Christine DiMattei

The folks who live along a small stretch of Fort Lauderdale Beach just north of Sunrise Boulevard know the drill.

Actually, they spent the first part of 2013 hearing little else.

Nearly every day since early January, work crews have been out between Northeast 14th Court and Northeast 18th Street  installing a new sea wall.  The first phase involved a huge rig drilling 40 feet down to make way for 500 pieces of sheet metal pilings.

With all the unknowns attached to the 2013 hurricane season, there’s at least one thing that’s down in black and white:  the 21 names chosen for this year’s tropical storms.

The first name up: “Andrea.”

Gulp.

Strike the last letter, add a “w” and you’ve got the name of the 1992 hurricane that killed 65 people and caused an estimated $26 billion worth of damage. 

A Broward County costume company is breathing new life into a Palm Beach County theater that fell victim to financial hard times.

The owners of Costume World are renovating the 30,000-square-foot former home of the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton and will operate the theater themselves under a new name.

Last year, the Caldwell closed down under the weight of $7 million in debt.

Journalist Tim Padgett spent nearly a quarter of a century covering Latin America and the Caribbean for TIME and Newsweek magazines.

But he's always been envious of the way foreign correspondents deliver the news for NPR.

"They're giving listeners a richer sense of the sounds and the colors than perhaps I'm able to do as a print reporter," he says.

At the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, it's intermission during a production of "War Horse."

Eric Chirinsky stands at the bar of the Broward Center's new lounge Club Level, drink in hand, watching the Miami Heat battle the Chicago Bulls on a flat-screen TV.

"I just figured I'd check it out and see how our home team was doing tonight," he says.

But his wife, Katarina, isn't focused on pro basketball right now.  She's sitting alone, enjoying a plate of hors d'oeuvres and a glass of bubbly.

Sixteen-year-old Webster Jean is driving around on city streets, left hand on the wheel, right hand holding a smartphone.  As he reads and responds to his text messages, he repeatedly veers across the double-yellow lines.

And then --  wham.

"I crashed,"  says Jean with a chuckle.

Jean tee-bones another car – but he’s fine.  The teenager is just taking a spin in a texting-while-driving simulator brought to Park Vista High School by wireless carrier AT&T. 

The woman whose name is synonymous with the fight for equal pay for women brought her message to South Florida this week.  And Lilly Ledbetter has some advice for working women at any stage of their careers:  learn how to negotiate.

A study released last month by the National Partnership for Women & Families shows that South Florida women are earning 86 cents for every dollar their male co-workers earn.  Although that's better than the national average of 77 cents, Ledbetter responds to that statistic with three words:

"Not good enough."

Throughout the 2013 legislative session, we've been posing questions to Tallahassee lawmakers that were raised at a WLRN-Miami Herald News Town Hall last February.

Among the topics is the rising cost of higher education in Florida.

Here's lookin' at YOU,  Bogie fans.

Starting today, fans of Humphrey Bogart will be flocking to Key Largo for a film festival celebrating one of Hollywood's most beloved tough guys.

It was a humdinger of a story.

A Miami police officer in a marked squad car is pursued, pulled over and handcuffed by a Florida state trooper after speeding down the turnpike like race car driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

A dash-cam video of that pre-dawn October chase in 2011 went viral and sparked a three-month investigation by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper into how local police officers routinely endangered the general public through reckless driving.

Much to the relief of Delray Beach arts lovers, the city has decided to let a popular cultural hub stay in the space it’s called home for the last two years.

The fate of the Arts Garage has hung in the balance since last summer, when a law firm offered to buy the city-owned property that the arts incubator occupies downtown.  Since then, Delray Beach has been forced to choose between the new jobs the law firm says it would bring and the wildly popular performance venue.

My wardrobe is completely Lilly Pulitzer-free. 

And today, I regret it.

As the fashion world mourns the death of the socialite-turned-designer, who died Sunday in Palm Beach at the age of 81, I find myself wondering what about Pulitzer’s signature line was so intimidating to me.

Were the sherbet orange and sea foam green prints too bold for me?

“Owl-catraz” is no more.

But it seems the controversy over a private prison company’s efforts to buy naming rights to Florida Atlantic University’s stadium is far from over.

In a letter to FAU’s Dean of Students, the American Civil Liberties Union criticizes the university for an alleged retaliation against seven students for rallying against the defunct deal. 

A $6 million deal that would have given a private prison company naming rights to Florida Atlantic University's stadium is now off. And that's leaving some FAU students wondering if another donation that size is coming around any time soon.

Playing cards -- even though you hate it.

Going shopping -- although you already have a closetful of clothes.

