. u o y y l e u q i n u s i t a h t e m o h a g n i t a e r c , y r a r o p m e t n o c e h t d n a c i s s a l c e h t g n i t a v e l E
T his year, T he Red L ion Inn t ur ns 250.
V int age char m. Cla ssic comfor t. Impeccable ser v ice. An unforget t able exper ience. T he iconic Red L ion Inn.
A ROAR ING good t ime cont inues.
MAGIC HAPPENS AT BERKSHIRE GALAS, as our community gathers to celebrate and support local causes. Case in point: The B.
Last year, my hosts at the Berkshire International Film Festival gala, Hans and Kate Morris, knew of my magazine career and the wheels started turning. Shortly thereafter, they introduced me to Fred Rutberg, their partner in The Berkshire Eagle.
The Eagle’s origins date back to 1789 with The Western Star where it had “historically served an outsized role as a faithful chronicler of news and culture, a purveyor and prompter of public discourse and a tracker and champion of the saints and eccentrics who have romped around this county through the generations,” as our writer Felix Carroll once put it. The B looks to build upon this mission. A glossy magazine that not only adorns your coffee table but one that brings you closer to our beloved heritage and celebrates the makers of new traditions and touchstones.
Perhaps you are visiting for the first time, or maybe you attended summer camp or college nearby and now have property in the surrounding area. Or you’re lucky enough to be a local. Whatever the case, I expect you relish our creative culture, outdoor pursuits, and good living. The Berkshires speaks to you.
We get it. I have lived here for ten years with my husband and four kids and it is dreamlike. Come view life in the Berkshires through the lens of The B. Sign up for a subscription—it is complimentary for a little while—by visiting berkshireeagle.com/theb.
The B is a labor of local love. Design director Julie Hammill spent hours in The Eagle’s archives searching for historic images. Photographer Ben Garver traveled from Hudson to Lanesborough to capture our stories and made several new friends along the way. The Eagle’s executive editor Kevin Moran helped blueprint the launch issue. My gratitude and applause land on The B’s editor in chief, Amy Conway. We share a language from our years in the New York publishing world and now, a vision of the Berkshires for you.
MICHELLE THORPE PETRICCA mpetricca@berkshireeagle.comtheB@berkshireeagle.com
theb.berkshires
I'm so happy to be here with you.
With spring bulbs starting to bloom, this is just the time for a new beginning. This issue celebrates what we're calling "The New Berkshires"—a reference to the infusion of energy in our towns since so many people sought refuge in the beauty of the Berkshires over the past few years. We also look at the county's rich history and how this area came to be a cultural wonderland in the first place, so many decades ago. That blend of old and new resonates with me. I'm a longtime lifestyle editor, having spent twenty-plus years in publishing in New York City (that's the old part, haha). For the new part: Like so many people, I've been reevaluating in recent years and knew I was ready for change (well, with my two kids off to college, change was coming for me whether I was ready or not!). I fell in love with the Berkshires many years ago, but I started putting down my own roots here much more recently.
I'm aware that this doesn't make me a local. In fact, when I met Fred Rutberg, publisher of The Berkshire Eagle, one of the first things he said to me was, "I am not a Berkshire native; I've only lived here for 50 years." Not being from here means that I'm looking at the Berkshires with fresh eyes, a giddy appreciation for what makes this place different from anywhere in the world, and a deep sense of gratitude that I'm able to contribute to the conversation through The B. It also means that I'm doing a lot of learning and listening, in order to tell the best stories from the Berkshires and beyond (we’ll be dipping into Columbia County and Litchfield County, too) to help you savor your time here—whether that’s every day, a quick visit, or anything in between.
AMY CONWAY
Located just steps from Williams College and Spring Street, The Williams Inn features 64 well-appointed guestrooms, a full-ser vice restaurant and bar, a 24-hour fitness center, and 3,200 square feet of versatile indoor and outdoor meeting and event space.
We invite you to visit, relax and enjoy our welcoming and open dining space. Indulge in our seasonal creative menu offerings, expertly prepared by Chef Peter Belmonte and his culinar y team.
The interplay of nature, industry, creativity, and culture has shaped and reshaped our county in so many ways.
Growth and the good life may just define this time.
Meet the neighbors: A new generation is calling this county home.
A glass house in Great Barrington makes a modern, welcoming place for family.
Plan your parties, get your tickets— it’s time to celebrate and support!
BY
PUBLISHER
Michelle Thorpe Petricca | mpetricca@berkshireeagle.com
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Amy Conway | aconway@berkshireeagle.com
DESIGN DIRECTOR
Julie Hammill | julie@hammilldesign.com
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Ben Garver | bgarver@berkshireeagle.com
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Dave Ackerson, Jeffrey Borak, Felix Carroll, Alana Chernila, Naomi Hopkins, Jennifer Huberdeau, Christopher Marcisz, Courtney Maum, Francesca Olsen, Carole Owens, Pops Peterson, Bill Schmick, Robin Tesoro
The B is a publication of New England Newspapers Inc.
PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER
Fredric D. Rutberg | frutberg@berkshireeagle.com
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Kevin Moran | kmoran@berkshireeagle.com
CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER
Gary Lavariere | glavariere@berkshireeagle.com
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
John Supple | jsupple@berkshireeagle.com
OPERATIONS MANAGER
Chuck Danforth | cdanforth@berkshireeagle.com
DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING SERVICES
Kate Teutsch | kteutsch@berkshireeagle.com
DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING SALES
Cheryl Gajewski | cmcclusky@berkshireeagle.com
MULTIMEDIA ADVERTISING CONSULTANTS
Eileen Marran | emarran@berkshireeagle.com
Jennifer Storti | jstorti@berkshireeagle.com
Haylee Carringer | hcarringer@berkshireeagle.com
POPS PETERSON 's corner of the Berkshires is 7 South St., Stockbridge, the location of SEVEN salon.spa, the popular business he owns with his husband Mark Johnson. When they moved up from New York City in 2005, Pops feared he may not fit into the Berkshire scene. Black, gay, and not from around here, he figured he had three strikes against him. But by answering phones and greeting clients in the salon, he soon discovered the amazing denizens of our community, people who were eager to know him and help him succeed as an artist. With artworks featured at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Henry Ford Museum, and numerous other museums and galleries, Pops has become one of the leading artistic voices of New England.
BEN GARVER is an award-winning photojournalist whose work has been published by nearly every major news outlet in the country. He has been a staff photojournalist for The Berkshire Eagle for almost 30 years. An avid hiker and biker, he rarely leaves home without a camera and we can all be thankful for that. He and his dog, Cheyenne, live in downtown Pittsfield.
CAROLE OWENS is an author of 12 books, including “The Berkshire Cottages: A Vanishing Era,” and more than 100 magazine articles for Parade Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, and New England Travel and Leisure. She lives in Stockbridge and writes a regular column in The Berkshire Eagle.
CHRISTOPHER MARCISZ is a writer based in Williamstown. He is a frequent Eagle contributor and adjunct professor at Williams.
COURTNEY MAUM is the author of five books, including the groundbreaking publishing guide that Vanity Fair named one of the 10 best books for writers, “Before and After the Book Deal” and the memoir “The Year of the Horses,” chosen by the "Today Show" as the best read for mental health awareness. A writing coach, executive director of the nonprofit learning collaborative The Cabins, and educator, Courtney's mission is to help people hold on to the joy of art-making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. You can sign up for her publishing tips newsletter and online masterclasses at CourtneyMaum.com.
FELIX CARROLL has twice been named Writer of the Year by the New York Press Association, and has received other journalism awards, as well. He has been a staff writer for The Berkshire Eagle, Cape Cod Times, and Albany Times Union. He lives in Housatonic. He's a South County firefighter, and he plays a gold sparkle drum kit.
ALANA CHERNILA is the author of three cookbooks: “The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making,” “The Homemade Kitchen: Recipes for Cooking with Pleasure,” and “Eating from the Ground Up: Recipes for Simple, Perfect Vegetables.” Her work has been published in several magazines, including Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, Parents, Fine Cooking, and Yankee. Alana lives in Great Barrington, where she serves as the marketing and communications director for Guido’s Fresh Marketplace.
JEFFREY BORAK has been writing about and reviewing theater for The Berkshire Eagle for 37 years. What he loves most about theater here is its immediacy, its intimacy, and its energy.
A footed bowl overflows with blooms in muted shades. For more, turn the page.
The owners of Township Four built their business on beautiful blooms.
By Amy Conway
At least once a week, Jed Thompson begins his day with a dawn drive to his favorite flower farms to choose local, seasonal blooms for Township Four, the floristry and home shop he owns and runs with his husband Nathan Hanford. Those flowers don’t end up going far—Jed brings them back to the shop, which is in the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, where they might be put into little vases for the tables in the dining room, made into exuberant displays for common areas, or be fashioned into chic arrangements and delivered to homes across Berkshire County.
The flowers are local, as are some other pieces in the store, but they are intermingled with gift and home items from France, California, upstate New York, and other locales. It’s all part of the Township Four aesthetic: always eclectic, always exquisite (which doesn’t mean, by the way, always expensive). “As a traveler, I like to be able to shop for worldly things,” says Hanford, an attitude that informs the selection they curate for their customers. Indeed, you can explore the shop as a destination unto itself, discovering new things visit after visit.
This is their second space in the area. Nathan grew up in Becket (its pre-revolutionary name was Township Four); after living in New York, San Francisco, and London, and meeting Jed, who is originally from Rhode Island, they decided to settle in the Berkshires. They had their first shop in downtown Pittsfield for five years, but around the time their lease was up they got the call asking if they wanted to move to the Red Lion. They didn’t hesitate.
“We were absolutely thrilled,” says Jed. “It's a wonderful location, a bigger space, and it’s in a beautiful, historic hotel. It was just a perfect opportunity, perfect timing.”
The old-meets-new setting is ideal for them. They offer a mix of antique, vintage, and new items. Their flowers may appear to have sprung to life from a Dutch masters painting, or be spare and modern. The vignettes they style in the shop—whether an inviting table, cocktail glassware, or bath and beauty products— have the same appealing, beguiling mix. Everything, by the way, is surrounded by plants and more plants. And in this new space, Thompson and Hanford’s roots in the Berkshires are growing deeper. B
Township Four 30 Main St., Stockbridge (in the Red Lion Inn) 413-347-3244 townshipfour.com
Township Four offers classes in arranging, making terrariums, and kokedama (a Japanese form of gardening that involves wrapping a plant’s roots in a moss ball for a living decoration).
This spring, they are also holding a Mother’s Day floral design class on May 13. (Space is limited and reservations are required.)
the local life: Spring Flings
Meet the newest chicks, piglets, lambs, calves, and kids at Hancock Shaker Village’s Baby Animals Festival. Enjoy farm talks and craft demonstrations—or just ooh and ahh over the fluff and fur.
Hancock Shaker Village
Baby Animals Festival
April 15 to May 7, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily Adults, $20; children 12 and under, free hancockshakervillage.org
PHOTO: STEPHANIE ZOLLSHANAfter a winter of “mixed precipitation” and a late snowstorm, the mud will be deep and local trails will be nearly impassable this spring. What’s more, hiking on wet and muddy trails causes damage, so it’s best to stay off them. This doesn’t mean that you should stay indoors. The question is how to enjoy spring without causing lasting impacts to the trails—or to your shoes. Here’s a walk that’s perfect for this time of year: Mt. Greylock Scenic Byway. The road isn’t open yet to vehicular traffic (that’s May 20 this year) and you’ll enjoy views that won’t be there once the trees leaf out.
You can follow the road all the way to the summit of Mt. Greylock, a distance of 4.4 miles, with an elevation gain of around 2,100 feet, or do an outand-back hike of whatever duration you choose.
To start this walk, drive south on Notch Road for 2.5 miles from the intersection of Route 2 in North Adams, following the signs for Mt. Greylock State Reservation; you’ll see a parking lot on the right just before a closed gate. As the road climbs steeply from the gate, there are views to the north through the trees. At the saddle between Mt. Williams and Mt. Prospect, the road crosses
the Appalachian Trail, and the grade lessens. After this the road continues to climb and passes the Fitch Overlook, with spectacular views. Further on is an intersection with Rockwell Road and a left turn toward the summit. As the road circles the summit on its final climb, you pass fantastic views of Adams and a grand sweep to the east and north at another intersection with the AT. Since the road is not open yet, most of the facilities at the summit will be closed. However, the Thunderbolt shelter is open and the views from the summit are outstanding. —Dave
Ackerson
We’re lucky to have so many farms at our fingertips in Berkshire and Litchfield Counties and the Hudson Valley. Buying a CSA share—community supported agriculture—lets you support your local farmers and get the freshest food for your family. If you’ve been reluctant to join in because of the commitment, now’s a great time to take another look. More farms are offering smaller shares and flexible arrangements.
