Been there, done that

A candidate for Ulster County district attorney will spend Saturday night with a family in Midtown Kingston.

I guess the implication is that he’s a brave man because Midtown is scary.

Because, you know, Midtown is the home of all those scary things like City Hall, Kingston High School, the Ulster Performing Arts Center, Kingston Hospital, the YMCA, the Bank of America and my residence, not to mention the home of Freeman reporter Blaise Schweitzer, who’s so scary he talks to people for a living (Blaise also likes to say he lives a stone throw’s away from my place, thought he hasn’t done that — yet).

Other brave souls who have spent parts of the night in Midtown in years past include Whoopi Goldberg and New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman. David Crosby and Graham Nash will be in Midtown tonight. And Bill Cosby is coming to Midtown’s UPAC in March.

Spooky.

I am being ridiculous, of course, since there are certain undesirable elements in town, to put it mildly. In my many strolls through Broadway at night, I have been offered many goods and services, and none of them were good for anyone or serviceable at any point.

Blaise and reporter Bonnie Langston, longtime readers might recall, spend a whole night walking on Broadway in Midtown one night in July of 1988, a day after the slaying of a 19-year-old Anna Kithcart, a woman whose body was found in a morning of July 1988 near abandoned railroad tracks in the city.

That is scary.

Here are the guys doing just that (with ’80s hairdos to boot) in a photo never published taken by the late Bill Madden: