Author: ruhlwrite

The black lacquer coffee table is covered with a piece of chocolate-brown burlap. Boxes of vintage buttons and beads are scattered about. Asami Hotta, cheerleader cute, kicks off her flip-flips and flips her long dark hair behind her head. Seated on a brown-leather footstool, she picks up a petite pair of pliers, and with the skill of a neurosurgeon, starts turning the bits into a piece of one-of-a-kind costume jewelry. “I love antique things,” she says, unscrewing the lid of a jam jar…

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My friends in Connecticut always talk about the wildlife that raids their yard. Deer, rabbits, moles and foxes — this is the city, I don’t have to contend with such pedestrian pests. Every weekday from September to May, my small patch of property is overrun with none other than the Trespassing Teens. There is a Catholic high school whose back faces my back yard, and when the school bell utters its shrill ear-splitting peal every afternoon, the Trespassing Teens, traveling in packs of…

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“The biggest thing about cooking is the story about it,” says Bradley O’Bryan Hawks. “The story always makes the food taste better.” In his case, the story — the spice or slice of life — starts a little more than three decades ago in the half-teaspoon Midwest white-bread town of Wanamaker, Ind. Wanamaker had only one stop light, but there were lots of corn fields and farms. Bradley’s mother taught high school home economics, and his daddy was a high…

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“I love the women,” says Angelo Grivokostopoulos. “I want to make all the women in the world beautiful all the time.” As he says this, he artfully arranges himself like a model on the sleek white leather sofa. He’s wearing a black T-shirt paired with skin-tight jeans, and when he crosses his legs, he displays his black leather cowboy boots to good effect. The ensemble highlights his black hair, which is peppered with just enough silver to make it sexy chic. Angelo,…

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“Everybody says we look alike,” says Francine Amendola. “But our mother says we don’t,” adds her sister, Laraine Amendola. (“It’s spelled L-a-r-a-i-n-e; I’m a stickler on that,” she says.) OK, there’s no way that Francine and Laraine could ever be mistaken for twins, but at the same time nobody would ever deny that they are sisters. Francine, the older, dresses a little more conservatively and her features are slightly more refined, but…

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