At age 88, unrelenting humanitarian Ruth Gruber is far from settling into an easy chair with a stack of scrapbooks and a head full of fading memories. Instead, she’s hopping a plane this week from her beloved New York City to L.A. to meet with the screenwriter and director of an upcoming CBS miniseries based […]

Widespread Panic. In an ordinary context, those words evoke the ruinous aftermath of a natural disaster — or, these days, perhaps the growing concern over the approach of the millennium and its joined-at-the-hip twin, the Y2K bug. Still, these two words have another meaning — an extraordinary musical intent — which brings with it a […]

Reports of Willie Nelson’s exquisitely lined face someday gracing Mount Rushmore might be exaggerated. But then again, maybe not. Over the course of his nearly five-decade career, this American legend has managed to become an astounding number of things to an astounding number of people. He’s been called a mystic, a sage, a guru, a […]

Like many other crafters, Rick Eckerd often gives his own work as gifts. This past Valentine’s Day, he gave his wife, Bridget, a glass heart perched atop a cart-like base. “A heart on wheels — sounds like a Springsteen song,” he quips. Then his middle son requested a glass volcano for his sixth birthday. “I’d […]

Had the summer of 1955 not been an exceptionally cool one up and down the Eastern Seaboard, O. Winston Link’s stunning photographs documenting the final years of the steam-engine train might never have blazed into life. Link — trained in civil engineering, but enthralled with photography since his father presented him with a camera as […]

“The Ring of the Fettuccines is the only opera I’ve ever heard of with a chase through the audience,” said Mockingbird Theater Productions Producer/Director John Hall last week, after a two-hour rehearsal in the choir room of Trinity Episcopal Church. He describes the oh-so-light opera for children as “a giddy melodrama,” which may be an […]

Attention, all you living-room jam musicians: Case up your guitars, give your congas a rest, and pay heed to a tutorial from a college-town jam band that’s hit the big time. Burlington, Vt.’s Strangefolk — signed last year by the prestigious Mammoth Records (who also handle the Squirrel Nut Zippers) — are playing to packed […]

The man whose seminal “alternative” bluegrass band, New Grass Revival, created not only a whole new sound but the moniker for a whole new genre (that would be “newgrass,” in case you’ve been living on Jupiter) admits that he can still learn a thing or two from an upstart like Virginia-based champion flat-picker Larry Keel […]

The trio of heroes at the center of Plays Well With Others (Vintage, 1999), the new novel by Allan Gurganus, is so brilliant, so good-looking and glossy with youth, they can — quite literally — charm the pants off people. The three are: Robert Gustafson, a composer celebrated as “the prettiest boy in New York […]

“Why doesn’t she just leave?” That often-innocent question, says Helpmate Inc. Executive Director Sharon Robbins, lies at the heart of the most common misconception about victims of domestic violence — that escaping an abuser is as easy as simply walking away. Helpmate, an Asheville-based nonprofit, gives those victims emergency shelter and also runs a 24-hour […]

While Asheville-area St. Patrick’s Day celebrations might pale in comparison to their counterparts in, say, Dublin, that’s no reason to keep your green self at home. Local clubs and other venues are offering loads o’ entertainment and drink specials to help keep your Irish up till the wee hours — and that’s particularly true of […]