February 2010

Wednesday, 2/10/2010

Women in Print: Worcester County Authors . Worcester Women's History Project
5:30 PM-7:00 PM Worcester Public Library, Saxe Room, 3 Salem Square, Worcester, MA - Free
Annual "Women in Print" event featuring Laura Menides, Prof. Emeritus at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a poet, fiction writer and opera librettist; Rev. Catherine Reed, Assoc. Pastor at John Street Baptist Church, author of "Crossing Boundaries"; and Karen Sasha Tipper, Prof. of English at Nichols College, author of "A Critical Biography of Lady Jane Wilde." Snow date is Wednesday, February 24, 5:30 PM.
For more information, e-mail info@wwhp.org or call 508-767-1852.

March 2010

Sunday, 3/28/2010

Dear Abby / a new dramatic presentation
2:30 PM-3:30 PM Worcester Public Library, Saxe Room, 3 Salem Square, Worcester, MA - Free
A new dramatic presentation of the letters and conversations between Abby Kelley Foster, Stephen Foster and their daughter, Alla, written by Carolyn Howe and Lynne McKenney Lydick. Performed by Lynne McKenney Lydick, Tom Lydick and Madeline McKenney-Lydick.
Sponsored by: Worcester Women's History Project
For more information, e-mail info@wwhp.org or call 508-767-1852.

Related Events

The following are other women related events happening in the area that are not sponsored by WWHP.

Ongoing Events

Thursdays, 10/22/2009 - 2/11/2010

Business Planning: Getting Started
6:00 PM-9:00 PM Center for Women & Enterprise (CWE) Central Massachusetts, 2nd Floor, 50 Elm Street, Worcester, MA - $500 with pre-registration, $550 at the door, Partial Scholarships Available to those who qualify.
Now you're ready to get your business on the right track! In this 14-week course you will work with other business owners and our experts to prepare a business plan. You will:
Determine the feasibility of your business concept
Understand and organize your financials
Learn how to market yourself and your business to reach your target customers
Find options for financing your business
Identify solutions to typical start-up problems and challenges
The course also includes one-on-one consulting sessions.
Dates: Thursdays, October 22nd, 29th, November 5th, 12th, 19th, December 3rd, 10th, 17th, January 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th, February 4th, 11th
For more information, e-mail info.worcester@cweonline.org or call 508-363-2300.

February 2010

Thursday, 2/25/2010

Sarah McQuaid
6:30 PM-9:00 PM A private residence in Grafton, North Grafton, MA
Pot luck dinner 6:30-7:30pm, concert 7:30-9:30pm

Venue: notfarG House Concerts, Grafton, MA

Suggested donation: $15

RESERVATIONS REQUIRED: notlobreservations@gmail.com

Born in Madrid, Spain, raised in Chicago and holding dual Irish and American citizenship, singer/guitarist and songwriter Sarah McQuaid lived in Ireland from 1994 to 2007. She has since moved with her husband and two children to the home formerly occupied by her parents near Penzance, Cornwall.

I Wont Go Home Til Morning, the long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut album When Two Lovers Meet, marked a distinct change of focus for the musician whose rich voice has been likened to matured cognac. Whereas her first album was a feast of Irish music, this is an enchanting celebration of old-time Appalachian folk, with Sarahs arrangements punctuated by her own fine compositions and a cover of Bobbie Gentrys classic Ode to Billie Joe.

Crow Coyote Buffalo, an album of songs co-written by Sarah with fellow Penzance resident Zoë (author and performer of 1991 hit single Sunshine On A Rainy Day) under the band name Mama, has also been garnering rave reviews since its January 2009 release; one critic described the pair as Two pagan goddesses channeling the ghost of Jim Morrison. (For more on Mama, see www.mamamusic.co.uk).

Sarahs third solo album, provisionally titled The Plum Tree And The Rose, focuses both on early music (including Elizabethan material as well as songs in Old French, Old Occitan, Italian, Middle High German and Latin) and on originals inspired by such topics as Bess of Hardwick and the garden created at Kenilworth by Robert Dudley for Elizabeth I. Its release is expected sometime in 2010.

As might be expected of one who has led such a peripatetic existence, Sarah developed a taste for the road early on: From the age of twelve she was embarking on ten-day tours of the US and Canada with the Chicago Childrens Choir. At eighteen she went to France for a year to study philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, where her performance at a local folk club drew a rave review in the Dernières Nouvelles dAlsace, saluting the superbe chanteuse doutre-Atlantique qui fit passer comme une vibration émotionnelle dans une salle conquise (superb singer from across the Atlantic who caused an emotional vibration to pass through a conquered hall)!

