Sweet slogan trivia stumps Scholarship Association event

Quizmaster Peter Vermilyea led trivia night March 30.

Patrick L. Sullivan

Sweet slogan trivia stumps Scholarship Association event

FALLS VILLAGE — The Trivia for Education fundraising event from the Falls Village Scholarship Association attracted about 42 players to the Emergency Services Center Sunday evening, March 30.

Quizmaster Peter Vermilyea went over the ground rules. He said spelling mistakes wouldn’t matter “within reason.”

“One time we had someone who tried to say that ‘Belize’ was a misspelling of ‘Brazil.’”

The categories included Women’s History Month, television theme songs, Region One trivia, and the opening category, Sweet Slogans.

These were ad slogans for candies, starting with “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”

The third item, “The Freshmaker,” had people looking quizzically at each other.

Number nine was tricky. It required two answers. “No partial credit” said Vermilyea, sternly.

The clue was “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.”

And the answers: M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand. The Freshmaker is Mentos, and the two-parter answer was Almond Joy and Mounds.

Latest News

Living with the things you love:
a conversation with Mary Randolph Carter
Mary Randolph Carter teaches us to surround ourselves with what matters to live happily ever after.
Carter Berg

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.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Beloved classic film ‘The Red Shoes’ comes to the big screen for Triplex benefit
Provided

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.”

Keep ReadingShow less
A botanical spring puzzle

Honeybees have developed interdependencies with early spring flowers.

Fritz Mueller

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.

Keep ReadingShow less