Month: December 2016

Decorating the tree at Ground Zero, the one in front of the firehouse. The guy in the beard, who is also putting the flag on the top of the tree, is my friend Les Speiser.

The musicians are: Matt Hughes with Giovanni Koll on the piano, Ellen Cooper with David Goldman on piano, and members and friends of Manhattan Samba. One singer is not in this movie because she said her song was a secret work in progress so I didn’t film it. But she and the song were great, for the record!

I hope their current spouses don’t mind, but I was looking through some old photographs and I came across a picture of my oldest and dearest friend, Christine Hegarty, and her then boyfriend Jim Kogel. They both look so beautiful I’m including a close-up of their faces. This was shot in my Waltham, Massachusetts apartment, so that means it was taken around from 1977. I moved to Cambridge the next year.

A few shots from the cemetery out in Queens that I visited yesterday. It’s right by La Guardia so there were planes coming and going the whole time, and getting a lot closer than the one in this first photograph.

I wanted to see the paupers sections where some of the people I’m writing about were buried. But the paupers sections are just large green patches of grass, with no markers. There isn’t anything really to see. But they’ve started a Wall of Remembrance, to list the people buried there. They have thousands more names to go.

Somewhere under there lies a six year old child I wrote about, and many, many others. Sad to think of her there. (I experimented with an edge fade, I think it suits the subject.)

The Wall of Remembrance. Churches would buy a plot, and I took a shot from the section for Grace Church, where I sing every week.

I’m going out to St. Michael’s Cemetery in a few minutes to visit two graves, one for a six year old child who died in 1882, and another for the man responsible for her death, who died in 1914. Ironically, they were buried in the same cemetery. This is one of the cases I chose to write about for the Penitentiary section of my book.

This photograph I took yesterday reminds me, I need to pick a day to walk around to see and take pictures of all the holiday windows! I love doing that. This is Charles Street in my neighborhood. This building always decorates very beautifully for the holidays (they also do a great job on Halloween).