From her weather tower in Coney Island, here is today’s weather by Rose at 7 a.m.

"It’s very, very foggy out my window. I can’t see anything. The weatherman says there’s a chance of showers this afternoon. It’s already 79 degrees. So it’s going to be hot and muggy today. And there may be some rain."

There’s so much to do at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday September 16. Too much even to mention here. So go to the website and check out the events schedule. You can also just walk around and see all the local book publishers and lit publications. Here are readings for kids ages 2 – 8 sponsored by Target. You can even have your photo taken with Bullseye, the Target dog.

10:00 a.m. Troupe Theatre— Performing Enchanting Children’s  Classics  by Ezra Jack Keats, Arthur Lobel

11:00 a.m.  Mo Willems—Elephant and Piggie; Knufflebunny: A  Cautionary Tale

11:45 a.m.  Jon Scieszka—Cowboy and Octopus; Time Warp Trio

12:30 p.m. Alyssa Satin Capucilli- Biscuit; Katy Duck

1:15 p.m.  Mari  Takabayashi–I Live in Brooklyn

2:00 p.m.  Myla  Goldberg—Catching the Moon

2:45 p.m. Randall de Seve—The Toy Boat

3:30 p.m. Tad Hills—Duck and Goose; Waking Up  Wendell

4:15 p.m. Kam Mak—My Chinatown; Moon of the Monarch Butterflies

5:00   p.m.  Pat   Cummings—Clean Your Room Harvey   Moon

Novelist Regina McBride, author of The Nature of Water and Air, The Land of Women, and The Marriage Bed, will offer a special one-day workshop in Park Slope on Saturday September 15 from 10 am -5 pm.

Register now to reserve a place in this workshop that is designed for writers of all levels. The cost is $125.

NOTE FROM OTBKB: I have studied with Regina McBride
since 1998 and I recommend her classes to all writers wherever you are
in your process. Using relaxation and sense memory, her technique is
wonderful whether you are just beginning to write, embarking on a novel
or memoir, or very experienced and in the midst of a novel or short
story.

For inspiration, character development and incredible writing
exercises, Regina’s course has been vital to my development as a writer
as it always propels me to my  best writing. Especially great when your
work needs a little jump start.

If you are interested, please email nightsea21@nyc.rr.com

Inner Lives: Developing Characters

An Intensive Workshop with the Focus on the Fictional Character

With Regina McBride

Using relaxation, sense memory, and emotional memory (Stanislavski
acting techniques transformed for the writer) a variety of exercises
will be offered to enable the student to find a deeper, richer
connection to the character he or she is creating.

Exercises will be followed by writing periods, and opportunities for
people to read and share their work. The atmosphere will be safe, with
the focus on exploration. The class is designed to help the student
break into new territory with the character, and with the story itself.

How would you feel if your most favorite dry cleaning gals disappeared? Suddenly. Out of the blue. That’s what happened when I went to Carroll Cleaners all prepared to say hello to Claudia and was told that the business had been sold.

"Was it sudden?" I asked

"No," answered the nice young Korean man. "It’s been in the works for about a year."

I figure it was a condition of the sale that Claudia and Co. not mention the sale. I immediately called Diaper Diva and told her to sit down.

"I am sitting down," she said.

"Carroll Cleaners changed ownership."

"I’ve known that for two weeks," she said.

I saw RED. Why was she holding out on me? When I saw her next she told me what she knew.

Apparently Claudia was married to the son of the owner of the old Carroll Cleaners. His parents sold the business and she’s now working at a Lord and Taylor’s.

I loved Claudia and the other women at Carroll Cleaners. Walking in there was like being on the set of a Pedro Almodovar movie. The woman were beautiful. The Latin conversation spicy and fun.

Ultra stylish Claudia, with her multi-hued blonde, curly coiffed hair do, worked at the shop for 18  years. She always looked fashion forward, sexy and fun and she was just the warmest, best dry cleaning person I’ve ever known. She was also an ace at fitting clothing. You only had to watch her as she pinned someone’s pants or formal dress. She really cared.

