In the opening essay of filmmaker Nora Ephron’s 2006 book I Feel Bad About My Neck, and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, she reflects on the experience of getting older in her signature, cleverly confessional style: “That’s another thing about being a certain age that I’ve noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror. If I pass a mirror, I avert my eyes. If I must look into it, I begin by squinting, so that if anything really bad is looking back at me, I am already halfway to closing my eyes to ward off the sight.” Few would disagree that Ephron, as a perfector of the rom-com

Sarah Pucci was born in Everett, Massachusetts, in 1902 and died there at the age of ninety-four, never having lived more than four miles away, spending a few years in an apartment in East Boston and two and a half decades at the house she bought in Medford. She worked in candy factories—Schrafft’s, Foss—putting designs on chocolates, and at the Leopold Morse garment factory, the Navy Yard, and General Electric. She outlived two husbands and had just one child, Dorothy Iannone. At fifty-seven, Pucci began to create a distinctive kind of craft object, covering Styrofoam forms in sequins, beads,

“Flanagan’s Wake” was like entering the aftermath of an unbridled party: A debauched spirit lingered dimly over this group exhibition organized in honor of writer and performance artist Bob Flanagan (1952–1996). Curated by Sabrina Tarasoff, the show was conceived as an ex post facto conversation with the late artist, whose transgressive oeuvre pursued pain, ecstasy, and restraint.

Flanagan faced every day as though it were his last. Born with cystic fibrosis, he was told by doctors that he would not live long; yet he miraculously endured the disease for forty-three years. Raised in Glendora,