Managing a move from the Litchfield Hills to the outlying suburbs of Boston is no mean feat. In our case, it involved the standard “tag sales,” farewell dinners with friends, all of which ended up with the de rigueur “We’ll see you soon,” and multiple visits to the town transfer station to make deposits on […]
For the moment, let’s consider it “accidental intersection.” Coincidence seems too grand a designation, so it could only have been a simple twist of fate that the first song emanating from the car stereo speakers after we had emerged from a screening of Alex Garland’s Civil War was Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi. The irony […]
‘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 […]
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 […]
All our lives we have been inundated with moving images: television, film, social media. We are so inured to the constancy of the motion, color, and sound, that when an image holds still, it causes a momentary catch – the need to register what we are seeing.
It was a moment like that that captured the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ah, it’s December! It’s time to roll out the traditional holiday favorites: Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, Polar Express, It’s a Wonderful Life, and that all-time classic, Fiddler on the Roof.
Fiddler on the Roof?
True, the musical based on Tevye and His Daughters by Sholem Aleichem, is not a Christmas story. Far from it. […]
There are powerful rhythms in art, music, and literature that certainly don’t subscribe to a strict 4/4 time. Images will reappear years after we first see them. Passages from books that were favorites a decade ago will suddenly manifest themselves in an article, a quote on the late news, or a weather-worn bumper sticker on […]
Somehow, “spring cleaning” got passed over this year. Perhaps it was the end of a strange New England winter and the slide into a rainy summer season that let the annual rite of purging slide by, unfulfilled. So, we decided to institute another annual tradition – fall cleaning.
Closets are always a great place […]