Summerguide 2013 It’s funny, but because Pluto has been unceremoniously dumped from the planet roster and become the Nicollette Sheridan of our Solar System, we have to update an old story (“Planet Highway,” by Tricia Summers, October 2005): This summer, don’t miss...
May 2013 Thanks to a neologism dreamed up by Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), we can suffer from extimacy issues, too. Say you and your loved one are snuggled in front of a stone fireplace with two free glasses of Courvoisier VSOP Five Star cognac (hey, it’s my example). A...
April 2013 I love the phrase in film noir, “He turned up missing.” Or “She turned up missing.” It’s phenomenologically impossible. And yet the Beatles turned up missing on American Idol recently. Challenged to cover famous Lennon/McCartney hits, contestants shrugged...
February/March 2013 Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? Who knew the baseball that dribbled past Red Sox star Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the ‘86 World Series vs. the Mets was picked up by sweet, shy Charlie Sheen, pre-tiger blood, in 1992 for $93,000? In...
October 2013 It’s zero dark thirty on Route 1 in front of Maine Medical Center in Scarborough. A snow plow tunnels through the darkness, widening the road for safe passage when…BOOM! What the heck was that? Sadly, it was history going bump in the night. The winter was...
Winterguide 2013 The new release of Gwen Thompson’s prizewinning novella Men Beware Women brings to light a very three-dimensional sense of our magazine. Across 28 years, so many gifted writers and artists with incredible talent have been drawn here to work with us so...
December 2012 Jamie Wyeth says he can hear the horn from his house on Monhegan. “It constantly blows. It’s so funny. People ask, ‘Aren’t you bothered by this horn?’ You get used to it. Manana is so different from Monhegan. Manana is very stark, no trees, exposed....
November 2012 I don’t know this house, but I know this house. We love bringing you “extraordinary perspective” at Portland Magazine. Sometimes, it catches us by surprise, too. I was touring our House of the Month on the windswept edge of Bald Head Cliff when I felt...
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...
