Waterfire started as a one-time event in 1994, but the residents of the city liked it so much that they begged for another lighting of the fires. That led to another, and another, and another, and eventually it expanded to a huge summer tradition.

That tradition was started by a man named Barnaby Evans, and I talked to Barnaby after a lecture he gave here in Boston recently.

Brogan Graham was one of the first riders for Boston Pedicab, a human-powered cab company that opened in 2005. His job is all about being anywhere on a moment’s notice, but he sat still for a few minutes at the festival to talk about what it’s like to pedal hundreds of pounds through Boston traffic for nothing but tips.

Of course, Spare Change News doesn’t just help the homeless; the vendors may have a place to live (and even a job). The paper is there to give anyone who needs it a way to make money.

My guest is James Shearer, President of the Homeless Empowerment Project and one of the founders of Spare Change News. He and a number of others started the paper 15 years ago while living on the streets, then turned what sounded like a crazy idea into a paper which now publishes thousands of copies every month.

I’d always been intrigued by the paper and wanted to learn more, so I visited the paper’s office in the basement of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Harvard Square for a conversation with Mr. Shearer.

T.J. Scallywaggle’s Vegan House of Pizza & Subs sells all of the standard pizza-place “comfort foods” without many of the standard ingredients. I found the idea unusual (to say the least!) and some of the food surprisingly delicious. So, I headed out to Allston a while back to find out what it takes to successfully make a meatless meatball sub.

The Swan Boats have been around almost as long as the Public Garden has, and through four generations, the Paget family and their crews have paddled around the lagoon pushing people from all over the world on a leisurely, human-powered ride.

Of course, the boats and their drivers have figured prominently in many stories – the two most famous ones are probably Make Way for Ducklings and The Trumpet of the Swan – but they have stories of their own. To hear a few of them, I visited Lyn Paget – the current owner of the fleet – on their dock in the Public Garden.

Most of us have tried our hand at juggling, magic, or other such tricks at some point in our lives, but I bet very few of us have ever thought of making it our livelihood. Well, that’s exactly what my guest does for a living: while you are at your desk, he’s trying to convince strangers to pay him for getting out of a straight jacket. Oh, and if that’s not enough, he’s just debuted a new version of his act where he wriggles free while hanging upside down 20 feet in the air.

Jason Escape performs in many places around the world, but I caught up with him recently on the Quincy Market steps — waiting for some bad weather to pass before finding some people to tie him up.

I’ve always loved puzzles — particularly those little metal ones you have to take apart. The problem is that over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at them, and most of the new ones I find are pretty easy. That’s not a problem at Eureka Puzzles.

My guest is the owner, David Leschinsky, and if you like puzzles he’s your guy. With thousands of puzzles, books and games — including a jigsaw puzzle with 23,000 pieces — David’s store is quite an experience. It’s one of only a few puzzle stores in the country, so I figured that there must be an interesting story in amongst the brainteasers.

So to find out, I stopped by for a chat — and couldn’t resist leaving with a few puzzles for the trip home.

The Athenaeum is in the middle of celebrating its 200th year with an impressive exhibition covering their continuous collecting of books and art over the last two centuries. The building holds books, paintings, and sculptures from the libraries of John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and others, along with many important pieces of Boston history.

As a working library, the Athenaeum runs community outreach programs throughout New England in addition to serving its 5000 members — who get to use the library’s amazing fifth-floor reading room.

I visited the library on Beacon Hill for the first time a few months ago, and went back a few weeks ago to get a feel for the place from the institution’s director and a tour of the anniversary exhibition from a curator.

Photo Credit: Boston Athenaeum

2007 marks the 111th running of the oldest annual marathon in the world. Started just one year after the first modern Olympics revived the marathon in 1896, the Boston Marathon brings tens of thousands of runners to Hopkinton, Massachusetts, then quite literally runs them out of town toward Boston’s Copley Square — 26.2 miles away. Along the course, the runners battle the weather, their competitors, their own tired bodies, and the notorious Heartbreak Hill.

