Bruce the Blog

Last Friday, I roved over to The Terrace Club on Route 6N in Mahopac to catch Class Action, a popular Yorktown rock ‘n’ roll cover band fronted by Gary Cusano, a lawyer by day and fierce rocker by night. Gary and Company have been very generous and kind to our Harrison Apar Field of Dreams Foundation, twice donating their services to help us raise money.

I like to support those who support our efforts and it helps that I really like to “lounge” around on a Friday night to chill after the work week, socialize, and listen to thumping music. Class Action does justice to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Billy Joel, The Rolling Stones and the like.

On Friday night, The Terrace Club was packed for the 10:00 p.m. performance. Before I left home, Elyse asked if I expected to see anyone I knew. “Probably Rob Reiss,” I told her, referring to a Yorktown physical therapist who is a friend of the band’s and with whom I played some pocket billiards when Class Action played a few months ago at O’Malley’s in Mount Kisco. Sure enough, Rob WAS there with wife Margot.

Asking the bartendress to start a tab for me, she asked my name. “First or last,” I asked, as if it mattered. There’s not too many Bruces, so that would have worked without my tab going to another Bruce down the mahogany or vice versa. But I chose my surname. “Apar,” I recalled it was.

At that moment, the gentleman occupying the stool to my left (I was standing, my preferred position when I’m hanging out — and there were no stools left anyhow) turned, looked at me, and fairly blurted, “Bruce Apar!”

When you’re in the news business, you’re not sure if that shock of recognition will be followed by an embrace or a sucker punch. Fortunately, in this case, I was embraceable.

It was someone I hung out with in Westhampton Beach 30 years ago as a half-shareholder in his summer house. He has a video of me he’s been wanting to give me for a couple years. I can guess what’s on it, and so can Elyse, who happened to be dating this person when she met me. I think the video I can wait to see involves a swimming pool, a raft, and a snorkel. Ankles aweigh!

This person was at The Terrace Club with someone other than his spouse. Later, another person I know entered the restaurant with two persons other than his spouse, but that’s because she is his ex.

It was then I realized we must all have happened upon a secret meeting of the Mid Life Crisis Men’s Club to which we were subliminally invited. I must have RSVPed without knowing it. My own MLC includes entertaining thoughts — serious, almost-ticketing thoughts — of traveling solo to Santa Fe to stay at the vacation home of a Syracuse U. frat brother who’s invited me several times. It seemed a good opportunity for early April, when Elyse and Elissa (with college friend in tow) and I are scheduled to be in Vero Beach at her parents. I figured “Lucy” (my nickname for Elissa since the day she was born — with red hair) would be otherwise occupied with her pal, as would Elyse with her folks, so I wouldn’t be very missed.

I was getting pretty excited about bacheloring it with my friend Norm in stunning Santa Fe, where his backyard views go on forever, and the days are filled with leisurely hiking, museum-going and soaking in Mother Nature in all her glory.

I found cheap airfares, surfed online for events we could attend and — then it hit me. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Lucy will be out of college in two years, off on a life of her own, and how many family vacations do we have left?

How many more times will I be playing golf with my father-in-law Buddy, an octogenarian who shoots his age. His love of golf is manifest in his and Roz’s backyard, which looks out over their golf community’s 14th fairway.

Then there’s the painfully obvious missing piece of our family that my absence would only magnify. And so it was Tuesday morning getting ready for work that I reversed course, calling Elyse to tell her it was ixnay on the Santa Fe. I spoke about my wanting to be there for her, for Lucy and for her parents. “You mean because they would think it’s wrong if you weren’t,” asked Elyse. “I think it’s wrong” was my reply, fairly boasting that I had figured something out for myself and felt the conviction deep inside me without compromise. It was a character building moment that was virtually tangible, excuse the oxymoron.

“I have to say I’m happy,” she told me. She had not objected one iota to my previous plan to go west, middle-aged man, part of her ethos to “not tell you what you should do.” Hmmm. Can I have that declaration etched in marble perhaps and cemented to our front porch for all to see? I’ll get back to you on that. I said that I knew she wasn’t very sanguine about my solo act and knew she was muting that dismay. I was happy to hear her say she was happy about my paternalistic decision to be a family man at the right moment.