To find your nearest farms offering CSAs, visit:
Berkshire County: berkshiregrown.org
Litchfield County: guide.ctnofa.org
Hudson Valley: hudsonvalleycsa.org
“Our community is so robust in its cultural offerings,” says Kelley Vickery, founder and artistic director of the Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF). “But when I started BIFF, it seemed to me that we were celebrating everything except for film. So this is really a celebration of independent film and filmmakers.”
And celebrate we have—this is BIFF’s 17th year. Over the course of a weekend, the festival features films, of course, but also much more: intimate talks with filmmakers about their craft, elbow-rubbing with industry insiders (not to mention star sightings), delicious local food, and festive parties. All against the beautiful backdrop of the Berkshires. At our press time, the lineup and details hadn’t been released yet for this year’s Festival (look for that in late April)—but that doesn’t stop us from calling out some top reasons to be there.
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It’s simply a fabulous way to start summer in the Berkshires. This year, BIFF takes place from June 1 to 4.
Support independent and local filmmakers—and get your indie cred. You’ll see movies before they’re released in other theaters or on streaming services—you may even see some that aren’t distributed in the U.S. at all.
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Whether you love docs or dramas, with 75 films this year, there’s truly something for everyone, including family-friendly fare and the always-popular shorts.
Meet the makers! “Having filmmakers there creates a very connective experience,” says Vickery. “And filmmakers love this audience.” Some talented pros make repeat appearances at BIFF, thanks to the welcoming, engaged audience.
5
Immersing yourself in movies and spending time with fellow film lovers makes you feel a part of the BIFF community within the Berkshires community. “A real kind of kinship develops over the weekend,” says Vickery. “Sitting in a dark movie theater with people in your community and watching the big screen, eating your popcorn…there’s just nothing else like it.”
Berkshire International Film Festival, June 1-4
Great Barrington and Lenox | biffma.org
Whether or not you play pickleball—which combines elements of tennis, badminton, and ping-pong—you’ve likely heard someone say it: It’s the fastest-growing sport in America. If you play already, you get it. If not, it doesn’t take long to understand the appeal: “In your first five minutes out there, you can be having a good time,” says Eric Cooper, executive director of Bousquet Sport in Pittsfield.
And from there, it’s a short path to being obsessed—particularly in the Berkshires, where the sport is especially well suited to the people. Many are drawn to the area by the active lifestyle—we like to hike, bike, and swim, and pickleball is another way to move (and a forgiving one, appropriate for a wide range of ages and activity levels). But even more than that, it’s a social sport where players develop friendships and a sense of community—again, perfect for the Berkshires.
“You get your exercise, but you also get this continual, enjoyable social contact,” says Tony Richards. He’s seen the growth up close. He’s on the steering committee of Berkshire Mountain Pickleball, a volunteer-run group dedicated to growing the game and sharing the joy of the sport; it began in 2018 with a couple of dozen players who thought, “this is great fun, we ought to try to expand it to more people.”
Get the gear: You don’t need much—look for a composite paddle (rather than a wooden one) and expect to spend about $50 for a beginner’s model. Make sure to wear tennis or court shoes (as opposed to running shoes)—the treads are meant for back-and-forth movement and will help prevent rolling an ankle or other mishaps.
Now they offer instruction and organized play to 350-plus members of all levels. (Membership is $20 per year.)
Bousquet has been expanding, as well; last summer, they introduced six dedicated outdoor courts, and a new field house with indoor courts is on the way. Around the county, there are courts at several public schools and community centers for open (free) play. But if you want to improve your skills and meet more players, it’s worth playing with a group or at a club that offers instruction and puts players together according to skill level. B
Bousquet Sport | bousquetsport.com
100 Dan Fox Drive, Pittsfield
413-499-4600
Berkshire Mountain Pickleball berkshiremountainpickleball.com
…mud! Practicality reigns (rains?) at this time of year—but you can still look good while sloshing through the puddles and mud that give the season its name. We scoured the county for these pairs, each made to last—and to keep your feet nice and dry. Consider this your PSA to shop local.
FRED’S PICK If your shoes took a beating this winter or you have pairs that need a pick-me-up, Fred Rutberg, publisher of The Berkshire Eagle, recommends Eagle Shoe and Boot Co. in Great Barrington (154 Main St.) for repairs and refurbishment (and not just because of its name).
PLASTICANA | Kapitana $85 westerlindoutdoor.com
Great Barrington & Hudson, N.Y. Made from organic hemp plastic and 100% recyclable. Women's sizes only
DANNER | Mountain Light Cascade $440 westerlindoutdoor.com
Great Barrington & Hudson, N.Y.
A comfortable Gortex-lined boot that has been around for 30 years.
BLUNDSTONE | Chelsea $215 barringtonoutfitters.net
Great Barrington
Durable, good-looking, and perfect for city and country.
BOGS | Arcata $165 naturescloset.net
Williamstown
Waterproof with an eco-friendly algae based footbed and gripping sole. Similar women’s styles available
LE CHAMEAU | Iris $159 naturescloset.net
Williamstown
Durable with a smooth jersey lining for easy on and off. Fits like a supportive shoe. Similar men’s styles available.
BOGS | Sauvie Slip-On $100 arcadian.com
Lenox
100% waterproof and with gripping soles.Like slippers for outdoor work. Similarwomen’s styles available.
KAMIK KIDS | Rocket Ship $45 familyfootwearcenter.com
Lenox
Waterproof with easy pull handles. PVC free.
Published by Dutton
Ana Reyes was 11 when she wrote her first story—an entry for a Berkshire Athenaeum writing contest—about a creepy house in the woods in Pittsfield. Thirty years later, that same house plays a prominent role in Reyes’ debut novel, “The House in the Pines.”
“The House in the Pines,” a thriller, begins with a viral YouTube video of a young woman dropping dead in a diner in Pittsfield. On the other side of Massachusetts, a viewer named Maya recognizes the man shown sitting across from the woman in the video. It’s the man who stood next to her best friend Aubrey when she dropped dead seven years earlier.
Reese Witherspoon, the actor and entrepreneur behind Reese’s Book Club, made “The House in the Pines” her first book club pick of 2023.
By Margery B. Metzger
Published by WildBlue Press
On Jan. 7, 1994, a girl on her way to school in Pittsfield escaped a man who tried to grab her off a street. Later in the day, police apprehended the man named Lewis Lent Jr. and their investigation would lead them to charge him with the murders of two 12-year-olds, Jimmy Bernardo and Sara Ann Wood.
In “Hidden Demons,” Metzger examines the investigation that ensued and what the district attorney’s office, which was in the early stages of the Wayne Lo murder trial, was up against. Interviews with retired investigators and prosecutors who formed a special task force to investigate Lent are interwoven with accounts from newspaper articles, police documents, and court transcripts.
“Hidden Demons” is a compelling account of how a community came together when evil arrived on its doorstep.
By Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop
Published by Regal House
Part-time Berkshires resident Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop grew up in Cold War-era Washington, D.C., the daughter of famed journalist, columnist, and political analyst Stewart Alsop (he wrote a syndicated column with his brother Joseph for the New York Herald Tribune) and Patricia Alsop, a retired American Red Cross medical research technologist who served as a decoding agent for British intelligence during WWII.
In this poignant memoir of her childhood, Alsop explores her relationship, or lack thereof, with her mother, who is slowly fading as dementia sets in. As Alsop researches her family history and visits her mother, she begins to chip away at the image of the perfect family that her parents presented to the world, slowly exposing the struggles and secrets her family kept, including the myriad reasons that contributed to her mother’s closeted alcoholism.
By Dr. Mark Hyman
Published by Little, Brown Spark
A new book by best-selling author Dr. Mark Hyman challenges us to “reimagine our biology, health and the process of aging.”
Hyman, senior adviser for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and founder and director of The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, traveled to Sardinia’s “Blue Zone,” a region with the longest-lived, healthiest communities in the world, to learn their secrets. Using what he’s learned, he’s put together this book, which explores the root causes of the hallmarks of aging and then gives science-based strategies and tips on how to increase your health span, live longer and, more importantly, prevent and reverse the maladies of aging— including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia.
In 2010, Dr. Pier Boutin, a boardcertified orthopedic surgeon from Great Barrington, led the first surgical team to arrive in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, following the devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake. Afterward, in an attempt to distract herself from the devastation she had witnessed, Boutin traveled to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
There she met Mo, a little boy who, despite the challenges posed by untreated clubfoot, still managed to giggle and smile. In this memoir, Boutin tells the story of their meeting, Mo’s journey to the United States, and how both their lives changed.
—Jennifer Huberdeau
the local life: Ring Any Bells?
We found this shot in The Berkshire Eagle's archives—it was dated 1972 and labeled "The Empire Treehouse Club, Crandall Street, Adams." The multi-tiered treehouse (not to mention the outfits) taps into our nostalgia for carefree summer days. Kids in the Berkshires still have a great time— but with a lot more guardrails. If you know anything about this image, please let us know by emailing theb@berkshireeagle.com—we'd love to hear the story!
Take in art after-hours this spring at MASS MoCA with two Thursday evening events, each with special programming. Explore buildings 4 and 5, including exhibitions “Ceramics in the Expanded Field” and “Choreopolitics,” as well as solo work by Marc Swanson, Carrie Schneider, Daniel Giordano, and EJ Hill.
April 13, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Enjoy soundtracks curated by visual and performing artists (bring your headphones).
May 11, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Listen to live music from local favorite Misty Blues, whose new song “Roller Coaster Man” is about Granville T. Woods, the African American inventor of the rollercoaster. Free for members or with museum admission; $5 for Berkshire County residents; $10 for visitors from outside of Berkshire County. massmoca.org
Artist Pops Peterson reinvented Norman Rockwell’s iconic Ruby Bridges—from the painting “The Problem We All Live With”— for a giant installation in Pittsfield. Here is “Rainbow Ruby”—she stands more than 20 feet tall in celebration of the Jubilee Hill neighborhood. For more from Pops on the importance of art for everyone, turn to his column on page 26.
By Pops Peterson
I’d only been serving on the Berkshire Art Center’s board for a couple of years when Lucie Castaldo made a pronouncement that took my breath away. “We all thought it would be great to name a scholarship after you,” she said. “The Pops Peterson Scholarship Fund.”
I’d never been more flattered or more terrified. Suppose I didn’t raise enough money? I’d look and feel like a broke impostor! I declined, explaining that I was just a boy from Queens. My adolescent reveries of being a philanthropist were as
dead as being an astronaut. But Lucie wasn’t daunted. “You’ll be great, Pops. Just believe me, you will!”
Before I knew it, I dreamt up plans for a karaoke fundraiser and other ways to realize my philanthropic ambitions. Lucie was right. Last year, the Pops Peterson Scholarship Fund proudly underwrote the cost of 25 local kids’ attendance at art school summer camp—and Lucie’s faith in me is only surpassed by her faith and passion for the Berkshire Art Center. She first entered the historic yellow
building as a child, attending art camp in 1997 at what was then called the Interlaken School of Art. “I ate up art like candy,” she recalls. After graduating with a BA in art history and minor in education from Mount Holyoke College, Lucie returned in 2012 to IS183, as the school was known for many years, as coordinator of curriculum development under executive director Hope Sullivan. When Hope accepted an offer she couldn’t refuse from another nonprofit, she hand-picked Lucie to be interim executive director.
I can hardly imagine the pressure Lucie felt—especially once she was named to the role permanently. This new director was twenty-something, someone I’m sure was carded every time she ordered a drink. Was she supposed to run an art center or produce TikTok videos? She sensed the skepticism from others. “Not only did I feel challenged by the work, my inner critic was also getting louder as I felt the doubt in my abilities rise around me. Ageism is very real. Sexism, too.” But Lucie believed. And she knew she had an important job to do.
