A detail of the poster for “Ken Reid’s Shirt Tales,” running Saturday in Central Square.

Moving is a pain for anyone, but for Ken Reid — a comedian and storyteller with a broad and obsessive interest in pop culture — it’s a monumental task. Never mind his music collection and thousands of DVDs and videotapes, many of them rare or unique; when he went down to his basement a couple of years ago for a move to the suburbs he realized he also owned literally thousands of T-shirts.

“It was the first substantial move I’d done in about 10 years,” Reid explained. “But I was like, ‘This is ridiculous.’”

When someone asked him to do a show, he made the practical and possibly vital decision to do it about those T-shirts, telling a story about several grabbed at random and then auctioning them off. “It was fun and people went nuts for the auction part. So I said, ‘I could do this without the auction part.’ I rented the theater the next day — which was probably a bad idea,” he said.

The result of all this arrives 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the YMCA theater in Central Square: “Ken Reid’s Shirt Tales.”

“My T-shirt collection is kind of the catalyst of the stories, but I’m also going to get into why people — specifically me — tend to collect T-shirts, since most people I know tend to have a bunch of T-shirts from different things, especially guys. I also get into the history of the T-shirt and how it got to where it is today. It should be funny and weird, and everyone gets a T-shirt at the end of the show,” he said.

Here are some T-shirts you probably won’t be getting at the end of “Shirt Tales”:

A “Just the 10 of Us” cast T-shirt autographed for Reid by Bill “Coach Lubbock” Kirchenbauer. Many won’t remember this three-season ABC sitcom spinoff from “Growing Pains,” but Reid has sent some of his consuming passion in pop culture down even this minor cul-de-sac and said he’s even supplied former cast members with scans of continuity scripts and their attached Polaroids showing wardrobe changes. He got Kirchenbauer’s autograph the obvious way: by being Facebook friends with him. “I don’t know anyone who could verify this, but I’m fairly certain I have the world’s largest ‘Just the 10 of Us’ memorabilia collection,” Reid said. An autographed T-shirt, though, “was like the one piece that was missing.”

A T-shirt autographed by Joel McHale, star of the NBC sitcom “Community” and the E! Entertainment Television pop culture review show “The Soup,” saying “Ken Reid, you’re fat and you watch too much television.” “I’ve actually never met him,” Reid said. But while opening for McHale at a comedy club, friend and comedian Shane Mauss talked about Reid and asked for a gift to bring back. “And that’s what he decided to write about me,” Reid said of McHale.

This is the fourth of Reid’s long-form shows, starting with “Ken Reid’s Cusack Attack,” which sold out the Boston Center for the Arts in 2006 with crowds eager to hear him chart his life via the films of John Cusack; “Very Special Episode: Portrait of a Pop Culture Victim” in 2008, revealing through clips of shows obscure and otherwise how television affected him, including his  appearance on U.K. game shows and a humiliating encounter with Adam West; and “Music to My Years” in 2009, which was featured by Boston.com for its stories of the dead bodies Reid has found (while working in local radio) and his time with the 1990s punk band 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.

“Shirt Tales” might be the end for Reid, in a way.

“This might be the last long show I’ll do. I have other stories, but I don’t know that I have anything else I can string together into a theme,” Reid said.

But at least he’s not quitting comedy, a rumor that dogs Reid because — despite touring with Todd Barry and work with Jonathan Katz, Eugene Mirman, Patton Oswalt and Bob Saget, endless acclaim from fellow Boston comedians and two Best Comedian nominations by The Boston Phoenix — he doesn’t really enjoy doing it.

“I never have. It’s a weird thing. Sometimes I don’t know why I do it,” Reid said. “It’s like bleeding a radiator. Sometimes you have to.”

If this is indeed the last long-form show of Reid’s, there’s still a chance to get in on it: Tickets are $15, including an opening act by retro chanteuse Niki Luparelli — and that free T-shirt. The YMCA Cambridge Theatre is at 820 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square.

The authority, which has been shaping Kendall Square since 1955, has been without a board for two years but has gone on conducting business in apparent violation of its bylaws. City Manager Robert W. Healy presented the council with four new board members April 9, and the state’s board member has said he is similarly ready to work.

A message was left Wednesday asking the authority’s executive director, Joseph Tulimieri, why the meeting was scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Monday, the same time as the council meeting.