Meanwhile, back at The Terrace Club, I was single too, for the simple reason, as I told someone who inquired, “Where’s Elyse,” that our body clocks seem to run counterclockwise to one another, so “I come alive at night when she’s ready for bed.”

Just to prove my point, on Saturday night, after a full day of reading Curious George to preschoolers at the Jefferson Valley Mall Book Blast, then rushing to a special meeting of the Yorktown Athletic Club board, on which I sit, Elyse and I were two of 300 laughing our assets off at a five-temple comedy night at Yorktown Jewish Center that featured three very funny standup acts.

It was over about 11:00 p.m., and my evening was only getting started. I headed for one of my several homes away from home, Colonial Terrace in Cortlandt Manor (Travelers Rest being another), where The Foundation for Excellence in Yorktown Schools was holding its annual casino night fundraiser, with a late night after-party that seemed tailor made for my nocturnal schedule’s event hopping. I got there 11:30 and most of the crowd was still enjoying the evening.

On Sunday afternoon, Elyse and I enjoyed the off-center comedy Kimberly Akimbo at The Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls (which I reviewed in this week’s North County News).

It’s been a quiet week so far, which is fine by me because I could use the break, but the fun resumes Friday with a Rocky Patel open house at Doc James Cigars in Shrub Oak, where owner Adam DeSiena is hosting Rocky himself to promote some new smokes. Then it’s on to the grand opening in Peekskill of Birdsall House, a highly anticipated brewery.

Saturday we’re off to New Jersey for the bat mitzvah of another Syracuse U frat brother’s daughter, then to the Lakeland Education Foundation Casino Night at Colonial Terrace, honoring my pal Chuck Newman, where a record crowd of 320+ is expected. That’s some turnout. No surprise, cause Chuck is some kind of special guy. I’d love to stay for the dinner, but a St. Patty’s Day biennial house party is waiting in Yorktown, and it’s a doozy.

But first some personal grooming to attend to. Thursday night I’m trying a new place to get my head handled, Michael Robert Salon on Lexington Avenue at Route 6 in Mohegan Lake, next to Augie’s Restaurant, then I’ll swing by to say hello to “Augie” herself — Audrey Hochroth — and husband Sal Barone.

Maybe they’ll even let me sneak in a private audition for their Augie’s Idol Season 2, which begins April 13-14. Oh, you mean judges don’t have to audition? Never mind then.

Last week was not a good one for my lofty claim that I write a daily blog. Posted Tuesday, then not again until past midnight Thursday, then skipped the weekend altogether. Clearly, I gotta get this blog thing down pat. Speaking of Richard Nixon, my pal and NCN’s political columnist Andy Bazzo, a loyal Bruce the Blog reader, saw me Thursday in the NCN office and had to make a smart-alecky remark about my new glassless look that he learned about — where else — on my blog.

“You know,” said Andy, as we stood in a room other than the newsroom, “from the side, without your glasses, you look like Richard Nixon — you have his nose.” Well, I hope the statute of limitations is up on my purloining a U.S. President’s proboscis. Shades of the memorably hysterical scene in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” when he points a gun at a disembodied nose he is stealing in order to clone it into a full-fledged person.

Adding insult to injury, the Amazing Bazzo then left me a voicemail on Friday feigning umbrage that I didn’t mention his — ahem — Nixonian compliment in my post time-stamped March 5 (even though I wrote it Thursday night, tapping away well past midnight). Sorry, Andy, but being compared physiognomically to our esteemed 37th President is more noxious than Nixonian.

Richard Milhous Nixon, in the view of many, has paradoxically been treated kindly by the footsteps of history, and not without good reason. The stage play turned acclaimed Hollywood film, Frost/Nixon, has helped elicit retrospective sympathy for his Shakespearean-size tragic descent as the only U.S. President to resign from office in disgrace as the self-inflicted victim of hubris more elevated than Mount Olympus.

Couple the evolutionary forgiveness burnished by the sands of time with his rising reputation as a visionary internationalist for his famed relationship building with China long before the rest of the world caught up to that enlightened collaboration, and — voila! — you have one of the two or three most fascinating, intellectual and complex Presidents of the 20th Century.

