And You Thought Underwear Parties Were Unseemly . . . It’s For The Kids!*

Brooklyn’s Puppetry Arts Theatre is funded, in part, by your attendance at that bi-weekly underwear party. And that’s the rest of the story:

Four years ago, Tim Young, founder and director of Brooklyn’s Puppetry Arts Theatre, which puts on puppet-based educational programs for underprivileged city youth, was facing a stark reality. He was pushing 30 and needed to strip down his life. “I was catering full-time, and I was working so hard that I wasn’t getting anywhere with the theater — ­nowhere,” he says, sitting fully dressed on a stool in his cramped Park Slope kitchen at one in the morning recently. A group of guys in boxers and bright-colored American Apparel briefs breezed by; some stopped to dispense Cosmos into plastic cups from an Igloo cooler. “I was going to have to get a roommate, I was going to have to get a third job. I just wasn’t bringing in the money I needed to run the not-for-profit.”

. . .

Half of the theater’s $30,000 operating budget — insurance, supplies, actor and musician fees — comes from the party’s proceeds (donations, sponsorships, and grants pay the rest). They have let the theater, which is approved to go into the schools by the city Board of Education, expand from throwing one or two events a month to five to seven. Activities range from visiting classrooms to teach students how to make puppets out of paper bags to an annual Halloween carnival in Park Slope. It also puts on a musical, called In a Round About Way, about a girl who runs away from home. Young’s puppet Oglesby also appears in John Cameron Mitchell’s upcoming sexually graphic film, Shortbus.

And although Young can sound a bit defensive — “If someone says, ‘You’re throwing a party for gay men in their underwear!’ I say, ‘Well, I don’t see you paying my rent or giving me money to buy glitter'” — the guests approve. “You come here for the social atmosphere, but you’re also helping kids,” said Mike, 34, a burly lawyer, as he retrieved a plastic bag filled with his clothes. “I’m all for that.”

*At least I refrained from saying anything along the lines of “Puppetry Of The Penis” . . .

Dude, Drop Some Diaeresis In “Reenactor” And You’ve Got A Talk Of The Town Piece!

Proof that even New Yorkers love the occasional historical reenactment:

It was soon after 1 p.m. yesterday when a band of Revolutionary soldiers, one of them just 16, emerged from the edge of the forest, muskets blazing. The British navalmen moved into place, taking no casualties, and loaded their cannon.

“Read-ay,” a man wearing a tri-point hat said as he twirled a smoldering charge in the air and touched it to the fuse. The cannon let off an enormous, black powder explosion, sending a five-foot smoke ring barreling down a hill at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

. . .

The muskets, clothing, cannon, and other materials are almost all replicas made by another group of reenactors, who create objects from historical eras using only the kinds of tools and supplies they would have had.

“I love history. I love doing this,” a parks ranger from Staten Island and part-time British artillerist, Michael Callahan, 49, said. Of his entire outfit, only two things weren’t replicas: a pair of small square spectacles he bought at an antique store, and his underwear.

“The truth is, they didn’t wear underwear,” a fellow artilleriest, Richard Cuneo, said. “We have health standards nowadays.”

It was a consensus among the reenactors that New Yorkers had a stronger interest in their hobby than they had expected. Gaggles of Brooklynites and history buffs with digital cameras, video cameras, and camera phones pushed close to the reenactors and cheered with the cannon’s deafening booms.

The field is a short walk from Battle Hill, the highest point in Brooklyn. Viewed in a larger frame, yesterday’s scene was just one part of the city’s tangled history. Looming above the clouds of musket fire were a Citgo gas station sign and a 1960s-era sign advertising “Worldwide Furniture Warehouse.” Behind those was a church steeple covered in black renovation material, the top of a chemical plant, and, beyond them, the Statue of Liberty.

Location scout: Greenwood Cemetery.

It’s Good To Be King

At least he doesn’t “always” use it to park illegally:

Former City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, who left public office more than 41/2 years ago, regularly uses an NYPD placard to park in illegal spots outside his private law office, the Daily News has found.

Last Wednesday, in the morning and the afternoon, The News spotted Vallone’s Cadillac DeVille parked in an illegal zone near his Astoria, Queens, office.

The sign read “No Parking 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday,” but an NYPD parking placard — a perk granted to Vallone by the city — protected him from getting a ticket.

“I try to use it [the placard] with discretion, but there possibly are times when I don’t,” said Vallone, who served as the Council’s speaker for more than a decade before term limits forced him from office in 2001.

“I don’t always park illegally,” he added. “I assure you of that.”

Vallone, 71, said he currently serves as an informal adviser to the mayor and the Council, but he acknowledged that he uses the placard for private reasons when parking outside his law office.

When told about complaints from people in the neighborhood who vehemently object to Vallone getting the special placard, the former speaker said, “I can understand that.”

