Ann Lemons Pollack

  • Get Low

    Robert Duvall has been making movies–a solid majority of good ones, a large handful of great ones–since the dawn of history, or so it seems. He won an Oscar in 1983 for "Tender Mercies," and may have a good shot at another for "Get Low," his latest, which opens today and again displays him as

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  • Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel

    When we discuss people who made a difference — technical, scientific, social — in the fabric of America in the 20th century, it's hard to avoid Hugh Hefner, and a new documentary, "Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel," opening today, is an interesting, if totally favorable, look at the man who put sex front and

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  • O! Wings Plus

    Wing shops are practically a dime a dozen these days, and the large majority of them are chains. We do have a taste for good wings, however, so when we found a new, small, family-owned spot, it beckoned. Located in a strip of shops on Page Boulevard between Woodson and Ashby Roads, O! Wing Plus

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  • Southern Connecticut Week, Part 2

    Years ago, when the completed Zagat questionnaires came in to us, those who wrote about Zinnia always included plenty of comments like “PURPLE!” because of the color of the fine little Webster Groves restaurant. Kitchen Little, in the seaside town of Mystic, CT, might not warrant the exclamation mark or even the capital letters, but

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  • This Week’s Wine, August 17, 2010

     Many millennia ago, as the Great Glacier receded through what is now upstate New York, its passage left a number of long, narrow lakes pointing north and south in the area between the cities today called Albany and Buffalo. Named by Indians or by 17th- and 18th-century frontiersmen mimicking them, we have Canandaigua, Cayuga, Conesus,

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  • Southern Connecticut Week, Part 1

    New London, CT, is the home of the Coast Guard Academy. It's an old city, relatively quiet, where we recently spent some time at the annual meeting of the American Theatre Critics Association. New London was the home of Eugene O'Neill, and the O'Neill Theatre Center was the host. The city, while not a major

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  • Gumbo Shop

    We reviewed The Gumbo Shop in Rock Hill for St. Louis Magazine's online edition. You can read it here. 

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  • Martha’s Vineyard, Part 3

    Built in 1891, the Harbor View Hotel sits, of course, above Edgartown's harbor. From the broad covered porch, tall, cool drink in hand, a visitor can see yachts arriving, the blinking of the lighthouse, and a surprisingly short distance across the water, the woods of Chappaquiddick Island. On a summer evening just before dusk, many

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  • Patrik 1.5

     We all know about typographical errors. Newspapers are full of them. People who rely on spell-check make many. They can undoubtedly be found on this blog. But when an adoption agency secretary's inadvertent period turns "Patrik 15" into "Patrik 1.5" we have the material for a comedy. Unfortunately, "Patrik 1.5," which opens today, tries to

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  • Copia Urban Winery

     When Copia opened a few years ago, it billed itself as a combination winery and restaurant. Its laudable goal was to help an incipient revival of downtown St. Louis as a place to go for an evening out. That's been a problem here since Chouteau and Laclede and their friends swam ashore in the 18th

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