After 30 years of practicing law in New Jersey, Jerry Finn has returned to his first love: theater. Finn, 74, and his wife, Terri, founded the Banyan Theater Company in 2002 to bring to Sarasota "more sophisticated, literary, even challenging" works during off-season summer months. Now the Banyan does 50 performances of three plays in [...]

The first thing to know about the house Ernie and Loretta Ritz built is that it is a trompe l’oeil masterpiece of un-Americanized Mediterranean style. The second thing to know is that it’s located above Bacco’s restaurant on Lemon Avenue in Sarasota, directly across from Whole Foods Market. Amid the dust of downtown renovation and [...]

Despite years of going to the theater here and writing about it, putting together this awards story never gets any easier. In fact, it gets harder. That’s in part because it’s simply harder to see every show presented in the Sarasota-Manatee area. Once upon a time there were only half a dozen venues; then a [...]

This month, we take you somewhere glossy lifestyle magazines like ours rarely go-into the haunting world of the homeless. And your guide may be as unexpected as the journey: comic novelist Robert Plunket. A noted author whose cultural commentary often appears in the New York Times and other national publications, Plunket is best known in [...]

Though names have been changed, everyone in the story is a real person who was homeless in Sarasota this spring. I had arranged to meet Rick in front of Resurrection House, a social service agency for the homeless that’s located on the picturesquely named Kumquat Court, just north of downtown. A friend who knew a [...]

Style isn’t static; like bread, it gets stale. Real style requires regularly reinventing your look, not in drastic Madonna-fashion, but by sharpening your focus on who you are and what’s happening in your life now. A new job, a move, a change in your body or outlook-all can call for a new crease in your [...]

In the old days, before the baseball cap became the ubiquitous symbol of Americans, hats were serious business and defined individuals in the deepest possible way. We were, literally, our hats. When my father was a TV and movie producer, he wore a Homburg, now known as the Godfather hat. When he was an investment [...]