On Sunday, a few hundred of Richard Ben Cramer’s friends, family, colleagues, and admirers gathered for a memorial service at Washington College’s Gibson Center for the Performing Arts in Chestertown. The acclaimed writer/journalist, who passed away January 7, had said he didn’t want a somber gathering and master of ceremonies Adam Goodheart promised an upbeat affair with “no tears or ‘Amazing Grace’ on the bagpipes.”

The service began with a recording of Cramer, with that fine-grade sandpaper voice, talking about Sunday school, where he learned mostly about “tyrants trying to do in the Jews. But then God showed up and smote them a mighty smite and things were better until next Sunday when the Jews were in trouble again.” As a result, he said, Jewish holidays “pretty much all add up to the same thing—they tried to kill us, they didn’...

What piece of art changed your life? How did it affect you?

Alan Lomax's The Land Where the Blues Began.

I first read LWBB when I was a sophomore in high school. It opened me up to a whole world of American history, religion, music, and dance, all interdependent and intertwined. I immediately went out and found as many of the artists and recordings in that book as possible. (This was before wikipedia, mind you.) My academic research in anthropology is indebted to Lomax’s fearless and selfless song-searching in the Mississippi Delta. It stoked my personal fire; here I was, a white suburban Jewish teenager in the 90’s/2000’s, daughter of a hippie and a professor, with a physical connection to R&B and hip-hop, and a deep connection to prison chants and blues songs. Like all teenagers, I was trying to figure out who I...

Baltimore native Anna Deveare Smith will pocket $300,000 as this year's recipient of the Dorothy & Lillian Gish Prize. Smith, a Western grad, appears in Nurse Betty, but she's best known for brilliant one-woman shows such as Fires in the Mirror and Let Me Down Easy, a highlight of Arena Stage's 2011 season. Smith's Aunt Lorraine, a retired Baltimore school teacher and character in Let Me Down Easy, must be proud.

Everyman Theatre cut the ribbon on its W. Fayette Street digs this morning, and the first public performance of its new production, August: Osage County,  takes place tomorrow night at 7 pm. For that first show, folks can pay what they want for tickets. It's part of Everyman's grand opening week, and it's also part of the theater's longtime mission to make its productions accessible to everyone. Tickets go on sale tomorrow at 5pm, and you'll want to get to the box office early. And you can read all about the new theater in our January issue!