Support the National Association of Letter Carriers’ (NALC) annual, nationwide Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive this Saturday!
Locally, NALC Branch 25 post offices participating in the food drive include the Gloucester, Rockport, Manchester-by-the-Sea, and Ipswich post offices. People in those communities can leave non-perishable food donations by their mailbox on the morning of Saturday, May 11. Letter carriers will deliver the donations to The Open Door to help feed local people.
The Open Door asks participants to please NOT donate anything in a glass jar.
The Open Door is specifically requesting donations of the following: coffee, condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and salad dressings), peanut butter, tuna, and cooking oil.
Those who live outside the above four communities are encouraged to contact their post office to learn if they are participating in the Stamp Out Hunger food drive.
The Sawyer Free Library will welcome local author Henriette Lazaridis for a discussion of her new book Last Days in Plakaon Thursday, May 9 at 5:30-6:30 pm. The event will take place at the Sawyer Free Library at 21 Main Street in downtown Gloucester. Registration is not required.
Featured Buzz Pick on Good Morning America,Last Days in Planka, explores the lies at the heart of an old woman’s identity and the desperation of a young woman’s struggle to belong.
Searching for connection to her parents’ heritage, Greek American Anna works at an Athens gallery by day and makes street art by night. Irini is elderly and widowed, once well-to-do but now dependent on the charity of others. When the local priest brings the two women together, it’s not long before they form an unlikely bond. As they join the priest’s tiny congregation to study the Book of Revelation in preparation for a pilgrimage to Patmos, Anna sinks deeper into Irini’s stories of a glamorous past and an estranged daughter and lost wealth and the earthquake damage to her noble home. Looking for revelation of her own and driven by a sense that time is running out, Anna makes a decision that puts her in peril, exposes Irini’s web of lies, and compels Anna to confront the limits of her own forgiveness.
Henriette Lazaridis is the author of The Clover House (a Boston Globe bestseller), Terra Nova (which the New York Times called “ingenious”), and Last Days in Plaka (publishing April 2024). She earned degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston. She was the founding editor of The Drum Literary Magazine and runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece. Her essays and articles have been published in Elle, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, and Pangyrus, and earned her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. An avid athlete, Henriette trains on the Charles River as a competitive rower, and skis, trail runs, or cycles whenever she can.
The event is open and free to attend at the Sawyer Free Library located at 21 Main Street in Gloucester. Registration not required. For more information, visit sawyerfreelibrary.org or call, 978-325-5500.
Carole Sharoff will be presented with the Gloucester Rotary’s Paul Harris Distinguished Service Award at a special dinner on Thursday, May 23, 2024, at Cruiseport Gloucester, located at 6 Rowe Square in downtown Gloucester. The Paul Harris Distinguished Service Award is the highest honor bestowed by the Gloucester Rotary and recognizes Ms. Sharoff’s many contributions to the community at large as well as to Rotary as a former club board member, secretary, and President.
Carole is the founder and CEO of Atlantic Vacation Homes and AVH Realty, Inc. and was recently awarded the vacation rental industry’s Pioneer Award with the notation that “This entire industry owes her a debt of gratitude for everything she has done.” She served on the Vacation Rental Management Association’s Board as Secretary and on the Executive Committee. She was a Presenter at the Annual Million Dollar Women’s Symposium at Salem State University Enterprise Center. Locally, she serves on the board of Action, Inc., has been a board member of the Greater Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce, Discover Gloucester and was copresident of Temple Ahavat Achim when it was destroyed in the tragic fire of December 2007. Under her leadership, a new Temple rose from its ashes at its original site on Middle Street. In all areas of her service, Carole focuses on improving the organization’s approach to Diversity and Inclusion.
Rotary International was founded by Paul Harris in 1905 as a humanitarian organization. In recent years, it has led the initiative to eradicate polio and has helped to provide clean water to poor communities around the world. Locally, Rotary helps fund local charities and built and maintains the children’s playground in Stage Fort Park.
Tickets to the Paul Harris Distinguished Service Award Dinner are $60 per person and may be reserved by contacting event Chair Steve Kaity at 978-879-1051. The dinner is open to the general public, and friends and colleagues of Carole are encouraged to attend.