I could tell that other people on line at Carroll Cleaners were a little shocked that they left so suddenly. Change is tough. Especially in Park Slope where we all get so attached to our stores and the people who run them.

New York 1 reports that Chris Monson won The Second Annual Brooklyn Bridge Swim, the 45-minute, 1 kilometer race from the shores of East River Park in Manhattan to Brooklyn Bridge Park. One participant told this to New York 1:

"I thought it’d be cold, but probably 75 degrees, and it felt great, warm. It had a funny taste but tried not to swallow too much."

I understand pseudonyms and nom de nets; the need to protect friends and family; the need to protect oneself from employers and corporations; the right to privacy and the dangers of being a public blogger…

Still, I like real names (or consistent web aliases) because I like to know that there’s a real person, who is willing to take responsibility for what they are writing, on the other side of that post.

Especially on a place blog or a community blog.

We all share the same streets and avenues, whether its physical space or cyber space. We live together and we choose to do it in an openhearted, respectful, generous and graceful way.

Our community is a healthy mesh of opposites.  That’s what we love about Brooklyn, right? It’s an energetic, diverse, creative, messy, expressive, sometimes explosive, sophisticated and opinionated place. 

Express your thoughts and opinions in a civil and respectful way. That’s totally fine. Leave your real name. And definitely don’t use someone else’s name (which someone has been doing).

Use your real name and be yourself. Warts and all.

But hiding behind masks and spewing insults? That’s pretty weird.

Just because I don’t like reading Brooklynian, for instance, doesn’t mean I feel the need to hide behind a pseudonym and leave insulting comments.

I don’t believe in that. I’ve got my own blog, with my name on it, where I can express myself. How cool is that?

Brklyn Stories   poses the question and answers it in a personal way. She describes her blog as a resource for residents of Kensington as well as
comments on cultural events within Greater New York and elsewhere. Here’s an excerpt:

The question might seem redundant but sometimes a reflection helps,
especially since blogging risks getting weighed down by negative
entries, forcing many to ask, "What’s the point?" But better yet, why
the negativity? These wavering doubts caused me to postpone opening a
blog for almost a year. This is ironic since I’m an art critic, so you
would think I would be used to taking artists and their ideas to task
quite frequently. Au contraire. Writing and, in this case blog writing,
is still a creative process. Pejorative trains of thought are very easy
to slip into, but unfortunately they are not progressive since it is
very hard to utilize another one’s emotions for anything useful.

Blogs are like photographs. Each is a digital document, in literary and
pictorial form, that attempts to capture the here-and-now moment of our
lives. The free access and exchange of ideas is by and large priceless.
In Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, it was clear that society was missing something very deep down and his adventure brought it all back.

From her weather tower in Coney Island, here is today’s weather by Rose at 12:30 p.m.

"It’s 71 degrees now. It’s going to reach into the middle of the 80’s and will be hot and humid. Tomorrow in the 80’s with a chance of thunder showers. The rain might last into Monday."

Why was there a HUGE crane on the corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue? It was attaching something to the top of the building that houses Sette.

Anyone know? Do tell.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the 2007 SNA Newspaper of the Year, the Brooklyn Paper.

The night before the first day of school, there was a festive BBQ in the front yard of Smartmom’s apartment building.

A potluck bonanza, the impromptu menu included pesto pasta salad, chipotle turkey burgers, shish kebob, roasted veggies and a seemingly endless supply of cold white wine.

Best of all, the adults got to commiserate about the end of summer.

“I’m just not ready for this,” one neighbor told Smartmom. “It feels very sudden this year.”

“I am so dreading tomorrow,” another neighbor said. “This summer went by in a flash.”

Clearly, it was the parents who were having a hard time letting go of the carefree days of summer. The kids seemed to be facing the transition with energy and aplomb. A girl who lives in the building next door was hula hoping while finishing “A Tale of Two Cities,” the required summer reading at MS 51.

