The Guy Who Saved the Bocce Court

White canvas ball bag in hand, Danny Berrios heads toward the bocce court in Astoria Park. It’s along the waterfront next to the children’s playground. Even if you’re a regular park-goer, you might not know of its existence. The long, narrow rectangular space, encased in a low, white wall, has not had a brightly colored ball roll on its surface in years. Danny thinks that’s a shame. When Danny, a friendly fellow with short-cropped pepper and salt hair, sought it out in June 2016, it was…

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The Music Maker

The flute was not Guillermo Laporta’s first choice. Guillermo, the co-founder of the multidisciplinary music ensemble CreArtBox, would have preferred playing the piano. He was 8, and he didn’t have a particular reason for favoring the ebonies and ivories over the woodwind’s shiny keys. To tell the truth, he wasn’t even particularly interested in classical music, but the small village of Monzón, Spain, where he’s from, happened to be the home of the Conservatorio Profesional de Música…

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The Tiffany Curator

From the more than 250,000 pieces of Tiffany art glass at The Neustadt, Lindsy Parrott pulls out a rippled cream-colored sheet and holds it up to the light. It comes luminously alive, its drapery-fold waves forming a shining sea of shadows. “It’s my favorite piece,” says Lindsy, the director/curator of the museum. “It’s exceptionally beautiful.” Brilliant. Gorgeous. Dazzling. These are the adjectives she utters as she walks among the vertical shelves of opalescent sheet glass, mosaics…

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The Words Worker

In a corner of her living room, in the shelter of a makeshift cubicle, Tracy Sayre sits typing on her 5-year-old black Toshiba laptop. The desk is small; the sign she faces – Writers Work – is large. Her cats, Reilly and Marla, stare as she fills the silent screen with the swirling sentences that have been struggling to escape her mind. Writing is a painstakingly lonely pursuit, the kind a lot of authors are expert at putting off. Tracy has had her share of writer’s block, but she’s trained…

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