No time to be bored
Public and private schools in Rochester will close twice this winter, as they do every year, for the last week in December and the third week in February. The kids will be home, with you, for some fun, meaningful family time. Don’t panic. There are plenty of things to do. Outdoor activities For no-fuss, nearby…
Celebrate the gift of watching
Nothing gets cinemaniacs more excited than the holiday season. It’s not the smell of Kwanzaa cookies or the incessant tolling of Salvation Army bells that gets them going, though. It’s the bounty of award-quality films making its way into local theatres to displace swill like I Spy and Sweet Home Alabama. This year is no…
Fear and loathing in the County Legislature
An air of jubilation swept through the chamber of the Monroe County Legislature in the final hour of November 12. Nineteen lawmakers from both parties had voted to override County Executive Jack Doyle’s line-item veto of a bipartisan budget. The plan that passed raised the property tax rate almost 2.5 percent in order to restore…
Six Characters in search of Pirandello
The University of Rochester’s International Theatre Program is playing Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Authorto surprisingly potent effect. It’s hard to tell, though, whether that theatrical strength comes from, or despite, director Michael Barakiva’s “adaptation” of this modern masterpiece. Like two other plays from Pirandello’s early collection, Naked Masks, Six Characters…
Wormhole
Walking into Dicky’s for the first time in five years, I thought I stepped into a wormhole. Nothing had changed since that night in ’97 I’d last left there after losing at darts, drunk. I wandered from the bar to the tables in the back, searching for some sign of time’s passage. There was…
Mother, daughter, and farm
Susan Hurd Machamer and daughter Amy Machamer, partners in Hurd Orchards Farm & Market, are fascinating people. Before every Hurd tasting, each takes a turn talking about the evening’s themes, and these women have a lot to say. They represent the sixth and seventh generations of Hurd family farmers, and that history is one favorite…
Chamber Potter mixture as before
Wisely perceiving (and abhorring) a vacuum between Halloween and Thanksgiving, the producers of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets apparently decided to anticipate the holidays and kick off the season a trifle early. Since their movie will assuredly harvest many millions of dollars and will probably still be playing somewhere at Easter, the maneuver…
As subtle as a club to the head
The Emperor’s Club was originally going to be called The Palace Thief, after the Ethan Canin short story upon which it’s based. But the film’s producers must have reasoned, “Heck, we’ve already ripped off Dead Poet’s Society; we may as well pinch its name, too.” (Rumor has it that another suggested title was Mr. Hundert’s…
Vocal ease
As a teenager, Karrin Allyson listened to all the usual suspects: Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Carole King, Aretha Franklin. She sang folk music and joined an all-female rock band called Tomboy. Then she heard Nancy Wilson. “When I finally discovered jazz it seemed to encompass all that I was really interested in doing,”…
The XX files
I sauntered into the plastic-surgery palace on East Avenue cocky and self-assured. I was attending the Botox lecture not as a woman desperate to turn back the hands of time, but as a strong believer in inner beauty. I was on a fact-finding mission — why would anyone submit to cosmetic procedures? What kind of…
City’s2002 Holiday Guide
The holidays are here again, and whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or some winter pagan festival your family celebrates, chances are you’re tired of doing the same old stuff.
Designing your own holiday
This year, you can recapture with your own two hands what the holidays are really about. All it takes is a little effort, a little inspiration, and, yes, just a little daring. People will say you’re doing that simple-living thing, getting back to basics. And you will make it look good, too. Here is a…
Thanks in absentia
Last year at this time, I wrote about my family, about the meal we were planning for Thanksgiving, and, especially, about my mother. Here is some of what I said: “My brother, Nat, says that food is our family’s religion. Although my mother is deeply spiritual, organized religion was absent from my childhood. Still,…
It’s a wonderful lie
Jorge Silva Years ago, when our son was a harmless bundle of blue blankets and diapers, my husband and I decided to go along with the Santa con, mostly out of laziness. We had discussed how annoying the holidays were, how Santa had become the fictitious embodiment of a consumer culture gone mad, how we…
