rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

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Alley Pond Park, the Cousins’ Club, and the Loony Bin

I remember two things about Alley Pond Park from my early childhood in the 1950s. Neither was that it was the second biggest park in Queens County, one of the five boroughs of New York City, nestled at the far east borderline of Douglaston, Queens, just a stone’s throw from suburban Nassau County, where I grew up…. long before they built the east-west, Long Island Expressway right through the middle of Queens and Nassau. No, what I do remember vividly, is that Alley Pond Park was the green-grassed, red picnic-tabled immigrant park of my forefathers, where my helter-skelter Russian Jewish…

Vaccine Tale with a Twist

Also posted on the ” Cultural Weekly“: https://www.culturalweekly.com/synchronous-vaccination-tale/ ———- So I’m driving home past Dodger Stadium, perhaps the biggest Covid vaccination site in our country. And living in Echo Park, as I do, actually in the hills called Elysian Heights, I live only 4 stops signs away from the World Series Champs of 2020. Seeing a very short line of cars on my way home from grocery shopping with the Fam about 4:30 on January 19, I slow down near the entrance gate at Stadium and Academy Ways, and using my gregarious New York cab driver persona, I shout out to…

Family & Christmas. Like Love & Marriage, rrrrright?

December 24, 2013 Family and Christmas go together, right? Like love and marriage. Like horse and carriage, right? Well, I won’t disagree. But growing up in a mostly non-practicing Jewish family, I didn’t know much about it. Sure, we had Christmas in Salisbury Elementary School and W. Tresper Clarke High School in the 1950s and 60s suburbs of Long Island, New York. Of course, the other-side-of-the tracks O’Farrells and the D’Agostinos let us upper middle class Jewish kids know all about their Irish and Italian blue collar ways, with their anti-Semitic middle school harassment and their Catholic jock-swearing braggadocio. “Fuck…

Turkey Day in the Time of Corona

        Frozen turkey’s in the oven since last night. Special Trules recipe. Last employed almost forty years ago, on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South in New York City, in my clown loft, when my parents were still alive, in the early 1980s. Slow roast. Get the bird to stew overnight in its own juices. Guarantees a moist, delicious feast. Or least it used to, as I said. Let’s see. Forty years is a lonnnnnng time. The times, they have-a changed. Indeed. Bob Dylan, the sage himself, is almost 80. I’m 73. I’ve lived in sunny California…

Psychedelic Home Schooling

Happy, 4/20/2020! What have you been doing with yourself during our now, more than month-long, prescribed shelter-at-home pandemic? There’s so much opportunity for those of us who aren’t wrestling with antagonists like sickness, joblessness, inability to pay rent or bills, buy food, take care of our family, friends, neighbors, or loved ones, become home schoolers, and/or not get on each others’ nerves. Of course, there’s universal fear, but fortunately, although my wife has been laid off from restaurant work, she is collecting unemployment insurance, and although my son has just sadly celebrated his 13th birthday alone with just his Mom…

On Losing Kobe

— Every weekday morning I wake up at 5:45 a.m., to carve out 45 minutes for myself in the bathroom (ok, on the toilet) – before I start my daily “personal homework routine” with my still English-learning, almost 13 year old, son… alternating spelling with dictation, and every morning, reading: “Charlotte’s Web”, “The BFG”… parents, you know the drill.—Ok, I sit and read the newspaper – the old fashioned way – turning the pages to find what I want to read. I have to be judicious, with just 45 minutes at hand. I look at the headlines, page 2 &…

The Big Day, 6th Grade Graduation

The big day. Exsel graduates elementary school! He is in the last 6th grade class in Elysian Heights Elementary School’s 100 year history. (It will become a K-5 arts magnet next year) I remember the 1st day we got there, May 2015, the very end of the school year. I found out that I HAD to bring him to school, otherwise he would be “truant”! So we arrived just down the street from us on Baxter & Echo Park – to this sweet old school, elementary school. He would get to attend the last 2 weeks of 2nd grade –…

Sara Gazarek and Black Nile at Metro Arts’ “Jazz Tracks” in Union Station

I love Union Station.  “The Last of the Great Train Stations,” I make sure to show it to all my out of town guests, along with the Hollywood sign, Santa Monica and Venice beaches, Pacific Coast Highway, Topanga Canyon, Chinatown, South Central, and Skid Row. (More on those choices in another post.)But Union Station, our West Coast gem of international “grand central” stations (you can tell I’m from New York), opened in 1939 and was designed by architects John and Donald B. Parkinson and built by Robert E. McKee Inc. The style is a gorgeous mishmash of Spanish mission, art…

Karma, Coincidence, and Clowns, or… a Perfect Circle of People

Sometimes… on a certain night…. or on a certain day…. or in a certain moment, people come together in your life… in an inexplicable, maybe karmic, and if you believe in it, even in a magical way. There’s no logic for it. It’s just something like “life is stranger than fiction”.

Who are YOU: Scarecrow, Tin Man, or Cowardly Lion?

Also in 10/31/18 Cultural Weekly: How many times have you watched the movie Wizard of Oz? Me? I don’t know exactly, but… probably at least eight years in a row, on TV, every year from ages six to fourteen. All in black and white. Not just the beginning of the movie, in Kansas, before the tornado. But the whole thing; naturally, on our black and white TV in New Yawk, the 1950s.   The first time I saw the film in color, I was shocked. I was sure it was some kind of mistake. The Yellow Brick Road was actually yellow?…

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