We drove from Mont Tremblant to the Alaskan Husky Adventure Dog-Sledding.  We met and held the beautiful puppies, they are large doggies with deep fur and intelligent eyes and they enjoyed our attention, holding and petting.

The site is very hilly, wooded land, with lots of varied terrain.  The 50 or so adult dogs barked and jumped non-stop in excitement until they were hitched up in teams to the sled . We called “Alley, alley- oop!” and they took off, and started to run.  They became silent and happily ran hard. We were two people per sled and six exited dogs per team.

It was like a roller-coaster ride through the snow! Up and down hills and spinning around many turns- fun and exiting! Put this on the “bucket list”.

The next day we snow-shoed through the woods and filled our extended hands with sun-flower seeds and Chickadees came down from the trees and ate out of our mittens. It was a sweet reward for bundling up and going out into the winter.

On the way back to NYC, we stopped off in Montreal for just a day and went to their Beaux Arts Museum to see the retrospective of Cuban Art. The show was fascinating, well installed and there were many fine pieces but the most striking thing is to see anything at all about current Cuban culture. We have been embargoed too. When will we start a new relationship with Cuba? 

During our drive back to New York City, we realized that we take upstate New York  much too forgranted, even though the state is so beautiful. So we will plan a future warm weather trip to the Finger Lakes Region.

Go to www.CentralPark.com  for a photo of the sculpture in Central Park of the famous hero sled dog Balto and his story.

This was the first January in about 75 years that we had no snow of any consequence in New York City, and it has been generally warm, so we decided to drive northward and find our old childhood friend, the Winter.

First we drove through the Hudson Valley and the rolling hills and long ridges of the Hudson Highlands which had some snow on the ground and we realized that the color of the light has started to change towards a spring color. There were no “signs of Spring”, just that change of light quality with the lengthening day. It was a feeling of fading winter with Spring just waiting.

Then we passed through the Shawangunks, pronounced “shan-gums” and known as the “Gunks”, with sleeping snowy apple orchards, and frozen water streams on the mountains until we came to the Catskill region and then to the Adirondacks, “the Daks”, beautiful mountains and valleys and we knew there was indeed Winter here.  There are fields of snow-covered frozen haystacks, creeks running down frozen snow banks on the mountains.

The placenames are so great, from Dutch, Native American, French and English and many other sources:

Niskayuna, Schroon Lake, Fort Ticonaroga, Saranac Lake, Cairo (say Kay-Row), with Lake Pharoah nearby, Paradox (population 14), AuSable Chasm which was frozen-closed for the winter, Troy, Albany, Loon Lake and Brandt Lake, Lake Champlain and Lake George, Watervliet, Rotterdam, Hague, Kaaterskill Falls and the Hurleys.

We reached the border and entered Quebec Province in Canada and all of the road signs warned us ” It’s winter, be careful” in French.

We had “officially” found the winter…and then the winter found us.

We continued past Montreal up to the Laurentians, which look like the Daks, and as we drove we were overtaken by a full winter blizzard of snow and freezing rain. We took the roadsigns advice and we went very slowly as did the other drivers on the icy, slippery road. We arrived in icy-snowy village of Mont-Tremblant well after dark.

We have spent a day exploring the mountain and ski area, and another day enjoying a new snow fall of about 6 inches of huge, fluffy flakes that made very nice snow for snow-balls and snow-people…

…the beloved snow of childhood.

Next few days: We will snow-shoe through a Canadian National Park, stopping to warm up and feed the birds, and then go out Dog-sledding. Very, very exiting.

Aviva, My Love, is beautifully written and directed by Shemi Zarhin. Against all the odds of a hard-working life: financial problems, a maddeningly demanding family, gender prejudice, Aviva is an aspiring author of poetic story. The interaction between her personal reality and her story writing very skillfully brings to mind the interaction of the love affair and the war in Hiroshima, My Love.

Three generations of women are depicted, each with a distinct set of expectaions and coping skills which reflect their changed status in society over time. The film is engrossing and entertaining and will be shown in NYC again in March.

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I Got No Jeep and My Camel Died  and Souvenirs, are both documentary road-trip films with father-and-son relationship themes but are they feel extremely different.

 I Got No Jeep and My Camel Died  is a desert road-trip, with jeeps and camels, and a stop in Brazil(!). It is the personal musical journey of Yair Dalal filled with absolutely splendid music. Yair Dalal is a World Music star and you can hear his music on his site.

Souvenirs an entertaining and moving  father and son road-trip film about  truth and memory. Travel starts in Israel, through Italy, and Germany to Holland and takes us through 60 years of a father’s stories to the source of his experience. The end is wonderful.

Photo by Jeff French Segall

This weekend we met representitives of the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village who were in town from Rwanda in order to study some new schools here.  The ASYV is a school in Rwanda which hopes to nurture and teach young orphans of that country’s terrible genocide so they may become whole/healed adults capable of becoming leaders. More than one million children were orphaned in Rwanda, so this is a huge task.

ASYV is based on the model of the Israeli Youth Aliyah Village of Yemin Orde which was established in 1953 to accommodate Holocaust orphans and immigrant children and several groups and agencies are involved in this excellent project.

