Maybe it’s the product of growing up in the seventh oldest settlement in the U.S., but I like to know a bit of history about anywhere I live. When I moved to Northampton earlier this year, I knew about its recent reputation as a queer and cultural hub, but not much else.

A quick google search led me to discover that I live down the street from the Historic Northampton Museum. How convenient! I saw that they were having an exhibit all about the history of Main Street, which is even more specific to where I live. Maybe I could learn about my apartment building there.

The big yellow house was easy to find, and the museum is fairly small inside—at least the part that’s open to visitors. The museum’s co-director welcomed me and gave me a little introduction to the museum space and the history of Main Street, which I really appreciated.

The main focus of the museum is the Making It on Main Street exhibit. In the center is a diorama of Main Street as it would have been in 1847, with signs indicating where modern buildings are now. In 1847, my apartment building was apparently a bush (i.e., not yet in existence*).

The perimeter of the room walked through the decades of Main Street history, starting with the mid-1600s settlements—folks moving to the area for The Meadows—to present times.

I appreciated that the exhibit didn’t shy away from the not-so-great parts of Northampton history, including racial injustices, economic devastation, and even (gasp!) homophobia. The years between 1920 and 1970 sounded particularly rough, with many vacancies downtown. I was surprised to learn how much the Thornes family played a role in reviving the town in the 70s. Thornes Marketplace is still a central downtown institution today.

A main takeaway—which I think reflects an honest historical portrayal—is that for majority of its history, Noho (or Hamp) wasn’t such such a great place to live. It wasn’t really until the 1980s when more people started moving here for college, particularly Smith College, that Northampton started becoming the arts and cultural hub that it’s known as today.

I’m not sure if the museum will have other exhibits in the near future, but I’d be interested in going back. It was definitely a worthwhile way to spend a drizzly Saturday afternoon.

*I later learned via some online research that my apartment building, as it stands now, was built in 1915 in the place of an earlier building that was likely built in the 1860s but collapsed (?!) in 1914. Just like, casually collapsed for unknown reasons. This is the most modern apartment I’ve lived in nearly a decade, and it’s still over a hundred years old. What can I say? I love it. I’m making it on Main Street!

For some reason I wasn’t expecting to see so many crucifixes at the Smith College Museum of Art.

My fault for presuming the vibe, especially when the main exhibit on view was European Painted Wood Sculpture from 1300-1700. Naturally there was going to be a lot of Christian art in there. I didn’t go there for that exhibit though. I went because it’d been announced that as of July 1, the museum is now free for all visitors.

A free art museum? In walking distance of my apartment?! Hell yes!

I quickly discovered the catch though—or at least a potential reason for it being free. The museum at the time of my visit was heavily under renovation. My admission mostly involved the greeter informing me of all the areas of the museum that were closed, including all of Level 3.

With one floor totally closed, and the atrium and the Asian Art wing also closed, the museum felt pretty small, but also eerily intimate. There were so few visitors. I could take my time exploring, stopping at whatever I wanted to see. That was kind of a nice change from the big and bustling museums like the ones in Boston, where you’re always at risk of being in someone’s way or photobombing.

There was a lot of Christian art and some ancient art. More fitting for the vibe of Noho though was the protest prints and photographs exhibit. I also enjoyed the video gallery, where I stood alone in a dark room watching a black-and-white video of ocean waves.

But my favorite exhibit of all was…the bathrooms! Art in toilets, who knew! On the lower level there are two all-gender artist-designed restrooms. I checked out both of them, even though I didn’t really need to pee. No one was around so I got to wander without feeling too weird. That discovery alone was worth the (free!) visit.

Currently, I don’t have a bike. But since moving to Northampton, I do find myself having increased stamina for outdoor adventuring. For example, a jaunt down the Northampton bike path near my apartment turned into a four-hour-long journey (with breaks) over the Connecticut River via the connecting Norwottuck (Branch) Rail Trail and into the farmlands of Hadley.

The Norwottuck Rail Trail is… very long. 11 miles from Northampton to Belchertown. Most of the travelers are on bikes, and the trail is relatively flat and shaded. One of the more scenic stops is on the Norwottuck Rail Trail Bridge overlooking the Connecticut River.

