A Weekend Bursting with Socializing and Fun

It’s going to be a tough week, with my bathroom being renovated, but happily, it was a great weekend. We were out all three nights, first to the Voo in Turners Falls, then to pal Shelley Rotner’s get together at her spacious studio in Florence’s Arts and Industry Building. The crowd was nearly all children’s book authors, plus a few other people we met including Kevin Downey, a world-renowned cave photographer. I had heard a lot about him from Shoul.

Kevin took me to his own studio down the hall where he has huge machines designed to photograph products plus an array of other devices to print huge color photos. I told him about the cave I visited while Sam and I were in England, called White Scar Cave. “I slept in that cave,” he told me. It was fun to get a chance to introduce my new friend Shelley (who I met during my trip to the Alps in September) to Cindy and to listen to the stories of all of these authors, editors and shooters. Later that night I popped into Dave Caputo’s Scorpion Bowl party, which featured music in the basement and a roaring fire outside. He’s got the best music in Holyoke, right there in his ‘roots’ellar.’

My pals Jackie and Mark were there, and I got a chance to meet one of my favorite bloggers, Peter who writes Rambling Van Dog, a blog about Holyoke. Blogging is such an intimate affair, you feel like you know people even though you’ve never met. He said kind words to me as we stood by the fire, and it was really a pleasure to get to actually meet him in person. We seem to attend many of the same social events, and we both blog about them too!

We finished the weekend with another Circolo Italiano meeting, and the speaker presented a program about an intricate re-enactment of a famous World War II battle that takes place every few years in the mountains of Tuscany. We brought along our pal Ed Valerio, who is joining the club, and once again with the delicious food and fascinating topics, it was a lot of fun.