Latest News
There is magic in a home filled with the things we love, and Mary Randolph Carter, affectionately known as “Carter,” has spent a lifetime embracing that magic. Her latest book, “Live with the Things You Love … and You’ll Live Happily Ever After,” is about storytelling, joy, and honoring life’s poetry through the objects we keep.
“This is my tenth book,” Carter said. “At the root of each is my love of collecting, the thrill of the hunt, and living surrounded by things that conjure up family, friends, and memories.”
The creative director at Ralph Lauren for almost four decades, Carter began writing this book during the pandemic, a time of rediscovering comfort. “I found more time to appreciate those special things that give our homes warmth and connection.” Working with Ralph Lauren, she learned that the best spaces tell a personal story. “His desk was filled with toy cars, miniature shoes, superheroes, English dandies, cowboys on horseback. The walls? A gallery of his children’s paintings, iconic photos of Frank Sinatra and Gary Cooper. Everything told a story.”
Carter acknowledges how homes can become overwhelmed with stuff but sees a difference between clutter and collection. “To live happily, create environments that inspire and comfort rather than encumber you! Look around and ask, ‘What is truly meaningful? What makes you smile? What recalls the people and places you cherish?’” Then, she added, “weed out the rest with discipline and courage!”
Provided
Each home in Carter’s book reflects its inhabitant’s spirit. “The first time I walked into Bethann Hardison’s apartment, I knew right away how authentic it was to who she is.” Hardison’s walls are lined with artwork from friends Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Haitian paintings, testaments to a life well lived. “Though her mantra is, ‘the lighter the load, the freer the journey,’ she also admits some things ‘delight your environment’ and can’t be parted with. Amen to that!”
Having survived two childhood fires, Carter deeply understands what truly matters. “It’s not the things, but the people and memories they evoke.” She loves her collections, but they don’t possess her. “They make me happy, but they do not define me.”
She delights in how people showcase treasures. Paula Grief, for instance, lives in a ten-foot-wide house and had to part with many books. “She tucks the ones she can’t live without through the rungs of her staircase. I love that ingenuity!”
When asked about her most cherished possession, Carter tells a story of loss and serendipity. A childhood portrait of her in a blue velvet dress was lost in a fire. “Years later, the artist’s daughter found another version. Now, it hangs in our apartment, surrounded by flea market art and one of my favorite saints, Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
Adding to the cozy feeling of this book, Carter’s son, Carter Berg, took the photographs, and her sister, Cary, contributed the illustrations. “Cary once stayed in our apartment and painted a dozen objects from our cluttered kitchen. I hung them immediately. When I started this book, I knew she had to capture my favorite objects.”
Four of the featured homes are local to the Northwest Corner, including Carter’s in Millerton, Joan Osofsky’s in Lakeville, Robin Bell’s in Salisbury, and Paula Grief’s in Hudson. They all gathered at the White Hart/Oblong Speaker Series on March 27.
After perusing the richly colored pages of this book, you may feel tempted to shop. “You don’t need money to create a meaningful home,” Carter insisted. “Some of my favorite paintings cost no more than $10 or $25. Value is personal. It’s not about provenance but the story an object tells you or the one you make up.”
Carter’s advice? “Fall in love with the wackiest thing. Surround yourself with what matters, and you’ll live happily ever after.”
On Saturday, April 5, at 3 p.m., The Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington and Jacob’s Pillow, the dance festival in Becket, Massachusetts, are presenting a special benefit screening of the cinematic masterpiece, “The Red Shoes,” followed by a discussion and Q&A. Featuring guest speakers Norton Owen, director of preservation at Jacob’s Pillow, and dance historian Lynn Garafola, the event is a fundraiser for The Triplex.
“We’re pitching in, as it were, because we like to help our neighbors,” said Norton. “They (The Triplex) approached us with the idea, wanting some input if they were going to do a dance film. I thought of Lynn as the perfect person also to include in this because of her knowledge of The Ballets Russes and the book that she wrote about Diaghilev. There is so much in this film, even though it’s fictional, that derives from the Ballets Russes.” Garafola, the leading expert on the Ballets Russes under Serge Diaghilev, 1909–1929, the most influential company in twentieth-century theatrical dance, said, “We see glimpses of that Russian émigré tradition, performances we don’t see much of today. The film captures the artifice of ballet, from the behind-the-scenes world of dressers and conductors to the sheer passion of the audience.”
Hailed as one of the greatest films about ballet, “The Red Shoes,” 1948, is a dazzling fusion of dance and cinema, featuring a mesmerizing 17-minute ballet sequence performed by Scottish ballet dancer and actress, Moira Shearer. Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the film’s breathtaking use of Technicolor and evocative storytelling continues to captivate audiences, including legendary filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Steven Spielberg all of whom have cited the film as an influence on their work.
Garafola recalled seeing the film as a young dancer. “I remember being more taken with the plot then, but seeing it again recently, it was the color, the fantasy, and the glamour that struck me. Given how gray England was after the war, the film’s vibrant costumes and settings create an almost dreamlike escape.”
