Archive for the 'Outings' Category
Date: May 16, 2009
Time: 10:30 a.m.
Location: Elm Bank Reservation in Wellesley
On May 16th, 16 alumnae and 7 guests had a delightful tour of the Elm Bank Reservation in Wellesley. The Elm Bank Reservation, run by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, is a hidden gem in the middle of a busy suburb. The land was originally owned by the Cheney family and several beautiful homes still stand. The land passed through a number of hands until it was taken over by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. A total of 8 gardens are included in the reservation including a formal garden for one of the Cheney houses, a Goddess garden, a children’s garden, and several gardens and greenhouses for experimental plants. Volunteers maintain all the gardens and run the Master Gardener program. After the tour of the gardens and grounds, we had a picnic lunch with Patty Talbot ‘61. Patty owns a greenhouse business in Vermont and she was able to expertly answer everyone’s gardening questions. In addition, Patty told about her amazing trip to France to see Monet’s water lilies.
A few small world connections…..our tour guide, Dr. Scott Birney was formerly the head of Wellesley College’s astronomy department and gave tours of the observatory to Jane Lifton’s 4th grade classes. Carolyn Heath’s family has a garden in Corinth, NY which was designed and installed by Patty. Finally Kathy Knight’s daughter, Jenny, interned with Patty in Vermont.
In attendance were 16 BMC alumnae and 7 guests, including Louise Ambler ‘56, Susan Cummings ‘75, Caron Dubnoff ‘64, Carolyn Heath ‘48, Artemis Hionides ‘82, Margaret Hoag ‘86, Kathy Knight ‘59, Jane Lifton ‘76, Sandra Mills ‘61, Sydney Owens ‘64, Cecelia Parks ‘50, Barbara Powell ‘62, Cornelia Robart ‘61, Patty Talbot ‘61, Debbie Weiss ‘68, and Win Wilbur ‘55.
- Margaret Hoag ’86
May 16 2009 | Outings | Comments Off
Date: September 12, 2008
Location: Old Frog Pond Farm, Harvard, MA
Thirteen was the lucky number of Mawrtyrs and companions who visited the idyllic orchard property of Linda Hoffman ’78, sculptress and orchard mistress, on a clement Saturday, September 12th. Linda studied Fine Arts under Fritz Janshka where she expressed her love of the circus and pantomime. Today we saw this love of humor and the fantastical in Linda’s sculptures as she guided us around the property and in her atelier, guarded by a welded circus lion hanging from a catalpa tree.
A tall wooden clown-like sentry with sliding-barn-door feet indicates the mossy way to the Sculpture Path featuring larger metal and wood sculptures by Linda and others. We circled the pond enjoying the quiet woods on one side and the waterlily-edged pond on the other. A favorite piece was three 20-foot high gleaming bone-white fish “luminaries” leaping on struts dramatically reflected in the water. Another was a landing seabird formed of wooden pieces perched over a pretty pattern of scum in an eddy near the little spillway. Old saws are featured in several pieces such as the “saw-toothed crane.” The Sculpture Path with signs and maps will be open until Columbus Day from 1-5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
Linda has also produced books of photos of some of her wood-and-metal collages coupled with haiku-like poetry. She is also co-editor of Wild Apples a new Thoreau-inspired journal celebrating nature. Her sculptures have been exhibited at museums, gardens and parks throughout New England. In October, one of her tree harps will be installed at the Virginia Thurston Healing Garden in Harvard, a refuge and resource for people living with breast cancer.
For the seven years she has been in Harvard, Linda has lovingly restored the old orchard and farmhouse. Thanks to a meeting with a knowledgeable orchardist, she has created the only Pick-Your-Own organic orchard in Massachusetts. Her organic fruit is not cosmetically pristine, but the flavor is wonderful. “We have grown accustomed to perfect, unblemished apples,” says Linda, “but in Washington State where apples are grown in the desert, growers don’t have the same pressures found in New England orchards!” In recent years (since my childhood, in fact) I have seldom bitten into such a fine and crunchy MacIntosh, so unlike the leatherskinned pasty-fleshed supermarket fruit. How can I ever go back to those? Tonight will be an applesauce- and pie-fest. Maybe some crisp or pandowdy, too. Mmm.
Attendees were: Sharon Gershman ’00; Margaret Hoag ’86 with twins Joe and Mickey Valle; Sierra Laidman ’04; Jane Lifton ’76; Gwedolyn Miner ’92 with Claudia Miner and Jesse Looney; Cassandra Phillips-Sears ’04 and friend Daniel Bergey; Cornelia Robart ’61; Shubha Sunder ’05.
September 12 2008 | Outings | No Comments »
Date: February 26, 2008
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: Belmont High School auditorium, 221 Concord Ave, Belmont, MA
It was amazing to see how many braved the rain on Tuesday, February 26 to hear Greg Mortenson speak about his book Three Cups of Tea. Mawrtyrs Rosi Amador ʼ81, Sydney Owens ʼ64, Cornelia Robart ʼ61, Elizabeth Robart ʼ93 and Elizabeth Atkins ʼ46 attended. There were at least 1000 people there because the groups involved in the “Belmont Reads” project, had planned an earlier series of lectures: a Pakistani professor, a Muslim teacher of world history at Newton North High, a photo journalist who had been many times to Afghanistan interviewing women and children, and a kite making project for kids, so that everyone involved wanted to hear Mortenson himself.
