All posts by Frances Marion Platt

Mushroom Shed Festival on May 10 brings community mushroom gardening to Huguenot Street

Mushroom Shed Festival on May 10 brings community mushroom gardening to Huguenot Street

Rosendale has its annual Pickle Festival, Saugerties its Garlic Festival, Margaretville its Cauliflower Festival. New Paltz is among many towns in the Hudson Valley with a seasonal celebration of their apple crops. But is there a community in the region as yet that has claimed the humble-but-delicious mushroom as the centerpiece of an annual feast? That prospect may be in New Paltz’s foreseeable future, if Amanda Heidel has her way.

Opus 40 opens its busy season of performances, walks & workshops

Opus 40 opens its busy season of performances, walks & workshops

May 10 to October 31: Harvey Fite, one of the founders of the Fine Arts Department at Bard College, spent time restoring Mayan ruins at Copán in Honduras while studying Mesoamerican indigenous sculpture, and in the process learned how to do dry-key stone masonry, a technique that uses gravity to create stable stone structures without mortar. In 1938 he purchased an abandoned quarry in High Woods as a source for bluestone to sculpt, and began to position some of his larger pieces in that outdoor setting.

New Paltz Historic Preservation Commission Art Exhibit now on exhibit at library

New Paltz Historic Preservation Commission Art Exhibit now on exhibit at library

Works by Cami Fischer, Lana Privitera, Maureen Rogers and Agnes Devereaux took top honors in the fifth annual exhibit, which calls for submissions of “artwork that focuses on and is inspired by local and area historic landmarks, landscapes and architectural details, and explores the theme of preservation, and life within a historic context.” Works will be on display in the Elting Memorial Library’s Ron Steinberg Reading & Meeting Room until May 4.

Avengers: Endgame shot scenes in Ulster, Dutchess

Avengers: Endgame shot scenes in Ulster, Dutchess

Let’s say you’re not already burning to know if and how the surviving Avengers will manage to reverse some of the harm (killing half of the universe’s sentient beings with a snap of his magic-gauntleted fingers) wrought by big baddie Thanos at the end of last year’s Avengers: Infinity War. Would it motivate you at all to know that some of the epic footage (all shot in IMAX, by the way) was gleaned right here in the Hudson Valley?

An Evening of Poetry and Song with Garrison Keillor benefits Performing Arts of Woodstock

An Evening of Poetry and Song with Garrison Keillor benefits Performing Arts of Woodstock

Saturday, Apr. 27: At age 76, with nine volumes of Lake Wobegon stories in print, a pile of awards including a Peabody, a Steinbeck, a Grammy and medals from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Humanities, not to mention having undergone heart surgery in 2001 and suffered a stroke in 2009, one would think that Keillor would be ready to settle into a comfortable retirement.