I have never wished I were a boy, but even as a child reading “Little Women” for the first time, I recognized why Jo said she was bitter about being born a girl.
It is interesting to contemplate that weather is blamed for the demise of the Vikings, the French Revolution and the bubonic plague. It is also interesting that the founding of this country, the creation of our Constitution, the Civil War, American industrialization and our Gilded Age all happened against a backdrop of extreme cold and global climate change.
To put it simply, many of us are so mired in the busy-ness of everyday life that we don’t, or can’t, look up long enough to assess what we do and when we do it and how effective we are in doing it in our daily lives.
If it passes at town meeting, the GB On Tap program intends to provide additional drinking fountains and bottle refilling stations throughout town. In addition, it will help participating merchants and restaurants offer refillable water bottles for sale.
Founded in 2016 upon the legacy of five American Renaissance authors who wrote in Pittsfield, the Mastheads is at once an urban architectural experiment, a literary research initiative, a writers’ residency and an educational program.
Sitting right next to the existing right-of-way being widened aggressively by Tennessee Gas Company is a "Thoreau Cabin," so named for American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who wrote the famous essay on civil disobedience.
“I want to raise the idea of conservation and civil disobedience. This is a symbol of our resistance and our resolve to stop this.”
--- Sugar Shack Alliance member Will Elwell
Berkshire Theatre Group Artistic Associate David Adkins reads from Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”
“We do not discriminate. Our buildings are sanctuaries for everyone to tell their stories. We do not discriminate in which stories we will tell, which culture we may seek to know.”
--- BTG Artistic Director Kate Maguire
“The future health of the lake is hanging in the balance. If we don’t address these issues soon, the lake will decline and die.”
--- Stockbridge Board of Selectmen Annual Report
To hear Thoreau's words spoken by David Adkins is revelatory. Adkins is never preachy, always real and confrontational, never violent even with an axe in his hands. His final speech about a vagrant water-lily is as touching a moment as any I've seen on a stage in many years.
Prison reform in the age of our own Mass. imprisonment has become a low-priority issue for today’s brand of timid political activists, who often seem more concerned about their own comfort than they are about the greater good of the society.
