Presidents have their social secretaries to tell them when to applaud during a White House concert. The rest of us, President Obama says, are on our own. But some of today's rigid rules need rethinking. Last Saturday night at the Boston Symphony, Peter Serkin performed brilliantly as soloist playing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2. The first movement …
Category: Culture
Remembering where we were
Fifty years ago today, the woman was not yet a journalist. She was barely 24, a Wellesley College graduate, living in a thoroughly domestic life in a garden apartment in Norwood, getting used to days and weeks totally different from what she might have experienced were she born a generation later. She was surrounded by other, …
Red Sox victory: How sweet it is!
I can't remember ever being happier to be wrong! There will be tons of words written about the first Red Sox win in Fenway in 95 years. None will be enough, nor will mine adequately express our collective joy. As CNN's John Berman, a Red Sox fan, said this morning outside Fenway: worst to first, …
Terezin Music Foundation touches core of humanity
When my husband and I visited the Terezin [also known as Theresienstadt] concentration camp outside of Prague in 1990, we could only begin to imagine the horrors the Nazis visited upon the political prisoners and Jews housed there. The barracks where human beings were packed in, disease rampant, prisoners starved, worked to death or killed, hundreds of thousands kept for months or …
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Bullpen cop not a picture-perfect image
Local writers (e.g., Dan Shaughnessy) have reveled in the image of Boston Police Officer Steve Horgan raising his arms in a celebratory pose as Tigers outfielder Torii Hunter fell over the bullpen wall chasing David Ortiz' grand-slam homer. It was certainly a joyous moment for all of us Red Sox fans in an extraordinary moment …
What’s in your wallet? Can you say Governor Alec Baldwin?
Ronald Reagan. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Clint Eastwood. Sonny Bono, Al Franken. All actor/ entertainers who won roles as politicians in real life. Now here comes Alec Baldwin. His MSNBC show , Up Late, which debuts tonight, may be the next step in his flirtation with politics. At least, that's what Variety seems to think. Baldwin may prove too …
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“All the Way” scores at A.R.T.
Political junkie alert! You can get a fix in Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston's portrayal of Lyndon Johnson at the American Repertory Theater. (We were lucky to be taken, along with two other couples, by dear friends celebrating their anniversary.)A.R.T.'s new production All the Way starts right after this towering figure's ascension to the Presidency following assassination of …
Nervous at All Star break
I'm a life-long Red Sox fan, though I have some fair weather tendencies. I even admit to some fair weather anxieties. The major one is that, if the Red Sox are in first place at the All Star break, I take it as a bad sign. It's the idea that the boys of summer simply …
Warren unfairly under fire on affordable housing
Newton Mayor Setti Warren is catching flak from some Garden City liberals for withholding $1.4 million in city-controlled federal money for a ten-unit building in a former fire station in the Waban section of Newton. The so-called Engine 6 project would house nine chronically homeless and an attendant, bringing to the residential neighborhood individuals with a history of …
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Book ideas for summer nights
My family's return from a glorious week in London shows how salutary it is for a political junkie to purge herself- albeit temporarily - of politics. So before I get sucked back into the nearly unspeakable frustration of focusing on the ongoing national political dysfunction, I want to reflect on the pleasures that lie between the covers of a …