Come to think of it, Andy, thanks for invoking Richard Nixon’s name in the same breath as mine. I’ll take my presidential comparisons wherever I can get them.
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In the 15th month of my bodily reincarnation, now I get comments to stop getting so skinny, or that I’m getting as thin as Elyse. Hardly. Don’t worry about me. I used to say, about 15 years ago, that my cholesterol level could win the American League batting title because it was 330. (Today’s it’s below 200.) Well, my body fat percentage is well into double digits.

Since lots of people still ask me what I did to lose the 40-plus pounds that went thataway, and think I’m still losing weight, the answer is I’m not. I’ve stabilized at about 186, from a high of 230 in January 2009.

The further answer is that diet is only the half of it. Regular exercise — combining cardio and weight exercises — is the other all-important half. I’ve been trying to lose those stubborn love handles and flatten the tummy and all that stuff that is exceedingly difficult to do when you’re in the second half-century of this thing called life. Doing three sets of 15-20 leg lifts on the Captain’s Chair helps, as does high-intensity interval training on the treadmill, where I alternate jogging easily for two minutes at 3.5 mph, then sprinting — or my version of it, at 6-8 mph — for 90 seconds to two minutes, for a total of 17-20 minutes two to three times a week. It does seem to slim down the silhouette even without shedding more poundage. But if it looks like I’ve lost more weight, who am I to complain?

There is a page elsewhere in this blogosphere of mine titled “It’s Enough to Make You Sixty.”It’s enough to make you sixty to decide a decade past your half-century mark that contact lenses might be a good idea. I acquired eye lamination for the first time in my life yesterday, to be exact.

I remember like it was yesterday when I first found out I needed four eyes instead of two. My spouse — who happened not to be the same person that proudly carries that mantle today, but enough about either of them — was getting on my case (some things don’t change even when spouses do) in the motor vehicle I was driving that I didn’t see the exit sign in time. I don’t understand what her problem was with me traversing three lanes, from the passing lane (which apparently is news to those slow-witted types who sit there without a clue they are in a passing lane, not a sitting lane, and are supposed to get back to the middle lane after passing cars in the middle lane), to the slow lane in one not-so-smooth move.

So Wife 1 — ahem — “sugggested” I get an eye exam. This was probably some 35 years ago. Wouldn’t you know it. She was right. I needed glasses.

I’ve had ‘em ever since, but after 35 years of gazing at the world with my cranium under pressure, I thought it was about time I escaped from the plastic prison. It’s not as if I didn’t get the focal point a long time ago.

Wife 2 wondered aloud why somebody of my — ahem — maturity (or maybe she said age) would first want contacts at this stage of existence. It was then I realized she didn’t get the memo about the mid-life crisis that visits men of a certain age. Somebody could make a fortune sending email blasts about men’s mid-life crisis to women, charging a premium for addressing it to their wives, or at least to their current wives. Their former wives likely would just laugh upon receiving it, relieved that they missed that milestone.

So March 1, 59 years 346 days after I arrived on earth, my eyeballs lost their virginity to Bausch & Lomb soft lenses. Let it be recorded that this fateful fall from grace occurred in the Mt. Kisco office of Dr. William Dieck. It was quite a learning curve enduring the tutorial of taking the contacts out and then putting them in. As Brenda, the affable lab technician, told me, some people can’t wear contacts simply because they can’t stand to have anybody touch their eyeballs, not even with their own hands.

When Brenda first put them in, she told me to cool my heels (not in those words) in the waiting room for about 10 minutes to adjust to the new sensation. I ambled around the eyeglass store that abuts the doctor’s office and of course immediately and impatiently hightailed over to the nearest looking glass to eyeball my newly naked visage. Whoa! To me, it seemed, jeepers, creepers, what a pair of peepers you  have, grandma.  My eyes seemed notably larger, like I had the lead in a high school production of Mr. Magoo Goes to the Opthalmologist, except without his glasses. (You know, high school shows can’t always afford all the props.)

