And They Say The Office Of Borough President Is A Vestigial Remnant After 1989’s Board Of Estimate Of City Of New York V. Morris Decision
If Marty Markowitz didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him:
Posted: February 5th, 2010 | Filed under: Brooklyn, Please, Make It StopHis State of the Borough address at the Park Slope Armory Wednesday night featured singing, dancing, lights and sirens — and even Markowitz’s head photoshopped onto newly-elected Sen. Scott Brown’s naked body from a 1982 Cosmo photo spread projected onto a big screen.
A judiciously placed file folder inscribed with “Fuhgeddaboutit” left a little something to the imagination.
“I don’t need Howard Wolfson, I’ve got my strategy all figured out,” said Markowitz, suggesting the beefcake photos could help him get elected mayor in 2013.
“I have four years to get in shape,” he told the crowd of about 1,600.
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There was as much singing, dancing, and noshing as there was speechifying — though there was plenty of that — Markowitz’s speech clocked in at just under an hour and 15 minutes, more than triple Queens Borough President Helen Marshall’s 20-minute address.
The Venuto Brothers belted out Italian opera; the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir sang hymns; the Brooklyn Ballet put on a modernist dance, and six-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator Ikim Whitley of East Flatbush in a top hat and pleather jacket came up on stage mid-speech to do the moonwalk.
Markowitz himself briefly got into the act, swaying hand in hand with feathered bikini and headdress-clad performers from the award-winning Sesame Flyers dance troupe, famous for their performances at the West Indian Labor Day Parade. “I’m not staring, Jamie, I’m not staring,” he promised his wife.
The borough president even whipped out a police light and jokingly pledged never again to break out the lights and sirens that got him in hot water when he was caught using them to speed in his official car to a press conference last month.