Moontime: Spheres of Influence

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Our trio Artisan Jazz, slipped into a red-hot groove last night. My intuition told me we were under the intoxicating influence of the full moon.

I sorted through my in-box where I keep low-priority mail, unsolicited calendars from my alma mater, Prudential Insurance, the Humane Society. Though they listed Arbor Day, Benito Juarez’s birthday, Eid a Fitr day, nowhere did they note the moon cycle.

For fear of being characterized as an astrology freak, someone who consults a star ephemeris every time he goes to his poker game, let me assure you, I haven’t a Druidic bone in my body. You’ll never find me casting the runes, auguring pigeon entrails, or avoiding black cats. I never dance on the knoll under the full moon--unless of course, my date likes that sort of thing.

Still, I believe the moon does affect us. Put me in a storm cellar, I'll guess when the moon's at apogee. It’s that feeling you get on a rolly coaster, the momentary pause at the top of the hump before all that stored kinetic energy is released and you plummet over the precipice.

I was an arts director at a downtown library for years. All our lunatics descended upon us on the night of the full moon as if chartered on the Luna Express: the rumpled anorexic creature who sprayed DuPont Day-Glo up his nose and played Dr. Demento disks; the preacher, dapper in a Thrift Store suit, who delivered dramatic recits from a desk dictionary; a city accountant, from all appearances the consummate professional, who felt a compulsion to spray our oversize art books.

That all of us are affected came home to me in my writerly life. I began to notice that when the moon was most aglow I was as voluble as Shakespeare, a cacophony of voices struggling to be heard, like a high volum...

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...discovered recently that the lunar month is getting longer, a bit less than a fiftieth of a second every century. Can you blame the Humane Society and Prudential for not dirtying up their calendar with every full-, new-, gibbous- and crescent moon? Crowding out National Mullet Day, Hobo Week, Marfan Syndrome Month? Let Farmer's Almanac truck in such unscientific tripe as when to put in the snap peas or negotiate a treaty with Hamas? Never mind that "There is a time for sowing and a time for reaping…

If you find yourself on some magical evening, suddenly doing the lambada like Felipe Polanco, or bowling a perfect game, or playing a jazz riff so hot the waiters are pouring out of the kitchen, and you look out the eastern-most window and there is an effulgent full moon. . . .

Don't get moonstruck. Don't buy into that hookum, moonshine. Probably just a coincidence.

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