Blues Beat: Warm weather s a perfect time for festivals
Domenic Forcella
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The Sawtelles will play at the Best Video Film & Cultural Center deck April 25.Dom Forcella / Contributed photo
The blues calendar is beginning to fill, and more and more artists are coming out of hiding with outdoor concerts.
While we slowly approach old times, things will remain different, but this year’s festival season, if it goes off as planned promises a great summertime season.
As people are anxious for more blues, this week’s column will list the information that has come across our desk.
On Friday, Cheryl Tracy is at Relish 670 in Middletown.
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In 1974, my mother was twenty years old, trying to make it as a theater actress in New York after dropping out of Bennington College. She was in a painting class led by the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish artist Norman Raeben (the youngest child of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem). One day, Bob Dylan showed up unannounced. They were painting abstracts at the time, and when it was my mother’s turn to comment on Dylan’s work she just shrugged. At first, that was the sum of their relationship: her quiet refusal to adulate Dylan’s celebrity.
One evening, after a particularly long session, Dylan abruptly asked my mother whether she wouldn’t mind hosting a party. It didn’t make much sense: she lived in a third-floor walk-up in the East 70s; he was Bob Dylan. He came to her apartment in red cowboy boots. People drank and chatted and left around 2 am. Dylan closed the door behind the last guest with a flick of his boot and turned to face my mother. So began a
Bearsville Theater Last month marked a full year since the lockdown went into effect in New York State, putting a freeze on musical performances as part of the overall effort to help slow the spread of COVID-19. But on March 3, the governor s office announced that arts, entertainment, and events venues statewide could reopen on April 2. The resumption carries with it some strict regulations: Until further notice, venues can only operate at 33 percent of their usual indoor capacity, with a limit of 100 people indoors or 200 people outdoors, and all attendees must wear masks and maintain social distancing. (Admission limits would be increased to 150 indoors or 500 outdoors if all audience members have tested negative before entering.) We checked in with several Hudson Valley venues to see how they ve been holding up and how they plan to negotiate the restriction easements.