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Kate DiCamillo

One of the dependable joys of being a parent is reading to your child. Children love being read to; we can feel virtuous, knowing we’re doing a good thing for our kids; and great children’s books make terrific...

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Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams sings about addiction — to love, sex, religion, drugs, danger, and memory — in songs riddled with an undeniable, compelling poetry. If her music is any reflection of her life, hers has been a hard one. That she...

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Nicole Mitchell

When people think of the flute, they rarely associate it with jazz music. But there is nothing intrinsically “nonjazz” about any instrument; the main problem with some is their low volume, an issue that was overcome...

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Renée Fleming sings Daphne

Here is the myth of Daphne as adapted by composer Richard Strauss and his librettist, Joseph Gregor: Apollo, god of light and truth, falls in love with Daphne, nymph of trees and rivers. When his amorous advances are rebuffed,...

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Tim O’Brien

A singer, songwriter, and player of almost anything with strings, Tim O’Brien started out in the late 1970s as cofounder of a bluegrass band called Hot Rize that contained its own western alter ego, Red Knuckles & the...

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Michigan Chamber Players

A school of music! The very idea would have seemed preposterous 200 years ago. Of course, there were music teachers and music students then, but teaching music was almost always one-on-one, and usually it was done in the family....

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And the Winner Is

Mitch Albom’s play And the Winner Is, now in an extended run at the Purple Rose through Saturday, September 24, opens as the protagonist enters purgatory. He’s a hunky actor who became a movie star / action hero and...

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Michigan Atlatl Championship

Atlatl and dart in hand, the loincloth-clad hunter quietly crept through the dense ferns, inching ever closer to a lone mastodon lagging behind the rest of its herd. His sinewy muscles tensed as he firmly nocked the end of the...

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Emphasis on Digital

Affable local artist Alvey Jones is an alert magpie. His works in the Washington Street Gallery's current show of digital art include cloth from Jo-Ann Fabrics, wood preservative from Stadium Hardware, a wood mat from...

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Interpol

If I could play one song to show off Interpol's talent, it'd be "Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down," the dreamy-moody centerpiece of their first album, Turn On the Bright Lights. The first time I heard...

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Mark Morris Dance Group

For some time now, concert dance has been losing its footing with audiences. Back in the golden era of Balanchine and the Bolshoi, when Broadway and PBS productions enthusiastically embraced it, dance was a growth industry. Kids...

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Patrick O’Keeffe

Although Patrick O'Keeffe has lived in America for a couple of decades now — a good deal of that time in Ann Arbor — it is clear that his imagination remains firmly rooted in the Ireland he left when he was in...

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Chuck Suchy

Chuck Suchy ("SOO-key") farms land near Mandan, North Dakota. In 1982 someone gave him a copy of "Field behind the Plow," the folk classic by Canadian songwriter Stan Rogers ("Watch the field behind the...

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German Park Picnic

Weaving among the older folks, families, hippies, and leather-clad Harley bikers are gaggles of barely-twenty-one-looking kids carrying buckets of beer. They don't look German. They look like partyers. I approach a...

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The Greencards

Australia is one of just a few foreign lands where American country music has truly flourished. Maybe to execute country music really well it's necessary to wholeheartedly embrace certain uniquely American forms of poor...

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Manuel Valera

From its earliest days, American jazz has been influenced by its southern neighbors, from Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Jazz rhythm and phrasing reflects the clave beat of much Afro-Cuban music, but the connections...

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Ypsilanti Garden Tour

The Ypsilanti Garden Club's 2004 Garden Tour exemplified every gardening principle found in modern landscape books — laying out gardens like rooms, creating added interest with garden art, installing water features,...

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Beth Patterson

If there were ever an artist who won on points for ambition, Beth Patterson's the one. She sings lead vocals and, on her recordings, backup too. She plays an arm's-length list of instruments. She writes her own songs,...

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The Jaycees’ Carnival

It's hot, all right, and although I'd rather be home hanging out in the backyard, my boys have noticed the carnival and been promised a ride on the bumper cars. They don't forget. The parking lot is full of teenagers...

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