As a child, Michelle Hayes dreamed of owning her own hotel. Instead of going toe to toe with Hilton and Marriott, however, the Whitehaven native and LeMoyne-Owen College graduate instead entered into the world of real estate in 1998.

“I woke up one morning and decided I was going to real estate school,” she said with a laugh.

She went to work for Willoughby Realtors after school, but the daughter of entrepreneur Charles Hayes, owner of Hayes Body Shop, wasn’t content to work for others.

While working as a real estate agent with another company, she opened a home improvement company. In 2001 she added a real estate division to the company and then formed her own realty firm, Michelle Hayes Homes and Realty Inc., at the age of 23 … (read more)

When “The Hunger Games,” the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling young adult novel, is released on March 23, 16-year-old Destiny Crump is sure to be one of the first in a theater seat.

The junior at Central High School read the book as a summer reading assignment last year, but was caught up in the suspense and drama regardless of the homework label attached to it.

“I didn’t think I would like it at first, but it turned out to be really, really good and interesting,” she said. “It put me in a different mindset, like it could possibly happen.”

Jimmie Tashie is excited about the movie as well. The vice president and general manager for Malco Theatres Inc. said his company is “happy to have another series coming out; they’re talking about this like perhaps it’s another ‘Twilight’-type series. With the end of ‘Harry Potter’ and some of the long-running sequels, the idea of a new one coming along is pretty exciting, because it usually means there’ll be as many movies as there are books.”

The Hollywood Reporter reported last month that anticipation for the movie set a new record for advance ticket sales previously held by “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” in May 2010. Malco Theatres is planning for a huge weekend of sales and is beginning it as early as possible, with 12:01 a.m. showings at a number of theaters around the area on March 23.

In the dystopian future of the novel, with more than 23 million copies in print, Collins has woven a tale of class struggle, dictatorial government, survival of the fittest, the human instinct toward fight or flight, and fierce familial loyalty … (read more)

What we create with a large family, other than a large mess and a lot of noise, is our own little society within a society. It has its own rules to be broken and its own hierarchy to be either respected or usurped. It has its own ways of operating to ensure that the machinery of family and home run smoothly.

The best way to keep things operating evenly, of course, is for all of the cogs in the machine to work together, for these brothers and sisters to come together and work as a team, all with the same goal of cleaning the kitchen, agreeing on what will be watched on television or simply passing the potatoes down the table at dinner.

When there is discord, factions develop, and strife becomes the norm; war breaks out over an otherwise peaceful land, and no one is happy. Happiness, and quiet, are the overarching goals every day.

I’ve been reading “The Saturdays” by Elizabeth Enright to my 9-year-old daughter at bedtime. It’s the story of the Melendy family with four children that mirror my own — two boys, two girls — living in a Manhattan contemporary to the time of the book’s first publication in 1941. Lamenting not having enough money to do what each really wants, the siblings agree to pool their weekly allowance (a total of $1.60) and take turns privately doing what each likes on Saturdays. By the end, they realize they don’t want to go off on their own for a day, but decide instead that it will be more fun to have their adventures as a group. It’s the story of working together for a mutual cause and respecting each others’ wants and dreams … (read more)