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Knights of Columbus to donate coats for local children

Knights of Columbus to donate coats for local children

Falls Village First Selectman Dave Barger, left, and North Canaan resident Steve Allyn display coats at the Bitterman Center. The Knights of Columbus Berkshire Council 1520 is providing 96 coats for distribution through social service agents in four area towns.

Ruth Epstein

NORTH CANAAN ­­— Children in four area towns will receive new winter coats through the Knights of Columbus Berkshire Council 1520’s participation in the national “Coats for Kids” campaign.

The council bought 96 coats, ranging in size from infant to 18, for children in North Canaan, Falls Village, Salisbury and Norfolk. The coats will be given to social service agents in each town for distribution to families.

Falls Village First Selectman Dave Barger and North Canaan resident Steve Allyn displayed the brightly colored coats at the Bitterman Center, part of St. Martin of Tours Parish at 2 Daisy Hill Road.

Barger said the local chapter purchased the coats from the Supreme Knights of Columbus Council of Connecticut.

Ruth Epstein
Reporter
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Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

John Mills at the birthplace of Connecticut abolitionist John Brown.

Courtesy the Alex Breanne Corporation

On Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Cornwall Historical Society, author and genealogist John Mills will breathe new life into the stories of some of Connecticut’s more underappreciated patriots. The reason these heroes were forgotten? They were Black.

At a time when white colonists were fighting for their own liberty and political independence, many Black men who fought alongside them remained enslaved. Some risked their lives only to return to bondage. Though enslaved people were promised freedom from both sides of the Revolutionary War in exchange for their service, Great Britain, too, was still deeply dependent on slavery. For Black people in America, the war presented both extraordinary risks and uncertain paths to the freedom that white colonists were demanding for themselves.

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Madi Long
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— Stephanie Saetta

Stephanie Saetta has spent much of her life caring for others. A physician at White Plains Hospital, she has another calling at home in Salisbury — one that has four legs and a wagging tail. She runs Charlie Chicken Bone Sanctuary, a nonprofit dog rescue that brings dogs from overcrowded pounds and the streets of Texas to foster homes in northwestern Connecticut, where they can begin again.

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The Pink House AM is serving up community

The Pink House AM is serving up community

Mare Rubin and Maggie Levine of the Pink House AM.

Madi Long

It all started with a yoga class. Mare Rubin was working on her second act after leaving the Upper West Side, where she’d raised a family and worked in corporate marketing. Newly empty nesters, she and her husband decided to move to the wilds of northwestern Connecticut, where they had spent 15 years as weekenders, to see what life in the woods had in store for them.

Rubin started teaching yoga classes at the Union in West Cornwall, a space designated by the town of Cornwall as a community hub with couches, Wi-Fi, occasional events and a growing yoga class schedule. She was adjusting well but missed one important thing about city life: a casual coffee shop.

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Sons of Astro are musicians, friends and bandmates — in that order

Sons of Astro are musicians, friends and bandmates — in that order

The Sons of Astro will be at the Common Pub in Housatonic on Oct. 24 and the 2nd Home Lounge in Winsted on Nov. 14.

Provided

No matter where they are in the world, musicians seem to find other musicians. There’s a shared language, a shared experience of being on stage and performing, and a shared enthusiasm for making those melodies by themselves or together. Such is the case with Norfolk and Brooklyn-based cosmic Americana band Sons of Astro.

That magnetic musicians’ bond drew Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mike Cobb into the orbit of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Matt Statler. The two neighbors took to each other right away and were soon playing open mics together. As an ethics professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Statler made the case that if he sat in for Cobb’s set and Cobb sat in for Statler’s, they could play together and double their stage time. Clearly, these men wanted to make as much music as possible. That became a little harder when Cobb and his family moved up to Norfolk, Connecticut.

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concerts

One more weekend to get inside the art at ArtEast

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The participating artists in this year’s ArtEast open studios.

Provided

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Now in its 21st year, the ArtEast October Open Studio Tour offers a self-guided journey with participating studios in Holmes, LaGrangeville, Hopewell Junction, Pawling, Patterson, Poughquag and Wingdale. Visitors can explore painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media and other artistic practices, and get some leaf-peeping in at the same time.

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open-studio

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Author Tarajia Morrell in her kitchen.
Jessica Antola

In her new memoir, “Desire Feeds the Feast,” writer Tarajia Morrell traces a life shaped by an appetite for beauty, pleasure and belonging. On Saturday, Oct. 24, Morrell will discuss the book with fellow author Dani Shapiro, whose works include the memoir “Inheritance” and the novel “Signal Fires,” at a prerelease event at Troutbeck in Amenia. Published by Zibby Books, a women-led startup, “Desire Feeds the Feast” will be released Nov. 3.

Described by author Chris Pavone as “a deeply gratifying emotional feast of a memoir: poetic, dramatic, romantic, atmospheric, sensual, evocative, poignant, heartbreaking, heartwarming,” this tale brings readers on a restless journey. Morrell writes of the “electric excess” of the New York City club scene in the late 1990s and the Hollywood tables where she waited on celebrities while pursuing her acting career. Her wanderlust took her to the beaches in Uruguay, where she discovered the “brine and brightness” of ceviche, the splendor of Barcelona’s food markets and, back home, the simple pleasure of a ripe plum eaten by her “graceful mother.”

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book talk
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