Compass A&E

The new Bridging Divides, Healing Communities Youth Film Challenge is giving young local storytellers the opportunity to make their voices heard, and compete for $3,500 in cash prizes and the chance to have their films screened at local theaters.

Have pity on poor Jonathan Tunick, the famed orchestrator of musicals and films, the favorite of Stephen Sondheim, one of only 16 people in the history of the world to hold the coveted EGOT (an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award). 

Aston Magna, performing classical music on period-appropriate instruments, offers  a concert of Bach, Marais, Leclair and Rameau on Saturday, Sept. 25, 7 to 8:30 p.m. at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y.

Tours of pottery and ceramic studios are coming up in the Tristate region at the end of September and beginning of October.

The first of the two, the Berkshire Pottery Tour, will be the weekend of Sept. 25-26 in Southern Berkshire County. 

This is the time of year when fruit is super abundant and when you want to preserve it in all its summery glory.

You don’t have to make traditional jam to do so: You can freeze most fruit and then pull it out in mid winter to make a summery tart or pie.

If I asked you to name some great war movies, you could likely rattle off a half dozen without much thinking. But TV does not dramatize war very often or very well. We do have Ken Burns’ fine documentary “The Vietnam War,” but I can think of only two miniseries worth mentioning here; each depicts a very different war.

Donald Bracken now lives in Cornwall, Conn., but in the late 1990s he was living in New York City and working as an artist in a building that most of us think of as being largely dedicated to finance: The North Tower of the World Trade Center. 

The next time you misplace your glasses, lose your car keys, or can’t recall someone’s name, take heart. Forgetting is not necessarily a failure of your mind. It is a required function that helps your mind to work best.