ARTS

At New Jersey Repertory's intimate 60-seat theater in Long Branch, the atmosphere is warm and friendly. You are greeted and seated by name. Everyone, from producer Gabor Barabas to the person seated beside you, smiles as though you’ve always known one another.

You begin to get the sense that you are a guest inside someone’s home; it is not until you look to the stage that you realize that you've been invited into the trailer park palace of Maude Gutman.

Although sweet potatoes, cranberries and pumpkin pie are solid traditional fare, our local book clubs have selected to sink their teeth into a pair of novels that give voice to adolescent angst. The holiday of plenty also seemed an appropriate time for clubs to grab second helpings of writers they had already enjoyed earlier in the year.

Nicole Chis learned how to play tennis when she was two years old during practice sessions with her father Marius. That training started at the borough’s Donaldson Park and eventually made its way to the courts on North Eighth Avenue.

“My dad’s been my coach my whole life,” Chis said of her father, who was born in Romania. “He would help me stand up, hold a racquet and ball and hit it. I ended up practicing every day, and having him there each time made it easy to develop.”

For eight summers, while Cynthia Walling was an Elizabeth High School teacher, the Highland Park artist lived, studied and painted in San Miguel de Allende.

Highland Park is a diverse community ready for its many populations to co-exist, and Donna Maiorano, owner of the new unique boutique Peace, Love, & Stuff, is looking to create the environment where co-existence will thrive.

On a recent September evening, as the Raritan River returned to its banks, we caught up with local shopowner and author Steven Hart at his Nighthawk Books store for a chat about diverse subjects, literary and otherwise.

High up on Hart's list this fall is the publication of his first detective novel, We All Fall Down (Black Angel Press, 2011). His heroine, Karen McCarthy, is a tough cop who defies some of the usual stereotypes. She's down-to-earth, unattractive, and subject to some human foibles usually reserved for the male of the species. Sent to patrol the streets of Bridgeborough, a working class town near the Pine Barrens, Karen stumbles upon the murder of the police chief's wife.

What happens when an otherwise normal midwestern housewife turns into a Raging Bull?

Donna's gooseberry blondies win kudos from the PTO bake sale to the state penitentiary. Her house cleaning skills are exemplary -- until she nearly decapitates her daughter with a vacuum cleaner, and starts pummeling a fellow churchgoer with her Holy Bible.

But not only is she mad, she has certainly gone mad, and her reasons are very different than you might have guessed. For once, suburban drudgery is not the enemy.

Shawn Simons' and Alvaro Llanos' lives were changed forever in 2000, when flames engulfed their freshman dorm at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, and both were severely burned.

Not many math teachers can say they hadn’t met the principal and didn’t know anything about the district, heading into their first day on the job at a high school.

However, special circumstances put veteran Highland Park High School mentor Chris Ruckdeschel in that position on Jan. 2, 2001 and he instantly flourished.