Words and Music

HISTORY INSISTS that the Duchess of Bedford, on a visit to the Duke of Rutland in 1840, grew uncomfortable peckish as she awaited supper. It...

From the Vault Dept .: Inspired by my voluble chronicle of my recent travels, here’s a throwback piece. It’s chronicles a delightful stop on...

THIS IS WHERE I GOT stuck in the bathtub. My wife and I share plenty of wonderful memories of our three days in England’s Cotswolds region, ...

Travel Diary Dept.: My wife and I uprooted ourselves to travel for a month this summer. I’ve given a couple of accounts of our version of o...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Speaking of travel, here’s Robert Benchley on the subject. Drawings, as usual, are by Gluyas Williams.                ...

WE HAVE NEVER crossed an ocean before. We have never even taken a shore-hugging cruise. With airplane travel growing ever more hellish, our ...

ONE OF THE ANNOYING FEATURES of the 1976 Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor movie “Silver Streak” was the amount of time the various characters spent...

AMY ENGELHARDT IS A VERY FUNNY PERSON. I hesitate to label her a comedian, although comedy seems to bubble from the soul of her being. But ...

THE WORLD OF SHAKESPEARE’S “Midsummer Night’s Dream” begins and ends in a nobleman’s home, taking us into the woods only after the plot has ...

WHENEVER I LAMENT the lack of cultural awareness across the U.S., I point to the support given to the arts in Europe, where it’s generally u...

I DISLIKE speaking with strangers. In fact, I resist speaking with almost anyone, but circumstances rarely allow such silence. Pandemic isol...

THE WORLD OF OPERA taught us that when a couple falls into a duet, they are in some way bonding. Usually it’s love. Sometimes it’s hate. It’...

THE EXPERIENCE OF SEEING Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” has changed in recent years. I’ve seen a variety of productions – that variety aided ...

EVERYTHING THAT MAKES Puccini’s 1896 La bohème one of the opera-loving world’s all-time favorites is on display in the current Glimmerglass...

MUSIC GIVES A SOUL TO A PARTY. Not recorded music; that’s a cop-out which has become all too normalized because we’ve gotten so far away fro...

From the Vault of the High Cs Dept .: Thirty years ago I reviewed a pair of NYC Opera performances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a...

THERE’S A RECEIVED NOTION that American food is exemplified by the blandest of processed inventions, those rubbery slabs of “American” chees...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Here’s the restaurant review I wrote 30 years ago, offered now just to make me feel all the older. I had moved t...

MY MOTHER WANTED ME to move back in with the family. It was 1974. I was eighteen and already had been living on my own for two years as I fi...

From the Jazz Vault Dept. : As noted elsewhere in these pages, I’ve been a Scott Hamilton fan since I discovered him at Eddie Condon’s on We...