Children need the school to exercise their imagination and learn important skills of self-actualization. Retirees consider the center a lifeline, enabling them to be with people and feel the joys of learning and growth. As a board member, I knew of all the grants she applied for and won. I saw how she worked with the students,
parents, teachers, insurance companies, contractors, bank executives, and donors. She was making it work.
It simply had to work.
As part of our Learning Through Arts program, my first guest appearance at an elementary school in Pittsfield was a poignant eye-opener. I brought some construction paper we had in the salon for years and never used. I thought the students could make use of it, but I was unprepared for the earnest gratitude.
“Can I please take some home?” asked an 8-year-old, with the most urgent look in his blue eyes. “I want to draw at home!”
I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. My mother was a teacher and my father was a barber. We didn’t have ski weekends or trips to Disneyland—but there was always paper in the house, as well as pens and crayons. Here was this child who didn’t have the simplest tools to escape his insecure world and develop his talents and mind. These are the children Lucie wanted to help with a scholarship fund.
Berkshire Art Center is now poised better than ever to provide the lifeaffirming powers of the arts to people young and old in southern and now also northern Berkshire County. The new Pittsfield location at 141 North Street, one of Lucie’s proudest achievements, enables the school to reach into areas where there is urgent need for young hearts to sprout and bloom, and for the mature among us to find refuge.
For her part, Lucie appreciates the opportunity to serve and share. “I’m grateful that I’ve felt the art in museums and galleries was for me to consume,” she says. “I’m grateful to now have the opportunity to spread that feeling in our community—because making and viewing art is for everyone.” B
“Not only did I feel challenged by the work, my inner critic was also getting louder as I felt the doubt in my abilities rise around me. Ageism is very real. Sexism, too.”To learn more or to donate to the Pops Peterson Scholarship Fund, use your phone's camera to open this link. PHOTOS: STEPHANIE ZOLLSHAN
I moved to the Berkshires from New York City in 2007. My husband is French, and we’d left his native Paris in 2005 for the Big Apple because we thought our creative dreams could only be realized in a firetrap of an apartment sitting under the flight path of both LaGuardia and JFK.
In addition to the sonic nightmare of our walk-up, our Brooklyn experiment didn’t prove as social as we’d hoped. Most of my friends lived in Williamsburg at the time, an area that was only accessible by helicopter because the F and G trains never worked and the Prospect Expressway is an oxymoron.
We were lonely in Windsor Terrace and our meager savings were depleting as was our goodwill for the city. “We could have
an entire house in the country for what we’re paying in rent!” we would say to each other over pasta and a bottle of Fat Bastard that we’d get in bulk from Costco. We watched a lot of HGTV on the weekends, figuring that if two yahoos from Miami could renovate a former bowling alley in Asheville, then we could start over, too. We decided to move somewhere “with nature,” and began looking in the Adirondacks until a friend pointed out that nobody would ever visit us because the Adirondacks were 17 light years away. So we searched in the Berkshires.
We found two properties in our price range: one was a dilapidated log cabin in Sandisfield, the other was a dilapidated
1 Get thee behind a counter:
By the fall of 2008, I was slinging coffee and breakfast sandwiches at the Southfield Store, and my life totally changed. Retail positions allow you to tap into the tensions that can exist between newcomers and old-timers and gain respect for local mores. Bonus points for free or steeply discounted breakfast treats each day!
2 Contribute to local publications: When I started writing for The Berkshire Eagle and The Sandisfield Times as a newcomer, I was catapulted directly into the thick of all things local, and got to attend regional happenings (for free) to boot. Local publications are always looking for graphic design, distribution, and fundraising assistance—you don’t need to be a writer.
3 Volunteer for cultural organizations: Contact your town’s local cultural council to identify the existing organizations in your area where you could be of help. Your local library and closest independent bookshop will be a fount of information, too.
4 Pitch in at school: You don’t have to have a child in the local school system to make a positive impact in your region’s schools. From helping to prep for a labor-intensive craft project to assisting on costume design for the school play, or teaching a weekly elective, it’s always good to bring the school of life to school.
5 Remember you’re new here:
While you’re excited to be a part of the Berkshires, be sensitive to (and aware of) the fact that not everyone might be celebrating your arrival. It behooves you to research issues and developments in your area so that you begin to navigate your new home as a transplant, instead of an intruder. (Your local paper and chamber of commerce will be helpful for this initiative.) Be patient, stay positive, shop local, and you’ll find your social footing in no time…even in the mud!
colonial in Otis. We went for the log cabin. This place was such a money pit even our real estate agent cautioned us against making an offer. But beside the faulty septic, evidence of rodents, and a roof that was more of a placeholder than functional protection, we fell in love with that house and moved in time for black fly season. It was mud—I mean love—at first sight.
For the first several days in our new home, I saw our life through rose-colored glasses. The house was too cold and damp to be more than a foot away from the hardworking wood stove, and it was best not to think about the animal sounds at night. We were demolishing walls, making Home Depot runs, and getting acquainted with our field mice roommates. What I mean was: We were busy. Busy with renovations, busy with our love for each other and this new, imperfect house.
But I woke up on our third night in a state of panic. My filmmaker husband and I both worked from home. We didn’t have children nor did we intend to make any. We didn’t have a dog to walk around the town. We had chosen an out-of-the-way house in a rural part of the Berkshires on a dead-end dirt road most people thought was a deer trail. How in the world were we going to make friends?
The question of how to forge new relationships—especially as an adult— presses regardless whether you are new to the area or not. My portal to a social life came by way of the Sandisfield Post Office when I saw a flyer advertising “Sandisfield Calendars still available!” Given that it was April, the person who answered the number on the flyer, Liana Toscanini (today executive director of the Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires), was surprised I wanted one. “You sound young,” she said. “What are you doing here?” When I mentioned I’d just moved to the area, she insisted I come up the hill to meet her right away. Liana was my second friend in the area; our first was Chapin Fish, our realtor. But even with two friends to call our own, we still had to work extremely hard to be seen (again, dead-end road, work-from-home jobs), appreciated, and valued in our new town, which is how I came up with my best practices for making friends when you’re the newbie. B
“They were compassionate and they were kind.”
- Rick Bua, Cancer Survivor
There are many wonderful reasons to spend time in the Berkshires. One important one: Your dog will like it here.
By Bill SchmickWhen my wife and I were looking to relocate to Berkshire County more than a decade ago, what was suitable for our chocolate Labrador retriever, Titus, was high on our list of priorities. We drove our real estate agent crazy. She showed us an endless stream of rural properties with larger and larger acreage, farther and farther from town. We came to our senses at some point and ended up buying a condo instead. It was just a few minutes’ drive from a dozen places to hike and swim, plus our boy was grandfathered
into the pet clause restrictions.
For many who have moved to the 900-square-mile-patch of heaven we call the Berkshires, owning a pet is as much a part of the culture as going to Tanglewood or competing in the “Josh,” as much a part of our history as the 19th-century artists, industrialists, and writers who have since passed the leash to today’s residents.
So why are the Berkshires and canines so natural together? There are countless places to hike, kayak, swim, snowshoe, jog, or cross-
country ski. And the best way to experience these wonderful locations, in my opinion, is in the company of your dog. During the pandemic, my wife and I hiked more trails, visited more ponds, swam in more lakes, and ate lunch at countless mountaintops—all with our dog. And we were not alone. Dozens of dog owners roamed those forests. Making friends was not only easy, but offered the opportunity for pets to socialize, as well.
Experiencing the beauty and local wonders of the area alone can be an exercise in solitude, but sharing that peace and quiet with a dog is just as profound.
The Berkshires are also noted for its cultural activities. There are plenty of places—from restaurants to historic sites like Herman Melville’s Arrowhead and
famed writer Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount—that embrace our canine culture. Wharton designed her Lenox home in the early 1900s and made sure she gave her beloved dogs room to roam on her grounds. It is one of our favorite spots in summer and winter. Berkshireites can also
explore museum grounds such as the Williamstown campus of the Clark Art Institute with their pets. On any given day, dogs can sample treats and lap at the many water bowls outside and inside retail stores, pubs, and hotels in most towns and villages.
As for our dog Titus, he passed away last year after more than 13 years of swimming alongside our kayaks on the Stockbridge Bowl, aquasizing with me in Onota Lake, snowshoeing on Greylock Mountain, and jogging with Barbara on her daily runs. Yes, we were brokenhearted, but it only took a few months before the opportunity to foster a new dog came along.
Atreyu is a standard poodle and a 2-year-old “COVID dog.” That is, he is one of the millions of dogs purchased—at the height of the pandemic—whose owner could no longer keep him.
To be honest, a poodle was not the dog that suited our image. But we were surprised. This 50-pound, mop-headed
Ask first before allowing your pet to greet a stranger or before petting a dog you don’t know. Respect the other person’s response.
Always be aware of others. Dogs are rarely perfect and will from time to time do something (barking, jumping, playing rough) that will upset someone. Apologize, but even more important, take measures to correct the behavior.
Barking, while natural in dogs, should be controlled. My dog is an incessant barker when approaching people and other dogs. Try redirecting his attention by offering treats, moving away, or having him sit away from the path or trail until it is clear.
Leash your dog on walks unless the area permits dogs off leash. Plenty of people are uncomfortable around dogs, so keep your dog close.
Don’t allow your leashed pet to play with another dog on a leash (or a leashed pet play with a dog off leash). If it is alright with the owner, you can let the dogs sniff one another before moving on.
Pick up your dog’s waste. Wherever you are, which includes out in the bush, pick up after your dog. Always carry a couple of bags with you.
ragamuffin loves to hike, run at full speed through the field and trails, swim, and retrieve with the best of them. And no, before you ask, he is not a French-cut, perfumed dandy by any means.
Perhaps the most important benefit of our pets is that they draw their owners closer. The welcome and reassuring “she’s friendly” from down the trail is often an automatic invite to talk, say hello, compare notes, and maybe exchange phone numbers or emails. Check out Facebook and you will find dozens of groups dedicated to pets, where members share their experiences, and provide things to do with them in the area.
The Berkshires is a great place to live, visit, or relocate, either part or full-time. But if you do, be prepared for wagging tails, slobbery kisses, and a chorus of barked greetings. Without them, it just wouldn’t be the Berkshires. B
Bill Schmick is a retired investment adviser and a financial columnist. He moved to the Berkshires years ago in pursuit of a better life and a love of the great outdoors. His love of animals in general and dogs in particular fills his days with joy and happiness.
voices & views: A Comfortable Supper*
By Alana Chernila
When people ask me where to eat in the Berkshires, I have my list. There’s pretty good Indian food here, a reliable pizza or fancy restaurant burger there, a place that can promise good service and a candlelit vibe in the next town over. But if you really want to know where I love to eat in the Berkshires, I’ll tell you that the best meals in the Berkshires are served not in restaurants, but in the homes of people who live here. We are a food scene made up of ingredients, and we use them well. What other county boasts so many well-stocked grocery stores, farm stands, farmers markets, and CSAs? There are five different places where you could spend a week’s grocery money on fancy cheese in Great Barrington alone. Large swaths of the county are still out of DoorDash’s service range, and many of us live too far out of our town centers (if our towns even have a center) to be able to walk to our favorite restaurants. So we cook. Or we partner up with someone who can cook for us. And then we feed our friends.
Hint: They may not be where you think—but good company is guaranteed.
Early in my adult life, I made my first grocery store friend. I was at the Berkshire Co-op, my 1-year-old happily sucking on the bar of the carriage seat, when I saw a woman similarly situated, her kid wrestling himself out of his frayed seatbelt. She was contemplating what I would later come to know as broccoli rabe with such focus that she didn’t notice me eyeing the contents of her cart. I took in the cheeses, the vegetables of every color, the Asian sauces in curvy bottles. I wanted to climb right into her cart so she could take me home, too. I wanted to eat whatever she was planning to make for dinner.
Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long. As soon as she registered my presence, she was asking me about my daughter, about where I lived, what I was making for dinner. I had lucked out with a true extrovert, and within a few weeks, I was at her long wooden table, about to dig into one of the best salads I’d had in my life. That year, I learned how to make duck, preserved lemons, and my own spice blends in her kitchen.
