THE
TOWN OF Woodstock, New York, has had a long and varied life. Beginning
as a small farming town along the banks of the Sawkill River in what
was once called the “Woodstock Valley”, it has changed its face many
times over the years, from sleepy, backwoods village to some notoriety
after the famous “Woodstock Festival” in 1969. But even long before
the Festival had “put it on the international map”, Woodstock had waxed
and waned, its shift from quiet backwater begun way back in 1902 when
Byrdcliffe was founded up on the slopes of Guardian Mountain just outside
of town. The brainchild of Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Byrdcliffe was
a Utopian haven for artists and artisans, the location chosen based
on a description of the “perfect” place for such a colony by none other
than John Ruskin. A scant four years later, in 1906, the Art Students
League of New York opened its summer sessions right in the midst of
town, and thus Woodstock was well on its way to international fame as
America’s premiere “art colony”. When Hervey White, a breakaway from
Byrdcliffe, started his own style of “utopia” — calling it “Maverick”
— in West Hurley (just beyond the town’s borders opposite Byrdcliffe)
— Woodstock was indeed the major attraction for creative
types, its concentration of artistic notables of all stripes second
only to those found in New York City. Back in its heydays, art critics
from all major newspapers covered the Colony’s “doings” as avidly as
they did those in the Metropolitan area, including reviews of exhibitions
held at the Woodstock Artists Association (itself founded in 1921) in
the New York Times — and, on any given summer day, one
might encounter a George Bellows, a Juliana Force, a Robert Henri, a
Thorsten Veblein, an Edward G. Robinson, and even a Charlotte Perkins
Gilman walking along Tinker Street, Woodstock’s main street. Both World
Wars managed to put dampers along the way, but almost always, the town
would re-invent itself — just as it did after the Festival (which,
in fact, was held some sixty miles away and in a different county!)
— managing to keep its name “in the news” in one way or another.
Like art itself, Woodstock has often been declared moribund by the nay-sayers,
the current put-down that it’s nothing more than a tourist-trap for
weekend browsers of artsy little boutiques. Over the years, “saviors”
have come — and gone — to declare their intentions of “putting
Woodstock back on the map”. Woodstockers have heard it before and merely
shrug off both snubs and well-meant promises. But Woodstock has even
survived floods — and as any old-timer can tell you, Woodstock
will continue to be Woodstock because, as it has done since the
turn of the 19th Century, it still attracts those creative
souls who cannot resist its charms (still bucolic in spite of the cheek-to-jowl
boutiques lining Tinker Street). Someone always seems to come along
to shake the old town up, to cause enough excitement to show —
well — that Woodstock will always be Woodstock. Two such
movers-and-shakers on the current scene are Christina Varga and Mery
Rosado, Christina, the owner/director of Varga Gallery on Tinker Street
and Mery, owner/director of Café Mezzaluna, Bistro Latino/Gallery, a
short ways out of town on Route 212. Both women — Christina hails
from Hungary, Mery from Manhattan — are fully-charged dynamos
that seem to tirelessly promote the area’s creative resources. I was
recently caught between the electricity that flows from these two while
a visitor on Christina’s Cable TV Show “Apocalypse Varga” (along with
a wriggling, tattooed lady named Elissa Jane Mastel, the “Empress of
Chill” and Peter Aaron, the dapper, young music editor of “Chronogram”,
a local arts ‘zine) and the experience left me more than a little dazed.
Varga’s super-charged energy and openness to anything creative spills
outside her gallery and into her weekly cable-TV show, and for this
conservative, seventy-five-year old, I could do little more than sit
as if pole-axed for the entire frenetic, one-hour show. Ostensibly,
I was there to promote my new novel The Mountain and to announce
an upcoming reading at Mery’s Bistro Latino — I think all I did
was keep my head down during the maelstrom of “Apocalypse Varga”. Whatever.
My point is that Christina and Mery are the very “stuff” that keeps
Woodstock forever in the creative spotlight. Come find out for yourself
— either visit Varga’s gallery (or watch her TV show) and do stop
in at Mery’s Bistro on Route 212 — you’ll find not only great
food, but an ever-changing scene of art, poetry readings, music —
and yes, even an occasional event like an old man reading from his novel!
