NEW YORK—I hope this is my last week in the Bagel. I plan to fly first to Switzerland and then on to London. There’s the annual Pugs’ Club lunch I cannot afford to miss, but now that Boris is married I don’t suppose he gives a damn about the poor little Greek boy and his club lunches. ...
NEW YORK—I haven’t felt such shirt-dripping, mind-clogging wet heat since Saigon back in 1971. The Bagel is a steam bath, with lots of very ugly people walking around in stages of undress that would have once upon a time embarrassed famed stripper Lili St. Cyr. How strange that very pretty ...
NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, at least private party time, yours truly being an extra man nowadays as my wife and I have been separated by pandemic restrictions for six months. Alexandra is in London, quarantined after visiting two little blond things in Austria for my fourth ...
I remember being in the minority in school with my dark brown hair, the majority of kids having light brown or blond hair. Americans back then looked like a mixture of Anglo-Irish, German, and Scandinavian, as opposed to now, where the Bagel looks like downtown Caracas, better yet, Karachi. Nothing ...
Back in 1967, during the Six-Day War, I was living in Paris, and such was my pro-Israel ardor, I actually went to some dump and put my name down as a volunteer in case the state of Israel ran out of soldiers. I was asked by the man in charge if I was Jewish, I answered in the negative, and he ...
NEW YORK—The Big Bagel is getting so bad, even the baddies are demanding the fuzz do something. As the body count rises, it is obvious that the victims of violence are predominantly poor and minority. Last week, a woman killed in a drive-by shooting had been attending a vigil for a friend who was ...
Already in your idiot box via Netflix is a miniseries about a man who also used one name, but burned out rather early due to an outsize ego and too much coke. His name was Halston, and his fame was based on the fact he designed a pillbox hat that Jackie Kennedy Onassis wore at her hubby’s ...
NEW YORK—Orthodox Easter Sunday came late in May this year, and I spent it at an old friend’s Fifth Avenue home chatting with his young relatives. During a great lunch I thought of those calendar pages one sees furiously turning while denoting the passing years in old black-and-white flicks. ...
NEW YORK—With the Karamazovian hangover now only a weekly occurrence, the healthy life rules supreme. Well, most of the time. Up early, I go for a brisk thirty-minute walk before breakfast in the park that stretches out two blocks away. I finish off with two sets of twenty push-ups on a park ...
NEW YORK—What follows has been covered ad nauseam, but I wonder why people were surprised at the planned football breakaway Super League. Professional sports in Europe now follow the American way, which means money comes before tradition, hometown loyalty, and lastly the fans, the schmucks who ...
