Live at the Linda: Ira Glass and Terry Gross
Buy your tickets now to see Terry Gross this fall.
If free mugs and CDs of Alan Chartock’s interviews with Scott Ritter no longer entice you to donate to WAMC, here’s a chance to get something special in exchange for a $100 contribution: a ticket to live evenings with two of NPR’s biggest stars—Ira Glass and Terry Gross—at “The Linda,” WAMC’s performing arts studio in downtown Albany.
Glass has been hosting This American Life (which WAMC airs Saturdays at 4 PM) since its inception in 1995 in Chicago. He will bring a version of his radio broadcast to The Linda on September 20. (He now also has a TV spinoff on Showtime.) With his nasal voice and nerd glasses and ability to synthesize literature and journalism, Glass, who has been working for NPR for 30 years, epitomizes the best of geek chic.
Terry Gross is the Barbara Walters of radio: She has interviewed hundreds of movie directors, politicians, soldiers, musicians, and authors. Or maybe Gross is more accurately the Oprah of the airwaves, for she’s highly empathetic and curious on Fresh Air, which has been broadcast nationally five days a week for one-hour since 1987. (And on WAMC Monday - Friday at 7 PM.)
An added bonus: If you buy your tickets now, you won’t feel guilty when you tune into another radio stations during the upcoming fall fund drive.
Ira Glass at The Linda
September 20 at 8 PM; Tickets $100
Terry Gross at The Linda
November 14 at 8 PM; Tickets $100
339 Central Avenue, Albany; 518.465.5233 ext. 3 .
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/31/08 at 09:15 PM • Permalink
To Your Health…and the Environment’s
It’s the rural equivilent of an urban legend: Everyone knows someone or has heard of someone who has a windmill that creates so much excess energy that, when the electric bill arrives, the company owes him.
Now’s your chance to become that guy.
This weekend 100 exhibitors, including, be assured, more than one authority on wind power, will gather, rain or shine, at the lodge and under tents at the Butternut Ski Resort for the Green & Healthy Living Expo. Experts on everything from acupuncture to organic zucchini will be on hand to tell and sell. There will be demonstrations, lectures, and authorities on every aspect of good, clean, healthy living to give advice. So, whether seeking to improve your carbon footprint or your health, you’ll find everything you need right here.
July 12 & 13
Green & Healthy Living Expo
Ski Butternut, 380 State Road (Rte 23), Great Barrington
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/09/08 at 11:07 AM • Permalink
Reality Check: The WAMC Public Radio Fund Drive
Alan Chartock and Joe Donahue at work
For the past week, I have been squirming in my car. I get goose bumps followed by stomach cramps. Like you, I have been hearing the promos for WAMC‘s tri-annual Fund Drive, and this season’s are particularly irksome and I can never figure out if Joe & Selma & Alan & Julia think they are being ironic or sardonic? Am I supposed to be laughing with them or at them?
But I am listening. Indeed, I was once told that WAMC Northeast Public Radio gets more listeners during the fund drive than at any other time, because it really is like an audio version of a Christopher Guest movie (think: A Mighty Wind and Best in Show.) Is it a parody of a public radio station fund drive or is it the real thing? Did I really just hear Dr. Alan Chartock and David Galletly sing “Happy Birthday” to one of the donors like the waiters in the “early-bird” restaurants that I used to go to with my grandparents in Florida?
It is a moral dilemma every second. For instance, right now, at 7 AM on Monday, there is a challenge grant from a man in Lakeville, CT, who has pledged to match $1 for every $3 raised by 9 AM up to $25,000. (And since I know many people in Lakeville, I wonder if I know this anonymous “great man” in Alan’s words.) But there are no gifts and premiums being offered! I know I am being shallow. This is a charity after all. But I also know from previous fund drives that there are all sorts of giveaways when Joe Donahue and Selma Kaplan are doing their spiels during the day. They always seem to be tasting cheesecakes and talking about the wonderful country inns where you can spend the night. How many times have I listened to Selma salivate over the airwaves as she reads the menu from some restaurant in Saratoga Springs while Joe tells us how much he loves creme brulee or some other dessert and how he would have trouble making up his mind if he won this gift certificate?
