HYSB gala brings glam and generosity to Lakeville

Mary Ellen Winters and Jerry Baldwin, the night’s honorees.
Alec Linden
Mary Ellen Winters and Jerry Baldwin, the night’s honorees.
LAKEVILLE — The Housatonic Youth Service Bureau’s third annual Gratitude Gala brought altruists across the Northwest Corner together to dine, dance and revel in the spirit of collective giving, embodied by the honorees of the evening: two local exemplars of community benevolence, the couple of Mary Ellen Winters and Jerry Baldwin.
Starting at 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 5, guests made their way out of the chilly rain and into the inviting, cheerful warmth of the Interlaken Inn’s Atrium Room. After shaking off their coats and stowing their umbrellas in the foyer, newcomers ambled into the buzz of the reception, arming themselves with drinks from the full bar and checking out the silent auction options on display in the middle of the room. Waiters passed through the space, offering hors d’oeuvres to the suit and gown-clad crowd.
Guests eventually took their seats around circular tables in the White Wedding Pavilion, attached to the Atrium, and began a salad course as Kelly Parker, executive director of the organization, made her way to the podium to deliver her welcome speech. “We call this the Gratitude Gala because gratitude is at the core of everything we do,” she said.
Parker explained that the Housatonic Youth Service Bureau’s work, which provides mental health services and support to Region One students and their families, is a vital resource to the region. “Right now, one in five children in the U.S. have a mental health issue,” she said, adding that statistically, over half of those children will never receive treatment — “but not here,” she affirmed.
Director of Finance Sara Beatty said that the Gala is essential to the organization’s functioning. “We charge nothing,” she explained, and with the group’s clinicians seeing more patients than ever before, every dollar counts. And importantly, it’s a ton of fun, she said: “We have a lot of repeat customers so we must be doing something right.”
From left: Michael Baldwin, son of the honorees, with Elyse Harney of Elyse Harney Real Estate, a benefactor of the Gala, and Scott Morris.Alec Linden
Following dinner was a series of energetic fundraising sessions, with a live auction seeing a $1,450 top bid for a scenic plane ride from Great Barrington Airport to the Statue of Liberty and back, while other offers included a day driving the Lime Rock racetrack and overnight hotel stays.
A paddle-raise followed, called “Fund the Mission” at the Gratitude Gala, in which four contributors gave the top-ticket amount of $1,000 while many others donated in increments down to $50. With each paddle raised, no matter the amount, the room erupted into cheers and applause.
Culminating the evening’s programming was the conferral of the Nancy Bird and Linda Sloane Gratitude Award — named for two past board chairs — to the night’s honored guests. Current Board President Bonnie Bellow introduced the couple, highlighting their long and decorated careers in volunteer and non-profit work in the Northwest Corner. Since moving to Lakeville in 1975, Baldwin and Winters “have been more than a presence” in the community, Bellow said.
The couple walked to the podium amid a clamor of whoops and cowbell ringing — an homage to the couple’s cheering habits at local sports games. They graciously accepted the award, and Winters offered simple but potent words to the applauding crowd: “It’s all about family and kids.”
After settling back into their chairs, the honorees were humble: “It’s a little embarrassing because everybody here has been so involved,” Baldwin said while gesturing at the now-mobile crowd as the Tales of Joy band broke into a groovy tune.
Party-goers take to the dance floor after the business end of the evening concludes.Alec Linden
“It’s just been years and years of work,” said Bellow of the couple as the dance party kicked up. She said that when a board member aired the Baldwin name as an option to be honorees at the 2025 Gala, the debate was over.
While the band upped the energy, Kelly Parker reflected on the Gala’s role in her organization’s work. “It brings the community together,” she said, “and it’s fun,” which she explained brings welcome respite to a line of work that is often emotionally intense.
She said that today’s children face novel issues in a world where social media, the internet and greater global connectivity bring more complex struggles to young students than in earlier generations. “There’s so much going that kids are aware of today,” she said, which creates unique challenges in offering support.
The Housatonic Youth Service Bureau is prepared to meet those challenges, though, she assured. “One of the things I’m most proud of is our organization’s ability to adapt and respond to the needs of the kids.”
The entrance to Torrington Transfer Station.
TORRINGTON — Municipalities holding out for a public solid waste solution in the Northwest Corner have new hope.
