Some Idle Tuesday…

Nineteen years ago. Bob Craig and I were sitting in a pub at London Heathrow. We were on a five-hour layover coming back from Poland, where we had attended the wedding of Christopher and Aga Schleyer. At first we thought they were showing a movie. Then we saw it was CNN. We thought it was……

Corned beef and cabbage

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and I am making corned beef and cabbage.I have made it every year on this day since I first moved out on my own.Outside there is uncertainty. There is a global pandemic. St. Patrick’s Day celebrations have been canceled the world over.But I am making my corned beef and cabbage.……

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……

My Date With (the) Davy Jones (Memorial Celebration)!

Originally posted on Atomic Wanderers:
Davy Jones passed away on February 29, 2012. On March 10th of that year, a memorial celebration was held in his adopted hometown. The following is an account of my visit. I have written before of my life-long affinity for The Monkees.  I’ve made no secret of it.  They were…