Today's downpours have led Sea Bright to cancel tonight's fireman's fair activities.
Mayor Maria Fernandes says the fair will open at 3p both Saturday and Sunday, weather permitting. That's three hours earlier than previously scheduled.
Are there more cigarette butts on New Jersey's beaches than in decades past?
Some environmentalists say so. Citing data gleaned in part by Clean Ocean Action from its twice-yearly sweep of New Jersey beaches, today's Star-Ledger reports that this summer's beachgoers "may be more likely than ever to find something other than sand between their toes."
The culprit? Smoking bans enacted by New Jersey and New York, the environmentalists believe.
From the article:
Those laws have sent smokers outside, where they are more likely to toss their butts onto the streets or sidewalks. Even if the litterbug is far inland, their tossed cigarette butt may wind up in the ocean or on the beach.Rain washes them into storm drains, which empty into rivers, bays and eventually the ocean, where the butts are washed onto beaches by wind and tides.
"I don't think people make the connection that what they're doing on the streets of Newark or New York City can wind up in the ocean or on the beaches next to them," said Anna Will, prevention coordinator with Clean Ocean Action, a Highlands environmental group. "People go outside and they don't think twice about tossing their cigarettes on the ground."
Vladislav Kovalsky
By TOM CHESEK
Beethoven? Perhaps you know him as the stony countenance that glowered from atop Schroeder's toy piano in a half century's worth of Peanuts comic strips.
Even the most musically illiterate among us is familiar with the portentous opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. More well-known themes of the German giant come at us daily from cable network newscasts, from TV commercials, Disney cartoons.
Growing up as he did in the former Soviet Union, Vladislav Kovalsky probably didn't have much access to Charlie Brown and Snoopy. But as the executive director of Red Bank-based Monmouth Conservatory of Music, the concert pianist knows that Beethoven and his brethtren continue to have something to say in the education of our kids. He's been part of the faculty of the nonprofit music academy for decades, teaching his private students with the same dedication that he's brought to his role as advocate for music education in our public grade schools.
Kovalsky has also been known to take center stage on occasion, for concert events that range from solo settings and chamber duets, to guest turns with orchestras of all sizes and configurations. This Sunday afternoon at the Count Basie Theatre, he appears in concert with Roy D. Gussman and the Monmouth Symphony Orchestra on a bill highlighted by Ludwig van B.'s Piano Concerto No. 4. It's another all-Beethoven lineup that further features MSO performances of Symphony No. 7 and the Fidelio overture.
Mirror, mirror on the tree, who knows this 'Where' with certainty?
Last week's generated eight responses, several of which were rather emphatic — readers sometimes get excited to 'finally' get a 'Where' — and, alas, mistaken.
Fran Waldmann, Fred Blumberg, Alan Placer and Wade Davis all guessed locations on Navesink River Road or at Harding Road and Hilltop Terrace. We can see why: we're familiar with similar mirror-in-a-tree setups on both.
But Jenn Woods (who's streaking again, Where-wise), Alicia Woods (Jenn's mom), Mary Kate Kane and JaCDs58 all knew the correct answer: Little Silver Point Road opposite Parker Avenue.
There's been little formal notice to the public, but word of a plan to close the Fair Haven post office at 4p on weekdays is proving about as agreeable to local residents and business owners as the taste of envelope glue.
In the 60 minutes leading up to the end of the customary business day, there's still work to be done, locals say.
"To me, it's very upsetting," says Dean Ross, owner of the Doc Shoppe. Though his shoe store is just two doors away from the postal facility in the Acme shopping center, he frequently needs to ship packages at the end of the day, he said.
He also feels the curtailment will force seniors and disabled residents with late-afternoon mailing needs to drive to Red Bank, where parking is difficult.
"If anything, they should be extending the hours," he says of the postal service.
The North Jersey Coast Line rail bridge across the Navesink River is slated for $5 million worth of upgrades, mainly on its piers, the Asbury Park Press reports today.
From the story:
NJ Transit's board of directors Wednesday approved a $5.191 contract with Midlantic Construction LLC of Manasquan to rehabilitate the bridge between Red Bank and Middletown.The bridge carries 97 trains a day on weekdays, said Richard Sarles, NJ Transit's executive director. The work is not expected to affect riders, he said.
Grace O'Connor of Shadow Lake, above and below right with Penny Ticehurst of Shrewsbury, tries her artistic hand at capturing the Sea Bright-Highlands Bridge from the deck behind Gaiters restaurant in Sea Bright Wednesday morning.
Both women left the heavy equipment that's about to dismantle the bridge off their canvases. "I don't think people want cranes," Ticehurst said. "They don't want the bridge to change."
Not to give too much away, but there's a moment in "Mark Twain's A Murder, A Mystery and a Marriage," the new play at the Two River Theater, that involves a last-minute rescue of an innocent by a lawman in a ten-gallon cowboy hat.
It's what Latin lover (the language, that is) Mayor Pasquale Menna calls a "deus ex machina" — or "god from the machine," a theatrical concept connoting a fortuitous reversal of fate by implausible means.
Well, pardner, at last night's first preview of the play, the role of the deus/marshal was played by none other than Menna himself.
"They needed a body, and they said I was it," Menna tells redbankgreen this morning. "I hope I didn't embarrass Red Bank too much."
The plunge in Shore-area real estate values that's been underway for almost two years is showing signs of abating, today's Asbury Park Press reports.
From the story:
Home prices in the area that includes Monmouth and Ocean counties were essentially flat in the first quarter of 2008, declining by 0.6 percent from the same period the year before, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday.The median sale price for an existing single-family home in Monmouth, Ocean, Middlesex and Somerset counties was $361,200, down $2,300, from $363,500 in the same quarter in 2007, the association said. The median means that half the homes in the area sold for more and half sold for less.