Zel and I went as far as Hadley, veering left of the trail to head towards the farmland and the long walking trail along the river. While mostly unshaded, walking through vast flat land with mountains in the background was surreal and worth applying the extra sunblock.

My favorite part though was walking the more tree-covered path along the river. I’ve since learned that this area is called the Alexandra Dawson Conservation Area and it has nearly 2 miles of trails. The views here were incredible. More incredible was the fact that hardly anyone was around on such a nice Sunday afternoon. We did wave hi to some river boaters though!

I didn’t expect to see a bald eagle nest and a swooping bald eagle parent within three weeks of moving to Northampton. But that’s what happened on my first visit to the Meadows.

Since moving, I’ve learned that “The Meadows of Northampton” can mean pretty much anywhere along the Connecticut River that’s just above “The Oxbow” — another term I’ve since come to know well. But my first meadow experience was in the conservation area that’s north or (or maybe even part of?) the Mass Audubon Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary.

The entrance to the conservation area—or at least one of them—is behind a residential street, Pynchon Meadow Road. I’m not sure where one would park if they drove there, but it’s fairly easy to find on-foot. Then again, I say this as someone who followed a guide there. I’m actually not sure I would’ve ever found the place myself. Which is maybe why no one seems to ever be here, despite it being a peaceful, lovely place with lots of birds.

While there’s some swampy shady bits, it seems less like a meadow to me and more like an open grassy field with views of the mountains that blew my mind when I first saw them (and they still kind of do, to be honest).

Alongside a mowed path there are some trees. On this day, there was an active bald eagle nest! It was hard to get too close, but even still, when the eagle swooped low, I might’ve screamed a little.

The walking path makes a big loop, turning into some dirt roads at some parts. It extends all the way down to The Oxbow, which looks like a fairly basic river and boat launch from the ground. I didn’t full appreciate what a cool and unusual formation The Oxbow really is until later, when I saw it from above, atop Mount Holyoke.

Last Friday I went to go see Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein presented by ArtsEmerson. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was in the mood for some Victorian horror, and I do love me some Mary Shelley. The show’s description promised “more than 500 handmade puppets” plus “animation and live music.”

Not only were there over 500 puppets (most but not all of them shadow puppets), and live music, and animation… there was also singing, acting, costuming, a gender-bending Doctor Frankenstein (!!), and robotic tambourinists.

And they all came together create—of all things—a movie.

In short, it was one of the most impressive and entertaining things I’ve ever seen happen on a stage. I still can’t fully wrap my head around it.

“How would I even begin to describe this to people?” one audience member asked Manual Cinema in their Q&A after the 70-minute performance/movie. The audience had lots of questions, and most of them boiled down to the same one I had: How?

“It’s like going to see a movie, but the movie is also being made right in front of you,” was one answer to the question.

I admit, it took me a good fifteen minutes to figure out the full wizardry of what was happening on stage. I was too busy watching the four musicians (plus some robots) and the large screen above them, which projected a silhouette animation telling the story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein after the sudden death of her baby, Clara.

Then suddenly I noticed that behind the musicians, near the back of the stage, there were people in full Victorian costumes acting against a white backdrop, providing some of the silhouettes on the screen above.

Oh cool, I thought, some of these scenes are happening live! But, um, where are these 500 puppets at?

Then, to my total bafflement, I noticed the costumed actors rushing back and forth between the shadow screen and what appeared to be some kind of lightbox down low.

Wait… I thought, are they… creating these animations right now? LIVE? With shadow puppets? HOLY SHIT THEY ARE!!

MANUAL CINEMA. DUH. GOT IT.

Sometimes in the silhouette scenes, it was hard to tell the difference between puppets and humans. Judging by the one (surprisingly intense) puppetry class I took in college*, shadow puppetry is a deceptively difficult artform. To see this level of detail and mastery was mind-bending.

Just when I thought my mind could be more blown, the puppeteers/actors moved to the other side of the stage to tell the Frankenstein portion of the story, and Mary Shelley became a drag Doctor Frankenstein acting in a silent-movie-era film (I know, this is very hard to visualize and explain). These were some of my favorite scenes.