50th Anniversary Meals on Wheels Breakfast Fundraiser Friday, May 17, 2024, 7:00 am – 9:30 am Gloucester House Restaurant, 63 Rogers St, Gloucester Tickets $20 (available online in advance or at the door)
SeniorCare is celebrating the 50th Anniversary of our Annual Meals on Wheels Breakfast Fundraiser (formerly our Valentine’s Breakfast), which has grown to become a well-attended, community-centered event. The breakfast benefits SeniorCare’s Meals on Wheels home-delivered lunch program and provides much needed funding.
SeniorCare currently delivers Meals on Wheels to more than 600 older adults each day. Annually, this means 169,000 home-delivered meals and 19,000 meals served at dining sites in Beverly, Gloucester, Essex, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Rockport, Ipswich, Hamilton, Topsfield, and Wenham.
Join us on a captivating journey through history as we explore the profound connections between art, innovation, and the human imagination. Delve into the fascinating intersection of artistic expression and community dynamics, from the medieval world to the present day. Discover how art has shaped our collective identity and inspired generations to push the boundaries of creativity. Don’t miss this enriching series that celebrates the power of imagination to transform the world around us. Join the conversation and be inspired! The series includes:
Television is one of the most ubiquitous technologies in human history, so much so that we tend to take it for granted. However, the story of TV is a winding tale of decades of painstaking research, false starts, technological dead ends and breakthroughs, commercial failures and successes, aspirational ideals, and human drama. The full picture of TV is composed of a mosaic of individual scientists, engineers, and industrialists who helped to bring it to life, including our founder, John Hays Hammond Jr., whose contributions to the medium are often overlooked. “Who invented television?” is not a simple question. Through this presentation, the complex evolution of television will be traced, the pioneers who forged its path will be given their due, and in particular, the significance of Hammond’s work will be revealed.
The form and function of the painted image changed drastically during the 15th-century Italian Renaissance. From the late medieval paintings of Giotto to works of Renaissance painters like Botticelli and da Vinci, one feels as though stepping from an old world into a new one. What were the sources of this transformation of image and world? How was this transformation related to other cultural shifts such as the rise of humanism, a burgeoning secular society, and the scientific revolution? This presentation examines the religious, philosophical, and scientific backgrounds to the changes of the image in Italian Renaissance painting, in particular the development of linear perspective techniques, and connects this visual revolution in painting to its accompanying spiritual, cultural, and scientific revolutions.
Beliefs and fears surrounding witches and the Devil were rampant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Laws against witchcraft were in place as early as 1542 in England. The resulting witch trials were published in witchcraft pamphlets written for the public to consume. While the church advised the people to trust in the power of God, many people took defense against witches into their own hands. Specific items concealed in walls or specific markings carved into fireplaces were believed to keep the Devil and his agents away. When the British came to colonize America, these practices came with them and can be found in many local historic homes even today.
On July 7, 1956, the librettist John Treville Latouche’s seminal American Opera The Ballad of Baby Doe premiered in Central City, Colorado. “It’s about love and It’s about money,” Latouche had joked, in predicting the public’s response to the Opera, “And there’s no combination an American audience likes more!” Today, The Ballad of Baby Doe is often cited as one of the most significant Operas in the American canon, but Latouche would never know just how right he had been. One month later, John Latouche was dead. He was 41. Over the course of his short years, Latouche lived a remarkably dynamic life; like a brilliant star, he pulled some of the most important artistic figures of 20th-century American culture into his brief orbit. The story of the community which Latouche anchored is one that features well-known characters such as composer Leonard Bernstein and artist Marcel Duchamp and local figures like Margarett McKean and Hammond Castle Museum’s own John Hays Hammond Jr.In fact, through Latouche’s legacy, a curious assembly of artists, poets, and occultists, many of them Queer, came to assemble at Hammond Castle Museum in its founder’s final years. This is a story about the life of John Latouche, but it is also a story about love. About money. About art. About magick. About false accusations of murder, and more. This lecture, the final in Hammond Castle Museum’s May Series on Art & Community Through the Ages, will also serve as an introduction to Hammond Castle Museum’s June Pride Month programming.
Admission: $15 per presentation / $50 for series. Member savings apply.
This Saturday, May 4th, Cedar Rock Gardens is donating all profits from plant sales to Backyard Growers! Our team will be there throughout the day (8am – 4pm), ready to answer veggie gardening questions and share stories of our impact in the community. Cedar Rock Gardens is such an amazing partner to us and supporter of our work – we can’t thank them enough for their generosity! All money raised on May 4th will go directly towards our programs in the community and Gloucester’s schools.
This Saturday, May 4th, 
Cape Ann Community 