Celebrating Bethlehem's Southside Culture
As a student at Lehigh, I am at Zoellner Arts Center a lot. I sit on its lawn while I read, do homework, or take a much needed break from either of those. Zoellner itself is a quiet refuge for many Lehigh students, who retreat to the third floor for the private music rooms to…
“This changed the norm, no one could imagine that there were athletes who were gay.” As a member of a Division 1 track and field program, I personally can attest to the absurdity of the notion that accomplished athletes can’t be gay. My co-captain and best friend is bisexual, and many of our best athletes…
Walking into the auditorium of the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts (Charter Arts) last Wednesday, I was immediately stunned. With the projector set up by the Southside Film Institute, there was little to differentiate the assembly hall in the center of South Bethlehem from an AMC theater. My arrival cut dangerously close…
Give me Back my father, give me back my mother;Give back my elders;Give me my sons and daughters back. Give me back myself,Give back the human race, As long as this life lasts, this life,Give back peaceThat will never end. On April 11th, Keiin Yoshimura visited Touchstone Theater for her performance of Sakura, meaning “cherry…
During the twenty years I’ve been on this earth, I’ve spent roughly eight of them knowing I was part of the LGBTQ+ community. Within those eight years, I’ve spent two of them feeling secure in my identity as gay. Finally, I’ve been openly out about sexuality for the last one and a half years of…
In our current cinematic era in which the technicolor spectacle of CGI dominates the box office, the choice of black and white cinematography in contemporary film suggests directorial deliberation and intentionality. It’s a choice the vast majority of viewers likely notice first when entering into the narrative of a film. And most of us, too,…
The Frank Banko Alehouse Cinema is part of the massive ArtsQuest complex which was once the Bethlehem Steel company. The steel stacks themselves, icons of Bethlehem, stand tall over the scene, lit up green and blue so they draw the eye at night as powerfully as during the day. They’re an emblem of a community…
When my friend asked me to attend the Found Footage Festival with her at SteelStacks, I can’t say that I knew what to expect. The only background knowledge I had was that the festival consisted of a series of recovered VHS tapes, and I wondered if it would be a similar experience to watching an…
Juliet, Naked is a great movie that outlines how relationships—and how you are treated within them—are important in order to be happy in life. It is a film that gives examples of how not everything is perfect, but it is that imperfection that allows us to feel happy and real.The film focuses upon Annie, a…
Many readers might be familiar with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Ugly Duckling— but you may not know of Willow Reichard-Flynn’s retelling. Recently performed at the Allentown Public Theatre, Reichard-Flynn’s modern The Ugly Duckling portrays the classic story of a social outcast being bullied for being different, but with a significant twist. In the…