Charlie Rose, accepting his award for his hard-hitting interview with me…eventually…in my imagination.
Greetings, Capital Region “Times Union” readers. This is the first of what I hope will be many posts on my new blog, “The Hoffman Files” on the Times Union website. I’ve been blogging on my own site– hoffmanfiles.blogspot.com– since mid-August, and now I’ve been given my shot at the big time. We will see how I handle this awesome responsibility.
Will I thrive and ride this opportunity to celebrity? Will I find myself doing the talk show circuit with frequent stops on NPR, Charlie Rose, Paul Harvey (I think he’s dead) and other young hip irreverent talk shows that all the young “hip-cats” who make up today’s “scene” are known to frequent? Or will I crash and burn on this newfound exposure, verbally duking it out with online chair-moisteners while I cry myself to sleep over my laptop, drunk on cooking sherry and broken dreams? More importantly, why should you care? Who is this guy who has the unmitigated gall to ask that you donate your precious reading opportunities to this new kid on the block, (I’m 50, but age is relative) when you have over 152,000,000 blogs to choose from? Well since you asked, (and I distinctly heard you) I’ll just have to talk about one of my favorite topics that I never seem to tire of…myself!
My story begins in a town called North Massapequa which is on Long Island, and my 50-year journey has taken me to Clifton Park. (To my Capital Region followers, North Massapequa is Clifton Park with higher taxes, more traffic and more attitude, to my Long Island/North Massapequa readers, Clifton Park is like North Massapequa with lower taxes, less traffic, and more hillbillies). There, I’ve insulted both of my core constituencies in one quick aside.
My childhood was shaped by my parents, Janet and Seymour Hoffman, both from the Bronx. My father was an accountant, which is even less exciting than it sounds. The best guess my brothers and I had for what my father did for a living was that he counted things, particularly other people’s money. One time he had to go to South Carolina and count shrimp and came home stinking of crustaceans. Glamour and sex appeal, thy name is Accounting!
It’s not my Dad, but imagine that reading “Playboy” and you get the idea.
The coolest thing about my father other than his box of rubber bands was the fact that he was the only “Dad” amongst all of my friends’ fathers to have a subscription to “Playboy.” This made me at least slightly more popular. (Not as popular as the kid who lived around the corner who had a “real” pinball machine, but it elevated me slightly amongst the swells of Plainedge High School) My father kept his collection in a “garbage can” like canister in his bathroom. He would always claim that the only reason he kept re-upping his subscription was for my brother, but I know he was also drawn in by the hard-hitting journalism, such as the time “Playboy” blew the lid off of the controversial world of leather bustiers. It turns out they were made of “Pleather”.
Having a subscription to “Playboy” also helped me figure out who I was as a man. The likes/dislikes section, filled out by the “Centerfold of the Month” made me realize that I don’t like “phonies,” “mushrooms”, and “pushy people,” while I love “the beach,” “sunshine” and “guys with a sense of humor.” It’s also possible that “Playboy” inspired me to want to pursue a career in journalism. I began writing for the “Red Devil,” the Plainedge High School award-winning (possibly made up by me) school newspaper. From there I wrote for my college newspaper, “The Oswegonian” which has accurately predicted snowy, cold winters in Oswego for over 50 years. However, none of this led to any employment in the newspaper world.
I loved history, and I believed I could make a difference and help teenagers (I”ll pause while your snickers subside) and ended up as a 7-12 social studies teacher, first in Long Island City and now here in the Capital Region. The dream of writing however never left me, and thanks to the Internet, only a brief 10 years after blogging became all the rage, I decided to stick my toe into the primordial ooze that is “The Blogosphere!”
So I hope you will peruse and enjoy my desperate attempts to make you laugh, (hopefully a lot) think, (not too much) and perhaps shed a tear, (provided you are peeling an onion at the time or watching the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life”) as you read my thoughts and views on almost everything, all of which by the way are accurate and factual, based on extensive research done on the part of myself and my staff here at “The Hoffman Files”, insofar that we can “Google it” in less than three seconds.
Let’s hear it then…a toast to me, “The richest man in town!”
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