Leslie Bridgers

Press Herald

Leslie Bridgers is the features editor for the Portland Press Herald, overseeing coverage of arts, entertainment and culture. She spent 10 years as a reporter, half of that time for the Portland Press Herald, covering the western suburbs of Portland, writing feature stories and working on special projects. Originally from Connecticut, Leslie came to Maine by way of Bowdoin College and never left.

Latest

Published
October 13, 2020

Holy Donut closing its shop in Portland’s Old Port

The company says the pandemic forced its hand and Monday will be the Exchange Street location’s last day in business as Holy Donut searches for a bigger space in the Old Port.
Published
October 12, 2020

Indie Film: Damnationland taps into election-year fears

The local horror film event goes virtual, in partnership with NextGen America.
Published
October 12, 2020

Bar Guide: Take a virtual pub crawl of fall cocktail specials

If you go on this tour in person, make sure to spread it out over several days.
Published
October 11, 2020

Deep Water: ‘Putting to Bed,’ by Marita O’Neill

Maine poems edited and introduced by Megan Grumbling.
Published
October 11, 2020

Sure, Eddie Van Halen was a guitar god – but what made his music divine was his quest for the perfect sound

Let’s start with the intro of “And the Cradle Will Rock” blasting out of your speakers, a monsoon crossed with a jet engine. When Van Halen released that song in 1980, the opener on the band’s third studio album, it didn’t sound like anything on Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40.” Few understood why at the […]
Published
October 11, 2020

‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’ marks Radha Blank as not just a fresh filmmaking voice, but a wise and accomplished one too.

Calling Radha Blank a fresh new voice on the filmmaking scene is just the kind of perhaps-vaguely-condescending language that she sends up so cleverly in “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” a wry love letter to New York, middle-aged angst, creative blockage and artistic survival against daunting odds. Sometimes those odds are of one’s own making, in the […]
Published
October 11, 2020

Surprise! This nourishing soup is studded with cheese tortellini.

Lately, I’ve been craving two things, which seem to be diametrically opposed but manage to come together in this soup: familiar comfort and an element of surprise. The base of it is like the minestrone, which is such a staple for me I could, as they say, make it with my eyes closed. Onion, carrot […]
Published
October 11, 2020

‘On the Rocks’ has all the right ingredients – Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Sofia Coppola – but it’s a flavorless dish

I always have a reporter’s notebook at the ready when I review a movie, just in case I want to jot down a telling visual detail, snippet of dialogue or revealing actorly gesture. After watching “On the Rocks,” Sofia Coppola’s latest urban picaresque, all I had was a blank page. In this cocktail peanut of […]
Published
October 11, 2020

Chicken cutlets can stretch your dollar in a delicious way

Sometimes stretching an ingredient – making it feed four instead of two – can be detrimental to a dish, but on rare occasions it can actually make it better. Case in point: Pan-fried chicken breasts. The breast is not my favorite part of the bird – that would be the thighs – but when I […]
Published
October 11, 2020

Coronavirus steals a chef’s sense of taste, and there’s no telling when it might come back

RIO DE JANEIRO — Two days until opening day, and the chef was sitting at a table outside the kitchen, feeling uncertain. He’d been cleared to leave the house after recovering from a coronavirus infection that almost anyone would describe as mild. But not for a chef. When COVID-19 came for Dudu Mesquita, who prepares […]

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