September is almost a memory so I have put away my whites…white shoes, white handbag and white duck pants. With all the troubles in the world that I can’t do anything about…Syria, Kenya, Turkey…and on the home front the debt ceiling and Obamacare…I for one am distracting myself by changing my closet from summer to […]
There was love in the room. Hannah Shmerler was being honored for her voice by the Taconic Opera. Though operatically, she had sung Gilda in Rigoletto, Violetta in La Traviata, and Michaela in Carmen, it was another voice for which she was being honored this week. For years, Hannah has been the voice for the Conservatory […]
Over the years, many people have asked me, “Do you know an artist who would volunteer to….paint a mural for my son’s school…perform at a benefit for our library…do a workshop for a group of seniors?” This is a well-meaning request on the part of someone who wants to do good for a cause. Yet, […]
My mother used to call me a “leaf thief.” That had to do with my love of African violets such that I would ask friends if I could steal a leaf from any of their exotic violets that I coveted. I would “root” the leaf and eventually, I had a window sill of friends in […]
I got my comeuppance this week in Chautauqua, New York. There by chance at an educational institute, I attended a lecture by the artist Stanley Lewis. I expected he would talk about landscape painting because, after all, that’s his métier. Instead, he talked about horses as in the friezes at the Greek Parthenon. Those horses […]
Is Westchester a “bedroom community”? I struggled with this question when I first came to Westchester from Boston some twenty years ago. Naysayers told me I was coming to a bedroom community. Obviously, a bedroom community is where you sleep…that’s all. What would I do at night or on weekends? The search committee at ArtsWestchester, […]
Jealousy, racism, deception and betrayal. Sounds like a recipe for the latest HBO series…sort of like The Borgias…only steamier. No, it’s not that at all. It’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, written perhaps in 1603, and now given a new spin at a 90-minute performance at the new amphitheater at the Hudson River Museum […]
What I like about Independence Day is that it reminds me of my own independence. That may sound silly, but with all the hoopla, I can pretend that it’s not just about my country, but about me too, someone who lives here and enjoys all of the freedoms denied to others in other places. For […]
Connect with Janet