In 1994, Sarah moved to Ireland, where she became a weekly folk music columnist for the Evening Herald and a contributor to Hot PressThe Irish DADGAD Guitar Book, described by The Irish Times as a godsend to aspiring traditional guitarists, and has presented workshops on the DADGAD tuning at festivals and venues across the UK and Ireland.

In the autumn of 1997, she recorded her debut solo album, When Two Lovers Meet, featuring traditional tunes and songs along with one original number. Sarahs voice is both as warm as a turf fire and as rich as matured cognac.... An astonishing debut by a unique talent, wrote the Rough Guide To Irish Music. Despite the critical acclaim, a long break from the music scene followed, during which Sarah married Feargal Shiels and had two children, Eli and Lily Jane.

When Two Lovers Meet was re-released in Ireland on 23 February 2007. Sarahs ensuing nationwide tour was highly successful, thanks in large part to a very well-received appearance on The View, the acclaimed arts television show hosted by John Kelly on RTÉ1. On 30 July 2007, the album had its first UK release. The December 2007 edition of fRoots described it as a masterclass in restraint and subtlety. Authoritative singing and quietly insistent arrangements make for a sumptuous whole  recommended. Tracks from the album were included in FolkCasts December 2007 artists of the year podcast and in Crooked Road host Mike Ganleys Top Ten picks for 2007.

The move to the other side of the Irish Sea was triggered by the death in 2004 of her mother, in whose former home she now lives and to whom I Wont Go Home Til Morning (a title taken from the lyrics of album opener The Chickens They Are Crowing) is dedicated.

Says Sarah: My first album was immersed in Irish traditional music, which I still love  but this time round, I felt the need to revisit the Southern Appalachian songs and tunes that I learned during my childhood. My mother was my introduction to folk music. She never performed professionally, but she had a lovely natural style of singing and guitar playing.

All the songs on this recording have powerful emotional resonances for me, and all are connected in one way or another to my mother. Looking back, I guess it was kind of a cathartic process.

Like its predecessor, I Wont Go Home Til Morning was recorded in Trevor Hutchinsons Dublin studio and produced by Gerry OBeirne. Both also guest on the album, alongside percussionist Liam Bradley, Máire Breatnach on fiddle and viola and Rosie Shipley on fiddle.

A cerebral and consummate performer, she is adept at researching the material she plays and this 11-track album is no exception. It is accompanied by a 24-page illustrated booklet explaining the fascinating histories of the songs and how she stumbled across them. Says Sarah: For nearly every song, Ive either photographed my own source material for the booklet  tattered books, LP and 78 records  or included library scans of archive transcriptions, broadsheet ballads and so on.

Sometimes elegiac, always elegant, the album includes upbeat, fun tracks steeped in the Appalachian tradition and others perfect for mellow, late-night listening. They range from opener The Chickens They Are Crowing, first heard by Sarah as a child, sung by the great Peggy Seeger on the 1958 recording Folksongs and Ballads, to West Virginia Boys, which started life as a blackface minstrel song in the music halls of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Performed as an instrumental on this album, Shady Grove is a song Sarah recalls singing with her mum on long car journeys, while she first heard East Virginia on her mothers scratched and battered copy of Joan Baezs debut album.

She discovered In The Pines in the 1980 Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miners Daughter (as sung by actress Sissy Spacek) and couldnt get it out of her head. Sarah recalls: Strangely, driving home at the end of the day on which I recorded In The Pines, I switched on the car radio just in time to hear Nirvanas 1993 acoustic version of the song being played on RTÉ Radio 2!

Sarahs exceptional voice is heard to great effect in the unaccompanied ballad The Wagoners Lad, whose origins can be traced back to the 1720s. Similarly, her stark and spellbinding rendition of the powerful Sacred Harp hymn Wondrous Love is likely to give you goosebumps. It also resulted in her being contacted by renowned American folk singer-songwriter and Appalachian dulcimer player Jean Ritchie, who had recorded it back in 1956.

Jean saw a YouTube video of Sarah performing the song and contacted her asking where she had found the lyrics, initially thinking they differed from her own version. Says Sarah: Having been listening to her album since my early childhood, I felt rather as I imagine a painter must feel whod received an out of the blue message from Leonardo da Vinci!

