![\"Nicole](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/NicoleFrontera-banner-placeholder2.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cDa Brooklyn I Rememba\u201d is full of memorable stories. Like when Lenny\u2019s aunt and uncle\u2019s TV, and dinner, went flying out the window after a long, tense game ended with a Brooklyn Dodgers\u2019 swing and a miss. To add injury to insult, he solemnly recounts, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and won a World Series championship within just a year. After \u201cit took them 65 years to win (their) only one in Brooklyn!\u201d<\/p>\n
Or the time, foregoing their superintendent grandfather\u2019s careful instruction on how to stoke their building\u2019s furnace, he and brother went with their much more efficient scheme for lighting it. The resulting explosion nearly blew them up, possibly along with the building. See chapter \u201cGreat Balls of Fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or the \u201cSo Much For Brotherly\u201d fracas which broke out between Lenny, age 7, and his younger brother over the Lionel train set their father brought home and set up for them.\u00a0 Later, he noted, \u201cNeedless to say, that was the last time the Lionel trains came out.\u201d<\/p>\n
A hysterical production note was during self-publishing, Amazon kept trying to turn the book\u2019s frequent Brooklynese into standard English. No, said the De Virgilio\u2019s, that\u2019s exactly how it\u2019s supposed to be!<\/p>\n
As the book\u2019s co-creator, Sophia explains, \u201cLenny is quite the storyteller, and he\u2019d hold court, often regaling fellow attendees of a friend\u2019s party or family gatherings. For years, Lenny had been hearing people tell him, \u2018You should write a book!\u2019\u201d Many friends also said they should write one. \u201cHe finally got to the point where he decided he\u2019d be the one, so he got a few marble notebooks and started writing down in long-hand all the stories he charmed many a listener with,\u201d Vailakas-De Virgilio said.<\/p>\n
After selecting the stories to include, Vailakas-De Virgilio went to work typing, then editing and drawing out each one. \u201cI asked (him) clarifying questions like: \u2018What were you thinking at the time?\u2019\u00a0 \u2018Was there a certain feeling or song or even a smell in the air?\u2019 \u2018What happened after?\u2019 \u2018What was that person\u2019s real name?\u2019 I basically interviewed him to get him to expound on what was going on at the time, to take us into that world,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n
Sometimes they\u2019d argue due to the time it was taking, she says, and he\u2019d \u201cget mad that I\u2019d ask him the names of people with nicknames that he either didn\u2019t know or remember. But mostly we laughed a lot when I would read back the stories I was writing and asked more clarifying questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
What delayed the process even more, though, was rebuilding their Broad Channel home since 2003 in the wake of 2012\u2019s Hurricane Sandy.<\/p>\n
Putting the book together took several years, amidst fighting to get their home rebuilt and move back in eight years after the storm. \u201cWhen I say we were fighting to get back home, I mean, we were fighting. The Build It Back program, lawyers, contractors, DOB. In addition, Lenny was dealing with liver cancer that put him on the transplant list at NYU for a new liver, but he dodged that life-altering bullet, and we were raising our daughter,\u201d Vailakas-De Virgilio said.<\/p>\n
Both originally from Brooklyn, Sophia is an IT trainer at a large law firm. Many might know her also as a Board of Elections poll worker in Broad Channel. She does \u201csome singing with musicians who\u2019ll let me join them, or at local karaoke,\u201d and played the clever thief Autolocus last December in Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cA Winter\u2019s Tale,\u201d a local production directed by an associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company.<\/p>\n
Lenny is a retired NYC high school physical education teacher who still subs as well as lifeguards and teaches and coaches swimming at various locations in Brooklyn. They noted his most rewarding job is teaching special needs kids at the Federation of Italian American Organizations (FIAO) in Bensonhurst. Many have Down\u2019s Syndrome or are on the Autism Spectrum.<\/p>\n
In June 1999, a pair of karaoke hosts called on their frequent singers, including Sophia, as they were starting at a new bar, one owned by Lenny, called the Sunflower Caf\u00e9. She finally made it down by October, singing some of her favorite songs. \u201cI apparently serenaded him without knowing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it took a few more months before we actually went out on a date. That\u2019s when I saw the man he was and is. We\u2019ve been together ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
They were married on the beach at Fort Tilden in June 2007.<\/p>\n
Vailakas-De Virgilio recalls one of their funniest memories. In the book, De Virgilio tells of his friend Rocko, just off the boat from Italy. Saying he was going to sing \u201cBlue Moon\u201d in Italian, he croons out \u201cBlue moon-ada, you saw me standing alone-ada\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
For their nuptials, Vailakas-De Virgilio, who had decided to go blonde at the time, had decided to actually sing the song in Italian after getting it translated.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, with the 16-piece swing orchestra\u2026at our wedding at the beach\u2026I sang \u2018Luna Blue!\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Having celebrated quite a bit, later during her performance De Virgilio stood up, shouting \u201cSing it, blondie!\u201d<\/p>\n
Available on Amazon, \u201cDa Brooklyn I Rememba\u201d has been a hit, with many readers leaving positive reviews.<\/p>\n
Then there is the gentleman who swims at the FIAO, who requested 100 copies to give as gifts at his September 26 wedding, which the De Virgilio\u2019s attended. They obliged with customized copies thanking all for joining the couple on their special day.<\/p>\n
Like all the other sweet, funny, outrageous, touching Brooklyn stories in their book, they say, that\u2019s one more you just can\u2019t make up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Have authors Leonard De Virgilio and Sophia Vailakas-De Virgilio got some stories for you. Together, the Broad Channel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361893,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-361892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}