Thank you to the editors of the following periodicals in which my essays first appeared:
An earlier version of “My Family Romance” appeared in my book The Body of Brooklyn (University of Iowa Press, 2003) as “My Little Heroes”—it has been substantially revised.
I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for the fellowship that helped me in the early stages of this manuscript.
And thank you to the following friends, family, and associates who aided me, directly or indirectly, with this book: Alyce Miller, William Fraser, Patsy Kelly, Martin McGovern, Alicia Christenson, Lois Zamora, Scott Lazar, Cathleen Calbert, Mary Cappello, Mike Mazurki; and to my parents, Leo and Rhoda Lazar, who in my forlorn memories are watching some melodrama from the ’40s in their small bedroom in Brooklyn.
This book is dedicated to Scott Lazar, who accompanied me in our teens on our epic trips to the Bleeker Street Theater, the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Art, the Cinema Village, the Carnegie Hall Cinema . . .