An amendment to House Bill No. 7287, known as the Implementor Bill, signed by Governor Ned Lamont, has put the $3.25 million sale of the Torrington Transfer Station to USA Waste & Recycling on hold.
The amendment was added after the formation of the Northwest Resource Recovery Authority in Torrington in late May. The text added to the bill reads, “any permit or license relating to the Torrington Transfer Station shall be deemed transferred to the Northwest Resource Recovery Authority, or its designee, and shall continue in full force and effect.”
The change halted the sale to USA, which was unanimously accepted by MIRA Dissolution Authority at its May 14 board meeting, and reopened negotiations with municipal leaders. Torrington is one of two transfer stations in Connecticut, the other being Essex, that are still operated by MIRA-DA. Combined, more than 20 towns currently utilize these facilities.
Members of the Northwest Hills Council of Governments have been working to establish a public option for solid waste management for more than a year. In February 2025, MIRA-DA entered into a term sheet for a regional waste authority to take over the Torrington Transfer Station to be used as a central hub for regional hauling. Those plans were nixed after MIRA-DA’s May decision to privately sell the facility, until the amendment to HB 7287.
The Implementor Bill is “an act concerning the state budget for the biennium ending June 30, 2027,” according to the state website. It was signed by Lamont in early June.
MIRA-DA reviewed the situation at its board meeting Wednesday, June 18. Conversation mostly took place in executive session, but several speakers participated in public comment.
Supporting a public option, Torrington Mayor Elinor Carbone said, “I’m advocating for the local taxpayers for return on the investment that they’ve made over the years through tipping fees.” She continued, “The best way to return that investment is to strongly consider that public option that has been submitted on behalf of the NRRA.”
Selectmen in Cornwall, Falls Village, Goshen, Norfolk, North Canaan, Salisbury and Sharon have all expressed interest in pursuing a public option. Each of these towns continue to haul to Torrington utilizing existing state service agreements, which are due to expire in 2027.
Ed Spinella, attorney representing USA, characterized the Implementor Bill text change as a “rat amendment” that does not affect USA’s proposal. He said he intends to enforce MIRA-DA’s previous acceptance of the sale.
“It’s an enforceable vote and I guarantee you I’m going to make it enforceable,” said Spinella. “We were going to buy the facility regardless of whether or not it had a permit.”
He urged MIRA-DA to produce the necessary paperwork to move forward with the sale.
“I want to sign the documents so we can finish this deal,” said Spinella. “Are you going to be defined by cowering to a rat implementor, rat amendment of the Implementor Bill?”
Following a lengthy executive session June 18 that continued the next day, MIRA-DA recessed without taking action. The meeting was scheduled to continue Monday, June 23, at noon.
In August of 1781, after spending thirty years as an enslaved woman in the household of Colonel John Ashley in Sheffield, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Freeman, also known as Mumbet, was the first enslaved person to sue for her freedom in court. At the time of her trial there were 5,000 enslaved people in the state. MumBet’s legal victory set a precedent for the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1790, the first in the nation. She took the name Elizabeth Freeman.
Local playwrights Lonnie Carter and Linda Rossi will tell her story in a staged reading of “1781” to celebrate Juneteenth, ay 7 p.m. at The Center on Main in Falls Village, Connecticut.Singer Wanda Houston will play MumBet, joined by actors Chantell McCulloch, Tarik Shah, Kim Canning, Sherie Berk, Howard Platt, Gloria Parker and Ruby Cameron Miller. Musical composer Donald Sosin added, “MumBet is an American hero whose story deserves to be known much more widely.”
Houston has shared the stage with stars ranging from Barbra Streisand to Motown great Mary Wells. “I have had the honor of portraying Elizabeth Freeman for three years in “Meet Elizabeth Freeman” by Teresa Miller. Our first reading of “1781” is in celebration of Juneteenth, which is wonderfully symbolic and poignant.” Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery. Two years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, word of their freedom finally reached slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865.
Tombstone of Elizabeth Freeman in the “Sedgewick Pie” family burial ground in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Lonnie carter
MumBet, born in 1742 to African enslaved parents, was purchased at age six months by Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, Massachusetts, for whom she worked until her thirties. Ashley helped write the 1773 Sheffield Declaration which stated, “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” Rumor has it that MumBet overheard a reading of the document. After a traumatic household experience, MumBet left the Ashley home in Bartholomew’s Cobble, walked four miles to Sheffield, and asked attorney and abolitionist Theodore Sedgwick to help her gain her freedom.