I must have tried putting the lens in and removing it a dozen times in each eye. The same fiasco recurred that evening at home as I tried taking the lenses out. Then again in the office Tuesday as I endeavored to put them in at about 3:30, timing it to follow the good doctor’s direction that I try not wearing them more than six hours a day for the first week to acclimate myself.

Once the contacts were in at the doctor’s office, though, I quickly liked the liberation, as I told Dr. Dieck, who chuckled in a way that seemed to say, “OK, pal, whatever you say.”  No sooner was I in my car, calling Elyse to tell her mission accomplished, than I reflexively went to adjust the glasses that no longer were bridging my nose.

I was off to find drugstore reading glasses the doctor said I’d need now to do close work, which is part and parcel of my profession.  Plus I’d need a pair of cheapo sunglasses when wearing the contacts.

Getting the little suckers in and out isn’t my idea of the jollies, but once they’re in place, so far, so good.

I’m trying my darnedest to conjure some contact lens humor. It’s slow going, but I envision light at the end of the tunnel. I have a penchant for puns and, let’s face it, my jokes don’t get any cornea than that.

To no one’s surprise in medialand, there was a rash of emails flooding our inboxes today that started with the fateful phrase, “Due to inclement weather …  is cancelled.”

Except for one such email that stood out — for the wrong reason.  In fact, it almost caused Grammar Geek to gag on his thesaurus (talk about an endangered species). This email spoke of “in climate” weather. It was sent by a school district. From someone whose title is “Key Communicator.” Sigh.

Discretion being the better part of pallor, we’ll refrain from identifying the school district to protect the guilty, but movie fans will recognize the municipality as the very tony east coast moviestar colony made famous in “Fatal Attraction.” And anagrammarians might visualize its name as a combination of sleeping furniture and the most famous American automaker. But I don’t want to identify the fancy shmancy town whose school district made such a stunningly uneducated gaffe.

Other than evoking the studied inarticulateness of 1960s standup comic Norm Crosby — a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show who made a career out of purposely mispronouncing words in the service of humor for the masses — “in climate” (the sender of course intended the word to be “inclement”) proves my long-held theory that subliteracy largely derives from the tendency of people to spell and pronounce words based not on understanding basics of the English language — relegating it to the English languish — but on intuitive (and more problematically, counter-intuitive) phonetics. Witness those who say “supposably” instead of  the correct “supposedly” or “hone in on” instead of the correct “home in on” or “for all intensive purposes” instead of the correct “for all intents and purposes.”  There are many more such examples that we don’t have thyme for.

Meanwhile, back at the meteor-illogical ranch, with the accuracy of some forecasts lately, I worry more when the prognosticators predict little or no snow. How often, or so it seems, have we been forewarned about an avalanche of frosty flakes only to have the little kiddies disappointed the next morning when the school bus stops on time at the corner as always.

That makes it all the more bemusing that nowadays school districts can’t wait to cancel classes a day in advance on the strength — or weakness, as the case may be — of a forecast. It’s like a doctor treating a patient for pneumonia after hearing the sniffles because, well, you just never know what it might turn into.

Why, when I was a kid in the rough-and-tumble former potato fields of Long Island’s western Nassau County, I had to trudge a whole block to school in the snow. In my galosh-shod feet. It had to snow 18 inches for school to be canceled. Or maybe it was 8. You know how big things look when you’re four feet tall. But let’s not nitpick. Back then, men were men, and kids were kids and snowmen were snowmen. A little frozen precip was hardly reason to bypass readin’ and writin’.

Not in the weather-wimpy 21st Century, though. When I told my wife Elyse that the schools already were canceled for Friday by 6:00p Thursday, she told me how Thursday counted as a school day even though students were dismissed at 10:00 a.m. and a school district needs to use up those snow days.

I looked at her in disbelief: “Oh, that’s nice. Early dismissal means today they didn’t learn much of anything, but here we are conversing casually about some bureaucratically-bungled rulemaking that dictates it still can count as a school day?” As the non-commital slacker types are quick to say … whatever.

The way I look at it, with the snow-drift-high school taxes we are privileged to pay, what business is it of mine or yours how far in advance classes are canceled. If anything, it probably is more cost-efficient and stress-reducing to plan ahead. I get it. I’m a lowly taxpayer: just shut up and pay up, like a good little lemming.

