More Hot Tickets: Plan Ahead or You’ll Be Sor….

Rural Intelligence Community Now that the holiday hubbub is behind us, the season for fireside strategizing kicks off. Along with all those home improvement plans, seed catalogs, and investment prospectuses, consider a couple of shrewd maneuvers to make life rosier in the months ahead.

• This year’s IS 183 Gala is not until April but tickets are expected to sell out early for this wildly popular annual costume ball, because the venue this time is both smaller and way more glamorous than usual. When built by a Vanderbilt, the house that is now called Elm Court Inn in Stockbridge was the largest shingle-style single-family home in the US. Even so, it has limited capacity, so we recommend that you commit pronto for Saturday, April 9, then spend the intervening months coming up with a costume to suit the theme, Anime House.
• Register now for children ages 5 - 12 at the Winter Break Art Camp at Omi International Arts Center; outdoor activities in The Fields Sculpture Park, art projects, yoga, stories, games, and sledding. Sign up for a single day or for the entire week. February 21 - 25; 9 a.m. - 3 p.m.; $50/day, $225/week
• Reserve now for the perennially sold-out Berkshire Botanical Garden annual winter lecture. This year’s speaker, Margaret Roach, former top editor of Martha Stewart Living and, for more than a decade before that, gardening editor there, will talk about, “At Home in the 365-day Garden.” Margaret Roach’s non-stop, year-round approach to gardening is the topic of her highly successful garden blog, www.Awaytogarden.com where she provides informative posts about her 2.3 acre, zone 5B garden on the NY/MA boarder. She will also introduce her eagerly-awaited memoir, And I Shall Have Some Peace There, a chronicle of her recent transition from Manhattan editorial titan to full-time Columbia County writer/gardener. Though not yet published, her book has already received a rave, gold-star review from Kirkus. Saturday, February 19 (snow date February 20); 2 p.m. at Monument Mountain Regional High School, Great Barrington.

• Become a Friend of Tanglewood now for as little as $75/person or $150/couple (100% tax deducible) and get to buy tickets for the upcoming season, including for the James Taylor concerts, before they go on sale to the general public on February 13. For those who must travel to attend these concerts, rooms should be reserved as soon as tickets are secured.

• The Wilco Solid Sound Festival at MASS MoCA in North Adams isn’t until June. Courtyard D, the huge space where the concert will be held again this year, is commodious, so tickets may be available, as they were for this popular event’s first year, up to the final week. Rooms, however, were not to be found for miles around in 2010, so anyone who plans on staying over would be well advised to book both the concert and their rooms right now. Porches, the hotel directly across the street from MASS MoCA , is an obvious first choice.

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