City Journal

Free's Advice

By schooling Boston kids in financial smarts, the rising star from Roxbury   shows she's one diva with a heart of gold. By Erin Byers

As a dancer-turned-rapper-turned-hot-stuff cohost of BET's top-rated 106 & Park, she hobnobs with the likes of Will Smith and Jay-Z. But back when Free was still Marie Wright from Roxbury, her life was filled with considerably less bling. "I got messed up on credit cards early," she says. "It took me awhile to get it together." To help teens in her hometown avoid the same missteps, she and her mom founded the Free4Life Foundation. The former Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts student says her next move is to take the organization's financial literacy campaign national.

Urban Studies

Where There's Smoke

Two years into the city's smoking ban, tobacco fiends are convening at cigarette smokeasies. By James Gaddy

On the second anniversary of the new Prohibition, smokers cling to a tenuous spot on the social ladder, just above last summer's clams. But as we learned in the 1920s, not to mention the Clinton era, every vice will find its outlet. While bars like the Tir na nOg in Union Square are no longer earning street cred by defying the no-smoking edict, the air in Allston is perfumed with rumors of a place where, behind a façade of yuppie hair gel and frat-sized egos, sympathetic owners host smoky after-hours parties and allow discreet Marlboros to burn in corner ashtrays.

A few places let smokers indulge their habit without flouting the law. At Cigar Masters on Boylston, which stays open until 1 a.m., business has ballooned and keeps growing. Tobacco enthusiasts also pack the Oriental-themed smoking lounge at Casbah in Charlestown, waiting up to an hour for a table on busy evenings. The underground choice — literally — is the North End basement known as Stanza dei Sigari, one floor beneath Caffè Vittoria. The space boasts a full bar and an authentic Sopranos décor that apparently keeps the smoking police at bay.

In time, even the gaggles of puffers outside our taverns and diners may find more welcoming environs. Boston's Moskow Architects has developed a prototype for a designated sidewalk refuge it calls the Urban Hookah. The apparatus, which resembles a giant motocross helmet, includes heaters, a fan, and a butt receptacle. Thoughtful touches, all. But since the one good thing the ban has done for smokers is enhance their rebellious image, they might want to decline the favor.

Hot Dates

What's happening this month. By Andrew Rimas

4/29-5/26: Television sweeps month: The networks pull out the stops to bring us sophisticated, intelligent entertainment. And lesbians kissing.

5/5: Snoop Dogg at Worcester's DCU Center: Just wondering — when Snoop goes to Austria, does he shizzle a schnitzel?

5/8: Duckling Day Parade: The swan is already the city's semi-official bird. Let's make the ducklings our semi-official moo-shi dish.

5/20: Bruce Springsteen at the Orpheum: Sure, there are plenty of tickets left. And the Big Dig is perfectly safe.

5/24-5/28: U2 Vertigo 2005 tour at the FleetCenter: "TD Banknorth Garden" just isn't working for us. Let's come up with a new name we can all agree on. Like the Bonodome.

5/28: The "Brains" exhibit opens at the Museum of Science: The perfect family outing. For cannibal zombies.

5/28-5/30: Faneuil Hall Street Performers Festival: How about that? There is something more agonizing than having your brains eaten by a cannibal zombie.

Chauffeuring Under the Influence

Why a lack of oversight could make your next limo ride a trip you'll want to forget. By Chris Berdik

For prom dates and wedding parties, a limousine is the Turks-and-Caicos timeshare of vehicular transport, a rent-by-the-hour ticket to status. For others — revelers at bachelors' and bachelorettes' bacchanalias, for instance — it promises secure and convenient passage through a night of debauchery. Both groups believe that the conspicuous luxury of limos, not to mention their sheer bulk, makes them an inherently safe way to get around. They never stop to consider what in a handful of recent incidents nearly was a life-or-death question: Who's behind the wheel?

Most of the time, of course, it's a competent professional. But in the case of nine women who endured a scary trip home to Wilmington from a Madonna concert last summer, it turned out to be a man who'd already been caught driving under the influence once before; four years earlier, another driver for the same company, Lynette's, was cited for DUI, his fourth such offense. The problem, says Mark Cohen, director of the Boston Police Department's licensing division — which oversees taxis, but not limos — is that, "with limos, we just don't know who they are, where they are, and who's driving."

The livery industry is a relatively easy in for entrepreneurs, and over the past decade the number of limo companies in this state has mushroomed. There are now 8,700 vehicles with Massachusetts livery tags, including limousines, cars, and for-hire vans. According to Massport, some 895 livery operators are cleared to work out of Logan Airport, up 49 percent from 10 years ago.

The drivers of those vehicles are not required to obtain a special permit. They carry the same Class D license as the average motorist and, like the average motorist, have only to pass a road test to receive one; there is no background check. The Department of Telecommunications and Energy's supervision of subways, bus lines, and moving companies does not extend to the coachmen in the black suits and round caps. It's an exception a department official calls "a big, gaping hole."

