Month: September 2006

This is the back of St. Paul’s Chapel, where I volunteered during the recovery effort. The city put up this ramp so people could look into the hole where the towers once stood. It always struck me, watching people walk over one graveyard to look into another. This must have been taken in the Spring of 2002.

I’m heading down to St. Paul’s Chapel later. I hope to see lots of old friends and have happy pictures to post tonight.

My choir director, John Maclay, sent out some very moving email about the times we live in, and making music in these times. He had a number of great quotes, but I liked this one of Robert Shaw’s best. “Might not the arts be not the luxury of a few, but the last best hope of humanity to inhabit with joy this planet?”

Still experimenting with making movies. This was made with my digital camera, which has the ability to make movies, it turns out. I made this yesterday when birds started lining up on the roof across the street, just like the Hitchcock movie, “The Birds.”

Hmm. The quality is not great at all, is it? It’s probably more acceptable with movies shot close-up. Oh, but maybe it’s because I compressed it too much, so it wouldn’t take up a lot of room.

What is not communicated in this photograph was the two minutes of crying at the ceiling and me trying to figure out what was wrong.

The conversation.

Buddy: Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.
Me: What??
Buddy: Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.
Me: What??

The same conversation, translated.

Buddy: Aliens! There are aliens in the ceiling! Help me! I cannot fight them alone.
Me: What??
Buddy: What? Are you deaf?? Aliens! ALIENS. For the love of GOD. Here they come. God help us.
Me: What??

My agent read the chapters I’ve written so far and wrote, “This stuff is gripping, vivid, cliff-hanging. The characters are amazing. Esp. Rhine. I just love it Stacy.”

Howard read it and said it was one draft away from being great (everything is first draft now, of course, and still needs polishing).

So, I’m giving myself one of my favorite treats, a trip to the beauty parlor! (No one calls them that anymore, but that’s what they were called when I was growing up.)

Here’s a group shot of some of the people I’m writing about. Thank you for living such amazing lives!

They found the records for the 1958 poltergiest case I want to write about!! YAY!! When a family in Seaford, Long Island experienced disturbances they couldn’t explain, they called the police. Who else were they going to call? The police were skeptical, of course, but then an ash tray flew at one of the detective’s heads. I’m in touch with the family of that detective, Joe Tozzi, who went on the become a police chief in Texas. Joe has, sadly, passed on. But his family tells me that while he remained skeptical, he had to admit he didn’t have an explanation for that ash tray, and that always disturbed him.

Gaither Pratt came up from Durham to investigate and he and Tozzi got along well. Gaither found no evidence of fraud.

Joe Tozzi’s wife Carla very kindly Fedex’ed a tape of an interview with Tozzi that aired on a show called The Armstrong Circle Theatre. I’ve been trying to find this. I went to the Museum of Television and Radio, but they didn’t have it. And then Joe Tozzi’s family came through!

Thanks to the Nassau County Police and the family of Joe Tozzi, (Carla, and their daughter Anna) this is going to be a really good part of the book, I think.