Entertainment

There are so many good Monty Python clips, bits, movies and discussions that it was hard to decide what to feature here this week. Given the confusion, I decided to take us back to the beginning, the very first episode of their TV show for the BBC.

So, imagine it is October of 1969, and you’ve tuned into the BBC for a bit of news, or perhaps a look at gardening in Wales. All is peaceful and orderly, until this program begins.

Brattleboro Community Radio is hosting a concert on June 6 starting at 5pm at the Stone Church, 3 Grove St/210 Main St, to benefit the station. Local Vermont based reggae band, Heirloom Seeds will headline the show other acts include: WVEW DJ Selector D, The River Bandits (funk, soul, fusion, etc.), Tara Dente (folk, singer song-writer), The Ditrani Brothers (old tyme Americana) and Sara Wallis.(folk-singer songwriter)

Heirloom Seeds is a band that lives for tradition and culture from the organic heirloom food that they grow to the Roots Reggae music they’ve learned straight from the elders in Brooklyn, Jamaica, and West Afrika. The Spirit that is ‘Reggae’ or ‘Regal’ music is an education of agricultural and nutritional self-sustainability, rural independence, multicultural unity, art, and mysticism.

Free MONDAY MORNING MOVIES at Brattleboro Senior Center. Gibson Aiken Center

Movies staring:

Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell,  Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, Abigail Breslin, Steve Carell, Mara Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Cuba Gooding Jr. & Kimberly Elise

Please stay after the movie and have lunch at Brattleboro Senior Meals. All are welcome.

Big Woods Voices is the union of four veteran area singers celebrating their common passion for a cappella harmony.

The Voices are, from soprano to bass: Liz Rogers, an internationally-touring singer-songwriter who started out with the Metropolitan Opera’s child chorus; Becky Graber, leader of the Brattleboro Women’s Chorus, music director at The Putney School and New England Youth Theater, and lifelong teacher; Will Danforth, an award-winning, multi-instrumental solo acoustic artist; and Alan Blood, longtime member of countless area groups such as the Blanche Moyse Chorale, the Brattleboro Concert Choir, and House Blend.

Andy Kaufman is one of those comedy legends that people either love or hate. I love him. Lise hates him.

Here is is, at Carnegie Hall, in 1979, messing with audiences and making them laugh, and wince, and be uncomfortable. Kaufman didn’t consider himself a comedian so much as a prankster and performance artist.

This show has it all. Tony Clifton, little kids, his grandmother on stage, wrestling women, and taking the entire audience out for milk and cookies after the show.

Lewis Black is a comedian who is very good at being angry. Vein-popping angry, about people, media, and politics. You can consider him a loud-mouthed social critic.

This is “Red, White and Screwed,” a performance at the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. that was filmed at an HBO special in 2006. He’s in rare form, talking about Bush and Cheney’s 6th year in office. Ahh, the good old days.

Free MONDAY MORNING MOVIES

The Brattleboro Senior Center

 207 Main St.

June Showings

 Coming Of Age

Movies starring:

Original Enigma No 3., from the May 12, 1837 Phoenix newspaper. (Spoiler alert: the comments will, I expect, have the solution at some point, so avoid them until you’ve solved the enigma, or give up and want to peek.)

….

“I am a word of eleven letters, and am a subject of much conversation.

My 11, 10, 8, and 7 is an appendage belonging to a flower.

My 5, 4 and 3, is an instrument used to stop the mouth.

Join cinefile, journalist, Tom Bedell, for a Thursday afternoon at the movies, to watch and discuss nine films that “you must see..but may have missed”.

On May 14th, 3 – 6 pm, come see a film starring Michael Caine, John Mills and Peter Sellers. The second Thursday of the month, continuing through Thursday, October 8.

Please join Friends of Brooks Memorial Library for this special program, Kitchen Tunks & Parlor songs with Mark Greenberg, at 7 PM on Thursday, May 14. 

Since the 1980s, Greenberg has been interviewing and recording musicians throughout Vermont, tracing the development of the state’s vernacular music from its roots in Anglo-Celtic traditions through the influences of French-Canadian emigrants and the arrival of radio and other electronic technologies. 

Greenberg currently teaches courses in American music at UVM and taught American Studies and Humanities at Goddard College from 1991-2003.