The friends who have fed me over the years have taught me how to be a better cook. The mother of one of my son’s friends, making a pile of lace-thin dosas learned from childhood in Mumbai. A new neighbor who introduced herself at the farmers’ market with the offer to feed me the following week. She made Claudia Roden’s Roz ou Hamud, a dreamy stew made of leeks, artichoke hearts, lemon, mint, ground pine nuts, sliced zucchini, and enough chicken wings for “a good broth,” which, in this case is precisely 16, a fact I now know from my own stained copy of “The Book of Jewish Food” that she gave me for my birthday years later.
Over the years, I’ve grown confident enough to reciprocate. I went through a phase of throwing the type of dinner parties I’d only seen in movies, inviting mixes of old friends and those I’d just met. Later, my family teamed up with a few others and gathered every Tuesday for a themed potluck of epic proportions, and I’d tackle my contribution with the sort of gusto I’d rarely directed toward my dinner
choices. And, as my now-grown children will tell you, we just became the kind of people who had other people over for dinner. A lot.
I imagine there are those cooks who try new dishes for guests, who cook to impress. More often than not though, I think people choose to cook for others the dishes on their own personal rotation that they have been loving the most. We all get into cooking ruts, repeating the same two or five or 10 dishes, partially from busy-ness or lack of imagination, but also because those are the dishes answering our own cravings right now. And a dish that’s on repeat for you might be totally new to me, ready to wow me and hang on my tastebuds afterward like a song I can’t get out of my head. Then I’ll make it myself, and what was part of you will become part of me, too. B
This is an excellent formula for all those spring vegetables starting to pop up at the store. You can also change it by the season, subbing out the crunchy green with hearty root vegetables in the fall and winter. It can be vegan if you leave out the cheese, a great vegetarian main, or a side dish to cozy roast chicken.
* If this phrase sounds familiar, you may be a local scholar—it’s based on a quote from a letter Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851: “...if I have done the hardest possible day’s work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably—why, then I don’t think I deserve any reward for my hard day’s work—for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?”
To make it, combine sliced lemons, quartered radishes, asparagus, fennel, and sweet onions cut into large bitesized pieces on a parchment lined tray. Top with olive oil and salt, and roast at 425°F until the vegetables start to show a bit of color, 20 to 25 minutes. Squeeze a bit of lemon juice over the vegetables and heap them into your widest serving bowl. Gently toss them with warm couscous, crumbled feta or goat cheese, fried chickpeas, and lots of fresh herbs (parsley, mint, and dill are wonderful here) and fresh pepper. Finish with the best olive oil in your pantry and enough salt and pepper to make it taste perfect to you.
The days of rough-hewn summer stock are long past gone. Theaters are airconditioned. Seating, indoors and out, is comfortable, generally audience-friendly. Production values are high. Work is made by serious theater artists who have found the Berkshires to be an accommodating place to create theater and develop material away from the pressures of New York.
Many theater artists have told me they particularly appreciate the adventurous nature of Berkshire audiences: their intelligence, their willingness to suspend disbelief, their curiosity, their insights that are reflected in post-performance talkbacks.
There is an intimacy about the theatergoing experience in the Berkshires. At 780 seats, the Colonial Theatre has the largest seating capacity of any of the county’s liveplay-producing theaters. The remaining theaters are at 500-plus seats or less, which makes for an up close and personal affair.
It’s also a season that will see two artistic directors who recently stepped down from their postitions—Julianne Boyd at Barrington Stage Company and Daniel Elihu Kramer at Chester Theatre Company—returning to direct one production each. Boyd will be directing “Faith Healer” a penetrating play about, among other things, truth, faith, and whether redemption is possible, in BSC’s St. Germain Stage. Kramer will direct Annie Baker’s “Circle Mirror Transformation,” about the dynamics among the five members of an amateur acting class in a small town in Vermont.
As far as the upcoming season is concerned, it seems to me to be diverse,
adventurous, and balanced. What follows are thumbnail sketches—shorts, if you will—of theaters that are regarded as the area’s major players. I’ve also tossed in some critic’s choices—plays that, for one reason or another, I am particularly looking forward to seeing and writing about. Where there is no critic’s choice it’s simply because, as of the writing of this article, the respective theaters had not announced their schedules.
See you in the aisle!
barringtonstageco.org; 413-236-8888
Boyd-Quinson Stage
30 Union St., Pittsfield
St. Germain Stage
Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Arts Center
36 Linden St., Pittsfield
No doubt the hottest ticket in town this summer will be Barrington Stage Company’s season opening production of the near-iconic John Kander-Fred Ebb musical “Cabaret”
(June 14-July 8 in BSC’s 520-seat BoydQuinson Stage). It’s not just the musical’s popularity that is the draw. The production is the local directing debut of the theater’s new artistic director, Alan Paul, who succeeded
founder Julianne Boyd after she stepped down at the end of the 2022 season.
Paul directed five of the 10 plays in BSC’s February-March 10X10 New Play Festival, but, as he said at the time, it’s “Cabaret” that will give audiences a clear idea of who he is as a stage director. “Cabaret” also plays to what has been BSC’s biggest audience attraction in the years since its founding in Sheffield in 1995: musicals.
BSC’s artistic profile has also been shaped by brand-new works, many of them commissions; established plays by contemporary playwrights; and reconsiderations of established plays from an earlier generation of writers.
In that tradition, Paul’s first season as artistic director hits all of those categories. It includes two musicals (“Cabaret” and associate artist William Finn’s “A New Brain”) and two world premieres (“The Happiest Man on Earth” by BSC associate artist Mark St. Germain, and Mike Lew’s “Tiny Father”). Established plays include “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” a 1995 drama by Springfield-born playwright Pearl Cleage; and Irish playwright Brian Friel’s intense 1979 drama “Faith Healer” (Aug. 1-27 at St. Germain Stage, three blocks from the BoydQuinson), which will be directed by Boyd
and performed by a hugely accomplished, high-powered cast—BSC associate artists Christopher Innvar, Mark H. Dold, and Gretchen Egolf.
Critic’s choices: “Cabaret” | “Faith Healer” | “Blues for an Alabama Sky”
berkshiretheatregroup.org;
The Colonial Theatre, 111 South St., Pittsfield
Unicorn Theatre
6 East St., Stockbridge
413-997-4444
Berkshire Theatre Group will be shaking the walls of its handsomely restored 120-year-old Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield this summer with a revival of a show BTG first produced in 2017 at its far more intimate Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge—“Million Dollar Quartet,” a jukebox musical that “recreates” one night in December 1956 when rockcountry legends Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins came together for an impromptu jam session at Sun Record Studios in Memphis. The goodtimes musical, which runs June 27-July 16, would seem ideal for the 780-seat Colonial Theatre, which has become an increasingly popular venue for performances by tribute bands and singers.
BTG’s Stockbridge campus is home to two theaters—the 122-seat Unicorn and the 314-seat Fitzpatrick Main Stage. The Fitzpatrick went dark in 2020 because of the COVID pandemic and has remained dark in preparation for much-needed renovation of the historic building’s interior. (It will reopen in 2028 to mark the 100th anniversary of Berkshire Theatre Festival as a cultural institution; the Festival and the Colonial merged in 2010 to form Berkshire Theatre Group.)
That leaves the Unicorn as BTG’s workhorse. This summer it will be home to an inviting schedule of theater pieces by women about women: Heidi Schreck’s “What the Constitution Means to Me” starring the immensely talented Kate Baldwin (May 18-June 3); Anna Ziegler’s
“Photograph 51” (June 15-July 1) with two highly accomplished BTG veterans in the cast—Rebecca Brooksher and David Adkins; the world premiere of actor Christine Lahti’s autobiographical solo piece, “The Smile of Her” (July 12-29); and a world premiere musical, “On Cedar Street” (Aug. 12-Sept. 2), based on a novel by Kent Haruf and created by a team of women—Emily Mann (book); Lucy Simon and Carmel Dean (music); Susan Birkenhead (lyrics); Susan H. Schulman (director); Kristin Stowell (music direction); and Terry Berliner (choreography and associate direction).
Critic’s choice: The entire Unicorn lineup
chestertheatre.org; 413-354-7771
Town Hall Theatre
15 Middlefield Rd., Chester
The Chester Town Hall is the unlikely home for a seemingly “unlikely” theater company that has been building a steady reputation— and following—for entertaining, thoughtprovoking theater since its founding in 1990 by the late Vincent Dowling as the Miniature Theatre of Chester. The name has long since changed and what once was a plain and simple town hall meeting room hosting fairly standard repertoire by familiar playwrights has become a comfortable, inviting place to see more stimulating theater under Dowling’s successors—Byam Stevens (1998-2014), Daniel
Elihu Kramer (2015-2022) and, beginning this season, its new co-producing artistic directors, James Barry and Tara Franklin. Husband and wife in private life, these accomplished theater veterans are no strangers to Chester, having performed on its stage several times. Franklin also has been associate artistic director and director of education at Chester over the past four years. The season they’ve put together for 2023 makes it clear they intend to build on the foundation created by Stevens and expanded by Kramer.
I’ve always thought of Chester as a kind of “Off-Broadway” theater in its choices of material—generally small-cast contemporary plays by some of American theater’s fresher voices who examine broader issues through the close-up lens of the personal. Barry and Franklin’s inaugural season, which runs June 22-Aug. 20, reflects that sensibility. In addition to Annie Baker’s “Circle Mirror
Transformation” (Aug. 10-20), the season includes plays by Rajiv Joseph (“Guards at the Taj,” July 6-16); Loy A. Webb (“The Light,” July 27-Aug. 6); and Peter Sinn Nachtreib (“The Making of a Great Moment,” June 22-July 2). Also scheduled is a workshop presentation of a play in development, “Unreconciled” (July 20, 21), co-written by and starring Jay Sefton. Mark Basquill is co-writer.
Critic’s choices: “Circle Mirror Transformation” | “The Making of a Great Moment”
greatbarringtonpublictheater.org; 413-372-1980
Daniel Arts Center, McConnell Theater / Liebowitz Black Box Theater
Bard College at Simon’s Rock
84 Alford Rd., Great Barrington
If you're interested in being on the ground floor of new play development, Great Barrington Public Theater should be your thing; it’s all they do. What’s more, their productions are directed, performed, and designed by theatermakers from the Berkshires and environs. Last summer, for example, the company produced four plays in a solo play festival: a world premiere by Mark St. Germain and the East Coast premiere of a play, “Things I Know to Be True,” whose Broadway run was blocked by COVID.
This summer’s appealing lineup includes “The Stones,” described by GBPT as “a contemporary gothic mystery by awardwinning, London-based playwright/ director Kit Brookman,” directed by
Michelle Joyner; Dan Lauria’s “Just Another Day,” about an aging comedy writer and poet “who meet daily on a park bench to question how, why, and whether they were ever actually married, and if so, what magic held them together besides a mutual love of old movies”; and the one that most catches my attention, “Off Peak,” a comedy by writer-actor Brenda Withers, about a once intimately connected couple “who now find themselves the only two passengers in a Metro North train car.” The creative team here is enormously enticing—James Warwick directs Peggy Pharr Wilson and Kevin O’Rourke as the twosome.
______________
Critic’s choice: “Off Peak”
machaydntheatre.org; 518-392-9292
1925 NY-203, Chatham, New York
If musicals are your thing, the MacHaydn Theatre is your place. The summer theater—with a seating configuration that surrounds a newly expanded stage on three sides—has been about stagings of well-known Broadway musicals since its founding 54 years ago in a cow barn. The theater’s founders, Lynne Haydn and Linda MacNish, passed away in 2018 and 2002, respectively. The “new” artistic leadership— producing artistic director John Saunders
and managing director James Rodgers—have maintained that audience-friendly aesthetic, although in recent seasons they’ve offered some more adventurous material. The 2023 schedule, which runs June 22-Sept. 17, is an audience-choice season whose titles include “42nd Street,” “The Sound of Music,” “Footloose,” “Godspell,” “The Marvelous Wonderettes,” and “Jersey Boys,” the popular jukebox musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. At such an unsettled, anxious time, there is much to be said for art—theater in particular—that is familiar, reassuring and welcoming.
Critic’s choice: “Jersey Boys” | “Godspell”
shakespeare.org; 413-637-3353
Tina Packer Playhouse
Roman Garden Theatre
New Spruce Theatre
Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre
70 Kemble St., Lenox
The Bard of Avon has found an accommodating home in the Berkshires with this Lenox-based group. In this, the theater’s 46th season (May 26-Oct. 22, with a special holiday offering mid-December), he’ll be keeping company with four of America’s preeminent playwrights: Ken Ludwig, William Gibson, and Pulitzer
Prize winners August Wilson and Donald Margulies.