Frankenstein’s creature was played by both a 3D puppet (made of ripped purses and other found textiles) and an actor/puppeteer in costume (who ALSO played Doctor Frankenstein’s wife… like, come on!). Everyone in the incredibly small cast, including the musicians, played multiple parts.

The live “movie score” included spotlighted musicians taking turns playing the waterphone during some of the creepier scenes. Even the way they played the instrument varied, with both bow and mallet. Everything about the performance/movie was intentionally multi-faceted like this.

For the movie’s “credits,” the cast took a traditional bow before running around the stage with name cards, holding them up over each performer, puppeteer, and musician’s head.

Maybe most incredible to me—during the Q&A portion, they told us that the manual movie we just watched was in no way recorded! The next night, they would do it all over again, and so the movie is never 100% the same. I just love the concept of a taking a visual art like film and making it ephemeral.

*Note: I will never forget my Katrina Van Tassel shadow puppet doing an accidental backbend during my one-and-only performance of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in front of my puppetry professor and classmates. Yes, it’s possible to fail puppetry.

Despite spending most of my life on the NH seacoast and seeing a fair share of local theater, I’d somehow never been to The Players’ Ring Theatre in Portsmouth NH until this past weekend.

When my sister invited me to a play there, I couldn’t even picture where the theater was. Turns out that’s because it’s pretty inconspicuous, located in a flat brick building on the edge of Prescott Park, not exactly downtown.

My sister wasn’t feeling well the night of the play, so I went with my dad to The Players’ Ring to see C33: The Queer Story of Oscar Wilde’s Undoing, a new historical play about Oscar Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment for “gross indecency” (i.e, being and acting gay) in the mid-1890s.

The Players’ Ring is a fairly casual, seat-yourself black box theater. It’s also maybe the smallest theater I’ve ever been to. That’s great for an intimate performance and not so great if (like me) you’re sometimes uncomfortable with being right beside the action.

Thankfully my dad had been to the Ring before and knew we should sit back a row. Given the stage size and setup, there wasn’t really a bad seat in the place. It ended up being a pretty full house.

Despite the play’s serious topic and tone, it was hard not to laugh watching the people in the first row sometimes flinch at the sudden emotional outbursts or movement from the actors (the play was one with lots of shouting and banging of fancy canes and cups).

I thought I recognized a couple of the actors from other local theater productions, but maybe not. In addition to The Players’ Ring, Portsmouth is home to THE REP (Seacoast Repertory Theatre, but THE REP is more fun to say) plus outdoor theater via the Prescott Park Arts Festival every summer.

After the play, many of the actors hung out in the little lobby, still in their Victorian attire, to mingle with the audience and thank them for coming.

I left with the impression that what differentiates The Players’ Ring is its intimate minimal-frills setting, its support for local artists (C33 was written by a local playwright), and a dedication to community theatah.

Photo Credit: The Players’ Ring Theatre website.

I picked a poor time to go to the Harvard Museum of Natural History—Sunday morning, which I learned is when the museum is free to all Massachusetts residents. Not only that, there also seemed to be some sort of dinosaur storytime happening in the paleontology wing, bringing in throngs of excited children and their less-excited (i.e. anxious and exhausted) parents.

Thankfully the exhibit I’d come to see was the quietest spot in the museum. In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss is a special exhibit open through November. 

Pitched as a “modern artistic interpretation of Henry David Thoreau’s preserved plants,” it includes some of Thoreau’s original pressed flowers and plant specimens from Walden Pond and the surrounding Concord area. The full collection is stored at the Harvard University Herbaria. Maybe not the most thrilling subject for MA families who’d rather see dinosaur bones. But as a Thoreauvian, it was something I didn’t want to miss. 

To my surprise, Thoreau’s original physical plant pressings were tucked in glass cases against the walls, not the featured items at all. The focal pieces of the exhibit were the “artistic interpretations” mentioned in the description.

This included a video projection wall by Robin Vuchnich, made up of digitized plant pressings, moving and rotating with quotes and facts, including how nearly 30% of Thoreau’s documented species are now extinct, and 36% are in low population. This loss is despite little to no human interference in the protected places where Thoreau first gathered them. In other words, climate change is behind their demise.

