Odyssey

An impossibly bright full moon creates a glow around a 15-foot rowboat on the stage of the Charlestown Working Theater. Inside the boat are two people, Odysseus and Penelope of Homer's ancient epic "The Odyssey," adapted and performed by Charlestown Working Theater codirectors Jennifer Johnson and John Peitso, a husband-and-wife team. Without ever leaving the rowboat, and with the simplest of theatrical techniques, Johnson and Peitso take the audience on a haunting and hypnotic version of Odysseus' journey, from Calypso's enchanted island past the dangerous sirens into the man-hating clutches...

Bracketology? An incomprehensible concept. RPI? A nice school in Troy, N.Y. They've been known to play some pretty good hockey there. The year was 1946. Nope, no Selection Sunday, either. The path to Harvard's first NCAA Tournament participation was a bit different. It was fairly simple. The Crimson were winning a lot of basketball games, and the people who mattered were paying attention. By the end of February it was kind of a given that if Harvard, which had lost only to Holy Cross, could defeat New Hampshire on March 2 in its last regular-season game, the Crimson would receive a...

FOXBOROUGH - Professional football is a game of routine - meet, watch film, practice, lift weights, play a game. However, there is nothing routine about the road trip the Patriots will embark on today. Most NFL trips are misnomers. They're really more like pit stops, but with back-to-back West Coast games against the San Francisco 49ers Sunday and the San Diego Chargers Oct. 12, the Patriots have opted for a full-fledged, 10-day football odyssey that has them flying out this afternoon, and not returning home until Oct. 13. San Jose State University will become Gillette Stadium West...

INDIANAPOLIS - His Romanian birthplace has been buried in snow and tonight's windchill reading is expected to be 2 degrees below zero. So the citizens of Timisoara won't be tempted to be outside, especially at 1:20 a.m. their time on Monday, when Super Bowl XLVI is scheduled to kick off. They'll be tuning in to Sport 1 to see what Zoltan Mesko can do with a ball that is pointed at both ends. "It's really humbling to represent the country I grew up in that has heard nothing about football before I came on the scene," said the Patriots second-year punter, who grew up kicking a...

INDIANAPOLIS - His Romanian birthplace has been buried in snow and tonight's windchill reading is expected to be 2 degrees below zero. So the citizens of Timisoara won't be tempted to be outside, especially at 1:20 a.m. their time on Monday, when Super Bowl XLVI is scheduled to kick off. They'll be tuning in to Sport 1 to see what Zoltan Mesko can do with a ball that is pointed at both ends. "It's really humbling to represent the country I grew up in that has heard nothing about football before I came on the scene," said the Patriots second-year punter, who grew up kicking a...

PROVIDENCE — Three things distinguish an odyssey from other journeys. It must be long, unpredictable, and have home as ultimate destination. Those qualities all apply to Linda Connor’s photographic career. For more than three decades, that career has taken Connor to sites as diverse as the Himalayas, Angkor, Chartres, the Valley of the Kings, Machu Picchu, and the desert Southwest. What these otherwise-disparate locales share is a sense of the sacred. They “remain mysterious, in plain sight,’’ as Connor puts it; and her photographs of them are “an attempt to point toward the...

No matter how many twists and turns Umphrey's McGee takes into prog-rock, metal, trip-hop, and, occasionally, free jazz, the group will forever be saddled with the term "jam band. " That's a dirty little label that makes most fans bristle, inviting all sorts of cliches. Can't a glassy-eyed college dude rock a Grateful Dead T-shirt and dread-locks in peace anymore? Let's get this straight. Umphrey's McGee does like to jam, sometimes noodle, over languorous songs that build to a fever pitch and then suddenly disperse in a whole new direction.

American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China , By Matthew Polly, Gotham, 320 pp., $26 A bad travel memoir is like a dinner guest who natters on about some personal experience, encounter, or adventure -- the inept camel ride, the drunken night in Bangkok, the beggar's mundane wisdom -- all the while oblivious to the listener, whose pasted-on smile can barely conceal a look of utter...

Anticipating a new year is like scratching an instant lottery ticket: Chances are slim that anything life-changing will happen, but for a little while, hope glows brightly. Why not celebrate in style while holding on to that hope? Here are some possibilities: You will not be surprised that Las Vegas whoops it up mightily on New Year's Eve. Don't expect the amazing bargains available most of the year, but vegas.com lists these three-night deals for two adults sharing a room Dec. 29-Jan.

TAMPA - Kari Lennon gently circled the head of 6-week-old Brooks with a blue ribbon, then stretched it along a measuring tape. Upstairs, her husband Steve was putting the older three children to bed, and Kari felt foolish, even furtive, doing something that she knew would seem crazy to him. But she could not help herself; she measured again. Since the day Brooks was born two days after Christmas in 2007, Kari had received nothing but assurances that the littlest Lennon was a healthy, blue-eyed boy. But the first time she and Steve had...

