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She first tasted wine as a Swiss boarding school student. She began to love it as a Minnesota housecleaner.

The Garage in Harvard Square is known for piercing parlors and Newbury Comics. But it’s also home to the Commonwealth Wine School, run by Cambridge’s Jessica Sculley. The school offers certification-level programs from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, the Wine Scholar Guild, and the Society of Wine Educators for professionals and civilians. Sculley, 48, reflects on her past as a teacher, artist, and wine connoisseur — and shares her favorite summertime sips.

Tell me about your job.

I’m the founder and director of Commonwealth Wine School. Our physical location is in the Garage at Harvard Square — it’s in a funky building and a funky part of town. We look, I suppose, like the more serious group that’s there, but we try to have a really good time.

Even though we’re called Commonwealth Wine School, we mostly teach about wine. We also teach about beer and spirits and cocktails and sake and cider. We’re really here for either professionals in the industry who want to polish up or move their careers along and learn more, but also just enthusiasts: people who really like a glass of wine and want to know what they’re drinking.

What’s going on at The Garage, anyway? It was going to be renovated, right?

COVID really did change everything, didn’t it? Trinity Property owns the garage. We have a great relationship with them, and they’ve always been really open from the beginning, because I signed our lease moments before COVID happened.

Initially, their permitting was for office space, and I think COVID changed the needs and the finance around office space completely. … Over the last many months, all sorts new and exciting businesses have moved in. There’s a new club that’s moved in; there’s a new arcade. There’s certainly a lot of exciting stuff going on there, especially for our particularly youthful population, which is what we have right in the Square.

How did you come to this interesting position?

I was a teacher for a long time. My background is in the sciences, and I was a science teacher and a math teacher at mostly the middle school and elementary levels, but a little high school and college. I was also always an artist from the time I was a kid, even when I was in my twenties.

I moved back from Minnesota, where I had gone to college and grad school and where I had been teaching, and started a school not so different from Commonwealth Wine School, except it was for the book arts: printmaking, paper-making, and all that jazz. I did all sorts of stuff that one does in their twenties, including still teaching math on the side, because all artists need to do something else — or many of them do. I moved around a little bit. Right around 2005, I met my husband, and we moved shortly thereafter to Pittsburgh.

I’d always loved wine. I come from an Italian family, and let me tell you, none of the wine on my family’s table was ever good wine. It was always lovingly called table wine, but it was always there. It was never taboo in my in my house. But I never liked it until I was a teenager and got the taste of some really good wine and thought, ‘Actually, this is kind of interesting.’

I was a teacher and I was an artist, which necessarily meant I had no money, and so really getting into wine was cost prohibitive to me. When we got married and moved to Pittsburgh, it was supposed to be a two-year stint that went on for seven years before I managed to get us back to Boston. At that time, when I had my daughter, I didn’t go back to teaching. I thought: ‘You know what? I have this infant who’s lovely, and I treasure being with her. But I could really learn about wine.’

I signed up for a class. I loved it, and at that point I just kind of went down the rabbit hole. I geeked out. When we moved back to Boston, I had already started tasting groups back in Pittsburgh, where I would invite my friends over … We would put our kids in a morning preschool program, and I would teach them about wine, and they wouldn’t spit out maybe as much as they should have. Let’s say it was a very sane way to have toddlers at least once a week.

When I moved back to Boston, I started teaching at Grape Experience Wine School, teaching mainly out of the Boston Center for Adult Education. [Grape founder] Adam Chase and I merged Grape Experience into Commonwealth Wine School, so that we became the official program provider for all of the WSET [Wine Spirit Education Trust] courses, which really meant that we were no longer just focusing only on wine. We were bringing in spirits and sake, and they’ve just started off their new beer programming. We have all of these extraordinary content experts, and they’re all sharing their passion, knowledge, and excitement.

Did you ever suspect you’d grow up to do this? Was there an early spark?

I grew up in Providence and was raised by a single mom. She was very culturally oriented and educationally focused. She would bring us up to Boston to go to the Science Museum and to the MFA. She would bring us up for doubleheaders, where we’d sit in the bleachers at Fenway Park.

She was an architecture professor at Roger Williams. She would take me out of school when the architecture students would come up to Boston, and we would visit Harvard Square, and she would point out the buildings. That was sort of my experience with the place, feeling like Boston was the capital of New England.

In Providence, the restaurant culture wasn’t anything like what it became in the ‘90s or 2000s or certainly today. The really good food was at my house, when my grandmother would come to visit. She was an extraordinary Italian cook. I came from certainly a middle-class background, but middle class with no extra funds.