There was also a large wallpaper display of Thoreau’s flowers using cyanotypes for data visualization. Plants against dark blue backgrounds are extinct. Medium blue, they’re endangered. Plants on white backgrounds are still alive, some even thriving. The wall, which one might imagine would lean more blue, was a solid mix, showcasing not just the loss of plant life, but the overall change caused by global warming.

My overall takeaway from the exhibit was the importance of historical preservation in studying the affects climate change. Which plants thrive and which die in this rapidly changing climate, and what can that tell us about the future of the planet? Without the record-keeping of Thoreau and other naturalists, answering these questions would be far more difficult.

Once I’d had my fill of flowers, I figured I’d explore the rest of the museum a bit. It’d been years since I’d last visited.

Skirting around the dinosaur storytime chaos, I walked through another new special exhibit all about sharks, displaying toothy jaws and watery blue light projections on the carpet.

I said a brief hello to the glass flowers and peeked into the rocks and minerals room. The Great Mammal Hall hasn’t changed at all, except some of the taxidermy animals are looking extra ragged. Surely Harvard has the budget for some fresh faux snouts? 

“Kids (and Their Parents) Say the Darndest Things” Harvard Natural History Museum Edition: 

“I want to take the big egg home!” “The big egg has to stay here in the museum, sweetie.” (cue meltdown)

“Daddy daddy daddy why are its bones like that?” “I don’t know, honey, but looks like it’s a [reads Latin name off museum label].” “But WHY are its bones like that?” “I don’t know.” “But WHY—” “I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ITS BONES!”

“See? Those are all shark mouths.” “What happened to the rest of the shark?”

“This bird looks like it’s dead.” 

“BYE BYE ANIMALS BYE BYE.” 

For nearly three years now, I’ve lived ten minutes away from The Center for Arts at the Armory in Somerville, MA. For nearly three years now, I’ve wanted to check out the community art space. But for nearly three years now, I’ve been mostly holed up in my apartment due to a little global pandemic and other fun facts of life.

At LAST I visited the Armory this past weekend to see queer performance artist and musician Bitch perform her one-woman musical, Bitchcraft.

The most surprising thing about the Armory to me (and this isn’t obvious in pictures online) is that it is located very much in a residential neighborhood. At first the Lyft dropped me off in front of someone’s house on Highland Ave and I was like, “excuse me?” until I saw the strange stark white building up ahead in the dark.

As a concert venue (at least for this particular concert), the Armory had a laid-back, communal DIY, “we just built this tonight” vibe that personally I really like. Think folding chairs, bulletin boards, volunteers, and a beer-and-wine-only bar.

The charming scrappiness of it all was made even more apparent when it came to the show, which had some sound and technical difficulties that derailed the musical for a good ten minutes. Bitch and the Bitchcraft crew made light of it, engaging with the audience as we patiently waited for things to resume (this was definitely NOT a boo-hiss kind of crowd). “So what the microphone doesn’t work? We’re all going to die someday anyway!”

These pauses allowed me time to take in my surroundings. The Armory is an odd building both inside and out. The ceiling in the performance hall has exposed pipes, beams, and insulation. Curtains only partially cover the half round windows. The shape of the room was is a bit irregular. Naturally, I found myself wondering about the history of the place.

“Here we are, together, in an old weapons hall,” Bitch joked at one point during the show. I thought, oh, right. Armory. Arms. Weapons.

According to the History page on the Arts for the Armory’s website, the building was constructed in 1903 for the Somerville Light Infantry of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia. It housed the MA National Guard for nearly 70 years and has been a community arts center since 2008. And that’s about all I can find online about it.

Now knowing I was in an old military building singing along to Pussy Manifesto with a buncha dykes just makes the whole experience feel that much more surreal (and wonderful).

“Wow I feel weak!” announced the man seated in front of me at the conclusion of Sacre, a 65-minute acrobatic dance performed by Circa, an Australian contemporary circus company. By “weak” he didn’t mean he was moved by the performance, per say, but physically weak.

“What do you mean? I can totally carry three people on my shoulders!” his friend quipped, referring to one of several strength-defying stunts we’d just witnessed on stage.

