Mary W.

BEST Art Gallery Somerville Open Studios

There are some amazing artists here! And I love studios as a setting for seeing artwork, much preferable to isolation on museum walls. But I got on to vote for the Liszt Gallery at MIT, unaccountably not listed here, and must say I almost voted for the Museum of Bad Art in Somerville (and Dedham): inspiring!

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BEST Concert Venue New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall

Great sound, for everyone, wonderfully rich array of musical events. Now that the Conservatory has ditched Benjamin Zander after a long, happy and happy-making career there, I loathe it as an institution and will no longer donate to it. But you can't deny that Jordan Hall is an acoustical marvel, and a more democratic one than Symphony Hall, where only the rich can afford seats you can hear in.

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BEST Indie Cinema Brattle Street Theatre

Rich variety of films, wonderful space, other great events like the now annual Cambridge Community Chorus Messiah sing-along, a sense of continuity with the past that expensive boutiques and shoe shops have all but driven from Harvard Square (along with bookshops, the Tasty, Elsie's and a really vibrant mix of people).

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BEST Live Music Venue Middle East Restaurant and Nightclub

Deserves a prize. But I was looking for Johnny D's in Somerville to give that my vote. (I'm puzzled: who chooses the nominees? What does it mean when so many great places, not particularly obscure, are left out of reach category?)

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BEST Museum Museum of Fine Arts

I love a lot of the museums that are listed here (and don't know why the Rose Museum at Brandeis is not--among others). But if I was told I could only have one, it would be the MFA, despite tacky recent directors and uninspired contemporary art collecting.

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BEST Performing Arts Venue Oberon

I've seen more exciting theater pieces there--at affordable prices--than anywhere in Boston/Cambridge since the small theaters all went down in the 80s.

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BEST Theatre Group Actors' Shakespeare Project

Great to have Shakespeare around with good actors, reliably. I especially love discovering different parts of town as the troupe changes venue with every performance.

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BEST Auto Repair A-Z Auto Center

I'm writing only about the Cambridge branch on Richland Ave. near Porter Square (the only one I've had experience with): the nicest, kindest, most honest bunch of people in the business anywhere I've ever lived, everyone who works there. They do great work, but their special quality is that you almost look forward to having to go there again! Which I've had the good/bad fortune to do several times.

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BEST Vegan Red Lentil Vegetarian & Vegan Restaurant

Absolutely the best vegan restaurant I've been to in the US. They have better ones than Red Lentil in London and Paris, for some reason, but this in terms of quality and variety is the best around Boston. It can't be the quality or variety of the food that has people voting for Veggie Planet--which isn't even vegan!? It's true that all the wait staff at Red Lentil have real attitude problems and are puzzlingly rude (their job e.g. is not to instruct me about my diet or argue with me about my doctor's advice!). But I still took myself out to dinner there on my birthday. The very best food I've had from there was at an event they catered--delicious stuff I mostly hadn't seen on their restaurant menu.

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BEST Landmark Boston Public Library

Stands for and exemplifies everything that made Boston a great city, before the advent of the vulgar, stupid 80s with their unremarkable little skyscrapers and multiplication of clothing stores for the suddenly-very-rich. Most amazing features to me: the series by Preraphaelite painter Edward Abbey illustrating (his own version of) The Quest of the Holy Grail, and the dioramas of beloved books from childhood--Alice in Wonderland, Arabian Nights etc. in the passage between the old and new library buildings.

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BEST Local Charity Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic

It was a hard choice: that people do not starve or die of exposure is paramount of course, and now that the government has given up on the poor it's up to those of us who aren't endangered to help those who are. But we don't live to eat, we eat to live. And life without books is a thin, confused, lack-lustre thing--at least now that we no longer have a rich oral culture in which stories are told and wisdom disseminated.

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BEST MBTA Line Red Line MBTA

Fast, frequent, nice stations, crosses many neighborhoods and cities, connecting all kinds of people.

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BEST Radio Show Tom Ashbrook

The best of the shows offered for voting--amazing variety of topics and people, and Ashbrook is a big improvement over Christopher Lydon's narcissistic, sometimes bullying interview style (though Lydon too chose a wonderful smorgasbord of guests). But the best show on the radio is This American Life, hands down, with the Moth a very close second, both available on WBUR.

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BEST Bookstore Harvard Book Store

They carry journals! (By which I don't mean blank-page diaries.) Also a quite decent poetry selection, though no patch on the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, around the corner. And lots of used books downstairs.

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