To get the inside story of the marathon, I went to the Copley Square offices of the Boston Athletic Association. The BAA has organized every marathon since 1897, and my guest this episode has been following those efforts since he was a kid. He’s covered it as a reporter, run it as a contestant, and now helps make it happen from his office at the BAA.

The Boston accent is famous for its misplaced Rs and strange vowels, as well as its well-known speakers. John F. Kennedy, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Click and Clack from Car Talk, the character Cliff Clavin on Cheers, and even The Simpsons’ Mayor Quimby have all have brought variations on the Boston Accent to the world stage.

It’s a dialect I hear every day, but almost all most people know about it is encapsulated in the phrase “Let’s pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd,” but that isn’t really the way people talk here. To do a little better, I went to someone who could give us the real deal:

MJ Connolly grew up just outside of Boston, and is now a professor of linguistics at Boston College. He’s listened to — and spoken with — the Boston Accent his whole life, so I went to him to tell us what it is.

Boston’s Omni Parker House Hotel sits at one of the oldest intersections in Boston on the site of America’s first public school. The hotel itself was the first luxury hotel built in America, and is now the oldest operating hotel in the country. Throughout its 150-year history, Omni Parker House has housed, fed, or employed such famous names as Longfellow, Dickens, Kennedy, Emerson, Roosevelt, Curley, Ho Chi Minh, John Wilkes Booth, and dozens more.

The hotel is now the flagship property of the Omni Hotels chain, and remains one of the places to stay in Boston. I stopped by for a short stay and a talk with one of their staff members about the place.

The hotel has such an involved history that the “Brief History” pamphlet they gave me is almost 50 pages long, so lets call this episode a snapshot of America’s oldest hotel.

Now, I don’t have the resources to get to the north pole, so instead I tracked down one of Santa’s helpers here in Boston. Today’s guest has dressed in red to hear Christmas wishes at Faneuil Hall, the Stone Zoo, and the city of Boston’s Enchanted Forest. And if you’ve never sat on his lap, you may have seen him as the big guy in a TV commercial. I braved the weekend crowds and talked to Santa in between sessions with the kids at the Stone Zoo.

Photo by Photos In a Minute

Sidi Mohamed Camara, or “Joh,” is from Bamako, Mali. He’s been in in the US since 1995, teaching and performing all around the country. He now lives right here in Boston, where he teaches drumming and dance at Harvard and BU — along with community and private lessons.

I thought it was quite amazing to find a prominent African musician accessible via the Red Line, so I asked him to tell his story, then sat in on a class of drumming and dancing.

So, in this early edition, I have an interview with Ken Procaccianti, who is hoping to become state representative for Beacon Hill, Chinatown, and the North and South Ends. This young marketing executive thinks he can help make Boston a better place for young people, and he’s trying to get his message out one person at a time.

Since political campaigns are something we all hear a lot about but never experience running firsthand, I met up with Ken in the North End’s Paul Revere Park to find out what it’s like to run for office.

Every year right before Halloween, you start to see posters on the T for the Garment District. Then you start to see tons of people carrying pink bags with the store’s logo and all sorts of fun stuff inside.

For the last 20 years, this former rag factory has been selling the clothes they used to cut up — and not just for Halloween costumes. Every day, they have more than 40,000 pieces of vintage and contemporary clothing on display on two floors of the old factory.

To find out what it is like to be at the epicenter of Boston’s Halloween, I stopped by last week for a chat with the manager.

So today, we’ll go inside MIT to find a real, live astronaut who works right here in the Boston area. My guest has done something many of us dreamed of as a kid: ridden a rocket into space. And not just once, but five times.

Photo Credit: NASA

Boston is home what could be considered the Boston Beer Company’s “research lab” brewery, where they develop the new beers you see from the Samuel Adams Brand. Most of the large-scale brewing is done in Ohio, but everything starts right here in Boston.

I wanted to learn about what it takes to brew fine beer in the city of Boston, so I went down to Jamaica Plain to get a tour from one Samuel Adams’ brewers.

St. Anthony’s is one of the biggest of the dozen or so feasts in Boston’s Italian North End each summer. It is put on by the St. Anthony’s Society, an organization formed by immigrants from Montefalcione, Italy around 1900.

