Stage & Screen

FDR site screens new documentary on Frances Perkins, architect of the New Deal

FDR site screens new documentary on Frances Perkins, architect of the New Deal

Sunday, Nov. 3: Even if Frances Perkins hadn’t been the first woman ever to serve in a US presidential cabinet, or the longest-serving Secretary of Labor ever (12 years), she would still deserve a shining place in 20th-century history. She was a suffragist, worked with Jane Addams as a Hull House volunteer, advocated passionately for female workers after witnessing the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, became the highest-paid woman in New York State government as Industrial Commissioner, taught Sociology at Adelphi University, fought against child labor and for unemployment and a minimum wage – all before she even joined the FDR administration.

Colony hosts “Forbidden Fruit: Haunted Hotel”

Colony hosts “Forbidden Fruit: Haunted Hotel”

Saturday, Nov. 2: When Colony opens its woody, elegant and historic space to the surging popularity of the drag and cabaret arts this weekend, that’ll be my child – Strawberry, six-foot-seven in heels – commanding the stage on which they still occasionally let me play guitar, a six-string fretted instrument popular in the Renaissance. As I have watched Strawberry’s bookings rise in the last few years, taking them to Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Calgary and filling their pockets with bills, I can’t help but notice that locally, they play all the same rooms I do, or used to. From the New Paltz bars to BSP and now to Woodstock’s elegant and historic room, I struggle to find gigs, while my child and their ilk are “killing it.” Circle of Life stuff, I guess.

The Laundromat deftly employs dark humor in a socioeconomic call to action

The Laundromat deftly employs dark humor in a socioeconomic call to action

Meryl Streep plays Ellen Martin, the fictionalized widow of one of the victims of the 2005 wreck of the tour boat Ethan Allen on Lake George. Her insurance claim falls through the holes in a multileveled net of phony corporations that have bought one another out to a point where there’s no accountability left, and mild-mannered Ellen gets ticked off enough to pursue the perpetrators with increasingly singleminded purpose.