Month: February 2022

In the back of the house, in the old two-car garage she calls her atelier, Eirene Archolekas is wielding a blowtorch, applying firepower to one of her abstract encaustic paintings. Eirene started painting six years ago. With bold strokes, she guides the tiny blue flame, back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down, waking up the wax. It is, she says, an “addictive, mesmerizing, healing” pursuit, one that she wishes she had discovered much earlier in life. Eirene’s…

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Dancing, explains Laurie Scherer, is about connecting. Laurie is a native of New Jersey but a lifelong New Yorker at heart. With your brain, with your body, with your partner, with everybody around you. “When you dance,” she says, “it’s not just balance, rhythm and coordination. You literally are stepping into someone else’s shoes.” She demonstrates a simple Lindy Hop Charleston step in the street then kicks her foot into the air with the fervor and finesse of a Rockette. Laurie’s…

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A lot of stuff has happened to Wonmin Lee in the last five years. Read the list of stuff that’s happened to him. Wonmin (it is pronounced, he tells everyone, as “1 min,” the “min” like “minute”) didn’t plan any of it, and once you know his story, you’ll understand why it would have been impossible (and in some ways undesirable) to do so. He starts ticking off the list, casually, almost as if all these events had occurred to someone else: I quit my job as a corporate…

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It’s 2 below zero and the 25-minute wait at the subway necessitates an unintended Lyft ride, but Monica Cialona, so bundled up that you can barely see her double anti-Omicron masks, is ebullient. Dafney smiling through the cold. And it’s not only because she managed, despite the delays, to be on time. No, it’s because she knows – deep in her heart, down in her soul – that 2022 is going to be her breakout year, a period of great possibilities that she’s been rehearsing for her…

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