Stories: Winning Juliet focuses on the new girl at a high school who runs into unexpected animosity and resentment by some established ‘popular’ students when she decides to audition for the female title role in the school’s production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Romeo & Juliet.

This is a story of a family home’s last surviving member, who set out to preserve his family’s example of a Victorian way of life to be enjoyed by others for years to come.

A wedding is one of the happiest days in people’s lives. But at a recent reception, tragedy struck. That's when Dr. Pedro Suarez sprang into action after a fellow guest’s pacemaker failed, causing her heart to stop beating. The local health professional’s medical skills and rapid response saved her life. 

Story: A bureaucrat in Franco’s Spain, circa 1962, interrogates an Israeli professor at the Spanish National Archives in Madrid. The professor has landed in hot water by purloining a file dating back to the infamous Spanish Inquisition from the late 15th century.

Story: Ted Narracott, the town drunk in Devon, England, puts up his rent money in order to outbid his well-to-do brother Arthur at a local auction for a foal whom he brings home to his wife Rose and son Albert. Rose is distraught over her husband’s reckless spending spree, but Albert is delighted. He quickly names the foal Joey and goes about caring for him daily.

Story: Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis has a lone occupant on April 3, 1968. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has returned to what the desk clerk jokingly refers to as the “King-Abernathy Suite” on the eve of a big speech he’s preparing for the Memphis sanitation workers.

After 18 years as the news director at KMOX Radio, you could understand if John Butler has spent part of his days reflecting on the past. But Butler doesn’t spend a lot of time looking back.

Story: Ralph takes the same walk every day, same park, same path, same familiarity. One day he goes crazy, changes his routine and becomes smitten with a beautiful woman strolling with her dog in the city’s dog park. Suddenly, the retired widower has a new spark and aggressively befriends the reluctant Carol.

Story: Boy Willie Charles has lived his entire life as a sharecropper in Mississippi on the same land where his grandfather was a slave of a white man named Sutter. When Sutter’s last remaining descendant down South puts the land up for sale, Boy Willie is determined to buy it. The time is 1937, in the Great Depression, and Boy Willie journeys north to Pittsburgh to convince his sister Berniece to sell their family’s heirloom piano so that he can buy the land with his share.

Got an app for that? ALEXA MILLER does! The St. Louisan is the developer of the StagePage Concert App, a free iOS app that allows concert-goers to document their experience in a multimedia scrapbook. When THE RASCALS recently reunited in Port Chester, N.Y., for the first time in 40 years to perform Groovin’, Good Lovin’, and other 1960s hits, Miller was in the fifth row, using her app to create a virtual scrapbook of the event. Following the concert, she and her father, PAUL MILLER, joined group members and the E Street Band’s STEVEN VAN ZANDT for dinner. Van Zandt, who inducted The Rascals into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, masterminded The Rascals’ Once Upon A Dream reunion, which alternated live performances with a million-dollar multimedia production retracing the band’s story. To find out more about StagePage, visit stagepageapp.com.

LN also gathered a group of professional counselors who shared their advice for families undergoing trauma and tragedy in their lives.

On the evening of Dec. 14, hours after the tragic killings of innocents in Connecticut, Mercy Children’s Hospital Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist Duru Sakhrani participated in an expert panel on KSDK on how to communicate with children during times of tragedy. How should we discuss situations like the death of a loved one, a pending divorce, or the loss of a home? Here are some of her tips.

Honestly, I think my head is going to explode. Reviews of this film use words like ‘epic,’ ‘expansive,’ ‘grandiose,’ ‘sweeping’ and ‘spectacle.’ And yes, all those words apply. This movie is a thriller, a romance, a drama, a tragedy, a sci-fi movie, a floor wax and a dessert topping. In many ways, the film is brilliant--maybe it’s too brilliant. But in the midst of all this scope, I found it hard to completely invest.

Story: Anne Frank, the 14-year-old girl whose life was one of millions of European Jews extinguished in concentration camps by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party in World War II, meets another 14-year-old, Emmett Till, a black boy from Chicago who was brutally murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in Mississippi, an act that galvanized America’s black community and started the Civil Rights movement.

