Feel the City Breakin and Everybody Skakin




Two big take-aways from a three-hour small bus tour of Brooklyn.  One is pretty obvious from the

title of the tour – pizza is a big deal in Brooklyn. Big names visit little pizza joints around the fifth borough to eat the stuff. It's a way of life.  The pics below, at Spumoni Gardens, is of the cast of Sopranos from the HBO show that took place across the East River and up the Hudson in New Jersey. On the tour you come find out

there are family-bound generational pizza wars that would make for excellent reality TV melodrama at  places like Grimaldis, (below) located right at the bottom of the Brooklyn Bridge.

You find out there are two styles of pizza you had better not forget, Sicilian and Neopolitan (thick and thin essentially. Thin in pic below.  In our final family-wide pizza critique, I think we split 2 1/2 to 2 1/2 on our favorite style with Carly choosing both sides depending on the moment you asked her.)

The second take-away, though, might be even more important to Brooklynites as we found out from two of our tour guides: Brooklyn was the filming spot for Saturday Night Fever, the 1977

cinematic music phenomenon that thrust John Travolta onto the big screen from his smaller previous role in Welcome Back Kotter, and still has a cult following among the residents.  The premise behind the pizza tour wasn't just to feed us, but to show us clips from movies that have taken place in Brooklyn, then drive by the shots.

It turns out the Bensonhurst neighborhood was where Tony grew up and worked.  In the opening credits of the movie he is walking along the sidewalk to the Bee Gees song "Stayin Alive."  He eventually gets a piece of pizza at Lenny's.  Our pizza guide told us she was soon to take a pilgrimage to Melbourne Australia where

there is a Bee Gees Hall of Fame.  Our other tour guide, a self-proclaimed disco diva from the 70's, told us later the hall of fame must be new, because when she was in Australia it hadn't been constructed yet.  I'd pick the movie over the pizza – or Brooklyn for that matter – any day.