rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

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The Not So Dumb Wrestler, A Tribute to Broadway Producer, Kenneth Greenblatt

We grew up in the same neighborhood. Post-war, baby boom suburban Westbury, Long Island, just about an hour as the crow flies from New York City. Manhattan. The Great White Way. Both our fathers worked in the “schmata business”. That’s the Yiddish word for the textile business. Kenny’s father worked in sales and printing. My Dad was the middle-man, a textile broker, arranging sales between manufacturers and the guys who printed on raw fabrics. Both our Dads took the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan five days a week. Who knows, maybe they took the same train at 7:15 a.m. every…

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…

Friendships Across the Aisle, Abridged

This is not a political piece. Or maybe it is. It is a piece about friendships. New and old. And how they can make you see yourself, and the world, differently. Especially at the start of a new year, on the East Coast of not so sunny Florida, half way between West Palm and Miami Beach. I’ll start with the new friend. Mr. Bobha. That’s not his real name, but it will suffice, even though the man is not a Buddhist, in fact far from it. He’s a devout Christian, Catholic in fact. He and his childhood sweetheart, now wife,…

Losing My Old Voice to Find A New One

Just about everyone who knows me knows I have a big mouth. Not just the size of it (I once fit 12 eggs into it), but also my compulsion to say whatever I want.   Because of it, I have burned far too many bridges, hurt far too many feelings, and stepped on far too many toes. More than I would ever like to admit. But… I like to see how far I can go… to get away with something… to fight for “the right”… right up to the precipice… before I pull back… without injury or damage… to myself…

He Was a Friend of Mine: Jack Slater

“Friend” is a word I value. I don’t use it lightly. As in “Facebook friend”. The word has more respect about it than that. At its core, it resonates with words like trust, loyalty and longevity. Because it also has substance about it, something Facebook and merely “acquaintance” simply don’t have. And there is a beautiful song about friendship that I love. it’s called “He Was a Friend of Mine”. My favorite version was sung by Dave Van Ronk, the salty, crusty folksinger with the raspy voice who was sort of the Mayor of Greenwich Village back in the early…

The “R” word

5/13/14 (On what would have been my mother’s 93rd Birthday; she died in 1999) It used to be the “C” word. C-c-c-ommitment. Normally a young man’s word. Why ever get married, settle down, have a family, limit your (sexual) options? What about freedom? Opportunity? Spontaneity? Improvisation? Living in the moment? Be here now? What about the 60s? Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll? I’ll tell you “what”. Life is what. It has a way of catching up with even the best (free-est) of us? Leaving us older, lonelier, less and less healthy and attractive with each passing year. Maybe even…

There as a horse

may 7, 2014 there was a horse. a golden palomino. ginger. like her color. a perfect, golden palomino. no bridle, no saddle, just naked and free. across the street on valentines road. on the bolson estate. tall oak trees, green grass, and a golden horse. she would come up to the fence and let us pet her. or sometimes, feed her apples. whenever she felt like it. she was there before us. the first horse i remember. probably the first i ever saw. ginger. we were the newcomers. 1953. i was six years old. my sister had just been born…

“when i’m 64”, the slow fade of the perfect easter lily

i go out and sit on the plump, stuffed designer chair on the narrow, red-tiled front porch, in a little corner i like to call “mi rincon de memoria” (my corner of memory), amongst the low hanging creeping charlies and the wood-carved mexican religious figurines, and i notice a single white easter lily growing through the green ground vegetation towards the black wrought-iron fence. it is singularly beautiful and very alone. i know that it is way too late in the season for a white easter lily to be growing in the garden. but there it is. i look a little closer to admire it, and i see that its white graceful edges are now fading to brown. in a few days, it will be gone. it stands there entirely alone, so fragile, in its slow, elegant decline. inevitably, it will crash like a springtime flower into the cold of september.

confessions of an ageing rage-aholic, part 1: when i’m 64!

i’m a civilized man. intelligent, educated, compassionate, even, some might say, sophisticated in the ways of the world. i’ve traveled a good deal of the planet, survived cancer; i have a good job at a major university, i married for the 1st time at 54 years old; hell, i have a lot to be grateful for. then why, oh why, dear shiva-allah-buddha-yaweh-whoever the fuck is in charge, is my goddam temper still on a such a short leash, threatening to explode in the most unpredictable, humiliating, and inopportune times? am i a fool? or am i just cursed?

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