Author: ruhlwrite

Dressed in her loose-fitting uniform, Hee Jung Jang goes to the head of the class and bows deeply. The dozen yoga students return her greeting then gather in a circle as Hee Jung leads them in warm-ups. Knees bent, they tap their abdomens 1,000 times to get the blood flowing then pace themselves for the intestinal exercises. At her direction, they move their abdomens in and out. It sounds easy, but it’s tough. Try it 1,000 times. You won’t like it. Neither do they. They grunt and groan,…

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“A great frame always excites me,” says Eli Wilner as he holds a gorgeous gilded example up to frame his angelic face. “I’d rather see a great painting with no frame than with the wrong frame.” In Eli’s world, frames are, indeed the big picture. For the nearly three decades that his Astoria-area frame restoration studio and Upper East Side gallery have been in business, he has devoted himself to bringing fame to the frame. In that time frame, he has gotten the…

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When Josephine Todaro walks down Ditmars Boulevard, she makes it a sunnier place even on the coldest day. She has her kids in tow. Putting their feet on pavement gives 7-year-old Stefanie and 5-year-old Joseph a new sense of freedom, because up until recently, Josephine has packed them in the car and driven them everywhere. Now that they’re old enough to walk without wanting to be carried, the sights and sounds of this whole new world so excite them that they charge ahead of her like shiny…

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Four years ago, I moved to Astoria, the most eccentric place on the planet. On the first day, before the moving truck pulled away, I was welcomed with a Greek good-luck charm. A guy on the street, seeing my open front door, invited himself into my house and threw a quarter up the living room stairs. It bounced down to welcome me to the land of fig trees, $15-haircuts and French bulldogs. It wasn’t long before I found out that even though Astoria is part of the Big Apple, it possesses a small-town…

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