There is something gracefully disarming about a conversation with Alan Wager and Robert Levinstein. They are so fully engaged as the managing director (Robert) and artistic director (Alan) of the Sharon Playhouse, that most every topic turns into a celebration of the theater, the community, the way in which a potentially nightmare summer has turned […]
A week on, the vacuum still picks up the occasional wiry hair. It would seem that the dining room rug has been crisscrossed 20 times, and yet the mementos of our nighttime guest persist. But, in fairness, back to the beginning.
For those of us who have chosen to […]
It was as if, one morning, without any warning, we arose to find the world a different place.
Because, it was.
Almost overnight, we acquired a new lexicon of terms and a distant geographic awareness that crash landed at home. Wuhan. Bergamo. Social distancing. Shelter in place. Virtual … everything.
It […]
2008 changed a lot of lives. The economy tanked, and people lost their jobs. Businesses closed. The prospects were bleak and those with enterprise and ambition had little time to pivot … to find their next move.
After finishing prep school at Master’s School in West Simsbury, CT, Zachary DeBisschop plied his estimable talents as a […]
The shirt on your back. The comforter on your bed. The flag flying in the yard. All the work of the weaver’s art.
True, most of the delicate hand-work done with mesmerizing rhythm by hand weavers has long ago been eclipsed by one of the early developments of the Industrial Revolution. Great bolts of cloth almost […]
One of the standard images in introductory art history classes is Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Cloth Guild, a 17th century portrait of six distinguished gentlemen who shared a common vocation and were proud members of the local guild. In existence since the early days of the Roman Empire, guilds had become the professional refuge of […]
We live in a strange time – a moment when some of our trusted norms and traditions seem to evaporate with the slide of a “mouse” or the flick across a phone screen. Word processing allowed everyone to become a writer – no more laboring with pens, pads, typewriters and carbon paper. Finish the screed […]
There is a freshness every time Allyn Burrows, artistic director of Shakespeare & Company takes to the stage in the crackling moments before the house lights dim, the actors move into place, and with a burst of stage wash, the play begins.
It is Burrows, after all, who welcomes the audience to one of the stages […]
Meeting photographer Tom Zetterstrom in his Canaan, CT, home is instantly reminiscent of encountering Henry David Thoreau’s explanation for why he established a cabin in the woods overlooking Walden Pond and spent over a year of his life among the maples, pines, and elm. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, […]
The very nature of radio broadcasting in the United States has gone through what Shakespeare termed a “sea change” in the 100 years since KDKA in Pittsburgh, PA, took to the airwaves on November 2, 1920 to announce that Warren G. Harding had defeated James D. Cox in