“Oh Baltimore, man it’s hard just to live …” - Randy Newman, poet Some of the biggest names in the Baltimore writing community – newspaperman Michael Olesker, steelworker’s daughter Deborah Rudacille and novelist Jen Michalski among them – will soon give readings of their work at a saloon in the Parkville neighborhood. The first [...]
Much is made of the last words the dying speak before passing to the next world. The writer William Saroyan, whose stories celebrate living life to the fullest, phoned his exit line into the Associated Press shortly before his death at age 72 in 1981. Maria Santa Zannino, Christmas, 2012 “Everybody has got to [...]
“All booksellers are connected by some cosmic fabric …” - Rock Toews, bookseller That fabric, of course, is literature. From yard sales to estate sales, good books and old manuscripts find their way to pre-ordained shelves. Few tales have illustrated the mysticism under-girding the lives of books better than Cynthia Ozick’s “The Messiah of [...]
It was the favorite book of the poet’s father, Beautiful Swimmers, a collection of tales about the Chesapeake that won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1977. Ted Betts [1931-to-2005] was a native Baltimorean [birth name Theodore Alva Butts] who painted landscapes in watercolor and oil. The coasts of Maryland and Virginia were Delmarva were [...]
“Old man, take a look at my life … I’m a lot like you were …” - Neil Young Rafael Alvarez, 1904 to 1990 My father and I went to the graveyard in East Baltimore on Father’s Day to visit his father. We took grass clippers, a clean rag and a small vial [...]
Joe Ciurca, Senior Surfer Memorial Day was early this year. Windy and cold, the holiday came and went almost a week before the month of May had passed. But early or late – ready or not, rain or shine – the long weekend that honors America’s war dead launches the annual vacation [...]
“Get out in that kitchen, rattle those pots and pans …” - Big Joe Turner It was the kitchen battle that changed Kevin Relf from a kid who liked to cook into a young man who knew he was going to be a chef: duplicating his grandfather’s braised Blue Crab dish so perfectly that [...]
“Everybody’s a dreamer, and everybody’s a star … and everyone’s in movies, it doesn’t matter who you are …” - Raymond Douglas Davies Deragh Campbell as Taryn This year’s Maryland Film Festival, anchored at the Charles Theater, will be screening some 50 feature films and 75 short films this weekend in [...]
In December of 2010, a blogger for the New York Times wrote that Orioles’ Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver had died and gone to heaven. He was, in fact, at home in Florida. “Well I’ll be damned,” said Weaver when contacted by a reporter in Pembroke Pines. Heaven was also relieved. Some three years [...]
"If you ask me, the circus in always in town ..." - guy riding Light Rail, whom no one asked Photo Credit: Feld Entertainment Five pachyderms - bonded trunk to tail - walked west on Fayette Street through [...]