I was really lucky in that my best friend growing up was part of these international summer camps that originated from a woman who grew up in Barrington, Rhode Island. After World War II, she went to work with refugee kids in Europe and built a summer camp for them, with the idea that that they would grow up playing together and living together and never go to war again. There was a little Rhode Island contingent. There was a house up in New Hampshire, and I became part of that. The woman then became headmistress of an alternative school in Switzerland, and they gave me a full scholarship. I went there for my last couple years of high school, and when I was there, it opened up a whole new world for me that I couldn’t even previously imagine.

To say, ‘I went to school in Switzerland’ sounds super posh and snooty. It was not that. We had cold showers, and we peeled our own potatoes and …..

Recently it occurred to me that in all my years of writing newspaper columns, I’ve never written one about the strangest life story I’ve ever come across, in terms of the wild twists and turns it took in a relatively short expanse of time. It is the story of a person I never interacted with to my knowledge, although we lived in the same city, at the same time, when we were the same age. I’ll tell you his story, but strap yourself in first.

Mark Frechette came from Fairfield, Connecticut. By the time he was 19 years old in the mid-1960s, he was a high school dropout, drifting back and forth between New York City and Boston. When he was in Boston, he made money by panhandling in Harvard Square and doing some carpentry work in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury.

One day in 1968, he was standing at a bus stop on Charles Street in Boston, arguing with a man in a third floor window of a nearby apartment building, yelling invective at the man that is not quotable in a family newspaper.

At this time, the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni was planning to shoot an American epic about the cultural and political turbulence in the United States at that time. Antonioni did not have much respect for the art and craft of acting, having been quoted as saying, “Actors are like cows. You have to lead them through a fence.” Consistent with this lack of esteem for actors, he decided he would cast two non-actors for the lead roles in his film, thinking that would make it more authentic. He had aides out scouting the nooks and crannies of America to find a young male and a young female to star in the film. The male lead would play a student on the run from the law for a killing at a student protest.

Two of these scouts happened upon Mark Frechette having his vitriolic shouting match at the bus stop. They decided he was right for the part, because, as they told Antonioni, “He is twenty and he hates.” So, in what may be the most bizarre path ever taken to movie stardom, Mark Frechette was offered the lead role in a major motion picture with no previous acting training, experience, or intention, and without realizing he was auditioning by having a venomous verbal street fight.

But if you think his path to movie stardom is the culmination, or even the apex, of Frechette’s wild ride, think again and stay seated.

Frechette and Antonioni did not get along at all during the making of the film, perhaps because whatever else Frechette was or wasn’t, he was no cow to be led through a fence; more like a bull in the ring. ”Zabriskie Point,” as Antonioni entitled the film, was a commercial and critical flop. The film’s bombing did not prevent Frechette’s experiencing the accouterments of celebrity, however. For instance, he had his picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone and posed for a fashion layout in Vogue.

Frechette stayed in Europe after acting in Zabriskie Point to appear in two more films made by less prominent directors with smaller budgets, neither movie making much of a splash. Then he picked up stakes and returned to Boston with his Zabriskie Point co-star, Daria Halprin, and $60,000 he’d saved from his payment for the three movies, the equivalent of about $450,000 toda

Lovestruck Books coming to Harvard Square

A new bookstore is readying itself to open in the heart of Harvard Square this fall. Lovestruck Books, a romance bookstore, is in the early stages of construction at 44 Brattle St. in Cambridge, and the owner is waiting on permitting for a possible cafe and bar area to accompany the romance-stocked shelves. Owner Rachel Kanter lives in Cambridge, graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is a former elementary and high school English teacher. Romance sells more than any other fiction genre, and more brick-and-mortar stores devoted to it are opening around the country. California’s the Ripped Bodice, the first romance bookstore in the United States, opened in 2016; now there are over 20 around the country. An opening date for Lovestruck is still up in the air, and the store will center books by women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ authors. Kanter aims for the place to be not just a bookstore but a community hub, offering a range of steamy reads, as well as a sense of belonging. For more information, visit lovestruckbooks.com.

Zoe’s Diner, a longtime staple of Harvard Square dining beloved for its retro aesthetics, bottomless coffee, and all-day breakfast offerings, permanently closed last week.

Zoe’s, which first opened more than 20 years ago, was popular with both students and Cambridge residents alike for the price and variety of its food options. Its menu boasted a blend of American diner food, such as pancakes and milkshakes, with Greek food such as spanakopita, kebabs, and baked lamb.

Denise A. Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, speculated that a difficult labor market following the pandemic could have contributed to the closure.

