The Luna Park Gazette

I did my best to keep it together, but I finally had to reach for the tissues. I’m a world famous weeper and I make no attempt to hold back the waterworks when I’m in the privacy of my home, where I can wail to the rafters and nobody’s the wiser. However, on this particular occasion I was at the Signature Theatre on 42nd Street in Manhattan taking in a performance of Athol Fugard’s Master Harold…and the Boys. But I couldn’t keep from crying, despite the crowd, as this is simply one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful plays I’ve ever seen. The language is fabulous and the emotions so raw that I never had a chance. I don’t know what the man sitting next to me was thinking when I start sobbing and after a few seconds I didn’t care. This was the third time I’ve seen Master Harold since 1982 when my oldest brother and I saw it with James Earl Jones and a young Danny Glover. I saw it again in 2006 with my sister and our late father and this time Danny Glover was playing the o...

I think I’m getting better at this. I had two book signings this week for my novel Born Speaking Lies and I’m starting to get this whole author thing down. On Wednesday I had a book launch party at the Mysterious Book Shop on Warren Street in Manhattan, where I’ve attended many readings. Now it was my turn. For years I’ve dreamed of standing in front of a group of people and reading from my work, but when I first arrived I saw nothing but empty seats. The list of attendees wasn’t that long to begin with and I had four cancellations before I even walked through the door. “It might be just the three of us,” I told my dear auntie and sister when they arrived. I was trying to chalk it up to experience; this was my first book, people have busy lives, and the old standby, shit happens. But none of that took away from the numbing sadness that had gathered around my heart. This was going to suck. When a UPS driver showed up to make a delivery I half-jokingly suggested we make ...

Thank God for the theater. My sister, auntie, and I saw Finian’s Rainbow at the Irish Repertory Theater today and we enjoyed a wonderful show filled with beautiful songs, fine acting and no Donald Trump. It was the closet thing to a remedy from Tuesday’s nightmare scenario that has one of the country’s largest KKK groups planning a parade next month to celebrate Trump’s election. Racist attacks have skyrocketed around America since Trump's victory so we shouldn’t be surprised that the boys in the white sheets have decided to come out of the closet. Trump claimed that he wasn’t aware of the incidents (was he in a fucking missile silo?), said there was only a small amount and told people to “stop it.” It seems fitting that there’s a character in Finian’s Rainbow who is an avowed racist--until he’s magically turned into an African-American. He learns pretty quickly what oppression is really like and amends his bigoted ways. Where’s a leprechaun when you need one? Trum...

My Halloween costume this year was painfully appropriate. I had made a last minute decision to buy an old time prisoner outfit, complete with striped shirt, pants, and cap. I didn’t think much of it, at first; it was just a standard issue costume intended to get me through the holiday. But it got a lot of positive responses, especially from total strangers. “I know you,” one young man said to me as my sister and I rode the F train. “We did time together in Alcatraz.” We were going to our friends’ apartment in lower Manhattan and we had a wonderful time, starting with the doorman who threatened to call the cops the moment he saw me. Our outfits were a big hit (my sister was a nun), we met some great people, and ate too damn much. When we left our friends’ apartment, I started running for a bus, prompting a man walking his dog to point at me and say to my sister, “he’s getting away!” Everything was fine, at first, but then the evening suddenly morphed from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. ...

I got the text shortly after 5pm last Sunday night. “ Hello, Sir Rob ,” it said. “ How are you? ” It was a message from the cab driver who would be taking me back to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport two days hence, and I got such a kick out of being called “Sir Rob” that I think I’ll start signing my checks that way. My driver, a Bangladeshi man who has lived in Dallas for 17 years, was a real hustler. I was in the Lone Star State on business so I didn’t get a chance to see the sites, and since my hotel was on a street with virtually nothing but other hotels I can’t tell you much about the third largest city in Texas. I did get to visit the George Bush Presidential Library on my last night in town, and, well, let’s just say that fantasy is best left to the folks at Disney. At least they try to be entertaining when they make shit up. I mean, seriously, people—“Bush,” “Presidential” and “Library”—those are three words that don’t belong together under any circumstances. I also manag...

I stood at the top of the stairs and watched my father emerge from the basement carrying a stack of presents. This was Christmas Eve, God alone knows how many years ago, and I had gotten out of bed to investigate the sounds I heard coming from downstairs. We lived on the second floor of our house back then, and the stairs leading to the cellar had a medieval dungeon look to them, disappearing quickly into a critical shade of blackness that seemed to defy the strongest beams of light. Our cellar was something of an underground junkyard. We put just about everything down there—old clothes, furniture, books--even a couple of refrigerators. Why the hell we didn’t just go ahead and throw this crap out I can’t rightly say. At the bottom stairs was this small storeroom and one of my brother’s had scrawled “Frankenstein Lives Here” across the room’s green wooden door in an attempt to frighten me. I maintained I wasn’t scared at all, but I avoided that room until I was a teenager. I ke...

Now I’ll have to write something else. My author’s website is finally up and running and it looks so funky I can’t believe it’s about me. The site is an online marketing tool for my novel Born Speaking Lies and I'm just crazy about it. The amazing Ed Velandria, the web designer who somehow made sense out of all my gibberish, put together this slick film noir site complete with review copy, a synopsis of the novel, some eerie images, and a mug shot of yours truly. There are also links to Amazon and Fomite Press , my publisher, for easy ordering. (No pressure) Ed handed me the reins to the site on Friday, an evening that came so close to being a fiasco of epic proportions that I’m still shuddering at the memory. We had planned to meet at the Wholefoods in Park Slope at 3rd Third Street and Third Avenue. On Friday afternoon Ed sent me an email requesting a change in time, but I completely misread the message and mistakenly believed we were going to meet on Saturday, th...