Owen echoed Garafola’s sentiment. “It’s magical. Color was their thing, and this latest restoration makes it even more breathtaking.”
The film underwent an extensive digital restoration at the UCLA Film and Television archive between 2006 and 2008 and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. This is the version of the film which will be screened at the Triplex.
Owen said, “I love the depiction of young ballet audiences racing to their seats. That kind of enthusiasm is contagious. It’s what draws young dancers in.” Both Owen and Garafola epressed hope that young dancers will attend the event, sharing in the film’s enduring inspiration.
Owen and Garafola’s Q&A is sure to be lively and educational as they delve into the film’s legacy in both dance and cinema. “It’s not just a film for dance lovers. It’s a filmmaker’s film, too,” Owen added.
Join The Triplex and Jacob’s Pillow for this rare opportunity to experience “The Red Shoes” on the big screen, a film that continues to enchant, inspire, and ignite artistic passion.
Tickets are available for $75 at www.thetriplex.org.
A botanical spring puzzle
Honeybees have developed interdependencies with early spring flowers.
Why are there no native super early flowering plants in our area?By “super early” I mean flowering some five weeks before forsythia. All the ones I know are alien.Most are “bulbiferous” and go dormant in summer. Snowdrops, Galanthus nivalis, and Snowbells, Leucojum vernum, are both in the amaryllis family; crocus species, in the iris family; and scilla, in the asparagus family belong to this category. Others, like cyclamen coum, primrose family; winter-aconite, eranthis hyemalis; and adonis amurensis, buttercup family; grow from tubers, thickened roots.None of them is a native plant. Although all mentioned families exist in the New World as well, none have produced super early flowering species similar to what exists in Eurasia, nor have other plant families.
We wait for our beautiful native spring wildflowers — Virginia bluebells, Dutchman’s breeches, Trilliums, Trout lily, etc.In our garden, the earliest native will be Bloodroot, by mid-April. By then, a large cohort of alien plants are already in full flower for several weeks, in some cases for over a month.
Why is this roughly four to five week temporal niche in the annual cycle unoccupied? It’s a niche of very low productivity for sure, but nature, famously, abhors any vacuum. Could it be that the physical habitat niche is too small here? What I found, doing some research, suggests it is possible — larger areas are correlated with more speciation according to p. 1149 in Science from March 15, 2025. Eurasia, broadly oriented from west to east, has a very long, uninterrupted temperate and mountainous zone, stretching from Spain to western China. With its many grassland habitats, it provides a huge playing field for evolution. America, by comparison, geographically laid out north to south, contains much less continuous temperate environments suited for crocus.
Until now. Our small, short-cropped lawn at winter’s end mimics aspects of Eurasian alpine meadows. There, before any green grass is visible, crocuses break through the edges of the melting snow cover on the late winter lawn. Species crocuses have conquered that new habitat, first in European gardens, and now here too. Before the grass grows too tall, they benefit from abundant sunshine to nourish their bulbs for next year. That’s another reason to delay mowing as long as possible. A lawn may not be a natural habitat, but if free of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers, it is after all just another meadow.
Perhaps another reason for missing March flowers is a lack of early pollinators.On one of these rare sunny, warm days in early March, I wrote in my diary: “03/09/23 - many honeybees on winter aconite, also a fly …”and some honeybees on crocus as well. Like winter-aconite and crocus, honeybees are not native in America and I have never seen them again that early, ever since a nearby beekeeper gave up.Looking at the amounts of pollen in these crocus flowers, they must be an abundant food source for all kinds of bees and bumblebees. However, only honeybees — whose colonies survive the winter in hives — can quickly deploy a large number of pollen collectors. Flowers and insects co-evolved a myriad of interdependencies, so super early flowering plants, cold adapted, depend on enough pollinating insects to make flowering through the snow worthwhile. On high alpine meadows there may be other early up-and-about insect species, but here it is honeybees which profit most.
Snowdrops, snowbells, crocuses — they don’t compete with any natives, but fill a manmade, unoccupied niche.The very earliest to flower through the snow, adonis amurensis and cyclamen coum, grow in light shade and slowly form stay-in-place clumps. Unless in a controllable setting, I would stay away from squill — Scilla siberica — which is a very aggressive naturalizer and easily escapes.
As we wait for our many native beautiful spring flowers, how nice to have these aliens, such benign aliens for a change, to cheer up a March-brown lawn.
Fritz Mueller lives in Sharon.
Theropods spotted in Falls Village
The Falls Village Children’s Theater’s production of “Dinosaurs Before Dark” played topacked houses March 28-30. Directed by Michael Siktberg, with choreography from Amber Cameron and Darcy Boynton, the lively show featured shadow puppets, tree houses, lots of dancing and singing, and of course dinosaurs, including a splendid Tyrannosaurus Rex.