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Dan’s Papers Flight to Portugal, Next Chapter First appeared in Dan’s Papers circa June, 1991 By Dan Rattiner Dan’s Papers is a newspaper that circulates weekly on the eastern end of Long Island. Last October, for the first time, we decided to print an additional 10,000 copies and put them free into stores in New York City. We have been doing this since, but at that time it was just an experiment and we really didn’t know how it would work out. The first edition to go to New York would be October 5, 1990, the Columbus Day issue. As editor, I got to thinking—what could I write that would address itself to New Yorkers and let people know we were circulating there, without being too obvious about it? I sat down and wrote a story called “Little Known Winter Holidays.” “The Hamptons Council,” I wrote, “has requested that inasmuch as this edition of Dan’s Papers is being distributed in Manhattan, we point out to the city dwellers the many interesting holidays and weekends that take place in these parts during January and February. Don’t just stop coming out to the Hamptons after New Year’s. Come enjoy it all winter long!”
Of course there are no holidays and festivals in the Hamptons in January and February. So I made them up. On January 6, I wrote, there was The Real Estate Equinox, celebrating the very bottom of the real estate market. It would be all uphill after the Equinox, and so there are champagne parties at all the brokerage houses on January 6. The following week, you could come join The Houses From the Outside House Tour. All the windows on all the summer homes are boarded up in the wintertime, so you trudge through the snow on January 12 and you look at these beautiful homes from the outside only. I wrote festival after festival. There was The Eel Festival on January 19 and 20 when teenage girls use eels as jump ropes and compete for prizes. And on January 26 there was the Flight to Portugal, when young men take old cars out to the Montauk Lighthouse where there is a big wooden ramp built for the occasion, and they rev the engines, roar up the ramp and arch out over the 80-foot cliff and down into the sea to be rescued by the Coast Guard. The kid getting the farthest out—the closest toward Portugal—wins.
There were four other festivals. We typeset all this, hoped it would amuse everybody and on October 5, 1990, we published it in an edition of 35,000 on eastern Long Island and 10,000 in New York City. Among other places in Manhattan, we had permission to distribute in all the Gristede’s food stores. The office manager at Dan’s Papers is a very capable woman by the name of Joli Erickson, and because she is so capable, she will often take care of things without my even knowing she is doing so. However, in the third week of January, 1991, she came to me and said there was something going on she could no longer deal with and she would tell me about it. It was quite extraordinary. What had happened was that just after New Year’s she had received a phone call from somebody wanting to know the details about the Flight to Portugal. She didn’t know what this caller was talking about so she asked around. It referred to a make-believe festival I had written about three months ago, she was told. Supposedly it was scheduled for January 26. She told this caller that the Flight to (continued on page 32)
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