On Three, Smile ~ City Boy Returns to Ryan's Daughter

This photo taken by my Dad won Our Town Eastsider photo contest.

Hope to see you this Saturday. 

Thomas Pryor's April Fools Stoops to Nuts Soiree

@ Ryans Daughter this Saturday, April 1st @ 7pm.

Our talented storytelling guests: Tricia Alexandro, Joe Dettmore, J.P. Connolly

 and City Boy in a special appearance 

every picture tells a story...  don't it?

“OK, go stand against the wall.” Dad said. “Oh God, another annoying picture.” Mom mumbled. Summer 1961, we just stepped off the Lexington Avenue local at the end of the line: the Pelham Bay Park El subway stop. With his Yashica 44 camera hanging from his neck, Dad was gathering us for our first group shot. On our way to Freedomland, the terrific new amusement park in the north Bronx, Dad thought he'd capture every step of the way. Every step. The three of us took a vote and Dad won “biggest pain in the neck of all time,” and we didn’t even get to the ticket booth yet. “No, no, Tommy on the left, Patty, you in the middle, Rory on the right.” Dad said. “I want to be in the middle!” “Rory, be quiet.” After the three of us were placed in dog show positions, Dad said, “Hold still, and smile when I count to three.” Mom said through her tight lips,”On three, make a stupid face.” “One, two… three!” And here it is. The most revealing photo in my family history. Mom and I in cahoots make stupid faces, Rory is still upset at Dad for not letting him stand in the middle. Because we ruined Dad’s photo, he walked ahead of us and didn’t talk to us for an hour.

My Yorkville Childhood in Our Town & Sideshow Goshko

Leslie @ Cornelia St Cafe

Tonight I'm heading to KGB in the East Village for Leslie Goshko's fantastic Sideshow Goshko Storytelling Series featuring Tara Clancy, Cyndi Freeman and Steven Berkowitz. I'm telling a story from my new book, "I Hate the Dallas Cowboys - tales of a scrappy New York boyhood."  Leslie never fails to please the you can count on it standing room crowd. The New Yorker loves, NY Times loves it, Even my grandfather loves it, and he doesn't love anything.

It will be wunderbar! Hope you can make it.

Here's the scoop from Leslie:

Hey Gang! Happy Fall!

Well, we've made it to the time of pumpkin-spiced everything and sweater weather. So what better place to spend an evening than in the coziest, red room of them all? That's right! Your friendly KGB Bar. 

Always FREE, always at a Soviet Bar. 

Here's the GIST:

Award-winning storyteller Leslie Goshko (Huffington Post, Manhattan Monologue Slam Champion) invites some of NY’s top writers and storytellers to share true, bizarre tales about their lives. There’s a challenging trivia game and a free wine giveaway where one lucky audience member will walk away with their very own bottle of Sideshow Sauce! Tonight’s stellar lineup includes stories from:

TARA CLANCY (The Paris Review, The Moth)

THOMAS PRYOR (The New York Times, author “I Hate the Dallas Cowboys")

CYNDI FREEMAN (NY Fringe Festival award-winner, The Colbert Report, Hotsy Totsy Burlesque)

STEVEN BERKOWITZ ("Scientific American", The Moth)

* Time Out NY “Critics’ Pick”
* NY Daily News “Editor’s Pick”
* “a well-programmed night” - The New York Times

(arrive early to snag a seat, they go fast!)




This week's issue of Our Town newspaper ran a solid piece on my book and last Friday's book event. Thank you, Catherine Roberts!

Hunter College ~ Filling My Toolbox For Life

Hunter College

Today, Our Town newspaper published my column on Hunter, the college on the Upper Eastside. In the piece I pay tribute to my two best teachers during my five years at Hunter. (I liked my fourth year at Hunter so much I did it again the next year. I was a “super senior.” Actually, I was 9 credits shy of degree so I plugged along.)

Robert J. White, classics, who imitated a werewolf and launched tribal mating calls during lectures. Professor White turned me on to D.H. Lawrence and Edward Albee and Pasolini films. Professor Richard Barickman taught me poetry, Hardy, George Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens and Henry James. He always wore riding boots like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, with the pants tucked in and taught me critical literary analysis. Both those guys were cool and effective teachers.

Old Hunter College 1912 Cornerstone @ Lexington Ave

Professors White and Barickman led me to a rich appreciation for ancient civilizations, Thomas Mann, Romantic and Victorian poetry (I still own my Washington Square Press paperbacks edited by William H. Marshall). Both men loved language and their students with all their hearts and we soaked it up. Hunter College helped fill my toolbox for life.