Here’s an idea for a revisionist rubric: Let’s teach kids math by having them count snow days. That’ll work just swell.

[TO SEE NCNLOCAL-TV VIDEOS OF ALL SIX PERFORMANCES BY FINALISTS VANESSA RACCIOPPO AND MARYANN RENZA, GO TO http://www.facebook.com/NCNLocal]

There were no losers Tuesday night (23) at Augie’s Prime Cut Restaurant and Bar in the Mohegan Lake hamlet of Yorktown. (One of the myriad beauties of life in Yorktown is the charm of having five sub-’burbs grouped under the rubric of hamlet. Billy Bard would be proud, if a tad confused because, after all, as far as he was concerned, to paraphrase Oscar Hammerstein II, “There is nothing like a Dane.”)

After such a self-indulgently elongated parenthetical aside, the writer in me (yeah, he’s in there somewhere, I swear) is compelled to act like one of those ’60s serial weekly TV dramas that began with a recap of “last week’s episode.”

Well, it’s true. There were no losers at the final, championship-round, no-holds-barred, cage match of Augie’s Idol Season 1 (Season 2 starts April 22). Not the audience (with an unfortunate momentary lapse of couth at the end), not the restaurant staff or management, and certainly not the two performers, who gave it their all and treated the jam-packed house to a thrilling display of competitive vocalizations in a community contest that was a rousing success on several levels.

The community itself — and people came from all over Westchester as well as beyond its borders, including as far away as Poughkeepsie (made famous by Gene Hackman’s cryptic recurring line in Oscar-winning “The French Connection” to a punk: “Do you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?”) — got to spend a weekend-style night midweek each Tuesday for 14 weeks. The ultimate night was simply amazing not least because on a horrendously inclement evening, when it took me nearly an hour to drive back to Yorktown from Hastings on a snow-encrusted Taconic, Augie’s was more crowded than arguably for any of the previous elimination rounds. It was quite a sight.

Showman Sal Barone, owner of the hot spot with wife Audrey Hochroth, even added his trademark dash of class and flash with what he jokingly called his “flashlight,” actually a skylight the likes of which are used at Hollywood premieres. As I was driving up a white-blanketed Lexington Avenue from Route 202, the beam of light washed across the night sky like a beacon beckoning to a judge who was running late after hightailing it from a really cool reception at Harvest on the Hudson to launch Hudson Valley Restaurant Week March 15-28.  Fortunately, the competition start time was running late too, so my lateness was right on schedule!

The restaurant staff and management benefited from a major boost in the watering hole’s reputation, reach, number of regulars and, quite evidently from all the filled tables and heavily peopled bar, midweek take.

Even the judges, including yours truly, had so much fun it should be illegal, with time off for good behavior.

Extra big shout-outs go to keyboardist par excellence Shelly Gartner and sound technician Brian Gunther, both of whose reliability, proficiency and professionalism helped elevate this competition way beyond a run-of-the-mill karaoke night.

The final night was graced by Maxine (Mrs. Tommy) Agee, a delightful person who served as a celebrity judge and with vocal chops of her own, as she amply showed with her rendition of “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

But the real point of this musing about the musicfest Augie’s treated us to these past several months is that both MaryAnn Renza and Vanessa Raccioppo are winners. Their final three performances each were a fitting, exciting culmination to the hard-fought competition.

Even my friends in the crowd who were so upset at the end they made some inelegant remarks about the outcome can be forgiven their trespasses because that’s how seriously some people took this bout among the warbling warriors. Some silly remark was passed — shouted, actually — that one of the contestants “should have been gone three weeks ago,” which couldn’t be further from the truth. Nobody in their right mind who was a regular Idol-ator would argue that MaryAnn and Vanessa weren’t the most deserving finalists.  We of course are not about to dignify the dishy outburst by identifying to whom it was aimed because it has zero validity. Like we said, there were no losers. That’s the point. That’s the spirit of this competition. To suggest otherwise is to totally miss the point, and perhaps to overindulge in liquid refreshment beyond your tolerance. That’s why The Kinks’ Ray Davies (pronounced “Davis,” BTW) called it “Old Demon Alcohol.” It can make people act waywardly and talk gibberish.