I’ve been to the circus. I’ve been to contemporary dance performances. But I’ve never seen anything quite like Circa, who performed Sacre at the Boch Center Shubert Theatre in Boston on February 9. It featured ten barefoot dancers dressed in black under stark white spotlights and strobe lights.

The dance began with discordant electronic music that gave me uneasy horror movie vibes. The dancers climbed and jumped onto and off of each other in ways that were suggestive and strong, sexy and strange. Every once in a while someone would appear to die on stage and lie there unmoving.

The lights intentionally shadowed the Circa dancers’ faces, so it was difficult to track who was who. Six male dancers wore black suit jackets, sheer shirts, or no shirts alongside four female dancers wearing long black maiden-like dresses. Though the costumes were gendered, the dancing wasn’t as much, which I appreciated given the heavy eroticism (i.e., gimme gay shit gimme gimme). 

It’s hard not to read meaning into movements that involve lots of touching, falling, and catching. “Ah yes, they’re courting! Now they’re breaking up? Or, no wait, now there’s a third person? And now she’s dead? Hm!”

During one part, two dancers appear to wake up side-by-side, as if in bed, and then climb over and around each other as if having sex, if sex involved crab walking and being swung around by the wrists like a human Skip-It (maybe I’m just doing it wrong). 

Then, without much transition, the music shifted to Stravinky’s “The Rite of Spring.” With this change, the dancing became less rigid, more bendy and organic. This included some of the most wild stunts, like the aforementioned one where three dancers balanced upon the shoulders of one and branched their limbs like a human-tree.

In one of my favorite parts, all ten dancers form a sort of writhing earthly mass and push up a singular dancer, like a blooming flower, who then falls and is (thankfully!) caught by the others. 

The performance, which had no intermission, concluded with all the lights cutting out and a guttural male groan that prompted the audience to chuckle a little. I’m not sure the purpose of the noise, except that it seemed suddenly absurd that in all their exertion—lifting and catching and balancing—the dancers had been totally silent. There had only been the slapping of bare feet and other body parts on stage.

This realization prompted another question for me—how on earth are these dancers not bruised all over at the end of each show?  

After months of wanting to see the exhibit, I finally caught the last guided tour of Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment at the Harvard Art Museums on January 15.

I was interested in it specifically for Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty’s 1746 anatomical print “Muscles of the Back” that was featured in many of the exhibit’s marketing materials. I was already familiar with the illustration due to a morbid anatomy phase* in my early twenties. It stuck with me because of my personal history with spinal issues and surgery. 

I had to register for the (free) tour ahead of time because it was limited to fifteen people. Yet ten minutes into the tour, there were somehow already about thirty people tagging along. All these folks choosing to spend their Sunday afternoon listening to the curator talk about Enlightenment era graphic arts! Wow!

I’m usually not one for tours, preferring to wander and engage with what interests me, but I’m actually glad I chose the tour route for this exhibit. I’m not sure I would’ve fully understood or appreciated the connections between the scientific illustrations and the more fantastical artworks depicting imaginary architecture, vehicles, religious figures, and mythological animals. A few pieces didn’t include museum labels, intentionally so. 

Rooms painted deep blue displayed prints organized by high-level Enlightenment-era themes like “Empathy” and “Imagine.” While the Age of Enlightenment is generally associated with the Scientific Revolution—a  period that emphasized rationality—the exhibit paid special attention to topics of morality and what it means to be human. Some of the most interesting prints were ones that directly challenged religious authority and the ethics of corporal punishment and slavery. 

Human anatomy featured less than I’d expected, “Muscles of the Back” being one of only a handful of prints on the subject. Probably the most interesting fact I learned about that particular print is that, despite its weirdly seductive and unreal quality, the illustration and its labels are actually anatomically correct.

*If you’re wondering what exactly a morbid anatomy phase involves, I can say it involved reading a lot about medical art aesthetics and anatomical venuses, attending lectures about the macabre, watching Oddities on the Science Channel, and seeking out (sometimes collecting) medical antiques at Brimfield. The phase ended when I started getting faint from some of the Victorian-era anatomical photography. Oh those darn daguerreotypes!