Posts from — April 2008

On November 21, 1934, a 17-year-old girl named Ella signed up to dance in one of the first Amateur Night competitions at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. When she arrived she found out The Edwards Sisters, a popular local dance duo, were competing that night too. Feeling intimidated, she decided to sing instead.

Ella Fitzgerald sang two Hoagy Carmichael songs and won the $25 first prize that night. Soon after, she signed with Chick Webb and his band. The rest, as they say, is history.

I’m not sure we saw the next Ella Fitzgerald at the Amateur Night competition we attended, but we did see an unforgettable show.

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A Day In Pictures
Brooklyn, New York

During our week in New York we house sat for friends in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. It’s a wonderfully diverse place with lots of restaurants, interesting shops and plenty to do within easy walking distance.

We could have easily filled a week without ever leaving Brooklyn. We spent a day hitting some of the highlights of New York’s largest borough.

We started our day down by the East River. The Brooklyn Bridge (below) is one of three bridges connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan. Shortly after the bridge was completed in 1884, P.T. Barnum helped prove its stability by marching 21 elephants across it.

The Brooklyn Bridge assured the decline of the Fulton Ferry service, but today the views of Manhattan from the original ferry landing are impressive.

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I’d never had fries like this before, certainly not with a peanut satay, a teriyaki mayonnaise or a wasabi sauce.

We found them in a narrow, half-timbered shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in the kind of place you could easily walk past and never notice. But the locals know it.

Pommes Frites is the kind of place people line up out the door to get their fix. We were in on the secret because a good friend’s sister owns the business.

No surprise, there’s a story behind the store.

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A midlife crisis is when a person reaches the top of the ladder only to find they’ve placed it against the wrong wall.”

— Joseph Campbell, writer and mythology professor

We spent a day exploring Coney Island in Brooklyn and tried our hand at home-made video production.

New York’s Finest stands watch over Times Square.

They told me the streets of America were paved with gold.
But when I arrived, I found they weren’t paved with gold.
I found out they weren’t paved at all.
I’m one of the people who paved them.”
— Unknown Irish Immigrant

Some time around 1895, my great-great grandfather Samuel Aiken left County Antrim, Ireland, to make a new life in the United States.

For him and another 12 million immigrants, the benefits of American citizenship came at the expense of a long and difficult journey through Ellis Island.

When we visited the Ellis Island Immigration Musuem shortly after Easter, the trip was considerably easier: Nothing more than a short ferry ride from Battery Park in lower Manhattan, following a brief stopover on Liberty Island.

But the relative ease of our journey was only the most obvious difference.

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In a sandwich shop, a sixty-something man sporting a beret and a stylish mustache, to his forty-something lunch companion:

“When I was young, much younger than you are now, I was all over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran.

In those days, you could travel to the ends of the earth. To places full of sultans and shahs. Full of adventure. You don’t have that anymore.”