Ann Lemons Pollack
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Crumbs From the Table of Joy
One of the problems with being a young playwright is a determination to gather everything you want to say into the play you're writing. The result may be entertaining, but it also brings extra length, too many words (thank you, Peter Shaffer), some artificiality in setting up straw men and knocking them down and the
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Life During Wartime
"Life During Wartime," writer-director Todd Solondz's fascinating new movie, opens today and expands the James Thurber-E. B. White fables about the Everlasting War Between the Sexes to the War Between, Among, About and Throughout the Sexes. In some respects, it is a loose sequel to his 1998 film, "Happiness," but it certainly works as a
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Cairo Time
People who like to drive in heavy traffic, or walk in busy cities as cars swarm by, will have some fun at "Cairo Time," which opens here today. So will viewers who feel a tingle of romance or desire when they think of Cairo, or the Pyramids, or the Nile. Toronto-based Ruba Nedda wrote and
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Cleanflix
It's tough to battle the Establishment, whether your cause is good, bad or somewhere in the middle, and Hollywood sure showed those Mormons in "Cleanflix," a documentary about movie content in Utah which headlines the Webster University Film Series today through Sunday. There are gray philosophical, political, moral and legal areas everywhere in the
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Mojo Tapas Restaurant and Bar
It's not the same old/same old for South Grand. Mojo Tapas Restaurant and Bar offers some serious contemporary cooking delivered mostly tapas-style in the midst of the neighborhood's ethnic restaurants. The space that formerly held Erato has been re-thought and re-painted, and chef-owner Eric Erhard brings the new to the kitchen, too. And wonder of
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New York Week 2010, Part 2
A bargain in midtown Manhattan? Astonishing but true, and pretty darn tasty as well. (Cheap is easy; cheap and good is hard.) Le Relais de Venise is one of six restaurants, the original in Paris, two in London, one each in Barcelona, Bahrain and now on Lexington Avenue at 52nd Street. The premise and
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New York Week, 2010, Part 1
Great N.Y. Noodle Town is practically a dive. When we say it's steamy, we're talking about what happens when the kitchen door opens, not as a seduction site. It's on the famed New York Bowery, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, brightly lit, jammed with tables one shares with goodness knows who (but it
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The Village Bar
We reviewed The Village Bar for St. Louis Magazine online. You can read it here.
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Southern Connecticut Week, Part 4
Friday night dinner at a lobster spot in New England, we thought, would be good for food and for people-watching. And we were right on both counts, once we found Captain Scott's Lobster Dock. At the end of a dead-end street on an arm of land with a marina on one side and the Amtrak
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Southern Connecticut Week, Part 3
Lobster in the rough—or as it's pronounced in situ lobsta—is an old New England habit. The phrase might evoke some cobbled-together approach to the crustacean, but actually it refers to eating outdoors. Lobster shacks, which frequently aren't (quite) shacks, can be found along the Atlantic Coast from Connecticut all the way up into Maine. Maybe