out in my mind. The singer describes the pleasure he gets from hearing familiar movie lines. Throughout the song other cast members pop up behind him and utter such gems as “why this is an egg from a dinosaur thought to be extinct for two million years!” Being a serious movie fan I’ve got some favorite film clichés of my own, but I haven't set them to music yet. One of them occurs in courtroom dramas when the crusading attorney stands up and makes some completely ridiculous request. The judge will pretend to ponder this motion for a few seconds and then say something like “this is highly ir...

This is Lent and the theme at Trinity Church on Wall Street is “Night Shall End In Day.” I take this to mean that there is hope; we don’t have to live in darkness—unless we choose to do so. I have been trying—really trying—to turn off the dark this week, but I sometimes feel like I’m running short on matches in a drafty room. In January I applied for Hunter College’s Creative Writing MFA program. I graduated from Hunter three decades ago, when, as I said in my application “Jimmy Carter was president, bread cost 48 cents a loaf, and Hunter’s West Building was just a hole in the ground.” I thought it would be great to go back to my old college and work on my writing. Well, I learned this week that the program’s selection committee had decided not to extend me an offer of admission, according to the online message I received. In other words, I didn’t get in. I was a little bummed, of course, but I’m okay with this—seriously. It was a long shot to begin with, and to be honest, I wasn’t ...

I’ve finally found the perfect place to live. Too bad it no longer exists. The spot I’m thinking of is post-World War II New York City, the time ranging from the mid-forties to the early Sixties, when Manhattan was the center of the universe. This is my Camelot, my Shangri-La. It’s the world of “ Sweet Smell of Success ,” one of my favorite movies, where Burt Lancaster, portraying a psychotic gossip columnist, witnesses a scene of midtown mayhem and happily declares, “I love this dirty town.” So do I, Burt, so do I. This is back when people went to clubs and men wore suits and ties and hats. Everybody ate steaks, smoked cigarettes, and drank bourbon round the clock. The neon lights really were bright on Broadway back then. There were no laptops, cellphones, I-pods, or other such devices that I like to complain about, but, of course, would never give up now that I have them. Newspapers were still the dominant media and this town had a dozen of them. Radio had its place, of course, and t...

I got some high praise the other day when I held the elevator door for a guy in the lobby of my office building. “You’re a great man,” he said as he stepped aboard. I wouldn’t go that far, but I wasn’t going to argue. You don't get called great every day of the week. Or least I don't. The elevator service was anything but great, though, as the thing just sat on the ground floor making obnoxious beeping noises. It gets annoyed if you mess with the doors. “Oh, come on,” my fellow passenger said in mock exasperation. “I’m a Southern gentleman, but I’ve got my limits.” The elevator got the hint, promptly closing the doors and starting to move. I made sure to wish my travel companion a good day as I got off. I had a rotten commute that morning and I appreciated a little positive energy. It had been freezing cold, the trains were all fouled up, and some loser insisted upon bullying his way on to the R train like he was racing to perform open heart surgery at Beth Israel...

I finally got around to watching an episode of The Twilight Zone that I recorded during the annual New Year’s cable marathon. I’ve seen just about every episode of this classic series—many of them several times over--but there was one in particular that I wanted to watch again. Entitled “Where is Everybody?” it is actually the show’s pilot, which was broadcast on October 2, 1959. It stars Earl Holliman as a man who is stranded in a deserted town with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The man, who is wearing an air force flight suit, is slowly going crazy as he desperately searches for other human beings. If you’ve ever felt lost and alone in your life this story will probably touch a nerve. In the end— spoiler alert! —it turns out that the guy is an astronaut training for a mission to the moon and has been hallucinating after 20-plus days of isolation. "The barrier of loneliness — that's the one thing we haven't licked yet," the astronaut’s commanding offi...

When Casey, our family dog, started to age, he had trouble getting around. He was fond of sitting on my parents’ bed and since the climb was difficult for him, my mother would get behind him and give him a push. “It’s tough to get old, sweetheart,” she’d say affectionately. I’m appreciating those words more and more lately. For example, a woman greeted me at my gym on Sunday saying that she hadn’t seen me in a long time and asking me how I was doing. We chatted briefly and then went our separate ways and I still have no idea who she is or how she knows me. Should I be worried about this? I like to listen to Jonathan Schwartz’ radio show on WNYC on the weekends. He plays a lot of tunes from the American Songbook—music from my parents’ day as I often say—but he also slips in songs from my day. This happened recently when he played a Harry Chapin song called “"W*O*L*D." The song tells the story of an aging DJ trying to get back with his ex-wife. He’s bouncing all over the map to...

There’s an old Italian saying that goes “spit in the sky and it comes back in your eye.” It’s a warning not to wish ill on other people because those bad intentions may backfire all over you. My mother was a firm believer in this proverb and she made sure to teach it to her children. If we ever said anything bad about someone, like “I wish so-and-so would drop dead”—she’d freak and literally chase us around the house crying “take it back! take it back!” When I was a teenager my mom told me that my grandmother had compiled a collection of old Italian spells and charms. My grandmother died when I was in the fifth grade and when I learned of this volume I kept bugging my mom to give it to me so I could have the thing translated into English. I was reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft and this collection reminded me of the Necronomicon , the handbook of black magic that appears in many of Lovecraft’s stories. My mother wouldn’t let me see this tome, no matter how many times I asked her. Perhaps...