The Good, The Bad, The …

March 3, 2013 By Mickey Friedman I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I like The Old Mill in Egremont ever since I read that cruel review in the Berkshire Beagle last summer. Reviewers are odd ducks. I’ve occasionally…

It’s Time To Act

February 16, 2013 By Mickey Friedman Rather than act, the Great Barrington Selectboard decided to discuss guns and gun violence. We Americans like to discuss/argue about everything.  But some arguments defy resolution. Like the argument about abortion and women’s rights.…

Digging in the Dark

February 7, 2013 By Mickey Friedman When last we spoke I was selling old CDs, used books, and desperately organizing a bake sale to raise the five hundred bucks to buy the second half of the still Not For Public…

Great Barrington and the Arming of America

February 7, 2013 By David Scribner Political fortitude appears to be in short supply among the members of the Great Barrington Board of Selectmen. Shortly after the horrific killing of 20 Newtown, Connecticut elementary school children – mostly first graders…

Traffic = Transformation

January 17, 2013 By Mickey Friedman News commentators like me, Maureen Dowd, and David Brooks, and old-fashioned reporter-types like the Woodsteins – who met their source in a dark parking garage, then blew the whistle on Nixon’s plumbers – well,…

Happy Mad New Year

January 3, 2013 By Mickey Friedman Anthony, my bestest Republican in the Best Small Town in America, frets about the Obama Death Panels. But as I transition to New Years, taking stock, a part of me looks forward to my…

And Even More Cheese

December 31, 2012 By Mickey Friedman We’re supposed to celebrate another great moment in the life and times of The Best Small Town in America. So many good things: The clean-up of the toxic New England Log Homes site; another…

Making The World Safe For Whoopee

December 1, 2012 By Mickey Friedman Ignore the gossip-mongers: the mission remains critical. We’ve invested so much making Afghanistan safe for Hamid Karzai and his drug-running relatives, it would be a crying shame to cut and run. Just because our…

The Real Heroes

November 22, 2012 By Mickey Friedman I was fifteen but looked more like twelve. Frightened, but determined. My local Woolworth’s was on Fordham Road. My sign said something about equal rights. The Greensboro, NC sit-in of February 1960 was a…

My Dinner With Mel

November 18, 2012 By Mickey Friedman Mel Greenberg invited me to have dinner with him Thursday evening. At the American Legion Hall in Sheffield. I must have been daydreaming because I drove right past it, through Sheffield and then had…