The Luna Park Gazette

Mrs. Thomas J. White was one angry lady. A resident of Indianapolis and a member of the Indiana Textbook Commission, Mrs. White demanded that the story of “Robin Hood” be removed from schoolbooks. Robin Hood is one of the most beloved characters of all time. Who can forget Errol Flynn's turn as Robin Hood in the classic 1938 film? There have over 70 versions of Robin Hood in TV and movies, and while this one is my personal favorite, you’ve got plenty of others to choose from. How can anyone have a beef with Robin Hood? However, Robin Hood rankled Mrs. White because, she claimed, the story pushed Communist doctrine. “They want to stress it because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor,” she said. “That's the communist line. It's just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.” I should mention here that the story of Mrs. White was in a New York Times article from Nov. 14, 1953, which I came across while doing res...

“Virtue lies in our power, and similarly so does vice; because where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power not to act...” ― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics Back in the Eighties, when I was working at a weekly newspaper in Bay Ridge, I covered a speech given by a prominent law enforcement official. This was during a period when many Wall Street executives were being arrested and during a question-and-answer period, this official was asked for his thoughts on why the supposedly brightest and best were being locked up. He suggested that we should go back to teaching ethics, like the ancient Greeks, explaining to young people why it's wrong to steal, why it's wrong to lie. "That's a very interesting point," my editor said upon reading my story and I agreed. That speaker was Rudy Giuliani, who was then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and a crimefighting media star, who had made a name for himself prosecuting mobsters...

The man with the telephoto camera smiled at me and squeezed my shoulder. “What is it about bubbles that we love so much?” he asked as he walked by. This wasn’t a rhetorical question, as the air around us was filled with soapy spheres, courtesy of The Bubble Girls, two women who dress up in outrageously colorful outfits and make all kinds of magic happen with wands and water. They’ve been making regular appearances at the Bay Ridge Summer Stroll, a series of street fares, where long stretches of Third Avenue are closed to traffic so that local merchants, artists and others can set up shop outdoors. There’s a lot of music and dancing and food, but The Bubble Girls are my favorite attraction by far. The Bubble Girls are like glassblowers, who create massive, fragile figures that float overhead like spirits or alien life forms. They’re composers who work with bubbles instead of music. Yeah, I know. What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I obsessing over bubbles like a five-y...

You never get over being a police reporter. I covered the cop beat in the Poconos for five years and even though I turned in my scanner 30 years ago, I still get a charge whenever I hear sirens or see flashing red lights. I felt that buzz last week when I was walking from the gym and I spotted an ambulance on the other side of Third Avenue at 83rd Street. Immediately the old instincts kicked in. Was there an accident, or an assault, or did somebody keel over? I didn’t see any other activity, but there was a young woman and a cameraman dead head on the corner. At first, I thought they were shooting a film and I decided to ask them about their project. But as I got closer, I noticed the woman was holding a microphone from Channel 12, so I reckoned they were covering whatever the hell was going on across the street. “Hey, there,” I said, “do you know what’s going on?” “No,” the woman said. “Actually, we’re here for something else. I wonder if I could ask you some questions...

They used to call him “Old Cement Head.” Back in the 1970s, a man named Ross Scott was the Professional Karate Association’s Heavyweight Champion. I knew that name because, like a lot of young people back then, I was determined to become the next Bruce Lee, which, you’ll be surprised to know, didn’t happen. There was several PKA stars back then, including Bill Wallace, the middleweight champion, Jeff Smith, who held the light-heavyweight belt, and lightweight champ Benny “The Jet” Urquidez. These guys were my heroes. Ross Scott was an extremely hard puncher who knocked out many of his opponents, but he virtually nothing in the way of defense outside an almost superhuman ability to take punishment and still clobber people. Notice I said “ almost superhuman.” This was long before the UFC and these kickboxing events were rarely televised, so I got most of my information from a handful of karate magazines I wasted my time and money on every month. I still remember reading ab...

On a summer night in 1994, I went to see a showing of “Il Postino” at the Academy of Music Theater in Northampton, MA. I was on vacation at the time and staying at my aunt’s farmhouse in Cummington, which was about 30 minutes away. The film is about an Italian postman on a small island who befriends the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, who is living in exile. The postman learns to love poetry through his relationship with Neruda. Then he falls in love and needs Neruda’s guidance more than ever. This turned out to be quite an evening for me. I was wearing my Brooklyn cap at the time and before the film started, a man walking to his seat saw me and asked me if I really was from Kings County. I assured him that I was, and it turned out he was a Brooklyn native living in the Berkshires. After the movie, I met up with my fellow Brooklynite, his wife and several of their friends, and we all went out for drinks and dessert. It was a complete turnaround from the night I h...

If only that innkeeper hadn’t been so nosy. I’ve always a massive fan of tortellini, the ring-shaped pasta that's packed with meat or cheese and tons of deliciousness. However, a recent incident has me reconsidering my love for these yummy little hoops. Like any beloved food, the origin of tortellini is disputed, with both the cities of Bologna and Modena claiming to be its birthplace. As far as its appearance, one legend—there are apparently several--has it that tortellini got its unique shape after Venus, the goddess of love herself, once stayed at an inn. The innkeeper, overcome by her beauty, spied on her through a keyhole and since all he could see was her bellybutton, he created a pasta in this shape. This would explain the term "ombelico di Venere", or Venus' navel, that is occasionally used to describe tortellini. I try to keep my pasta consumption down, but for the last few weeks I’ve been picking up tortellini at my local supermarket for lunc...