Staying home and watching television? Yawn.

Golf?  Not on your life.

Many of the senior citizens who gathered Tuesday in solidarity at Boynton Beach’s Cleopatra Arcade paint a grim picture of a future without their beloved senior arcades.

North Perry and Boca Raton airports are among 149 small facilities nationwide where federal budget cuts have forced closures of air traffic control towers.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced the decision today, nearly a month after it released a preliminary list of towers that could be affected.  

The tower at Miami-Dade's Opa-locka Airport had originally been considered for closure, but it's now on the list of only 24 towers nationwide that will be kept operational.

On any given day, 53-year-old Ron Wooldridge guides dozens of flights in and out of Boca Raton Airport, just east of I-95. But early next month, instead of manning the airport's control tower, he could be standing on the unemployment line.

"I find it a little ridiculous,” says Wooldridge. “They're not thinking of the safety of the aircraft.  Or how it's going to affect the rest of the city itself."

Inside Jose Moreno's Judaica shop in Aventura, there's an entire wall lined with Hebrew books.  Other shelves hold glistening menorahs and there's a rack filled with special Passover games and toys for children.

An elderly customer enters the shop wearing a yarmulke and Moreno greets him in Spanish.

Moreno, 71, was raised in Venezuela and for many years owned a similar store in Caracas.

"Most of the Jewish people had good businesses and [a] good living standard,” Moreno said.  “We had a lot of synagogues, temples, schools.”

Pope Francis may not be from the United States, but for many in South Florida, the fact that he's from Argentina is even better.

Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski has hailed the selection of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as a "great thing” for the hemisphere, and called the new Pope an American.

“Latin America, as Pope Benedict described it, is the continent of hope. And it is the continent in which we have the largest growing number of Catholics in the world.”

Imagine enough sand to cover about four football fields, four feet high, and you'll get an idea of how much work is being done to build up the dunes in Boca Raton's Red Reef Park.

It was busier than usual inside Café Canela last night, but owner Ramon Peraza repeatedly came out from behind the counter to give new arrivals a hug or a handshake. All of them were jubilant.

But Peraza struggles to describe his emotions.

“I feel that my heart is very, very happy and quiet, quiet. We are waiting for this for many years,” says Peraza

When Peraza says the word “quiet,” he makes a soothing gesture over his chest. 

On stage at the Kravis Center, Palm Beach Opera is performing Rossini's Cenerentola, the Italian version of Cinderella.  In the second to last row of the house, 27-year-old Jennifer Pfaff's thumbs are going a mile a minute on her smartphone:

Audio includes spot, hard news and feature material by WLRN reporter Christine DiMattei.

Spot:  "Obama in Century Village"
Hard News: "Palm Beach County Floods"
Feature: "Jaco" -- Parts 1 and 2

A crowd of about one hundred supporters of the Arts Garage gathered outside the venue Tuesday  and marched the few blocks to Delray Beach City Hall.  They were prepared to speak out against a bid by the law firm of Kanner and Pintaluga to buy the city-owned space that houses Arts Garage.

The leader of the Democratic National Committee says the U.S. embargo of Cuba should remain in place, in spite of recent reforms in the Communist island nation.

Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz spoke before a crowd of over 500 people Friday at an event sponsored by the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches. 

The DNC chair says it doesn't make sense to lift the embargo, in light of what she calls the "unbelievable oppression" in Cuba.

Thousands of West Palm Beach senior citizens will have to wait another month for a decision on a controversial development planned near their retirement community.

After hours of public comment on Thursday, a Palm Beach County Commission meeting ended in a tied vote on the future of the project, named "Reflection Bay."

Developers want to turn an unused golf course next to the West Palm Beach Century Village into a neighborhood of homes and retail stores.

A four-block stretch of State Road A1A in Fort Lauderdale that got a pounding from Mother Nature last fall is now getting a drilling by construction workers.

Between October and November, crashing waves, high tides and storm surge from Hurricane Sandy destroyed parts of the beach, seawall and roadway just north of Sunrise Boulevard. 

This week, an enormous rig positioned along the beach will drill about 40 feet down, to prepare the way for the installation of a new seawall.

Poets are melancholy and morose, right?

“I’m so happy,” says a beaming 23-year-old Marci Calabretta of Hallandale Beach.

People who write poetry can’t relate to others, correct?

“I love people.  I adore people,” says 23-year-old Jose Villar of South Miami.

Most poetic souls are lonely and live in dusty attic rooms in ancient houses.

“I live in one of those over-55 ‘active’ communities,” laughs 64-year-old Adele Alexandre of Coconut Creek.