This is the man who melted the Cold War. This is the man who led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991. This is the man who signed two broad disarmament pacts and ended communist rule in Eastern Europe. This is also the man who did a Pizza Hut commercial in 1997.
But what was he doing in the Trenton, New Jersey on Monday afternoon?
Espionage becomes us. We traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts this weekend on a reconnaissance training mission to discover restaurants and entertainment venues that snarky Harvard students frequent. Posing as Mr. Black and Mrs. White – and alternately Vladimir Bolshoi Khoi and … Read More
“TRUST but verify,” goes the Old Russian proverb, and such a maxim can apply to the Guggenheim’s current “RUSSIA!” exhibit, which seems to require further probing – further verification – to find the reason for the obvious compensation attempted by using all capital letters and an exclamation point in its title.
Out of all the streets in the world stretching from Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg to Lombard Street in San Francisco, I have spent the most time traversing Witherspoon and Nassau here in my hometown of Princeton, watching the dynamic of businesses, the ebb and flow of success and decline.
Roger Q. Mason is controversy. Roger Q. Mason is change. Roger Q. Mason is revolution. “Every good revolution happens behind locked doors,” he proclaims, sealing the portals leading to Theatre Intime’s Charrier Room. He’s been directing rehearsals for seven weeks … Read More
That I spent the first 13 years of my life living with a Jamaican woman is always striking to those who best know me. Seldom, I suppose, is the topic broached in casual parley. So when I reveal I have … Read More
Given the impenetrable penumbra of mystery surrounding the secret letter from the Center for Jewish Life (CJL) to President Shirley Tilghman about the Chabad Affair, one may question the current adequacy of the support for Jewish life at Princeton. Though … Read More
Though it might otherwise be dismissed as a horribly-written play, Me, Myself & I inspires additional disappointment, flowing as it does from the pen of three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee. A moving and clever piece, it is not. Perhaps the only element that could have saved and justified its stodgy formal progression—an insistent meta-theatricality—comes off as forced, hackneyed, dismissible. Yes, Albee reveals, these are actually actors onstage. We get it. Got it. Good.
Tickling the teeth, the tongue, the lips, Dr. Rabinowitz-Drillstein would jab various metal objects into my mouth during my visits to his dentist office. Though the majority of dentists will have at their most depressed of times the faint scent of Scotch or some strong digestif, my humble tooth doctor lacked this characteristic, and quite mysteriously so.
For a kid with a fear of the dark, public bathrooms, flying, and dying alone, I embarked intrepidly on a transatlantic cruise that mirrored the intended route of the ill-fated Titanic of 1912 from port at Southampton to New York … Read More
Rabbi Eitan Webb, when I come to interview him early last Wednesday in his Nassau Street apartment, is juggling with ease five things at once. The sun rages to highlight red flourishes in his beard and the car beeps become louder as the Princeton Borough awakens, but he is preparing to have some thirty students over for Passover seder, arranging to have a Matzah Ball party with a middle weight boxing champion, balancing his son on his lap, updating the Chabad website, and fingering an official letter from President Shirley Tilghman.
Like the juiciest of farts, the relieving and incredibly human production of The Playboy of the Western World arouses in the depths of your belly that sort of visceral, ancient laughter perhaps only possible and appropriate in Irish villages. It’s … Read More