SOUTH HADLEY - In an age when more and more people are downloading reading materials, independent bookstores satisfy a need in readers like me, readers still in love with actual books. In the Pioneer Valley in central Massachusetts, the Odyssey Bookshop offers everything you would expect from an indie store, and more. With 4,000 feet of retail space, book lovers can peruse the shelves to their hearts' content while benefiting from suggestions by the knowledgeable staff. "Everyone who works here, including the owners, spends time on the floor.

Website visits: 281,895 Money spent: $104,808.17 Money raised: $157,972 Miles traveled: 42,884 Nights spent in youth hostels: 174 In hotels: 64 In orphanages: 148 Trees planted: 8,000 Acres of land puchased for Dalit families, India: 65 Pairs of shoes supplied: 765 Teens taught conversational English: 120 Teens receiving health-education training: 1,800 Brave … or...

THE ODYSSEY Directed and overall design conception by Stacy Klein Creative team: Brian Fairley, Jennifer Johnson, Matthew Glassman, Carlos Uriona. Technical design, Adam Bright. Music arranged and directed by Brian Fairley, John Peitso, Scott Halligan. Costumes, Tadea Klein. Lighting, John Pietso. Design: Nancy Winship Milliken, Hayley Wood, Jeff Bird, Rachel Silverman, Cynthia Fisher Presented by Double Edge Theatre in association with the Charlestown Working Theater, at The Farm, through Aug. 31. Tickets: $25. 866-811-4111, www.doubleedgetheatre.org.

ONCE UPON A RIVER By Bonnie Jo Campbell Norton, 348 pp., $25.95 "Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms. " Rainer Maria Rilke's advice in "Letters to a Young Poet" could easily serve as the epigraph to Bonnie Jo Campbell's new novel. The beating heart of "Once Upon a River" is its heroine, 16-year-old Margo Crane, who lives almost entirely in and for the natural world. "Before she could answer a question posed in the classroom, she always had to figure out...

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - “Oh my, that’s delicious,’’ said Susy Davidson, a gourmande from Seattle, as she tucked into a plateful of king crab ravioli at Chila, a chic bistro in this city’s restored docklands. Two years ago, Chila’s resident chef, Soledad Nardelli, picked up the Best Upcoming Chef prize from France’s Académie Internationale de la Gastronomie. On any ordinary day, her seafood and game-bird dishes - clam risotto, moulard duck magret, quail with mascarpone and lemon - attract a demanding clientele of local and visiting foodies.

THE BORROWER By Rebecca Makkai Viking, 324 pp., $25.95 The “I” trap. Attractively baited for the uncertain novelist. Easy to get into. Hard to get out of with much advantage. Great novels written in the first person require one of two conditions. In “Moby Dick,” Ishmael is essentially a window, though tinted with metaphysical light. The other option requires becoming a guide of sorts. To play an active part, to become a participant with one hand while clutching our elbow with the other, it is necessary for character and voice to possess an autonomous...

In the introduction and first chapter of his new book, “Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey,’’ Robert Camuto writes of breaking more laws in 20 minutes than anytime in his life, driving behind a winery employee to a restaurant in Sicily’s countryside. He lauds the island as his kind of “terra santa,’’ or holy land, from “the anarchic street markets of old Palermo, to the morning stillness of the vineyards and lava flows of Mount Etna.’’ What the book doesn’t describe is how he broke that stillness one morning in 2008.

ABOARD THE OASIS OF THE SEAS - We were standing on the Boardwalk, admiring the display of hand-carved carousel horses, when we heard the first scream. Then came a long shriek. Our eyes tracked upward, past the eight decks of balconies overlooking the expansive, Coney Island-style walkway . . . and there she was! A woman in a harness, her legs dangling precariously. Her feet soon struck a platform, and she was pulled completely upright, smiling triumphantly after completing the Oasis zipline track, a first in the cruise industry.

Baron Hilliard wasn’t much of a cyclist when he decided to spend a year biking across the country visiting black businesses. But walking wouldn’t get the entrepreneur, who promotes black businesses through his Together AsOne Foundation, where he wanted to go fast enough. So, on February 4, his 39th birthday, he left his home in Plainfield, N.J., pedaling an $89 bike donated by a co-worker. “I wanted to get out and bring more exposure to some of the good things going on in our community,’’ said Hilliard, whose ride is chronicled on www.JourneyThruBlackAmerica.com.

What is it about rivers that draw us? They connect remote places, yet they threaten to flood. But also this: Their ancient rhythms slow us, and their meanderings make our minds meander, too. Perhaps because of the patience rivers enforce, a great many books have been written about journeys down them. In fiction, think Huck Finn and “Heart of Darkness.” Gonzo travel writers have paddled the Amazon (Joe Kane’s “Running the Amazon”) and the Yenisey (“Lost in Mongolia: Rafting the World’s Last Unchallenged River” by Colin Angus)