There are also two heartfelt compositions of her own. She describes Only an Emotion as a song in defence of sadness and something of a gentle riposte to people who flippantly say Cheer up, it might never happen!, while Last Song is the perfect album closer  a tender number written for both her mother and her daughter Lily Jane (who sadly never met each other), illustrating a perfect three-generation fusion of mothers singing their daughters to sleep.

Eleven years and a musical career break on from the original release of her debut album, Sarah is happy that the new album has achieved what she set out to do. I really like that feeling of continuity and connection through music  the way it links people across generations and even on different continents. Its been a very emotional project for me  not just because Im keeping my mothers spirit alive, in a sense, by singing the songs she loved but because in researching the origins and evolution of these songs and putting my own stamp on them, Ive been taken right back to my roots.

Now busy with upcoming tours and concerts in Ireland, the UK, Europe and the USA, Sarah will be returning to the studio in July 2009 to record her third solo album, once again with Gerry OBeirne producing and Trevor Hutchinson engineering. Sarah is also slowly but surely working on a novel for which shes received two Irish Arts Council Bursaries in Literature. She hopes to finish it one of these days.

© 2009 Sarah McQuaid

http://www.sarahmcquaid.com
Sponsored by: notfarG House Concerts
For more information, e-mail notlobreservations@gmail.com.

March 2010

Wednesday, 3/17/2010

JBMTI Webinar Series-Part 6: Are you my mother? Developing the capacity to connect in early childhood relationships.
12:00 PM-1:15 PM Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley Hills, MA - $50
JBMTI Neurobiology Webinar Series
Presenter: Amy Banks, M.D.
Location:  Wellesley,MA

Dr. Amy Banks is the director of the Practitioners Program at the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute (at Wellesley Centers for Women). Dr. Banks is also Instructor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; coeditor of The Compete Guide to Mental Health for Women; and author of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Relationships and Brain Chemistry.  This program is part of the JBMTI Webinar Series. Learn more at www.jbmti.org. For more information, call (781) 283-3700.

One (1) CE will be awarded for each program attended.
$50 per program; pre-registration is required. Space is limited but programs may be repeated if there is high demand.


March 17, 2010
12:00 -1:15
Are you my mother? Developing the capacity to connect in early childhood relationships.
Objectives:
-Participants will be able to describe general brain pruning patterns in children through adolescence.
-Participants will be able to name three important neurotransmitter systems shaped by responsive contact with a caregiver.
-Participants will be able to describe how "shaming" impacts the human autonomic nervous system.

April 14, 2010
12:00 -1:15
What do our children need? Exploring the ways American culture is shaping our children's brains.
Objectives:
-Participants will be able to present a basic overview of neuron growth during the first ten years of life.
-Participants will be able to describe the relational risks and benefits of our advanced technology.
-Participants will be able to name three things to enhance a child's capacity to connect with others.

May 20, 2010
12:00 -1:15
When love goes wrong: Understanding the devastating impact of interpersonal violence.
Objectives:
-Participants will be able to name three brain changes seen in people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder
-Participants will be able to name the "five bad things" of an abusive relationship.
-Participants will be able to describe the process of amplification seen in PTSD.

June 16, 2010
12:00 -1:15
If it feels good, do it.right? The dopamine reward system as friend and foe.
Objectives:
-Participants will be able to describe the role the dopamine reward system plays in human beings.
-Participants will be able to describe how addictions high jack the dopamine reward system.
-Participants will be able to describe how addictions interfere with relationship.
For more information, e-mail jbmti@wellesley.edu or call 781-283-3800.

May 2010

Saturday, 5/29/2010

stop abuse of women in the world
2:00 AM-6:30 AM, 10:00 AM-2:30 PM, 10:30 AM-3:00 PM, 11:00 AM-3:30 PM, 3:00 PM-7:30 PM To Be Determined - $10.00
Stop Abuse of women in the World will gather supporters of a mission to the Eastern Congo, Africa to train counselors of Gang Raped women, and provide basic health care to Gang Raped women. Supporters will walk in organized team led by volunteers and will ride community bicycles on a flat track. A baazar will feature African and tropical art works.The fund collected will pay for volunteer-trips to Africa and equipment freight.
Sponsored by: www.ipsaci-vuyingo.org
For more information, e-mail ipsaci12@ipsaci-vuyingo.org or call 781-322-2394.

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