What To Do In The Catskills This Weekend

  |  May 28, 2015
Methodist Church, Roxbury

The Methodist Church in Roxbury

Headwaters History Days
Headwaters History Days take place this year over the span of two weekends: May 30 – 31, and June 6 – 7. Celebrating the history of the Central Catskills, festivities include exhibits, open houses, historic train rides, and more. Museums such as Hunting Tavern in Andes, Shandaken Museum in Pine Hill, and Empire State Railway Museum in Phoenicia will be open free of charge. In Roxbury, historic tours include the Depot, the Walter Stratton Stone House (built in 1828), and the Town Clock Tower at the Methodist Church. Sawmill demonstrations and farm tours will be held at the Hubbell Homestead at Kelly Corners. For the full program, click here.
Phoenicia Library / Telling Your Story, Telling Your Truth Memoir Workshop with Jenny Milchman
Suspense author Jenny Milchman will be teaching a memoir workshop at the Phoenicia Library Saturday, May 30 from 10:30 am to 1 pm called Telling Your Story, Telling Your Truth. Participants will learn how to turn their life stories into memoirs. Workshop leader Jenny Milchman is an accomplished writer whose novels have been reviewed by the Publishers Weekly, Booklist, the New York Times, San Francisco Journal of Books, the AP, and other publications. Milchman won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for best suspense novel, and was nominated for the Macavity and Barry Awards for best first novel. Her third novel, As Night Falls, will be published on June 30th, 2015. For more information about this workshop, click here.

FHK Museum

The Fred. J. Johnston Museum, operated by Friends of Historic Kingston.

Friends of Historic Kingston Gallery
Friends of Historic Kingston (FHK) gallery is hosting an exhibition called Jervis McEntee: Kingston’s Artist of the Hudson River School, a show that will run through October this year. The exhibit features never-before-seen works by McEntee on loan from several museums and private collections. McEntee, a Kingston native, was a landscape painter of the 19th century, and a member of the National Academy of Design. He painted in the romantic style of the epoch, in a rather melancholic and gloomy manner. McEntee also kept detailed journals depicting the Gilded Age and the lives of the Hudson River School painters. His journals are held at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian. This Friday, May 29 at 12 noon Valerie Balint, associate curator at Olana State Historic Site, will be talking at FHK gallery about the friendship between McEntee and Frederic Edwin Church, a leading figure in the Hudson River School of Painting. For more information, click here.

Bardavon_stage_poughkeepsie_2007_03_18

The interior of the historic Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie.

Bardavon Theatre
Bardavon Theatre in Poughkeepsie is hosting Simple Gifts: A Treasury of American Music, Saturday May 30 at 2 and 6:30 pm. The Ballet Arts Studio will perform music by American composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, as well as lesser known names such as Louis Moreau Gottschalk, William Grant Still, and Steve Reich. For more information, click here.
Woodstock Playhouse
The Woodstock Playhouse is presenting Oliver!, a two and a half hour musical by Lionel Bart based on Charles Dickens’ novel of the same name, Friday through Sunday, May 29 – 31. The play, directed by Randy Conti, and performed by the New York Conservatory for the Arts students, includes adventurous moments from Oliver Twist’s journey through Victorian England accompanied by juvenile delinquent Artful Dodger. Performances are held at 7:30 pm on Friday and Saturday, and at 2 pm on Sunday. For more information, click here.

About Simona David

Simona David is a writer living in the Catskill Mountains, New York. She is the author of Art in the Catskills (3rd edition, 2016), available on Amazon.com and Kindle. For more information, visit www.simonadavid.com.

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