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Vol. LXIV, No. 10
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
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Vol. LXIV, No. 10
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
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 (Photo by Sybil Holland)
CELEBRATING THE FAMILY: HomeFront staff, guests, and clients recently celebrated the Family Preservation Center’s seventh birthday, and paid tribute to FPC Director Thora Faigle (back, center), who is retiring next month (story on page 11). HomeFront’s Executive Director Connie Mercer calls it “a genuine milestone” and credits the Center with “the joyous reality” that there are no more families in welfare motels along the Route 1 corridor: “We have literally changed the face of Route 1.”
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Discussion of whether or not the Westerly Road Church’s 18½ acre site and proposed building on the Princeton Ridge should be subsumed under the Township’s recommendations for wastewater management turned Monday evening’s Township Committee meeting into a nearly four-hour marathon. The Committee ultimately left the final call up to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP).
Kicking off the first of what promises to be several talks about the 2010 municipal budget, Administrator Bob Bruschi presented the state of the Borough’s operating budget to Council at the open public meeting last week.
Over 400 people attended the YWCA’s 27th annual “Tribute to Women” last week at the Hyatt Regency Princeton, where ten women were recognized for their significant — and very different — achievements.
Albert Einstein’s birthday party is this weekend, and the whole community is invited. Sunday, March 14 marks Princeton’s most well-known celebrity’s date of birth, as well as a day beloved by mathematicians, since 3.14 are the first digits of the irrational number pi.
While Monday’s Township Committee meeting saw much discussion about Westerly Road Church’s proposal to relocate to a site on Bunn Drive, along the environmentally sensitive Princeton Ridge (see story on page one), development in town is getting a closer look by the Princeton Environmental Commission (PEC).
“If all of you were on parole,” said Vera Institute president and director Michael Jacobson addressing a filled auditorium at the Woodrow Wilson School last week, “half of you would be in prison by now. Prison makes everybody crazy. Everybody violates parole.”
It is a five-hour bus ride from Harvard University to Princeton.
It was a situation that might’ve overwhelmed many a lacrosse team.
As Julie Barry and her teammates on the Princeton High girls’ basketball team faced Hopewell Valley in its last game before starting play in the state tournament, they were looking to build some positive momentum.
For the better part of two weeks now it’s been Chopin in the kitchen and Chopin in the car as I gear up for a piece to mark the composer’s 200th birthday, which was March 1 and has meant a crash course in music virtually unknown to me, except for those portions of it that are almost as familiar as air, water, and light. In the midst of this orgy of mazurkas and études, fantasies and preludes, came the realization that this week’s Town Topics is appearing on March 10, the day in 1903 when Bix Beiderbecke was born to a middleclass German-American family in Davenport, Iowa. A notoriously heavy drinker, the jazz legend died at 28 of lobar pneumonia and edema of the brain in an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens. In truth, his legendary status was a post-mortem phenomenon. As George Hoefer puts it in The Jazz Makers, “America’s jazz world … needed a hero, preferably of the martyr type,” on which “to build a romantic legend for a new American art form.”
The Princeton University Concerto Competition concert is always an opportunity to showcase individual talent within the orchestra and from the university student body as a whole. This year, the judging committee of David Miller, a violist with the renowned Handel and Haydn Society of Boston; and Seth Baer, a 2002 graduate of Princeton and a member of Solisti, New York chose three winners to perform concerti of violin, piano, and clarinet. All three soloists were exceptional in their own right, but pianist Kendra Nealon was all the more remarkable because of her youth — she is a freshman at the university, with a reassuringly extended period of time ahead of her to grow musically within the university’s music department. The Princeton University Orchestra presented these three winners on Friday night in Richardson Auditorium (the concert was repeated Saturday night) playing three works from the 20th century, combined with a Beethoven staple in the orchestral repertoire.
Even — and especially — in the midst of winter, one can look forward to longer, warmer, and sunnier days. As this winter finally winds down, we may still have snow on the ground, but daylight saving and spring are just around the corner.
When it’s a really special event — whether a wedding, anniversary, family reunion, bar/bat mitzvah, or corporate gathering — you want only the best. The guests must have the best time ever, and you must enjoy your own party!