Among the first steps to be taken by the board members must be a review of what Tulimieri was working toward in their absence, including the deeding of ground-level park land along Binney Street and the train tracks and a plan by developer Boston Properties to build atop a rooftop garden to connect buildings housing Google offices. Tulimieri also approved some construction and the installation of a large sign for Microsoft and set in motion plans for Cambridge’s “gateway” from Boston at the Longfellow Bridge.

Whether Tulimieri’s work was legal is to be addressed at a June 5 meeting of the council’s Government Operations and Rules subcommittee, said David Maher, the subcommittee’s chairman, after the April 23 council meeting. Although he said the June meeting’s primary interest was in looking at “what the council’s role with the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority was … and there really isn’t a role, it’s governed by the board of directors,” Maher also acknowledged that he didn’t know whether the actions of the agency over the past two years — when there was no board — was legal.

“I’m sure it will be addressed,” Maher said.

The city’s Law Department is responsible for determining whether the actions of the authority over the past two years fit with its bylaws, said a communications specialist at the state Department of Housing and Community Development, Mary-Leah Assad.

One member of that subcommittee is councillor Minka vanBeuzekom, who wrote the policy order asking for a definition of the council’s role in the running of the authority. Maher’s quick answer last month indicated that he feels that aside from confirming Healy’s appointments to the board, there is none.

But on April 9, councillor Ken Reeves hoped that the subcommittee would look into the council’s role while linking those hopes directly to “how the CRA could be operating without a full complement of people, how the CRA could be holding meetings.”

“We really need a deep review of the CRA going forward and going backward,” Reeves said. “This has not been a good show of how we could best do business.”

Noting the possibility that appointment might be the council’s only power over the authority, councillor Craig Kelley suggested that the new members’ confirmation be put off until after an examination of the authority. He lost that vote 8-1, with even vanBeuzekom and Reeves voting in favor of the immediate appointments.

Toner

Cambridge’s Paul Toner was re-elected president of the 107,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association at the association’s annual meeting of delegates Saturday, with Brockton’s Timothy Sullivan re-elected vice president.

Both have held the positions for two years and will begin serving their second and final two-year terms in those offices in July.

In winning a second term by a wide margin, Toner defeated a challenge from the floor by Ron Colosi, president of the Arlington Education Association.

“My years of experience as MTA president, MTA vice president, an MTA Board member, local president in Cambridge, a middle school social studies teacher, a lawyer and a public school parent have prepared me to lead our state association,” Toner wrote an his pre-election statement. “My vision of the MTA is as a union of professional educators serving two equally important functions. First, as the largest labor union in the Commonwealth, we are a proud voice for workers’ rights, collective bargaining, due process in the workplace, improved compensation and benefits, human rights and social justice. … In addition to being a strong union and voice for the middle class, I believe the MTA must also be the voice of our profession and public education.”

Toner taught social studies and reading to seventh- and eighth-grade students at the Harrington Elementary School in Cambridge from 1993 to 2001, when he was elected president of the 1,100-member Cambridge Teachers Association. In 2006, he was elected vice president of the MTA.

A graduate of Boston University and the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Toner also holds a law degree from Suffolk University. He lives in Cambridge with his wife, Susan Connelly, and his children, Grace and Jack, who are in Cambridge Public Schools.

Sullivan, a middle school reading teacher and computer lab manager, was president of the Brockton Education Association before his election as MTA vice president in 2010.

The sewing machine, invented by Elias Howe, is only one of the Cambridge-created devices and concepts to be discussed Sunday. (Photo: Wikipedia)

News of “Fig Newtons” becoming just “Newtons” served as a reminder that the cookie was created in Cambridge — the Kennedy Biscuit Co. named its cookies for nearby towns in the 1890s — and a Sunday event will do the same for everything from the sewing machine and fire hoses to frozen orange juice, vaccines and venture capital.

“You can’t go through a day without using something that was invented in Cambridge,” said Gavin W. Kleespies, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Society and organizer of “Innovation: How Cambridge Changed America,” a two-hour program being held in the innovation center known as Kendall Square.

“We have been documenting this history for a year,” Kleespies said. After the program comes the launch of a website allowing people to explore some 30 Cambridge inventions, he said, ostensibly starting with early innovations in such industries as shipping ice and making clay bricks, through the Polaroid camera and up to more recent world-changing concepts such as the e-Ink screens on readers’ Kindles and Nooks.

