It was the best of times… “Leave the Kid Alone” is a seriocomic memoir set in the free and easy safety of the 1950s. Stevie is seven years old. He lives with his parents and siblings above the family-owned saloon, restaurant, and country inn – The Washington Crossing Inn, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The family business is, and always has been, peddling liquor to people who, by all accounts, would have been much better off without it. The tale is told in two distinct voices, Stevie at seven, and Stevie the adult: each with his own jaded perspective on life at seven-going-on-eight, and the world in general. Stevie’s domain is populated with a never-ending parade of colorful characters, from Eugene, the king-sized, ever-wise, Seminole Indian bartender, to the combat veterans of WWI, WWII, and Korea laboring in the kitchen, to the free-spirited waitresses, to the Broadway celebrities carrying on nefarious affairs, to Stevie’s mob-connected godfather. Added to this mix is Stevie’s family; an overbearing older sister, two self-absorbed brothers, blasé hard-drinking, hard-working parents, a grandmother he never knew existed, and a tyrannical great aunt who Stevie discovers lifeless in her bedroom on Easter Sunday. The tale unfolds over the course of a single year: Quaker school, toiling in the kitchen, summer at the Jersey Shore, the Shakespeare Festival in Canada, bussing tables on Thanksgiving, Christmas chaos, his father’s intrusion into reenactment of George Washington crossing the Delaware, and culminates with Stevie reflecting on the emotional challenges and pressures his clan faced on a daily basis while residing above this raucous establishment. “Child labor laws do not apply when it comes to a family run business.”