Author: ruhlwrite

The sun is shouting hot as Kaman Fong dons the straw hat she’s kept folded in her pocket. Kaman is one of 120 people who have plots behind the black-thumb chain-link fence at Two Coves Community Garden. It’s only 10:30, yet she’s been tending her fruits, vegetables and herbs since the first light of day. This season, she planted strawberries, sweet yams, mint, corn, spinach, tomatoes, lettuce and a couple of sunflowers. She puts the hose down, and satisfied that her garden is growing…

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Mike Barrett opens the closet door and brings out a loose white jacket and a hat with a veil. When he zips himself into this outfit, he looks like an astronaut. He’s not going into outer space. He’s only going onto the roof of his house. He climbs the closet’s metal ladder then, using a rope, hauls up a large bucket that’s the color of a construction cone. It’s filled with equipment. He sets it down by the hatch door. Toward the center of the roof, there’s a…

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On the kitchen countertop, there’s a sliver-slim volume. will tell us everything we need to know about Jenn Wehrung. She’s happily married with four kids, two dogs, four kittens and two cats (the gerbil didn’t make it). She has — let’s make that “had” — a booming fashion business. Before that, she was a dancer with a best-seller tucked under her tutu. She just taught her son to play piano. “But I don’t even play piano!” she complains. Gotcha.…

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The century-old glass-front door opens, and there stands Mr. D with Friday, the 77-pound pit bull/pointer bruiser who howled his head off when the bell rang. “Are you afraid of dogs or kids?” It’s a moot question; Friday’s nosing around, and the kids — 10-year-old Ian and 6-year-old Willow — are bound to be bounding down the stairs any moment. James A. DeSoucey Jr. is a squat muscle-bound square with laughing baby blues. The kids he coaches on Willow’s first-grade…

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You can get mad. You can get sad. You can get even. Or, like Clif Militello, you can do all three. By writing a book. Of fiction (wink, wink). Clif is many things — art director, cartoonist, caricaturist, inventor, lecturer and proud mustachioed bald man — but he’s the first to admit that author is not one of them. Still, when he lost his job as an art director for MTA-NYC Transit on Sept. 17, 2010 during a “workforce reduction,” he decided to pen, a who-might-do-it…

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