Real News & Fake News

CLOSED, abruptly last Friday, without warning: The Fitness Zone, in Great American Plaza, Cairo. Vanished proprietor Josh Kelder leaves behind a 3600-square-foot space crammed with exercise equipment, overdue rental payments to Ellsworth Slater, unpaid wages, and scores of members who bought 12-month subscriptions. Some of the locked-out members have already found their way to the Summit Hill Athletic Club in Catskill.

CLOSING today: Beginner’s Mind gallery on Main Street, Catskill.

ALMOST OPEN: Play of Light, a new Catskill gallery featuring holographic (laser light-scattering) marvels devised by Rudie Berkhout. The gallery, at 460 Main Street, also will serve as headquarters for Novia Lighting Innovation, a new laser light-promoting company launched by Mr Berkhout along with his long-time collaborator, Hudson Talbott, and Catskill Village President Vincent Seeley.

TOUTED, in a “Perfect Weekend: The Catskills” piece in the current issue of Newsweek: the Bowerbird shop in Catskill. “If shopping is your idea of a perfect day,” well, here is “a hip housewares store in Catskill that sells vintage as well as modern goods.”

OPEN, as of last Friday, next door to Pomadoro’s restaurant in Catskill Commons: a branch of The Shoe Dept., which is part of the 1078-outlet Shoe Show chain that was started in 1960 in Kannapolis NC. The local manager told Seeing Greene that all information about the store must come from company headquarters—including her name. According to its web site, the company is “active in a number of charitable causes including Cooperative Christian Ministries, Bible Teaching Associations, Salvation Army, Gardner-Webb University, and Association of Retarded Citizens.”

41=percentage increase in tickets sold to visitors to the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill this year as compared with 2006 (which was a spectacular year as compared with 2005). So reports Executive Director (and new mother) Elizabeth Jacks.

RESURRECTION? “Fallen war veteran receives medals 62 years after death” says a Daily Mail headline (11/10/07), challenging conventional notions about what people can do or have done to them after they have died.

SOLIDARITY? Greg Seeley, newly elected to the office of Greene County Sheriff, “will begin his four year term January 1 and join District Attorney Terry Wilhelm in what some are calling a ‘law enforcement dream team’.” That’s the word from Daily Mail reporter Andrea Macko (11/7/07), who neglects to name one person, let alone several of the “some,” who voiced that opinion.

PURPOSEFUL PAPER? “The goal” of a certain bill that is up for consideration by State legislators, says a local journalist, “is to deliver a higher quality of public defense services and increase the efficiency of legally-required representation.” That bit of putative reportage invites us to believe (i) that legislative bills--pieces of paper—have goals, and that (ii) those goals are objectively accessible to journalists.

UPCOMING

Tonight at 7:30, and Saturday (7:30) and Sunday (3pm.): “On Golden Pond” performed by Classics@thePoint troupe (Chase Crosby, Mike Steese, Lora Lee Ecobelli, David Fanning, Eileen Roehm, Dan Kirby) directed by Joseph Capone, at Columbia-Greene Community College theater. 828-4181.

Saturday (12/1):

*Catskill Garden Club’s holiday sale, from 9am at Beattie-Powers House in Catskill.

*Harvest and Holiday Forest Farmers Market, from 10am at Agroforestry Resources Center in Acra. Edible forest items (honey, ginseng, maple sap), local farm produce, locally crafted gift items, decoration materials.

*Holiday Fair at Catskill Elementary School, from 11am. Crafts, gifts, refreshments, raffles.

*Coxsackie’s Christmas by the river, at the Gazebo, from 6:30pm. Santa, caroling, gifts for tikes, refreshments. ….

*Hudson’s Winter Walk, on Warren Street, from 5pm. where (says Ellen Thurston) “dancing snowmen and walking grandfather clocks meet Victorian carolers and horse-drawn carriages.”