Yes, Rural Intelligence is going to donate right now so the fund drive won’t last one-minute longer than it has to. (Although, to be honest, there’s a perverse pleasure in knowing that Alan is sweating it out every second—karmic payback for all the times he is rude to Rex Smith and Elisa Streeter on The Media Project.) I can’t imagine driving without being able to listen to my favorites: Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, Piano Jazz, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, and, of course, The Roundtable and The Congressional Corner. So we are going to give. You should too.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/02/08 at 07:05 AM • Permalink
Whose Mount Is It Anyway?
“This is a sorry sight.”
—Macbeth
Update, July 6, 2008: Granted a six-month reprieve by the banks, The Mount had raised $1,000,000 by mid-June—just one-third the amount needed by October 31 to forestall foreclosure. Along with it’s other troubles (detailed below), The Mount may be victim of a trend being whispered about by members of the boards of historic landmarks nationwide: tourists’ interest appears to be on the wane. Ticket sales are rumored to be down at sites as established as Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and Old Salem in Winston-Salem, NC. To survive, sites both within our own community (Clermont, Olana) and beyond are trying to wean themselves of their dependence on tourists by becoming community resources. Of course, new programs cost money. —M.B.
“The plot is Shakespearean,” said my friend the Berkshire Babe, who was in the audience Monday night at Lenox Town Hall, where more than 100 people attended a public forum on the future of The Mount, the Edith Wharton Estate and Gardens. It’s become clear that the current financial crisis (owing millions to Berkshire Bank) has a complex, tragic and compelling backstory, which must be why The New Yorker has assigned reporter Rebecca Mead to write a feature article that is due out later this month
The Mount is a regional Rorschach Test--it means different things to different people. The business community sees it as a tourist attraction (along with Tanglewood, the Norman Rockwell Museum et al.) The cultural community considers it a literary landmark. History buffs treasure it as a valuable vestige of the Berkshires’ Gilded Age. And locals with long memories think of it as the birthplace of Tina Packer’s 31-year-old Shakespeare & Company, the theater troupe that first brought the derelict Mount back to life when it was in residence there, putting on plays in the house and in the woods. They also remember that it was Stephanie Copeland, who ran The Mount from 1993 until last week when she resigned, who first tried to evict Shakespeare & Company in the 1990s, which became an ugly, public battle and the wounds have apparently never healed. After all, Copeland had once been Shakespeare’s & Company’s director of development.
Copeland sat silently in the back of the Lenox Town Hall on Monday night. “She was shaking,” observed the Berkshire Babe. “She may have screwed up financially, but she did do a pretty remarkable job restoring the house and gardens. You can’t take that away from her. I keep thinking, poor Stephanie.” But others are less charitable in judging Copeland’s accomplishments and bemoan that the house is basically a shell that does not animate Wharton’s life. They say the installation a few years ago of decorator show-house rooms (which were supposed to generate publicity and tickets sales) was not only confusing but also counterproductive.
Gordon Travers, the only member of The Mount’s board of trustees to live in the Berkshires (he has a weekend house in Sheffield), wanted to focus on the future. “It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback,” he said. “In hindsight the wrong decisions were made.” One of those decisions was the 2005 purchase of Edith Wharton’s library for $2.6 from an English book collector without having the money in the bank to pay for it. “It was something of a Hail Mary,” said Travers. He thinks The Mount is a better institution for owning the library but could prosper without it: “We would sell the library if the right buyer came along if it meant we could save the property.”
Travers explained that the Berkshire Bank was doing its best to be patient with The Mount, but that the bank has a fiduciary responsibility to its stockholders and employees. He said the threat of foreclosure is very real and that the bank would probably have no trouble finding someone with deep pockets who would like to buy the property and turn it into a private residence. Having raised $580,000 in the past five weeks, the board hopes that it can convince the bank to hold on until the summer when The Mount will be able to use admission receipts to pay for operating expenses while continuing its quest to raise $3 million to satisfy the bank and win a $3 million matching grant (payable over five years) from an anonymous donor. “We’re in a triage situation,” said Travers, who noted that the five member board needs to be three or four times larger. “It is of critical importance to us that a number of these new positions be filled by local Berkshire people with the time, commitment, vision and fund-raising capability to achieve success,” he said.