Joel Naroff, chief economist for Commerce Bank, said the decline is "relatively modest, to say the least."
Red Bank police have charged a Tinton Falls woman in a string of cases in which she's alleged to have pretended to be either a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency officer.
Maria Collins, 41, of Buford Place is in he Monmouth County lockup facing charges of robbery and impersonating an officer.
According to Capt. Steve McCarthy, borough police were summoned shortly before noon Sunday to the corner of Bridge Avenue and Chestnut Street, where a 31-year-victim reported that she'd been stopped by a woman driving a car who had demanded to see her identification.
The woman in the car "displayed what appeared to be a handgun," took the victim's purse and fled in the car, McCarthy said.
Councilman John Curley tosses candy from a fire truck during the 2006 Halloween parade.
Citing a "major budget crisis," Red Bank Councilman John Curley last night raised, and then backed away from, a suggestion that the borough hold off on the purchase of a new $90,000 fire police truck for six months.
"I know I'm going to lose votes over this, but it's a conscience thing," Curley said by way of introducing his request that the council impose a moratorium on any new spending until the final 2008-'09 budget is passed.
Playwright and TRTC associate artistic director KJ Sanchez chats with jazzman Joe Muccioli in the theater lobby last night.
By TOM CHESEK
There are radical re-imaginings of two British stage classics. An erotically charged, aerially enhanced production inspired by a famous painting. A modern musical based on a Shakespeare antique, and the world premiere of an ambitious work on the subject of soldiers returning from war.
Coming off its most commercially and critically successful season yet — a year in which more than 10,000 first-time patrons saw such productions as the sold-out blockbuster Macbeth — Two River Theater Company announced its 2008-'09 schedule last night with a catered affair at the Bridge Avenue performing arts facility.
Company artistic director Aaron Posner unveiled (to the delight of a nearly full house) a slate of five subscription-series mainstage productions at the building's Joan and Robert Rechnitz Theater, as well as four "special event" engagements to be presented inside the black-box Marion Huber performance space. He'll direct two of the shows.
The brief program also included "Pulitzer Prize," a whimsical song by TRTC managing director Guy Gsell, in which he shares a "bean counter's perspective" on the business of selecting plays ("We've got Shaw and Shakespeare, but at what cost/We're head to head against AMERICAN IDOL and LOST").
If there was one person whose star seemed to shine a little more brightly, however, it was KJ Sanchez, the TRTC associate art director who emerges in 2009 with a pair of high-profile projects as both director and co-writer.
Continue reading "'ART,' HEART AND OTHER DELIGHTS AT TRTC" »
The R-FH Euro challengers: from left, Sam Wilson, Robbie Trocchia, Margot Keale, Steven Fuschetti and Jennifer Lapp.
If you think understanding the U.S. economy is a brain-buster, try overlaying its complexity with currency exchange rates, European history and social trends unique to a post-Cold War continent.
That, in a thumbnail, was the starting point for five sophomores from Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High who competed as a team in something called the Euro Challenge last month.
Then they had to develop their teamwork, public speaking and time-management skills, preparing themselves to answer arcane questions under the gun about the "decoupling" of the U.S. and European economies, among other arcane topics.
This for a group of kids who didn't know their CPI from their GDP at the start of the school year.
Well, cutting to the chase: after two grueling and nerve-wracking days of competition, the R-FH team took first place among 47 teams from seven states in a final held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in late April.
By TOM CHESEK
The last time we caught up with Aaron Posner, the seemingly Energizer-driven artistic director at Two River Theater Company was in the middle of a boffo double-extended engagement on Macbeth, a tricked-out thrill ride that he co-directed with magical mischief maker Teller — and a show that nearly everyone saw as both an artistic and commercial triumph.
Afterward, while Two River founding father Bob Rechnitz presented his revival of The Glass Menagerie at the Bridge Avenue performing arts center, the 42-year-old Posner returned to his native Oregon for what turned out to be a pretty poor excuse for a vacation. He spent most of March fine-tuning and premiering his own stage adaptation of Ken Kesey's classic American novel Sometimes a Great Notion. Then he hightailed it back to Jersey just in time to begin directing a new production of yet another Posner-penned literary adaptation: the barn-raisin', bluegrassy musical Mark Twain's A Murder, A Mystery and a Marriage.
Kicking off previews tomorrow and opening officially on Saturday, the show (hereafter referred to as 3M) follows on the heels of Is He Dead?, the never-before produced Twain script modified by comic playwright David Ives that enjoyed a Broadway run earlier this year — making Samuel Clemens something of a hot property nearly a century after his passing.
The Red Bank borough council is expected tonight to vote on a proposed lawsuit settlement that would have the town paying the Bluffs Condominium Association $4,500 a year to offset the costs of private snow plowing and trash pickup.
According to a resolution on tonight's agenda, the upmarket condos next to Riverside Gardens Park on West Front Street sued the town for reimbursement of its garbage collection, snow plowing and lighting costs. It doesn't say when the suit was filed.
Now, the borough attorney has advised the council that a court "may find that the internal ways within the Bluffs constitute a public street, thereby entitling the Bluffs to reimbursement under the Municipal Services Act."
That state law is aimed at preventing double taxation of condo residents.
Michael Nitka, an experienced rower from Red Bank, gets ready to enter a scull during Navesink River Rowing's open house on Saturday.
Next Sunday, as part of Red Bank's two-day centennial celebration, rowers from the the non-profit club will participate in a flotilla of boats large and small to honor the town's riparian roots.
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