Sorrow

It’s fair to say that Stanley Pleskun and his girlfriend, Barbara, have a strange relationship. “Strongman’’ catches them in an emotionally codependent tangle. They’ve been sharing a small, cheap New Jersey apartment with her sister for the last couple of years, and Pleskun has almost had enough. For half a year, he and Barbara let a documentary filmmaker into their lives. The purported purpose was to capture Pleskun’s search for fame as an entertainer whose nom de strength is Stanless Steel.

AS A child, I learned to apologize for a mistake. Oops, I spilled the flour. Sorry, I forgot not to clomp noisily down the stairs. Our apologies were reserved for real mistakes, not for overt acts of deliberate cruelty, like hitting my sister. When those occurred, we were punished, and we promised not to do it again. This taught us to think before we acted and to behave properly with kindness and respect for others. This is diametrically opposed to the grand public apologies, the feigned remorse, expressed by people caught behaving very badly.

AS A child, I learned to apologize for a mistake. Oops, I spilled the flour. Sorry, I forgot not to clomp noisily down the stairs. Our apologies were reserved for real mistakes, not for overt acts of deliberate cruelty, like hitting my sister. When those occurred, we were punished, and we promised not to do it again. This taught us to think before we acted and to behave properly with kindness and respect for others. This is diametrically opposed to the grand public apologies, the feigned remorse, expressed by people caught behaving very badly.

NEWTON - Olga Tines drove in the predawn darkness from Nashua to Newton for final markdown at her beloved Filene's Basement store. At 7 a.m., she was the first customer here for Black Friday. As she pushed her shopping cart and grazed the aisles for bargains, she couldn't help but mourn the coming loss of a Boston retail institution. "It's like going to a funeral," said Tines, who has made the early morning road trip an annual tradition with her husband, Andrew Smith, who shopped in the men's store across the street.

William Finn's "Elegies: A Song Cycle" begins and ends in darkness, as do we all. In between, though, Finn fills the stage with a glorious flock of magnificently individual characters, each one brimming with vitality and light. These are departed friends, acquaintances, loved ones, and Finn celebrates their lives even as he mourns their deaths. So should we all. What Finn accomplishes in "Elegies," now receiving its New England premiere in a perfectly simple production by the SpeakEasy Stage Company, is nothing short of miraculous.

“Why must I dwell upon sorrow?’’ asks the narrator at the end of Andrea Levy’s fifth novel. “Perhaps . . . upon some other day there may come a person who would wish to tell the chronicle of those times anew. But I am an old-old woman. And, reader, I have not the ink.’’ The speaker is July, narrator and heroine in the fullest sense of the word of “The Long Song.’’ Born on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, daughter of a field slave called Kitty and the plantation’s brutish Scottish overseer, July lives through the last two decades of slavery, the chaotic and...

‘Women Without Men’’ takes place in 1953, during the civic unrest surrounding the CIA-backed overthrow of Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Really, though, that’s a dodge. Shirin Neshat’s film, a magical-realist cry from the heart, is as up-to-date as last year’s pro-democracy protests. “All we wanted was to find a new form, a new way,’’ muses one of the characters on the soundtrack. “Everything repeats itself over time.’’ That the woman saying this is either dead or on her way there — it depends on how you read Neshat’s...

Though the Allman Brothers Band has been part of rock royalty and pop culture for more than 40 years, the Gregg Allman dossier isn't particularly overstuffed. Allman has been far more restrained than other musicians of his caliber when it comes to hogging media, which makes his memoir, "My Cross to Bear," a riveting read. Unlike Keith Richards who used his book "Life" to reinforce the persona we have come to appreciate, Allman gives a seemingly honest appraisal of an extraordinary life led by a guy who, by all appearances, would have happily settled for normal; Allman figured...

‘Darling Companion" is about and for an audience that really doesn't get enough respect: women of a certain age who love their dogs too much. It's far from a great movie — an overwritten, underplotted vanity project that's a distant echo of what director Lawrence Kasdan ("The Big Chill," "Grand Canyon") could do in his prime. But it has Diane Keaton, and that's enough. Keaton plays Beth, the well-to-do wife of an officious Denver back doctor named Joseph (Kasdan regular Kevin Kline)

Tim Thomas separated himself from his Bruins' teammates yesterday afternoon when he refused to join them at the White House, a day meant to celebrate their 2011 Stanley Cup championship. The two-time Vezina Trophy winner later in the day issued a statement, released by NHL.com and on Thomas's Facebook page just after 6 p.m., noting his disillusionment with the United States government and offering that as his reason not to stand with his team. "I believe the federal government has grown out of control," he stated, "threatening the rights, liberties, and property of the people.

