Rochester news

• The architecture of radio: Failing or fun?

  22-05-2023 18:03 via roccitynews.com
  
  A forecast for airwaves from the NON-COMMvention in Philadelphia.
  
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• REVIEW | “End of the Rainbow” at JCC CenterStage chronicles Judy Garland’s final months

  19-12-2025 21:07 via roccitymag.com
  In Celtic folklore, the end of the rainbow signifies the end of a treasure hunt, a triumphant place where one finds the leprechaun’s pot of gold. Of course, science is always here to dash whimsical lore — because rainbows are simply an optical illusion created by light refracting through raindrops, there is no actual ‘end of the rainbow.’ The refracted light creates a colorful arc that only seems to touch the ground because it shifts with the body in pursuit. It can
  
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• REVIEW | ‘End of the Rainbow’ at JCC CenterStage

  19-12-2025 21:07 via roccitymag.com
  In Celtic folklore, the end of the rainbow signifies the end of a treasure hunt, a triumphant place where one finds the leprechaun’s pot of gold. Of course, science is always here to dash whimsical lore — because rainbows are simply an optical illusion created by light refracting through raindrops, there is no actual ‘end of the rainbow.’ The refracted light creates a colorful arc that only seems to touch the ground because it shifts with the body in pursuit. It can
  
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• Michael Fambro turns to grief to art as a tribute to her beloved father

  19-12-2025 14:37 via roccitymag.com
  In December 2020, Michael Fambro walked out of the hospital for the first time in three days to find her car buried in snow. After she cleared it off, she climbed inside and sat in a daze. Her beloved father, world-renowned musician Miché Fambro, had just died.The only thing Fambro could think to do was to turn on Steel Pulse, a band she and her father loved. That night, she said, Steel Pulse “took her home.”Growing up, Fambro was surrounded by music. As a teenager, she worke
  
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• Three Black millennial women launch a members-only dining and social venue downtown

  18-12-2025 05:22 via roccitymag.com
  Behind an unmarked door on East Main Street in downtown Rochester, a staircase leads down into a lit 3,000-square-foot space. Half of the room is a stocked bar; the other half is a dining area. Welcome to Exclusively Members Only (EMO), a membership-based social club opened by three Black millennial women. And while the historic space needed some sprucing up, the trio saw something special, something exclusive. “We saw a diamond in the rough,” said co-owner Janelle Holmes.
  
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• REVIEW | ‘Are We There Yet’ by Katy Martin

  16-12-2025 16:00 via roccitymag.com
  Though goals and results drive modern society, it’s only after struggle and pain that we learn the journey is the destination.Local singer-songwriter Katy Martin’s latest solo album, “Are We There Yet,” captures this wisdom in eight indie folk songs that play with bright, twee sounds while tackling an ever-present heaviness.Martin, half of the acoustic duo The Local Hang-Ups, is an evocative and gifted songwriter, approaching subjects of loss and faith with a nimble touc
  
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• After 12 years, Rochester Brainery has a new owner

  15-12-2025 07:09 via roccitymag.com
  As Rochester Brainery founder Danielle Raymo contemplated ending her decade-plus tenure with the business, she wanted to go out the right way. She didn’t want to just close down, leaving the teachers of so many experiential classes without that revenue stream or unique marketing opportunity. She also didn’t want to hand it over to someone that was going to radically change how the Brainery operated.When Mike Krupnicki heard Raymo was preparing to sell, he eagerly called her, only sl
  
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• REVIEW | “Rumors” at Blackfriars Theatre is nonsense — but good for a laugh

  13-12-2025 03:31 via roccitymag.com
  When Neil Simon’s “Rumors” premiered in 1988 it was unlike anything Simon had ever written. Indeed, it would be unlike anything he would ever write again.The play is Simon’s only farce, which is hard to believe considering his vast body of acclaimed work and that he honed his comedic chops early in his career writing one-line zingers and slapstick gags for the likes of Sid Caesar and Jerry Lewis.But why Simon never attempted another farce will become clear after seeing &
  
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• Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School relocates from the hill to the heart of downtown

  11-12-2025 06:19 via roccitymag.com
  For nearly a century, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School sat like a sentinel above the city, perched on the hill at 1100 South Goodman St., its Gothic towers peering over Highland Park. Designed by James Gamble Rogers, the same architect who left his mark on Yale and Columbia, the campus radiated a stately stillness that seemed immune to time.But time caught up. Declining enrollment, costly maintenance and shifting patterns in theological education pushed the seminary to leave its iconic
  