Thomas Pryor & Robert White December 2010

Read the full Our Town piece here.

Thomas Pryor Hunter ID Sept 1972

You Can't Dress Him, You Can't Take Him Anywhere

First the good news, strawberry, apple & banana stains come out in the wash. Now the other news.

Yesterday, I pulled a doozy. After putting a lot of the above fruit in a blender with four ice cubes I hit the “crush ice” button and periodically poked it around with a knife until it turned to mush. Then I poured my first pint of poor man’s smoothie.  I took the glass to the computer and sat to enjoy my treat.  My phone rang, I answered it put it on speaker and placed it down on the desk. It was my cousin Jimmy.  He went to Green Bay this past week to see a Packers game, his first time at Lambeau Field. I got pretty excited talking with Jimmy about the hallowed place but especially my fondness for the Packers throwback game jersey. Blue background with a yellow circle on the front with a blue number in the middle.

Does it get better? For some reason it reminded me of The Who’s Quadrophenia. Rock & football. Oh, yeah.

When I get excited my hands start taking off like Frank Crosetti in the third base coach box waving Yogi Berra in on a homer. 

One of my hands whacked the glass. It started tipping towards the computer keyboard, but luckily, it fell back on my lap. Unluckily, it poured half itself on my new Droid phone.

“Jimmy, I just dropped a glass of lava on my lap, call you back.”

Got up started wiping myself, the floor, the rug, before I noticed my phone made a strange noise. Wiping it off I saw two things: two icons on the phone’s screen. One was a waste paper basket with a demonstrative arrow coming out of it and standing next to the basket was an icon that looked like an incredibly sad R2D2. I said out loud, “this ain’t good.”  

I changed my pants and came back to see if there was any change in the phone’s status, I sat in the chair and felt a creamy cold sensation against one of the apples of my ass.  I forgot to clean the chair and picked up some of the fruit lava on the new pants, the good pants.

Hour after the mishap, the phone came back to life, and the evil icons went away. I hope I learned my lesson but it’s more likely The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.

*************************************

Fyi, Our Town & The West Side Spirit published my column about“Half-Birthdays.”

Last Camp Cornelia Swim: August 16th @ 6pm

Due to the failure of many parents not sending the camp's administrator their tuition checks on time, (and you know who you are!) Camp Cornelia's Last Swim will coincide with the next City Stories: Stoops to Nuts storytelling show on Tuesday, Aug. 16 @ 6pm @ Cornelia Street Cafe. While you swim you'll hear great tellers and songsmiths, The Amygdaloids, Lindsey Gentile, Rachel Pertile Goldstein, Jed Parrish, Thomas Pryor and Andy Ross. It will change your life. I don't know how we do it, but we do. The Cafe requests $7 admission to cover their expenses then they turn around and give you a free drink, a swell deal.

Cornelia Street Café, @ 29 Cornelia St. between W. 4th St. & Bleecker St.

*****************************************

Further Camp News:

Our Town newspaper published my story, “Sentimental Journey on a Hot Summer Night,” today.

An excerpt's below, click link above if you'd like to read the whole tale.

Sadly, during his youth my father’s emotional development was stunted. In 1945, hanging over the mezzanine at the Paramount Theatre, Dad swayed dreamily side-to-side listening to the Artie Shaw Orchestra. In mid swoon, while admiring his new suit, Dad flipped over the railing landing head first on an usher flirting with a floozy in the orchestra’s tenth row. Luckily, neither was killed. Both bleeding, they were taken to Polyclinic Hospital for stitches and x-rays. Dad begged the theatre’s manager for a rain check as the medics led him through the lobby. Dad sustained permanent injury that became apparent as the years unfolded. He no longer could make a decision or form an opinion that’s basis did not derive from something that happened in 1945 or before.

Garland Jeffreys, New York Storyteller ~ Loves His Town

photo by Danny Clinch

“Twenty two stops to the city, twenty two stops…” Garland Jeffreys voice kicks in joining the drum’s anthem beat on “Coney Island Winter,” his terrific new single from his forthcoming album “The King of In Between,” a lament and love letter to New York City. (Release date: June 7th through Luna Park Records).

This week, I wrote about my musical hero, Garland Jeffreys, in my "City Stories: Stoops to Nuts," column in Our Town and the West Side Spirit.

