New York City

Hunter Harris’s talkback to our masters of entertainment has proven she has what it takes to become a vital voice of America. When she aims at official powers-that-be, the country benefits from her wit. Not that our ruling classes float above Harris’s usual beat. Her reporting in this swatch from her latest column places Mayor Adams inside the celebrity terrarium…

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is going through it to a degree that would make SZA¹ pick up her pen or make Martin Scorsese start storyboarding the saga of a new criminal conspiracy. On Friday afternoon Adams pleaded not guilty to five federal corruption charges, per The City.² He is the first New York City mayor to face criminal charges while in office. The news of his indictment went through Twitter like the night Trump got Covid, or the day Azealia Banks said Grimes smells “like a roll of nickels.”

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I so vividly remember watching the Jackie Gleason show with my family as a kid. I always loved the finale when Gleason would do the Joe The Bartender sketch and Frank Fontaine’s Crazy Guggenheim would come out. (Seemed like all the boys in my grade school class watched Gleason because we’d all take a shot at impersonating his signature laugh thereby driving our supervising teachers — what else? — crazy.) The inebriated Guggenheim would tell some wacko story, get a lot of laughs and then, at Gleason’s request, sing an old-timey ballad in the most beautiful baritone around.

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I am standing on West Ninth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, sometime in the 1930s: a horse-drawn ice wagon has just come down the street, and I am looking at the golden apples the horse has dropped and saying to myself (not the horse), “Your necktie is maroon.”

My mother had an elegant way with colors, which devolved on us children, a flair she developed along with her flair for elegant names; this was clear in the voluntary refinement of her name from “Esther” to “Estelle”—a habit acquired by her younger brother Yitzchak (Isidore, Izzy), who chose to be known to the world as “Morton.” My father, an affable salesman of millinery (i.e., ladies’ hats), did not care for his eccentric brother-in-law; and when he called, my father would answer the phone, saying almost nothing but declaring to my mother, after she had asked who’d called, “Itza Mutt,” reducing her to literally helpless laughter. My father liked to make my mother laugh so hard that she had to run, as best she could, out of the kitchen . . . but I digress.

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