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Taming the Big House

When Richard Frey was a U-M student in the 1960s, he had a friend who brought five bottles of Boone’s Farm wine into Michigan Stadium for every football game. “He’d drink one per quarter, and one at...

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Pioneer’s Track Stars

“Every year is my last year,” Don Sleeman jokes.Sleeman began coaching Pioneer High’s cross-country team in 1968 and added the track program in 1974. In more than four decades, his teams have won six state...

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Ann Arborite Choi Palms-Cohen

Lately, Choi Palms-Cohen has been juggling two very different roles. At the Institute for Continuing Legal Education in Ann Arbor, she spends her days in sales and customer service, helpful but anonymous–taking calls from...

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Family Business

There’s no job like owning and running your own small business–except maybe keeping it all in the family.”Everything is always your responsibility,” says Duncan Cole, owner of Sam’s Clothing Store...

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The Knapp Gap

In a recent chat with a longtime Ann Arborite, the conversation wandered to the subject of favorite restaurants, then narrowed to reflections on now-defunct eateries whose passing left a gap in a city known for gastronomic...

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Incredible Journeys

My manicure with Lezen Nguyen takes thirty-five minutes. He gently rotates each finger, plying the tools of his trade to ensure each of my nails is shaped just right. “Pretty color,” he always says as he deftly...

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Ann Arborite Artist Lynda Cole

When Lynda Cole hit Manhattan after graduating from Michigan State in 1970, she dreamt of making it as a clothing designer. She got a few jobs but was glad to return to Michigan after two years. “New York is no place for a...

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Acoustic Brews

Buying beer at the Ark can be a cumbersome process. First you must buy an Ark membership, then wait in what can be a long line to select, order, and collect your beer from a volunteer barkeep. So it’s only natural that...

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Wright by the Night

The Palmer House has found new life as a guest house.The house at 227 Orchard Hills has no TV, small bedrooms, and a galley kitchen–and it’s booked all month at $300-$500 per night. The appeal: a chance to experience...

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Meijer Adventure

The stars twinkled overhead with a cruel innocence, mocking my band of adventurers.We were stranded.Our shopping trip now a distant memory, my friends and I were stuck in the store’s parking lot, waiting for a bus back to...

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October Babies

In 2002, when U-M music composition instructor Erik Santos traveled to Japan for a three-week band tour, a friend joked he was going there to fall in love. During the final week of the tour he met Toko Shiiki, a stage actress...

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Celebrity Authors

Jay Leno, Madonna, Billy Crystal, Julie Andrews, and Whoopi Goldberg are talented, wealthy, and famous. Less known is their authorship of children’s books–some of which will be on display later this month at the...

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Musictime on Maryfield

A little before four every Wednesday afternoon, a crowd starts gathering at Maryfield Wildwood Park.Just north of Dexter Road, the small park is horseshoed by Linwood, Westwood, and Maryfield streets. It is usually quiet, with...

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ArtPrize

In mid-September, Ann Arbor artist Margaret Parker packed two semitrailers with art and rode with them to Grand Rapids. It wasn’t a one-woman show–it was a single giant structure that she built in a south-side...

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Stiff Box #12

“How fun to see the Lucas Samaras sculpture,” writes Julia Jickling. “Sometimes I know these and sometimes I don’t, but this sculpture I have enjoyed too many times to resist entering!” Katie DeBona...

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Answer This!

Writer-director Chris Farah, thirty-four, and producer Mike Farah, thirty-one, shot Answer This! in Ann Arbor in August 2009. It’s a coming-of-age story about a young man who emerges from the shadow of his father, an...

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The Blackbird Flies North

The Blackbird Theare celebrated its new freedom with nude male wrestling.The scene, in the theater’s current production of Women in Love, would never have been possible in its former home on Pauline. While the space in the...

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Eat. Write.

Really? Fifty thousand of you thought Seva really served stewed rhubarb? Really?We don’t know how else to explain that only seventy-eight cagey Fake Adders spotted the ad for the Eat. Write. restaurant review website on...

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The Romance of the Car

The Christmans’ Maynard Battery is in the Allen Creek valley on Miller, just east of the railroad bridge. The blue paint on its sign is so chipped and pitted it’s nearly impossible to read, and the cinder-block...

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Gas-Free Lawn Care

On a humid July morning, the owner of Green Wheel Lawn Care bikes up to Bill and Betty Ingram’s house on the corner of Brooklyn and Westminster in Burns Park. On a trailer behind him Jeff Monchamp tows an electric lawn...

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