Bessie Smith Sings The Devil's Music

Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith sang the blues or “the devil’s music,” as some called it. She rose to fame during the bluesiest of eras, the 1920’s. Toughened by a poor childhood, Bessie’s hardscrabble life was interrupted by a few brief years in the sun.

During the 1920’s, Bessie signed a recording contract [...]

Smelling Your . . . Silence!

Silence! The Musical

We immersed ourselves in The Silence of the Lambs this weekend. We watched the movie twice straight through, then watched the outtakes, then the documentary and then the movie straight through again.

All this watching was preparation for Silence! The Musical, a parody of the 1991 movie playing Off-Broadway at [...]

CANstruction: Canned Food Art at the WFC

Canned! Mr Potato Head

When everyone seems to have their hand out, how does a city food bank grab a New Yorker’s attention?

I can’t think of a better way of engaging people in charitable giving than the CANstruction® competition. In CANstruction®, teams of designers, architects or engineers create exhibits using canned [...]

Tribeca Grill becomes a Standard

My first visit to Tribeca Grill was sometime during my first year in New York, in 1992 or 1993.

I was overly impressed that Robert DeNiro owned the restaurant that I WAS EATING IN. I really  thought DeNiro might be standing quietly at the end of the bar, notice me and my friends and [...]

The Confines of New York City

At some unidentifiable point, after I lived in New York City a long while, I started talking about leaving. I would say, if it weren’t so cold in Wisconsin in the winter, I would have already moved back to Milwaukee.

The sore point and source of my complaints always boils down [...]