This is perhaps the most diversified, intriguing, and brave season Shakespeare & Company has offered in the 37 years I’ve been covering it—three plays by Shakespeare, one of them rarely performed; and four contemporary plays, one a New England premiere and one a world premiere.
Shakespeare will be represented by his beloved fanciful romantic comedy, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Aug. 1Sept. 10, in the company’s newest space, the 500-seat outdoor New Spruce Theatre; “Hamlet,” in a staged reading Sept. 1-3 in the indoor 400-seat Tina Packer Playhouse; and the rarely seen “The Contention (Henry VI, Part II),” regarded by artistic director Allyn Burrows as the best of the Henry VI trilogy. Burrows likens this rarely produced, titleshortened epic to “Game of Thrones” in terms of its themes of power, ruthless rivalry, and ambition. The production is set for June 17–July 15, also in the Tina Packer Playhouse. Packer will be directing, along with associate directors Kate Kohler-Amory and Sheila Bandyopadhyay.
Increasingly over the years, the “& Company” portion of the theater’s name truly has earned its co-equal billing, perhaps never more so than this summer.
Four contemporary plays are on tap this summer, three of them worth more than usual attention. From Ken Ludwig, best known
New England
THE CONTENTION:
for the farces “Lend Me a Tenor,” “Moon Over Buffalo,” and “Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery,” comes the New England premiere of “Dear Jack, Dear Louise” (May 26-July 30 in the 280seat outdoor Roman Garden), a love story that unfolds through the correspondence between two strangers during World War II. There is also the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies’ “Lunar Eclipse,” about a long-married couple reflecting on life while observing the seven stages of a lunar eclipse from a field on their farm (Sept. 15-Oct. 22 in the 200-seat Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre). And August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning “Fences,” (July 22-Aug. 27 in the Tina Packer Playhouse), a true classic by one of our country’s top-tier playwrights. Improbable as it seems, “Fences” has never been produced in the Berkshires; nor, for that matter, have any other of his plays.
Rounding out the “& Company” offerings is an eightperformances-only revival of William Gibson’s solo play, “Golda’s Balcony,” starring Annette Miller as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir—a role she created in the play’s world premiere at Shakespeare & Company in 2002. Daniel Gidron is again directing. Given the unsettling tumult in Israel these days, this revival could not have been better timed.
Critic’s choices: “Dear Jack, Dear Louise” | “Lunar Eclipse” | “Fences” | “The Contention (Henry VI, Part II)”
wtfestival.org; 413-458-3200
’62 Center for Theatre and Dance
Main Stage / Nikos Stage
1000 Main St., Williamstown
AUGUST WILSON’S FENCES
Directed by Christopher Edwards
JULY 22 – AUGUST 27
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM by William Shakespeare
Directed by Allyn Burrows
AUGUST 1 – SEPTEMBER 10
GOLDA’S BALCONY by William Gibson
Directed by Daniel Gidron
Featuring Annette Miller AUGUST 5 – 20
A Staged Reading HAMLET by William Shakespeare
Directed by Kevin G. Coleman
SEPTEMBER 1 – 3
World Premiere
LUNAR ECLIPSE by Donald Margulies
Directed by James Warwick
SEPTEMBER 15 – OCTOBER 22
Going into its 68th season this summer, Williamstown Theatre Festival’s rich history is a narrative of new and classic American and European plays performed and directed by some of the best known talents in theater. In recent years, what used to be considered an actor-centered theater has become much more of a home for playwrights and directors who want to work on a variety of projects away from the madding crowd of New York’s theater world.
A typical Williamstown season also includes any number of special events, play readings, and talkbacks.
The Festival is in transition now. Under the guidance of interim artistic director Jenny Gersten last summer, the Festival produced one Main Stage production—a wildly unorthodox, controversial reexamination of Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella” called “Most Happy in Concert”—and two shows on the Nikos Stage: Anna Ouyang Moench’s wild black comedy, “Man of God,” and Harrison David Rivers’ moving drama, “we are continuous.” And from New York, the Festival brought to its Main Stage Alex Edelman in his one-person show, “Just For Us,” for what turned out to be a hugely successful five-performance run. Gersten is continuing as interim artistic director. It would not be surprising if the 2023 season’s format was patterned somewhat after last summer’s reduced format. B
By Michelle Thorpe Petricca
These are not terms usually synonymous with the Berkshires—but then again, we are talking about the invitation for the Berkshire Arts Center’s 2023 Gala for the apropos date of April 1. The event included a performance by Brita Filter, a New York City performer featured on RuPaul’s Drag Race season 12.
The Gilded Age saw great “cottages” built throughout the Berkshires and those residents brought their love of culture and arts. It helps explain the age of some of our local arts organizations—Berkshire Museum (120 years) and the Colonial Theatre (120 years) to name two. While their missions have remained strong, their original patrons and their funding are long gone.
The galas can premiere theater productions that go on to win Tony Awards, present curated art collections from around the world, or celebrate a hero in the social services—followed by exquisite dinners and dancing. While this
formula may sound familiar, there is nothing basic about a Berkshire gala. Delightful dining has more meaning when the meal is prepared by young apprentices trained under the region’s top chefs through the Railroad Street Youth Project. Dancing next to members of the Miami City Ballet at the Jacob’s Pillow afterparty makes for a special (and physical) Saturday evening.
Year after year, these Berkshire galas cumulatively raise millions for our creative economy, attract hundreds of thousands to our region, and preserve cultural touchstones for generations to come.
Manhattan’s Met Gala owns the First Monday of May. There is even a documentary about this iconic event with that very date as the title, and no other New York institution is going to plan their fundraising event on that day. And in the Berkshires, many organizations have “owned” their gala date for decades. Over the past 30 years, Amy Rudnick has planned over 100 galas in the Berkshires. “Organizations are highly respectful of each other’s dates. On rare occasions, they ask to switch,” she says. A few major events, like the Williamstown Theater Festival and MASS
MoCA galas, extend past the summer and state lines into New York City. But we know those won’t be on the first Monday of May.
Who attends?
Yo-Yo Ma mingles with guests at the Tanglewood gala. Bradley Cooper and Steven Spielberg were spotted there in 2018. However, you don’t need to be a world renowned cellist or Academy Award winner to attend any of them. The guests are mostly patrons who believe in and support the organizations’ missions and look to enjoy the experience. The hosts, for their part, welcome all supporters. “There is a concerted effort to reach a greater cross-section of the population, including past beneficiaries, who appreciate and understand the organizations so well,” says Natalie Johnsonius Neubert, executive director of the Berkshire Music School and performing arts consultant.
Inclusivity is paramount in the Berkshires. Anyone can attend these events at various ticket prices and in a few circumstances, for free, thanks to some generous underwriters. Jacob’s Pillow continues to stream the night’s performances with a “choose what you pay” model.
If you are invited to be a guest at a friend’s table, the recommended answer is a resounding “yes.” When the live donation auction fires up, don’t feel obligated to participate. If you are moved by the evening
and do feel comfortable, wave your auction paddle in the air. Or consider bidding on a silent auction item and continue your relationship with the organization.
What’s the attire?
The invitations provide suggestions such as “Berkshire chic,” “festive cocktail,” and even “costumes that reflect flights of fancy and imagination” (looking forward to sharing photo recaps of that one, Norman Rockwell Museum).
Save the black ties and designer shoes for city galas. Heels will slide into the lawns of places like Hancock Shaker Village and Shakespeare & Company, so wear a wedge or flat. Bring a hat and sunglasses if cocktail hour is outside. Tissues are a must if you attend the Community Access to the Arts (CATA) gala. These artists with disabilities will have you leaping up to applaud with one of the most joyful and inspirational events of the season.
Most of all, remember you are in the mecca of a creative culture, so you do you. The Berkshire galas are unique due to the large concentration of cultural and philanthropic organizations in a relatively small region. The Met may have the First Monday in May but the Berkshires has a season. Oh, and the theme of last year’s Met Gala: the Gilded Age. Something we know a little bit about in the Berkshires. B
The B has assembled a Gala Guide that is useful if you are new to the area, a regular on the circuit looking to plan your season, or simply curious about these happenings. The word “gala” suggests a formal affair, but these creative celebrations take many forms and styles—what they have in common is that they are fundraisers for worthwhile organizations.
Let’s party!SHAKESPEARE & COMPANY: CHRISTINA LANE; MAHAIWE: MICHELLE PETRICCA; KIDS 4 HARMONY: RYAN COWDREY
Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding
Saturday, April 29
Holiday Inn, Pittsfield berkshiremusicschool.org
This festive new fundraiser includes a special performance of the renowned theater production Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding. The professional New York City cast appears in this immersive show, where guests of the bride and groom are more than just members of the audience, they’re friends of the family. The hilarity unfolds at the Holiday Inn in downtown Pittsfield over an Italian feast catered by McNinch Restaurant Group. Most important, all proceeds will benefit the Berkshire Music School community engagement projects, including free programs in the public school and “paywhat-you-can” community group classes for musicians of all ages.
CATA Gala & Annual Performance
Finding New Rhythms
Saturday, May 13
Tina Packer Playhouse, Shakespeare & Company, Lenox
Attire: Berkshires chic CATAarts.org/gala2023
Get ready to have your heart blown wide open! Celebrate art and inclusion at one of the most joyful events of the year. CATA’s gala evening features an electrifying performance by artists with disabilities in music, acting, dance, juggling, comedy, and more—plus a fabulous afterparty with dinner and dancing! Proceeds support CATA’s life-changing arts programs for people with disabilities. It’s one event you won’t want to miss—and it all takes place at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox!
May 13 | Lenox
Enjoy an evening of performances by CATA artists followed by a fabulous afterparty with dinner and dancing! Proceeds support CATA’s life-changing arts programs for people with disabilities.
Dance the Blues Away
Friday, May 19
Berkshires Hills Country Club, Pittsfield loveoft.org
This wonderful evening features music by Miss B. Haven and the Lucky Bucket Band, a silent auction that further supports Love of T’s mission to close the gap in behavioral healthcare services, and incredible food by Chef Mike Mongeon of KJ Nosh.
Annual Culinary Arts
Apprenticeship Dinner
In celebration of the culinary apprentices
Saturday, May 20 rsyp.org
Columbia Memorial Health
35th Annual Hospital Ball
Saturday, June 3
The Barn at Locust Hill, Ghent, NY givecmh.org/events/
Berkshire Immigration Center
One World Celebration
Sunday, June 4 Shakespeare & Company, Lenox Berkshireic.org
Peek Behind the Curtains
Friday, June 9
St. James Church, Great Barrington greatbarringtonpublictheater.org
Enjoy preview snippets of the GBPT’s upcoming season and get a first look at new shows being considered for future productions. The benefit will include food and drink, live music, singing and other surprise entertainment, as well as meet and greets with some cast members and special company friends.
Featuring Wanda Houston and her band and an opening performance by Natalia Bernal and Jason Ennis.Norman Rockwell Museum
A Night of Wonder
Saturday, June 10
Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge
Attire: Costumes that reflect flights of fancy and imagination are encouraged. nrm.org/gala
A sparkling night of the unexpected, the mysterious, the coincidental, the puzzling, the unique, the surprising, the impossible, the unforgettable.A wondrous world inspired by the art of Tony Sarg, master showman, illustrator, and puppeteer, whose exhibition is featured this summer and fall. Creative cuisine, mystical drinks, parades, performances, and puzzles. All under a tent and on the magnificent grounds of Norman Rockwell Museum.
Berkshire Opera Festival Café Society
Sunday, June 11
Gedney Farm, New Marlborough, Attire: Berkshires chic berkshireoperafestival.org
Celebrating our mainstage production of Puccini’s La Bohème and the full 2023 season
Berkshire Museum
120th Anniversary Celebration
Celebrating 120 years of art, history, and science
Saturday, June 17 berkshiremuseum.org/120gala
Jacob’s Pillow
Season Opening Gala
Saturday, June 24
Jacob’s Pillow, Becket
Attire: Festive cocktail jacobspillow.org/gala
Known throughout the region as the ultimate summer kickoff, the Jacob’s Pillow Season Opening Gala is sure to be a spectacular evening of conversation, connection, and magical moments, filled with lots of dancing. Your involvement ensures we can continue to provide a place for local and global communities to gather in celebration of dance and invigorate the cultural landscape of the Berkshires and beyond.
