Wives run wild
Everybody runs in Ray Cooney’s Run For Your Wife. John Smith, the taxi driver who’s married to two different wives, runs all over London trying to hide them from each other and, for that matter, also trying to hide two different policemen and two upstairs tenants — all from one another, and the truth from…
Do you know this man?
Tom Hampson has been an avid birdwatcher since he was a child growing up in Allegheny National Forest. He’s been a jazz lover since his teenage years and a radio host since his college days. But his listeners may still have been surprised the night he did a show of jazz tunes based on birdcalls.…
Recapturing the past with violence
The producers of The Butterfly Effect open the movie with a prose epigraph citing the familiar statement from chaos theory about the beating of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the planet eventually leading to hurricanes on the other, as if that notion explained their picture. In reality, the movie owes more to…
Good fun in the sun with Shirley
Residing in a city with a film festival that has trouble getting its big name honorees to show up (failure might be impossible, but so is luring Pam Grier and Lainie Kazan to Upstate after Columbus Day), it practically made me giggle to hear that the 6th annual Sarasota Film Festival, which wrapped this past…
Chilean cool
The distance between the coat check and the stage at the Blue Note may have been only a few dozen yards, but to Claudia Acuña, in the mid-1990s, it sometimes seemed miles way. Acuña took the coat-check job at the world famous Manhattan jazz club after moving from the security of her home in…
The threat to America
This year’s presidential election will be one of the most important in the nation’s history. Voters will decide whether to re-elect a man whose policies are destroying much of what the nation stands for, are alienating other nations of the world, and are fueling terrorism. Many Americans — perhaps most — continue to support…
Weird library science
The word “librarian” may not conjure up the image of a guy laughing over a stack of records. But Gerry Szymanski is no ordinary librarian. “It seems that pop music covers are the ones that are the goofiest,” says Szymanski, circulation services librarian at the Eastman School’s Sibley Music Library. He’s working on…
Home-school advantage: choice or segregation?
The best school for your children may not be the one within walking distance. Instead of being theoretically tied to their neighborhood school, city kindergarteners next school year will have a choice of several schools. The schools available to them depend on which zone they live in. The city school district has been divided…
Say what?
Bound for Iraq with a seven-person peace delegation, 21-year-old Khury Petersen-Smith was waiting for a connector flight in Amsterdam. He spied a half dozen Americans in the airport, all headed for Iraq, and all wearing the “KBR” logo. He knew that stands for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, a friend of people in…
Working their way up
In a recession that won’t say die, words like “underemployed” and “underpaid” take on a life of their own. They also consume some people’s lives. City resident Brent James knows this. A single parent, he works two part-time jobs; each pays around $6 an hour, he says. One of these jobs is…
