Thank you!
Your support is sustaining the future of local news in our communities.

Horse whispering at the drive-in, for Equus Effect

Horse whispering at the drive-in, for Equus Effect
Equus Effect’s Jane Strong (with Dutch Boy Paint) has planned a COVID-19-safe gala at the Amenia drive-in for Sept. 12. 
Photo by Leila Hawken

AMENIA — Bucking the trend of fundraising cancellations due to COVID-19, The Equus Effect in Sharon, Conn., has instead reimagined its fall event, planning a gala fundraiser at the drive-in on Saturday, Sept. 12. 

In pre-coronavirus times, the fundraiser, now in its seventh year, would have been held under a tent on the grounds of The Equus Effect on Drum Road.  

To accommodate social distancing and to provide the glamor of a silver screen event, Horse Whisperings will be held at Amenia’s Four Brothers Drive-In, where owner John Stefanopoulos promises a delectable pizza dinner delivered with aplomb directly to each car. And that’s just one feature.

Tory Jadow, a documentary filmmaker from Cornwall, is creating a short video for the gala that describes what The Equus Effect is and does, including programs to benefit veterans, health care workers and first responders as they confront trauma and stress in their pandemic-centered work. 

The Equus Effect has offered its program free of charge to health workers throughout the summer, program director and founder Jane Strong noted.

The featured film of the gala evening will be “Buck,” the true story of Buck Brannaman, best known as a “horse whisperer,” whose philosophy and training methods form the basis of the program at The Equus Effect. 

The program, as described by Strong, helps with “moral injury and emotional impact” trauma exhibited by some veterans as they transition from military active duty to civilian life. They work with the horses and are able to heal with the help of the large animals’ exceptional sensitivity.

“What horses feel is what they do,” Strong said, describing a profound ability to trust that is tempered by the wariness they develop as prey animals. “They question the intentions of everyone.”  

Strong and her team are working to make The Equus Effect a program of choice for the Veterans’ Administration in helping veterans “who need to come home but who suffer the costs of locking feelings away.”

With a heart rate half that of humans, horses offer an innate calm and an honest temperament to help to relieve buried traumatic stress, whether induced by military service to country or pandemic-related service experienced by first responders here in the Tri-state region.

“We hope it will be a terrific evening out for the community — without the risk of being in one space together,” Strong said. 

Future plans for The Equus Effect include expansion of the program to year-round, which would require the addition of an indoor arena for work during the winter months.

Horse Whisperings at the Drive-In is expected to sell out early, though Strong said on Monday, Aug. 24, “We’re not full yet.” 

To reserve a space or for more information, go to www.TheEquusEffect.org.

Leila Hawken

Latest News

Millerton wine shop owner organizes charity wine tasting for local child

Millerton wine shop owner organizes charity wine tasting for local child

Millerton Wine & Spirits owner Chris Jeans has organized a charity wine tasting to benefit the family of Crew Slater, a Millerton native with congenital kidney disease. The wine tasting is set for Thursday, Oct. 29, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Pasture Kitchen on Route 44 just east of the Village of Millerton.

Illustration provided

MILLERTON — Two local business owners have joined forces to put on a charity wine tasting benefitting Millerton's Slater family.

Crew Slater, a 5-year-old Millerton native, needs a kidney transplant to survive congenital kidney disease. Millerton Wine & Spirits owner Chris Jeans and Pasture Kitchen founder Austin Cornell have organized a charity wine tasting at Pasture Kitchen on Route 44 next Thursday, Oct. 29, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Keep ReadingShow less
events

Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

On Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Cornwall Historical Society, author and genealogist John Mills will breathe new life into the stories of some of Connecticut’s more underappreciated patriots. The reason these heroes were forgotten? They were Black.

At a time when white colonists were fighting for their own liberty and political independence, many Black men who fought alongside them remained enslaved. Some risked their lives only to return to bondage. Though enslaved people were promised freedom from both sides of the Revolutionary War in exchange for their service, Great Britain, too, was still deeply dependent on slavery. For Black people in America, the war presented both extraordinary risks and uncertain paths to the freedom that white colonists were demanding for themselves.

Keep ReadingShow less
education

A sanctuary for second chances

A sanctuary for second chances

Stephanie Saetta runs Charlie Chicken Bones, a sanctuary in Salisbury.

Madi Long
You only get one or two of these soul connection dogs, so I do this in his honor.
— Stephanie Saetta

Stephanie Saetta has spent much of her life caring for others. A physician at White Plains Hospital, she has another calling at home in Salisbury — one that has four legs and a wagging tail. She runs Charlie Chicken Bone Sanctuary, a nonprofit dog rescue that brings dogs from overcrowded pounds and the streets of Texas to foster homes in northwestern Connecticut, where they can begin again.

The sanctuary is named for Charlie, the dog who taught her how special a bond between a person and rescue animal can be.

Keep ReadingShow less
our community
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.

Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Hunter Runnette, founder and board chair of field, has spent years fostering arts and cultural programming in the Berkshires.

Provided

What do joy, gardening, artificial intelligence, the American experiment and the creative process have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out, at least when some of the world’s most compelling thinkers get together to talk about them.

From Friday, Oct. 23, through Sunday, Oct. 25, Lenox, Massachusetts, will host the inaugural field festival, a three-day gathering of writers, artists, scholars and cultural figures at Shakespeare & Company. Billed as a festival of ideas, entertainment, learning and discovery, field brings together an impressive roster of voices to explore everything from the deeply personal to the profoundly political.

Keep ReadingShow less
community

The Pink House AM is serving up community

The Pink House AM is serving up community

Mare Rubin and Maggie Levine of the Pink House AM.

Madi Long

It all started with a yoga class. Mare Rubin was working on her second act after leaving the Upper West Side, where she’d raised a family and worked in corporate marketing. Newly empty nesters, she and her husband decided to move to the wilds of northwestern Connecticut, where they had spent 15 years as weekenders, to see what life in the woods had in store for them.

Rubin started teaching yoga classes at the Union in West Cornwall, a space designated by the town of Cornwall as a community hub with couches, Wi-Fi, occasional events and a growing yoga class schedule. She was adjusting well but missed one important thing about city life: a casual coffee shop.

Keep ReadingShow less
business

Sons of Astro are musicians, friends and bandmates — in that order

Sons of Astro are musicians, friends and bandmates — in that order

The Sons of Astro will be at the Common Pub in Housatonic on Oct. 24 and the 2nd Home Lounge in Winsted on Nov. 14.

Provided

No matter where they are in the world, musicians seem to find other musicians. There’s a shared language, a shared experience of being on stage and performing, and a shared enthusiasm for making those melodies by themselves or together. Such is the case with Norfolk and Brooklyn-based cosmic Americana band Sons of Astro.

That magnetic musicians’ bond drew Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mike Cobb into the orbit of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Matt Statler. The two neighbors took to each other right away and were soon playing open mics together. As an ethics professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Statler made the case that if he sat in for Cobb’s set and Cobb sat in for Statler’s, they could play together and double their stage time. Clearly, these men wanted to make as much music as possible. That became a little harder when Cobb and his family moved up to Norfolk, Connecticut.

Keep ReadingShow less
concerts
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.