Original Leisure & Entertainment

Recently, the state of Indiana expanded Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which gifts free, high-quality, age-appropriate books to children from birth to age five on a monthly basis, regardless of family income. Gov. Holcomb announced Dolly Parton’s . . . 

This Labor Day, many people will enjoy cookouts and end-of-the-summer trips to the lake or other vacation spots. Summer is in its last gasps as autumn starts its season with cooler nights and pumpkin spice on every edible imaginable. For me, it is . . . 

We aren’t the first to wear feather accessories! The Neanderthals wore the darker feathers of birds of prey. Later, high-ranking Egyptians wore ostrich feathers in their hair as a symbol of allegiance to the Goddess of Truth. In 12th-century feathers . . . 

At the 2023 Quilt Celebration at the Quilter’s Hall of Fame in Marion, Indiana, album quilts were the focus of the weekend.

Quilter Hall of Fame Inductee, Elly Sienkiewicz, whose name is synonymous with Baltimore Album quilts joined us by zoom as . . . 

Hillerich & Bradsby, Co. and Adirondack, Inc. dominated bat manufacturing during the early days of American baseball history. Following is an abbreviated timeline of the history and the specifications of the Bat and Baseball. You can be an educated . . . 

Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten to know quilter, June Thompson of Monroe, Indiana quite well. She has shared her personal, church, and charitable quilt projects with me. Since this article would be published close to the 4th of July, I . . . 

It was difficult to find anything to watch even a fraction as good as the second season of The Bear. I rarely review a second season if I wrote about the first, but the latest installment of the FX/Hulu show is so beautiful, well-written, and tense . . . 

 . . . 

Salt, sodium chloride (NaCl), is one of the oldest forms of food seasoning and is essential to human and animal health. Salt is a naturally occurring mineral which breaks into sodium and chloride ions. The salty flavor comes mostly from the sodium . . . 

Snack food is subject to silly trends, but the longevity of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is a triumph of food engineering and marketing. I did not know that the alarmingly red snack has a true underdog story. Flamin’ Hot tells the story of the man behind . . . 

While volunteering at the St. Therese Food Bank recently another volunteer added some grapefruit to items already in a food cart. I asked, “By the way, why are they called ‘grapefruit’ when they don’t seem to have any connection or taste like . . . 

The Fort Wayne Philharmonic recently announced the concert line-up for the 2023 Summer Series, bringing you exciting performances at venues throughout Northeast Indiana this summer. Highlights include the return of Patriotic Pops, plus Star Wars: The . . . 

Back in early February, I purchased a beautiful cathedral window quilt that I proceeded to list in my Born Again Quilts Etsy shop. This cathedral window quilt was made in the 1970s with vibrant scraps of many bright purple, pink, orange, and yellow . . . 

A new movie about NSA whistleblower Reality Winner tests how much more audiences care about rescue pets than their humans. Reality, based on Tina Satter’s play Is This a Room, tells the story of Winner’s (Sydney Sweeney) interrogation by FBI Agents . . . 

Do you recall the series of 6 red Burma-Shave advertising signs along the country highways?

In 1925, Clinton Odell and his brother, Allan, installed these sequential road signs to market Burma-Shave, a brushless shaving cream. In the early 1920s, their . . . 

After completing requirements for a master’s degree from Northwestern University in December 1964, I immediately was subject to the military draft. So, I enrolled in the U.S. Army Reserves in Fort Wayne on Jan. 6, 1965, and left for Fort Knox, KY . . . 

This week, I watched two movies with incredible star power and fairly weak storytelling: Air on Amazon Prime and The Mother on Netflix.

Air the blockbuster hit–or whatever the streaming equivalent is–tells the story of Nike executives, Sonny Vacarro . . . 

This year Mother’s Day came early for the Levihn Family as we gathered on April 25 for a final goodbye to our mother Dorothy (Poppe) Levihn. Mom took seriously ill and was taken to the hospital where the doctors gave us six sibs the decision to either . . . 

I was not a reader of Judy Blume’s books when I was a young person, because, unfortunately, I was a little snob who went to the library and found the biggest book on the shelf in the children’s section. It turns out that while I read Robin Hood, . . . 

Near the end of my 30-year career in the Public Affairs Dept. at Indiana Michigan Power in Fort Wayne, the company sent me to a week-long photography workshop near Portland, Maine.

I arrived at the Portland International Airport late on a Sunday afternoon . . . 

This week, my toddler came down with a fever, which gave me plenty of naptimes to check out new streaming series. Unstable, a comedy, and The Power, a drama, take very different tones, but both offer social commentary and significant star power.

In . . . 

In case you missed it, both the Today Show and the CBS Sunday Morning Show with Jane Pauley recently featured cast members of the original musical Shucked! The reviews found the musical to be:

“A glut of Gleeful Puns and Cornography” (New York Times), . . . 

April Fools’ Day is one of the most widely recognized non-religious holidays in the Western world. Children prank parents, coworkers prank coworkers, and even national and local news outlets still prank their readers and viewers. But why? What is . . . 

The “wearing of the green” on March 17 in honor of St. Patrick, along with all the parades with their bagpipes and blarney, is part of a folk ritual that announces the death of winter and the birth of spring. On this day, Irish and Irish-Wanna-Be’s . . .