Archive for February, 2006

Due to the production cycles of the Forum, we are publishing with some delay this report of an event from December 10, 2005, a performance of „Rita”, a one-act comic opera of Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848), presented as part of a series of concerts in celebration of the tenth anniversary of Opera Circle.

With the right author addressing the topic, one can find much light humor in the relationship between husband and wife. The librettist Ustano Vaez is one such author. He came upon an idea to show us something different and just a bit livelier for the amusement of the audience: one wife with two husbands under no suspicion of bigamy, but rather living in accordance with the law.
(more…)

Those of us who were raised in Communist Poland have much in common. We are direct, act with a characteristic ease, and we tend to pay little attention to manners.  The Polish post-war generations stand in direct contrast to the Polish pre-war intelligentsia. To many of us the pre-war intelligentsia is an abstract notion often associated with rigid etiquette and snobbism.  When at the end of the eighties I arrived in Cleveland, the first representative of Polonia who reached out to me was Doctor Jerzy Maciuszko, a charming, courteous man full of gentleness, humbleness, politeness, and inherent high culture.

A Warsavian by birth, Jerzy Maciuszko, is a 1936 graduate of the Department of English Language at the University of Warsaw.  He began his American career in 1951 as a lecturer of Polish Literature at Alliance College in Pennsylvania. Soon thereafter, he moved to Cleveland where he enrolled in the doctoral program in library sciences at Case Western Reserve University and worked in the department of foreign literature at the Cleveland Public Library. Upon defending his Ph.D. dissertation, Maciuszko was promoted to director of the prestigious John G. White Department at The Cleveland Public Library and continued his academic career teaching Polish literature at Case Western Reserve University.
(more…)

The Euclid Corridor Transportation Project is converting Euclid Ave. into a “smart street” ensuring that the Project, when complete will be among the most technologically advanced Bus Rapid Transit Systems in America.

Before the high-tech system is constructed, Wilbur Smith Associates, the prime consultant for the Final Design phase of the Project, will develop a computerized model of Corridor traffic and pedestrian patterns. The model will be a tool to determine signal timing and the technical procedures needed to regulate the safe and efficient operations of traffic and pedestrian signals along the Corridor. Fiber optic lines will be threaded inside a special tube placed beneath Euclid Ave., supplementing what already is an extensive underground network of fiber optic ducts. In a separate project, the City of Cleveland, Division of Water has begun replacing 100 year-old water lines beneath Euclid Ave.
(more…)