Summerguide 2014 So the General Services Administration (GSA) is selling Boon Island Light this summer. Bids start at $5,000 for this stick on a pile of rocks that’s always belonged to all of us, and to no one. At the Black Pearl, our family’s cottage on Gooch’s...
May 2014 When we slide our chairs back in the Old Port, we sometimes bump into pieces of our lost geography. On Moulton Street, in the rathskellar of the Old Port Tavern, there’s a bar, stage, and dining area. Lining it is the gray stone wall that was once Portland’s...
April 2014 Where do web pages go when they die? If you see Error: 404, it means the page isn’t there anymore. So much for the eternal promise of the Internet. We ran into a real-life analog of this recently when one of our staff members stopped at 30 Preble Street to...
February/March 2014 To celebrate the beginning of our 29th year, we’re proud to bring you “The Best of the Best.” Along with our up-to-the minute restaurant reviews, events listings, and arts coverage in departments like Goings On, Chowder, and Maine Classics, here...
Winterguide 2014 We’ll be a lot more creative when we start thinking of the Portland Pirates as part of the creative economy. My wish for the New Year is for both sides of the Cumberland County Civic Center versus the Portland Pirates to stop digging in their heels...
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...