“I do make make mistakes and I’ll try to correct it. I’m sorry,” he said.

But this is actually a time-honored tradition — sort of the way former Presidents get office space and a secret service detail:

Paul Browne, the NYPD’s top spokesman, said it’s the department’s “longstanding practice” to provide special parking placards to former mayors, former police commissioners and former City Council chiefs.

Browne said the placards expire annually, but he said these former officials are entitled to the special perk for life.

“It’s been the custom followed for many years,” he said, adding, “I don’t know the precise history.”

Kinky-Haired Jews Across The City Looking For A Hero

Shawn Green comes at a time when the city’s Jewish community is searching for a role model:

Not that there’s any pressure on Shawn Green to succeed in New York, but when Mr. Green — power-hitting right fielder, two-time All-Star, Jew — took the field in a Mets uniform for the first time on Thursday, a fan named Corey Mintz held up a poster with Mr. Green’s photo on it.

“The messiah has arrived,” the poster read.

Jews are famed for their prowess in many fields, but have long been stereotyped, even by themselves, as being weak in athletics. There might not be a group on the planet with a more finely honed sense of physical inferiority.

So when a star ballplayer who happens to be Jewish comes to play in the New York area, a capital of Jewish culture, home to nearly two million Jews, it is cause for much rejoicing.

Americans, Jewish and otherwise, may not hold sports stars in the esteem they once did. Jews no longer feel quite the need to prove themselves as Americans by, for instance, excelling at sports.

But still the Jewish people hunger for a hometown hero to call their own.

. . .

And in the stands at Shea Stadium, Joshua Ostrovsky, a husky Manhattanite with a billowing Jewish afro and a gold Hebrew “chai” necklace outside his Dwight Gooden jersey, called Mr. Green a role model.

“There were many times in Little League that people said to me, ‘Ostrovsky, you are fat, you’re Jewish, you’ll never play baseball.'” said Mr. Ostrovsky, 24. “So I lost weight, and they still said, ‘You’ll never play baseball because you are Jewish.’ Shawn has been an inspiration to me.”

. . .

Mr. Green, for his part, seems happy to be in New York. “For me it’s an important thing, the Jewish community here,” he said Thursday. “I definitely want to be a part of it and am excited to be a part of it and hopefully I can make them proud.”

So far, so good. In his second at-bat Thursday, he lined a run-scoring single to left field and the place erupted.

“Ma-zel tov! Ma-zel tov!” Mr. Ostrovsky chanted to the rhythm of “Let’s Go Mets.”

Mr. Ostrovsky pulled at his mane of kinky hair.

“I haven’t been this proud of a Jew since my brother’s bar mitzvah,” he said.

The Traffic Puts Them In A Fowl Mood

Traffic is so bad on Staten Island that motorists use cemeteries as short cuts, leaving a trail of blood in their wake:

Sunrise at Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp is usually announced by the crowing of Rodney the rooster, who is ever accompanied by his companion, Henrietta the hen.

But yesterday, for the first time in years, dawn was missing its “cock-a-doodle-doo” after a speeding car struck and killed Rodney Friday afternoon, leaving Henrietta and Moravian staffers forlorn.

“People treat Moravian Cemetery like it’s Hylan Boulevard,” said Richard L. Simpson, the cemetery’s historian. “Accidents happen, but if you go slow, birds move. You know they were speeding, the way Rodney was splayed on the ground, with feathers everywhere.”

This is the third bird killed by drivers in the cemetery this summer, Simpson said. The cemetery’s two freshwater lakes draw many migrating birds, including ducks, egrets and Canada geese, he added. Earlier this year, a favorite cemetery goose, Squiggles, also was killed by a car.

. . .

Around 2 p.m. on Friday, when the feathered pair would normally be pecking on the office window, ready for their lunch, a worker found Rodney dead in the road.

Cemetery workers stayed late after work to give Rodney a proper burial in a shady spot behind the office building, overlooking the lake. Henrietta was nowhere to be found. But later, when staffers went to pay their respects, they found her standing over her friend’s grave. She laid an egg there, which staffers placed on the cross-post of Rodney’s grave.

“She had to know he was there. They were so close,” Simpson said.

Moravian has posted numerous stop signs and speed-limit signs, as well as adding speed bumps to discourage lead-footed drivers who cut across the cemetery from Richmond Road to Todt Hill Road, but to no avail.

Two fire hydrants and many signs have been knocked down by speeders, Simpson says, adding that road rage and aggressive drivers on nearby Hylan Boulevard probably don’t help matters.

“Most people are very respectful here, but every now and then, you get somebody in a hurry, like in any other place,” said Rev. Duane Ullrich, from nearby New Dorp Moravian Church, noting that the birds are fed in front of the office building, in the area of the cemetery with the highest traffic.