News
by Advocate Staff | Jan 2, 2026 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
By CAROLYN BROWN For the Valley Advocate Fifteen years ago, Gabriel “Gabe” Levey’s life took a drastic turn when he had a seizure — his first of many. But rather than letting the diagnosis silence his career as a performer, the Northampton-based clowning...
by Melissa Karen Sances | Dec 31, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
By Melissa Karen Sances For the Valley Advocate If “Frankenstein” is ultimately about creation — and pulling back the curtain between marvel and manipulation — it’s only fitting that CinemaStorm’s upcoming screening of Guillermo del Toro’s movie will itself be an...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 29, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
By DON STEWART For the Valley Advocate A century ago, when women could be arrested for smoking in public and the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol was illegal, there was an artistic and social revolution in this country. You can view a wealth of Jazz Age...
by Melissa Karen Sances | Dec 26, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News, Uncategorized
By Melissa Karen Sances For the Valley Advocate The black-and-white buddy comedy “Tallywacker” opens on Aleister, its star, a young man with brittle bone disease sitting in a wheelchair in downtown Northampton. Locals will recognize the actor as Jeremy Dubs, who is a...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 24, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
By Melissa Karen Sances For the Valley Advocate For Yana Tallon-Hicks, the “V-Spot” has been the epicenter of her career. The column she began for the Valley Advocate in 2010 has since spawned a sex therapy practice, her first book and a Tedx Talk in Vienna — not to...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 24, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News, Uncategorized
By Erin-Leigh Hoffman For the Valley Advocate As Turn It Up! approaches its 30th anniversary, the music store is falling into the hands of a new, but not unfamiliar, owner. Founders Patrick Pezzati and Chandra Hancock are selling the business, which has locations in...
by Jennifer Levesque | Dec 24, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News, Uncategorized
By Jennifer Levesque For the Valley Advocate Burial Grid “NORD Compendium” I’ve been following Adam Kozak’s musical career since we were both in high school. Dare I say, close to 25 years later, Kozak is still one of my favorite local musicians. His latest conquest,...
by Monte Belmonte | Dec 24, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
By Monte Belmonte For the Valley Advocate Perhaps Christmastime still has enough magic in it that small gestures toward peace can make us believe that peace is possible. And if that small gesture is drinking wine, count me in. Max Hastings in his book Catastrophe...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 19, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
By CAROLYN BROWN For the Valley Advocate Though filmmaker Rio Contrada no longer lives in Florence, he’s got plenty of love for his hometown — and he’ll be showing it off when he brings his debut feature-length film back to the Valley next week. Contrada will screen...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 12, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News, Uncategorized
By CAROLYN BROWNFor the Valley Advocate After 18 years at the helm of the Academy of Music, executive director Debra J’Anthony has announced her retirement. J’Anthony started in her role at the Academy of Music in March of 2008. Her previous role was executive...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 12, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News, Uncategorized
By ERIN-LEIGH HOFFMAN For the Valley Advocate MONTAGUE — As Turn It Up! approaches its 30th anniversary, the music store is falling into the hands of a new, but not unfamiliar, owner. Founders Patrick Pezzati and Chandra Hancock are selling the business, which has...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 11, 2025 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News, Uncategorized
By MELISSA KAREN SANCESFor the Valley Advocate After two years of silence, the voices of the the Amherst Area Gospel Choir will rise again. On Saturday, Dec. 13, the group will present the Black Gospel Christmas Story at the Wesley Methodist Church in Hadley. The...
by Advocate Staff | Oct 18, 2024 | Featured, Leisure, News, Uncategorized
By CAROLYN BROWN Staff Writer An arcade near Boston will soon have a new location in Northampton. Hometown Arcade will open its third location in the basement of Thornes Marketplace this November, replacing what used to be Acme Surplus, though the exact opening date...
by Advocate Staff | Jul 12, 2024 | Arts, Featured, Leisure, Music, News, Stage, Uncategorized
By PAIGE HANSON For the Advocate For the first time in two years, The Friends of Mount Holyoke Range have returned the Summit House Sunset Concert Series to its namesake, Skinner State Park’s historic Summit House. The Summit House, which sits at a 935-foot elevation...
