Audrey Ellis grew up on a fruit farm in western New York dreaming of being a dancer. She moved to Brooklyn five years ago after graduating from Goucher College with a degree in dance and philosophy, and joined a dance company while also working as a freelance instructor. She enjoyed the cycle of performing and teaching, performing and teaching, but something was missing. Enter the farm. A few years back, Ellis and her friend Sarah Capua formed a dance company called A+S Works and decided to host a weekend-long dance festival on Ellis' family's land. The first event was a success, as was the second, and so the festival will have its third year this summer. I met Ellis recently in Bushwick and we talked about how the festival got started, the difficulties of the New York dance scene, and her day job teaching dance at a high school around the corner. READ MORE

The Tribeca Film Festival starts today, and at its helm this year is Frédéric Boyer, who is something of an accidental artistic director. All the Parisian ever wanted to do was watch films. He even skipped his schoolboy exams to screen a flick. That obsession—viewing five, six, seven movies a day—led to a job at Videosphere, the Paris store with over 60,000 titles, which in turn resulted in a gig programming the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes. Now, he finds himself programming the New York festival. The career path is accidental, perhaps, but he's hardly unprepared. "It's the life I choose because I don't want my work to stop at 6:30 p.m. I just want the work to be in my life and my life to be in my work. It's what I like," he told me when we met for coffee last week at one of his favorite cafes in (yes) TriBeCa. READ MORE

Brad Reedy grew up surfing in Orange County. He originally planned to be an English teacher, but a chance internship pushed him toward the practice of wilderness therapy instead. With a few colleagues, Reedy launched Second Nature, a treatment group dedicated to helping troubled preteens, teens and young adults. Four years ago, he stepped back from the therapy side to focus on outreach and growing the organization, which now has four sites in three states. As the face of the company, Reedy travels 130,000 miles a year. We met on one of his recent trips to New York. READ MORE

Remember Magic: The Gathering? It was a game very popular in the '90s, and if you were like me, you may have spent hours in your bedroom, the sounds of Nirvana or Soundgarden bouncing off the walls around you, flipping through your cards. But then it might have gotten too expensive (a pack of 15 cards went for something like five bucks then, which doesn't sound like much except you were 16, had virtually no income and always needed more, more, more cards to compete)—or maybe you just moved on. But if you didn't know, the game has been enjoying a recent resurgence, and if you need proof, you need only go to Citigroup Center, in Midtown, on a Monday night to see it. READ MORE

Bill Walsh will openly admit that his many former bosses were justified when they fired him. He was "arrogantly unfit," and is not shy about telling tales of his, shall we say, youthful misadventures. Eventually, Walsh righted himself, joined a recovery program, went to chiropractic school, and started a practice in Park Slope. He's been treating people there for the past 25 years. READ MORE