How to Lose Money in Your Spare Time -- At Home! by Jim Mullen, the Catskill-based author of It Takes a Village Idiot, is a collection his funniest stories from the last ten years.  “The title story of How to Lose Money is one that never seems to go out of date,” says Mullen. “It’s not intentional but even when I think I’m writing about something that’s the news of the moment, the same subjects crop up over and over again -- keeping passengers in planes on the tarmac for hours, parents who give their children strange names, internet dating, waiting rooms in doctors offices, how bad television has become, visitors who over stay their welcome, inappropriate tattoos, teenage fads, memory loss, husbands and wives, and colonoscopies. None of it is funny while you’re in the middle of it, but afterwards it’s what people talk about with their friends.  That’s when we all try to make the story fun to hear, and that’s what I do.  For some reason, the more miserable a time I’ve had, the funnier the story that comes out of it.  Lucky for me, lots of miserable things seem to happen to me.  I’m never at a loss for something to write about.”

Mullen’s memoir of moving from Greenwich Village to the fictional village of Walleye in the Catskills, It Takes a Village Idiot, was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor.  It got rave reviews from The Washington Post, The Nashville Tennessean, The Virginian Pilot, CNN, The Cleveland Pain Dealer and The Baltimore Sun. The Rocky Mountain News named it one of their Best Books of the Year.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman is a trilogy of fantasy novels coming together to form an epic.   The three books - Northern Lights (1995), published as The Golden Compass in North America, The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000) - follow the coming-of-age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes against a backdrop of epic events. The three novels have won various awards, most notably the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year prize, won by The Amber Spyglass. Northern Lights won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in the UK in 1995. The trilogy as a whole took third place in the BBC's Big Read poll in 2003. The story involves fantasy elements such as witches an armored polar bears, and alludes to a broad range of ideas from such fields as physics, philosophy and theology. The trilogy functions, in part, as a retelling and inversion of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost.  Pullman's publishers have primarily marketed the series to young adults, but Pullman also intended to speak to adults. The London Royal National Theatre commissioned and staged this major two-part adaptation of the series in 2003–2004, and New Line Cinema released a film based on Northern Lights, titled The Golden Compass in 2007.

Shelley Hirsch is an award winning, critically acclaimed vocalist, composer, and storyteller  whose mostly solo compositions, staged multimedia works, improvisations, radio plays,  installations and collaborations have been produced and presented in concert halls, clubs,  festivals, theaters, museums, galleries and on radio and television on 5 continents. She has  appeared in and composed music for several films and is the subject of 2 documentary portraits  on Aspekte and Arte TV Programs in Germany.

http://www.shelleyhirsch.com/shelley/index.shtml
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH6cx3ZgJ-A

Michael Suchorsky has spent decades performing and recording around the world playing drums in a wide variety of musical genres; from middle eastern jazz, to microtonal, to punk rock. Michael Suchorsky has played in venues that stretch from the iconic punk club CBGBs in NYC to the Berlin and Montreaux Jazz Festivals, the Fête de l’Humanité in Paris, and Lincoln Center. He has long standing associations touring and recording with artists such as Lou Reed (6+ albums and a movie sound track), Soldier String Quartet (2 albums), jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, and French rock legend Jacques Higelin (6+ albums). Suchorsky has performed with dozens of other bands and artists from Motown artist Don Covay to country rock artist Peter Rowan to an opera with Michael Sahl to microtonalist Johnny Rheinhard, and recorded albums with Nelson Slater and French artist Bernard Sazner. He has also composed music for TV, and a variety of bands including his joint collective project the Every Man Band which resulted in two albums for ECM and was voted one of the best new electronic bands in the Down Beat 31st Annual International Critics Poll following their first album.

He has recently composed for choreographer/dancer/filmmaker Pooh Kaye, with whom he has continued to work and perform at various venues including two of Kaye's multidisciplinary evenings at Franklin Stage. In April of 2012 they performed at Roulette in NYC joined by dancers Sally Silvers, Colleen Blacklock and acclaimed vocalist, composer, and storyteller Shelley Hirsch, with whom Suchorsky has formed a duo. He also recorded on the CD "Where Were You Then?" a collaboration between Shelley Hirsch and Simon Ho recently released on John Zorn’s Tzadiks Key Series. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sotUgVtRpqg

Don't Fool With Love by Alfred de Musset
The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard
Design For Living by Noel Coward

Communications from a Cockroach: Archy and the Under Side is drawn from the Archy and Mehitabel sketches, which were written by noted humorist and poet Don Marquis for his daily column in the New York Sun starting in 1916. The illustrious Archy is a cockroach who possesses the reincarnated spirit of a free-verse poet and who finds his means of expression by jumping from key to key on Marquis’ typewriter. He shares with us his misadventures as well as those of Mehitabel, an alley cat with the soul of Cleopatra. Archy, Mehitabel and their lowlife acquaintances face the bewildering challenges of the modern world with humor and grit. This rich material provides us with a context for the creation of a wide array of puppet critters operated by actors in full view of the audience - from fleas, tarantulas and crickets, to an ancient Egyptian mummy - a colorful population from the nooks and crannies of early 20th century New York.