Month: January 2003

Wintertime begins with deceptive familiarity, as if it’s going to be a frothy dinner-theater bedroom farce with all the wacky, naughty shenanigans familiar to regular viewers of Frasier. Spending a romantic weekend at the family cabin, young Jonathan is just about to propose to his girlfriend when—whoops!—in walks his mother wearing a negligee and swilling…

Penumbra’s milestone 25th season is in a big way due to a guy in the audience during their very first production—August Wilson, arguably the foremost living dramatist in America. In 1981, Penumbra staged Wilson’s first professionally produced play, forging a relationship that’s stayed close ever since. Wilson went on to wow Broadway with his 1984…

Have you noticed? Knitting is back in a big way—we find more and more of our Gen X friends picking up the needles and trying their hand at a sweater for the kids, a hat for mom. Here, a traveling exhibition finally arrives in the heartland of American Scandiphilia—literally hundreds of amazing samples from this…

William Gibson may not exactly be the next Philip K. Dick, but who wants to be a Dick? Gibson has achieved significantly more commercial success than his sci-fi forebear, and may not have the same literary gravitas, but he still can spin a pretty great yarn. The coiner of the word “cyberspace” also created cyberpunk…

Funny Times, the monthly humor newspaper, may seem a little old-school compared to hip upstarts like The Onion and ModernHumorist.com, but it can still deliver a quality product. With essayists like Garrison Keillor and P.J. O’Rourke and comics by Lynda Barry and Matt Groening, their 60,000 subscribers always get their money’s worth of humor with…

Klinkenborg got our attention a decade ago when he was a visiting professor down in Northfield. Ever since then, he’s been writing thoughtful little meditations on the New York Times op-ed page under the rubric “A Rural Life.” We’re not sure how one ends up with a job like this—paid to say whatever crosses your…