Finally! You've waited years and now they're here. Critics generally give Swing Time the edge, but my favorites are Shall We Dance (if only for the Gershwin score and that goofy roller-skating routine) and Top Hat. The latter film also gets my vote for the best all-time dance sequence with "Cheek to Cheek": Fred's delivery, the choreography and that feather dress (see left) all conspire for a sequence of cinematic bliss so purely escapist it even features as a plot point in other films such as The English Patient, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and The Green Mile.

Even if you can't make the fifth annual Open to Art walk this weekend, there's plenty to ponder during a casual lunch-hour stroll downtown. Less than a block from the bus station on 4th Avenue, in "The God Show" at Gallery Project, you can catch a huge oil on canvas titled "American Fundamentalists (Christ's Entry into Washington in 2008)", artist Joel Pelletier's update of James Ensor's 1888 Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889. Or, just across the street at the WSG Gallery on Liberty St., you can catch Death playing chess from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal in Alvey Jones's "As Time Goes By: Scenes from Famous Motion Pictures".

Ann Arbor’s own Davy Rothbart, writer and magazine publisher, can be seen on CTN Channel 17 this week, speaking on his collection Found:The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World. The program, part of the library’s 'Sunday Edition' series, was recorded in May. It can be viewed on October 4 at 3:30 p.m., October 6 at 1:30 p.m., October 7 at 5:00 p.m., and on October 8 at 1:30 p.m. Rothbart, a graduate of Community High and the University of Michigan, is the creator of Found magazine which publishes the text of the discarded bits of people’s lives: receipts, shopping lists, unsent letters, personal notes, etc. During the program he also reads one of the stories in his eagerly-awaited, just-released collection of stories The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas.

"Listen for me on a spring night, on a wet night, on a rainy night.…Listen for me tonight, tonight, and I'll sing you to sleep." So begins Song of the Water Boatman and other Pond Poems by Joyce Sidman. Poetry forms from Haiku to sea shanties highlight the food chain of a pond, cattails in all seasons, or late fall when a painted turtle settles into the mud. Each poem is accompanied by a paragraph that provides scientific information about a specific creature, plant, or aspect of pond life. Becky Prange's woodcuts are a natural accompaniment to Sidman’s poems. My favorite is the title poem about a Water Boatman; “Down through the jolly waters green, I stroke with legs both long and lean, like a streamlined class-A submarine…on a sunny summer’s morning.” Delightful!!

13 year old Sam Lopez is a scrappy, “pretty” boy who grew up in California with a “hippie” mother. When Sam moves to England to live with relatives, he agrees to pose as a girl for the first five days of school in order to gain acceptance into the new group. Boy2Girl offers “laugh out loud” scenes and thoughtful reflection on gender and roles. By the end, life goes on. Terence Black states "Entertainment ... often has a serious thread running through it."

The Play Ground is in the mood for a black comedy. Check out Redbud Productions new feature: HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES. It is playing at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti October 6-9 and 13-16. This award winning play is set in the mid 1960s and concerns a zoo keeper/songwriter, his star-struck girlfriend and other assorted characters who cross their paths during a few history making days in New York City.

Take your family to pick apples and I bet you'll find yourself looking for recipes. An Apple Pie Harvest will get you started. This fun book also inicudes background information on this ubiquitous fruit. If you don't quite remember what you picked, the color photographs toward the beginning may remind you. Don't fear, the recipes in the book go beyond pies and applesauce. However, do be warned a relatively high proportion of the recipes seem to involve meats like duck, veal, lamb and I even spied a rabbit recipe. Vegetarians beware!

August Wilson, award winning playwright, died Sunday, October 2, 2005, of liver cancer.

Mr. Wilson, a high school dropout who then devoted himself to education by inhaling knowledge at his local Pittsburgh public library, originally intended on being a poet. But his drive to celebrate the African American experience exploded onto paper in the form of a cycle of ten plays that forever shaped how this country sees the real Black America. The first entry in his cycle, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was produced on Broadway in 1984. Fences, another in the cycle, won a Pulitzer in 1987, as did The Piano Lesson, in 1990. The last play in this historic body of work, Radio Golf, opened at the Yale Repertory Theater in the spring of 2005, and is the only one in the cycle that has not yet appeared on Broadway.

"A Breath of Snow and Ashes isn't great literature. It's way, way too long; full of breathless prose, cornball archaic language, and Gaelic phrases; easy to make fun of or relegate to the status of guilty pleasure."

So why am I telling you about it? Read this review from Kathy Weissman.

And don't worry about jumping into the series at the end - heel her advise and get hold of a copy of the The Outlandish Companion. Before long, you will be handselling Diana Gabaldon and this historical fantasy series to all your friends.

The British are coming! Check out these new titles for the latest British Invasion on these shores.

At #4 is Thud! by Terry Pratchett: the anniversary of the disastrous battle of Koom Valley draws nigh in this latest stirring adventure in the Discorld series.

At #7 is On Beauty by Zadie Smith: this splendid postmodern retelling of Howard's End, set in a New England college town, was recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.