Words and Music

“BUT YOU KNOW it’s going to end the same way again!” my father would complain. “His face comes at the screen and the bars close across it!” ...

From the Vault Dept .: For many years, no Troy Music Hall concert could begin without Fire Marshall John Tilton’s no-smoking warning. “Fire ...

From the Bookshelf Dept .: As a writer for Esquire and the NY Times , Gay Talese made his name with colorful, well-researched articles about...

Guest Blogger: George Ade . Keeping the English language safe and pure always has been a priority for bluenoses, who found their beezers sui...

THE RECENT PROCTORS THEATRE visit of the hit show “Million Dollar Quartet” reminded me that the same sum had been bruited six years earlier ...

Lily Whiteman Makes the Pageant Semi-Finals Miss New York Teen | 20 January 2013 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

From the Vault Dept. : Asked to contribute to a group of pieces about falsehoods, I titled this “Fuck You, Virginia,” but Metroland ’s headl...

From the Computer Vault Dept .: Computers were becoming a bigger-than-ever deal on Broadway in the mid-90s, so, as a writer for the then-gar...

A PRE-SHOW PROJECTION reminds us that in December 1956, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley joined Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis in the Sun Rec...

Across the USA Dept .: Another installment from the series I wrote describing a cross-country camper-bus trip my wife and I took in 1989. Th...

From the Pages of History Dept .: Today’s Inauguration festivities remind me of a far less happy event, twelve years ago, which I chronicled...

From the Lab Dept. : Eight years ago, I looked at some cookbooks that celebrated scientific approaches to gastronomy. Since that time, Ferra...

Late 1920s, about the time I moved there.

From the Vault Dept .: When, some sixteen years ago, my wife decided to acquire a horse and ride again regularly, it fell to me to groom the...

MY FAMILY MOVED from New Jersey to Connecticut when I was seven, placing this scared second-grader in a big, unfamiliar school. Which decide...

From the Vault Dept. : The Ensemble Rustavi, which was founded in 1968 and is still going strong , paid its first visit to the U.S. in 1990,...

Guest Blogger: William Dean Howells . In his day (and for a long while thereafter), Howells was known as “The Dean of American Letters.” Bes...

From the Vault Dept .: On 12 May 2013, a scant few days after he turns 94, Pete Seeger will perform at Proctors in Schenectady with his hal...

From the Vault Dept. : Last weekend, David Finckel and Wu Han returned to Union College’s Concert Series to play Brahms’s Cello Sonata in E ...

Date and photographer unknown