Story: Chicago’s Clybourne Park neighborhood in 1959 is a fine place to live. But there’s a caveat: You can live there if you look like its white residents. When Russ and Bev put their modest, three-bedroom bungalow up for sale, they’re visited soon after by Russ’ former Rotary pal Karl. As president of the neighborhood association, Karl at first nervously asks the couple to reconsider their sale.

Story: Walter Lee Younger Jr. shares a cramped, dilapidated apartment on Chicago’s South Side with his wife Ruth, his son Travis, his mother Lena and his sister Beneatha. While his wife and mother accept their poverty and their lot in life, Walter Lee chafes at his suffocating situation. He has big plans for going into business as the co-owner of a liquor store with his friends Bobo and Willie. Those plans will cost money, but Walter Lee is anticipating a big check from his late father’s insurance company on Walter Sr.’s life insurance policy.

Jeannette Walls lived a nomadic childhood, setting up precariously with her family in small towns throughout the country, until each time her father decided it was time to ‘skedaddle.’ As an adult, she examined her childhood in the memoir, The Glass Castle. Walls will visit St. Louis on Tuesday, Oct. 23, as part of Maryville University’s St. Louis Speakers Series. LN sat down with her in advance of her speaking engagement.

Story: Yank and his cohorts spend their days and nights toiling in the boiler room of a steamship, stoking the fires with the coal they shovel into the gaping mouth of its churning engines. He is content with his lot until a chance encounter with the spoiled daughter of a steel magnate, who insists on visiting the ship’s engine room and is appalled by the look and behavior of Yank, from whom she recoils in disgust and terror.

Story: Theseus, Duke of Athens, is betrothed to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. They plan a festive wedding celebration, but first Theseus is asked to rule on a demand by nobleman Egeus. The latter says that Athenian law mandates that his daughter Hermia be compelled to marry Demetrius (her father’s choice for a son-in-law), rather than the man she actually loves, Lysander. If she doesn’t, she will be forced to enter a nunnery or sentenced to death. Simultaneously, a band of laborers led by Peter Quince prepares to perform a ‘comedy and tragedy’ about Pyramus and Thisbe as part of the royal couple’s reception entertainment.

Story: Three inspired actors decide to distill and condense all of the plays written by William Shakespeare into one, two-act performance. Considering that Hamlet takes up the entire second act, the first half is considerably congested as the lads tromp through The Bard’s comedies, tragedies, histories and “problem plays” on their merry mission.

Story: Roman general Caius Martius, under the leadership of elder generals Cominius and Titus Lartius, successfully leads Roman troops into battle against Volscian forces rallied by his blood enemy, Tullus Aufidius. Martius is able to withstand Aufidius’ attack on Rome and instead captures the Volscian city of Corioles. For his deeds, Cominius rewards Martius with the honorary title of Coriolanus.

Story: Othello, a Moor and a military general serving the City of Venice, falls in love with Desdemona, daughter of the Venetian senator Brabantio. They secretly wed, drawing the wrath of her father when he learns she has married an African. The Duke of Venice, however, dismisses Brabantio’s charges against Othello when the latter is ordered to lead Venetian forces into battle against the Turkish army over the rights to the island of Cyprus.

Once a week for two years, Azar Nafisi clandestinely met with seven of her most dedicated female students in her home in Tehran, Iran, to study Western titles by authors like Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Muriel Spark and Vladimir Nabokov.

Story: Theseus, Duke of Athens, is betrothed to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. They plan a festive wedding celebration, but first Theseus is asked to rule on a demand by nobleman Egeus. The latter says that Athenian law mandates that his daughter Hermia be compelled to marry Demetrius (her father’s choice for a son-in-law), rather than the man she actually loves, Lysander. Simultaneously, a band of laborers led by Peter Quince prepares to perform a ‘comedy and tragedy’ about Pyramus and Thisbe as part of the royal couple’s reception entertainment.

In this classic American updating of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, two young lovers risk the anger of their respective peer groups by falling in love on New York City’s West Side, circa 1957.