Ann Lemons Pollack

  • Fair Game

    While spies always are exactly what the title of "Fair Game" implies, they are entitled to better treatment by their employers than Valerie Plame got from the George W. Bush White House, which leaked her name to a newspaper columnist after her husband, Joe Wilson, found no evidence to support the Bush Administration's rush to

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  • Christmas Windows and Food

    Just a note to say that our pals at Zagat have blogged about the foodie windows this season at Barney's NY, the downtown Manhattan department store. Pretty amusing, and you can read about it and look at photos here.

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  • The Crossing

    Is St. Louis’ best bang for the restaurant buck (to use Tim Zagat’s phrase) the tasting menus at The Crossing? Quite possibly. Jim Fiala’s flagship restaurant offers a delicious, flavorful four-course meal for $32 or $45 per person, in a location where menu entrees range from $26 to $38. Yes, St. Louis, the servings are

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  • My Tehran For Sale

    Filmmakers don't care about "fair and balanced" any more than Fox news does,so "My Tehran for Sale" is an interesting look at popular culture and youthful rebellion in Iran, as seen through the eyes of writer-director Granaz Moussavi. Her sometimes feisty, sometimes tragic film plays tonight (Nov. 16) at 7 at the Tivoli Theatre as

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  • Entitled

    Looking for the woman who took your order? How do you call for her? Joe talking about that in St. Louis Magazine's blog Relish last week.

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  • The Good Doctor

    The charm of the short story is in its brevity. There is no time for unnecessary characters, overdrawn exposition. Things happen. An action. a reaction. Bada-bing. Michael Frayn described it best in “Noises Off.” “Get the sardines on. Get the sardines off. That’s life, that’s theater, that’s art,” he wrote A lot of Neil Simon

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  • Fat City

    Once upon a time, in 1972, when I was a young(er) film critic at the Post-Dispatch, one of the first movies I wrote about was John Huston's "Fat City." A boxing story set in seedy Stockton, Calif., it resonated with me for its stark honesty, and I remember it often as a comparison with sloppy,

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  • My Dog Tulip

    A man and his dog. The subject of hundreds of stories of loyalty and friendship and love, from Albert Payson Terhune’s “Lad, a Dog,” and John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley,” to the Welsh legend of Gelert, Prince Llewelyn’s hound, killed in a tragic error and memorialized in the little Welsh town of Beddgelert. “My Dog

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  • Rock ‘n’ Roll

    By the time Tom Stoppard was nine years old, he had lived in four countries and survived a war. Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, he and his family moved to Singapore in 1939 to escape the Nazis. When a Japanese invasion was imminent, in 1941, he and his mother fled to Darjeeling,

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  • Valerie Lemon

    Valerie Lemon has a lovely voice with an embracing tone, and she looks good in an outfit that took its inspiration from a tuxedo, with a black cravat over a flowing white collar and outsized white cuffs. She opened a four-night cabaret run at the Kranzberg Arts Center last night, and the 75-minute set allowed

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