Signs of a crossing

The Welcome Wagon’s front man Vito Aiuto wore a black wool cap rolled up to expose his ears, framing a scraggly beard, a look somewhere between hipster and monk. The snap buttons on his rose-embroidered cowboy shirt rose to his neck. An acoustic guitar wound tightly around his chest, he faced his wife, Monique, The […]

A dance with "D-Man"

In the glory days of the Dallas Cowboys—the early 1990s—kids used to joke about how the team’s compact, unstoppable running back Emmitt Smith took ballet lessons in the off-season. It made theoretical sense, kind of, that studying movement would improve his footwork. But the thought that it was Smith’s moonlighting in Capezios and a tutu […]

Four bullets later

Last week marked the fourth anniversary of Seung-Hui Cho’s shooting rampage on the campus of Virginia Tech that killed 32, plus Cho, and injured 17. In the four years since, even as Nidal Malik Hasan and Jared Lee Loughner have used legally-purchased firearms for mass murder, there has been little progress in reforming the loose […]