I'm Also The New Spokesmodel For These Shaker Piglets

Video by Ben Garver of the Berkshire Eagle.

Another new client is Hancock Shaker Village. The baby animals festival will run April 11 - May 3. I'm going to do special baby animals outreach to east coast mommy (and daddy) bloggers. Are you one or do you have any favorite parenting blogs I should know about? Thanks in advance for any tips.

My New Gig: Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF) Tweetmaker in Residence

Posting in a hurry as I've got lots to do today, but want to let you know about my fun new gig as Tweetmaker in Residence for the Berkshire International Film Festival. Leading up to the festival, I'll be tweeting about the films and filmmakers (this year's BIFF schedule includes 70 films from 13 countries) and then I'll be a live micro-blogging fool during the event itself, May 14 - 17 in Great Barrington, MA. To follow along and add to the conversation yourself, please see http://twitter.com/BIFFMA.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...

My new website: TA DA

The Berkshire Living Visionaries Breakfast Series: Annie Selke

February 27, 2009 UPDATE:
Here's a link to Charlie Deitz's WAMC report about this event.

The following event flows from (but is different than) my recent BBQ cover story about Annie Selke. This new lecture series is like our own little Berkshires TED conference...be there. Call soon, though, as seating is extremely limited.

BBQ: Berkshire Business Quarterly Events
presents
The Visionaries Breakfast Series
A Quarterly Talk with the Region's Greatest Thinkers and Doers

Behind the Scenes with Pine Cone Hill's Design Visionary and Founder Annie Selke

Annie's Hard-Won Wisdom: "The Top Ten Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know"
A Breakfast discussion including A Private Tour of The Annie Selke
Companies New Headquarters

February 26, 2009
8am
The Annie Selke Companies
125 Pecks Road
Pittsfield, Massachusetts

$25
Seating is Limited. Advance Reservations Required.
413.528.3600

More Sneak Peek Website Pages

Here are the other new page designs for my website. Click on the images to enlarge them.

Sneak Peek at My New Website

After various stops and starts, I'm super happy to report that Heather Rose is nearly done redesigning my website. The above is what she did with those Mexican wrestler postage stamps I picked up in San Miguel. This is the contact info page (double click on the image and it'll enlarge). Each page of the site has a gorgeous Rothko-like collage of Mexican walls in the background and many of the pages are discreetly seeded with magic potions. This page has some "call clients" magic soap. Love, love, love it.

Which Photo is Best?

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I've been switching out the profile photo a lot lately. I've been testing the recent Berkshire Museum photobooth shots to see how they might look on my revamp-in-progress website. My mother wrote this evening: "You seem to be specializing in Tilted Head and Recipes these days. Have you any straight-on vegetarian head shots? ...Nice shot of the truck." Annalena thinks my eyes look crazy in the gazing heavenward smiley photo. Obviously there are more important things to fret about, but I need to turn in one of these to accompany a magazine article this week. Which do the royal we think is best?

To Twitter or Not to Twitter?

There's a wave of Twitter washing over my world these days and much seductive peer pressure to join the action. Twitter seems like the Facebook status line on steroids, like 21st century haiku, like something I'd much prefer to do than, say, earn a living.

Novelist Tayari Jones posted on Facebook last week that she was cutting back on Twitter. She un-installed the application TweetDeck from her computer, as her life had started feeling like a constant cocktail party (and she loves cocktail parties).

I'm tempted and conflicted. For those of you who tweet, here's my question: Is there any point to doing it in moderation? Is it even possible to do in moderation or is Twitter heroin for people like us?

Jane Iredale Makeup Makeover Magic and Your Charming Future Horse Farm Home

Yesterday my Shelley Memorial Movie Club friend, Jamie Puntin, who works as a sales representative for Jane Iredale Mineral Cosmetics, volunteered to do the makeup for my new website author photo. I sat on a stool in her sunny kitchen while she worked her makeover magic.

The after shot above is more Barbie than I wish to project professionally, but thumbs up to the dewy glow of the makeup. I wore my glasses for the official portrait session conducted in a photobooth at the Berkshire Museum.

Jamie's extraordinary home, by the way, is for sale. One of you Californians should trade your insanely over-priced two-bedroom bungalow for her horse farm located just up the road from pristine Lake Garfield in Monterey.

Open Window

Matisse, Open Window, 1905

Today is the first day in at least six months, maybe a year, that I don't have a freelance magazine article deadline to contend with on top of my regular job and family life. This happened because I said a word I rarely say to editors: No.

The various assignments have mostly been fun and the income welcome, but I'm so relieved to have a break. I googled images tonight to illustrate the feeling: open road...big sky...open window.

The Sound of Music notion of God closing doors and opening windows looms large in my world view. I hope I manage not to say yes to the next thing until the view looks like this painting.

Juggling

"In dreams begin responsibilities."

- My father quoting
Delmore Schwartz

Next Tuesday is the start of Masha Hamilton's 10-week beginning novel writing online class. It's been a good 15 years since I took a writing workshop that lasted longer than a weekend and I'm both excited and terrified about it. Part of my terror is imagining how I'll keep up with the assignments in the face of my job, freelance magazine writing assignments, mothering, daughtering, spousing, and dog caretaking duties.

Something needs to give and it'll probably be housekeeping and this blog. I still plan to post regularly, but I'll do so as a treat after I've finished my homework.

Church, State, Beckett

In general, I think of my job job serving as communications director for this esteemed theatre festival as being work. It's often extremely fun, but it's work (as Dave would say, that's why they call it work). It's the job that pays my mortgage, separate from my extracurricular creative life -- it's the state, whereas this blog is church.

Today, though, felt more integrated. I threw a press conference lunch for 30 journalists to announce the festival's 80th anniversary season. 80 years! If you click on the link above you can see the plays -- one powerhouse modern classic after the next (Shaw, Albee, Pinter, Beckett). One of the things I like best about my position is being able to ask the directors what interests them most about the plays in order to quote them in the press releases.

I enjoyed what all of the directors had to say this year, but I especially loved what Anders Cato said about the prospect of directing Waiting for Godot. Loved it in a church sort of way, so I'm going to take the liberty of quoting him here:

"The first production that I did at BTF was an adaptation of a Beckett prose piece called Text for Nothing, starring Joseph Chaikin. Joe was a friend of Beckett and the rehearsal process brought me very close to his musical language. It often felt like Beckett was in the room when we were rehearsing, listening, with his eyes closed.

I was thrilled when Kate approached me about doing Waiting for Godot. To step back inside Beckett's world is, of course, very challenging. You have to step inside yourself and listen very closely. It's a form of cleansing. Beckett's rhythmical language helps block out all the distracting noise and clutter that we're surrounded by, and guides you back to the essential. It is about communicating what can't be communicated -- something absolutely private and universal in the same moment.

Godot is not an esoteric exercise, but a deeply emotional piece. You have to make the audience feel and laugh and be completely engaged in each moment on stage. The questions have to matter. It isn't a conversational game with clever turns, but a desperate search for solutions and answers, a search for a way out of the predicament that the characters find themselves in. Beckett's world is physical and emotional. He said in an interview: 'I'm no intellectual. All I am is feeling.' I think that's where you have to start with his plays."

Isn't that beautiful? I also think what he says about Beckett's language would make a fabulous spa treatment.