This month marks my 60th year as a New Yorker, and I still find new and interesting things everywhere I go in all five boroughs. To celebrate the city, to thank my friends, this month my storytelling show is free on me. I’m giving away stuff, too. “City Stories: Stoops to Nuts,” Tuesday, March 11… Read more »
The week after Thanksgiving 1959, my mother left my brother, Rory, off at my grandparents on York Avenue and picked me up at P.S. 77 after kindergarten dismissal. Together we walked over to the 86thStreet cross-town bus just pulling up to the corner. Mom dropped a Mercury dime (I loved coins my grandmother and father… Read more »
So I walk into the house, I’m 10, and the first thing I see is a pair of bare legs on the inside of a closed window and the rest of the body isn’t in the apartment. I’m praying to God whoever it is doesn’t fall, the soapy glass prevents a clean identification of the… Read more »
On Friday, November 22, 1963, after lunch the St. Stephen of Hungary’s student body assembled in the auditorium for our once in a blue moon movie. That day our feature was “The Yearling.” A kid adopts a baby deer and his father played by Gregory Peck gives him the business. I was happy and not… Read more »
Only good part to getting older is how I pop up in the early morning like a Reverse Vampire. Makes it easy to get outside when the light’s right. This past Saturday, I rode my bicycle to Central Park and arrived at Bow Bridge on The Lake at 6:45. The colors in the park slowly… Read more »
I used to ride in my father’s rumble seat,” Dad told me while we sat at the bar in Loftus Tavern. As Dad drank a short beer and I sipped a coke, I wondered what’s a rumble seat? I asked. He said, “It was a seat that hinged out of the back of the car, it felt like you… Read more »
You can learn a lot about a place by what it denies is floating around its sewers. In New York, where I live, there are rumors of alligators lurking around our poop canals. They originated, according to believers, when in days of yore parents purchased tiny, adorable reptiles for their children, only to discover (quite… Read more »
Standup comedians are continually on the prowl for more jokes to enhance our punchline arsenal. Occasionally we stray away from gags about airline food or poop jokes and investigate edgy subjects, like race or sexuality. Most comics want to avoid incorporating bigotry into their sets (or to at least make themselves strategically bigoted so they… Read more »
Bollywood, in case you are unfamiliar, is Bombay’s film juggernaut, producing thousands of Hindi movies each year. The films are terrific, because the characters spontaneously burst into song randomly, and instead of sex scenes the characters dance in a suggestive manner. It’s almost exactly like my high school experience, except that everyone speaks foreigner! Recently… Read more »
Back when I was a lad we had this thing called “high school,” which was the cheapest way to corral all of the young people into a confined space where they wouldn’t bother adults during working hours. (Except for the teachers.) There were various classes, all designed to prep us for life as adults: Chemistry,… Read more »