Spend an evening under the stars with award-winning biographers and historians celebrating 30 years of memorable lectures at The Mount.
Kids 4 Harmony Gala
Tuesday, June 27
Seiji Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Lenox 18degreesma.org/how-we-help/ kids-4-harmony
An Evening Benefit Celebrating 30 Years of the Summer Lecture Series
Wharton, Women, and War: A Backward & Forward Glance
The Mount, Lenox Friday, June 30
Attire: Festive edithwharton.org
Spend an evening under the stars with award-winning biographers and historians celebrating 30 years of memorable lectures at The Mount.
Shakespeare & Company
2023 Gala, Honoring Founding Artistic Director Tina Packer
Saturday, July 1
Shakespeare & Company, Lenox
Attire: Festive shakespeare.org
The Gala will begin with a cocktail hour outside of the Tina Packer Playhouse at Shakespeare & Company, then move into the theater for a one-night-only performance celebrating a retrospective of the Company, as well as a look toward our future. Following the performance, guests will make their way to the tented meadow for an elegant dinner by a Berkshire favorite, the Old Inn on the Green. Our Gala wouldn’t be complete without dessert and dancing.
July 1 | Lenox
Following a a restrospective performance of the Company, guests will enjoy an elegant dinner, dessert, and dancing.
Berkshire Botanical Garden
Fête des Fleurs
Saturday, July 8
Private home, Stockbridge Bowl berkshirebotanical.org
A benefit to support Berkshire Botanical Garden’s education and horticultural mission.
happenings: Gala Guide
Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood
Summer Celebration at Tanglewood
Friday, July 14
Tanglewood, Lenox bso.org/tanglewood
Mahaiwe
Mahaiwe 2023 Gala
Saturday, July 15
Performance by Brian Stokes Mitchell
Attire: Semiformal mahaiwe.org
The Trustees of Reservations
Naumkeag Garden Party
Saturday, July 22 Naumkeag, Stockbridge thetrustees.org
Barrington Stage Company
Gala 2023
Monday, July 24
barringtonstageco.org/support/gala/
Fairview Hospital
Silver Jubilee Gala
Wednesday, July 26
Gedney Farm, New Marlborough
Hancock Shaker Village
Summer in the Berkshires
Saturday, August 12
Attire: Formal summer garden party hancockshakervillage.org
Literacy Network of Southern Berkshires
Annual Gala
Saturday, September 9
Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge litnetsb.org
Berkshire Theatre Group
Moonlight Sonata Gala
Sunday, September 10
The Colonial Theatre, Pittsfield
Attire: Festive, to honor the moonlight berkshiretheatregroup.org
The theatre is the setting for Hershey Felder’s brilliant performance as Beethoven and the
becomes an ode to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”
1Berkshire
Celebrate the Berkshires
Fall 2023
1berkshire.com
Hillcrest Educational Foundation
21st Annual Fall Classic
Friday, September 15
Berkshire Hills Country Club, Pittsfield hillcrestec.org
Williamstown Theatre Festival
The 2023 Williamstown Theatre Festival Gala
Monday, November 13 wtfestival.org
July 22 | Stockbridge
Raise a glass to the splendor of Naumkeag, a public garden and historic home, at its annual Garden Party.
While many Shakespeare & Company followers were bundled up in the Berkshires, more than 300 new and seasoned fans learned about the upcoming season at the first-ever Theater in the Garden event at the Sarasota Garden Club in February.
BFAIR offers quality residential programs for individuals with acquired brain injury in Berkshire County and the Pioneer Valley
We provide enriching experiences to individuals of all abilities and ages through distinctive, individualized, and quality services. As part of our Residential Services, we have 6 homes dedicated to individuals with ABI
https://bfair.org/brain-injury-awareness-month/
Like the seasons, markets change. When markets change, financial plans may also need to change, or need adjustments based on your financial goals.
Together we can develop a strategy to address any changes that may affect your financial plans.
That’s why we’re here. We’re here for you.
There are images that leap to mind: Hills and forests untouched by time. A string of little towns that jumped out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and gritty mill towns reinventing their future step by step. A place hanging in the balance between too remote and perfectly accessible, where you can hike or ski or catch a concert or see world-class art. Where little farms and pastures hint at a bucolic past.
As with most quick impressions, these are just the surface of the Berkshires. Ask local historians about how geography, people, and luck have created the many layers of the Berkshires over generations. Or someone who has spent a lifetime within a Berkshire institution watching it grow and change for the better over decades. Or an artist who found the community here to make the work he wanted. Or the chef who remembers learning about how food and place meet here, and what can be taken into the future. Ask, and you’ll hear stories about resilience and adaptation, of building something tied to the world but with a little slack.
The interplay of nature, economics, and culture has shaped and reshaped the region in a million little ways, moved along by visionaries, thinkers, leaders, and inventors— here’s their story.
Hills, forests, farms, and factories have made up the everchanging Berkshire landscape for the past 200 years. Color aerial photograph of General Electric in Pittsfield on newsprint, undated.PHOTO : THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE ARCHIVES
Local historian Bernard Drew has spent decades thinking and writing about this place. He moved to the Berkshires from far northern New Hampshire in the early 1950s when his father became caretaker at the estate of Colonel Arthur Budd in Windsor. As a boy, Drew would ride the backroads of the 3,000-acre property in a truck, his father and the colonel up front, he in the back with the dogs. He wanted to learn the stories in the land, in the cellar holes of abandoned farmsteads and old country roads.
When Colonel Budd passed away in 1965, the estate went to the Trustees of Reservations and became Notchview Reservation. Drew had picked up the bug for telling stories and went into journalism, writing for the old Berkshire Courier and the Lakeville Journal, and since 1996 writing the “Our Berkshires” column for the Eagle. He draws from a bottomless well of stories about how the Berkshires became the Berkshires. “It emerged in different times and different ways; you’d be hard pressed to find a single source that pulled everything together,” he said. “It’s luck and happenstance.”
The land itself is part of the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people, who hunted, fished, and farmed along the rivers and in the woodlands between what are now called the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers. Their traditional way of life was put under assault by the waves of European settlers who began to arrive in the 1700s. Some Native families tried to find a way to live with the newcomers, adopting Christianity and western farming practices and settling in at Stockbridge in the 1730s. But the systematic devastation of their livelihood and dispossession of their lands continued. They were forced to relocate to western New York, and then again to Wisconsin, where the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians lives today.
The first settler farming was largely subsistence level, providing just enough from the hilly, rocky land for survival. As the United States added more and more territory in the west, many of the first white settlers pulled up and left for more
fertile farmland in the Midwest, leaving empty farms behind—along with the opportunity for reinvention.
The rising urban middle class began to notice the natural appeal of getting out of cities like New York and Boston. Places like Bash Bish Falls, Mount Greylock, Balance Rock, and Monument Mountain became the region’s first tourist attractions. And a lot of that unprofitable, difficult-tofarm land was ripe to be snatched up by the early state park system. Mount Greylock was preserved in 1898, and other sites by nonprofit land trusts like the Trustees of Reservations in the following decades. The charm of the Berkshires’ rolling hills for hiking, lakes for swimming and boating, and green space for its spectacular views was locked up, even as the economy and demographics of the region continued to swirl around it.
It emerged in different times and different ways; you’d be hard pressed to find a single source that pulled everything together. It’s luck and happenstance.”
New railroads began to spread through the region starting in the 1850s, snaking up from New York and over from Boston. The tracks followed along the rivers, except in the notable case of the Hoosac Tunnel. This nearly five-mile-long tunnel under the Hoosac Range was built from 1851 to 1875, at the cost of at least 135 workers’ lives and a whopping—for the time— $20 million. It was famous enough to become a punchline for Mark Twain (“a joke had managed to bore itself, like another Hoosac Tunnel, through the solid adamant of his understanding”). It gave a sense of grandeur and purpose to the region, as the city seal of North Adams to this day notes: “We Hold The Western Gateway.”
The brilliant railroad network made the Berkshires more and more connected to the world, though service began to be scaled back in the 1950s as auto travel grew. The Mohawk Trail along Route 2 formally opened in 1914; it was one of the first routes marketed as a way for city dwellers to drive out into the country. The completion of the Massachusetts Turnpike in 1957 created another major east/west route in South County.
And it looked for a while like the future of getting here was by air. In 1965, Robert C. Sprague Jr., Sprague Electric's head of corporate relations, claimed he could leave his office at 10 a.m. and make a 2:30 p.m. (Pacific time) meeting in San Francisco. In the mid-1970s, Command Airways offered five flights a day from Pittsfield Municipal Airport to JFK or LaGuardia in New York, $30 one-way.
The Pittsfield Airport weather station in 1938; at one time, it seemed that air travel was really going to take off as another major gateway to the Berkshires.
Charles Dew, a professor emeritus of history at Williams College, arrived here as a first-year student in 1954. Williams was a very different place. It was all men, social life was dominated by fraternities, and it was profoundly non-diverse. But in the course of Dew’s time, upon returning to teach there in 1977, it was already dramatically different, thanks to the will and the ability to take steps toward change. “Each time we’ve done that, we’ve gotten better,” he said.
It may be a small liberal arts college, but Williams is a foundation of the region’s economic and cultural life. It adapted to its unique environment to become a world-class presence that is not just the county’s second-largest employer, but continues to play a role in shaping the cultural landscape in North County.
The school sprang from the last will and testament of Colonel Ephraim Williams, the heir of a major landowning family from the Connecticut River Valley. He died in
battle with the French in 1755, but left funds for the creation of a school in the township where many of his troops had settled. No sooner had Williams opened its doors in 1793 than some malcontents on staff began scheming to move anywhere else—anywhere more cosmopolitan, that is. In the late 1810s, the then-president and a handful of faculty and students finally headed east— though not with half the books from the library, as college folklore still claims. They founded Amherst College, creating one of the longest lasting college rivalries in the country.
After this existential crisis, Williams realized it needed reliable, long-term support to survive. It created an alumni
The center of Williamstown has changed and grown along with the College through the decades. The Van Rensselaer Manor House, seen here in 1963, was torn down to make room for Sawyer Library, which itself was torn down in 2014 to make way for the new Stetson-Sawyer Library.
association—the first—in 1821, giving Williams an enormous fundraising head start that it has never given up. The college chose to embrace its idiosyncratic location and lifestyle, where big ideas could be pondered in natural tranquility. It was best embodied by Mark Hopkins, who was president from 1836 to 1872 and defined the American liberal arts tradition for undergraduates. As the beloved and oft-repeated quote goes, attributed to Williams graduate President James A. Garfield: “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.” Williams still serves as a cultural foundation for the rest of the region, bringing people and ideas to the area even if just for a little while. Many decide to stay.
It seemed in the early 1800s that sheep and wool might be the future, but more and more economic activity concentrated on the fast rivers that first powered sawmills and grist mills, and later textile mills that could turn Southern cotton into products. By the 20th century, new enterprises had come to the region. William Stanley Jr. was an early pioneer of alternating current, and in 1886 lit up downtown Great Barrington. A few years later, he opened Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company, which made his patented transformers in Pittsfield; he sold to General Electric in 1903.
By the 1940s, “the GE” as locals called it, employed about 13,000 people in a town of about 50,000, and its rhythms defined Pittsfield—from the Thursdays of the month when everyone was paid and traveled downtown, to traffic around the massive plants in the center of town at shift changes. And it was a place of new technologies and new ideas, not all for the best. For most of the 20th century, PCBs were a wonder invention, until the environmental consequences of them getting into the water became clear. Jack Welch got his start running the plastics division in
Pittsfield and honed his hard-charging leadership style there. His name became a byword for a new generation of rapacious corporate leadership that emphasized cutting costs and maximizing shareholder value.
In North Adams, the massive textile complex at Arnold Print Works was done in by the Depression, and a new firm from outside Boston, Sprague Electric, moved in. Sprague made high-quality electrical circuits and parts that powered the age of electronics— especially tiny capacitors with names like “Bumblebees” and “Orange Drops”
that were on stage in Jimi Hendrix’s guitar at Woodstock and in the Apollo 11 lunar module on the moon. Their research and development wing was moving faster than the company could keep up, filing patents for discoveries that would later be exploited in Silicon Valley to make semiconductors and microchips.
