Sometimes our friends are bellwethers to the times, a communal finger held up to the wind of opinion, breaking or not. It can be an unexpected indicator of things to come, perhaps even fortuitous things. But the wind can sometimes resemble the twisted faces of disaster that rarely match those found in better police lineups.
The following occurred several years ago near an apartment where I once lived. Perhaps a mere dozen stories tall, my neighboring building offered eight studio apartments per floor. Over the decades, time and rental wear and tear would take its toll, and by the early 1970s new owners had cleaned up the old girl, painting her decorative facade like the belle of a ball to which she was never invited.
Did you have a metal character-related lunch box when you were a kid? You know, those colorful 1960s tin litho treasures featuring Peanuts or Superman or the Munsters or Hogan’s Heroes or Batman & Robin or Get Smart or Star Wars or Gunsmoke (if your parents were seriously lame).
The news of the world becomes more disturbing, shocking and, let’s be honest, downright odd with the passing of every numbing hour.
Recent performances of Adam Brody’s brilliant The Fear of 13 have faced another real fear: poorly behaved Broadway audiences.
East and West Villagers are routinely smitten by the latest must-see venues: beautiful people, places and things that are beyond mere nouns. Where’s the experience of cutting-edge end retail design? The upscale dives, the delightful deliriums, the decorum-less dioramas?
Our meeting is scheduled at a famously obscure East Village restaurant where patrons arrive via the exit door of One Touch of Glamour ─ an equally hidden sweatshop known for its manufacture of irregular drag wigs. Sitting at the bar is the Antichrist or “AC” as I am instructed to call His Evilness.
Valentine’s Day is a holiday one best not mess with.
The year 2026 will be the most monumental year in the history of man, but only if aliens make their presence known somewhere other than the parking lots of Home Depot or Menard’s. So, in the spirit of clairvoyant foretelling non-AI-written predictiveness, let’s all take a long leap off a short pirouette…
Several holiday seasons ago, an opportunity arose to have my antiques store appear on a nationally syndicated morning television show.