Almost every year since 1919, on the last weekend in August, tens of thousands of people from all over the world come to the feast. It’s a huge event, with games, bands, parades, and of course, food.

I wanted to know more about the feast, so I ventured out on Saturday evening — when you could barely walk in the streets due to all the people — and found one of the members of the feast committee.

Two weeks ago, I was walking through Harvard Square looking for topics for Boston Behind the Scenes when I came across a group gathering for a tour in “The Pit,” next to the entrance to the T station.

This unauthorized tour of Harvard has gotten a lot of attention, with stories in the Globe, the Herald, and of course the Harvard Crimson. I wanted to see what all of the fuss was about, so I waded into the crowd, took out my recorder, and spent an hour and a half learning quite a bit about Harvard.

Afterwards, I sat down with my two tour guides for a behind-the-scenes look at the Hahvahd Tour.

[UPDATE: The Hahvahd Tour is now Unofficial Tours presents Harvard University, and they’re still going strong in Harvard Square]

I see him quite often during my day to day travel, and when I do, I always wonder who he is. Does he have a job? Does he have a home? Is he crazy?

I ran into Bob on the platform in the Park Street T Station where he was handing out his last few pamphlets before calling it a day. I had my recorder, so I walked up and asked him for an interview. He usually gets his dinner for free from the leftovers of a few of the Quincy Market food vendors, so I went over there with him for a conversation about his life.

If you’ve ever walked past the Park Street T station on Boston Common, you might have noticed the prominent fried dough cart that always has a prime spot right next to the entrance. If you haven’t seen the cart itself, you might have seen the big friendly guy who is usually behind cart greeting everyone with a smile. He certainly stood out to me, so I thought he’d be a great person to tell us about the art of street vending.

Boston Common is the nation’s oldest public park, and throughout the last 350 years, it has served many purposes. From grazing cows to civil rights marchers, the parks has seen visitors of all types.

These days, many of those visitors head over to the Visitor Information Center to find out all about the Common and the city. A small building next to the Park Ranger’s station and at the beginning of the Freedom Trail, thousands of people walk through its doors every day.

So, let’s add some ears to that number during our visit to Boston Common.

Where do you go if you want ten oranges for a dollar? What about a case of strawberries for five dollars? Or maybe you’re looking for something more exotic, like 5 loquats for a dollar? You’ll find all of these things at Haymarket.

Haymarket’s been around for well over a hundred years, and it’s quite the experience. To find out how it happens every week, I tracked down the board of the Haymarket Pushcart Association sitting on a Blackstone Street Jersey barrier.

You can listen to this short soundseeing tour however you’d like, but to get the full experience, you have to put your headphones on. This is because I used some special microphones that will give you a true 3D soundscape.

I’d never been to Cheers, so I decided to head down there a few weeks ago and find out what it is like to work in part of TV history.

After talking to the manager and a very busy but helpful receptionist, I sat down at a bar in one of their private rooms with Eddie Doyle.

Eddie’s been a bartender at the Bull & Finch for more than thirty years. In that time, he’s been named to the Bartender’s National Hall of Fame, raised millions of dollars for charity, had “Eddie Doyle Day” declared for him by the mayor of Boston, and inspired a pair of Hollywood directors to use the Bull & Finch as the setting for a new sitcom.

Lucky for everyone involved: they float.

Since coming to this city, I’ve always wondered what kind of person it takes to drive a giant rainbow boat through Boston traffic. To find out, I talked to a couple of those brave souls last week.

The North End is the place to go for food in Boston. With almost 90 restaurants packed into a neighborhood smaller than some parking lots, some may find the number of choices overwhelming. But no matter where they eat dinner, thousands of people get dessert at Mike’s every day.

My guest is Guy, an employee of Mike’s for 25 years. Now the Executive Chef, he knows just about everything about the place.

Ten years ago, Donald Covington joined the Big Apple Circus after retiring from the Navy. He is now the show’s Company Manger.

I caught up with him during the last performance of their stay in downtown Boston.