Aperitivo, named for the Italian pre-dinner tradition, will feature low-alcohol cocktails, amaro, mostly Italian wines, and charcuterie board offerings with local, seasonal elements. “This is kind of your stop either before you go to dinner or when you’re done with dinner,” she says.
The life of a jazz musician: sometimes you’re headlining a concert house in front of an audience who came to see you specifically and listen with rapt attention, and sometimes you’re playing a club where your music blends with the chatter of the crowd. Hey, a gig’s a gig. But what’s it like for the musicians onstage? And how are the audiences in the Ann Arbor jazz scene?
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Kathy Kosobud, a longtime Ann Arbor resident and educator, received the David McMahon Human Rights Award from the Michigan Education Association in April. The award honors moral and ethical leadership in the fields of human and civil rights.
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In late February, when I started researching Alyshia Dyer (Washtenaw County’s first female sheriff) and her first year-plus on the job, there was already much to unpack and discuss.
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In May 2024, a week before police stormed and dismantled the Gaza solidarity encampment on the Diag, first-term Democrat U-M Regent Jordan Acker wrote on social media that he would never budge from his view that the university must not divest its endowment from companies that profit from Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. “If these protesters do not like these answers, they are free to run for office and try to get the people of Michigan to elect them,” Acker posited.
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After a whopping 99.6 percent of the members of the Ann Arbor Education Association (AAEA) voted against a tentative teachers contract in April, two big questions remained: What now? And, also, why did the union make everyone vote on an agreement that was so universally loathed?
Read MoreThe demolition and clearing of three major buildings (a motel, an office building, and another building used by a church congregation and others) south of the intersection of Stadium Blvd. and Washtenaw Ave. [next to the plaza that houses Trader Joe’s and other businesses] were completed many months ago. But the large signs of the former occupants still are in place. Why?
A dean’s designs, turn-of-the-century homes, appearances can be deceiving, and railroad-side living.
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The theater at Hear.Say Brewing + Theater is small and intimate, with rows of chairs facing a low, narrow stage backed by black theater curtains. On a cool spring evening, it was packed with couples on date nights and an excited group of improv enthusiasts behind us, who I gathered were students in one of Hear.Say’s classes.
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Elizabeth von Groeller, age seventy-two, passed away from endometrial and colon cancer on March 9, 2026. Liz was born in Detroit, Michigan, of Austrian and Canadian parents. From an early age, however, her European and Canadian relatives visited her or welcomed her in their home countries.
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Alfred Slote, beloved husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and friend, died Sunday, April 26. He was ninety-nine. Born in 1926 in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents, Alfred earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English at the University of Michigan. He later returned with his wife Henrietta Howell Slote and young family to Ann Arbor in 1956 to begin his “day job” writing and producing educational television shows at the university’s Television Center (now Michigan Media). He was also a prolific author, best known for his novels for preteens, many set in “Arborville.” He published twenty-eight books in all, two of which (Jake and Finding Buck McHenry) were made into movies. He was a man of a million stories, of enormous energy, funny, smart, generous, athletic, curious, and kind. Not surprisingly, he has written his own obituary:
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Dick Sarns passed away on Sunday, April 19, 2026, at age ninety-eight. He was an engineer and entrepreneur, yet he is best remembered as a devoted husband to his beloved wife of seventy-four years, Norma. They shared a beautiful and adventurous life together.
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Philip Lawrence Roe, much loved husband, father, grandfather, and scientist, died on April 26, 2026, at the age of eighty-seven.
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Robert “Bob” Guenzel was born in Detroit, Michigan, on November 22, 1941, to Robert and Violet Guenzel and died peacefully on Sunday, February 8, 2026, following a long decline caused by Lewy Body Dementia.
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