Compass A&E

On the evening before the presidential inauguration, the Shakespeare & Company theater group in Lenox, Mass., will once again air a taped performance of the play “Martha Mitchell Calling,” by Berkshires resident Jodi Rothe and starring Annette Miller as the wife of the attorney general and Kale Brown as John Mitchell. 

Natalie Baxter uses needle, thread and wit to make statements about the world around her in fabric. 

She will give an online talk about her work, hosted by the Wassaic Project,  in Wassaic, N.Y,. on Friday, Jan. 15, at 5 p.m., with time for questions from participants.

In just nine years, the Kent Gingerbread Festival in Kent, Conn., has gone from being just fun to being quite a big deal. It’s one of the biggest gingerbread festivals in the region and has become a big draw to town, even in years when there’s a pandemic quarantine.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering what goes on inside the grand white building in Winsted, Conn., that’s called the American Museum of Tort Law.  If you have questions or concerns about the presidential election and about pardons that Pres.

The dozens of viewers who attended the December talk on the life and art of Sharon, Conn., summer artist-resident Alethea Hill Platt came away with a more informed appreciation of this late 19th- and early 20th-century woman, who earned every inch of her success as an artist while exercising her fierce independence as a woman of her times.

The beginning of the new year is a time of optimism, when we hope that the coming 12 months will be better than the past 12 months. 

If such high spirits seem unwarranted to you, then a new book by David Pogue called, “How To Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos,” will perfectly suit your mindset. 

It’s not like most of us have the opportunity to visit all the great museums even without COVID-19. But it is possible these days to get a “next best thing” tour of world culture thanks to the internet. 

There’s an apocryphal story about marmalade that says the sugary citrus jam got its name from Mary, Queen of Scots (the famous Mary from the 1500s, who was a cousin to Queen Elizabeth).