2012 March

Collected Works Expands

After closing briefly to knock out a wall, Irene Patalan has expanded Collected Works, near the Farmers’ Market, into the former Lily’s Garden (the flower shop moved down the street near Zingerman’s last...

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Taxing questions

“We’re heading into tax season, so we’re getting a lot of questions on where people can find forms and other kinds of tax information,” says Laura Pershin Raynor, one of the librarians who staff the...

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Eat and Seoul Street

What draws me to takeout food is, of course, the lure of carrying it home, where husband and dogs await, along with comfy clothes, a crackling fire, a bottle of wine minus an exorbitant restaurant markup, maybe a movie or...

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Ann Arbor, Brazil

In late January, I was in Rio de Janeiro. Walking along the New York-style streets of the Leblon neighborhood (condo towers, boutiques, heavily booked restaurants, wine stores), a few blocks from the vast beach full of...

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Any Quonset huts in the area?

Q. Are there any remaining WWII-era Quonset huts in the area?A. Named for the Rhode Island locale where they were first made, Quonset huts look like a half cylinder laid on its side. More than 150,000 of the prefab...

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Dead Man’s Shoes

“Are you calling me fat?” the rotund prisoner asks the inmate in the next cell. It’s dirty and dark in the North Dakota jail, and soon Jean-Phillipe DeLaRoux Baptiste, better known as Froggy, will have problems...

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Suburban Students?

“This will destroy the entire neighborhood!”So warns one of sixty or so pissed-off neighbors who packed Grace Bible Church’s meeting hall on a cold Thursday night in January. Four years before, nearby residents...

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LIVE Happy Hour Has a Reprieve

“We’re here to prove that you can have a nightclub that’s not a sleazy place,” says Adam Lowenstein. In February, Lowenstein and four partners were reopening the pair of troubled nightclubs they had...

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A Stone Carver

After a long string of homegrown scripts, the Purple Rose is presenting A Stone Carver by East Coast playwright William Mastrosimone. Best known for his 1980s Extremities, and more recently for Bang Bang You’re Dead,...

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The Kingsley Post

“This ornate facade is hidden away on Kingsley,” writes Joel Batterman–“809 E. Kingsley,” adds Michael Ferguson, identifying February’s photo of what Kristen Schleick further decscribes as...

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Visit Alaska!

Last month’s Fake Ad, on page 71 of the February issue, invited readers disappointed with Michigan’s mild winter to visit Alaska to experience an old-school one. We received 166 entries correctly identifying the ad,...

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The Curator Who Cared Too Much

“I am instructed by my dean to have no communication with the press.”That was the response of the usually chatty Steve Ball when the Observer asked about the response to a widely circulated Associated Press...

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Match by Match

Match By Match’s soft, hypnotically intricate sound grabs me from the first song. Gray Bouchard stands center stage with his acoustic guitar and curious tuft of dyed blond hair hanging awkwardly above his forehead....

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American Dream

For a good many of us, the American Dream is a house. It’s the very real house that we own, or once lived in, or imagine moving into someday. Thus, it’s fitting that several pieces in Gallery Project’s current...

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Bill’s Beer Garden

Before you say the last thing downtown Ann Arbor needs is another bar, imagine an outdoor courtyard under twinkly lights, surrounded by mature espaliered trees. It’s a casual German beer garden that also features Michigan...

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“I Never Thought it Would Happen”

A lot more people are working in Washtenaw County today than there were two years ago. But many others are still feeling the recession’s pinch.After cresting at a painful 10.1 percent in October 2009, the nation’s...

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