by Advocate Staff | Apr 30, 2024 | Arts, Featured, Music, News, Staff Picks, Stage, Uncategorized
By STEVE PFARRER Staff Writer In late March, the fabled Iron Horse Music Hall, slated to reopen in mid May, was still a pretty raw construction site. Boards, pipes, boxes, and other materials were piled on the floors, along the walls, and on tables. Extension cords to...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 8, 2024 | Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
By STEVE PFARRER Staff Writer It’s been a long run — but the finish line is now in view. The Northampton Community Arts Trust building, largely or partly shuttered for most of this year, is poised to reopen, as work to make the final improvements in the...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 8, 2024 | Articles, Featured, News, Uncategorized
By EMILY THURLOW For the Advocate A woman dressed in pajamas walks into a Cottage Street bar and challenges a random stranger to an arm-wrestling match. The circumstances sound like the set-up of a joke. It’s not. That woman is Rose Lynch of Easthampton, and over the...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 8, 2024 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News, Uncategorized
By ALEXANDER MACDOUGALL Staff Writer When Chris Freeman was in eighth grade, his father took him to the Iron Horse Music Hall for his first concert at the venue, where he was immediately entranced by the atmosphere, sitting at one of the tables by the wall plastered...
by Advocate Staff | Oct 27, 2023 | Articles, Featured, News, Staff Picks, Uncategorized
By BOB FLAHERTY For the Advocate If it was just that hippie rag, as detractors liked to rank it, well we hippie ragamuffins devoured it front to back. It spoke our language, the F-laden part included, and it was as underground as the music we toked to. But we soon...
by Advocate Staff | Oct 27, 2023 | Arts, Featured, Music, News, Stage, Uncategorized
By ALEXANDER MACDOUGALL Staff Writer At long last, the Iron Horse Music Hall has a new owner, and music could be emanating from the venerable Center Street location as soon as February. The Parlor Room, a nearby music venue run by a nonprofit, announced last month...
by Robin Goldstein | Oct 27, 2023 | Cannabis!, Columns, Featured, Food Booze and Beyond, News, Uncategorized
By ROBIN GOLDSTEIN For the Advocate Since the birth of the progressive era, western Massachusetts has been a hotbed of progressive activism. But some of that activist history might surprise you. Progressivism was a Protestant social reform movement that swept America...
by Advocate Staff | Sep 8, 2023 | Arts, Featured, Music, News, Podcast, Stage, Uncategorized
By STEVE PFARRERStaff Writer Musicians are always looking for another venue to play. Actors and playwrights search for a new place to stage a show. Dancers want another floor to move on. At Holyoke Media, they all can find room. The independent, nonprofit...
by Advocate Staff | Aug 25, 2023 | Arts, Featured, Music, News, Staff Picks, Stage, Uncategorized
By STEVE PFARRER Staff Writer Joe Farnsworth was 10 or 11 when he got the chance to meet a drumming legend: Max Roach. It was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in 1979, where Roach taught. Farnsworth, who grew up in South Hadley, remembers how one of his...
by Steve Pfarrer | Nov 2, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
Growing up in Springfield, Aprell May knew a few bits and pieces about her Native American ancestry. But it was not something that family members talked about much. In fact, May says that for years she thought of herself as a “Lost Bird” or a “Missing Feather”...
by Bob Flaherty | Aug 26, 2022 | Articles, Featured, News, Uncategorized
In short, there’s simply not A more congenial spot For happily ever aftering Than … here … in … OK, our little Happy Valley ain’t exactly Camelot, but it’s got a lot going for it. Even in the midst of quarantines and arguing over masks and...
by Dusty Christensen | Aug 26, 2022 | Articles, Arts, Featured, News, Uncategorized
Stephen Parmenter married his wife Nina on a special, palindromic date: Nov. 11, 2011. Read another way: 11/11/11. So as the couple’s 11th anniversary approaches, Parmenter knew his anniversary gift to his wife had to be special. Nina is originally from Vietnam,...
by Bera Dunau | Aug 26, 2022 | Articles, Featured, News, Uncategorized
Cafe Balagan, the Main Street coffee shop associated with the Balagan Cannabis dispensary next door, has opened for late-night service. Rachael Workman, one of the owners of Cafe Balagan and Balagan Cannabis, said that she and her fellow owners, who are all in their...
by Emily Thurlow | Aug 26, 2022 | Articles, Featured, News, Uncategorized
When she was 10 years old, a fourth-grade teacher asked Debora Bridges during a classroom lesson “what it felt like to be a slave” as a “little colored girl.” It happened in 1961. In Amherst. Although her mother and grandmother were able to scrounge up an apology...