Appropriately, speakers include Michael D. McCreary, the deputy chief technology officer of E Ink Corp. (and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Edward Goldfinger, chief financial officer of Zipcar, the company leading the car-share revolution; Eric Freedman, senior director of marketing at AeroDesigns Inc., which has developed the aerosol delivery system for food and nutrients popularized by LeWiffs, the calorie-free breathable chocolate.

The event is scheduled for 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 7 Cambridge Center, Kendall Square. Tickets are $75. Light refreshments will be served, and guests are encouraged to explore the Broad Institute’s interactive displays on the Human Genome Project and the molecular components of life. For information, call (617) 547-4252 or e-mail info@cambridgehistory.org.

This post took significant amounts of material from a press release.

The sisters fronting the band 2:54 play The Deaf Institute in Manchester, England, in April. They perform in Cambridge on June 13. (Photo: Man Alive!)

June is shaping up well for visits by exciting new bands, with London’s 2:54 set to play T.T. the Bear’s Place on June 13 and New York’s MS MR looking for a venue to play before starting a tour with another band the next month.

“We would love to play Massachusetts,” said an unidentified member of MS MR, noting that the band’s second-ever show was in Boston, “and are actually trying to lock in a show for that area before the Marina dates kick off — so stay tuned!” (That earlier show  was March 28 as part of under the auspices of WFNX-FM’s Alternatour, even though the band’s “Ghost City USA” songs were released the previous summer. Why no touring for so long? Because that’s what bands do now, says the music blog Earmilk, adding MS MR to “collectives such as The Residents, Daft Punk or more recently The Weeknd, using the sense of mystery to their advantage.”)

The band’s tour dates with Marina & the Diamonds start July 1, making the mission to find a date in Allston, Boston, Somerville or, ideally, Cambridge, before that but after its June 1 date at Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn.

In the meantime, Cambridge residents overloaded with great local bands may be wondering what the fuss is about. And the best way to explain is for them to hear and possibly download “Hurricane,” the MS MR song released Thursday. (The video for “Hurricane” is still private, but is just as obsessively watchable as the song is listenable.) The track is transfixing — it gets in your head and demands repeated plays — and promises a powerful live show. Here’s the band’s “Ash Tree Lane,” a great song (with an increasingly creepy video) that is going to be simply amazing live:

And what’s this 2:54 all about? The Thurlow sisters formed their band in September 2010 and are looking at a self-titled debut album May 28. While acknowledging the sisters’ past in punk band The Vulgarians and even spotting traces of it in their current work, the Spoonfed blog calls their music “pure lo-fi seduction.”

Both bands have a deceptively restrained quality but a powerful undercurrent that gets into the listener’s head and won’t let go. June 13, and whatever date MS MR might find to play the city, will be a time to celebrate that Cambridge isn’t just home to great bands, but a home away from home.

It’s been a rough few months for Komen. It tried to defund Planned Parenthood to massive public disapproval and lost leaders and staff when the politics behind the decision were revealed; it canceled its annual gala and lost a traditional kickoff from Vice President Joe Biden and his wife; its chief executive, Nancy Brinker, has drawn attention for lavish spending; and it’s been embarrassed by its choice of partner in Uzbekistan, dictator’s daughter Gulnara Karimova.

And June 1 is to be the U.S. premiere of “Pink Ribbons, Inc.,” a Canadian film asking, in the words of distributor First Run Features, “who really benefits from the pink ribbon campaigns — the cause or the company? And what if the very companies and products that profit from their association have actually contributed to the problem?”

Komen’s Massachusetts affiliate released its funds vowing it was committed to the goal of ensuring screenings, care and follow-up for residents, with “nearly 80 percent of the funds raised by Komen Massachusetts” staying in the community, according to Lisa M. Cascio, the chapter’s director of marketing and communications.

Cambridge Health Alliance was credited for its Breast Health Connection, a program described as providing outreach to women not served by other health systems; identifying and linking those in need of breast care to “a culturally competent navigation service”; and developing partnerships with community organizations for referrals, care coordination and education. “The ultimate goal of CHA is to continue to expand work with community partners to offer events focused on the important of early detection and screening mammograms, access to care, cancer risk reduction and nutritional awareness,” according to a Regan Communications press release.

Grants are awarded through a competitive application process overseen by an independent panel of local experts assessing programs for impact, feasibility, sustainability and other criteria,Cascio said.

