I recently showed my Film and Literature students the film It’s A Wonderful Life. We first read an excerpt of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and as we were watching, we compared and contrasted the Dickens’ work with Frank Capra’s film. It was so refreshing how much they enjoyed the film. What is even more interesting is many of my students do not even celebrate Christmas. One young man who is quite polite and enjoys the class usually comes only four days a week. When he entered the class

Last week a friend forwarded me a Time magazine article titled, “Why Everyone Is So Rude Right Now.” Obviously everyone knows that I am obsessed with the behavior of my students, and people in general. The statistics in this article were staggering. One place where people have become ruder is the airline industry. According to the article, the FAA has fined misbehaving passengers over one million dollars so far this year. As I wrote in my restaurant etiquette column, restaurant managers are

Over the years my family, friends and I have all worked in the restaurant industry. I used to say everyone should have to do a semester of hospitality work to become empathetic with the workers and understand walking a mile in their shoes. Unfortunately, not everyone has taken that semester of working in the restaurant industry, so a lesson in restaurant etiquette is needed. Since I know so many people in the industry, I sent out a few texts to servers from local restaurants and this is what

It is that time of year again where we will all be subjected to the crazy elf pictures when many of our social media friends try to outdo one another with their elaborate poses and shenanigans. Those of you with children that have been experiencing this for a few years, how do you keep it original?

For those of you like me who either have older children or no children at all, the Elf on the Shelf is a book that was published in 2005 by the genius mother-daughter team of Carol Aebersold and

Driving in New York City is a video game. It reminds me of the old video game Pole Position and the newer one Grand Theft Auto. My nephew, Tyler, plays a game where he drives like a lunatic and laughs. He runs things over, crashes and then can hop into a new car. It seems these games are becoming more real.

People in New York City, especially Rockaway and Broad Channel, need to learn how to drive. What people also need to do is to learn simple driver’s etiquette. PS: I really only drive from

Thank you so much for all of your emails this past week. Everyone seems to be on the same page with people needing beach etiquette. I just want to note these rules are for everyone, not just our visitors. I just am so sad we had such a poor weather weekend that we could not try to implement the rules. 

Here are some we ran out of room for last week:

Rule 4: PDA. Our beach is a public beach, not a private beach on a romantic getaway. You may hold hands but do not make out in the water or on