In short order she had placed a regular column, "Parlor and Side-walk Gossip," with the Sunday Times and Noah's Weekly Messenger.
The brothers have gradually widened their net of parlor regulars partly through their work as musicians.
There is also a no-limit poker parlor where Ben Affleck (a regular) has played until dawn with $1,000 chips.
Several regulars had identical ink, and a woman even left the bar, visited a tattoo parlor around the corner and returned with her arm branded.
"People come week after week," Jim Nanos, of Setauket, one of the regulars, said one evening during intermission in the parlor room, where a couple of 19th-century portraits gaze down on the performance area.
When his father-in-law's license renewal was turned down the next year because of problems with a partner, Salerno stepped in and bought the operation--which consisted of a dilapidated parlor and bar and a roster of regular, dollar-bet customers.
In the last couple of years, as Elaine Kaufman faced on-and-off health problems, some of the regulars at her restaurant played a particularly morose kind of parlor game.
"Where are all these people going to hang out?" For at least another week, the regulars will keep going to the OTB in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, an aging parlor that is now a landmark to its neighbors.
In his fictionalized renditions, a seemingly ordinary man and a woman (a massage-parlor receptionist played by Mr. Jia's wife and his regular star, Zhao Tao) respond to the pressures of their otherwise unremarkable lives with violence that is at once emotionally, horrifyingly realistic and visually baroque.
In the front parlor is a pewter mug that belonged to one of the tavern's regulars, Daniel Webster, then a Congressman from nearby Marshfield.
