Red is a confidence color: Mary Jo Marshall models an outfit from Honeypot. Being a top arts town — American Style has us second behind Santa Fe — takes more than buying an easel or learning a few dance steps. The Asheville Area Arts Council is an umbrella organization for educational programs, grants, classes and … Read more
photos by Cecil Bothwell Summer has arrived at The North Carolina Arboretum. It brings with it this year’s seasonal landscape exhibit, populated by colorful blossoms of all seasons tucked into beds and planted in containers, baskets and buckets. The memorable fragrances, colors and textures of the featured plants — arranged to demonstrate reproducible design — … Read more
East of the sun • Who she is: Mary Singer • What she’s wearing: a canvas hat that she found, black Indian cotton top from a friend, purple Thai pants from another friend and black-and-white-striped knee socks from the Costume Shoppe. • Why we love it: “It’s pretty much all hand-me-downs,” says Mary — but … Read more
You know it, we know it: Mountain Xpress has got the flavor. Blue Ridge Flavors, to be precise. Every summer, we cook up this special, stand-alone publication to feed readers with all the latest morsels on food and fun in Western North Carolina. The latest addition has more than 50 pages of restaurant listings, indoor … Read more
Write What You Know Last year, WCU student Craig Buchner mined a painful personal experience to write “Good Night,” a story about a son’s last chance to bond with his aging father who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. Enter the Association of Writers & Writing Program, which recently honored the piece, awarding Buchner its annual Intro Journals … Read more
In our post-Enron, post-WorldCom era — with Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton piling up huge profits from no-bid contracts in Iraq and New Orleans while children of poverty enlist and die — a dramatization of World War II profiteering, corruption, family loyalty and greed seems as immediate as the evening news. Thus Arthur Miller’s All … Read more
Most men (and plenty of women) would turn up their noses at a paperback novel with a brightly colored cover bearing some cartoonish depiction of a heart/a couple/a title including the word “love.” Chick lit, as a genre, gets a bad rap — like there’s something inherently wrong with fluffy reads involving shopping, relationships and … Read more
“For me, comfort is a slow death,” says Phil Lesh. The Grateful Dead are dead. Long live the Dead. It’s now been almost 11 years since the Grateful Dead broke up following the death of Jerry Garcia — the band’s lead guitarist, primary singer and, as the cliche goes, “spiritual leader.” But that hasn’t kept … Read more