by Dusty Christensen | Apr 28, 2022 | Articles, Featured, News
When police raided a house at 276 Amherst St. in Granby earlier this year, they described finding an “elaborate” marijuana grow operation with nearly 1,400 plants, an extensive lighting system for six grow rooms and a packaging operation. The person they arrested,...
by Dusty Christensen and Abigail Soukup | Feb 24, 2022 | Articles, Featured, News
The machines inside Analytics Labs seem like futuristic, esoteric devices. Workers in lab coats move around instruments with names like Agilent High-Performance Liquid Chromatography System, performing what seems like complicated science experiments. But the work that...
by State House News Service | Mar 2, 2021 | Articles, Featured, News
Freshly restocked with three new members, the Cannabis Control Commission is gearing up for a year that will include the implementation of recently-approved regulations that allow for home delivery of non-medical marijuana, continuing to press for legislation that...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Dec 10, 2020 | Articles, Between the Lines, Featured, News
For a time, it really looked like the large-scale repudiation of President Donald Trump so many of us had hoped for would come to pass — the polls seemed to predict it and Democrats were racking up mail-in and early vote advantages across the board. But instead the...
by Chris Goudreau | Dec 10, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
All they want is a clean slate. After nine-plus months of dealing with the tumultuous life upheaval caused by the pandemic – on-again, off-again jobs, opening and closing of public schools and the overall anxiety posed by COVID-19 – Paige Spaulding and her husband,...
by Joanna Buoniconti | Dec 10, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
If things smell a bit skunky in the neighborhood, don’t automatically point the figure at those nocturnal creatures. That odor may be emanating from cannabis plants that have cropped up, so to speak, at homes throughout the Pioneer Valley. It’s been four years since...
by State House News Service | Dec 10, 2020 | Articles, News
BOSTON — With the threat of legal challenges looming, state regulators gave final approval on Nov. 30 to new regulations that will reshape the legal marijuana industry to include home delivery businesses initially available only to social equity program participants...
by Chris Goudreau | Oct 8, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
Across Court Square in the city of Springfield the words, “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” are painted on Court Street in 20-foot-tall, bright yellow letters — a powerful symbol of a movement that has taken on a new urgency nationally and in our own backyard in this chaotic year...
by Chris Goudreau | Oct 8, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
While Springfield grapples with the fallout of a highly critical U.S. Department of Justice report, other police departments throughout the Valley are implementing changes in the wake of a national wave of protests following the death of George Floyd. In Northampton,...
by Joanna Buoniconti | Oct 8, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
Nearly two years after the first recreational marijuana sales began in Massachusetts, it’s safe to say the budding industry is contributing mightily to the state and regional economy, despite a significant hit to sales earlier this spring when the coronavirus pandemic...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Oct 8, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
I remember when I first got into journalism covering community planning meetings with quaint names like “Vision 2020,” about what this year would be like. Now here we are, and I can honestly say I don’t think any amount of planning would have prepared us for the...
by Brigid Glackin | Oct 8, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
On the evening of Oct. 29, 1915, a group of 500 women of the Equal Suffrage League, dressed in white, and wearing, across their chests, gold sashes emblazoned with VOTES FOR WOMEN, gathered in the alleys around their headquarters on Center Street in Northampton. At...
by The League of Women Voters of Northampton | Oct 8, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
With the Nov. 3 General Election less and a month away, here are some key voting dates compiled by the League of Women Voters of Northampton: Voting timeline Sept. 14: Vote by mail applications are mailed to all voters for the election. Oct. 17-30: Early in-person...
by Steve Pfarrer | Apr 30, 2020 | Articles, Arts, Featured, Music, News
Kris Delmhorst, holding an acoustic guitar in her lap, wore a hopeful smile as she sat recently in a room in her Shelburne Falls home and stared into a video camera. “I’m here,” she said. “Are you here? I think we’re here together, people … thank you for coming.” Like...
by Steve Pfarrer | Apr 30, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
As deadly as it has been, COVID-19 doesn’t have the historical track record of what has consistently been America’s second leading cause of death: cancer. Yet the novel coronavirus has certainly made matters more difficult for people struggling with cancer and for...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Apr 15, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
It was October 2018 when Emily Collins of Holyoke, now 30, had her second child, Sebastian, who was born 12½ weeks premature. Sebastian lived for 15 days, then died at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. Collins’ friends and family, apart from her sister and...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Apr 15, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
No farms, no food. That bumper sticker slogan feels more apt than ever in this time when government officials are determining what counts as an “essential service.” Could there ever have been a doubt that those growing the food to feed us pass the test?...