The Oh So Feisty One wore her first-day-of-school outfit to the barbecue: a test-run of the stylish blue dress, black leggings, and new slip-on black sneakers. Needless to say, she got a lot of compliments.

Upstairs, her blue and purple messenger-style bag was already packed and ready for its debut the next day.

Teen Spirit was clearly in denial about his first day. When Smartmom saw him walk past her with a large group of friends, she reminded him that he needed to get a good night’s sleep — for a change — so that he could leave the house by 6:45 am.

“Don’t worry, mom,” he told her.

But worry she did. It’s not like he’s been awake before 1 pm in months. Smartmom was stressing because she knows what it takes to get her kids to school.

Tabloid Mom could tell that Smartmom was agitated. She told her to have another glass of Chardonnay. But the wine only made Smartmom more morose. She thought of that line from “Charlotte’s Web”: “The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer’s ending, a sad monotonous song. ‘Summer is over and gone,’ they sang. ‘Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying.’”

Oy. The sound of those crickets. It’s been so loud on Third Street that sometimes Smartmom wonders if they’re in her living room.

Thankfully, Tabloid Mom interrupted the morbid daydream.

“What middle school’s are you looking at?” she asked, posing a question that Smartmom knows she’ll be hearing at least 43 times a day for the next few months.

Yes, this is OSFO’s last year at PS 321 and soon it will be time to fill out those dreaded middle school applications.

Smartmom forced herself to remember the names of the local middle schools she’d blocked out of her mind all summer.

It’s not like she thought about middle school options while she was working on her novel in her Edward Hopperesque room with an ocean view on Block Island.

She certainly did not read “New York’s Best Middle Schools,” by Clara Hemphill, while sitting on the beach in Amagansett.

And don’t think she was comparing middle school test scores while sipping latte and reading beat poetry in Mario’s Cigar Store Café in San Francisco.

But Tabloid Mom’s question brought it all back. All of it…

The next morning at 6 am, Smartmom wanted to ignore the annoying beep of her alarm clock. But she didn’t.

She wanted to stay under the covers and continue dreaming. But she didn’t.

Instead, she dragged herself into Teen Spirit’s room and shook the sleeping giant awake. She knocked on Mrs. Kravitz’s door to borrow back the butter she’d lent her a few days before so that Teen Spirit’s bagel could be buttered…

By 7 am, Teen Spirit was out the door, and OSFO was in her back-to-school outfit and ready to go.

Later, they walked slowly up Third Street to Seventh Avenue as Smartmom thought about all the back-to-school errands that lay ahead (supplies from Save on Fifth, groceries from the Co-op, a new bag for Teen Spirit from Brooklyn Industries). But then something miraculous happened:

Smartmom saw the parade of parents on Seventh Avenue. Friends. Acquaintances. Familiar faces. It was good to see them all.

There’s Angela, the friendly crossing guard on Second Street, who wished them a good new year at school.

When they entered the PS 321 backyard, Smartmom noticed that one of OSFO’s teacher’s from last year is pregnant (and has a little bump to prove it). Cute.

While OSFO lined up with her classmates, Smartmom took in the scene. Friends ran up to OSFO and gave her a hug. A friend’s redheaded daughter got so unbelievably tall. Brainy Lawyer and her family looked suntanned and healthy. Tall and Sultry was jet-lagged after a month in Italy.

“Hey, moms, pose for a picture,” said Groovy Architect Mom. “It’s our last first day of school at PS 321.”

Smartmom joined this interesting gaggle of mom-friends for an enthusiastic photograph. They all smiled. Smartmom felt a twinge of nostalgia. She’d been through a lot with these women.

After the flash, the moms dispersed. They were off to work, off to do errands. One mom said she was “off to open the stacks of mail on my desk.”

Buoyed by the warmth of her mom-friends and the scene in the backyard, Smartmom was ready to face her first day of school, the school year, and everything else that comes her way.