Like an episode of Gilmore Girls, a quirky parade of locals came to the microphone to share thoughts about how to save The Mount. Nancy Goldberg, the owner of Belvoir Terrace, a nearby summer camp, was blunt: “I suggest you get fifteen people from New York City to give you $1 million a piece.” Joy Schmidt, the head of the Friends of the Lanesboro Library, brought her knitting with her to the podium. “I am knitting a prayer shawl and I wish I could wrap it around The Mount,” she said. When Tina Packer stood to speak, she received rousing applause. She looked Travers and fellow board member Hannah Burns straight in the eye: “You’re strangers to us. You are not part of the community.” She said she wants to see The Mount succeed but does not believe that will happen unless a new direction is taken. “It can’t live as a cold museum,” she said. “The library does not hack it. The library does not belong to the people. The plays in the woods belong to the people.”
The notion that Packer would return to The Mount (which is just down the road from Shakespeare & Company’s campus) and put on plays now that her rival was felled certainly seemed like a plot twist worthy of Shakespeare himself.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/02/08 at 11:53 AM • Permalink
The Age of Innocence is Over
“The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.”
—Edith Wharton
David Dashiell
The Mount, novelist Edith Wharton’s estate and gardens in Lenox, MA, is fighting for its survival. The not-for-profit’s board must raise $3 million by March 24 to keep the bank from initiating foreclosure proceedings on the property, which is a National Historic Landmark and a major Berkshires tourist attraction. As reported last Saturday by The New York Times and the Berkshire Eagle, the Mount missed a $30,000 mortgage payment in February that precipitated the financial crisis.
“People ask me, Why can’t you just raise $30,000 a month, but it actually costs $100,000 a month to operate the Mount,” says executive director Stephanie Copeland. She told Rural Intelligence that six of the 11 full-time staffers have been laid off, and everyone who is left is devoting all their time to fund-raising. “The bank wants to know that we are a good prospect going forward. We are reaching out to our list of 9,000 people around the world who are friends of The Mount.”
These friends are being told that their donations will be returned if the campaign is unsuccessful. “Any contribution that is made, be it by check or credit card, will not be processed unless the bank agrees to a restructuring,” says Copeland. “To save postage we won’t return the checks but we’ll rip them up.”
The Mount has been praised for the meticulous restoration of its formal garden. It was featured as a top-notch example of historic preservation on Bob Vila’s Home Again. But some critics suggest that the Mount’s financial problems reflect the institution’s identity crisis. Although it hosts lectures, symposiums and other cultural events, it is not now nor are there plans for it to become a full-fledged house museum. Visitors are often disappointed to find that the drawing room and dining room are typical designer show house rooms by New York City society decorators Charlotte Moss and Bunny Williams.
There are plans to recreate Wharton’s world in only two rooms. “We have no original furniture, and the rooms that will be furnished to look as they did in Wharton’s time will be her bedroom suite where she wrote and her library,” explains Copeland. “The other rooms, since we have none of her original furnishings, are dedicated to interpreting Wharton’s influence on interior design by having decorators demonstrate her influence on their art.” Wharton was, of course, the author, with Odgen Codman Jr, of the seminal 1897 design book The Decoration of Houses. “This season, we hope to celebrate French design and have an all new decorator installation,” says Copeland. ‘“But that of course depends on the success of the Save the Mount campaign.”
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 02/27/08 at 04:54 PM • Permalink
The Toughest Ticket in Town
One of the great mysteries of our region is why the secretive Dowmel Foundation has made it so difficult to get the free tickets for its annual lecture series that brings some of the great thinkers and newsmakers of our time to the auditorium of Monument Mountain Regional High School.
If you don’t know about the Dowmel ticket distribution system, it works like this: Tickets are distributed a couple of weeks before a lecture on a first come, first serve basis beginning at 8 AM on a Friday at the Berkshire Museum and at 8:30 AM on a Saturday at Monument Mountain (with the school doors opening at 7 AM), which means you have to get up before dawn if you want any chance of snagging a pair of ducats (limit two per customer.)
Rural Intelligence tracked down Roberta Haas, who has been in charge of recruiting Dowmel speakers for the past decade. She was not quite sure how the ticket distribution tradition began. She says that the system was designed to make sure full-time residents would have an edge on getting tickets (which is also why the lectures are always held during the week.) Haas revealed that the lecture series is not funded to go on forever. “Its final year will be 2010 and then it’s over,” she says.
If you want tickets for the last lecture of this season on March 4 when economist Jeremy Rifkin [photo] will deliver a talk entitled “The Hydrogen Economy"-- you will need to be at the Berkshire Museum on February 15 at 8 AM or at Monument Mountain Regional High School on February 16 at 8:30 AM.
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