by Steve Pfarrer | Apr 9, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
Andrea Hairston was already a pretty serious bike commuter, riding through most kinds of weather to her teaching job at Smith College, when she had an encounter several years ago with the late Frances Crowe of Northampton. It was a cold winter day, with snow coming...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Apr 9, 2020 | Articles, Between the Lines, Featured, News
Now firmly in the second month of intense disruption caused by the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, it’s getting clearer to see that information is among our most highly prized assets as we continue to shelter in place and undertake other efforts to flatten the...
by Chris Goudreau | Apr 1, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
Schools across the state, country and the globe are closed amid the coronavirus pandemic. Here in Massachusetts, though schools are slated to reopen at the beginning of May, they’re now closed per Gov. Charlie Baker’s order. In the meantime, local educators in the...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Apr 1, 2020 | Articles, Between the Lines, Featured, News
I’m sad to report that I was among those laid off last week by Valley Advocate parent company Newspapers of New England, which also owns the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Greenfield Recorder. As you can see, I’m still here writing the Advocate’s...
by Luis Fieldman | Mar 25, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
Editor’s note: Due to the dangers facing those seeking asylum and their families in their home countries, as well as the sensitive natures of their legal cases, the Advocate is using pseudonyms Natty, Eva, and María for asylum seekers featured in this story and...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 24, 2020 | Articles, Bizarro Briefs, Featured, News
The most useful COVID-19 app yet Yes, we all know that toilet paper is in short supply as a result of coronavirus panic shopping, but here’s something new: an app that lets you know exactly how many poops you have left before your toilet paper stockpile runs out....
by Advocate Staff | Mar 20, 2020 | Articles, Bizarro Briefs, Featured
Today’s forecast: Droplets of iron Swiss and other European astronomers examining a hot, Jupiter-like planet 390 light-years away have discovered that rain falls there in an unusual form: iron droplets. The mega planet, called Wasp-76b, is so hot on its sunny side —...
by Luis Fieldman | Mar 18, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
Editor’s note: Due to the dangers facing those seeking asylum and their families in their home countries, as well as the sensitive nature of their legal cases, the Advocate is using pseudonyms Valentina, Isabel, Ramon, and Santiago for asylum seekers featured in this...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Mar 18, 2020 | Articles, Between the Lines, Featured, News
As news pours in regarding the coronavirus, it is becoming clear the scale of how many people’s lives are affected in such dramatic ways. In terms of the Advocate’s function as the keeper of the community calendar, we’re having to reinvent as we go with the vast...
by Chris Goudreau | Mar 17, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
David Katz, a retired family practice physician from Northampton, arrived in Brownsville, Texas, on March 14 to help refugees across the border living in a camp in Matamoros, Mexico. He planned on arriving with two other physicians, one of which is also from...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 17, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News, Podcast
Staff writer Luis Fieldman speaks about the first part of his three-part series on asylum seekers coming to Western Mass. This part focuses on the stories of Ramon and Santiago, whose names we changed to protect their identities as they escaped violence in their home...
by Advocate Staff | Mar 13, 2020 | Articles, Bizarro Briefs, Featured
More Than Just Birdcage Liner At the Advocate, we’ve had our fair share of readers disagreeing with our coverage claim the only thing this paper is good for is lining their birdcages. Well, an Australian newspaper took things a step further, and printed extra blank...
by Luis Fieldman | Mar 11, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
Editor’s note: Due to the dangers facing those seeking asylum and their families in their home countries, as well as the sensitive nature of their legal cases, the Advocate is using pseudonyms Ramon and Santiago for two asylum seekers featured in this story and...
by Dave Eisenstadter | Mar 11, 2020 | Articles, Between the Lines, Featured, News
This week, the Advocate begins a three-part series by Luis Fieldman about asylum seekers who have made it to western Massachusetts, and those who have helped to get them here. Political stability is something we in the United States take for granted. Even having the...
by Luis Fieldman | Mar 11, 2020 | Articles, Featured, News
Over the course of the Trump presidency, seeking asylum in the United States has become more difficult. Below are some policies implemented by the Trump administration that have placed additional obstacles before asylum seekers in recent years. Detaining asylum...
