Upcoming “Special Guests” at the Colony Café – Monday Night Open Mic – Poetry/Prose/Performance – Every Monday Night “Forever”
All events include an open mic of poetry/prose/performance hosted by Phillip Levine (Chronogram Poetry Editor). Doors Open at 7pm, start time is 7:30pm. Features read for approximately 20-25mins each, beginning around 8pm. Open mic before & after the featured readers.
Monday, February 25th, 2008 7pm:
Phillip hosts Phillip & Friends on his near birthday featuring: Gnomon Shadow Puppet Theatre (Sharon Penz & Zzoe), Elijah Wapner (“Mr. Inevitable”-stand up comedy) & Wide Open Mike
Gnomon Shadow Puppet Theatre (Sharon Penz & Zzoe) – Presents shadow puppet theatre in the Western European tradition, performed live, with live music & narraion, in performances of edifying plays and stories from many cultures. Gnomon Puppet Theatre is available for parties, festivals, and performances at Libraries, schools, homes and other venues, as well as for tutorial workshops. Contact: (845)247-2843 or email: gnomonshadowtheatre@yahoo.com or Gnomon Shadow Theatre, 122 West Bridge Street, Saugerties, NY 12477-1418. Website: http://web.mac.com/taimasmith/Gnomon/Home.html
Elijah Wapner (Mr. Inevitable-stand-up) – Elijah Wapner is an 11th grader at the Hudson Valley Sudbury School and studies acting, movement and voice in the teen conservatory at Stella Adler Studio in Manhattan. He performs standup comedy as a regular at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York City and travels the country raising awareness about autism. His TV debut was on MTV’s True Life, and he has been featured in the New York Times, Redbook Magazine, and on Japanese Television (NHK). Check out his calendar of events at www.MrInevitable.com
Monday, March 3rd, 2008 – 7pm:
Tara Johannessen (poet and filmmaker w/short film: The Holy Longing by Goethe) and Gretchen Primack (poet, with her new book The Slow Creaking of Planets)
Tara Johannessen (poet and filmmaker w/short film: The Holy Longing by Goethe) – publication includes Sleep: bedtime reading by Roger Gorman and Robert Peacock (Rizzoli) and Wildflowers. Currently working for the severly disabled and the elderly as a nurse’s assistant.
Gretchen Primack (poet, with her new book The Slow Creaking of Planets) – Gretchen Primack’s publication credits include The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, New Orleans Review, Rhino, Best New Poets 2006, and others. Her chapbook The Slow Creaking of Planets is freshly minted from Finishing Line Press. She teaches at Bard College and at two maximum-security prisons through the Bard Prison Initiative. More information and poems can be found at www.gretchenprimack.com.
Monday, March 10th, 2008 – 7pm:
A. C. Everson (A pinata bashing poet) and Frank Boyer (writer, performance/installation artist)
A. C. Everson (A pinata bashing poet) – A. C. Everson is a home grown poet, sculptor and performance artist who has performed and shown in the Albany area and abroad since 1994. In 1995, A. C. started Breaking My Art where her poetry and piñatas are combined in what has been described as “awesome” performances. She has four self published chap books of poetry and two self produced cds of her poetry backed up by some of the Albany areas best musicians. You can hear some at www.myspace.com/aceverson .
Frank Boyer (writer, performance/installation artist) – Frank Boyer was born and raised in the Middle West. Throughout the 1980’s, he was based in New York City, where he was active in the performance art scene and also wrote and performed poetry. He has lived upstate since 1992, and is the single parent of a teen-age son. He is glad to read and to hear poetry whenever he can.
Monday, March 17th, 2008 – 7pm:
Tom Molinaro (meditation instructor, teacher, writer) and Laura Lonshein Ludwig (poet)
Tom Molinaro (meditation instructor, teacher, writer) – I am a writer, poet, interested in freedom, heaven on earth, for you, for me, for everyone who wants it, and for changes upon the planet from these intolerable conditions. What are the intolerable conditions? The lack of interest in things that matter, of waking up and celebrating life, the lack of culture, the death of the good things we’ve found in the past, the thrusting upon of technology without our proper balance of spiritual development, the lack of creative living, new ideas and the lack of the impending bonfire of our vanities and the trivial grossness to which we, as a group, have become attached and infected. www.tommspace.com
Laura Lonshein Ludwig (poet) – Laura Lonshein Ludwig’s work is listed in Who’s Who in the World in 2004 and 2005. Recipient of 4 New York State Council of the Arts grants, and author of 3 books, Robo Sapiens, Sounds Like a Plot, and Reflections for the Renaissance. Reviewed by legends in TV, radio and scholars. see: www.barnesandnoble.com.