“If I…” is the name of the comedy special by Demetri Martin that combines observations, philosophy, and comedy, in form of presentation with slides.

You may not know, this young man was accepted into Harvard Law, but didn’t go. Instead, he went down the path of a legal education at NYU, but became a comedian instead. Probably a wise choice.

Winston Prouty Center for Child Development is hosting its Inaugural Indoor Mini-Golf Classic for grownups and families on Saturday, May 16, 2015 and Sunday, May 17, 2015, respectively. The two-day “FUN-raiser” is open to the public.

Saturday’s tournament for grownups is a black-tie optional evening that will feature light dinner fare, music, and a cash bar. The tournament will be from 6 to 9 p.m. and tickets are $25 per person.

Sunday’s family fun day will take place from 1:30 – 4:30 p.m. The cost is $5 per person, or only $12 for a foursome if you bring your Saturday night scorecard.
Both events will take place at the International Center at World Learning’s SIT campus in Brattleboro.

Let’s go to D.C. this weekend and see a 1996 show featuring Chris Rock.

The jokes are a bit dated in places — Marion Barry crack jokes, for example. But his insights on race, addiction, violence, education and other issues in America are what the crowds love him for, and much of the routine stands true today. He won two Emmy awards for this show.

This week we find ourselves studying the comedy stylings of our New Hampshire neighbor, Sarah Silverman.

In 2005 she released a film of her one-woman show, Jesus is Magic. In it, Sarah boasts to her friends that she, like them, has something cool going on in her life. A big show. It’s a lie, so she has to go put on a major production just to hide the fib, And then her stand-up begins.

Its time for another experience that you won’t soon forget..this time its..Attorney Alan Phillips of Asheville, NC is a nationally recognized legal expert on vaccine exemption and waiver law. He advises clients and attorneys throughout the country concerning vaccines required for birth; daycare and school enrollment; employment; military members, families and civilian contractors; immigrants, including foreign adopted children; children of separated and divorced parents in “vaccine custody disputes”; and various other contexts.

From 1995 in San Francisco, we have the droll, hipster comedy stylings of a young Janeane Garofalo.

She started out doing stand-up, and quickly moved on to TV and film roles. One of my favorite appearances was her guest spot on Viva Variety, in which she started to do stand-up but the hosts found it too depressing. They gave her a bad makeover and had her re-tell her jokes, but in a positive way. They suggested “Instead of ‘I hate Jenny McCarthy,’ how about you try “I LOVE Jenny McCarthy!’

Not much needs to be said about this musical comedy duo. They hit it big during the 60’s, first poking fun at the coffeehouse folk music scene with their interrupted musical numbers and brotherly disagreements, then as counter-culture leaders challenging the boundaries of television.

We’ll celebrate by showing a couple fo their best known routines, and an episode of the 60’s comedy show.

Sandglass Theater closes the Winter Sunshine series with Circus Minimus, The One-Man Circus in-a-Suitcase by Kevin O’Keefe

PUTNEY VT- On April 11th at 1 and 3pm Kevin O’Keefe will bring his joyous, playful and raucous good time of a show to the Sandglass stage. Circus Minimus, One-Man Circus in-a-Suitcase gives everyone an opportunity to participate in an enthralling, whimsical celebration of the imagination. From Kevin O’Keefe’s suitcase an entire circus emerges: tent, band, lights, the boisterous ringmaster Steve Fitzpatrick, the officious Mervin Merkle, the incredible Bumbilini Family, the Magician to the Stars Clyde Zerbini, and Keefer–an innocent trying to runaway and join the circus. However, the most important performers emerge from the audience. Each performance becomes a dialogue between the characters and the audience–a light-hearted collaboration.

Forget Justin Bieber. Here’s Dean Martin’s celebrity roast of Jackie Gleason, featuring roasters Art Carney, Gene Kelly, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Foster Brooks, Nipsy Russell, and others.

If you were watching NBC in February of 1975, you may have caught this as it originally aired. If not, here’s your chance to watch it anew – a Dean Martin roast from start to finish.

Kevin Hart is a relatively new arrival on the comedy scene, and his career has been going quite well. I think I heard that he will be headlining a comedy performance in a stadium soon, something few, if any other, comedians have attempted.

This is his show, I’m A Grown Little Man, from 2009 or so.