In late 2015 and early 2016, the Woodstock community was shocked into action by a string of drug-related deaths of young people. Since then, progress has been made on enforcement and treatment. But the problem is persistent.
How different would Woodstock be today if not for a meeting arranged by the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman?
The Phoenicia Festival of the Voice returns for its seventh season beginning Friday, August 4 and finishing Sunday, August 6.
The Matagiri Sri Aurobindo Center will commemorate its 49th birthday with an evening of classical Indian music and theater at 7 p.m. Wednesday, August 2 at the Mountain View Studio. Matagiri is a nonprofit organization located just outside of Woodstock dedicated to spiritual growth and the evolution of human consciousness.
Culturally, the Catskills are a bright mosaic of urban and rural mores and values. But scratch the surface and we have all the problems of rural Appalachia: addiction, poverty, a greying population, a general purposelessness that siphons the brightest of our young people out of our schools and our communities.
At last June’s BioBlitz, scientists and expert naturalists worked with local residents to identify 280 species of plants and wildlife at the Thorn Preserve in Woodstock. On July 28 and July 29, the third annual BioBlitz will again bring citizen scientists and volunteers to the 60-acre preserve for a search through meadow, forest, stream, pond, and wetlands, in an event that is free and open to the public.
The sixth annual Mayapple Writers’ Retreat, which takes place at Byrdcliffe from July 27 to 31, will present four public readings of poetry and prose by regional and national writers at a quartet of local venues including two restaurants, the Woodstock Library, and Byrdcliffe’s historic Villetta Inn.
In the attic, I open another box and find canceled checks going back to 1982. Did my parents ever throw anything out?
The Woodstock Comedy Festival will introduce cabaret into its repertoire in a fundraising event preceding the fifth annual festival. Cabaret…Classics…Comedy! will take place at 8 p.m. Saturday, July 29 at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, and will star composer and comic Jimmy Roberts, accompanied by “King Clarinet” Felix Peikli.
Challenges include traffic and parking problems; the town’s loss of mortgage tax income due to the numbers of Brooklynites purchasing homes with cash; a loss of long-term rentals to the Airbnb phenomenon, and shifts to the local equalization rate that are getting fueled by short term rentals which raise the value of local homes not seen until after they sell.