In 1950, the city of Pittsfield was slightly larger than the city of Orlando, Florida, but everything was moving south and west, and once again the region had to find a new way forward.
What made the Berkshires’ reputation for nurturing the arts? That it is a place not too far but not too close to big cities? Where there was a small community to keep you company, but still plenty of time and space to be alone and get to work? That it was affordable (at times!), or had enough of an audience available (at times!) to put your work in front of? It was a little of everything.
Nathaniel Hawthorne rented a farm in Lenox in the 1840s and wrote some of his most famous works, including “Tanglewood Tales.” Here he met Herman Melville, who lived up the road in Pittsfield and was working on “Moby-Dick.”
Later, Edith Wharton wrote several of her most famous works at her home, The Mount, in Lenox, tending to her husband’s health and her gardens and renovations over their 10 years there. “But meanwhile The Mount was to give me country cares and joys,” she wrote years later in her memoirs. “Long happy rides and drives through the wooded lanes of that loveliest region, the companionship of a few dear friends, and the freedom from trivial obligations which was necessary if I was to go on with my writing.”
The popularity of the Berkshires as a second-home location meant audiences—even if at first they were only seasonal. In 1937, the Tappan family donated their estate—where Hawthorne had lived in his little cottage in a previous century—to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Under the leadership of luminaries like Serge Koussevitzky, Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and James Levine, Tanglewood became a summer home for the orchestra, and a vital part of the region’s cultural calendar, drawing over 350,000 visitors each season.
Other arts institutions found the same appeal of getting away and getting to work. Ted Shawn was already a major figure in American dance when he bought a rundown farm in Becket in 1930. It began as a place to nurture his own dance company and create a uniquely American style of modern dance. It evolved into the wide-ranging Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival that is now a major event on the world's dance calendar. Summer stock theater for those seasonal crowds also grew here,
with the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge and the Williamstown Theatre Festival up north. Some visionaries saw the potential for year-round culture here. At Williams, the art history department had become legendary, led by acclaimed scholars including Lane Faison, Whitney Stoddard, and Bill Pierson, producing generations of curators, scholars, and museum leaders.
When art collectors Sterling and Francine Clark were looking at
preserving their collection in New York, Faison and Stoddard convinced them to think about the value of showing their Renoirs and other French masterpieces in the glory of nature. Not coincidentally, they explained, it would be more likely to survive a nuclear war away from a major city. The Clark Art Institute opened in 1955.
There was a lot of culture here in 1954 when Norman Rockwell, the most famous painter in America, decided to move to Stockbridge from his home in Vermont. He was lured here by the Austen Riggs Center, a prominent mental health treatment center founded in 1919, where his wife Mary was receiving treatment.
Rockwell became a cottage industry all his own. He used locals as his models and turned Stockbridge into a model of a small town. He bought supplies and supported local institutions. “He needed
that community to paint the way he wanted,” said Laurie Norton Moffatt, director of the Norman Rockwell Museum. “He found what he needed to continue to nourish and inspire him in this community.” From that point on, Rockwell would create some of his most iconic images. When he passed away, a group of community volunteers came together to preserve his studio and eventually create a museum to put his work on permanent display. That mix of outsiders becoming insiders and the people and money coming together made it a vibrant place.
Some steps were so bold, it is hard to believe they worked. Thomas Krens was a Williams graduate who came back to become director of the Williams College Museum of Art. Inspired by seeing
old industrial buildings in Germany turned into contemporary arts spaces, he wondered why something similar couldn’t happen at the abandoned Sprague Electric plant.
Through his work and that of his protégé Joe Thompson, the plan won support from local and state officials, who guided it past all the doubters. While it took over a decade to get off the ground, MASS MoCa opened in 1999. Today it is one of the largest contemporary arts spaces in the world, host to a sprawling assortment of special and semi-permanent exhibitions, and to big music events like the annual FreshGrass festival, each summer’s Bang on a Can festival, and Wilco’s biannual Solid Sound Festival.
Ted Shawn turned a ramshackle Becket farm into an important and beloved center of modern American dance.
Chef Dan Barber grew up in Manhattan, but remembers the deep impression made on him by his summers on his grandmother’s farm in Great Barrington. At Blue Hill Farm, he spent days feeding cows and haying fields and learned about the connection between agriculture, beauty, and open space.
“I was introduced to a lot of hard work and the idea of land management and
open space, and responsibility has stayed with me,” Barber said.
While nature and culture have been important parts of the Berkshires equation, another pillar is right under our nose. While the land isn’t suitable for large-scale industrial agriculture, it is almost perfect for smaller highquality, sustainable, artisanal farming. Berkshire farms are vibrant—from the cheeses of Cricket Creek Farm in Williamstown to the milk and ice
cream of High Lawn Farm in Lee. Restaurants like Prairie Whale in Great Barrington and Mezze in Williamstown are building menus using local, seasonal products.
But Barber thinks this is just the start. He went on to build a brilliant career at the very top of fine dining, opening his own restaurant, Blue Hill in New York in 2000. His passion for top-quality, farm-to-table food continues today at an additional restaurant/laboratory space, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, just north of the city. In addition to holding two Michelin stars, he works with farmers and researchers on new products. Along with his brother, David, they still manage Blue Hill Farm in Great Barrington, along with fulltime farmer Sean Stanton.
This kind of farming is almost unlimited, he says, and a place like the Berkshires is poised to lead with its mix of land, commitment to quality, and proximity to big markets. He envisions a network of small, independent farmers that grow sustainable products and can share seeds, equipment, and expertise.
Top: Early farming in the region was hard work just to get by. Now, technology has opened up possibilities and markets. Bottom: Corn is harvested and chopped for silage at High Lawn Farm in Lee.
It wouldn’t be farming as nostalgia, but the cutting edge of food production and economics. And it wouldn’t just be for those who can afford it, but could democratize quality food for consumers and provide economic stability for a whole region. B
By Carole Owens
Our Gilded Age “cottages” have reinvented themselves for a new generation to enjoy.
this
When the United States was young, the fabric for Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural suit came from Pittsfield and his “mammoth cheese”—a gift weighing 1,235 pounds— came from Cheshire. A lawyer that George Washington appointed to the Continental Congress rode out from the Berkshires, as did three of his Supreme Court justices.
When the critics said all literature was British, all art was French, and all architecture was Italian, the Berkshires attracted and nurtured writers such as
Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Catharine Sedgwick, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Cullen Bryant. Its hills and meadows inspired the great American artists of the
In Tyringham’s Ashintully Gardens, all that’s left of an original 35-room, Georgian-style mansion are the pillars; the house was destroyed by a fire in 1952.
Hudson River School who also painted the Housatonic, and the first American architects built here.
More than a place on the map, the Berkshires has always been a place in the heart.
The Berkshires also held the promise of magic— many believed they found the fountain of youth here.
On March 28, 1767, an early settler and select board member from Pittsfield, William Williams, wrote his brother-inlaw, Nathaniel Dickenson, in Deerfield, urging him to move here. Williams promised the “moderate temperature and goodness of the air” would restore his health and keep him healthy—and if he sickened, Berkshire air would prevent him from dying. Does that sound fanciful?
Two hundred and fifty years later, the Berkshires saw its greatest rise in new arrivals. The cause was the outbreak of COVID-19. Just as Williams in 1767 moved to safeguard his health, in 2020, there was an urgent flight to safety and away from the pandemic.
Williams added one more bit of Berkshire magic: “Another proof of the goodness of the country [air] is the prolific behavior of the female sex among us. Barren women beget … women that have left off for years begin anew.” Apparently, wives grew frisky and prolific. Now that’s a sales pitch.
The uber-rich of the Gilded Age— known as the Four Hundred—came because of the patriots, artists, and writers who came before them. They built theaters, museums, and concert halls that until then were found only in the cities. And, down long drives and behind specimen trees, they built large,
beautifully designed “cottages,” the first more than 130 years ago.
In a time when a ballgown cost a year’s salary and a carriage cost three, a Berkshire cottage cost more than a lifetime of labor. The cottages dotted the hills with charm and wealth; then, as suddenly, they were gone. When it all crashed—when war followed by depression followed by war caused the end of the era—the Berkshire Cottages were abandoned. It was a lush and romantic story buried in the walls of the mansions and gardens that American titans left behind. Empty and boarded shut, these cottages were the holloweyed giants of a bygone era. The mere impression of formal garden beds and the remnants of garden walls were romantic, leaving behind an air of mystery.
The Berkshires never lost its charms— or the ability to inspire and excite. Ordinary people followed the famed and feted into the Berkshires; the Four Hundred was followed by the 400,000, and they never stopped coming. Painters continued to capture the beauty and writers to sing the praises. Young lovers continued to picnic by the lakes and on the lawns of bygone estates. And the great houses never ceased to fascinate. The fabulous properties were remade into house museums, luxury inns, condominiums, restaurants, and cultural venues.
From the makers of wool and cheese and the Revolutionary lawyers of the 18th century to the literati of the early 19th century and the moguls of the late 19th century, the Berkshires attracted them all. It is no different in the 21st century.
Walk, ride, bike, motor, or row, and you will see the same lush natural setting, the same fantastic dwellings, and breathe the same healthy air. As the tiny lakeside cabins of the 1950s are replaced with the mega-mansions of today, the question lingers: A second Gilded Age—why not? B
Massachusetts’ wildest, westernmost wonderland, the Berkshires have drawn discerning, creative, and venturesome pilgrims, dreamers, and pragmatists for hundreds of years. But recent conditions in the world—including COVID, crowded and expensive cities and suburbs, and a deterioration of the quality of life elsewhere— have led to a new generation discovering this place and deciding not just to visit, but to put down roots. Meet some new arrivals, people who could have chosen to live anywhere.
‘Welcome!” said Jane Lowe, a keeneyed emissary for historic things disposed of and prime for repurposing. She’s holding open a heavy old door and inviting entrance into one such thing: the former St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Route 7 in Lanesborough, a Greek Revival structure built in 1836 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Back in 2020, she and her then-fiancé, Ian Purkayastha, noticed that the stone building, long vacant, was for sale.
“We started dreaming of what this place could be,” said Lowe. In 2021, they purchased it. She is originally from Pennsylvania. He was raised in Texas and Arkansas, the son of an Indian immigrant father and a Texan mother.
This former church wouldn’t be their first rescue effort. Only a few years prior, they took a first excursion into the Berkshires from their adopted home of New York City. The visit prompted spirited internet real estate searches.
They soon visited a vacant, nine-acre farm in Cheshire that featured a Federalstyle house built in the early 1800s, outbuildings, a pasture, and a stream, all set amidst the glorious green hillocks that nudge against the ankles of mighty Mt. Greylock. They bought it.
“We just really wanted to take a chance and get out of the city and spend more time in nature, which is something we both are accustomed to,” Lowe said. Indeed, Purkayastha’s know-how includes foraging for wild mushrooms, a skill learned from an uncle in the Ozarks. This curious pursuit led to his founding of a successful truffle import business based in New York and a book, “Truffle Boy:
Through the Exotic Food Underground,” published in 2017.
With curatorial commitment, the couple kept the farm’s original name, Mason Hill Farm. They offer short-term lodging there. They raise chickens. Lowe is now a rescuer of sheep—the runts, the sick ones—which she takes in and cares for and, through local connections, turns wool into skeins.
As for this old church, just a short drive from their farm, they’ve hewed to the many restrictions placed on the historic property and skillfully renovated it for short-term rentals and events such as weddings. They turned the former choir loft into a bedroom. They refashioned heavy old pews into movable benches.
By the way, Lowe and Purkayastha, were wedded in this church, just after purchasing it. At the ceremony, Edwin Lawrence, of Williams College, played the church’s original organ, a 450-pipe, hand-pumped tracker built in the 1800s. Lawrence played Philip Glass’ “Mad Rush.”
“That sounds really cool on an old church organ,” said Lowe.
First, he came upon the flats by Gould Farm, a series of meadows in Monterey that give way to boglands, that give way to hillocks that rise, round and calloused. The view gave him pause, reminding him of the natural haunts of his childhood in Blount County, Tennessee, a place that no longer exists, having since been drawn and quartered by development.
