“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.
From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.
Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.
Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.
The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!
My piece for Brokelyn on top-five diner plates around the borough; great pix by their staff photog, too. Stay tuned to Brooklyn Diners tonight for a review of the Emphasis in Bay Ridge.
I’ve (re-)discovered a few things over the course of the recent Days Of Rage. Some of them are great!
I found it while researching a murder (…this is a sentence I have more frequent use for than most), the true story of a neighborhood legend from my childhood. I grew up in a leafy, …
That tuna melt is lookin’ at me funny…
Are those RAISINS? In what looks like coleslaw? Hmmm…I think somebody might have been looking for your buttons.
Yeah, there’s also bacon, which I don’t eat, but: caveat emptor, I guess.
Oh you Americans and your diners. They are just so completely awesome that I get tinged with jealousy every time I think about them. It’s like I can’t actually believe such a chrome and laminate heaven still exists
To a foreigner, they’re like finding out that Happy Days is actually a place.
You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever wanted a tuna melt. Usually, I have to be in a certain mood to tolerate tuna, and the moon has to be in the right phase, et cetera. The place w/the good coffee is something I’d have to experience to believe, b/c the only to-go coffee I’ve ever had that didn’t suck was from Dunkin’ Donuts. Otherwise, it all tastes like burnt feet.
Tuna salad, in melt or not, is always a risky order for me. I love it, but I don’t love all the things that diners do to stretch out the protein. That is to say, the addition of miracle whip, onions, capers or pickles into the tuna-mayo mix is, to me, horrifying. Celery? Okay. No prob. The rest do not belong. And asking a diner waitperson what’s in the tuna reliably gets you the ‘whaddaya think this is, Le Bernadin?’ look and no helpful answer. But yeah, when the cheese isn’t in full-melt, that’s ot-nay ood-gay. (The bacon add-in, though, that’s a thing of beauty.)
I think diner tuna melts–with pickle and crinkle-fry accoutrement–are some entity’s perfect food–not Nature, of course, but Nature’s best girlfriend Pauline who is always telling you what a great deal she got with the ShopRite coupons. I love them–the more mayo and other crap, the better. I must be chock fulla mercury by this point, but we don’t care, do we, girls! *slaps your knee*
Bacon is never wrong.