Irish music with a dash of Irish history is coming to the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House in Chatham on Oct. 12 when the highly-acclaimed Irish folk singer/songwriter Sean Tyrrell performs “Message of Peace: The Life of John Boyle O’Reilly in Song and Story.” “The show consists of a range of songs drawn from many sources—poets whose work I have set to music and songwriters,” Tyrrell said in an email last ...

CHATHAM – In the late spring of 2016, Christine Padgett walked into the Atwood House Museum with a box of photographic negatives. It didn't take museum Archivist Jean Young long to realize the significance of the material. “I knew immediately when she brought in the box,” Young said, especially when she saw a number glass plate and panoramic negatives. “I told her she made my year!” The photographs did inde...

CHATHAM – Revising is second nature to author/illustrator Bob Staake. The illustrations in each of his children's books go through many versions, as his thick files attest. But his latest book is different. Folders holding the various iterations of the drawings and manuscript for “The Book of Gold” were so thick he had to put them in a separate box. Ten years in the making, the book's manuscript went through n...

Monomoy Schools Announce Adjusted Bus Routes Updated bus routes and times have been released by the Monomoy Regional School District. The new schedule was scheduled to go into effect on Wednesday. According to Superintendent of Schools Scott Carpenter, in the first few weeks of school middle and high school buses were arriving just before the start of class or a few minutes late. Bus company Cape Destinati...

Sometimes even in our high tech world the closest bonds are formed through the simplicity of handwritten letters. One hundred and eighteen, to be exact, which arrived at Monomoy Regional High School last spring in a tattered manila envelope that, once opened, began a correspondence between students from vastly different parts of the world who have since been learning that in spite of their unique home countrie...

Who will miss you when you’re gone? How will they react when you die? Family, friends, co-workers, and even the people on the street you see every day? Ever wonder that? Gordon Michael Schwinn, songwriter for a children’s show starring a frog named Mr. Bungee, has a severe case of writer’s block and a brain disorder. Will he survive either? “A New Brain,” an imaginative and madcap musical/operetta by William F...

Earth and fire would come later in the day, via a great bonfire, but Saturday morning of Orleans’ Celebrate Our Waters weekend was all about wind and water. A photographer and a reporter (coincidentally husband and wife), completely inexperienced with sailing, had volunteered to board a sailboat, courtesy of Pleasant Bay Community Boating (PBCB), to skim the bay’s gentle waves. We’re so inexperienced, in fact,...

In an era when many women did not possess a driver’s license, over 1,000 women became Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), flying with the U.S. military for two years during World War II. In 1999, when these women’s stories were still little known, award-winning filmmaker Laurel Ladevich wrote and directed the fascinating one-hour documentary “Fly Girls” about WASP. The film is in the PBS series American Expe...

This is an edited version of the full schedule. Go to orleanspondcoalition.org for important details and to attend events requiring registration. All events on Saturday and Sunday are free. Come by Headquarters in Depot Square: 8 to 4 on Sept. 16 and 17 for * Full Schedule Information including maps and late breaking events * Orleans Pond Coalition: information and membership table * OPC’s “Health...

Prolific American playwright Neil Simon is turning 90, and the Academy of Performing Arts is celebrating him with their next two productions — “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” and “The Sunshine Boys.” “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” is one of Simon’s lesser produced plays (he’s written over 30). It opened on Broadway in 1971, starring Peter Falk and Lee Grant. In 1975, it became a film featuring Jack Lemmon...

Glenn Starner-Tate knew his calling as a young child. However, as sometimes happens, life put a few obstacles in his way. “My Music and Me,” now playing at the Chatham Drama Guild, is a one-man autobiographical show starring Starner-Tate that debuted in 2016 at the Cotuit Center for the Arts. The local musician, actor and playwright shares a lifetime of joys and sorrows while slowly rediscovering his childhood...

“Everything seems to taste better at the beach,” author Kristen H. Scholz Demeo’s mother used to say. Demeo, a member of a four-generation Cape Cod summer family, has published “Harwichport: Three Harbors, One Port: An Inspirational and Historical Guide to this Seaside Haven,” a 33-page valentine to Harwich Port. The short book is designed to help other visitors make their own memories in Harwich Port. “I w...