Words and Music

From the Vault Dept. : The piece below ran in the Schenectady Gazette thirty years ago, and the group profiled is still active, with interne...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Albany’s restaurant scene has evolved slowly. Forty years ago, only a single Indian restaurant could be found; s...

Guest Blogger Dept.: Ellen Terry owned the stage, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, during the last two decades of the 19th Century; she...

MARLENE DIETRICH BECAME A LEGEND long before she died (at 90, in 1992), a legend invented by director Josef von Sternberg, with whom she mad...

YOU’D THINK IT HAS MUCH TO DO WITH FLAVOR, this diet of ours. It turns out we’re making choices based on an amazing range of factors, includ...

WILLIAM BLAKE PUBLISHED HIS “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” a collection of metaphysical poems with mystical illustrations, at the e...

From the Record Vault Dept .: As noted in the lede, there had been plenty of versions of this set in the past and the years since have seen ...

LEONARD BERNSTEIN’S “WEST SIDE STORY” wasn’t by any means the first time Latin-influenced music came to Broadway. Irving Berlin’s “Watch You...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Let’s welcome Don Marquis to these pages. Best known for the free-verse, lower-case writings of the reincarnated cockr...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Ten years ago, my wife and daughter and I treated ourselves to a post-Labor Day getaway to the mountains of Verm...

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

WHY DID MARFA SOBAKINA SICKEN AND DIE immediately after her wedding to Ivan the Terrible?  Scholars speculate that it was the result of a fe...

SASHA MARGOLIS IS A VERSATILE VIOLINIST, an accomplished actor, a witty novelist – but at heart he’s a tummler. He wants you to enjoy yourse...

DUTCH SCHULTZ IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE buried his $5 million fortune in the Catskill woods; his delirious deathbed confession has sent countless ...

Guest Blogger Dept. : George Ade was a best-selling author in his day, and his legacy persists among those who honor the encomia paid the Ch...

From the Computer Vault Dept. : Again, from the pile of magazines that recently turned up, a piece I wrote in 1994 about the variety of port...

From the Computer Vault: Back before the Flood, computerists had to call one another to share files and such, and an enterprising techie wi...

From the Food Vault: The expected life of a restaurant is, sadly, brief. Unless it’s a chain with endless advertising money behind it, able...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : Eight years ago, the avant-garde quartet Brooklyn Rider snuck into Schenectady to inflict its adventurous p...

Guest Blogger Dept. : There’s no question in my mind that Henry Livingston wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” the poem we incorrectly title...