Stacks of fabric. Spoiled food. Personal care items covering every surface of the sink and shower. Mold overtaking a bathroom. Unfinished projects. A collapsed garage full of things. Unmaintained yard.

Welcome to the childhood and houses of the Longs, Amanda Uhle’s family, which she writes about in her new memoir, Destroy This House.

Uhle will celebrate the release of her book and be joined in conversation by Davy Rothbart on Tuesday, August 26, at 6:30 pm at AADL Downtown.

The exploits of Uhle’s parents, Stephen and Sandra Long, sound incredible. Uhle distanced herself when she left for college—and even before then. Yet, what is clear in the memoir is that the family ties were strong, at times humorous, and at other times painful.

George and Charlotte used to be the toast of Broadway back in the day. Now it’s the 1950s, and they’re still performing in New York ... Buffalo, New York.

Playwright Ken Ludwig’s Moon Over Buffalo is the story of a marriage on the rocks, careers reduced in their minds to traveling theater shows far from the Big Apple and other big cities, and the occasional movie role—bad B-movies, of course. 

But Moon Over Buffalo is a comedy!

PTD Productions is presenting the play, directed by Daniel Dye, through August 23 at Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti.

Dye has been performing on stage in several area theaters; now he’s directing for the first time. The rookie director gives a stellar performance behind the scenes, too, as he knows how to handle a show that combines everything from slapstick to shifting romances to excellently handled farce.

In his director’s note, Dye writes about the importance of stories, the stories we tell each other, and the stories that good writers tell us.

“We had a conventional way of what it meant to craft a story and share it. However, certain playwrights and authors bent those conventions in different ways. That is when the world was shown something new,” Dye writes.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features orchestral indie by Racing Mount Pleasant, soulful indie by TV Blackout, EDM-influenced drum 'n' bass by Fading Sun, improv noise by Horse Bomb, and lo-fi techno by racer-nelson.exe

Freddie Brooks wants to create a time capsule for the band Detroit Energy Asylum.

The Metro Detroit producer and label owner discovered that analog tape recordings of the group’s past studio sessions were starting to disintegrate and raced to preserve them.

“I had roughly three dozen of these big two-inch reels [of analog tape] and some of them were starting to shed,” said Brooks, who produced and managed the band from 1980 to 2000.

“The [tape] was falling off, and I ended up having to bake all those tapes and to transfer them for posterity. That’s when I started going through them, and that’s what happened with the ReCreation record [in 2019]. I was going through them and thought, ‘These songs are mostly finished. Most of them haven’t been released.’ I put the ReCreation [record] together, and beyond that, later on, I started listening to some of the other ones.”

Brooks realized there was a wealth of Detroit Energy Asylum material to unearth and share with fans—both past and present.

You likely have heard of Alexander Hamilton, but do you know his sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler Church?

Angelica led a wide-ranging social life, born in the United States in 1756 and spending time as an adult in England and France before returning to the U.S. In fact, a town in New York bears her name.

U-M lecturer Molly Beer wrote her new, eponymous biography, Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution, as an account of Angelica’s “web of soft-power connections that spanned the War for Independence, the post-war years of tenuous peace, and the turbulent politics and rival ideologies that threatened to tear apart the nascent United States,” according to the book jacket.

That web contained many recognizable—and male, owing to the times—names. First, there was Angelica’s father, Philip Schuyler, who was a Revolutionary War general. Alexander Hamilton married her sister, Elizabeth. The General and first U.S. President George Washington, the third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, and Dr. Benjamin Franklin, among others, were in her orbit, too.

Yet, Angelica also counted many influential female friends who were involved in the revolutionary process, in addition to her sisters. The book contains stories about these active women: Lucy Knox, Catherine Greene, Janet Montgomery, Mary Byrd, Sarah Jay (and Abbe), Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and even royalists—Lady Mary Johnson, the Haudenosaunee diplomat Molly Brant, and Baroness Riedesel. Her contacts in Europe included Maria Cosway and Marguerite de Corny, among others.

In reflecting on Angelica’s relationships and approaches, Beer writes:

For generations, people from all over the country have moved to New York City for a fresh start—the chance to plant themselves in a densely packed, busy place where no one knows their story, and they can start writing a new one, and maybe even realize a dream.

But there’s also an inherent risk: What if no one in this teeming city cares to know your story, old or new, and instead of becoming known in a new place, you simply stay invisible?

Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days—staged by Penny Seats Theatre Company at Cahoots—is a sung-through chamber musical focusing on four New Yorkers: Warren (Henry Ballesteros), an optimistic aspiring artist who is house- and cat-sitting for an artist jailed for vandalism; Deb (Kristin McSweeney Kelly), a cynical graduate student who’s struggling with her thesis about Virginia Woolf; and Jason (Michael Bessom) and Claire (Katrin Murdock), a couple weathering their differences after moving in together.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition focuses entirely on Ann Arbor's own Scott Morgan, a truly local singer and guitarist who made waves in rock 'n’ roll culture worldwide over the past 50 years.

