Rural Intelligence (Page 745)

Food

Step One: Poach a Chicken

In uncertain times (is there any greater understatement?), comfort food can do wonders, if only for a moment. A shared meal soothes frazzled nerves, and creates a sense of communal pleasure and ease. For some, mac 'n cheese is the ultimate. Don't get me wrong, I love

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Arts

A Choreographer Climbs the Walls at Bard

The Richard B. Fisher Center helped put Bard College on the cultural map, and now the Fisher Center is putting dancers on the roof of the iconic Frank Gehry-designed building. This weekend and next, site-specific Canadian choreographer Noémie Lafrance will premiere a work called Rapture on the brushed

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Food

A Family Vineyard Takes Root

A lot of deskbound urban executives dream of one day owning a vineyard, but few pursue the dream as studiously as Carlo DeVito, owner with his wife Dominique of the Hudson-Chatham Winery. Instead of building castles in the air, DeVito, Editorial Director of Sterling Publishing ("We all,"

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Arts

Music: Something to Talk About

The first time cellist Yehuda Hanani saw his future wife, Hannah, he was in a taxi heading to his apartment from the airport following an out-of-town engagement. Stopped at a red light at the intersection 95th and Broadway, where the Thalia used to be, he saw two young

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Community

Rhinecliff Hotel & Restaurant (pssst...it's open)

In Rhinebeck, where she lives with her family, Jan Greenberg, author of Hudson Valley Harvest: A Food Lovers Guide to Farms, Restaurants and Open-Air Markets (Countryman Press), was strategically positioned to keep an eye on the venerable-but-gone-to-seed Rhinecliff Hotel as new owner James Chapman pushed

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Arts

From Great Barrington to Off Broadway: Here Comes "Castronauts"

"The reputation of the Berkshires' being a hideout for artists is true," says Bobby Houston, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker (Mighty Times: The Children's March, 2004), who moved to Great Barrington a few years ago from his longtime home in California. "Castronauts was

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Parties

Berkshire Grown's Harvest Supper

For anyone who thinks that the Berkshires turns into Brigadoon when the weekenders and summer residents head back to Boston and New York, witness this: Hundreds of food fanatics and locavores packed the old stables at the Eastover resort in Lenox on Monday, September 15, to celebrate the work of

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Food

Pickles with A Soul from a Falls Village Farm

At the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center farm in northwestern Connecticut, they don't just grow potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage, they cultivate a new generation of Jewish farmers. Every summer and fall, two groups of 14 young men and women between the ages of 20 and 29 spend three

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Community

Third Thursday: An Extravagant Street Fair in Pittsfield

Every third Thursday from May through October, the city of Pittsfield gives itself the equivalent of an over-the-top Bar Mitzvah. Director of Cultural Development Megan Whilden manages to outdo herself each month, coordinating the creative community to turn the downtown into what was known in the go-go

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Food

Fiesta Mexicana: Viva Carnitas!

As a former (Los) Angeleno newly transplanted to the northeast, one of the things I (and my family) have pined for is Mexican food: authentic, great, Mexican food, which, sadly, can be hard to come by in this otherwise bountiful neck of the woods. But as I've settled

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Style

The Last Open Day of the Season

Ah the joys of snooping around other peoples' gardens, luxuriating in their seeming miles of brilliantly conceived, meticulously maintained, well-fed, deeply-mulched, weed-free planting beds, without personally having suffered a single twinge of sciatica or, indeed, so much as a broken nail. Devotees of the Garden Conservancy

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Arts

Romantic Music and Sexual Intrigue

Their relationship is the stuff of legend and, of course, song. When they met at the home of a mutual friend of both their parents, she was just nine, he eighteen, and her piano playing so inspired him that he resolved to give up law to study music with her

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