When the National Touring Company of a play that won six Tony Awards last year goes on the road, one invariably wonders if the Los Angeles production will get the same caliber of performances as those presented on Broadway. Please don’t worry as this production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” with book by Tony Award-winner Steven Levenson, 15 songs with music and lyrics by the award-winning team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who won an Oscar for “La La Land,” has travelled exceedingly well.

Despite democracy’s diminishment by gerrymandering and the playbook of suppression, your vote is still your best Hail Mary defending against the Big Money’s low art of the thinly disguised bribe. It’s your best chance to sink the oligarchy floating in on the tides of captured government.

Betty was lying in bed one night. Don was falling asleep but Betty was in a romantic mood and wanted to talk. She said: "You used to hold my hand when we were courting..."

See the best places to see fall foliage in New England and read about falling overboard from cruise ships, the perfect length of time to go on vacation, the world's most polluted travel destinations and staying safe on a Caribbean vacation.

Here's some trivia for the month: travel to Singapore ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ style for cheap, last meals of 23 famous people, surprising things the TSA allows past airport checkpoints, the latest in flight meal reviews, burping and other global etiquette surprises and our latest Beatles trivia.

From the balcony of the Hotel Castillo Vista del Angel high on the eastern flanks of Quito, the sky above seems sprinkled with a dew of diamond stars, while below thousands of flickering city lights like radiating fireflies create a fascinating glow. A keen, piercing wind skims across the dramatic volcanic-edged cityscape intensifying the remarkable sensations created by the majestic vista.

A woman asks a wise teacher: "I have a strong desire to live to eternity. What am I supposed to do?"

First there’s the fact of two million birds. Yes, two million. An equally astounding number is that the lake where they hang out is over one million years old. Then there are those names: Wilson’s phalaropes and red necked phalaropes, Warbling Vireos and Sage Thrashers. Implausibly, they’re the colorful appellations of just a few of the birds that inhabit Mono Lake.

You can’t call it “Bland Rapids” anymore. Every fall, the most attended free public art event in the world turns Grand Rapids, Mich., — once the butt of jokes for its sleepy status as Michigan’s second city — into a hip, cutting-edge community that celebrates creativity.

French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73) is hard to pigeonhole. He operated outside established channels (eventually running his own studio) yet he employed movie stars. An inspiration to the New Wavers who liberated French cinema, he remained a consciously classical technician. Abroad he’s best remembered for a trilogy of gangster dramas — Le doulos (1962), Le deuxième souffle (1966) and Le samouraï (1967).