“Many of our eateries have had trouble getting staff post-pandemic,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “Labor shifted, and it’s not an easy thing to do.”

Jillson added that increased breakfast options closer to the heart of Harvard Square may have squeezed out Zoe’s, which is located farther down Massachusetts Avenue than some competitors. Harvard Square has seen an influx of breakfast-serving coffee shops and restaurants in recent years, including Tatte, Bluestone Lane, and, most recently, Friendly Toast.

It looks like a Cambridge diner that offered a mix of Greek and American fare has shut down.

According to a poster within the Friends of Boston’s Hidden Restaurants Facebook group page, Zoe’s in Harvard Square is no longer in business, with a sign out front at the Mass. Ave. eatery indicating that it has closed for good. This appears to be confirmed within a Reddit post, with a picture showing a “permanently closed” sign, and that poster indicates that it had been open as of a few days ago.

Zoe’s first opened approximately 20 years ago, offering such dishes as omelets, spanakopita, lentil soup, burgers, kabobs, baked lamb, and gyros.

The address for Zoe’s was 1105 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138. Its website is at https://www.zoescambridge.com/

We don’t make the rules. Everything — drinking, dancing, talking, eating — is better on a roof. Whether you’re looking for a chic supper spot or just a margarita in the sun, these bars and restaurants will take you to a higher plane. (And, this being Boston, you’ll find some winter-friendly rooftop igloos, too.)

Construction has begun in the Allston neighborhood of Boston on a new home for the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University.

The university says the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance will contain interconnected, adaptable multiuse spaces designed to support creativity and embrace future change. It will have two flexible performance venues — the West Stage, where large-scale productions will be produced, and an intimate East Stage.

In addition, the center will house light-filled rehearsal studios and teaching spaces, a spacious public lobby, and an outdoor performance yard to host ticketed and free programming. The facility will also have dressing rooms, technical shops, a café, and administrative offices.

The existing home of the repertory theater is in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The facilities design incorporates a blend of environmental and social strategies to minimize embodied and operational carbon, maximize well-being, boost biodiversity, and enhance resiliency.

The building is designed to achieve the Living Building Challenge core accreditation from the International Living Future Institute in recognition that it will give more to its environment than it takes. It will be constructed with laminate mass timber, reclaimed brick, and cedar cladding to minimize its lifetime carbon budget.

The building’s chilled water, hot water, and electric utilities will come from Harvard’s new lower-carbon District Energy Facility. It will capture additional clean energy from rooftop solar panels and leverage natural ventilation to reduce energy usage and enhance occupant comfort. A green roof and extensive plantings will aid stormwater attenuation and increase biodiversity and occupant well-being. 

The architects are Haworth Tompkins and ARC/Architectural Resources Cambridge, and the construction manager is Shawmut Design and Construction.

The American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer of Boston team will paint Harvard Square pink to raise awareness on June 21.

Local vendors and the American Cancer Society join forces next week to paint Harvard Square pink. The annual awareness event will take place at the heart of Harvard Square in Brattle Park this year.

Find the traveling 8-foot-tall inflatable pink chair, yoga, live music, and pink-themed food and beverage from local vendors for purchase. Surrounding buildings will be lit pink, so the whole block will appear pink.

There will be 14 participating vendors in total! Cambridge Savings Bank will further the pink illusion with pink lights of its own, Playa Bowls will donate $1 of every pink bowl to Strides, and at Mint Julep, any purchase of $100 or more will receive a pink leather cosmetic pouch (in-store on June 21).

Join the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer of Boston team in raising funds and bringing awareness to Breast Cancer on June 21.

Brattle Plaza, Harvard Square

Friday, June 21 from 6-9 PM

Its current owner told the Licensing Commission that new management doesn’t plan to change much about the Cambridge institution.

Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square is getting new management, and potentially new owners that reportedly have plans to bring the Cambridge institution “into today’s time,” said current co-owner Paul Overgaag. 

The news broke at a License Commission meeting last Thursday, when Overgaag told the body that David Toraji Oshima and Derek Luangrath — both with industry experience at places like Cafe Sushi and who recently turned the former R.F. O’Sullivan & Son into The Cornerstone — would take over as operators with the board’s approval and eventually as owners. 

“After 28 years, the interest from the Overgaag brothers to run got less and less,” Overgaag said. “We couldn’t keep up with the new times and the new ways things are being done.”

A three-day recap of the best and worst of Boston Calling 2024, from the scintillating sets to the overwhelming Sunday crowds.

Leading up to Boston Calling 2024, which took over the Harvard Athletic Complex Memorial Day weekend, I was nagged by a persistent question: Who, exactly, is Boston Calling for in 2024?