Miss MaryAnn opened it with “Remember Me,” and Miss Vanessa answered the well-sung challenge with “At Last.” Next time up, Miss MaryAnn lit into her belting mode with “The Greatest Love of All” and Miss Vanessa delivered a fresh rendition of “Over the Rainbow” that highlighted her smooth style.

Then it was time for the final round and Miss MaryAnn certainly didn’t disappoint, using her brassy, room-size personality and punctuated gesticulation to full effect with an homage to Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary.”

Finally, Miss Vanessa capped the competition with a sultry, shimmering “Power of Love.”

Both of these Misses didn’t miss much when it came to having the right instincts and excellent song selection that showed off their respective strengths and muted their lesser qualities. They both know how to put a song over, a talent that at its best is transparent because it’s effortless, but, perhaps paradoxically, you still know it when you see it, and hear it. Vanessa received a $2000 check from Sal Barone and Audrey Hochroth as well as a chance to appear in the April production of “Cats” staged by Scarlett Antonia of Antonia Arts at the Paramount Theater in Peekskill. Miss MaryAnn Renza received a $500 check from Bel D’Oro Jewelers owners Gino and Josephine Rubino, who are upping the runner-up prize for Season 2 to $750. They also are exploring the possible appearance of the elegant Miss Vanessa Raccioppo in Bel D’Oro marketing.

Speaking of Misses, I’m going to miss watching all the Augie’s Idol entrants, especially these two. But who knows. There’s always Season 2, right Sal and Audrey. Maybe I’ll even get my long-awaited break as a standup. That’s the dream of every aspiring comic — to play the big room in a Vegas hotel. In my case, it may be Sal announcing, “And now, laddies and germs, playing in Augie’s Men’s Room, please welcome Bruce the Blog. Fortunately, seating is limited.” Sorta gives new meaning to the show biz term “standup.” But I’m not greedy. All I need is a single laugh in that venue to feel flush with success. Oops. Time to clean up my act. Besides, the hook’s here. Later.

When we moved to Yorktown Heights in 1993, my job was in Manhattan, and continued to be either there or, during my consulting phase, at home. Over the years, I’ve seen the evolution of the Croton-Harmon Metro North parking lot, from the rude and gruff management in the early 1990s, who acted like they were doing motorists a favor when you forked over the $3.00 daily parking fee, to the newly paved, flood-resistant current digs.

As my boss Carla Chase and I yesterday (Tuesday) approached the Croton parking shed familiar to those who are daytrippers and pay the daily parking fee, a worker advised us, “There’s nobody in there anymore,” and very helpfully ushered us to the APM (automatic payment machine) that has displaced the humans who once stood inside the shed like bank tellers and collected the daily fees. “That’s one way for the town to save money,” I told Carla as we wended our way between the cars to the station.

We were headed to the annual conference at the New York Hilton of the Association of the Towns of the State of New York. For the second year in a row, we were invited to give a presentation to the public officals who attend this event. Our topic this year was a slight modification of last year’s seminar: “How Main Street Media Affects the Way You Govern.”

[Actually, the official title used the word “Impacts” where I substituted “Affects.” Call me eccentric (and get in line when you do that, podner) but when it comes to language, as followers of my alter ego Grammar Geek know, I’m obsessive compulsive to the max. The word “impact” is a native noun, and I recollect that it started to be misused as a verb in the mid 1980s (told you I was nutso about this stuff), but to me that corruption, commonplace as it has become, is like hearing chalk squeak on a blackboard and I avoid it like the plague. Impact is a harsh word. Affect is a warmer, fuzzier, kinder, gentler word. Why people wrongly use impact to mean affect is beyond me.  And we won’t even go into the frequent confusion of affect and effect, made more complicated by the latter’s dual identity as both a verb and noun.]

