This video is a slideshow of photo highlights from the pro wrestling event Salvation, presented by House of Glory, an independent pro wrestling organization based in Queens, New York. The program is available to watch via streaming video at Fite.tv
If you have yet to be tested for COVID-19, you should make every effort to do so. There are many test sites throughout the United States now offering tests at no cost. The test itself only takes a few seconds. Check out the video to see a mobile test site set up by CORE in action in The Lower East Side to get a sense of what’s involved.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. I haven’t worked on my podcast, or posted a Song of the Day, even though I was fully intending to. I started recording episode 4 of #smileSays, and took a break because I needed to do some fact checking online. This was on late Monday night, May 25 (early Tuesday morning, May 26). When I went online, this was when I learned:
Some of you may know that I have been a Team Leader for New York Cares for a while. The last couple of years I’ve been leading projects with seniors and kids. When the pandemic shut everything down earlier in the year, my projects were included in those shut downs. I continued to volunteer from home, making wellness checks on seniors and vulnerable populations via telephone, and providing tech support to students who received iPads from the New York CityDepartment of Education for home schooling. (Full disclosure: I wasn’t actually able to provide tech support to students due to technical issues, but I tried and others did). For the last few weeks, I’ve been leading a project delivering groceries and PPE go bags to tenants at The Vladeck Houses on The Lower East Side.
smile and his Team deliver go-bags and Vladecks’ Residents’ Association President Nancy Ortiz explains the project
If you watched the video, Nancy mentioned that CERT also answered the call, and you saw how we coordinated our efforts nicely. I was invited to tag along and observe a similiar operation that CERT was running on Roosevelt Island this past Saturday. I didn’t take any pictures that day, but others did, so I’ll post pictures here when I get them.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted anything because I have been prepping my new podcast. #smileSays is now available on the following podcast platforms:
Subscribe now so you won’t miss a thing. I was originally going to host the podcast here, but decided to let Anchor host and syndicate it in the hope of generating revenue through donations or integrated advertising. There was more that went into the decision than that, but I’ll digress for now. I’m going to see if I can embed the episodes on the site as well. The player featuring the latest episode should load here:
If it doesn’t load, or you want to listen to an older episode, you can check out individual episodes in the meantime by checking the sidebar on a desktop or scrolling further down on mobile. I’ll get it to work eventually.
My second oldest, Krystal and her partner, Matt, recently became foster parents to two young brothers. They came into Manhattan for a visit and the kids got to ride the subway for the first time. While waiting for the train, the boys each took some photos with my phone. One of the boys was trying to get a good grip on the phone because his hands were small and while he was futzing around with it, he took a couple of quick video clips.You can hear my mother shouting advice at him and Krystal gives me a compliment that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me. I’m proud of my heirs, and in their own way they’re proud of me too.
The Quad Cinema is showing Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde as part of their Hammer Films retrospective, giving me another excuse to recycle some old material, a clip that was recycling old material to begin with. Back in 2006, I produced a video podcast (before the format had really been established or anyone knew what it was) called Potluck: Substance Over Style. The person I was supposed to interview backed out last minute, so I had to come up with an episode on the fly. I pulled out some old videotape of my mom, a couple of other old tapes and some digitized public domain film and put this together. By the way, my mother has never even seen Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, believe it or not.
Ten years ago this weekend, I was the host / emcee of The New York Infringement Festival, a series of plays and one person shows held over Labor Day weekend in Greenwich Village. Someone (I forget who) had created this large puppet called Bushiva to parade around Washington Square Park. I don’t know if they had any specific performance planned, at least, I wasn’t given any direction when I was asked to help operate the puppet.
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans that weekend, and if you remember, the initial government response to the crisis was far from adequate. Consequently, there were a lot of activist groups and politically minded individuals demonstrating when we arrived with this giant George W. Bush head. I decided to give Bushiva a voice right there on the spot and started fielding questions from pedestrians, offering satirical commetary on the policies and practices of our then president.
I’m not sure who shot and edited the video below, which was posted to YouTube some years ago and I came across recently. Even though the general public’s questions prompting the responses aren’t included, you can still get the idea. It would be great to have a look at the raw footage since I’ve never seen it, but I’ll take what I can get.
If the embedded video doesn’t load, click to watch Bushiva at YouTube.
smile 
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