'Man v. Food' Visits Westchester

I got to write a little something about the Travel Channel series, Man v. Food, and some trips the show, and its new host, Casey Webb, were making to Westchester County's River Towns for the new season. That was for Westchester's own Journal News. 

Webb visited Dobbs Dawg House in Dobbs Ferry, The Oath Craft Beer Sanctuary in Tarrytown and J.P. Doyle’s in Sleepy Hollow, and tried some funky foods at each joint.

“What a beautiful spot that was,” says Webb, a Jersey Shore native who said he’d had little exposure to Westchester before this trip.

Man v. Food  sees a restaurateur lay down a challenge to host Webb each episode; it may involve spicy food, such as the habanero ghost chili wings he had at the Lunchbox on Staten Island, or an enormous portion, such as the four-and-a-half-pound Reuben sandwich he encountered in Milwaukee, and a dozen hot dogs at Dobbs Dawg House.

Capturing Happy Days of Yore in the Irish Catskills

I got to write a little something...OK, not that little a something...about a place that was very special to me as a very pasty kid.
If you're wondering just how pasty I was, click on the link. 
It's an essay on summers spent in the Irish Catskills--not just by me, but by Irish immigrants decades before that, and those who continue to visit the diminished, but still active, Irish community a few hours north of NYC today.
A snippet:

Every year, we would spend a week at the O’Neill House, one of around three dozen Irish resorts in East Durham at the time. We would wake up groggily with the breakfast bell, spend hours in the pool, hike the mountain behind the ball field, build rock dams in the creek and play baseball until the crickets came out. Our parents would then put us to bed and, along with the rest of the grown-ups, walk up the hill to the pub for live Irish music and dancing.

Three decades removed from those vacations, there I was, driving my own children to the Irish Catskills. Or what’s left of them.

The Times ran it on the front page of its Sunday "Metropolitan" section in late August.

My Novel is Out!

Betsy Town, which is book No. 3 of my Tompkins Trilogy, three standalone novels set around Tompkins Square Park, is out. Unlike the first two, much of Betsy Town is set in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which gives the novel its title.

The main character is David. Three decades before, his mentally imbalanced mother stood on the train tracks at Elizabeth Station, her baby in her arms. David survived.
This is his story. 

Wrote John Roche, author of "Bronx Bound": “From the first page to the very last, readers feel as though there’s a speeding train heading right for us as we accompany David Campion on his complicated quest for sanity, happiness and wholeness. Michael J. Malone’s gift for dark humor makes this madcap journey even more worth the ride.”

If you're curious about, ya know, reading the book, you can grab a copy here. 

I'll be having my book party at Captain Lawrence Brewing in Elmsford, NY Feb. 21.

Labor Day, Then a Day of Labor

I'm a lifelong baseball fan.
Actually, my connection to the game extends beyond my life on earth, at least by a day or two.
Call it "womb with a view"--my essay on the heroic double play my mother turned four and a half decades ago, a day before giving birth to me. 

U2? Me Too.

Including their performance on July 31, I've been going to U2 shows for 30 years. That makes me old, and U2 older.
I wrote a little essay for Medium.com about some of those concerts, and what it all means.
One I left out by mistake: 1987, hitch-hiking after class on a Friday from Kingston, Rhode Island to Boston to see U2 at the old Boston Garden.
We made it to Boston; I recall riding in the back of a pickup truck. We got tickets off a scalper. It was pouring when we found the way to Boston College on the T, surprised a high school friend, and slept on his floor.