Have authors Leonard De Virgilio and Sophia Vailakas-De Virgilio got some stories for you. Together, the Broad Channel pair has written/published their book, “Da Brooklyn I Rememba,” regaling with tales of people, places and language, that readers from Brooklyn, Queens and beyond will smile, nod, laugh out loud and be touched by.
Within its 200-plus pages, including neighborhood and vintage family photos, and some handy Brooklyn/English translations, ‘Lenny’ recounts his days from childhood onward growing up in the neighborhood of South Brooklyn, which he and Sophia explain is geographically “actually northern Brooklyn.” It’s a running gag throughout book.
“Da Brooklyn I Rememba” is full of memorable stories. Like when Lenny’s aunt and uncle’s TV, and dinner, went flying out the window after a long, tense game ended with a Brooklyn Dodgers’ swing and a miss. To add injury to insult, he solemnly recounts, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and won a World Series championship within just a year. After “it took them 65 years to win (their) only one in Brooklyn!”
Or the time, foregoing their superintendent grandfather’s careful instruction on how to stoke their building’s furnace, he and brother went with their much more efficient scheme for lighting it. The resulting explosion nearly blew them up, possibly along with the building. See chapter “Great Balls of Fire.”
Or the “So Much For Brotherly” fracas which broke out between Lenny, age 7, and his younger brother over the Lionel train set their father brought home and set up for them. Later, he noted, “Needless to say, that was the last time the Lionel trains came out.”
A hysterical production note was during self-publishing, Amazon kept trying to turn the book’s frequent Brooklynese into standard English. No, said the De Virgilio’s, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be!
As the book’s co-creator, Sophia explains, “Lenny is quite the storyteller, and he’d hold court, often regaling fellow attendees of a friend’s party or family gatherings. For years, Lenny had been hearing people tell him, ‘You should write a book!’” Many friends also said they should write one. “He finally got to the point where he decided he’d be the one, so he got a few marble notebooks and started writing down in long-hand all the stories he charmed many a listener with,” Vailakas-De Virgilio said.
After selecting the stories to include, Vailakas-De Virgilio went to work typing, then editing and drawing out each one. “I asked (him) clarifying questions like: ‘What were you thinking at the time?’ ‘Was there a certain feeling or song or even a smell in the air?’ ‘What happened after?’ ‘What was that person’s real name?’ I basically interviewed him to get him to expound on what was going on at the time, to take us into that world,” she explained.
Sometimes they’d argue due to the time it was taking, she says, and he’d “get mad that I’d ask him the names of people with nicknames that he either didn’t know or remember. But mostly we laughed a lot when I would read back the stories I was writing and asked more clarifying questions.”
What delayed the process even more, though, was rebuilding their Broad Channel home since 2003 in the wake of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.
Putting the book together took several years, amidst fighting to get their home rebuilt and move back in eight years after the storm. “When I say we were fighting to get back home, I mean, we were fighting. The Build It Back program, lawyers, contractors, DOB. In addition, Lenny was dealing with liver cancer that put him on the transplant list at NYU for a new liver, but he dodged that life-altering bullet, and we were raising our daughter,” Vailakas-De Virgilio said.
Both originally from Brooklyn, Sophia is an IT trainer at a large law firm. Many might know her also as a Board of Elections poll worker in Broad Channel. She does “some singing with musicians who’ll let me join them, or at local karaoke,” and played the clever thief Autolocus last December in Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale,” a local production directed by an associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Lenny is a retired NYC high school physical education teacher who still subs as well as lifeguards and teaches and coaches swimming at various locations in Brooklyn. They noted his most rewarding job is teaching special needs kids at the Federation of Italian American Organizations (FIAO) in Bensonhurst. Many have Down’s Syndrome or are on the Autism Spectrum.
In June 1999, a pair of karaoke hosts called on their frequent singers, including Sophia, as they were starting at a new bar, one owned by Lenny, called the Sunflower Café. She finally made it down by October, singing some of her favorite songs. “I apparently serenaded him without knowing,” she said.
“But it took a few more months before we actually went out on a date. That’s when I saw the man he was and is. We’ve been together ever since.”
They were married on the beach at Fort Tilden in June 2007.
Vailakas-De Virgilio recalls one of their funniest memories. In the book, De Virgilio tells of his friend Rocko, just off the boat from Italy. Saying he was going to sing “Blue Moon” in Italian, he croons out “Blue moon-ada, you saw me standing alone-ada…”
For their nuptials, Vailakas-De Virgilio, who had decided to go blonde at the time, had decided to actually sing the song in Italian after getting it translated.
“So, with the 16-piece swing orchestra…at our wedding at the beach…I sang ‘Luna Blue!’ ”
Having celebrated quite a bit, later during her performance De Virgilio stood up, shouting “Sing it, blondie!”
Available on Amazon, “Da Brooklyn I Rememba” has been a hit, with many readers leaving positive reviews.
Then there is the gentleman who swims at the FIAO, who requested 100 copies to give as gifts at his September 26 wedding. They obliged with customized copies thanking all for joining the couple on their special day.
Like all the other sweet, funny, outrageous, touching Brooklyn stories in their book, they say, that’s one more you just can’t make up.