He spoke passionately about his experiences and work, showing slides of people and projects but it didn’t sound at all like a canned speech. He began with an African proverb which he had heard as a child when his parents were working in Tanzania. “If you teach a boy, you teach an individual, but if you teach a girl, you teach a community,” and went on to show the correlation between lower pregnancy rates, better health etc. that resulted from this. He felt that schools being built with USAID
funds or by the Pakistani government were top down and cost much more than those built by working with the local people, listening to their needs and getting them involved. That would be the best counteraction against the Taliban. That’s the same complaint made by Sarah Chayes the NPR reporter who started a soap factory in Afghanistan.
Sydney Owens and a friend then returned to my (Elizabeth Atkins) house with me following the talk. Her friend was a nurse and remarked that she could tell from the way that Mortenson walked that his back must be hurting. He had already spoken that same day at Babson College and a high school. He said that the hardest thing was being away so much from his wife and children but he feels that it’s important to continue going back to Pakistan and Afghanistan and also to talk about his work. Volunteers were handing out copies of “The Journey of Hope”, a special report by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle of a trip taken last summer by the editor and the chief photographer to Pakistan and Afghanistan to document his work there and the Central Asia Institute which he founded.
February 26 2008 | Outings | No Comments »
Date: November 3, 2007
Time: 2 p.m.
Location: Boston University
An adventurous group of local Mawrters (Clare Nunes ’56, Carla Lynton ’55, Louise Ambler ’56, Roo Dane ’61, Beebe Nelson ’61, Barbara Powell ’62, Dorianne Low ’66, Linda Holiner ’75, Linda Holiner ’75) and 3 guests attended a first rate production of Macbeth, staged by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project. The cast was all women, a nice turn on the all-male casting of Shakespeare’s day. I’ve seen—and directed and acted in—all-female Shakespeare scenes and productions before. They make you hear things that, when said by men, you just accept.
Seeing the all-female Macbeth brought me back to the May Day plays we staged in the Cloisters, and in particular to the wonderful production of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle which I co-directed with Kate Evans ’61. All the pairs of characters were short and tall – that was our directorial trope. The allusion of the title was so completely lost on me – on all of us – that it wasn’t till I began to write this paragraph (nearly 50 years later) that I realized what it was. In case you’re not sure either, here’s the unexpurgated definition from Wiki:
A mortar and pestle is a tool used to crush, grind, and mix substances. The pestle is a heavy stick whose end is used for pounding and grinding, and the mortar is a bowl. The substance is ground between the pestle and the mortar.
Makes me wonder if Professor Arthur Colby Sprague, who was our faculty advisor, missed the allusion too.
In Macbeth, there’s a lot of talk about what men do and what women do, and there’s Macbeth’s famous “bear men only”, addressed to Lady M when she is being particularly horrid. But the challenges to one’s assumptions also come in more subtle ways in this production.
I found Marya Lowry’s Macbeth superb. Her every word was intelligible (as, in fact, were almost all the other words in the play). She had gravitas and grace and beauty, and oh my it’s a horrid tale. I have never been so aware as in this production of the idiocy of Macbeth’s turn-around. S/he comes on stage and delivers what amounts to about 10 or 20 lines about how stupid it would be to kill Duncan, how things are just going really well now, how when you do stuff like that it’s really hard, as s/he says later, to “trammel up the consequences.” It takes Lady M about 30 lines to convince him otherwise, and somehow it’s even harder to take, even stupider and more unbelievable, when the actors are female.
Paula Plum as Lady M was also superb. The most bewitching moment in her performance for me was her hand-washing scene. How could anyone do that in a way that is new and fresh and horrifying? She did, licking at her hands, scrubbing them with short desperate strokes.
MacDuff and Lady MacDuff were played by the same actor, Sarah Newhouse. She was wonderful as Lady MacDuff, perhaps not quite so on as MacDuff – but that scene when he learns of her death – “all my pretty chicks at one fell swoop?” – had me in tears. I think the grip, for me, was “my country” – the scene made me reflect on my country. I’ve been imagining George W. Bush playing Lady Macbeth and trying, madly, to wash his hands – it somehow seems the only fitting ending for our horrible 8 years.
In our sophomore year Kate directed me in Katherine and Petruccio, a one act cobbled from the Taming of the Shrew. I played Petruccio, and my Katherine was a senior who was headed for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She chased me around the stage until Kate finally kept me late after a rehearsal and gave me reason to be more afraid of her Kate than my on-stage version, and I was finally able to stand my ground. I felt a huge relief when I literally kicked Petruccio’s “groom” across the Cloisters as s/he was trying to pull off my boot.
I’ve often wondered what playing with gender does in one’s growing up. I think it gave me more confidence in myself, and perhaps an added sense that most of who I think I am is pretty much pure chance – male/female, smart/dumb, rich/poor. To act in a play, or to direct one, is to take on personas that might be very far removed from one’s “normal” experience. I loved being flat-chested and deep voiced enough to play men – the rest of the time those assets seemed like huge liabilities. In fact, playing men seemed in some ways more normal to me than trying to take on the “girl part” that my mother had scripted for me. What I know for sure is that, acting or directing or being in the audience, cross-gender casting gives my settled ways of thinking a good shaking up.
November 03 2007 | Outings | No Comments »
Date: October 6, 2007
Time: 11 a.m.
Location: Honeypot Hill Orchard in Stow
Apple picking, hayrides, and much more! Picnic lunch.
October 06 2007 | Outings | No Comments »
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