Houston shared, “I live in Sheffield near where she was enslaved, in a house she would have passed on her walk from Ashley Falls to Sheffield. I am humbled by the fortitude and inner strength it must have taken for this woman to defy norms and take a stand for her own freedom.We Americans must still stand and fight for our rights to live free.”
Elizabeth Freeman spent her years as a free woman working for wages in the Sedgewick household, saving money to buy her own home in Stockbridge, where she was a midwife and healer. She died in 1829 and is buried in “Sedgewick Pie,” the family burial plot in Stockbridge. One of her great-grandchildren, W.E.B. DuBois, born in Great Barrington, was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. DuBois founded the NAACP.
Her tombstone reads: “She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal. She neither wasted time nor property. She never violated a trust nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper, and the tenderest friend. Good mother, farewell.”
The performance of “1781” will take place Thursday, June 19 at 7 p.m. at The Center on Main (103 Main St., Falls Village).Admission is free, donations gratefully accepted.
Curator Henry Klimowicz, left, with artists Brigitta Varadi and Amy Podmore at The Re Institute
For anyone who wants a deeper glimpse into how art comes about, an on-site artist talk is a rich experience worth the trip.On Saturday, June 14, Henry Klimowicz’s cavernous Re Institute — a vast, converted 1960’s barn north of Millerton — hosted Amy Podmore and Brigitta Varadi, who elucidated their process to a small but engaged crowd amid the installation of sculptures and two remarkable videos.
Though they were all there at different times, a common thread among Klimowicz, Podmore and Varadi is their experience of New Hampshire’s famed MacDowell Colony. The silence, the safety of being able to walk in the woods at night, and the camaraderie of other working artists are precious goads to hardworking creativity. For his part, for fifteen years, Klimowicz has promoted community among thousands of participating artists, in the hope that the pairs or groups he shows together will always be linked. “To be an artist,” he stressed, “is to be among other artists.”
Curator and owner Klimowicz and both artists spoke of the physicality of making art, revealing an abounding intimacy with their materials. Podmore recounted seeking the perfect bare branches to use in her “Fall,” the piece that dominates the center of the space.She would find those that most suggested figures slipping into a fall, and mimic them herself, as animators do for accuracy, before admitting them into the crew now lying on the floor.Each isunique, but all are united by their red-socked feet, which, though tiny, are touchingly rendered in adult proportions. For art professor Podmore, they signal how “failing in public” is a phenomenon today’s students must learn to navigate.
For Varadi, whose background is Rusyn-Carpathian, the main medium is Karakul sheep’s wool, a particularly robust variety used in Persian carpets. Her process of felting the fiber involves extremely hard labor; she wryly expressed hope that technology would ease the burden of this long-term project, best seen in her huge wall piece, “With Their Backs to the Mountains.” The title refers to the staunch resilience of her ancestors — stateless but proud, subject to historical violence.
In Varadi’s video “Hunia-Permission to Be,” the color red amid the chiaroscuro of snowy winter forests offers a mesmerizing counterpart to Podmore’s floorpiece.Wearing the traditional, oversized red felted coat called the Hunia, the artist silently plods through the lovely scene, suggesting cycles of effort, disappearing and reappearing.
Podmore’s video adds the aural element, with the creaking of trees rubbing against each other at various tilts.The title “Fifteen Degrees” indicates a tree’s maximum safe angle from vertical. Reflecting this, two silhouetted jointed figures lean against each other — by turns intimate and aggressive — a shockingly apt metaphor for current society.
“As a younger artist,” Podmore observed, “I was very serious about the human condition; now I see that it is just bizarre.”
Another of Podmore’s works, “Audience” — now on view at Mass MoCA — gives a nod and a wink to our strange time.Hundreds of unique plaster-cast baskets mounted along an 85-foot wall, some fitted with single mechanical eyes, offer viewers the experience of being viewed, to the quiet cacophony of eyes popping open.A must-see through Nov. 30.
The Re Institute exhibition can be seen through July 5, with hours Saturdays 1 to 4 p.m. and by appointment.More information at the reinstitute.com.