Nancy Ruhling's Astoria Characters

It has been weeks since Stefano Poliseno has been to his Astoria Sports Complex.   Stefano outside the closed Astoria Sports Complex. He parks his car – a white Maserati detailed with a green and red stripe in homage to his and its Italian heritage – and goes to the front door of the building, which remains forever closed to him. Seeing it again is hard. “How do I feel? Sad and happy,” he says. “I’m passionate about the children who came here; I miss them, but now I’ll…

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It was more like a clatter than a crash. When the big bang occurred, I sprang from my swivel chair and flew to the window to see what could be the matter. There, sprawled on my lower-level flat roof, sparkling in the sunlight like a diamond, was a silver ladder. I’ve lived in my house for more than 16 years, and I’ve borne witness to all manner of strange happenings. But most of them occurred on the ground. Attached townhouses, I discovered too late to move, rarely make good (or…

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Waitress. Seamstress. Photographer. Bartender. Screenwriter. Costumer. Carpenter. Actress. Interior designer. Purveyor of vintage attire. Jade is the owner of Vintage Queens NYC. Jade Oliver, who has long, flowing auburn hair, cherries-in the-snow-red lips and dramatic diction, has, at one time or another and even simultaneously, been all of these things. “I’m a jack of all trades, she says. “I do whatever I can to survive.” Most recently, that meant sitting down at her sewing…

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Hal bursts into the back yard like a flying bullet, grabs a knit cap from the bag on the chair and starts dragging it through the mud. He gets excited when visitors come, says Lynda Kennedy, as she tries to pry the prize from his mouth. Lynda works for the Intrepid museum. Hal, a Great Dane/Labrador/Border Collie mix, is a 4-and-a-half-year-old rescue with innocent brown eyes. He joined Lynda’s family when he was only 4 months old, so he’s had plenty of time to train everyone to…

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It’s complicated. Ava Forte Vitali’s life, that is. Ava has been fascinated with Egypt since childhood. She lifts her biker-black leather skirt to reveal the tattoo on her right thigh. The half-foot-long stick-figure skeleton is from a mosaic in Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that Mt. Vesuvius buried in a belch of volcanic ash in 79 A.D. “He’s carrying two jugs of wine,” she says. “The image was found on the floor of a party room, and in Greek it said, ‘Be cheerful,…

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