How the Working Families Party Keeps the Democrats’ Fight Real Back in 1988, my parents and I were watching one of the presidential debates between George H.W. Bush and Mike Dukakis, and my frustration at not being able to vote for Dukakis — I was still just seventeen — was…

How Atrocious Fans Kept Me Away From the Misfits and Other Great Music They say that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and back in 1984, after struggling mightily with algebra, I finally achieved a breakthrough via Transitive Properties, and it wasn’t long…

Why it’s Time for Italian-Americans to Upgrade Our Primary Hero — Friends! Romans! (and most especially Italian-American) Countrymen! Lend me your eyeballs! I come here not to cancel Columbus but to UPGRADE him! But first! Let us properly commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Quincentennial of Columbus dropping anchor on The Americas. Back in 1992, I was in college amid the…

Protecting My Tools with Personification and Pink Spray Paint — So I’m pushing a pickup-height gurney loaded with leveling cement at the Home Depot over in Newburgh when I catch up to my carpenter, Jesus (yes, my carpenter is named Jesus — Jesus is My Carpenter, okay, let’s just keep it moving, here) who pulls a $13 mixing paddle (that…

How drag performance helped me backhand demons and toxic masculinity — Once upon a time there was a magical pair of shoes. No, not those glass slippers from that retrograde tale telling girls to sit around and wait for polished mediocrity to show up. No. I’m talking about a REAL PAIR OF MAGIC SHOES. Okay so it’s 2011, I’m back at…

Decoding the mixed messages of Bruce Springsteen — Despite growing up in New Jersey, my first exposure to Bruce Springsteen — back in 1981 when “Hungry Heart” was charting — put me in a decade-long state of Meh toward this rock icon and American treasure. Nevertheless, the song’s second (and most famous) couplet stuck on me: Like a…

How a power tool taught me that everything gets worse before it gets better — Across the Hudson River from Beacon, midway up the valley rising above the Regal Bag Factory, on the corner of Montgomery and Broad Streets in Newburgh — a vibrant and recovering city lined with some of the most sublime architecture in the country — I was working among my crew…

Why we will never cure financial addicts by throwing more money at their disease — The old proverb to walk a mile in another man’s shoes remains true, even when those shoes are designed by Salvatore Ferragamo. That’s why I recently tried to imagine the emotional torment of being a billionaire. …

Why, after twenty years, I may no longer wish to remain on the ground — Back in 1980, I couldn’t care who shot J.R. because I saw something else on TV that rocked my world. I was watching a kids’ science show called 3–2–1 Contact that presented a segment on hang gliding and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: human beings — without an…