The answer has undoubtedly evolved since the festival first dazzled audiences on a cold, rainy weekend at City Hall Plaza 11 years ago. That first edition, headlined by festival curator Aaron Dessner’s band The National, featured almost 100 percent bands that fell somewhere on the indie rock spectrum — a reflection of festival co-founders Brian Appel and Mike Snow’s origins at independent radio station WFNX and defunct alt-weekly the Boston Phoenix .

But times and tastes change, and Boston Calling has changed along with them. What was once indie becomes mainstream, what was mainstream becomes retro, and what didn’t exist until six months ago is the hottest thing on the planet.

Dessner, a force in the indie rock world, has worked extensively as a producer for Taylor Swift, the most popular pop star of this generation — and quite possibly any generation, if she keeps breaking records. And since moving to Harvard Athletic Complex in 2017, Boston Calling has grown in capacity and ambition, landing stadium-level talents like Metallica in 2022 and Swift collaborator Ed Sheeran this year.

Change can be a good thing. Stars revered by Gen Z and Gen Alpha like Reneé Rapp and Chappell Roan were some of the highlights of Boston Calling 2024, and Megan Thee Stallion delivered arguably the most high-powered rap set at the festival since Travis Scott in 2019.

That’s not to say the festival has abandoned its roots, either. Young The Giant, who played the very first Boston Calling, were back again this year. So too was Frank Turner, who played the May 2014 festival, and the Killers, who didn’t play Boston Calling until 2018, but would have easily fit in the rock-heavy early lineups.

The answer, then, to the question of who Boston Calling is for? It’s for everyone.

It has always been for high schoolers and college kids who go with 10 of their best friends to see their favorite artists. It’s also for twenty- and thirty-somethings who now make enough money to pay festival prices to see their favorite bands from high school or college for a weekend.

Most of all, it’s for music lovers of any age who possess an open mind and an adventurous spirit. I had only a vague awareness of Chappell Roan’s music heading into the weekend, but by the end of her set on Sunday, I was a convert. Similarly, one of my college-aged coworkers was unfamiliar with Trey Anastasio, but came away impressed by the Phish guitarist and his Classic Tab band’s jam-heavy Saturday night performance. 

In honor of my colleague Chad Finn, whose unconventional reviews are a must-read after every Patriots game, here’s my unconventional review of Boston Calling 2024.

BOSTON CALLING 2024

• Boston Calling 2024: Live updates from the festival
• Boston Calling 2024 photos: The best shots from every day of the festival

Friday

Who Friday was for: Ed Sheeran and Reneé Rapp fans.

For the first few hours on Friday, you could easily move around the festival grounds. Then came time for Reneé Rapp’s 5:55 set, and suddenly the crowd swelled, with young fans filling the Green Stage area to support the “Mean Girls” star.

Beyond typical festival fashion, the most common accessory was an Ed Sheeran merchandise. The English singer-songwriter has consistently filled Gillette Stadium, and the T-shirts from previous editions of the Math tours made it look like a physics conference.

Best Set: Reneé Rapp

Rapp made her apologies for the song “I Hate Boston” early and often. The Broadway singer turned pop star first clarified that the track was about a “trying time” she had in the city with some exes. When she got to the lyrics “As far as I’m concerned, they should just burn the whole city down,” she quickly added, “That’s not true anymore!” Not that her fans needed convincing, 

Local Act to Watch: The Wolff Sisters

The Wolff Sisters weren’t part of Saturday’s country-influenced lineup, but the Americana/roots rock trio from Hyde Park would have fit right in. Check out their latest single “Hurricane,” or their most popular song “Down by the Lake” for a taste.

Gratuitous Brand Activation of the Day: Dunkin’

For the second year in a row, Dunkin’s two-story lounge was the hit of the festival. Two separate lines – one for the ground floor, one for the balcony — were each longer than the queues for every other concession, as fans waited for free coffee, gift cards, temporary tattoos, and other Dunkin’ goodness.

Saturday

Who Saturday was for: Country fans and jam banders

Leading up to the festival’s first-ever country headliner, Tyler Childers, Saturday’s lineup had country or country-adjacent acts on every stage. 

Walking to the Blue Stage for a 5:50 set from The Red Clay Strays, there was a noticeable change in the crowd’s aesthetic from Friday. Fans in Luke Bryan T-shirts and American flag cowboy hats lined up for the ferris wheel. A couple in matching Bass Pro Shop tank tops edged toward the front of the stage. Two guys in Alabama Crimson Tide shirts spit chewing tobacco into (hopefully) empty Miller Lite cans. For a day, Boston Calling had gone country.