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• REVIEW | ‘& Juliet’ at RBTL

  10-12-2025 22:28 via roccitymag.com
  What would happen if you combined Lisa Frank, a Disney amusement park and a 90s music video? Probably something in the same aesthetic ballpark as the unabashedly over-the-top jukebox musical “& Juliet,” which is turning the West Herr Auditorium Theater into a nostalgic dance party through December 14.Set in a remixed Y2K version of Shakespearean London, the show opens with a “Larger Than Life” William Shakespeare in skinny jeans (CJ Eldred, giving Mr. Shue from &ldqu
  
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• REVIEW | “Persuasion” at The Company Theatre

  09-12-2025 17:38 via roccitymag.com
  This month marks Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, which means there have been almost two centuries of adaptations of beloved novels that either make her readers upset or make them swoon. The Company Theatre gets it right. Their fresh and faithful theatrical adaptation of her final novel “Persuasion” plays in their new home on 28 Lawn St. through December 21.The show opens with Anne Elliot (played by Abigail Rice) bowing to the audience and stepping onto a turntable to play a (pro
  
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• REVIEW | ‘Between Strings’ by Suen-Kam Duo

  09-12-2025 15:50 via roccitymag.com
  Is physical media dead? Or is it having a comeback? If the latter is the case, let’s have more unusual physical forms, like the guitar-shaped USB drive on which you can find the Suen-Kam Guitar Duo’s debut album, “Between Strings.”Guitarists Shiuen-Huang Suen and Kenneth Kam met through the Eastman School of Music as graduate students and also connected through the community of the Rochester Chinese Christian Church. They’ve been playing together in concerts over t
  
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• REVIEW | In “Hamnet,” the play is, ultimately, the thing

  07-12-2025 00:21 via roccitymag.com
  The last third of director Chloé Zhao’s film “Hamnet” takes place in London, specifically at the Globe Theatre, where Agnes (Jessie Buckley) has traveled from Stratford to see what her husband’s latest play could possibly be about. That play is, of course, “Hamlet,” and it’s not a spoiler to note that this husband is William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). He’s been living apart from their family for years, honing his craft (among other endeavor
  
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• 5 local-ish books for the reader in your life

  05-12-2025 05:04 via roccitymag.com
  Garrison Keillor, longtime host of the Minnesota Public Radio show “A Prairie Home Companion,” once said “a book is a gift you can open again and again.” And while Kindles are convenient and alluring, nothing quite tops cracking a fresh book spine and breathing in the printed pages. Whether you’re stumped on what to buy someone or you need a lesser known tome for the bookworm in your life, here are five local-ish books that might do the trick.“Pilgrims&r
  
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• A retail store meets the next generation of riders off-piste

  04-12-2025 06:00 via roccitymag.com
  Jonah DiPasquale remembers the first time he carved up a fresh bank of snow on his friend’s Burton snowboard. It was the late ’80s, when skiing still dominated the mountains and snowboarding was finding its footing in professional and recreational winter sports. “The equipment back then was just so antiquated, these giant buckles and big webbing straps,” said DiPasquale, who is now operations and events manager — and self-proclaimed “Wonderful Wizard of
  
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• Build a dopamine menu to battle the seasonal blues

  03-12-2025 06:00 via roccitymag.com
  People love to talk about the weather. It’s a safe topic to fill gaps in conversation or segway into the unapproachable. But for all the time I’ve spent talking about the weather, I didn’t spend much time thinking about how it impacts me — until the last few years, because I started talking to a therapist. My first therapist, Alecia, lived in a different state, so we met virtually. Each session, she started off by asking, “How’s it going? What’s it
  
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• REVIEW | ‘Montréal’ by The Thriffs

  02-12-2025 15:56 via roccitymag.com
  Until recently, Rochester band The Thriffs went by a more typical tag: The Thrifts. But due to the existence of another band of the same name, this moody yet energetic quartet modified its name.The change-up suits the music, a rare blend of insular post-punk infused with blasts of extroverted personality. On The Thriffs’ debut release, “Montréal” — taking the name of the city where the group recorded it — that combination yields a welcome infusion into the l
  
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• Local arts organizations lost federal funding in 2025. What’s next?

