In my element
It felt like quite a coming home party last Saturday night at “Movies & Music Under The Stars”—an event recently held at the Fort Lee Community Center which featured The Party Dolls belting out pop hits from the ‘60s to today—plus a showing of “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” on their giant outdoor big screen.
I was an invited guest, and I brought my family to “meat & greet” the huge crowd. It was me, Mommy Meatballs, Big Brother Meatballs and Baby Meatballs—oh, and about 500 of my meatballs which I served up complimentary. I felt right at home for several reasons.
Movies and music are probably two of my favorite things in life, and being with family and friends—and food of course—all tie in to that. The other tie-in was the fact that the film had meatballs in the title! I got up on stage and introduced it and loved every minute of it. It also felt like home because I grew up just a few blocks away from the community center in nearby Palisades Park. My corner house on Thirteenth Street was actually right on the border of Fort Lee. When the ball rolled down the hill when me and my cousins were playing, by the time we retrieved it, we were in Fort Lee.
We also always played at Inwood Terrace Park in Fort Lee all the time, and the site of the new, state-of-the-art community center was the former home of Shop-Rite and Genovese drug store right across the lot—two stores I always shopped in with my mom and grandmother. Genovese burned down (it later became an Eckerd and now is a Rite-Aid), and Shop-Rite was demolished when a new one was built in Pal Park by the town pool. So it felt quite fitting to be up on that stage, probably in the same footprints I stood as a kid with my mother on the checkout line paying for meatball ingredients.