Dan's Papers - June 19, 2009 -

Teams of men from the Suffolk County District Attorney Spota's office are now riding the subway back and forth from East Hampton to Westhampton, where they have adequate parking for all their agents' BMWs while they are off investigating all the hanky panky going on at East Hampton Town Hall. If you see them - and you can identify them by their sunglasses, earpieces, grey suits, black fedoras and ties - try not to look at them, and particularly try not to look at the stacks of records they will be carrying westbound on their laps. Just look off into the corner of the subway car as if you are minding your own business. You don't want to call attention to yourself.

Dennis Lynch, who will show a preview of his documentary, King of the Hamptons, at the Starlight Gala for the American Heart Association Ball at Hayground on Saturday night, June 20, was seen with his camera on the Bridgehampton to Sag Harbor line. Smile and wave if he points his camera at you.

There's a problem with the fireworks we've been hoping to set off on at 9 p.m. July 4 on all our underground platforms. We were banking on approvals from all the Towns, particularly East Hampton, which up until three years ago had the big fireworks at Main Beach there. For the past three years, each fireworks display has been cancelled because of a family of piping plovers that lay their eggs on the beach in a little nest and because of their endangered status cannot have loud noises or raucous tourists nearby.

We had hired the Grucci Fireworks for our display - it will be the largest underground display of fireworks in history we are told - but now it seems no piping plovers set up a nest on Main Beach this year and the Fire Department is going ahead with its display, and East Hampton has denied our application.

Our board is meeting with Grucci about all this. We are told they made special fireworks for our occasion, fireworks that would only go up a few feet before exploding. We will let you know what's what next week. Now we hear in East Hampton that fireworks are cancelled again.

Biff Aspinall, the brother of our Commissioner, has put on his chef's hat and re-opened the dining cars on all the subway trains under the same name that was there before, Le Sommielle. He is going to try out a whole new concept in eating, however. He will be serving dishes that don't tell you what the main ingredient is. On the menu will be Strained Soup and Mystery Meat. For dessert, enjoy a variety of unnamed Smoothies that glow in the dark. That's it. Soup is $6, the main course is $18 and the glowing Smoothies, your choice of color, are $5. Worth every penny of it.

We hope riders like this new concept. Biff thinks his idea where people don't know what it is will soon sweep the country. Remember, you ate it first on the Hampton Subway.

The Board of Directors of Hampton Subway met last week to consider a proposal, presented to us by a marketing firm we hired, to consider changing our subway slogan. Currently our slogan is "The Hampton Subway along with the New York Subway System, is the Only Subway System in the State of New York."

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this slogan and there were those that argued our hiring the firm of Peanuts Popcorn and Walnuts (PP&W) was a big waste of $50,000 in these hard times.

Nevertheless, PP&W did make their presentation to us last Thursday in our boardroom in the Hampton Bays office, and they said that we should definitely change the slogan because it is too long and unwieldy for people to remember.

Their recommendation, presented with great fanfare, was that we should embrace our new slogan "We're Down Here." They also said we should put a pair of devil's horns on the letter H in Hamptons, and we should put a devil tail at the end of Y in Subway.

After much discussion, our nine members agreed on one thing, which was that we didn't like the idea of the subway embracing the devil. So the horns and tail were out. But then one group thought it should say "We're Down Here If You Need Us," and another group said "We're Down Here If You WANT Us," arguing that need and want are two entirely different things.

In the end, among our nine board members we had five opinions. And so what we finally voted upon was to take it to our straphangers, which is you, my friends. So please vote. Here are the choices:

1. Keep our current slogan.

2. Change to "We're Down Here."

3. Change to "We're Down Here If You Need Us."

4. Change to "We're Down Here If You Want Us."

The fifth choice is because one of our board members changed her mind.

5. Change to "We're Down Here" with horns.

Percy Peanut, the senior partner in the firm, said that whatever we wanted was okay with him. He also said that bringing this out to the straphangers was a good idea because it made the decision a sort of interactive thing. To vote, mark your choice with the chalk provided on the chalkboards at all our station platforms. Our straphangers speak!

This Saturday June 20 at 5 p.m., author Dan Rattiner reads from his new book, One Year on the Hampton Subway, at Bookhampton in Amagansett. Hope to see you there.