“I was born in 1931, in a small community north of Chicago,” Pat Ward-Baker begins. “I grew up in the ’30s and ’40s. By the time I was ten or eleven, the Second World War was on, and everything around me felt rigid. Wives stayed home. They hosted tea parties, talked, shopped. Somehow my little self hated that. I wanted…
A fresh scoop Michael and Marie Carducci had no plans to start a business. Michael, a Rochester native, works full time in IT, and his wife, Marie, who grew up in Zambia, is a senior accountant. The couple shares four kids. But when the two saw a sign in the window at 1245 Park Avenue at the corner of Colby…
Picture books are for little kids. Chapter books are for elementary students. Young adult novels are for teens. Everything else is for adults, right? Well, kind of. While most books written for adults aren’t intended for children, the opposite is certainly not true. Picture book creators’ work must appeal to the grown-ups who read to kids. Middle grade novels make…
New job jitters only multiply if the day goes sideways, an unfortunate lesson Kelly Metras learned on her first day in the food industry. She started as a waitress at seventeen and found herself grossly underprepared. “Thrown to the wolves,” is how she remembers it. Being a server means managing a thousand different tasks all at once, and that first…
A dinner plate soars into a steel wall and breaks four ways. A computer keyboard falls on concrete, fracturing each key. A drinking glass shatters on impact with a bat. At first glance, these descriptions may not evoke images of low-key, guileless fun. But free-wheeling entertainment is exactly what Rochester’s first-ever smash room, iSmash, aims to represent. The sprawling facility…
