Ah, city living. New Yorkers have at their disposal, in addition to an infinite number of cultural opportunities and convenient scenes from life’s rich pageant, hundreds of ways in which they might acquire a championship …

Ernie and I became best friends because we could both derive hours of undiminished amusement from bathroom humor. We became friends in a rather roundabout fashion; we met through our mutual friend The Lip at …

Gary Larson once drew a panel for his cartoon The Far Side in which a kid huddled underneath his bedclothes with a snorkel-esque apparatus attached to his face; the apparatus had a tube that snaked …

This morning, my alarm went off, and when I tried to get out of bed, I found that a microbe or allergen of some kind had once again invited several million of its closest friends …

In light of previous rants in this space in which I railed against various no-brow media subjects, not to mention my tendency in conversation to use the words “Joey Buttafuoco” synonymously with the word “contemptible,” …

I went out of town on vacation last week, and in my travels – all of them at least one time zone removed from the greater New York metro area – I saw a fair …

I do not like going to the doctor. Obviously, nobody likes going to the doctor, except little kids, because the waiting room of any upstanding pediatrician has cool stuff like unfamiliar chewed-on toys and other …

When I go home to visit my parents for the weekend, my trajectory when I first arrive at the house always follows the same path: from the back door to the front hall, where I …

A few days ago, a local TV newscast ran a story on the reaction of Italian Americans to Spike Lee’s latest “joint,” Summer Of Sam. According to the news piece, the film features as its …

It hadn’t happened for a long time – for such a long time, in fact, that I had begun to forget the horror, the pain, the feelings of shame. As the bad memories receded, my …