Remembering Challenger

I can’t believe it’s been 34 years already. That morning I was playing in my room with my sister Anna; if I recall properly, Skeletor had teamed up with the Purple Pie Man to vex the joint forces of He-Man and Strawberry Shortcake. The phone rang, and our mother yelled up the stairs to say……

This is it! This is the sign!

The trailer for the new Ghostbusters flick dropped today: https://youtu.be/7yZCOXBAyWo This is it. This is the movie I have waited 30 years for. Ghostbusters, and to a lesser extent Ghostbusters 2 and The Real Ghostbusters, has been profoundly influential on me. In second grade, my friends and I performed a Ghostbusters routine in the school……

Weren’t they good? They made me happy!

This post was originally published here on December 3, 2012. It started off small. Innocuous. A simple Facebook status update by Mike Nesmith on August 7th: “We may be coming to your town.” Then I started to lose my mind. On August 8th, we were treated to this: Two days later, tickets went on sale,……

My House is Haunted. No, Really.

I live in a haunted house. It’s not nearly as scary as it sounds. It’s annoying. I think by now we’ve all seen this tweet: Truthfully, that’s not far off the mark. My house is more than a century old; it was built around 1900. My grandfather lived here from February of 1949 until his……

Candyman…

Thanks to Netflix’s belief thst I am interested in the films of the 1990s–mostly because I am–I watched Candyman tonight. This was the first time I’ve watched it in full since the first time I watched it. It was my junior year of high school. 1994. Saturday night, around 1 a.m. All the lights in……

Standing Witness

I don’t think I’ve ever cried at a burial. Funeral masses, not so much, either — my mom being the notable exception. I do cry at viewings occasionally — mom, my paternal grandparents (I was a mess at Mohawk’s, especially when I saw my nephews cry), and my second mother-in-law — but even then, by……

Mohawk Farms, 1922-2019: A Retrospective

The farm has sold. I’ve been staring at the screen, trying to come up with some flowery, grandiose introduction, some better way of saying it, but there it is. The farm has sold. After 97 years in the family, and five generations of Berenato men and women working there, the farm has sold. We knew……