Name: Christopher Cuomo
Age: 41
Neighborhood: Upper East Side
Occupation: Journalist; Last weekend he hosted the Men’s Urbanathlon in Flushing Meadow, with another one on the roster for San Francisco on Sunday, November 13.
Who’s your favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional?
The obvious answer is my pop, but that would neglect my mom, my wife and kids … too much agita. So I go with Courageous Cat. I always believed Empire City was NYC. Look at the background. Had to be.
What’s the best meal you’ve eaten in New York?
Anything my mother makes.
In one sentence, what do you actually do all day in your job?
Every day seems to be a fight: fight to tell the important stories; fight to get people to trust the media enough to tell their story; fight with the government, corporate or other power source that doesn’t like our story; fight to get there first, to get the facts straight, to tell it the right way, and most of all to figure out how to get people to watch.
What was your first job in New York?
Bouncer.
What’s the last thing you saw on Broadway?
Imagination Movers with my wife and kids.
Do you give money to panhandlers?
Yes, but I often feel I choose the wrong ones.
What’s your drink?
Vodka in a glass … ice to look less like a souse.
How often do you prepare your own meals?
I love to cook, but my wife is better at it. So I cook whenever Cristina doesn’t want to.
What’s your favorite medication?
Vodka. Or anything that makes me less allergy-sick.
What’s hanging above your sofa?
Usually one of my kids.
How much is too much to spend on a haircut?
A decent barometer for men is not spending more than the price of a large pizza pie and a six-pack of Rolling Rock. For women, whatever doesn’t start a fight when you get home.
When’s bedtime?
Any time.
Which do you prefer, the old Times Square or the new Times Square?
The new. I love the innovative experiences surrounded by all that old-school cool. What people miss about the old I found depressing and also something that needed to be healed — the host of human desperation — not preserved.
What do you think of Donald Trump?
He paid me to jump off one of his casinos for charity. When I survived, he offered me double if I would do it again. Enough said.
What do you hate most about living in New York?
Sometimes everything … but I know this: The worst part of living here is still better than living anywhere else for me.
Who is your mortal enemy?
All the guys who do what I can’t in the Men’s Health Urbanathlon, bounding over cabs and walls … making my city a playground, while I am the doughy asthmatic in the corner.
When’s the last time you drove a car?
Every weekend. Cuomos are car people. Vintage muscle that I try to fix myself, fail, and then send to my brother.
How has the Wall Street crash affected you?
[It has] given me an opportunity to show how people have been destroyed by greed, how those who cost the country the most seem to somehow still benefit the most, and how, despite it all and all the yap, nothing has changed for the better.
Times , , Post, or Daily News?
I read everything. Everyone has an angle.
Where do you go to be alone?
My garage: open the tool box, grab a tool, make it work, hope the success translates to what I am failing at elsewhere in life.
What makes someone a New Yorker?
To be fearless. The ability to back down from no one and nothing; the deep-seated belief that you can take on any challenge, or at least, that there is no reason you shouldn’t try.
