The Green Room

Bill Church has used a scene from the play The Guys in his acting technique class at Interlochen Arts Academy for years.

The Guys is the story of a fire captain who lost hundreds of men in the attacks on the World Trade Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

Fantasy books, games and movies can take you to another reality. Think about Dungeons and Dragons, or The Lord of the Rings. But what if you could enter those alternate, fantasy worlds in real life?

Some people try through LARPing— or Live Action Role Playing— and it blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.

There’s a LARP group in the Traverse City area. They fight evil, save the king and come out victorious, all within 48 hours. 

It’s 6:30pm on a Wednesday evening at Rare Bird Brewpub. There are about 80 people inside drinking beer and eating dinner, and only one open table left.
 

"Everybody might think like, 'Oh you’re busy, you have a successful business, that means you’re rich,'” says restaurant co-owner Tina Schuett. "No. It means I’m several hundred thousands of dollars in debt for a long time out."
 

Tina Schuett and Nate Crane opened Rare Bird Brewpub two years ago in downtown Traverse City.

Jerry Coyne was bored with classic rock on the radio. As a teenager in the 1970s, he saw bands like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones when they were in their prime and he listened to WABX, a rock station in Detroit that introduced a lot of the music that came to define his generation.

Jerry says it changed the entire culture in the U.S.

“Rock ’n’ roll was revolutionary,” he says. “It stopped the Vietnam War.”

It took Linda Beeman three years to find someone to teach her how to make a Japanese woodblock print. 

She finally found someone teaching a workshop at the Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids. 

“When I pulled my print on the last day, I burst into tears,” recalls Linda. “Because it felt like this is what I was made to do.” She was at Interlochen, teaching her own Japanese printmaking workshop. 

If someone were to ask you to name your top songs about Michigan, what would come to mind? Would you have trouble coming up with more than one or two? 

Jake Cagle writes for the website, The Awesome Mitten. When he was asked to come up with his top five songs that mentioned Michigan either in the title or lyrics, or were about the state– he had some difficulty at first.

"I could only think of maybe a handful," Jake explains. "I knew it would take me days and days to come with an actual list, and then to whittle it down to songs that wouldn't get me laughed off the internet."

Jake Cagle eventually came up with his list of the top five Michigan songs, but since four years have passed since that article was published, but he recently collaborated with IPR to update it.

When Billy Strings decided to move from Northern Michigan last January, he wasn’t exactly sure where he wanted to go. He just knew he wanted to get away.

“I’m 23 years old and my feathers are fluffed, you know,” he explains. “Kind of just wanted to go see what was on the horizon.”

The 12th Annual Traverse City Film Festival gets underway next Tuesday.

This year, the 32 officially selected films are all directed by women. Meg Weichman is the Creative Director for the film festival. She says it was founder Michael Moore who had the idea making all the official selections, films that were directed by women. 

"We did try to look for more films by female filmmakers this year, and we were shooting for maybe just having fifty percent," explains Weichman. She says what they found was staggering. "Michael loved so many great movies by women, he wanted to make all of our official selections in competition just directed by women."

Eric Patterson wakes up around 7 a.m. He pulls his hair back into a bun, puts on a beige suit and heads out the door. He is the owner of Cooks’ House in Traverse City, a well-known farm-to-table restaurant. 

Previously, he worked as a chef at three Michelin-starred restaurants. He was head chef at Andre’s, a famous restaurant in Las Vegas, where he relished the thrill of finding the ingredients, preparing dishes and working for hours behind the stove. The stress of the job kept him going for years.  

Fewer than 900 people live in the city of Onaway, Michigan. But every year, thousands of people flock to the city's annual Fourth of July parade.

And many of the residents say Tom Moran is the reason why. 

Friday is the opening night of The Manistee Civic Players’ stage rendition of 1970s hit television show Free to Be… You and Me. Kate Botello sat down to talk with the director of the production, Connar Klock. He lives in Kalamazoo, but he’s originally from the Manistee area and was asked to come back to direct this show about gender neutrality and social constructs. Behind the bouncy and upbeat music, Free to Be… You and Me addresses serious themes that are still relevant today. 

Peggy McNew is a painter from Empire, Michigan. There’s nothing unusual about that— there are a lot of painters in Leelanau County. But Peggy is different. She’s legally blind. 

And a question that she’s wrestled with is whether or not that matters in relation to her art.

Beth Bricker is a painter from Glen Arbor. When she bought a home last summer, her property had a lot of trees on it. Then the infamous August 2nd storm, happened.

After waiting out the storm in her bathroom, she emerged to find a tree had landed in her bedroom and studio area.

In fact, she had five trees fall on her house, and seven more on her garage. Her property which used to be covered in trees, was suddenly wide open. She says she is going to miss all that shade.

“I’m a middle-aged woman," says Bricker. "I get too hot way too fast, and I’ve got ... high windows here which really didn’t used to have any sunlight coming in.”

