Month Fourteen

The past couple of weeks have been a "remember when" to the summer of '77 when the Son of Sam was loose, there was a tremendous blackout, and the Yankees were on their way to a World Series. I've always felt a bit of a kinship to that Yankees victory because it's the year of my birth and I love baseball. Make no mistake, I hate the Yankees.

Now that I've been here awhile, reading the locations of the Son of Sam's killings has been a bit chilling. A few were in Forest Hills, Queens, a place I regularly walk late at night after work. Hard to believe this upscale community played a backdrop to notorious murders.

Now that I'm training people in projection at different theatres, I've become a little more familiar with Brooklyn than I once was. Sure, it's not the bad, dirty Brooklyn you always hear about (some communities, like Canarsie, East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, just to name a few, sound like bullets are always whizzing by your head), but it's a different experience anyway. Near the place where I've been training people, you can see a spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge. This 12-screen theatre has 6 levels of projection on every other floor and the projectionists share an elevator with the guests trying to get to their movie. It's a setup that basically requires them to set a timer to start the projectors because it's nearly impossible to start everything on time without them.

And a uniquely New York experience: I'm watching the movie Sunshine tonight at the Landmark Sunshine on Houston St. And director Danny Boyle is going to be there for a Q & A. Should be fun. As soon as I saw it was getting a limited release this weekend, I knew the Sunshine theatre would have it. How can you pass that up?