Thank you!
Your support is sustaining the future of local news in our communities.

Put on a happy face

I looked in the mirror the other day and was startled to see that I was frowning. It seems to be my default expression. I tried smiling, but the best I could manage was a horizontal line. How did this happen? It’s not like I grew up in a tough neighborhood. A friend of mine did and he said that you had to walk around with either a scowl or one of those kind of vacant, but threatening, expressions like Sylvester Stallone. The idea was to give muggers the impression that it would only take one more thing to set you off and that they should look elsewhere for an easier mark. After a while it became permanent.

Look around. I find that most people do not look very happy. At best they project a kind of bored neutrality. There are a very few that are smiling, but they are immediately suspect. Are they members of one of those blissed-out cults? I would never make it there. With my inability to form a really good smile they would always be asking me what’s wrong and bringing me up before the review board for insufficient bubbliness. I would be drummed out of the cult, albeit to a happy beat.

    u    u    u

I do have a sort of remedy for my condition. Charlton Heston, for whatever you may think of his gun affiliation, mastered the reverse smile. Watch the movie Ben Hur closely sometime. If you can stay awake until the part where he meets his boyhood friend, Messala, he gives a first-class demonstration of his technique. He frowns, but makes it into a smile somehow. I have been working on this. The trick seems to be in the eyes.

Maybe the key is your state of mind. Peter Pan teaches Wendy, Michael and John to fly by thinking happy thoughts. Often what you are thinking shows on your face. This has been the ruination of more than one budding relationship. This is where we get the saying, “If looks could kill.�

Plastic surgery is a possibility. The only catch is you could wind up looking like Dr. Sardonicus in the horror movie of the same name. His smile is surgically fixed, permanently, in place. I need something that I can erase if I don’t get it right the first time, so I guess tattooing is out, too.

Clowns cheat. They paint a smile on their face. In fact, they paint a face on their face. Anybody can do that.

Ooooooooh, right.

Makeup!

Bill Abrams resides (and practices his smile) in Pine Plains.

Lakeville Journal

Latest News

Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

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.

Keep ReadingShow less
education

A sanctuary for second chances

A sanctuary for second chances

Stephanie Saetta runs Charlie Chicken Bones, a sanctuary in Salisbury.

Madi Long
You only get one or two of these soul connection dogs, so I do this in his honor.
— 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.

The sanctuary is named for Charlie, the dog who taught her how special a bond between a person and rescue animal can be.

Keep ReadingShow less
our community

Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Hunter Runnette, founder and board chair of field, has spent years fostering arts and cultural programming in the Berkshires.

Provided

What do joy, gardening, artificial intelligence, the American experiment and the creative process have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out, at least when some of the world’s most compelling thinkers get together to talk about them.

From Friday, Oct. 23, through Sunday, Oct. 25, Lenox, Massachusetts, will host the inaugural field festival, a three-day gathering of writers, artists, scholars and cultural figures at Shakespeare & Company. Billed as a festival of ideas, entertainment, learning and discovery, field brings together an impressive roster of voices to explore everything from the deeply personal to the profoundly political.

Keep ReadingShow less
community
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.

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.

Keep ReadingShow less
business

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.

Keep ReadingShow less
concerts

One more weekend to get inside the art at ArtEast

One more weekend to get inside the art at ArtEast

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

Provided

ArtEast’s annual October Open Studio Tour is already underway, but there’s still one more weekend to step inside the creative worlds of artists working throughout eastern Dutchess County. On Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 24 and 25, artists will once again open their studio doors, inviting visitors to see where the work happens, meet the people who make it and perhaps discover something worth taking home.

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.

Keep ReadingShow less
open-studio
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.