The Music Man

George Phillips is at the counter strumming an acoustic guitar. He’s sounding out its sound. In a back room, a piano student is scaling the scales. Up and down, down and up it goes like an aural escalator to nowhere. A young man walks in to buy some guitar strings, and George rushes to the other counter to ring up the sale. George, a fire hydrant with Einstein’s frizzled hair, is the owner of Astoria Music, but it’s more fitting to call him a one-man band because ever since he…

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The Ice Sculptor

It happened many moons ago, but when Shintaro Okamoto opens the door of the walk-in freezer and sees the tiger’s head, he remembers the swan. It was winter in Alaska, and Anchorage was as frozen as a pack of Popsicles when his father, Takeo, took Shintaro out to the lake to cut out the block of ice to sculpt the cygnet. Shintaro wasn’t even a teenager when this occurred, and he had no idea that that simple swan would change the course of his life, leading him to open the ice sculpture…

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The Singing Streetlights

‘Tis the month of Christmas, and I’m strolling along Steinway Street, when what do my wondering ears hear but “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I look left. I look right. Curiously, the carol isn’t coming from a car stereo. Or a store. I’m not Dorothy, but I stare at my shoes; will Santa and his sleigh go away if I click my bronze MBTs three times? And then I look to the sky and see the sound. Yes, Virginia, the song is singing itself silly out of a speaker strapped…

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The Guy With the Extra Six-Pack

Gurgle, gurglegurglegurgle, gurgle. Rich Buceta gets so excited when he hears this sound that you’d think he’d discovered a multi-million-dollar oil well gushing up through his factory floor. He walks over to a giant shiny silver tank that looks like a spaceship from a forbidden planet and points to a hose that’s snaking out of its nostrils. A bubbling amber liquid is flowing into a large white plastic bucket. “It’s the carbon dioxide being released from fermentation,”…

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