GRAND CANYON - In the waiting room of Papillon Helicopters, laughter erupts from a group of foreign-speaking elders. My mom and I look at each other and shrug. We miss their joke; but we soon have our own giggle. As we watch the English version of the safety video in preparation for our helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon, we hear a woman's voice: "If the door opens during your flight, do not be alarmed. " My jaw hangs open. My mom's moon-shaped face lights up. I want to rerun the video: If our helicopter door opens midflight more than a mile above jagged, unpronounceable...

When students return for school Monday morning at Washington Prep, they'll be greeted by crisis counselors and missing one of their beloved classmates, a cheerleader who died after collapsing during a football game. Angela Gettis, a 16-year-old sophomore at the school, was rallying the crowd Friday night in the fourth quarter of a tie game at Fremont High School when she suffered an apparent cardiac arrest, Los Angeles Unified School District spokesman Tom Waldman said. The game stopped as coaches and trainers ran to help.

JOY KILLS SORROW At Club Passim, Oct. 1 at 7 and 10 p.m. Tickets: $15. 617-492-7679. www.clubpassim.com Rising Boston band Joy Kills Sorrow takes its name from a piece of bluegrass lineage: the call letters of radio station WJKS, which was home to the Monroe Brothers' show in the 1930s. And Joy Kills Sorrow uses classic bluegrass instrumentation - acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, upright bass - and regularly plays bluegrass festivals. But Joy Kills Sorrow does not consider itself to be a bluegrass band, but rather a "modern American string band.

The walls of Greater Love Tabernacle in Dorchester could not contain the grief of a family mourning the loss of not one but two loved ones yesterday. Their pain rolled down the concrete steps and onto the street below, where friends and family dressed in white held each other as they said goodbye to LaShon Washington and Joseph Winston, cousins felled by gun violence over the Fourth of July weekend. The private service in the packed church lasted more than two hours, with groups of men occasionally emerging and holding up men and women...

REDON, France - Two months ago, Tyler Farrar was demoralized, sleeping 20 hours a day. He had even stopped riding, overcome by sorrow after his best friend died in a crash at the Giro d’Italia. Yesterday, Farrar became the first American to win a stage of the Tour de France on the Fourth of July. It was the first time he had won a stage in cycling’s showcase race, and he dedicated the victory to the late Wouter Weylandt of Belgium. “It’s a little bit unbelievable to me at the moment that it actually happened,’’ said Farrar, who pulled out of the Giro after the...

NEW ORLEANS — Relatives flew over Gulf of Mexico waters yesterday where 11 oil rig workers died a year ago, residents gathered in quiet prayer vigils onshore, and President Obama vowed to hold BP and others accountable for “the painful losses that they’ve caused.’’ Somber remembrances marked the one-year anniversary of the rig explosion that caused the worst offshore oil spill in American history. But all is not bleak. Beaches, restaurants, and hotels are filling up again, and analysts say the resilient gulf is on the mend.

AUSTIN, Texas - Robin De Haven was driving the company truck when he saw something that didn’t look right - a small plane, flying extremely low over a heavily congested area of Austin. The 28-year-old Iraq war veteran recalled yesterday how he then saw black smoke billowing from the glass building and rushed to the scene. There, where the plane had exploded into flames in a suicide attack fueled by antigovernment hatred, De Haven found five people trapped on the second floor of the burning office housing Internal Revenue Service employees.

ROCKVILLE, Conn. - A 19-year-old from Long Island was sentenced yesterday to three years and one month in prison for the hit-and-run death of a University of Connecticut freshman last winter. Anthony P. Alvino of Lindenhurst, N.Y., said during the emotional hearing in Rockville Superior Court that he hoped Carlee Wines's family could one day forgive him, but that he could never forgive himself. "I'm truly sorry for causing the death of Carlee Wines," he said. "It's been something I've wanted to say for the past year.

In Howard Norman’s best novel, “The Bird Artist,’’ and in two that approach it, “The Museum Guard’’ and “Devotion,’’ we are led beguilingly the wrong way and into comical dead ends; only to find the wrong way is another way to arrive, and the end is not dead but opening up. “What Is Left the Daughter’’ is not quite up to those three; it suffers more noticeably from a Norman weakness: a tendency to provide brilliant moments...

“Why must I dwell upon sorrow?’’ asks the narrator at the end of Andrea Levy’s fifth novel. “Perhaps . . . upon some other day there may come a person who would wish to tell the chronicle of those times anew. But I am an old-old woman. And, reader, I have not the ink.’’ The speaker is July, narrator and heroine in the fullest sense of the word of “The Long Song.’’ Born on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, daughter of a field slave called Kitty and the plantation’s brutish Scottish overseer, July lives through the last two decades of...