Monte Belmonte Wines: Wine Snob Glossary, Part 1
By Monte Belmonte For the Valley Advocate While dining out with my lovely wife the other day, it occurred to me that I use a lot of extraordinarily snobby adjectives that are incomprehensible to the lay drinker. Then it occurred to me: maybe a wine glossary would be...
Behind the Music
Neon FaunaLeather Motel “Pinned Butterfly” the opening track and first single off of Neon Fauna’s second full length album Leather Motel sets the energetic mood immediately with this experimental album. When I say experimental, it's not just in reference to the...
Blazing Their Own Trail: Only the 2nd community in the nation to officially commit to reparations for its Black residents, Amherst is in important and unchartered territory
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...
The V-Spot with Yana Tallon-Hicks: What actually makes for good sex
After over a decade of doing this work, I firmly believe that everybody who is interested in having sex wants to be good at it. Or, at the very least, they want to have sex that is good rather than sex that is not. Meaning, we are motivated to experience good...
‘Social equity’ applicants making inroads, gradually, in cannabis business
The first time lifelong Holyoke resident Damaris Aponte sold marijuana, she was 14 and growing up in a city deeply impacted by the so-called war on drugs. She saw many people she knew get arrested on drug charges, and her own brother was killed in the city’s...
Stagestruck: Black Plays Matter
2020’s Summer of Rage following the murder of George Floyd gave rise to much soul-searching in many areas of American society, including the theater community. Some of the fruits were on view this summer.
Stagestruck: Don’t Pass Over This One
In a season when every major theater in the region has mounted shows reflecting on today’s racial tensions and evils, I found “Pass Over,” at Chester Theatre Company, the most compelling and affecting. If you see only one play this summer, see this one.
Stagestruck: The Land on Which We Dance
It’s become standard practice in the region’s theaters to offer a land acknowledgement before every performance. As Jacob’s Pillow’s artistic director Pamela Tatge says every night, “The land on which we dance is the ancestral homeland” of the Native peoples whose...
Stagestruck: Brothers in Blood
Two plays now running in our region center on pairs of Black brothers, one bonded by blood, the other by circumstance. Both offer reflections of Black lives not often seen around here, presented by theaters determined to make a difference, and both are worth a visit.
Stagestruck: Turning in the Keys
After a boundary-busting 30-year run, the Ko Festival of Performance is coming to a close with two final shows: a meditation on legacies and “an environmental, cultural and spiritual parable of domination and resilience.”
Stagestruck: Tropical Tolstoy
The title character in “Anna in the Tropics,” now playing at Barrington Stage Company, isn’t a person, but a book. And she plays a central role, thematically, narratively, even physically. The book is “Anna Karenina,” Leo Tolstoy’s winter’s tale of love – illicit, unrequited, doomed. The setting, though, in Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer-winning play, is a Little Havana in 1920s Florida.
Sessions
Check out our most recent performances in the playlist below, or click here to dig into interviews and related material!No Results Found
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Philip B. Price on the Valley Advocate Sessions Stage
Philip B. Price (Winterpills) writes finely crafted pop songs mixed with experimental rock stylings.
V-Spot: How Do I Make My Orgasms Come Back?
Recently, whenever I have attempted to reach orgasm, it never comes. I get the brink, right before the fall, but I’m just stuck.
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Cinemadope: Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Where is the Friend’s House?’ comes to Amherst Cinema
It’s a kind of filmmaking — understated yet rich, quiet but never boring — that deserves a wider viewership.
