Grandma's Been There

Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger... Folk music was the soundtrack of my childhood. I knew there was a neighborhood right across the river from Brooklyn, just a subway ride away, filled with streets and cafes where it was all happening. Greenwich Village was the promised land, and I just wanted to be there all the time.

The wormhole we're going down today will drop us off at the Granada Movie Theater on Church Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush on a Saturday afternoon in 1962. So bring fifty cents for a ticket and a quarter for popcorn. Oh, one more thing. There'll be no parents on this trip because we're going to The Kiddie Shows.

Since February 9th marks the sixty-first anniversary of The Beatles first appearance on American television on The Ed Sullivan show, we're going to revisit the early days of Beatlemania. It was less than three months since President Kennedy had been murdered and we needed some good news. Well, that good news landed at the recently renamed Kennedy Airport on February 7, 1964 in a PanAm plane a...

We're continuing our trip into Beatlemania and it's gonna get trippy. In 1964, they changed rock and roll and our perspective on music, but by 1967, The Beatles were doing their part to challenge an entire generation's frame of reference while they were helping provide the soundtrack to a world-wide cultural revolution. Let's get into Beatlemania Part 2: Sergeant Pepper Revolut...

By virtue of where we come from, Brooklyn kids are basically expected to be smart-asses, just like the people who rear us. It's part of the culture. If the sarcastic comeback, the witty quip and dark humor doesn't flow naturally from a child's lips, his elders may worry about him. However, there's a fine line between making jokes that have your proud parents in stitches and bei...