The invader
You grow up with adults telling you not to judge a book by its cover, not to make a decision about something until you understand its intentions. And it’s a truism, an unavoidable absolute that everyone has made at least one false judgment based on someone’s outlook or demeanor. Ninety percent of the time, though,...
Labor of love
It’s thoughtful and imaginative and designed to draw out positive thoughts. It’s designed to promote local unity, local industry, local interaction, local pride. It’s structured simply but packed to the gills with understandable symbolism. It’s called Love Knots, and it’s Saugerties artist Willie Neumann’s new art installation, stationed at the corner of Main and Market...
Saugerties church to hold an emotional, unique service
The Reformed Church of Saugerties will present the powerful drama, “Were You There?” on Maundy Thursday, March 28 at 7:30 p.m. It is a poignant re-enactment of Jesus’ trip to the cross brought to life by a cast of Broadway actors and professional musicians working side by side with members of the congregation. The drama...
Passion Play an emotional experience
Jesus is walking up and down the aisles of St. Mary of the Snow Church. He’s miffed because he can’t find his other shoe. It’s in the confessional, where he took it off earlier. Richard O’Gorman is in full costume, portraying the son of God in the Church’s annual Passion Play. He’s played Jesus since...
Corralling the butterflies with the Toastmasters
“Surreptitious – it means to do secretly,” Wordmaster Geri Jones tells me. She says I can score bonus points with the crowd if I include it in my speech. I am standing in front of 20 or so people whom I have never met in my life, delivering a short speech about the worst date...
Saugerties High School gets a television studio
After years of preparation and fundraising, Saugerties High School is days away from launching its brand new media production center – a project that has been cooking for four years. “We actually just connected the last cord today,” says Scott Wickham. Wickham, a teacher at Saugerties High School, always had cameras, but mostly did single-shot...
Mindful gliding at the ice arena
It’s not too much, the Kiwanis Ice Arena. It’s an unassuming ice rink in a very cool town. The place is a fixture, like the Lighthouse or Inquiring Minds. It is there and will be there always, a cold house on the edge of the village. Every little town has something like it, a privilege...
Local filmmakers plan Opus 40 documentary
Opus 40, with its vast terraces and unexpected pools and hypnotic sense of design and layering, is an American masterpiece. Architectural Digest’s Brendan Gill called it “the greatest earthwork sculpture I have ever seen.” Now, two Saugerties natives, Ed Gerrard and Peter Himberger, are working on a documentary about the work. “You’re not going to...
When classics were classics
Along with the Good Guys Classic Car Show and Saugerties’ own Sawyer Motors Car Show, the Mills Mansion Antique Auto Show is one of the premiere area antique auto events. Hundreds of cars parked up and down the grounds of Staatsburgh’s Mills Mansion, adorned with a sea of trees with turning leaves and overlooking the...
Open Mic Poetry: The last bastion of free speech?
Poet Andy Clausen tore it up last Friday night at Café Mezzaluna bistro Latino and gallery. Clausen was a contemporary of the Beat poets by his own admission; he even read a passage from a short story he wrote in which he hangs out with Charles Bukowski (called “Hank” by his sycophants, according to Clausen),...
Artist Robert George: As the Spirit Moves
Artists tend to have some adventurer in them. It takes an itinerant mind to do what they do; a restlessness, a wanderlust, a thirst for knowledge that is supremely difficult to satiate. Saugerties artist Robert George is no different. Having arrived in Saugerties in May of 2012 after five years in Mexico with his wife,...
Once upon a mattress
A cadre of luchadors are hurdling down Partition Street at breakneck-ish speeds as one of them sits in a bed frame and the others push. Angry twangs of old-timey music rattle off the facades of the buildings on a blocked off Partition Street – the melodies are the “Yakety Sax” to the race’s Benny Hill....