The Lardner Report

Unleash your creative superpowers!

Hand dancers – you’re kidding, right?

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I dare you not to chuckle.

Since last July, over 6 million viewers got hooked on this crazy act.  Meet Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding – two dancers who seem to have captivated a fast-growing audience hungry for their brand of quirky entertainment: hand dancing. They’ve actually appeared with Riverdance, and now have a McDonald’s commercial running, but their video, “We No Speak Americano,” has taken the more populist route on YouTube.

The pair performs a comedic series of complex choreographed contortions while seated and blank-faced. The catchy song was recorded by the Australian duo Yolanda Be Cool and producer Dcup.

You will be trying this at home.

NYC Subway: A Brief Encounter with Mr. Frost

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(Pic #1) Epiphany in the Park

Last Monday, I arrived in Manhattan in what has been called “the snowiest January since the city starting keeping records” — 36 inches to be exact — easily breaking the record of 27.4 inches in 1925.

NYC Subway: poetry in motion (AP Photo/Jim Cooper, File)

Struggling with my bulky bags on the icy subway stairs, trapped by what seemed like hundreds of layers of winter clothes, I quickly needed a serious attitude adjustment.  I managed to win a seat on the B train down to Bryant Park in midtown. Cursing the weather, the crowds, and my decision to travel to New York in January, I suddenly saw something that completely transformed the experience.  On the subway train, amidst the ads for personal injury lawyers and dermatology clinics, I saw a message in the ad space overhead: A short poem by Robert Frost, called “Dust of Snow.”

Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

I read it, and cried.  Re-read it, and lost it again.  I couldn’t believe this poem had found me, and on this particular day. No born-and-raised New Yorker had ever appreciated the transit authority more than I did at that moment.   It was such a sweet, powerful  reminder that those unexpected moments – just like Frost’s snow dusting – can instantly cialis shift our thought and lift our spirits.

Emerging from the subway exit, I saw what can only be described as a silent white city. The falling snow had completely muted the normally discordant traffic noise, and turned Manhattan into a gloriously quiet, spectacular black and white cityscape.

(Pic #2) Fountain Freeze

The barren trees behind the New York Public Library formed delicate lacy patterns against the flat bluish skyscrapers, and the park’s famous fountain had frozen over. (Pics #1 & #2) I grabbed my camera and couldn’t stop shooting. The snow kept coming. It landed weightlessly on my hair and I caught flakes on the tip of my tongue, the way I used to as a little girl growing up on Long Island. The experience was every bit as miraculous all these years later. All of this — all of it — sparked by 34 perfectly chosen words from the mind by Robert Frost, and the largesse of the MTA.

Sadly, I’m told the agency has begun removing those literary ads from the train cars because of state budget cuts. Transit officials have replaced the words of Franz Kafka, Galileo, and other great thinkers with updates about the agency’s new technology, equipment, and infrastructure.  Perhaps some will find inspiration in the promise of jobs that those projects could bring. For me though, I will just remain grateful for the warming fire of those two Robert Frost verses on a winter’s day.


CNN Hero: One Image Changes One Man

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When you catch yourself acting like a spoiled brat — click above.

For Narayanan Krishnan, it took only one image to change his life: that of an elderly man eating his own waste. Krishnan was an award-winning chef at a 5-star hotel group when he came across the man living under a bridge in Madurai, India. When the chef saw what the man was eating, he said he was shocked — and haunted — by the image. He began feeding the man, and a week later, Krishnan had quit his job and decided he would devote his life to feeding the hungry. That was in 2003. He has now served priligy more than 1.2 million meals to India’s homeless and destitute — mostly elderly, abandoned and often abused by their own families.

Krishnan’s day begins at 4 a.m. He and his team cover nearly 125 miles in a donated van, routinely working in temperatures topping 100 degrees. The hot meals he delivers are simple vegetarian dishes he personally prepares, packs and often hand-feeds to nearly 400 clients each day.

And consider this:  While most of us skirt the homeless on city streets and freeway underpasses, Narayanan Krishnan seeks them out.