Motivated by the drunk-driving arrest of a Cambridge chauffeur who used a fake license to get hired — this after serving time for sexually assaulting a minor — state Senator Charles Shannon filed a bill in 1994 that called for allowing municipalities to screen would-be limo drivers. When Shannon died last month, he was still trying to win support for the measure, which has been knocked down five times in 10 years. The limo industry, led by Dav El owner Scott Solombrino, contends that the legislation would create an onerous bureaucracy — that "the companies that are legit are doing the background checks anyway, because they know it's their business they're opening up to exposure."

Meanwhile, a few towns have crafted their own licensing requirements. "I just denied a guy about 20 minutes ago," says Andover police officer Robert Cronin. The aspiring Jeeves, Cronin discovered, was facing drug charges and a burglary rap.

Thank God We're A Two-Newspaper Town

March 18, 2005: " Hard Words Over Steroids" — Boston Globe ; "Soft Ball: Congress Lets Stars off Hook" — Boston Herald

Drawing On Tradition

Filene's Basement's iconic ads all come from the hand of the same prolific doodler. By Katherine Bowers

The strapping Gillette Man has sold out to Procter & Gamble. Mustachioed Fred the Baker retired nearly a decade ago, making way for the stars of Dunkin' Donuts' ever-changing marketing campaigns. But as long as Kurt Lumpkins holds a Prismacolor pencil, the city will retain at least one bit of its corporate iconography. The stylish, fortysomething reformed Texan (he's almost lost the twang) is currently the lone illustrator behind the familiar sketches of "famous maker" fashions that have defined Filene's Basement's ads throughout the company's 97-year history.

Usually, Lumpkins sketches the clothes in the ads from actual merchandise, tacking up, say, a Barneys tapestry skirt in his cubicle as he works. Other times he conjures designs from his imagination; around Christmas, when the workload is crazy, he paper-dolls, carefully gluing new duds over old images. With a few flicks of the wrist, he's got his model's pose. Next he adds color, filling in the soft, chalky pastels to create the eerily luminous skin that is a Lumpkins hallmark. "I've gotten into trouble over the years spending so much time on faces," he says. He renders cheekbones so sharp they could chisel ice and has a thing for operatic hair; he never got over Julia Roberts's Pretty Woman mane.

It used to be that every department store across the country had at least one illustrator like Lumpkins. Now, "I don't want to use the word dinosaur," he says, "but there are very few of us left." Over his 20 years on the job, he has drawn hemlines rising and falling; these days he's cautiously keeping up with another trend, drawing midriffs peeking, Britney-style, out of blouses. "That's something we would never have done before. It would have been taboo."

The Modest Proposal

Au Bon Pain in the Butt

A call for an end to the sandwich maker's maddening sack-it-yourself system.

Consistency is my thing. Every workday, I crave the same scrumptious stack of turkey, melted Swiss, onions, and cucumbers on multigrain from my local Au Bon Pain. The young sandwich makers know this. They also know I like my bread toasted and my herb mayo dabbed, not slathered. Then I get to the cash register, and the blissful symbiosis falls apart.

For months, I've had to request a bag for what is obviously a takeout meal. I don't see why this should be an issue. My sandwich is wrapped. I'm not carrying a tray, and my jacket is securely buttoned. Clearly I am not planning to stay. But there I am, bagging my sandwich myself as I try to pay and stow the change, futzing with my purse and trying not to drop everything on the floor, dammit. So I plead with you, my dear local Au Bon Pain: You've got a new manager, an upscaled menu. Why keep leaving your customers holding the bag? — Cheryl Alkon

Mary Poppins, Ph.D.

What separates Boston's nannies from the ones you've seen on TV? The advanced degrees, for starters. By Katherine Ozment

I was reminded the other day what a strange and cerebral place we live in when our nanny sent an unexpected e-mail containing a five-page paper she'd written for a graduate course. It carried the heady title "A Piagetian Analysis of Time-Outs as an Effective Mechanism of Punishment for a 26-Month-Old Child." In it she dissected, with due academic rigor, the popular post-spanking-era disciplinary tactic my husband and I sometimes employ.

Supernanny 's Jo Frost is a big fan of the time-out — in which a screaming, kicking, or otherwise rule-defying child (what our nanny labeled "the subject") is placed in a quiet corner so he can contemplate his bad self and return with a fresh perspective on the world and how to function in it — though she has replaced the corner with the "naughty room" or the "naughty step." Here in the academic center of the universe, you're more likely to find a nanny who will deconstruct the merits of your parental methodology than one who'll dole out reprimands, no questions asked.

"I always say I'm going to put up pennants of the colleges our nannies have gone to," says Marsha Epstein, president of the American Nanny Company in Newtonville. "Boston nannies are very smart, very polished, and have great educations."