Johnson

Add Estella Johnson, director of economic development for the city, to the list of retiring city officials. After 10 years with the city, Johnson’s last day on the job is May 23, she said Monday.

“I don’t have any plans right now — just to rest and relax and enjoy being retired,” Johnson said.

Before working as director of economic development, Johnson, whose LinkedIn page lists a master’s degree in public administration from American University, worked in the nonprofit world. While working for Cambridge she did everything from lead explorations on the future of Central Square to ensure the city was a supportive environment for small-, woman- and minority-owned businesses.

She was unsure Monday how her role would be filled. She joins other long-time employees in recent or announced departures: Margaret Drury, the city clerk, retired in February after serving since 1992; Donald Drisdell, city solicitor since 2003 and assistant city solicitor before that, retired in January; and most prominently, City Manager Robert W. Healy has announced his resignation for next year after more than 30 years overseeing municipal functions.

Five questions. We just want to ask you five questions — or, rather, get five recommendations of things to read, listen to, watch, eat and buy from people who live, work or otherwise spend time in Cambridge. Here are some from Ken Reid, the comedian and storyteller behind “Ken Reid’ Shirt Tales” (“One man’s personal history via the medium of his t-shirt collection”) running Saturday at the Central Square YMCA.

Read: Reid exults in pop culture, so it makes sense his reading suggestions delve into comic books and television. He recommends Back Issue magazine, which is about “bronze age” comic books — those of the 1970s and 1980s, “stuff like The Micronauts, The Defenders — which is the better Avengers — stuff they’re not going to be making a movie out of anytime soon.” (Reid acknowledges that the magazine, while awesome, is “for a very specific market” and bears “the most generic name for a magazine, which makes it very difficult to search out on eBay.” But he discovered it on the racks at a comic book store, and current issues can still be found there.) He’s also reading the two-volume “Glass Teat” works by Harlan Ellison, “a long diatribe against television as only Harlan Ellison can write.”

Listen to: Lately Reid’s been listening to Shadoe Stevens’ “American Top 40” episodes from the early 1990s, the era he’s been focusing on collecting out of the DJ’s seven-year run. “You can listen to this week in 1992 and see what the top 40 was, you can listen to ‘Step by Step’ by New Kids on the Block and count how many times they say ‘girl’ in the song, and the answer is 17,” Reid says. “Because I did that yesterday.”

Watch: “Everyone should be watching ‘Fringe,’ which takes place in Cambridge and is the best show on television,” Reid says without hesitation. The Fox show launched in 2008 and follows an FBI team based at Harvard that investigates the unexplained — which may sound like another Fox show, “The X-Files,” but in Reid’s opinion surpasses it. He calls “Fringe” “the best show of the past 20 years, hands down the best sci-fi show we’ve had in decades.” The show just had its season four finale, but has been renewed for a fifth season.

Eat: Inman Square’s southern comfort food joint Tupelo, at 193 Cambridge St., gets Reid’s culinary recommendation, especially for its Cheap Date Night. The deal, offered every Thursday, is $25 for a small gumbo or salad, any entree and an order of crispy fried cheddar grits to be shared by two. “Their gumbo is particularly good,” Reid says.

Buy: Reid’s recommendation for purchase is timely and provocative: the Blu-ray edition of “Forbidden Zone,” which has a May 21 release date but can be pre-ordered, including with autographs by director Richard Elfman and brother musician Danny Elfman. The 1982 musical features the Mystic Nights of the Oingo Boingo (a quintessential 1980s band that went on to become Oingo Boingo, then Boingo, then the thing Danny Elfman used to do before scoring films for Tim Burton), Hervé Villechaize (Nick Nack from “The Man With the Golden Gun” and Tattoo from “Fantasy Island”) and Susan Tyrell, an Oscar nominee whose imdb.com profile describes her “fearless attraction toward the dark side [portraying] various whores, harridans and grotesques.” Both stars were well-suited for this bewildering, appalling and all-around mesmerizing black-and-white ode (now also in a colorized version) to weirdness, performance art and the DIY aesthetic. It’s no wonder Reid explains that he saw it first as a 5-year-old watching the USA Network — “unsupervised.” But the film’s free-for-all poking at race, white trash and even the French is “in keeping with the cartoons of the time that’s it’s paying homage to. Plus you get these people who claim to be Danny Elfman fans who have not seen this, and that’s a shame. And you get Susan Tyrell singing songs of her own creation, and you can’t miss out on that,” Reid says. “Everyone can benefit from watching this.”

