Actress waxes poetic about hometown Birmingham

Actress / singer Alexandra Silber has moved onto London's West End and spotlights beyond... but her heart is still in Birmingham, Michigan.

Excerpt:

"There are so many beautiful nooks and crannies in this seemingly sleepy, Wonder-Years-y suburban town complete with wide American streets peppered with Labradors, slip-n-slides and children on bicycles. There is a buzzy downtown with two cinemas, boutique-y shopping, and utterly glorious places to eat for every budget.

But part of the peculiarity of metro-Detroit is that no single neighborhood is like another and they are all too nebulously nuzzled and inter-mingled up against one another to know where one begins and another ends. It is, of course, a driving city too, so as a kid you are stuck riding your bike to downtown Birmingham (scores of 12-year-olds wander the streets outside the cinemas at weekends) and as a teenager you are suddenly in a car and 40 miles away within 15 minutes on the giant American highways with nothing particularly important to do. Something about that dilemma feels charmingly typical to American suburbs— having been the plight of youth from the 60s until now.

Birmingham is 4.8 square miles, 12.4 square kilometers, 2 High Schools, 17 churches. 3 post offices. 1 train station. 3 golf courses. 2 cinemas. 4 seasons. 1 river. 1 annual Spring carnival. And 20,000 really nice Midwestern people and probably 1000 assholes. Give or take."

Read the rest here.