Monday, March 24th, 2008 – 7pm:
TBA and Richard Boes (prose, 1st chapter of his new book Last Train Out)
Richard Boes (prose, 1st chapter of his new book Last Train Out) – Richard Boes has written a ripped-from-the-heart memoir (The Last Dead Soldier Left Alive) of the years of struggle, substance abuse, and failed relationships that followed his combat experience. It’s painful, yet richly rewarding. Imagine sitting down in a pub next to a slightly scary-looking fellow who buys you a round and then begins to talk, his words spilling out in a heated rush, things bottled up within him all flooding to the surface. And although some of what he is saying is hard to hear, it’s made compelling by his wry, ironic perspective and stream-of-consciousness style, which is akin to that of Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac. At closing time, you’d be inviting him home for a nightcap to hear the rest—even if it disturbed your sleep for weeks to come. – Anne Pyburn (Chronogram, June 2007)
Monday, March 31st, 2008 – 7pm:
Donald Lev (poet) and R. Dionysius Whiteurs (Peptic Poet of the Pepperoni Persuasion)
Donald Lev (poet) – Donald Lev was born in New York City in 1936. He attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of the Daily News and New York Times, and then drove a taxi cab for 20 years (with a 6-year hiatus in which he ran messages for, and contributed poetry to, The Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side). His earliest poems appeared in print in 1958 and he started his first small press magazine, HYN Anthology, in 1969. The most recent of the fourteen collections of his poetry is Grief, a chapbook published in 2006 by Bard Press/Ten Penny Players in Staten Island. A volume of his Selected Poems will be brought out soon by Red Hill Outloudbooks in Claryville, NY. His brief underground film-acting career pinnacled with his portrayal (he wrote his own lines) of “The Poet” in Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 classic Putney Swope. He and his reclusive cat Kit Smart live in High Falls, NY, where he spends most of his time publishing the literary tabloid Home Planet News, which he and his late wife Enid Dame founded in 1979.
R. Dionysius Whiteurs (Peptic Poet of the Pepperoni Persuasion) – Born in the Bronx, brought up in the hills of Mahwah NJ, Ron (R. Dionysius) Whiteurs has lived in the New Paltz-Rosendale region since 1966. With an MA from SUNY New Paltz, he taught English at that institution in 1970-71 and went on to a long career as unofficial “Poet Laureate” of IBM Publishing in Poughkeepsie. From these scintillating heights his fortunes took a flip/flop/flip like some half-dead fish out of water in the following manner:
Performed regularly at the Rosendale Creative Space Co-Op from 1989 to 1992; Performed annually at the Cave Readings at the Widow Jane Quarry in Rosendale from 1991 to 1997; Starred in the Igneous It performance Ox Necks in Tweed on April 3, 1992; Performed at Fountain House, NYC and slammed at the Nuyorican, NYC during these years; Performed at the Woodstock Guild’s Byrdcliffe Barn as part of Summerjazz (FM Artists Coalition) in 1992; Performed as main featured poet at the Outloud Festival in Claryville in 1994; Formed the amateur-amateur-amateur rock n’ roll band “Glory-Hole Bishops of the Holy See” in which he starred as lead NON-singer and song writer; Recorded four poems in 1993 for the Steve Charney Show (“Knock-On-Wood”) on WAMC Albany Public Radio; Featured in the brief biographic film Trapped in Amber by Bart Thrall of Big Time Records; and somehow got himself published in the Rondout Review, The Poets Gallery (Woodstock), Chronogram, Hunger Magazine, and Wuzz Buzzin (Switzerland).
Presently, Ronald, a noted toy collector and craftsman of fine costumes and objects, reads, rants, and raves regularly at the Bohemian Book Bin in Kingston, at the Colony Cafe in Woodstock, and at the Woodstock Town Hall. He is a member of the Woodstock Poetry Society.
Poetry/Prose/Performance:
Colony Café, 22 Rock City Road, Woodstock, NY
(845)679-5342 – www.colonycafe.com
The Colony Cafe has full bar and cafe menu.
For further information about the Monday Night Open Mic or possible bookings contact: Phillip Levine pprod@mindspring.com. For information about the Colony Café contact: Jeff Harrigfeld osmrecords@hotmail.com
