Jayne, a professor of agricultural economics at Michigan State University, helps small farmers in Africa hook up with local and global markets. He goes to Africa several times a year, but hasn’t had an extended stay there since a Peace Corps stint 18 years ago.

After a six-year fling, the gallery will forsake a sleek, chic but problematic storefront at 113 S. Washington Square and move a block north to the cheaper, bigger and more accessible 119 N. Washington Square, between the YMCA and Kositchek’s, the gallery’s board of directors announced last week.

If you like lots of tomato, garlic and onion in your art, Kim Kauffman’s “Investigations” series, now on view at Mackerel Sky in East Lansing, might be just the spread for you. However, be warned ' you must also open yourself to acquired tastes like cracked turtle shell, dead finch and beaver skull.

When Morrill Hall was built in 1900, it was a huge house ' a women’s residential college ' and it still feels like one. The creaking floors, obsolete fireplaces and time-melted glass windows moan in the low frequency of memories.

Velvet-voiced actor/director Ken Beachler and perfectionist piano man Sergei Kvitko have a strangely compelling musical partnership.Suave cop, intense cop? Honey and salt?Their chemistry is hard to pin down.

Oster’s speech is labored, but he’s patient as rock and persistent as water. With help from his girlfriend, Michelle Dengeldey, the thoughts from the probing analyst’s mind beamed from his tortured body..

There’s a good reason Pat Metheny will lug hundreds of pounds of acoustic instruments and state-of-the-art gadgetry to MSU’s Wharton Center Friday. He’s going back to the basics. Metheny, a lifelong plugger-in of exotic guitar enhancements, has turned his han- kering for tinkering to acoustic ends.

It sounds like a three-ring circus, but Allen stressed that the show doesn’t call for more than two artists to be on stage at a time. “They’re not there to be a distraction from the orchestra, but to enhance the whole concert experience,” Allen said..

On a recent Wednesday, shiny tomatoes and cheery flowers perked up a yellowish, institutional-looking hallway in the basement of Sparrow Hospital’s gigantic Lansing campus.Misha Keenan, an O.R. nurse, stumbled upon a strategically placed stand of locally grown fruits and veggies from Lansing’s Urbandale Farms on her way to the cafeteria.

The Russians have a proverb: The only tool you really need is an ax. Michael Gurt, a brilliant pianist with a bearish frame, untucked shirt and savage glee in his eyes, kicked through classical decorum to hew, hack and finesse his way through Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto Friday night with maestro Timothy Muffitt and the Lansing Symphony.