Meanwhile, back at the Hilton … last year, our session was in a single-unit function room and it was packed, standing-room-only. Naturally, this year, they gave us a room twice the size, and gave us the organizers said was a better, as well as longer time slot, moving our session up to 12:30-2:00 from last year’s 2:00-3:00. Naturally, this year, we had a fraction of the turnout in the much larger space than we had in 2009 in the smaller room. Murphy’s Law. What we didn’t realize until later is that our 2009 session was on Monday, the first day of the conference, and this year we were slotted at the tail end, after the exhibit area closed, so naturally, many attendees had hightailed out of town by the time we were speaking to the hardy few who stayed behind.

There’s also the cost-savings factor that towns throughout New York State and the other 49 are grappling with in the new reality of the New Economy. My co-presenter, Dan Alexander of Denton Publications, based in Elizabethtown, New York, said that town’s officials told him they were sending half as many people to the conference as last year.

We also encountered Cortlandt Supervisor Linda Puglisi, who gave a talk on shared services. The four-term municipal leader told us for all the years she’s been attending the conference, this year’s had the lowest attendance in her memory. Between local government austerity budgets and metro New York’s arctic weather, we were getting a more holistic view of why our big room moment was anti-climactic.

From downsizing the workforce through automated payment at public facilities to cutting back on travel and expenses even if it’s to a conference that includes seminars on how towns can be more cost efficient, knowing that towns now frown on spending what they can’t afford just might give taxpayers a little reason to smile.

I have a few built-in thermostats I reflexively use to take the temperature of periodicals in the course of determining the caliber of journalists at the helm.

1) Dates: They are most correctly and cleanly written as on the folio of a periodical or on a calendar, which is to say Feb. 9, 2010. Inexplicably, even the same publications that present dates the correct way on their cover or on the folio of each page are prone to clumsily present the date inside their pages as Feb. 9th, 2010. That’s the way it’s said, not written. The culprits surprisingly include Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. In the latter case, its chief editor is a trained reporter, which rarely implies a comparable skill in editing. Both periodicals are at a far remove from the height of their previous powers as among the most revered and cleanly edited consumer periodicals, as reflected by their flouting of the most standard, obvious style conventions.

2) State abbreviations: In journalism, the abbreviation for California is
Calif., not CA, which, like every other two-letter state abbreviation, is a postal code used in the context of street addresses, not a textual abbreviation. Journalists with a sense of style and dedication to the details of their craft know that; other journalists are just lazy and don’t care, so they moonlight during their day job as mail carriers.

3) Advertorial: It’s not only because this non-word is properly reviled and not even acknowledged as legitimate by the American Society of Magazine Editors that I make it known to all staffs I’ve ever run that I don’t want to hear or see the oxymoronic term appear on anything I publish or used in conversation with advertisers. 

My rationale is rooted in the most simple logic and respect for our language and our audience: Everything that appears on the printed page can be classified as one of two things: if it’s placed and controlled by the pub’s staff, it’s editorial: if it’s paid for and originated by someone outside our staff, it’s advertising. The duplicitous purpose of the neologism advertorial is to confuse and mislead people into thinking the content so labeled is either neither editorial or advertising or is both editorial and advertising. Either way, there’s no such thing.

4)  This is the latest litmus test that separates the publishing pros from the shmos: It’s not everyday you see any business fairly bragging about violating a federal regulation. Yet that’s just what free periodicals that list U.S. Post Offices among their distribution locations are doing. The pros know it’s against
U.S. postal code for periodicals to be displayed for distribution inside a post office. You can’t blame the shmos for not knowing any better.  That would require research, which happens to be another word for reporting.

I’ve been to more than my share of Super Bowls. There was the 1998 game in San Diego when those of us who wanted to see the Denver Broncos quarterback beat the Green Bay Packers and finally win the big one after three prior losses, including to the N.Y. Giants, chanted “Elway all the way!” And he did just that. I’ll always remember being on the treadmill in the Hotel Del Coronado’s fitness room Super Bowl morning when notoriously irascible Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis walked in. We were the only two there. He asked me, “Gonna be on that long?” I assured him I didn’t have miles to go before I was done, then couldn’t resist asking, “Who do you like in the game?” His reply approximated, “Harumph!” His team wasn’t in it and he could care less.

