She's Got Moxie! Saluting Creative Women of the Berkshires

Writer Bess Hochstein, who seems to know everybody worth knowing in the Berkshires, reports from Lenox: A brilliant sunset cast a festive glow in the lobby of Founders Theatre at Shakespeare & Company on March 13, as the Berkshire creative community gathered to fete the recipients of the She’s Got Moxie! awards, a central event of the first annual Berkshire Festival of Women in the Arts. Chef Michael Ballon of Castle Street Café prepared canapés as guests sipped Moxie cocktails, a luscious red libation featuring pomegranate juice with a star-fruit garnish. Before the awards ceremony, Jacob’s Pillow and Community Access to the Arts (CATA) presented “Common Ground,” a dance performance featuring a diverse cast of women drawn from the community, choreographed by Dawn Lane, founder of The Moving Company, a program of the CATA committed to nurturing the creativity of people with disabilities through the visual and performing arts. Eugenie Sills, founder and publisher of The Women’s Times, conceived of the Moxies to celebrate women who have launched bold, successful, large-scale creative initiatives in the past five years. Sara Katzoff, co-founder of the Berkshire Fringe Festival (photographed above with Hilary Somers Deely); Kelley Ryan Vickery, founder of the Berkshire International Film Festival; and Ellen Spear and Laurie Norton Moffatt, co-founders of Berkshire Creative Economy Council received their awards from other Berkshire cultural luminaries, including Tina Packer, Ella Baff, Julianne Boyd, and Kevin Sprague. Honoree Vickery took some time in her speech to explain the results of her Internet search on the word “moxie,” which was one of the first mass-produced (and Massachusetts-produced) soft drinks, initially marketed as a medicine to prevent softening of the brain and to promote spunk. These days, the word connotes guts, courage, or chutzpah. But we suspect the ever-tasteful Eugenie Sills chose it in place of a more crude expression for a male anatomical feature that represents a certain risk-taking bravery: cujones.—B.H.