A smile and a sale
Ashley Terrace, the new condo at the corner of Huron, has suffered from bad timing and worse architecture (see “The Good, the Ugly, and the Hideous,” p. 21). But it’s found a persuasive salesman: one of its...
Read More2008 December
Tuck & Patti
The duo of guitarist Tuck Andress and vocalist Patti Cathcart perform with in-ear monitors. “The result of these is that everything but Patti and me disappears while we are playing,” says Tuck. They draw the listener...
Read MoreStorming the court
When the U-M men’s basketball team beat Duke on December 6, fans rushed the court to celebrate. And it wasn’t just students on the floor of Crisler Arena: the giddy crowd included a couple of middle-aged friends of...
Read MoreBeyond diapers
When a store is called Tree City Diapers, people figure it sells nothing but diapers. And when Molly Ging started Tree City Diapers in her basement in 2003 to cater to a growing demand for cloth diapers, diapers were all she...
Read MoreSelling the Holy Toaster
“The skylights leaked from day one,” says University Reformed Church pastor Sung Kim.The URC building at 1001 East Huron was erected in 1962 at the height of Ann Arbor’s brief flirtation with modernism....
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MoFo Karaoke
When I arrive at the Elbow Room, Stevie Wonder is pumping through the dark, dingy space. It’s wonderfully funky. The husband-wife team that runs MoFo Karaoke is setting up, but I don’t see any bubbles. That’s...
Read MoreThe Glass House
The Glass House Cafe, which opened in September, sits in a beautiful location—in Palmer Commons, part of the university’s life sciences complex on the inside curve of the Huron-Washtenaw junction. The cafe occupies one of...
Read MoreBig toy store news
In early November owners Tricia and Hans Masing, who started the original Tree Town Toys in Traver Village in 2006, opened a second location in Briarwood’s Sears wing.Briarwood doesn’t attract many mom-and-pop shops;...
Read MoreBlue Tractor
A few days before the Blue Tractor opened, while the floors were being polished and the tractor parts being hung on the walls, brewmaster Fred Rouse was offering anyone in sight a sip from a beaker of sludgy tan liquid that was...
Read MoreApartment 3A
Jeff Daniels is author of about a dozen plays, most of which have been produced at his Purple Rose Theatre. And if he ever turns up on one of those “This I Believe” spots on NPR, I think I know what he’ll say:...
Read MoreArgo Ultimatum
The future of the aging impoundment off North Main has been debated for years. Rowers want the pond preserved and dredged, while the Huron River Watershed Council advocates removing the dam to restore the river’s natural...
Read MoreThe Black Pearl
I’m having trouble with my metaphors here. I want to say that walking into a restaurant for the first time is a blind date. But if you had as bad a first date as we did on our initial outing at the Black Pearl, it would...
Read MoreWhat’s that light?
John Beilein’s first year at the helm of Michigan basketball looked like more of the past, only worse. The Wolverines started 4–8, including a loss to perennially awful Harvard—now coached, ironically, by Beilein’s...
Read MoreDinosaur Discovery Day
Inside the elegant 1920s golden marble lobby at the U-M Exhibit Museum, children gather around a folding table to guess how many Brazil nuts are in a jar. A staffer restocks cold apple cider and cookies. A flushed three-year-old...
Read MoreWolverines versus Buckeyes
If you think the Michigan-Ohio conflict has gone badly lately, you should see how it started. That’s one takeaway from former Ann Arbor News editor Don Faber’s new book The Toledo War: The First Michigan-Ohio...
Read MoreBolcom & Morris
Every good song recital should have a theme, even if it’s only “An Evening with Frank Sinatra.” Otherwise how is the audience supposed to know what it’s in for? So for Joan Morris and Bill Bolcom, the...
Read MoreAdam Zagajewski
Of the poets who have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature during the last quarter century or so, almost all of them are primarily concerned with history and the individual’s place within the historical swirl. Of...
Read MoreCoach blue
The U-M’s miserable football season tested the patience of first-year coach Rich Rodriguez. Fans who attended practices reported hearing a lot of cussing at the young team members by the head coach and his staff. “Bo...
Read MoreShelby Lynne
Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien was, of course, Dusty Springfield. Shelby Lynne is, of course, Shelby Lynne. The intersection of these two singers—one a phenomenally popular beehive-haired, blue-eyed-soul...
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