I’ve been wanting to Hike the Hopper since the first weekend I lived here in summer. In June 1999, after my junior year, I shared a roomy apartment with college friends on the first floor of a big yellow house on Park Street. I wanted to pick strawberries, and someone […]
Read articleBackyard blackberry season begins — BTW column
I’ve just spent an hour or so negotiating with the blackberry tangle in the back yard. My landlord gets all the credit for its growing there in the sun by the back fence, and every time I take out the compost I check on the state of the berries on the […]
Read article‘The Clean House’ cracks open love, illness and joy at Williamstown Theater Festival
A woman with a spreading illness sits on a balcony, tasting apples by the sea. A younger friend sits with her, warm and afraid at the same time. The younger woman has recently lost her parents, and she remembers them alive and in love. “They laugh until laughing makes them […]
Read articleRare butterflies thrive at Lime Kiln Farm sanctuary in Sheffield
Berkshire Naturalist Thom Smith takes a walk through a Mass Audubon property in Sheffield. From beginning to end, a visitor to Lime Kiln Farm Wildlife Sanctuary would be hard pressed to find a more beautiful walk that includes vistas of the Taconic Mountains beyond open hayfields and history with glimpses […]
Read articleJacob’s Pillow Dance Festival celebrates 85 years in Becket
It is July, 1932. An athletic, tanned and slender man with dark hair cut very short takes a break from his morning’s work. He stretches in the sun, unselfconsciously wearing little. He is laying a new floor to turn the barn into a dance studio. By the next summer, people in this […]
Read articleMastheads writing residency brings writers outdoors in the Berkshires
“Like the giddy time I met and danced with my wife-to-be at that roof-deck party with a full moon rising above us, and I was amazed I could have that much fun sober. …” In the wake of a hurricane a paramedic is riding an ambulance back to the hospital. […]
Read articleWhere Storms Are Born electrifies the Williamstown Theatre Festival
Two boys sit on a fire escape together, tracing the stars in the city sky. They are brothers, and they have lost their father. Now the older brother is a memory, and the younger brother and his mother are facing his loss, in the world premiere of Harrison David Rivers’ Where […]
Read articleFarmers Markets ripen across the Berkshires in summer
A table at the front holds hand-turned bowls. I once saw that dark rippling on creamy wood in an old farmhouse near here, and the man who lived there told me it was spalted maple, and fungi cause that pattern, but they often leave the wood too brittle to work, so […]
Read articleMeleko Mokgosi infuses everyday scenes with light
Cheetahs raise their hackles against an abstract background like blown sand. Two boys play with a sleek black dog in a spare, shaded room, in a bar of bright sun from the doorway. …
Read articleRagtime rocks the foundations and lifts strong voices at Barrington Stage — BTW column
Make them hear you. Make them hear you. His voice is low and proud, angry and resolute. His voice is bass, and he carries it to the back of the hall. Darnell Abraham is Coalhouse Walker Jr., tall and formal in a dark red suit jacket and a bowler hat, […]
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