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Illustration by Lara O’Dell, from The Rumpus I had taken off on a steep backside break and popped up to my feet on my little yellow-and-blue four-finned fish. It was about eight o’clock on a New Hampshire evening. The sun was low, throwing a harsh and bright orange light that…
Read More »With the Lowell Folk Festival coming this weekend, here is some background on the event. As some of our readers are aware, for the past two years I’ve been writing a book about the origin and impact of Lowell National Historical Park. What follows is an excerpt from a chapter…
Read More »The following is a poem from the early 1980s, which appears in my book “Strong Place” (1984). This poem was also one of four featured in Yankee magazine in 2009. Merrimack Street is the same and different today, with preserved buildings and a new array of businesses for the most part.…
Read More »Kendall Wallace of the Sun kindly mentioned in today’s Saturday Chat column the progress being made by the Greater Lowell Music Theatre, another piece of Lowell’s creative-economy puzzle that has been put in place. There are audience niches yet to fill, as the GLMT experience demonstrates: 1,200 people in two…
Read More »In the past few years at the Lowell Summer Music Series at Boarding House Park, I have been struck by the superlative musicianship of the artists presented by the organizers, Lowell National Historical Park and the Lowell Festival Foundation. Night after night the featured artists and their bands demonstrate the…
Read More »The media coverage of family friction involving the owners of the Market Basket supermarket empire sent me back in the Time Tunnel to the mid-1960s, maybe 1965, when the Ford Mustang was the sports car of the moment (the model had been unveiled at the 1964 World’s Fair in New…
Read More »Jack Neary is one of our contributing writers at rh.com. We cross-post his blog entries, but he hasn’t been blogging a lot because he has been busy inventing a regional music theatre group, among other things. This past weekend, more than 1,200 people attended two outstanding performances of “Guys and…
Read More »The game today is in the bottom of the tenth inning in Oakland. No matter how today’s contest turns out, the Red Sox have had a productive first half of the season. Few of us in Red Sox Nation expected them to be in such a strong position at the…
Read More »Paul McCartney read aloud a sign down front in the crowd that summed up the situation nicely: “Macca-holics: There Is No Cure.” First, I will post Sarah Rodman’s exuberant Boston Globe review of Tuesday night’s concert at Fenway Park, and then will offer my thoughts. Web photo by Barry Chin…
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