Harrisburg’s Best Guilty Pleasures (Radio Edit)

I don't deal with stress well. Don't get me wrong, I love being busy, but when I'm legitimately stressed, I'm a textbook case of what not to do. Basically, I push myself to the limit and then turn to some comfort object to blow off steam. Usually that means ingesting substances that aren't good for the body. Calm down. Not those kind of substances. If you'd get arrested or fired for doing it, it's not on the list.

Things have been pretty crazy lately, so I've been leaning on my typical crutches, and since I work in downtown Harrisburg and park on City Island, I usually have to make due with things that are close at hand. If you're having a bad day, bad week or bad month and need to indulge yourself with a pick-me-up, here are five of my favorites in Harrisburg.

Dancing Like the Stars

I have a confession to make. For the past three consecutive seasons, I’ve been obsessed with Dancing with the Stars. Not so much the glitz and glam of the show itself, but the underlying notion that with the right amount of guidance, anyone can learn to ballroom dance. Like many DWTS fans, I’d watch the show every week, my toes tapping along to the poor rendition of the latest Katie Perry song wondering if I could learn to Rumba like Erin Andrews.

Picking up on my sudden fascination, my boyfriend decided to surprise me with dance lessons for our two-year anniversary. He’d packaged the gift certificate and circa 1985 marketing pamphlet atop a dozen long-stem roses and sent them over to my office. The flowers were quite beautiful, but the outdated brochure made me wonder if ballroom dancing wasn’t as cool as it looked on TV.

Summer Fun on the Susquehanna Heartland Wine Trail

Every summer my sister and I migrate north to Klingerstown for the Summerfest Wine Festival at Benigna’s Creek Winery. The event is pretty simple. After a small admission fee you are given a glass and left to visit with each of the wineries on hand to find out which wines are best for you. You can stick by beloved Cabernet Francs or Chardonnays or be more adventurous and try wines like Cosmic Charisma or Bell Bottom Blueberry. Traditional or whimsical, whatever your fancy, it's there.

Each winery is unique so the afternoon never gets old. Some wineries have a featured wine, while others have specialty drinks featuring one of their wines. I've been going for a few years and I've always found everyone to be extremely pleasant to chat with and more than happy to answer questions. My sister and I are definitely not wine connoisseurs, but over the past few summers we have learned a lot and have enjoyed doing so.

Smoothies: The Coffee Cure

It might be more addicting than the cigarettes. It might be more addicting than crack cocaine. People need their coffee, and everyone goes through different trials and tribulations in search of the bean. Hectic mornings in the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru. Being jostled in a packed Starbucks. Freezing rain on the walk to the Downtown Café counter. Coffee’s a year round phenomenon. It’s your routine, your habit, your caffeine dependence. It's steaming right under your nose, beckoning on your desk.

People, wake up and smell the baking asphalt. It’s 90-some degrees out there. You don’t drink hot chocolate while your basking out on our deck relaxing at the end of the day, do you? Mix it up with a smoothie—the perfect healthy, cold, fruitilicious summer treat.  Here are two of my favorite places in the Harrisburg area who’ve mastered the ancient Brazilian purée art of smoothie mixing:

Ski Roundtop: OHNO, THE OGO!

Imagine yourself crawling into an inflated hamster ball 11-feet in diameter. It's hot. Real hot. Might even beat the back seat of the Dodge caravan baking out in the parking lot. Five gallons of fresh cold water come to the rescue, sloshing around the bottom, but now they're zipping up the hatch. Your nerves are tweaking you. This is it. You and the mountain. It's the culmination of your day. You're inside the H2OGO. And now they're pushing you over.

Review: Eclipsed

Nervous sweat beaded under cotton, fan-made Team Edward and Team Jacob T-shirts long after the 10, 5, 2 and 1-minute countdowns in the sardine-packed Theater 2 of the Cinema Center in Camp Hill. Breath was still being held even after midnight, and by 12:03 we'd all gone into a frenzy. A hungry audience threw shouts and popcorn at the poor doorman in the red shirt with the radio until 12:17 am when the movie finally began.

Twilight was a soaped up Edward/Bella prelude, doused in a handful of awkward moments. New Moon was soaked in Jake and drama, and after watching Bella struggle with depression for two and a half hours I was starting to question my own existence on the way out of the theater. As the previews started, my hand reached the greasy bottom of the popcorn bucket. Trailers rolled for more Harry Potter, Paranormal Activity, and Narnia movies (don't these people stop?), and all I could think was, Stephanie Meyer, it's your third. It's about time for some action.

An Open Letter to Stocks on 2nd

@twoitterings is a local tweeter who, from time to time, produces streams of conciousness that are both frigthening and hilarious to behold. He's recently been having relationship problems with one of downtown Harrisburg's longest-tenured establishments. Here's what he's got to say:

Stocks on 2nd, I used to love you so. You were my first in Harrisburg; a pioneer on the scene. A place where just a little bit of that big city feel could be found at happy hour. But that was so long ago. You see, Stocks, you’ve gotten comfortable. You’ve gotten complacent. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some flickers of light. The bartending staff is great, and a few of the servers are top notch. But that’s just the thing, out of many mediocre aspects there are a few points of light. It supposed to be the other way around.

Stocks, how can this be? I mean, I get that it’s probably never going to be a place where “everybody knows your name.” But seriously, you’d think that after the amount of time we’ve spent together, day in and day out, that you’d at least remember mine. It just feels like you’ve been mailing it in for far too long. It’s time for a change. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not into ugly divorces; I’m into counseling. Allow me to offer some timely observations.

Reflections From a Rainy Friday Night

It was all worth it. Five and a half hours. A handful of showers and a nasty thunderstorm. A blackout. A suffocating heap of on-field silliness and a small fortune spent on concessions and beer. Eight tickets behind home plate and dead batteries in the camera. It was all worth it to watch Ben Revere flail hopelessly at three pitches from Stephen Strasburg.

By the time Strasburg finally threw his first pitch on City Island, I'd shared all of that and more with a sold-out crowd that showed remarkable resilience. Three thunderbolts later it was worth it. It started raining again in earnest a few innings later and that was all she wrote for us, but by pumping three straight fastballs past a player who was hitter of the year in the Twins minor league system in 2009, Stephen Strasburg delivered what we'd all come to see — dominance. Reflections on the stadium experience and the tempest in a teacup that has resulted after the jump

Review: Spring Awakening at Hershey Theatre

Sometimes something that once seemed absolutely scandalous loses its bite over time. Ulysses is arguably one of the best modernist works of literature ever written, but the sexual proclivities of the pervy and underwear obsessed Leopold Bloom seem fairly milquetoast when placed next to Gossip Girl. When it was originally written in 1890, Frank Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen — or Spring Awakening — was positively incendiary. The repressed sexuality of adolescents simply wasn't talked about in Germany at the time, which is why many credit Wedekind with writing the first play in the modern history of theatre. Almost a century and a quarter later, the musical adaptation of the show by Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik still packs a mighty punch, and between now and Sunday you can see the touring production of the Tony Award-winning smash hit at the Hershey Theatre.   Full Article »

Breakfast at the Bar

After our regular Tuesday morning diner — the Paxtang Diner — closed, two friends and I went in search of a new diner in the Paxtang/Swatara area. The second diner we tried was also closed (for “restaffing”) and the third was pricier than we were had hoped for (“You call that a special?”). Then last week we gave Sudsy’s on Paxton Street a try.
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