When I was 8, I saw Mickey Mantle in the RKO movie house on 86th Street. The Yankees were promoting "Safe At Home," a silly film made right after the 1961 record home run year. Before the movie started, the whole team filed into the theatre and lined up on the right aisle. I was positioned perfectly with my father. Elston Howard, I could've touched and Mantle right next to him I could've reached with my sneaker. Howard saw my face with my mouth open looking at Mantle, Ellie leaned over and whispered, "Say hi, kid, he won't bite." I remained in my trance. Howard and my father laughed, and a moment later the Yankees marched up to the stage took a bow and left the place through a fire exit.

I swore if I ever met another one of my heroes, I'd start talking and not stop. This wouldn't be very productive if I intended on writing about it, so I used one of my childhood tricks to shut up, I put my whole fist in my mouth and let Garland talk. This was difficult but rewarding. We hung out in a cafe for an hour. No surprise, he is a nice fellow.

Brooklyn born, Manhattan native, Garland Jeffreys, is a New York City storyteller who uses the medium of music to lay his story down. His introspective autobiographical songs effectively use New York as a character. Listen to “New York Skyline,” “Ghost Writer,” or “Wild in The Street.” You cannot separate him from the city or the city from who he is. Even when the city is not mentioned by name you sense it in the words and tone of the characters he paints in his songs.

Jeffreys’s cultural background is black, white, and Puerto Rican. He grew up (22 subway stops from the city) in Sheepshead Bay in a multi-ethnic neighborhood where his was the only family of color in his local Catholic church. This racial diversity underlines and at times punctuates his music. Over coffee last week in a First Avenue cafe, he told me, “Growing up in that multi-national neighborhood in a large and loving extended family was a blessing. It readied me for the world. I’ve always mixed well with people.” In the restaurant, I saw evidence of this when he warmly greeted the wait staff with waves and a smile. Easy to see why Garland counts Bruce Springsteen and Lou Reeds as close friends.

Garland is married to Claire Jeffreys, a writer and his business manager. Their talented daughter, Savannah, 14, pens her own music. Being there for his family is the central reason Garland’s been out of the musical limelight for several years. “I did not want to be on the road all the time; I wanted to watch my daughter grow up.” He also wondered whether or not he should re-engage with the business of making music. After a long period of retreat, he came to see that in the end, performing is the most important facet of his musical identity, and little by little the performing led to a desire to get back to writing new material.

Though prejudice wasn’t flagrant in my family, the subtleties were there mostly fed by fear of the unknown. Hearing Garland’s stories, seeing the city through his eyes, visualizing his “Racial Repertoire,” gave me a desire to engage other cultures and consider the race issue from both sides. This readied me when I went to work for city government and comfortably adjusted to the cultural diversity there.

In June 1992, I drove my brother, Rory, upstate to a rehab program. Not for the first time. He and I tried hard to become closer as brothers, but we couldn’t make it work. I loved Rory but didn’t know him. At the same point, I was having my own personal problems and about to change jobs. I came home to New York City miserable. The next day, I read Garland Jeffreys was giving a free concert at Summerstage in Central Park. I felt low, I almost didn’t go.

Garland played for two hours. The cops were dancing by the third song. It was a gorgeous day and people whirling around sent the dust on the floor of the space into the air where it stayed. I wrote my first story when I was 49, eight years ago. The seed to write the story was planted in Central Park at that show.

Garland Jeffreys & the Coney Island Playboys headline the Highline Ballroom next Saturday, April 30th. Tickets are available. His live performances are legend, don’t miss it.

Dancing in the Moonlight

I love tackle football, always have, and encouraged it year round in Yorkville.

In my lifetime, I've played a tackle football game in every one of the twelve months. Many viewed this strange.

Finding a decent field to play tackle football in Yorkville was a challenge in the 1960s & 1970s. In Central Park you marked the sidelines on the rocky no drainage field by carefully placing your coats and bags in a row and making an end zone with your extra equipment. Nobody wanted to put there stuff far away from the action. It tended to walk off.

In 1973 the Asphalt Green opened ~ we played tackle football on our first authentic marked-off field. In March 1974, St. Stephen's of Hungary won the Championship.

Here's the Our Town newspaper article on that game and several photographs from 1973 and 1974.

At the conclusion of the "Pineapple Bowl," aka the "1973-1974 Yorkville PAL Football Championship" St. Stephen's celebrated on the sideline at 90th St & York Avenue. This song blasted on several radios, we rocked all day and danced in the moonlight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMc8naeeSS8&feature=related