Mall marauders
Rebecca’s black Coach bag had a stuck zipper, so she didn’t close it as she shopped at Kohl’s one weekday morning. A pickpocket took the opportunity to steal her Visa and bank cards. In the hour before she...
Read More2009 December
Flash with a Heart of Denim
Pitaya, the new women’s clothing store in half of the former Shaman Drum (the half that was once Wild’s Menswear, if you go back that far), hit the ground running. The second week it was open, the staff was unpacking...
Read MoreAA News Alums
The people thrown out of work when the Ann Arbor News closed in July are getting on with their lives. After twelve years at the News, photographer Leisa Thompson is snapping senior portraits, weddings, and images for some local...
Read MoreCharles McGee at Eighty-Five
“It taught me a lot about what I didn’t want to see,” says Detroit artist and former EMU art professor Charles McGee of his experience as a marine in post-bomb Nagasaki. The quote comes from a video in the...
Read MoreClayton’s Dilemma
With the narrow defeat of a police service millage in Ypsilanti Township, sheriff Jerry Clayton has to figure out how to patrol the county’s -second-largest community with ten fewer deputies–and also what to do with...
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Seafood Trio
When I moved to Ann Arbor from the East Coast ten years ago, seafood withdrawal was my only fear. From cherrystone clams on the half-shell to Chinese steamed carp, from Mediterranean seafood stews to mackerel sashimi, from...
Read MoreSing Along with Santa
The excitement starts to build from several blocks away when we see family after family with little girls in red velvet dresses, white tights, shiny black shoes, and red ribbons in their hair. The sidewalks are slippery as...
Read MoreAnn Pearlman
Time for an unlisted number? That’s what friends are asking Ann Pearlman. The question throws the therapist, author, and longtime Ann Arborite for a loop. Yes, she’s living out every writer’s fantasy: Simon...
Read MoreOnline Rhubarb
We received 174 responses correctly identifying the Fake Ad on p. 11 of the November Observer. The ad was for a book, Can You Have an Online Rhubarb?, self-published by Ed Nimby, a character who’s appeared in several...
Read More“Everything is on the table”
Ann Arbor was the only municipality that supported the proposed two-mill “enhancement” tax in the November election. “We did gauge the temperature of this community accurately,” says Ann Arbor PTSO...
Read MoreUnderstated Success
“The building was stuffed to the gills,” says Kelsey Museum director Sharon Herbert.In contrast to the high-profile addition to the U-M Museum of Art across State Street, the expansion of the Kelsey, the U-M’s...
Read MoreLet ‘er rip
Straight-arrow former U-M baseball coach Don Lund, who guided the Wolverines to a national championship in 1962, was once a skilled sign stealer. That’s one revelation from Playing Ball with Legends, a new biography of...
Read MoreCrime Map: October 2009
Burglaries dropped sharply in October, with 65 reports (including attempts). Thanks to a timely call from a northeast side resident, “We caught two [burglars] right in the act” in late September, says AAPD Det. Lt....
Read MoreDonald Hall
Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006-2007, and Ann Arborite Jane Kenyon, his second wife and an extraordinary poet in her own right, left Ann Arbor in 1975 to move to Hall’s ancestral home in rural New...
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