  02-12-2025 15:32 via roccitymag.com
  Out of the many uses for the letterpress machines at Flower City Arts Center, this year has seen a rise in protest posters. The Trump administration’s myriad executive orders, immigration crackdowns and weaponization of the Department of Justice have galvanized artists and other community members to push back.Executive director Kristin Rapp said the machines offer a voice to do just that.“Those are traditionally where people would be expressing dissent or public protest and making s
  
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• Members of the local Food Not Bombs chapter serve meals for solidarity, not charity

  01-12-2025 06:21 via roccitymag.com
  It’s just before 5 p.m. on a Wednesday when the cutting boards come out. Then, the kale — big fluffy piles of it, fresh from a vendor at the Westside Farmers Market, ready to be destemmed. The leafy vegetation was picked up earlier that day by a member of Rochester Food Not Bombs (RFNB), which meets twice weekly to cook at the Flying Squirrel Community Space on the outskirts of Corn Hill.RFNB is just one chapter of the international, all-volunteer movement that recovers food from be
  
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• Macaulay Culkin, the original meme, embraces his ‘Home Alone’ roots

  28-11-2025 06:17 via roccitymag.com
  Few people can lay claim to being a meme before the term reached widespread usage. After all, what did a meme in 1990 even look like?The answer is Macaulay Culkin.As a nine-year-old boy, he effectively conquered the world when the unusual yet heartwarming holiday film “Home Alone” reached major global commercial success. There he was: a blond boy with his hands on his cheeks, frozen in a scream. He was without his family, and villains were closing in.Yet as Culkin told CITY in a rec
  
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• How to be the best bar guest

  26-11-2025 06:55 via roccitymag.com
  A good bar, the type I like to go to, should be a third place. It’s where you celebrate wins, drown sorrows and everything in between. Bars are such interesting spaces — at the end of the day, they are businesses, but can feel like an extension of home. And just like every house has its own rules, there are a few tips and tricks for guests who really want to fit in and have the best experience possible (at least, when you’re at Leonore’s, where I manage the bar). 1.
  
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• REVIEW | “Sentimental Value”

  25-11-2025 06:03 via roccitymag.com
  “A house is just a house,” as the saying goes, but in Joachim Trier’s latest film, “Sentimental Value,” it is so much more than that. The house in question is a place filled with memories and grief, a structure that holds people back from growing while also forcing them to grow beyond what once took place in the home. It becomes a character in and of itself.The movie opens with a narrator giving life to the family home at the center of the movie, talking about the
  
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• Native Made Market, a hub of Indigenous heritage, returns on Small Business Saturday

  24-11-2025 16:21 via roccitymag.com
  On a crisp November morning in Rochester, the doors of the annual Native Made Market will once again swing open, and the room will hum with voices, laughter, drums, rattles and the quiet shuffle of footsteps across wooden floors. For founder Angelina Marie Hilton, the annual event, which returns on Saturday, Nov. 29 for year four, is more than a market — it’s a living archive of Indigenous creativity, a space where stories, skills and traditions converge. Each handcrafted piece and
  
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• Gateway to the Finger Lakes

  29-07-2025 11:00 via roccitymag.com
  As it nears two decades, New York Kitchen continues to lead with local.
  
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• Album Review | 'Richocet'

  29-07-2025 11:00 via roccitymag.com
  The garage-prog group’s debut EP is all raw, for better or worse.
  
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• 'Pavement fans would have been going to the video store'

  28-07-2025 18:14 via roccitymag.com
  
  
  Director Alex Ross Perry will present two cultural documentaries at the Dryden Theatre, July 29-30.
  
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• Theater Review | 'Always… Patsy Cline'

  25-07-2025 11:00 via roccitymag.com
  A breezy concert based a true events, dressed up as a play and presented by Geva Theatre Company through August 3.
  
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• A spa with sparks

  24-07-2025 11:00 via roccitymag.com
  Welder and metal sculptor Stacey Mrva provides empowerment and community at Ironwood Studios.
  
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• Movie Review | 'Eddington'

  23-07-2025 11:00 via roccitymag.com
  Ari Aster's latest film isn't a horror flick — but the pandemic-era plot has its share of horrifying moments.
  
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• Eastman Museum celebrates 75 years; keeps a cautious eye on the future

  22-07-2025 22:57 via roccitymag.com
  With federal grants in jeopardy, the center looks to alternate sources of funding for ambitious expansion projects.
  
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