Entertainment

I come from a generation comfortably acquainted with the “Give Peace a Chance” era of John Lennon, a perennial figure in any college dorm. For this reason, it came as a shock to watch the international beacon of peace curse his mother and ditch school regularly as a youth. Yet both these images surface in director Sam Taylor-Wood’s 2009 biopic “Nowhere Boy,” which chronicles the formative years of the young and troubled John Lennon.

Amusement parks have a special place for illustrator Lane Smith. While he studied at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, he paid his bills by working as a janitor at Disneyland. Each day after class, he put on the white suit and took his pan and broom and shot the breeze with the balloon vendor until the park closed. He swept the Haunted Mansion, dodging motion-activated spooks as he reached for soda bottles that had rolled beyond his reach. Smith thinks that the nights he spent alone in the park played a role in the formation of his otherworldly aesthetic.

Two years ago Mark Russell, the warbling, piano-playing political satirist, decided to pack it in and announced his retirement. Two years later, he has un-retired.Why miss all the fun?
“I’m not making this up,” Russell told me in a telephone interview last weekend. “It was a year ago last summer, a group of congressmen went over to the Middle East. They got drunk and went skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee.
“That was funny. If they’d drowned, it would have been funnier. Plus, the presidential campaign was going on, and I didn’t want to miss it.”

Richard Blanco is a hot property. This Cuban-American immigrant, trained as an engineer to build bridges and highways but with a master’s degree in creative writing, was selected by the inaugural committee to write and read a poem at President Obama’s second swearing-in last January, a poem he wrote in three weeks. Ever since, he has been in constant demand. On Sept. 27 he will be the first speaker in The Salisbury Forum’s fall schedule.