Announcing the Laurel Park Association 2025 Season!
All events open to the public and free; donations welcome.
- Saturday, May 24th, 10am–noon, starting from Normal Hall: BENEATH THE SURFACE: THE GEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF OUR COMMUNITY
Join Laurel Park Naturalist/Artist Claire Dacey for a talk and field walk exploring the dramatic geological history of the Park and its surroundings. Claire will weave an engaging narrative of millions of years of landscape change in our local environs and illuminate the connections between that ancient history and the current character of Laurel Park and its vicinity. Claire’s presentations have been called “poetic,” “magical,” and “eye-opening.”
This is part one of a two-part series on the nature of Laurel Park. It will begin with a presentation in Normal Hall followed by a gentle field walk. Rain date: Sunday the 25th.
- Saturday, June 21st, 3pm, The Tabernacle: CLAIRE DACEY’S SOLSTICE CONCERT
Claire is an award-winning folk singer/songwriter and instrumentalist with a voice reminiscent of the legendary female folk singers of the 60’s and 70’s. A seasoned musician, she writes and performs moving, original songs in a genuine, openhearted style, with a focus on the inner life and our connection to the natural world. Her sound and style bear similarities to the music of Kate Wolf, a musician whose life and career has left a deep and enduring influence on her. She has performed in a variety of well-known venues such as the Iron Horse and the Academy of Music in Northampton, and is now a Laurel Park resident. Rain or shine!
- Saturday, June 28th, 10am–noon, starting from Normal Hall: PIECES, PATTERNS, AND PROCESSES: EXPLORING OUR PLANT AND ANIMAL NEIGHBOR
Our Laurel Park nature series continues as resident naturalist/artist Claire Dacey turns her narrative lens on the plants, animals, and ecological processes that characterize our home ground. The event will begin with a slide-show presentation at Normal Hall and continue with a gentle field walk in the surrounding area. Rain date: Sunday the 29th.
- Thursday, July 10, 7pm, Normal Hall: WE MADE A THING
Laurel Park residents Pam Victor and Scott Braidman, who run Happier Valley Comedy, have been playing together as the theatrical improv duo “We Made a Thing” for almost 10 years now. Watch as Pam and Scott step into the lives of a few characters and see what they’re up to. Everything is made up on the spot beginning with a single suggestion from the audience.
Happier Valley Comedy is nonprofit improv comedy theater and training center in Hadley that brings laughter, joy, and ease to Western Massachusetts (and the world) through the principles of improvisation. Learn more at HappierValley.com. Refreshments to follow.
- Saturday, September 20th, 7pm, Normal Hall: IT HAPPENED HERE, a one-woman comedy by Joanna Rush
Joanna is at it again with her take on life’s seismic moments—literal earthquakes and metaphorical ones and the ones inside the jumbled brain of the Mango Mussolini. Catch it while comedy is still legal.
Joanna Rush started out as a Rockette, and choreographer: Gangster Chronicles, NBC/Universal. Acting: Broadway, Off-Broadway, film, TV. Writing/acting: KICK, formerly Asking For It, Off-Broadway Alliance Award nominee; Sex and Power, Marsh Theater, LPA; Home Sweet Homeland, Amas Musical Theater; Accidental Mummies, Stocker Arts Center. Screenplays: Irish Whiskey (co-author). Proud member of Actors Equity, SAG/AFTRA, and Dramatists Guild.
- Sunday, October 5th, 2pm, the Chapel: LAUREL PARK: A VISUAL HISTORY
Held in the Parker Memorial Chapel at 20 Laurel Park, the cottage now serving as an informal Laurel Park museum, our Park historian Cindy Joy will share an updated Powerpoint version of the slide show that long-time Laurel Park resident Irving D. Baker periodically gave from the 1980s until the year 2000, using photographs from the archive accompanied by his lively narration of early Laurel Park history. Light refreshments will be served.
- Saturday, October 18th, 7pm, Normal Hall: THREE POETS AND A PLAY
Laurel Park resident, poet Barbara Friend, will read from her work, joined by poetic novelist Edie Meidav and poet Richard Michelson, and followed by a performance of The Story: I can’t Remember Anything, a brief one-act play by Arthur Miller performed by Barbara Friend and Paul Powell.
Edie Meidav is the author of Lola, California; Crawl Space; and Another Love Discourse, among other books. She has won the Bard Fiction Prize and the Kafka Prize for Best Novel. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Howard Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and elsewhere . A senior editor at the journal (Itals!)Conjunctions, she teaches in the UMass Amherst MFA program, where she founded the Radius outreach project. More at https://www.ediemeidav.com/.
Richard Michelson is the author of four full length poetry collections, and two limited edition fine press books, illustrated by the artist Leonard Baskin. He was the 2008 Clemson University R. J. Calhoun Distinguished Reader in American Literature, and the recipient of two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships. Michelson hosts Northampton Poetry Radio, and served two terms as Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. More at https://www.richardmichelson.com/.
Barbara Friend: For seven decades, Barbara Friend has been scribbling poetry and appearing onstage, radio, and TV; in stock and community theater. She’s won prizes from The Poetry Society of America, been published in Ms. Magazine and Thirtieth Year to Heaven, and has performed in Israel, Toronto, Seattle and New York, as Eliza Doolittle, Desdemona, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Saint Joan. She delights in the prospect of sharing words with residents and artists in Laurel Park, where she has lived for twenty years.
Paul Powell has appeared on stage most notably as little Ricky in David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones; as Terrible Jim Fitch in James Leo Herlihy’s hour long monologue of the same name; in several of Sam Shepard’s one acts including Cowboys Two; and in the premiere of Like There’s No Tomorrow, by Sonny Wasinger, performed in the Black Box at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and several other theatrical productions and TV commercials. Paul is excited to return to the stage after three decades of helping raise his four children.
Arthur Miller’s short play, The Story: I can’t Remember Anything, is a poignant study of two old friends, an elderly man and woman, who live in nearby houses and often take their meals together. She is a wealthy widow whose life seems to have come to a stop after her husband’s death; he is a retired draftsman, a doctrinaire Communist who was her husband’s best friend despite the radical differences in life styles and political outlook. Both lament the passing of better days, the lack of contact with loved ones, and the loss of memory that clouds the meaningfulness of the time left to them.