But on the other hand she says she can now look up and see stars at night. Those types of new views are the inspiration behind a new exhibit at the Glen Arbor Art Association. 

New Views: A Storm of Art is a juried exhibition of art. The art association wanted to give artists an opportunity to express themselves and help the community heal.

The Accidentals released a new EP on June 1, titled Parking Lot. It’s been three years since the group released their last album, Bittersweet. Since then, the band has toured the country, been showcased at South by Southwest, and signed a new management deal.

The group's appearance at SXSW earlier this year, was the second straight year the group traveled to Austin, Texas. Katie Larson says the event is beneficial for indie bands like theirs because it's a chance to network.

"We did get to meet a lot of people this year, and that was a really good focus," she says. "And we made a lot of good connections that'll help us out for this next year or two."

When Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon in 1969, a little bit of Charlevoix was with him. 

Charlevoix made it to the moon in the form of a very tiny, lightweight chrome and nickel thread. The thread was manufactured by a Charlevoix company named Hoskins, and was used in the Apollo Space Program space suits.

That's the kind of historical link that might not be well known, but something that a new exhibit at the Charlevoix Historical Society seeks to make known.

When chef John Larson and his family moved from Chicago to Traverse City last spring, he soon realized that getting a table at a downtown restaurant was a bit difficult at times.

"There weren't enough restaurants," says Larson. "I noticed every single place was on a two-hour wait during the summer months."

That was good news for the entrepreneur from Chicago. 

Just over a year later, Mama Lu's is now open for business just in time for the busy summer months in Traverse City.

On a recent Saturday evening in Cedar, Michigan, about 40 guys are gathered in the home of Jeff Smith, the editor of Traverse magazine. The night is centered around beer and poetry. The beverage of choice is from the recently opened Lake Ann Brewing Company. The poet is Mike Delp.

Mike Delp has a new book titled Lying in the River’s Dark Bed. It’s what he calls the confluence of the Deadman and the Mad Angler— characters he’s has been crafting for years.  

Mary Sue Wilkinson remembers how sad she felt when she used to visit her father-in-law who was suffering from dementia. He was a former minister, but near the end of his life he couldn’t talk. 

Whether out of desperation or instinct, Mary Sue took her guitar and started to sing the old Gospel hymn, I’ll Fly Away. He made eye contact and began to sing along. 

"He sang every word in perfect harmony; perfect pitch," says Mary Sue. "He was so happy you could just see that he was experiencing the competence of that.” 

Jema Hewitt says if you see someone wearing a pair of goggles with a top hat, you've spotted a steampunk.
"It's kind of like a secret sign," says Hewitt. "If you spot someone, and they're wearing a pair goggles like you would an Alice band, you kind of go, 'Ahah, you're a steampunk!'"

Aja Black says that misogyny and violence often show up in hip-hop music. But she believes the reason we have that subject matter in the music is because it’s reflective of our current culture.

“So, what we’re trying to do with our hip-hop music is just show that there’s a perspective that’s not being put into the mainstream media that’s positive and encouraging,” explains Black. “Inviting people to get along with one another and to love one another.”

Black and her husband Big Samir form the hip-hop group The Reminders. The group is in Traverse City performing as a part of Caravansarai. It’s a tour bringing Muslim-American performers to different parts of the country to share contemporary creative expressions.

If you have your portrait hanging on the Birdland Jazz Club Wall of Fame, you’re kind of a big deal.

Natalie Douglas is an award-winning singer who has her picture hanging in the legendary New York City establishment, and yes, she’s a big deal in the world of cabaret. 

Earlier this year, she released a new album, Human Heart.

Natalie Douglas says creating an album using classic, cabaret songs, was pretty straightforward for her.

"Selecting songs for the cd was really easy," explains Douglas. "They're 12 songs I truly love and that I wanted to sing and do in this way."

This time of year can be an especially busy time for seniors in high school. There are all kinds of things going on — exams, dances, senior skip days, college applications and so on.

It’s even more hectic when you’re a top-notch young musician like Mei Stone, a senior studying flute performance at Interlochen Arts Academy. 

One of the better April Fool’s Day pranks in recent memory happened right here in Michigan just a couple years ago. A group of seven students at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids decided to prank their economics professor. Turns out, the professor had a policy about cell phones in the classroom— if your phone rang during class, you had to answer the call on speaker phone in front of everybody.

Taylor Nefcy was a theater major at Aquinas, and she came up with the idea of using that rule to her advantage in creating a prank. 

Just a couple years ago, Penny and Radel Rosin were performing in separate bands. The two siblings from Grayling, Michigan had grown up in a musical family and had gotten used to the performance life at an early age. But, being in a band with multiple members and schedules can be difficult to coordinate at times. That was a big reason why Radel eventually approached Penny about creating their own music act.

“Yeah, Del just pretty much just called me up and he said, ‘We’re going to start a duo, and we’re going to call it Oh Brother Big Sister,’” Penny recalls. “And I said, ‘Alright, sounds good.’”