Words and Music

From the Classical Vault Dept .: Back when daily newspapers covered classical-music events, I often had the assignment both to preview and r...

From the Theatrical Vault Dept. : At the beginning of 2019, the 92-year-old Hal Holbrook announced that he was retiring his one-man show, “M...

From the Culinary Vault Dept. : Now it’s 40 years for the Raindancer Restaurant in Amsterdam, NY, an area institution that is holding its ow...

From the Theater Vault Dept. : Life during social sequestration has inspired a torrent of movie-musical watching, the more vintage the bette...

From the Vault Dept .: Back in the day, I was eager to write about anything. When there was nobody else available or willing to cover a 1986...

From the Terpsichorean Vault Dept .: Early in my arts-reviewing days, I covered a lot of dance, which was a joy. Then it became apparent to ...

From the Classical Vault Dept .: Conductor Arturo Toscanini’s legacy lives on in an endlessly recycled set of recordings he approved for rel...

From the Vault Dept .: I started the new year, back when the year was 1996, with a list of sardonic resolutions that I, then in the midst of...

From the Food Vault Dept .: One of the joys of skidding into the year’s end was diving into the cookbooks that crossed my desk. Being no fan...

From the Food Vault Dept. : I ended the year 2008 with a review of an Albany-area diner, the Metro 20. Two years later, it changed hands and...

AT SOME POINT during my single-digit Christmas years, I learned to impress my parents and other elders by declaring that what I really, real...

EVEN IN THIS STAY-AT-HOME version of the Christmas season, we're bombarded with music. Music that easily can drive the sensitive human i...

Guest Blogger Dept .: We’re hurrying O. Henry back into the fray in order to set the holiday mood for us. He did it brilliantly in his most ...

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE smack-your-forehead, it’s-so-obvious ideas: collect the other sides of all the 78s that Harry Smith chose to include in ...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We welcome, for his first appearance on this blog, the great juggler and ventriloqist – and he had something to do wit...

From the Computer Vault Dept .: And then there are the seeming orphans that crouch in old computer directories, pieces that I wrote many yea...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : The internet can be as opaque as it is revealing. I dug out the below review, which I wrote 35 years ago, a...

From the Theatrical Vault Dept. : Thanks to a recently acquired scanner that whisks piles of papers into PDFs – and its accompanying OCR pro...

IT'S THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the lavish Thanksgiving dinners we've served here at Jollity Farm, so we weren't about to let ...

Guest Blogger Dept .: This Thanksgiving slice-o-life comes from O. Henry, who spent the dawn of thge 20th century relentlessly chronicling t...