2004 May

When my friends and I snuck into Nichols Arboretum with stolen dorm cafeteria trays on winter nights to go sliding down the hills back in the mid-1980s, the Arb was a wilder place — mostly just leaves and paths. When I visited...

Imagine taking your ten-month-old baby to the movies. You go into the theater knowing full well that unless the baby takes a nap, you'll be lucky to see even part of the show. You expect to endure the disapproving looks of...

In the dark, bitter cold winter of 2003, twenty-three local singer-songwriters loaded up in the back room of Leopold Bros. recycle-everything-even-the-gas-you-create-while-making-beer pub and waited for their turn to play two...

The Flatlanders — Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Joe Ely — are college buddies who played in honky-tonks in Lubbock, Texas, in the early 1970s. They recorded a country album, Jimmie Dale and the Flatlanders,...

James Hynes's two previous books, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror and The Lecturer's Tale, both received a good deal of national attention for their blend of biting academic satire and sometimes...

"You know, Jan," the president of a Christian record label once complained to Detroit-area songwriter Jan Krist, "if you would just mention Jesus in your music, we could all make a lot of money." Instead,...

The piano trio — with bass and drums — is one of the classic jazz combos that developed during the bebop period. Earlier pianists often played alone or with a drummer. Later, Nat King Cole popularized the...

Mushrooms are bizarre little beings. They inhabit a weird twilight realm somewhere in between animal, vegetable, and mineral. My dad used to tell me about searching for mushrooms with his great-grandfather in Ceylon after a...

The Underpants, playing at the Purple Rose through June 5, is based on an early-twentieth-century farce by an obscure German playwright, Carl Sternheim, resurrected and adapted by Steve Martin. Forget Sternheim, whoever he was....