If you go on this tour in person, make sure to spread it out over several days.
Leslie Bridgers
Columnist
Leslie Bridgers is a columnist for the Portland Press Herald, writing about Maine culture, customs and the things we notice and wonder about in our everyday lives. Originally from Connecticut, Leslie came to Maine by way of Bowdoin College and never left. She joined the Portland Press Herald in 2011 as a reporter and spent seven years as the paper’s features editor, overseeing coverage of arts, entertainment and food.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Deep Water: ‘Putting to Bed,’ by Marita O’Neill
Maine poems edited and introduced by Megan Grumbling.
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Posted inArts & Entertainment
Sure, Eddie Van Halen was a guitar god – but what made his music divine was his quest for the perfect sound
Let’s start with the intro of “And the Cradle Will Rock” blasting out of your speakers, a monsoon crossed with a jet engine. When Van Halen released that song in 1980, the opener on the band’s third studio album, it didn’t sound like anything on Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40.” Few understood why at the […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Review
‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’ marks Radha Blank as not just a fresh filmmaking voice, but a wise and accomplished one too.
Calling Radha Blank a fresh new voice on the filmmaking scene is just the kind of perhaps-vaguely-condescending language that she sends up so cleverly in “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” a wry love letter to New York, middle-aged angst, creative blockage and artistic survival against daunting odds. Sometimes those odds are of one’s own making, in the […]
Posted inRecipes
Surprise! This nourishing soup is studded with cheese tortellini.
Lately, I’ve been craving two things, which seem to be diametrically opposed but manage to come together in this soup: familiar comfort and an element of surprise. The base of it is like the minestrone, which is such a staple for me I could, as they say, make it with my eyes closed. Onion, carrot […]
Posted inReview
‘On the Rocks’ has all the right ingredients – Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Sofia Coppola – but it’s a flavorless dish
I always have a reporter’s notebook at the ready when I review a movie, just in case I want to jot down a telling visual detail, snippet of dialogue or revealing actorly gesture. After watching “On the Rocks,” Sofia Coppola’s latest urban picaresque, all I had was a blank page. In this cocktail peanut of […]
Posted inRecipes
Chicken cutlets can stretch your dollar in a delicious way
Sometimes stretching an ingredient – making it feed four instead of two – can be detrimental to a dish, but on rare occasions it can actually make it better. Case in point: Pan-fried chicken breasts. The breast is not my favorite part of the bird – that would be the thighs – but when I […]
Posted inFood
Coronavirus steals a chef’s sense of taste, and there’s no telling when it might come back
RIO DE JANEIRO — Two days until opening day, and the chef was sitting at a table outside the kitchen, feeling uncertain. He’d been cleared to leave the house after recovering from a coronavirus infection that almost anyone would describe as mild. But not for a chef. When COVID-19 came for Dudu Mesquita, who prepares […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Hundreds of theaters are closing as the pandemic upends the film industry; here are the biggest releases you’ll have to keep waiting for
Regal Cinemas, the country’s second-largest movie theater chain after AMC Theatres, will be suspended operations at its 536 locations on Thursday – a bold move that its parent company, Cineworld, attributes to an “increasingly challenging theatrical landscape.” The decision affects approximately 40,000 jobs and was primarily driven by delayed release dates and continued closures in […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Review
Art review: CMCA Biennial takes on tough topics
Among the diverse works of the 34 artists, current controversies continually emerge.