The visitors met with the synagogue members at Congregation Ansche Chesed, an Upper West Side Synagogue, and discussed the school and their hopes for the future for both the children and for their country.  They are survivors of the Rwandan genocide. A synagogue member was able to link them to an organization which provides computers to third world schools for only $100 each. This was good news. All help is appreciated.

As we had lunch, elderly members of the congregation, who are Holocaust survivors, walked up and  simply patted the visitors gently…all understood without the need for any additional words.

Who Will Carry the Word?, by Charlotte Delbo, will be performed by  The Red Fern Theatre Company at Center Stage on West 21st St.

It is based on the true story of Charlotte Delbo, and depicts the lives of 23 women while they were prisoners in Auschwitz.  Their goal was to keep the strongest of them alive so that there could be a witness to what they had experienced, and so the survivor could tell the world.

The theatre  company has chosen to partner with Remember the Women Institute for this play, and the institiute will receive some of the proceeds. I am a member of the Board of the Remember the Women Institute.

At the Saturday evening, March 1 performance,  there will be a special talk-back session afterward that will include an Auschwitz  survivor, Bronia Brandman. Rochelle Saidel, the institute’s Director and I will also be there as well. A reception will follow the performance. Come.

We spent primary night at Lincoln Center enjoying the NY Philharmonic. No matter how many times I have the great pleasure of attending a NY Phil concert, I am first always so moved by the beauty and variety of the hand-made string instruments, the glistening brass, the warm woodwinds and the amount of different objects the percussionist has at hand ready to play.

It reminds me of an animation I saw as a child about the history of the orchestra which claimed that violins ultimately derive from bows and arrows. Something like ..”swords into plowshares.”

The NY Philharmonic has tried it’s hand at making a bridge for diplomacy and cultural sharing in the past with it’s historic visit to China, and this week the orchestra will make another historic  trip and perform in North Korea. The concert in North Korea will be on February 26 and be broadcast on PBS. The program is (Brooklyn born) George Gershwin’s, An American in Paris, and Dvorak’s, From the New World, which was written mostly in New York.

We have friends and relatives who love High End sound equipment and tell us how much like a “real orchestra” their system sounds. Their systems are wildly expensive, and sound great. But with my subscription seat which is a teeny fraction of the cost of their systems, I sit up in the third tier of Avery Fisher Hall,  all the way to the front of the house, and I can hear and see everything so gloriously. Even the conductor’s score, and the musicians faces. Just my cup of tea.

The program that night was: Rossini Overture to La Scala Seta( The Silken Ladder), Mendelssohn’s Symphony No 4 (Italian), and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6 the Pathetique, conducted by Lorin Maazal. Buy yourself a ticket and enjoy this great orchestra. The program notes for each concert and about the musicians are fascinating and available online.

Hillary and Barack, and tomorrow’s primary, are the topics of conversation at every dinner, phone call and meeting. This is unique, I can not recall a time when so many people were so engaged in a primary here in New York. 

Let’s start with names and perception: Hillary is not a just a current, blond, female tv character named “Hillary”, a character for us to either “love” or “hate” and be amused.

She is New York’s Senator,  Hillary Rodham Clinton, and she has earned  true support and popularity in both this state and in this city. She is expected to win easily here because she deserves to win- she has earned it.

“Barack Obama” is not a competing sit-com character or someone to favor on a “reality tv show” or vote for in a popularity contest, neither is he some new age messiah come to fulfil our wishes.

He is a candidate for  US President.  He is an attractive, nice man with great rhetoric and not enough political history to have actually tested his mettle. He is too unclear for me, considering the capable leadership we desparately need to make repairs after this administration leaves office.

Rebecca Wallace-Segall and Deborah Siegel have co-authored a great piece about tomorrow’s election in The Huffington Post, please read it. I have also added their blogs to my blogroll.

Please read Goodbye To All That (#2)  by Robin Morgan a great essay about Hillary Clinton and the media’s sexism. I have added the Women’s Media Center to the blogroll too.

Also, the city cheered and celebrated the Giant’s Superbowl win last night. People walked around town nodding, smiling and congratulating each other, savoring the win.

Tomorrow, we will have the primary election, plus the usually crazy traffic and quite a bit extra, and the pleasant chaos of a tickertape parade.

By the way, there is no longer any ticker-tape on Wall Street. They toss many tons of shredded paper from our “paperless” society, etc. The feeling of celebration and the honor from the city is exactly the same.

The Blind Boys of Alabama, the four- time Grammy-winning Gospel group, stopped by the Upper West Side this week and sang for a packed house in a book store’s performance space. It was jam-packed and all possible standing room was filled.

Jimmy Carter, the lead singer, said that they were up since 4 am and exhausted but they had plenty of energy and electricity.  He apologized for not being  “in uniform”, that is, in matching outfits.

Many in the crowd were clearly listening to the spritual message of the music, others just seemed to like the rhythm and danced as they sang.

They were promoting their new album, “Down In New Orleans,” which combines Gospel and New Orleans style. On the album they are accompanied by music giants: Allen Toussaint, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the Hot 8 Brass Band, and pianist David Torkanowsky, bassist Roland Guerin and drummer Shannon Powell. The links have sound clips too.

I love Gospel, New Orleans Jazz, Preservation Hall Jazz Band etc, etc, so I happily own this new CD and I plan to walk around town with them singing in my ears.