Where else would you find a nanny like Adam Gordon, a Bates sociology grad who also studied music at UMass Lowell? He works with a local family with two sets of twins, ages three-and-a-half and five. He does rhythm and movement exercises with the children and is teaching them to recognize the pitches of various guitar chords. Gordon's charges are also learning to speak Spanish.

Then there's Boston's own star nanny, Michelle LaRowe, last year's International Nanny Association's Nanny of the Year. LaRowe, who works with a set of twins in Newton, was a chemistry major. She eagerly applies the theorems she learned in the classroom in her new career. "My volcanoes," she says, "are obviously the best."

Employees of the Month

Two stars of The Office recall the lessons of the formative summer jobs they held here.

>>Rainn Wilson (eccentric paper salesman Dwight Schrute): I worked at the Lyceum restaurant in Salem. There was a cheap-ass dinner theater upstairs. I served prime rib and iceberg lettuce salads while they did plays like Last of the Red Hot Lovers where a guy would pull panties out of the couch cushions and then roll his eyes at the audience. It's not so different from what I do right now.

>>B .J. Novak (temp Ryan Howard): [Fellow cast-member] John Krasinski got me a job at Caffè Lampara in Newton. My boss, Kevin, was a nice guy, but he had a habit of calling everybody "Boss." I was always tempted to call him "Employee." I learned a lot. For instance, if you show up early on your first two days, you'll be "the early guy" even if you show up late every day afterwards. — Carolyn V. Marsden

Taming Your Green Monster

Lawn-care advice from David Mellor, Fenway Park's director  of grounds and resident turf doctor. By Sedona Fitzgerald

>> Splurge on good seed. Fenway uses Kentucky bluegrass, but homeowners can choose anything from a sunny mix to a perennial rye to a fescue — as long as they don't scrimp. "You get what you pay for," says Mellor, who shares wisdom from his 23 years as a big-league groundskeeper in his two books, The Lawn Bible and Picture Perfect: Mowing Techniques for Lawns, Landscapes, and Sports. "If it's on sale or an off-brand name, you could be planting weed seeds."

  >> Take just a little off the top. While the Fenway turf is kept at exactly one-and-a-quarter inches, the proper backyard mower setting is around twice that. "Don't cut off more than one-third of the grass at a time," Mellor says. And keep the blades sharp. "A dull blade tears grass and frays it, instead of getting a nice, clean cut." The Sox rely on the Toro Sidewinder mower, but for home use, Mellor likes the Simplicity lawn tractor.

  >> Cure your chemical dependency. Mellor, who recommends Scotts and Vigoro fertilizers, stresses the importance of reading up on proper dosages before dumping products on your pasture. "People use too many chemicals and don't follow instructions," he says. The best time to water is between 3 and 7 a.m.; don't do it early in the evening, when the moisture will sit on the grass, making it vulnerable to pathogens and fungal disease.

  >> Treat your lawn as a canvas. The flawless lines Mellor's crew cuts into the field at Fenway come from the rollers on the mowers pressing the grass in different directions: The light sections are mowed away from the viewer's vantage point, and the dark sections toward it. "Patterns are only limited by your imagination," says Mellor, who cautions: "Of course, a Yankee logo will kill the grass."

TEN-SECOND SEMINAR: A quick cure for longwindedness.

"Time your speech in advance by standing up and delivering it — not by sitting and reading, which takes less time." From Channel 4 anchor-turned-executive coach Suzanne Bates's new book, Speak Like a CEO: Secrets for Commanding Attention and Getting Results.

By the Numbers

387 Length, in miles, of the roots of a single grass plant

Grass plants per square foot in an average lawn: 850

Days the grass on Boston Common goes between mowings: 7-10

Times per 24 hours the Fenway outfield is trimmed during Red Sox home stands: 1

Agronomy interns employed by the team: 12

2,200 Acres of land overseen by the Boston Parks and Recreation Department

Fee to a Boston resident for a permit to be married in a public park: $50

Maximum number of guests allowed, including wedding party: 50

Number of weddings celebrated in Boston parks last year: 101

Typical cost of a wedding held in Massachusetts: $20,000-$24,000

35 millionVisitors to Massachusetts state parks last year

Annual budget of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation: $77 million

Cost of backlogged infrastructure and building repairs in state parks: almost $800 million

Rank among the 50 states of Massachusetts' environmental spending as a percentage of its total budget: 48

Bathing beaches under state jurisdiction: 24

Times contamination prompted swimming advisories on those beaches last year: 87

45,000 Tulip bulbs planted this year in Boston parks

Daffodil bulbs: 10,000

Rose plants in the Kelleher Rose Garden in the Back Bay Fens: 1,000

Number of Americans allergic to insect stings: 2 million