After Long Island comedian Tom Kelly stumbled upon a discarded Syosset diploma along with two childhood diaries on the streets of New York City, he took to social media to find their owner. He said he found the diploma on the corner of 74th Street and Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side on Sunday, March 17.
“I was walking down the block, and I look down and I see a diploma for Syosset High School,” said Kelly, a Massapequa native.
The diploma, belonging to Alexandra Dayna Durst, made quick rounds on social media. Because of Kelly’s Long Island content, he said he has acquired a large following in the area, and word traveled quickly about the missing diploma.
The initial video, which has since accumulated more than 30,400 views on Instagram and almost 200,000 views on TikTok, spread quickly, tracking down the Durst family the same day.
“By 5 that afternoon, I had a message from the girl and her father separately saying ‘we’re on the Upper West Side, and we’re happy to get the belongings back,’” Kelly said.
Returning the belongings to the family had been made more complicated by the fact that the owner uses the nickname “Sandy” and has since birth, according to her father, John Durst. Kelly said most of her online profiles use the nickname and because she didn’t appear in a quick Google search, social media had been a big help.
Kelly said he wanted to return the belongings simply because they seemed important. He said he had not known how they ended up on the street.
“This could fall into the ‘proverbial’ wrong hands,” said Kelly, who said he lost his own high school diploma in Hurricane Sandy.
“Treasured, vulnerable moments from being a freshman wound up in the hands of a very immature comedian who happened to do the right thing,” Kelly laughed.
Sandy’s father said his wife and daughter had been going through a closet of old belongings at their West Side apartment and had left him a box to take down to the trash.
“They put it out by the door for me to carry down and put in the garbage. And I went down, I stuck it in the garbage can, put the lid on, walked away,” Durst said.
Later that day, he said both he and Sandy had received numerous calls and texts about the diplomas and diaries. By 8 p.m., he said Kelly had stopped by the apartment to drop off the belongings.
“It was just a nice thing that he did,” Durst said.
Now about to earn yet another degree from law school in May, Sandy is currently based in New York City, where she runs an all-female band called “Feral Romance” that has performed in Central Park and other spots throughout the city, Durst said.
What Kelly and the Durst family soon found out was that they were neighbors on the Upper West Side. The Dursts, who had moved into the city shortly after their children graduated from Syosset High School, live just one door down from Kelly, he said. Had it not been for a lost diploma on the street, the two never would have met.
Durst said that he has attended Kelly’s comedy shows at the Westside Comedy Club since their meeting on St. Patrick’s Day and that the two have kept in touch.
Kelly said one of his many jokes about Long Island is that it’s a community where “you know a guy who knows a guy.” Finding his way to his next-door neighbors is just another example of how the Long Island community can rally together, he said.
With so many coincidences and mishaps that led the two to meet, Kelly said he is left wondering what it all means in the grand scheme of things.
“I’m trying to find a deeper meaning of this story. Was I meant to meet her father? Was I meant to teach people a lesson, to shed their personal documents? Was I meant to teach children to get your stuff out of your mother’s and father’s house because you never know when they’re going to throw your crap out?”
