The Scarlet S – for Stupidity!

Comedian Bill Engvall – one of the original members of the Blue-Collar Comedy Tour - has this side-splitting routing called “Here’s Your Sign.” Its theme is that less than intelligent folks should be mandated to wear signs bearing the phrase “I’m Stupid,” as to save anyone the trouble of asking them a question.

As an example, he recounted the plight of a motorist whose engine had suddenly caught fire. A good but dim-witted Samaritan pulled over and asked if his car was on fire. The motorist replied, “No, it just wanted to take a cigarette break. Here’s your sign!”

I’m sure most of us have wanted to hang a sign on one or more people at various times. Like the time I was taking a run down the main artery of my town in 90-degree weather and had just slowed down when a couple taking a stroll in the opposite direction asked me if the heat was uncomfortable. I replied no, despite appearances, I was not really drenched with sweat, someone just decided to spray me with a garden hose.

Here’s your sign!

Sadly, even professional people deserve to wear a sign at times. Or in some cases, on a regular basis.

To Absent Clients

Recently I was scrolling through Yahoo Finance! and came across a video interview with the owner of the legendary Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, the century old training and battle ground for both amateur and professional boxers. The past and present champions who have trained there over the years would nearly fill the New York City white pages.

In any event, Gleason’s, like thousands of other fitness facilities in New York, had been shuttered since March. Therefore, no member dues were coming in and the owner had a balloon tax payment due that he admittedly could not make. He pleaded on camera with the powers that be in Albany to allow him to reopen.

Next week, thankfully, gyms across New York will be allowed to remove the padlocks from their doors – albeit under strict COVID-19 rules – such as limited capacity, no shower facilities, and mandatory masks etc.

But I got to thinking.

Five months without any cash-flow would place a tremendous strain on a large corporate owned facility, let alone the thousands of small gym or mom-and-pop business owners across New York as well as other states.

Ditto for restaurants. I read recently where two upscale establishments in the expansive and Hudson Yards development on the west side of Manhattan were closing shop for good – barely a year after they opened.

How many times do you suppose that scenario will be repeated before year end? On a personal level two family owned restaurants and a barber shop in my area have placed the proverbial soap on the windows. The signs on the front door explain that they are closed “for renovations” but as most of you know that’s code for “we’re outta business.”

If your CPA practice serviced clients in those sectors, how many would be left standing at the end? That would unquestionably ignite a severe trickle-down effect, as accounting practices are usually among the last to feel the impact of a downturn.

For those who follow the accounting trade press and profession-centric webinars the majority of articles and presentations project the quantum changes that are sure to reshape the industry as we know it – whether by exponentially increasing their remote workforce as a result of being sequestered by the pandemic, a major loss of clients or firms morphing into more of a consulting entity as opposed to a firm that provides basic compliance services.

Either way change is coming.

And there is no known mask or vaccine that can prevent that.

Another Quintessential New Yorker Leaves Us

Back when they still referred to grades 7-9 as Junior High School, my parents began a subscription to was then a fledgling start-up called New York magazine. Not to be confused with the legendary New Yorker, the new kid on the block featured articles by some the Big Apple’s most contemporary writers like Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese and Nat Hentoff as well as grizzled news veterans like Jimmy Breslin.

I was flipping through a June 1969 issue when I came across a profile of heavyweight boxer Jerry Quarry, who was preparing to challenge Joe Frazier for the title at Madison Square Garden. For those old enough to remember, Quarry was a hard-punching face-first fighter from California who, unfortunately, emerged at the same time as Frazier and Muhammad Ali and was therefore rendered to perennial contender status for the duration of his career.

The article titled “The Great White Hope” described in uncomfortable detail Quarry’s spartan training regimen while sequestered at Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskill Mountains. The author was Pete Hamill - another battle tested soldier of the Big Apple’s tabloid wars, who if you sliced his arm, would no doubt have bled his beloved New York.  He would often remark that you could just “wander around and let the city dictate the script.”

I kept that magazine for nearly 10 years and today have a printed copy of the piece among my boxing memorabilia. It was then I became an immediate fan of his – whether reading his columns in the New York Daily News, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire Magazine or one of his many books and novellas.

He was the eldest of seven children born to Irish immigrants and a high school dropout, yet rose to become a reporter at the New York Post, and had covered the Vietnam War, riots, sporting events and was just feet from Bobby Kennedy when he was assassinated in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He even found time to squire around Shirley MacLaine, Linda Ronstadt and Jacqueline Onassis.

Don’t Count the Big Apple Out Just Yet

While yet another appliance at Chez Carlino went on the fritz – this time thankfully it was just a broken dryer belt – I found myself engaged in a brief but lively conversation with the repairman, who interestingly enough sold real estate as a sideline.

His territory was the northern part of the suburban county where I live and he said for the first time in his career, the buyer market far exceeded inventory of available homes – by nearly a 3-to-1 margin.

He explained there was a massive exodus from New York City – fueled partly by the COVID-19 pandemic and shuttered businesses, the other a spike in crime thanks largely to the reduction in policing policies and bail reform measures championed by the buffoon currently occupying City Hall and his idiot minions on the City Council. (his words not mine, but you will not get an argument from me.)

In any event, his theory was that New York City was amid a decline from which it may never recover. Even local suburban papers carried articles on how outlying towns are basically positioning themselves as havens from the urban blight.

But New York has seen its share of tough times before and has managed to rebound each time when either nature or events have smacked it with a 2-by-4.