5 Illuminating things from the weekend

1. Paul Rudd looks fantastic in a Paul Stanley costume.

Paul Stanley, front man for KISS

2. It's a lovely thing to watch Frank Sinatra on DVD with someone (who saw him in concert several times when she was younger) — and to notice she's smiling the whole way through.

3. If you think a high school student can't rock a recitation of Gwendolyn Brooks' devastating poem, "The Mother," you haven't seen a Poetry Out Loud competition. (By the way, although I was grumpy about driving to Tacoma to judge a poetry contest at 9:30am, it turned out to be one of the best ways to spend a Saturday morning: having some of the best poems in the world recited to me in stellar form.)

4. Bellevue Youth Theatre is a pretty extraordinary operation. A West Side Story number never made me cry like that before...

5. And why shouldn't the best stories have pictures?