October 2012 In the span of five days, two talented Mainers gave their final bows and went to that great sound stage in the sky. Aren’t they now playing wonderfully against each other, even if they never happened to share the limelight here on earth? Phyllis Thaxter...
September 2012 I’m driving on Route 1 in Falmouth behind a silver SUV with the vanity plate FUGAWE. Hello, 1920s vaudeville (look it up–that’s what the Internet is for). The “Church Lady,” the functionary at the Department of Motor Vehicles who decides whether our...
July/August 2012 It’s the latest pub talk in the Old Port. What would you do with House Island–if you could pony up the $4.85 million to buy it? John Cougar Mellencamp toured Clapboard Island in Falmouth Foreside after we came out with our “Dream Islands” story...
Summerguide 2012 Portland, we hardly know the North, South, East, and West of you. At the eastern extreme of our city on Jewell Island (next stop, London) is a circular enclosure called The Punch Bowl. Even when the sea is storming around it, inside the bowl it’s as...
May 2012 Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt’s great-great grandparents owned and lived in the landmark brick townhouse that’s our magazine’s headquarters at 165 State Street. This came to light when Hunt appeared in the television show Who Do You Think You Are? and...
April 2012 “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.’ –Bob Seger How could we have known that when Whitney Houston visited Portland in February, 1996, she was at the top of her game? Just 32, she’d dazzled audiences with The Bodyguard and seemed to have an...
February/March 2012 He’s an artistic gadfly and bohemian, engaging downtown denizens in animated discourse about politics and current events. But don’t look for him at Starbucks on Congress Square. Because he’s dead. The name Ralph Frizzell, a colorful artist born in...
Winterguide 2012 I read an article in an AirTran inflight magazine over the holidays and came out of it with the distinct impression that 21st-century boosters and marketeers in Pennsylvania are now crowing about having “invented” the whoopie pie. It’s official, they...
December 2011 Our surveillances are so sophisticated. Who’ll be the fly on the wall at your company Christmas party? Some things, perhaps, we shouldn’t be allowed to see. I’ve just seen one of those things–something PETA might very well call a snuff film for fish....
November 2011 If James Joyce defines a pier as “a disappointed bridge,” I wonder what he’d call the Megaberth–a disappointed pier? Hardly. The Megaberth is a fantastic success. Designed to accommodate some of the largest cruise ships in the world, it’s already enticed...
October 2011 News travels faster than a snow leopard in the Information Age, but if you are culturally relaxed enough to consider Portland’s fortunate geography in relative terms, it traveled even faster in 1805. In fact, our 1805 could blow the doors off the speed at...
September 2011 On a dazzling fall day, it’s hard not to be thoughtful about the evil that flew out of Portland Jetport 10 years ago, on September 11, 2001. The bizarre tidbit that we slept with the enemy the Night Before is something Maine may never live down....
