December 2013 Now here’s a mystery. You’re a visiting diner to the Kennebunks. Wine stewards in many of the glittering bistros whisper, with unreserved enthusiasm, “If you want to sample a local legend, try Rat’s Reserve.” It is all that. Eateries as diverse as the...
November 2013 Among the saints and strangers who braved the New World on the Mayflower, John Howland (1592-1672) is solidly in the stranger category as the wild man, the headline grabber, the howler. Among all the Pilgrims, he has the most to do with Maine. Why is he...
September 2013 If you dig straight down, you’ll come out in China, as the saying goes. What a startling cultural disconnect. If you dig straight down, say, from Deering Oaks, the closest civilized spot (I use “civilized” in the lightest sense) on the extreme opposite...
July/August 2013 Even with all the traffic zooming along the coast this summer, it isn’t every day the image of a 1968 Mustang Fastback with BULLITT on its Maine license plate rises into view in your rear-view mirror. “I bought this car the same year the Steve McQueen...
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...
