RI Rambles: Feeding the Family, Birthdays and Fantasies

If you’ve ever wondered why Julians, renowned purveyors of PVD brunchiness, don’t offer linner – and are, in fact, closed for a seemingly weird 90 minutes mid-afternoon on Saturday and Sunday — it’s because their staff have a tradition of enjoying their own deferred brunch goodies. “It gets so crazy busy during brunch, we don’t take breaks to feed ourselves,” explains Sarah, one of the servers. “So, we just work through, and then we all have a family gathering around the table when everyone else is gone.” It’s also their chance to reset everything on their busiest days.

The Avon, esteemed grand-pappy of Thayer St, is celebrating its 80th birthday. The movie venue, which has also had periods robust with live performances, has been entertaining since 1938, when going to the movies was a fancy, dress-up affair. Movies themselves were a rarity, especially compared to the digitally enabled flood of moving pictures from which we can all pick new fare by the minute, and the spectacle of a well-designed movie house like the Avon was part of the wonder of it all. Congratulations to the esteemed icon for weathering the onslaught of in-home theaters, big box movie factories and countless changes in the flow and eddies of cultural progress over the decades. We’re hoping for 80 more years of sequels (but not the Hollywood kind).

Finally we welcome the return of Fantasy Island — no, not the one from the ‘80s with Tattoo (even though Motif did just publish a tattoo issue), but the art installation dedicated to Peurto Rico’s often bizarre financial relationship to the rest of America. Created by AS220’s Shey Rivera and fellow fine and performance artists, the exhibit has occurred before, locally and in New York City, and is now in its 4.0 incarnation in a pop-up space at 233 Weybosset St, PVD through March 17.