Not that Red Clay Strays frontman Brandon Coleman saw it that way: He considers the Mobile, Ala. group to be rock ‘n roll. (Perhaps he’s onto something, as the group will be opening for the Rolling Stones at Gillette Stadium later this week.)

The other distinct demo at Saturday’s shows were jam band fans, who gathered en masse for a set from Phish lead guitarist Trey Anastasio on the Red Stage. Grateful Dead tees, gray dreads, and barefoot dance circles made for a festive atmosphere.

Best Set: Khruangbin

On the Green Stage, Khruangbin played a mesmerizing, largely instrumental set of groovy tunes, with one track melding into another. The repeated chorus of “Time (You and I)” — “That’s life / If we had more time, we could live forever” — felt like a zen koan mantra, putting the the swaying crowd under the trio’s spell.

Local Act to Watch: Paper Lady

My favorite local discovery of the weekend was Paper Lady, a five-piece indie band formed in 2019 by a group of Berklee students. Singer Alli Raina showcased haunting, otherworldly vocals with a cover of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and on “Violet,” the powerful closing track on the band’s 2023 EP “Traveling Exploding Star.”

Gratuitous Brand Activation of the Day: Red Bull

In terms of paying respect to the festival’s Harvard confines, Red Bull deserves some kudos for reviving Out of Town News to hand out free energy drinks to the music-loving masses.

Sunday

Who Sunday was for: Based on the crowd size, all 650,706 residents of the city of Boston.

I’ve been to every single Boston Calling, and I’ve never seen the festival more crowded than it was on Sunday, which was the only day that sold out. The number I heard from a few different festival sources was 40,000 people (compared to only 16,000 on Saturday), but it felt like even more than that.

Part of the reason the grounds felt so oppressively crowded was that almost all of those 40,000 people were already in place to see Chappell Roan on the Green Stage at 4:05 p.m. The festival has a history of putting up-and-coming acts in a midday slot, which is a cool way to let fans say they saw a future headliner “before they got big.” Noah Kahan, who is set to perform multiple sold-out dates at Fenway Park this summer, played at around the same time last year, for example.

But the consequence of Sunday’s schedule was almost no one left the area surrounding the Green and Red Stages for seven consecutive hours. There was a brief surge for concessions after Roan finished her set, but by the time Megan Thee Stallion walked onto the Green Stage at 6:25, many people were essentially stuck in place.

Logistics that worked seamlessly on Friday and Saturday were suddenly overrun. Staff began handing out $5 waters freely to the crowds, but the number of overheated concertgoers who needed medical assistance – which is something that happens at every outdoor music festival, to be clear – spiked.

Meanwhile, I swung by the Blue Stage on the opposite end of the grounds a few times, and despite great bands like Blondshell and Alvvays playing, there was never more than a few hundred people there.

The performances throughout Sunday were some of the best all weekend, but as comments on Boston Calling’s social media accounts (and on our Instagram as well) showed, the crowds were a problem.

On Tuesday, Boston Calling organizers issued a statement promising to continue working to “create a better environment for everyone.”

“We deeply appreciate the audience, staff, and performers who make Boston Calling possible, and want to acknowledge feedback from Sunday,” organizers posted on Instagram. “While attendee count was several thousand below the official capacity rating of the site, we never want anyone to feel uncomfortable or unsafe at the show.

“The safety and well-being of our fans, artists, guests and staff is paramount,” the statement continued. “We will to continue to work with public officials and our operations team to improve the experience, layout, and ultimately create a better environment for everyone.”

Gratuitous brand activation of the day: Liquid Death

In honor of all the free water they handed out on a day when it was sorely needed, it’s got to be Liquid Death, which had a macabre country club full of skulls, grim reapers, and a casket full of new flavored waters.

Local Act to Watch: Fleshwater

After being unable to negotiate the crowd to see the start of Hozier, I encountered the heaviest music of the weekend from Fleshwater, a hardcore band part of the broader nu-gaze movement.

Best Set: The Killers

You could argue the real answer is Chappell Roan (and you can read my colleague Heather Alterisio’s recap of her performance), but letting my extreme millennial bias show, I have to pick The Killers.

Brandon Flowers and co. are old pros at this point, having played the exact same stage in 2018 and currently touring on the back of a greatest hits album. Songs like “All These Things That I’ve Done,” “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine,” and “Somebody Told Me” had the crowd singing along to every word. 

Ever the showman, Flowers waited until the very end to deliver the band’s biggest hits, finishing with “When You Were Young,” then coming back for an encore of “Human” and “Mr. Brightside.”