The next year my late son Harrison accompanied me to Miami to see Denver win two in a row, this time against Atlanta Falcons. We met Joe Morgan, Warren Moon, Steve McNair, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, rapper/actor LL Cool J, Harrison had his photo taken with very nice Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers receiver Lynn Swann and we were standing in an elevator when Magic Johnson walked in and graciously signed Harrison’s hat. At a party where KC and the Sunshine Band played, we got Neil O’Donnell’s autograph (remember him, Jets fans?). We were standing right next to a rather hefty fellow but never asked for his autograph because Harrison’s dad has this rule about not asking without knowing who the person is. It just seems somewhat insincere and hollow. Others we were with didn’t recognize him either, only to find out later that night it was former Dallas Cowboys linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson.

Two years later, I went to Tampa for the drubbing the Giants took at the hands of the brutish Baltimore Ravens, but at least had the privilege of telling Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler I didn’t have a match when he asked me for one to light his cigar in the hotel lobby as we were waiting for our bus to the airport on Monday.  I have to admit that was a matchless experience.

This past Sunday, though, I had another matchless experience. As a guest of my friends at the Christopher Columbus Society clubhouse on Mahopac Avenue in Yorktown for their Super Bowl party, it was quite a sight to see all those present reflexively rise as the old cathode-ray television showed Carrie Underwood singing the National Anthem. Several of the men placed their right hands over their hearts. I’ve been to other Super Bowl parties over the years, and never remember seeing this heartening display of sacred respect, for a way of life that these people do not take for granted.

As the game transpired, we were deeply engaged in animated conversations. I enjoyed meeting and chatting with recently inducted Columbus Society president Frank Weller and with the more familiar faces of Peekskill Police Chief Gene Tumolo, his son Andy Tumolo (VP of the Columbus Society), Yorktown Parks & Recreation Commision Chair Joe Falcone, Columbus Society treasurer Vince Lemmo, who also is president of Mount Kisco Chamber of Commerce, Alfie Boniello, and Phil and Nunzio Cassese of Cassese & Sons Construction Corp., commemorating its golden anniversary this year. Also on hand was Yorktown civic fixture Bob Giordano, a Yorktown Planning Board member, who’s always ready to lend a hand and move things forward with whatever group he’s involved with, and there’s no shortage of them for him. Bob’s always in the mix.

The game offered a nice backdrop, visual wallpaper if you will, and when the action heated up, we’d crane our necks to pick it up. Otherwise, we were more entertained by each other than by those armored gladiators playing footsie with an oblong object. As for the commercials, when Elyse asked me the next morning what I thought of them, I proudly was able to answer I didn’t pay attention to a one. Much like Al Davis, I could care less. The whole zeitgeist of “Super Bowl Commercials” has lost its romance for me because they’ve become self-parody. More to the point, where they once were genuinely clever and resourceful, they now are shallow and often stultifyingly tasteless.

Of course, one thing I wasn’t about to miss was The Who’s performance, and was surprised by how long it seemed to last, wondering to myself if that was how long the previous halftime shows were.

My most memorable halftime show that I attended was at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, an antiquated arena with cement seats and with entrance tunnels so narrow it took us forever to pass through security and we got to our seats as the National Anthem was playing. The stadium itself is ensconced as if in a cul-de-sac, with only one road in and out, which means the ingress for buses is single lane, so just getting to the parking lot also took an eternity.

The game highlight of that Dallas Cowboys 52-17 blowout of the Buffalo Bill was the Texans’ defensive tackle Leon Lett picking up a Bills fumble and running it just to the fringe of the end zone, but not breaking the plane, preferring instead to preen, only to have the ball knocked out of his hand, costing the Cowboys a touchdown, which they certainly didn’t need with a huge lead. However, it also cost the holding the record for most Super Bowl points in a single game, which is 55 held by the San Francisco Giants. It endures as one of the most infamous plays in NFL annals, but I say Lett Leon alone already.

But the real highlight of that event didn’t happen as the game clock was ticking. Whereas I couldn’t even tell you right now without Googling it who performed at the three other halftime shows of the aforementioned Super Bowls, there’s no way to forget, between the halves, the sylph-like figurine that appeared first midfield, then magically materialized the next second perched high atop the Rose Bowl’s wall: it was a guy named Michael Jackson.