Rural Intelligence (Page 653)

Parties

The Mahaiwe Hits a High Note with Deborah Voigt

On Saturday, May 21, in Great Barrington, opera’s great dramatic soprano Deborah Voigt performed a rare intimate recital at the Mahaiwe Gala to benefit the theater's year-round programming fund. Local opera lovers were thrilled to have Voigt all to themselves, having just seen her star turn

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Food

AgriCulture: Animal Farm

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes: It is the time of the big change-over at Turkana Farms. Last week our veteran prize ram, Suleyman the Magnificent left for his new home at Pine Hills Farm

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Arts

BIFF and Pittsfield Honor Native Kent Jones

This weekend, June 2 through June 5, the Sixth Annual Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF), will host screenings in theaters in Great Barrington and Pittsfield. In addition to some 70 independent feature films, documentaries and shorts from 15 countries, the festival includes Q&A sessions and panel discussions with

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Food

John Andrews: Reinvigorating the Farm to Table Restaurant

Dan Smith, the chef who opened John Andrews restaurant in 1991 in an old farmhouse in Egremont, MA (on the Berkshire/Columbia County border), has always cooked with as many local ingredients as possible. "They weren't as easy to come by back then," says Smith, who

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Parties

Williamstown Theatre Festival Summer Preview in Lenox

Last Thursday in Lenox, the kids put on a show in the barn. But what kids! What a barn! With a new, effervescent artistic director, Jenny Gersten (left with general manager Joe Finnegan) the storied Williamstown Theatre Festival is trying to woo residents of southern Berkshire County (and adjacent counties,

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Style

Style Shopping: At 3FortySeven Charisma Reigns

The building started life as an art deco service station. He started out as a Harvard-trained architect. Together, what they are in the process of becoming—3FortySeven is still very much a work in progress—is already far more exciting than either of those bio snippets would suggest. Not

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Food

Don't Shop! Save the Environment, Become a Forager

By Betsy Miller Food forager Russ Cohen has a shopping list that’s a little different. This week he’ll be looking for Dame’s Rocket Flower (left), which is currently rife along the margins of fields edging wooded areas. When he finds the white or purple flowers, he’ll

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Community

The Civil War: Frederic Church Makes a Statement

by Betsy Miller Before cameras were common, the cognoscenti learned about the physical world from paintings. Salons and art openings weren’t just for creative contemplation, they were opportunities to be educated. And the paintings of Frederic Edwin Church, among the country’s premier artists, were each received by an

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Food

Food, Glorious, Food! Guido's Grows in Pittsfield

As Tanglewood is to music, Guido’s Fresh Marketplace is to groceries. (Or, if you prefer, it’s to food what Jacob’s Pillow is to dance and MASS MoCA is to art.) Whichever analogy you like, it’s incontrovertible that the Masiero family’s grocery stores in Pittsfield and

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Community

Naumkeag: Tree Peonies and a Stanford White House

Apologies to Tolstoy, but, happy or not, rich families in any given milieu tend to be a lot alike—similar politics, values, virtues, blindspots. In contrast, Joseph Hodges Choate (1832 - 1917) and his wife Caroline (nee Sterling) are interesting because they were not quite standard-issue for their day. A

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Community

20 Questions for 'Money and Power' Author William D. Cohan

When RI last chatted with William D. Cohan, he had just published House of Cards, his New York Times best seller about the fall of Bear Stearns. Now he's written another insider account of Wall Street greed called Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the

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Parties

Community Access to the Arts Spring Benefit

The Berkshires have become synonymous with "culture," but it's not just the world class museums, concerts and plays that define the county. It's organizations like Community Access to the Arts (CATA), which was founded in 1993, to nurture and celebrate the creativity of people

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