From the flats, he kept driving east on Route 23, and soon pulled into the driveway of a house for sale, a former Colonial tavern built in 1750. Kevin West, the former Tennessean who had gone off to a successful career as a travel writer, author, and food consultant living in New York, Paris, and Los Angeles, counts among his weaknesses a tenderness for old houses. He walked around the yard and felt a tug at
his heart that spawned from his ancestral Appalachian past. “This is it,” he thought. “This is my spot in the world.”
The year was 2015. He was writing the book “Truffle Boy” with Ian Purkayastha, when Purkayastha and his then-girlfriend Jane Lowe “tricked me,” West explained with a laugh. One Saturday, while West was staying at the couple’s Cheshire home, Lowe had suggested they look at some old houses. They came upon this Monterey home—the only one West needed to see. It’s known as the Capt. John Brewer House, and this is where he imagines he’ll die someday and be carried out feet first through the wide doorway of the keeping room.
Before he discovered the Berkshires, West was in L.A. and yearning for the deciduous forests and the change of
seasons of his youth. He wanted a place where he could plant fruit trees and have a garden. The Berkshires “totally captured my romantic imagination. And still does,” he said. “There’s a lot that’s close to the surface here. And also, thanks to prudent zoning boards and conservation-minded communities, the place hasn’t been screwed up beyond all recognition.”
West now tends a garden just up the road. His work there has provided the raw material for a book of his being published by Knopf next year. The working title is “A Cook’s Garden.” Among the many featured vegetables, he said, will be greasy beans, an heirloom—“the most delicious green beans you can ever eat, out of the southern Appalachians.”
Mike Dell’Aquila looks at his watch: 15 seconds until 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 2. He heads over to the glass door facing onto School Street in downtown Pittsfield where a crowd has gathered. “Here we go,” he says, unlocking the door.
The crowd floods in. Celebratory hoots bounce off the freshly painted walls. This was all supposed to be a “soft opening” for a long-dreamed-of debut of Hot Plate Brewing Co., a brewhouse and taproom. Nothing was soft about this opening. The place hit its occupancy by 4:25 p.m.
For craft beer lovers, Hot Plate serves as an abiding place of the affections.
For business owners in the downtrodden downtown, Hot Plate is cause for hope. Methuselah Bar & Lounge’s Yuki Cohen delivered a “Good Luck” balloon. David Renner, of The Marketplace, delivered a plate of snacks.
Dell’Aquila and his wife, Sarah Real, have harnessed the chaos of recent years— struggles in Brooklyn, followed by a societal shutdown with the pandemic—and pressed it into service for good. In their case: creating excellent beer, yes, and coupling that with a higher calling to help mend the cracked crucible of “community.”
The couple (he grew up in Pennsylvania, and she in New Hampshire) chose Pittsfield, specifically. “This downtown has these amazing, iconic buildings,” said Dell’Aquila. “It’s ripe for renewal.”
“We want Hot Plate to be like hanging out in a friend’s apartment,” said Real. Mission accomplished. They’ve stacked shelves with board games and even hauled in an old couch the couple had in their former Brooklyn condo.
On the wall, with reliquary-like significance, they’ve mounted the original metal hot plate that Real used in Brooklyn to brew beer, having to resort to an improvised heat source after the gas was shut off in their building due to a code violation. They had no heat, no hot water for several years. Then COVID hit.
It was time to take a chance. They put a business plan together. They made trips to the Berkshires. They sold their condo. They bought a small home in Lenox and eventually, with help from the community, put the financial pieces together to make Hot Plate a reality.
Dell’Aquila and Real met at Penn State, back when craft brews began strutting into the Natural Light landscape of an undergrad beer budget. They wished to open their own brewery, a dream waylaid
by practical concerns and careers. She has worked as a marketing strategist for Nickelodeon, and he as a copywriter for Macy’s. They bought their first smallbatch home brewing kit in 2013. Real successfully recreated beers she had tasted in her work travels to Europe. The two new Berkshire businesspeople now have a seven-barrel brewhouse that’s the toast of the town.
In her autobiography, the novelist Edith Wharton wrote rapturously of the Berkshires, “that loveliest region,” and described The Mount, her Lenox country estate built in 1902, as “my first real home.” Mindi Morin can now say the same thing. She bought a house just five minutes from Lenox village center in 2017. It’s heaven, her first home after a couple decades spent moving every few years.
A native of Nova Scotia, Morin was raised by parents who ran B&Bs in lovely landscapes. Morin, too, would eventually pursue a career in hospitality. At Fairmont Hotels properties in San Francisco; Vancouver, B.C.; Jasper, Alberta; Pittsburgh; and Washington, D.C., her task was to make people feel at home. But by 2016, she and her husband, Max Scherff, a Minnesota native also in the hospitality business, were ready to turn their efforts into creating their own home.
Canyon Ranch, the luxurious wellness resort, obliged her cravings, offering her a dream job as general manager of its sprawling Lenox facility.
Morin remembers her first full day in the Berkshires. “We fell in love with it,” she said.
That very same day, she and Scherff, who would eventually become vice president of hospitality operations for Mill Town Capital, happened to drive down a residential road that would delight them. The following year, they bought their home on the very same road, signing the contract for it at the Locker Room Sports Pub in Lee. They share the house now with five cats and two German shepherds.
“I have to stop going to the Berkshire Humane Society,” Morin joked.
One of the things she appreciates most about her new Berkshire life is when friends and colleagues notice she’s stressed out. Her
life revolves around wellness after all. “You’re going to ride today, right?” they will say to her, a verbal elbow encouraging her to take some time to go to her favorite rendezvous: the horse stables at White Horse Hill in West Stockbridge. “I ride five days a week,” Morin said. “You could have the worst day ever, and then you have to be so present on a horse. You can’t be on your phone. You can’t not be paying attention.”
On a recent Saturday, she led the way to her horse, Zadkine (she calls him “Z”). He’s a Dutch warmblood. From his stall, Z reaches with his mouth for the lead rope in Morin’s hand and gives it a tug. He’s ready. So is she.
‘Ishould have stayed in Puerto Rico,” said Julio Santiago (shown here), holding his head in his hands, mockdramatically.
“I should have stayed in Los Angeles,” said his partner, James Adams.
The two men most definitely are joking, having just described a previous weekend in February in which outside temperatures fell to 15 degrees below zero. Inside this old house of theirs, on a pine-lined country lane on the western edge of the Berkshire Hills, in Hillsdale, New York, the heat had stopped working. And of course, they had houseguests—several—in what has become a veritable conga line of weekend visitors hailing from far-flung points. To visit their Berkshire home, one can expect to eat well and have a lot of laughs. But guests also
must abide a form of proselytizing.
“We want everyone to move here,” said Santiago, a Spanish-born, Puerto Rican-raised optician who transplanted his celebrated eyewear boutique and art gallery, called Artsee, from New York City to Hudson, in 2020.
Why did the couple choose the Berkshire Hills? “I mean, look,” said Santiago, directing attention to their stunning view of terraced mountains.
The couple met in 1998. Adams, raised in the colder climes of Canton, Ohio, has been described by the Hollywood Reporter as one of “Hollywood’s Top 100 Attorneys.” He keeps an office in Los Angeles and New York City. The Berkshires remains his relief valve in a pressure-cooked career. “I always tell everyone, ‘Julio has the far better life,’”
he said. “He gets to stay here all week.”
They purchased this place, built circa 1790s, in 2015. The more Santiago soaked in the Berkshires, the more difficult it became for him to leave for the lower lands. The Berkshire getaway, for him, became a permanent home when he simply decided he’d had enough of city life. In 2019, they purchased a building on Warren Street in Hudson, where Artsee has its new home, after a 20-year run in Manhattan. The denizens of Hudson have since absorbed the singular and whimsical life lessons imported to the area by means of Santiago. Those lessons include: Eyewear first; outfit second. Expect, no; adventure, yes. “It’s all an adventure. That’s the only way,” said Santiago, in his stylish eyewear—and warm flannel. B
This modernist home in Great Barrington has glass walls, views for days, and warm, inviting spaces for everyday family living.
BY FRANCESCA OLSEN
PHOTOS BY IWAN BAAN & BEN GARVER
The Flower House—named for the petallike appearance when it’s seen from above—was born when owners Doug and Lara Holtz embarked on creating a weekend retreat space for their family. Initially, they planned to build an addition onto Doug’s parents’ home, comprised of two 1790 barns from New Hampshire, reassembled in the Berkshires. But in talking with them, Andrew Heid, founding principal of No Architecture, a firm based in New York City, realized that “what they really wanted was a separate house.”
What they created has turned the Holtz property into a family compound of sorts. Heid suggested dividing the property, and worked with his team to create a new site separate enough from the existing structure that it was distinct, but close enough to take advantage of shared outdoor space.
The Holtz family reached out to Heid’s firm after seeing photos of another project his team did in Oregon, a light-filled, “glass house”-style home that takes advantage of the site’s natural topography to simultaneously create a sense of privacy and vast openness. The Holtz property is surrounded by land in trust; the surrounding view inspired Heid to create the flower-shaped design, which offers 360-degree views of the Berkshires.
“The open layout allowed us to make the perimeter transparent and create socially convivial spaces that amplify the view and take advantage of natural ventilation and cooling,” Heid said. “The landscape, at every scale, really played an important role.”
The house’s six interconnected pavilions are oriented to let in as much light as possible, making for an efficient structure that can absorb more energy than it uses. The house has no conventional walls, and conceals the elements of daily living into L- and T-shaped partitions which can be closed off for privacy at night. A central courtyard and open entry pavilion help connect the structure to the nature around it, with native plants that evoke an alpine meadow, along with many ways to enjoy *
the surrounding land, from an outdoor shower to a stone fire pit. No Architecture hired mostly local contractors and tradespeople for the project, from millwork to landscaping.
A geothermal pump heats the house, and Heid used as many sustainable techniques as possible, from triple-pane glazed windows that create a high level of insulation to sustainable mass timber (thick, compressed wood layers with a high load-bearing capability) and carbon-sequestering concrete, which adds recycled carbon dioxide during the mixing process to reduce carbon footprint. To Heid, it’s not just a question of saving energy. “The race to net zero is something that we as a profession have to address, radically and very quickly, to decarbonize,” he said.
During the pandemic, the Holtz family spent much of their time at Flower House, growing a deeper appreciation for the space and its surroundings. “It was exciting to see how the space took on a life of its own,” Heid said. “That’s also at the heart of sustainability: balancing spiritual, artistic, ecological, and social harmony. The view is very spiritually moving. It’s still hard to believe this all came together on that site.” B
Six interconnected pavilions make a flower shape, above. The home’s courtyard, left, is filled with native plants and deciduous trees, offering shade in the summer and sun in the winter, as well as year-round thermal insulation.
spend a day with Roberta McCulloch-Dews
With warm weather right around the corner, this local professional, volunteer, and mentor— and Hinsdale resident—is dreaming of her perfect day.
9:00 a.m. | My morning begins with an hour-long workout at On Pointe Barre and Fitness on Williams Street in Pittsfield. Jill, the instructor, is amazing and works her magic to keep us focused and energized.
10:30 a.m. | After a quick change, I head to Haven on Franklin Street in Lenox for a yummy breakfast of French toast, eggs, and some people watching.
11:30 a.m. | Next stop: the Catwalk Boutique on Church Street. It’s shopping with a purpose (proceeds benefit the Berkshire Humane Society) and I love their unique finds.
12:30 p.m. | For some solitude, I make my way to the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge and take in the surrounding beauty.
2:00 p.m. | Meet up with a few friends at Olivia’s Overlook in West Stockbridge for a short afternoon hike. It’s a magical place, an easy to moderate hike that rewards you with a breathtaking view.
4:30 p.m. | On the way home to change for dinner, I check in at The Spot on Tyler Street in Pittsfield for my favorite drink, the Vacay Smoothie.
6:30 p.m. | Arrive at Tanglewood. The experience is made even better with good company and a basket filled with delicious treats. An assortment of crackers, vegan cheese, fruit, and chocolate from Guido’s is a must-have. They also carry a really great non-alcoholic wine called Töst that I love.
9:00 p.m. | Still enjoying Tanglewood under the stars.
North Adams, Mass.
massmoca.org