The Ann Arbor District Library recently made public the "Scott Morgan Collection," a large assemblage of documents related to his music career. The cache of interviews, newspaper clippings, gig flyers, photographs, and recordings provides a window into Morgan’s experiences in the music industry and the era that shaped him.

Born and raised on the shady streets of A2, Morgan’s career began as front man for The Rationals, a teenage garage-rock combo formed in 1964. In a scene that lionized idiosyncratic voices, Morgan stood out as one of the strongest singers of his cohort. He had the confidence of an old-school crooner, the rawness of a hopped-up garage rocker, and the soulful swagger of an R&B frontman.

A true lifer, Morgan spent decades on stages across the country and abroad, releasing dozens of great records with an impressive lineup of collaborators and bands. He sang on a big national hit during the mid-'60s, played guitar on the greatest Detroit rock song of all time, and served as elder statesman to a new generation of musicians as the century turned.

Let’s take a brief, completely subjective look at Scott Morgan’s best recordings.

Pulp's "Hip-Hop History" series sheds light on the early days of the genre and the integral role it’s played in the Washtenaw County music scene since the 1980s. To get a better idea of what it was like back when hip-hop first emerged, we spoke to four pioneering local DJs—Will “Chill Will” Higgs, Chuck Slay, Scott “DJ Scotty D” Downer, and Jamil “DJ Jammin’ Jay” Powers—about how they got started in the music, some of their favorite memories, and where their creative journeys have taken them.

Will Higgs

In 1978, 10-year-old Will Higgs wanted to become a DJ after seeing a cousin demonstrate his skills.

Rob Millett, aka DJ Robby Rob, taught Higgs his mixing skills and dubbed him “Chill Will,” a moniker that stayed with Higgs and later became his DJ name. It stemmed from Higgs getting hyped up about learning the DJ trade.

“Instead of [being] the kid that wanted the GI Joe with the kung-fu grip, I wanted a turntable and a mixer,” he said.

Higgs’ father soon got him two turntables and a mixer, allowing him to sharpen his DJ techniques alongside Millett.

“I’m right-handed, but I’m really ambidextrous,” he said. “But I do things—in the DJ world it’s called ‘hamster’—backwards to [my cousin] because [with] my right turntable, the crossfader goes left, [and with] my left turntable, the crossfader goes right. Eventually, mixers started coming out where you [could] just flip a switch and make it hamster for you.”

Higgs also tagged along with his uncle Walter Harris to WCBN-FM since Harris knew several DJs at the station. Those early WCBN visits eventually laid the on-air foundation for Higgs, who would later DJ and host the weekly The Prop Shop radio show on Saturday nights starting in 1988.

Taylor Greenshields didn’t anticipate he'd be doing Fun Fest this long.

The Ypsilanti audio engineer, producer, and drummer started the annual event in 2021 after envisioning Frog Island Park’s amphitheater as the ideal space for an outdoor music festival.

“Yeah, it’s crazy that it’s the fifth year,” said Greenshields, who’s curating and hosting the event on August 9. “The first year was like a test run, and then seeing people enjoy the fest so much the next couple years, I had to keep it going.”

Since then, he’s featured an eclectic group of local artists performing at Fun Fest, including Travis Auckerman, Stormy Chromer, Ki5, The Macpodz, Thornetta Davis, and others.

“It’s almost like the festival is its own organism at this point,” said Greenshields, also the owner and operator of Fundamental Sound Co., an Ypsilanti-based recording studio.

“The festival has grown in many ways over the years by having different activities for kids [and] all sorts of different vendors, bands, and artists. Just the word getting around about the festival has really evolved over the last few years [as well].”

Now, he’s gearing up for the fifth edition of Fun Fest, which includes returning acts Al Bettis, Dani Darling, Ma Baker, and Violet Sol. It also features the new additions of Marcus Elliot, Peter Madcat Ruth’s C.A.R.Ma Quartet, and Jacuzzi Beach to the festival's lineup.

There is a movement in the United States to reach out to people in other countries through person-to-person contact. The intention is to develop empathy for other people, other cultures, and other points of view. The idea is admirable, but “empathy” is not always the same for everyone.

Playwright David Wells’ Radical Empathy is a challenging look at that movement through the relationship of an American couple and an Iraqi couple during the conflict between U.S. forces and ISIS from 2011 to 2018. Wells has found a perfect theater for his thought-provoking play at Ann Arbor’s Theatre Nova, a small theater with big ambitions.

A TED Talk lecturer gives an emotional, riveting, and eventually viral lecture on radical empathy. He challenges his audience to imagine how Americans would feel if, in the past, China had taken control of American coal, China had prospered, and Americans had fallen into poverty except for the richest citizens. He then brought the argument to the present—2011—and the United States is prosperous, but the Iraqi people are caught in a seemingly endless series of conflicts with the United States while also dealing with internal forces.

The lecture draws the attention of an Iraqi man. He is middle-class, unhappy with life under the control of ISIS, and wants to learn more about Radical Empathy. He writes to the lecturer, and a person-to-person conversation begins that also includes the wives of the two men.