AT LARGE

‘Tis the season. Winter is now a fading memory. With warmer temperatures, windows and doors open, and the brackishness of closed houses drifting away, it’s time to offer up our trinkets and treasures to the annual tradition of yard sales. Based on the geographic origin of our childhoods, our designation for this rite of spring can be quite different. Call them yard sales, rummage sales, [...]

If it had happened once, it likely would have simply been an anomaly – an odd moment in the universe when reasoning got temporarily suspended. It was, however, the third time in less than two weeks that a similar moment had presented itself. “That’ll be six dollars.”   The total of two “senior citizen” admissions to the local high school basketball game would be six [...]

Childhood memories of black and white television. The Lone Ranger.  “Hopalong” Cassidy. Wyatt Earp. Gene Autry. Gabby Hayes. Bass Reeves. Who? Bass Reeves. He was not on the list of western heroes who filled the screen with 30-minute installments of fantasies about the taming of the frontier. His moment came many decades later when, after a lengthy development process, the limited series drawn from the [...]

With the shorter days and early darkness of winter, the screening of Napoleon began as an afternoon matinee and ended as night fell. It is a long film, spanning years of turmoil and combat in the early years of the 19th century.   The “Reign of Terror” had finally come to an end and the new “rock star” of the French people, Napoleon Bonaparte, emerged [...]