Wearing a gray newsboy cap and carrying a leather organizer, John Astin looks like the very model of a Johns Hopkins professor as he strides across the Homewood campus en route to lunch at the Brody Learning Commons cafe. And yet, this esteemed college campus—rife with Nobel Prize winners and eminent scholars—seems like an unlikely place for a star sighting of the actor who played Gomez, the loveably madcap father figure from the ABC hit series, The Addams Family.

During its first two incarnations, CityLit Festival conferred a curious Midas touch: Book a writer as headliner, and, whammo, he or she wins the Pulitzer Prize. Ten days prior to the 2004 inaugural festival, the Pulitzer board announced the event’s main attraction, Edward P. Jones, as its fiction winner; ditto the next year when Steve Coll copped a Pulitzer for nonfiction just before his festival appearance. Subsequent editions have featured luminaries such as poet Mark Doty, fiction writer Junot Díaz, and Baltimore-based mystery writer Laura Lippman. 

You've been the Choir’s artistic director and conductor since 2004, what made you decide to leave now?

You know, I love Handel Choir and what a community chorus represents to its singers, instrumentalists, and audiences. It was a very hard decision, but I just knew. Time to trim my responsibilities and time for fresh vision and energy to take the organization to the next level. I invite everyone to meet the new conductor at our Spring Gala [May 4] where I’ll hand over the baton! It will be bittersweet for me! 

Harriet Tubman left Dorchester County without a trace, covertly returning again and again to shepherd away slaves, so maybe it’s appropriate that such an underground legend still casts something of a fleeting image in her native region. There are, in fact, no elaborate memorials to Tubman in Dorchester, just a storefront museum in downtown Cambridge, a mural off Route 50 near the Food Lion, and a historic marker outside of town.