Minutes of meeting: March 19, 2008
Attending: Joe Baker, Maureen Banner, Kathryn Roberts,
Laurie Epstein, Neil McGinnis, Joel Schick, Julie Shapiro
1. NEW PEOPLE. John Heffernan, who had come to our February meeting, is joining the MCC. Marion Simon attended this meeting as a guest, perhaps to join next month.
2. MONTEREY GENERAL STORE. Kenn Basler came to suggest two co-productions.
A. An Evening With Karen Allen, set for Friday, June 6. There has been a lot of interest in this event, it will be too big for the Store, and will take place at the Church. Kenn would like to work with the MCC, get our ideas and promo help. He would like to charge a small admission, and donate proceeds to the MCC. Kathryn, John and Joel volunteered to meet with Kenn and Karen to make plans.
B. Cirque de Soleil. Kenn’s son is a clown with the circus, and would like to do an event for the town when Cirque de Soleil performs in Amherst in September. Plans to come.
3. BASKETRY WORKSHOP. The workshop went well, with nine people in attendance (most were Monteruvians). Everybody had a good time.
4. MEMORIAL DAY EVENTS. Plans are set for Richard Guthrie’s Friday evening bird slide talk, Q&A session (6-8 p.m. in the Church basement), and Saturday morning bird walk. Time and location of the walk to be decided later. We had an offer from a couple of excellent NYC musicians to do a concert here; they hoped it could be on the Sunday of Memorial weekend. Unfortunately, one of them would have to miss a time-and-a-half performance of his B’way show in order to play that night. He hoped that perhaps we could pay more than our usual $150/musician. We couldn’t. They would still like to do a show here (for our price) on a weekend when B’way is dark.
5. PASTEL WORKSHOP. Friday, April 18, 6-8 p.m., in the Church basement. The workshop can accommodate 15-20 people; we currently have nine registered.
6. NATURE WALK. We authorized $100 for Bonner McAllester to lead a Nature Walk on the Land Trust Trail, Mt. Hunger Road, Sunday morning, June 8. The walk will be open to a maximum of 12 people; call 528-5134 to register. We will have an ad in the May and June Monterey News and a poster.
7. POETRY READING. We authorized Joe to make arrangements with opera baritone Ben Luxon to do a poetry reading at the Church during the summer. Ben has organized three different programs: War Poems, Love Poems, Humorous Poems. His own choice was the humorous program, which was our preference as well. We may ask him to come back at Valentines Day to do his program of Love Poems.
8. AFRICAN QUILT. The quilt project brought to us by Kathie Frome is happening. We started to make tentative plans for a celebratory event to present the finished quilt to the townsfolk before it goes off to Cameroon. The current notion is to have a community potluck dinner with African music and dance during Labor Day weekend. We usually do a big event on the Saturday of that weekend (missed it last year, since we did our big event at Memorial Day instead). Joel asked that we plan our event for Sunday evening this year, so that we don’t compete with the Saturday night music show at the General Store. Joe will check with Kathie to get the expected time table for the quilt. Laurie will check out two African music groups--one from Pittsfield, one from Hudson, NY. Joe can connect us with some African
musicians from Wesleyan Univ.
9. DOCUMENTARY. We kicked around the idea of a future event involving showing a documentary movie at the Church, and following it with a group discussion. We’ll discuss this further at future meetings.
10. THEATER PROGRAM. Laurie reported on progress. The George Packer play she had hoped to bring to Monterey turns out to be too big a production for us (cast of six). If we decide that we really want to do this play, we might try to co-produce it with the Sandisfield Arts Council, since they have a good venue for a play of this size. Laurie will look further at the possibility of getting Howard Zinn and his (2 person) play instead. Another possibility is Bill Gibson’s play based on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. Joe will call him to see if he’d be interested in working with us, and how much the program would cost.
Next meeting: Wednesday, April 16. 4:00 at Town Hall.
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