Category Archives: Bet On Crazy

TORAH TORAH TORAH by Peter Nolan Smith

December 7, 2023 – 1:12 am

TORA TORA TORA was one of my mother’s favorite films. The infamy of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor burned bright in her memory. Her friends from Jamaica Plain enlisted in the Marines, Army, and Navy by the scores. Many of them failed to return to Boston. Their bodies rest on islands across the Pacific. […]

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BET ON CRAZY 1 by Peter Nolan Smith

December 7, 2023 – 1:06 am

In the 1970s I knew very little about diamonds as a child other than Superman could squeeze coal with his steel-hard hands to create diamonds and my father had bought a diamond ring for my mother. It was a hundredth of the size of the diamonds Superman never gave to Lois Lane, but my mother […]

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GUILT VERSUS SHAME by Peter Nolan Smith

November 24, 2023 – 2:29 am

Back in the last century I left work on 47th Street early on December 24. Manny complained that I was deserting my post selling diamonds, but I had been working every day since Thanksgiving. “I should pay you a half-day.” Manny was a grinch of the first-order. “Do what you want. I’m heading home.” Boston […]

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An Artist’s Fast Fingers

November 21, 2023 – 11:26 pm

My boss Manny started selling jewelry on Canal Street in 1954. He says that he didn’t sell his first diamond until a year later. “Back then all diamonds were white. We didn’t know any better and better still neither did the Gs.” Manny’s speech is colored by hundreds of diamond selling terms interspersed with Yiddish. […]

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Points of View for the Shabbat Goy

November 16, 2023 – 9:51 am

Since my return from the Land of the Dead, my friends have been phoning to hear my voice. They all say I sound better than before and this afternoon Big Abe called from $7th Street to say that he had seen an advertisement online for a Shabbat Goy ie that is a gentile to turn […]

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