Send us your own five recommendations and your best big photo at editor@cambridgeday.com.

Composer Harold Farberman created the “Three Letters” song cycle to be unveiled Saturday by the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra. (Photo: bard.edu)

The concept behind the May 19 performance of the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra is intriguing on its own: letters by soldiers from the Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War set to music by composer (and, as of 1951, the youngest-ever member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) Harold Farberman.

But this performance of the “Three Letters” song cycle is also its world premiere, and of a work commissioned by the orchestra.

“From time to time we commission work, but it’s expensive,” said Carol Thomas, publicist for the community music organization, noting the last commission from the orchestra was in May 2010. In this case the topic called out, and the idea was decided last summer.

“It’s an important issue in our community, and that was the feeling of our board and artistic director,” Thomas said.

Soprano Rochelle Bard and baritone Graham Wright will bring to life the voices of servicemen and women, and music director Cynthia Woods is also bringing in celebrated pianist Jonathan Bass to join the orchestra on Maurice Ravel’s “Piano Concerto for the Left Hand,” commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein after he lost an arm in World War I. He used the concerto to continue his career as a concert pianist.

The concert will benefit the Disabled American Veterans charity, which will get a portion of ticket revenue and collect direct donations, and spotlight its work through representatives and literature in the lobby. There will also be lobby space for other nonprofits supporting veterans and their families, including Fisher House Boston, Helping Hands: Monkey Helpers for the Disabled and the Metro Boston Recovery Learning Community.

This concert is supported in part by grants from Cambridge Savings Bank and the Cambridge Arts Council, which gets support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

The orchestra’s Benefit Concert for Disabled Veterans is at 8 p.m. May 19 at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, 45 Quincy St., Cambridge. Advance tickets are $15 for adults and $12 for seniors and students via CambridgeSymphony.org or $20 for adults and $15 for seniors and students at the door.

The Chipotle in Davis Square, Somerville, is only one of five existing or proposed sites in the fast food chain north of Boston on the red line. (Photo: Eric Hatch)

Chipotle Mexican Grill really, really likes Cambridge.

The fast food restaurant chain already has locations at Alewife (227 Alewife Brook Parkway) and Harvard Square (1 Brattle Square), as well as one in Somerville’s Davis Square (276 Elm St.), probably close enough to Porter Square to make an actual Porter Square location unnecessary.

But a Kendall Square spot is well under way, with its signs already having replaced most of those for Champions bar and restaurant at 2 Cambridge Center, and as a March 22 hearing of the Board of Zoning Appeal cleared the way for one in Central Square at 600 Massachusetts Ave., replacing a Wendy’s.

That more or less covers every stop on the red line north of Boston.

Lechmere, Cambridge’s stop on the green line, also lacks a Chipotle. (One wonders for how long.) But it does have a locally owned Mexican eatery in Boca Grande, just as Harvard Square has Felipe’s and Central has Picante Mexican Restaurant. Alewife residents have farther to go for Mexican food — to Jose’s, which is nearly in Porter — but there are Anna’s Taqueria sites in Harvard, Porter and Davis squares and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Sometimes I have a burrito craving,” student Bonny Jain told Bruno B.F. Faviero, a reporter for the institute’s Tech newspaper. “Which an Anna’s burrito right in the middle of campus can satisfy.”

Chipotle, based in Denver, Colo., opened with a single restaurant in 1993 and has grown to more than 1,250 restaurants.

A representative of Chipotle was asked for comment Friday on Cambridge’s appeal to the chain — although what’s not to love? — but its website offers some clues. A section asking visitors “Want a Chipotle in your backyard?” has criteria that must be checked off for a site to be considered, including a strong residential and daytime population, as well as nearby office, retail, university, recreation or hospitals and “preferred site criteria” such as a size of 1,000 to 2,800 square feet with a a minimum 25-foot frontage; appropriate zoning for dining and a beer and margaritas liquor license and “excellent” visibility and access.

There’s been a push for sidewalk dining throughout the city, matching the company’s preference for having patio seating, and having beer and margaritas isn’t unimaginable. The only way the Kendall and Central sites could have disappointed is in their lack of obvious parking, which is another company preference.