“No One Cares About Crazy People,” a documentary directed by Gail Freedman and inspired by Ron Powers’ book of the same name, screens at The Moviehouse in Millerton on Sunday, Oct. 11, at 1 p.m. The film examines the realities of living with severe mental illness in America, combining personal stories with a look at the systemic challenges facing individuals and families seeking care. A Q&A with Freedman and Jo Ann Brown, executive director of NAMI Mid-Hudson, will follow the screening.
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Dr. Bronwen Childs with Monty.
Provided
The household included pocket pets, as well as goats, a sheep, Fjord ponies and even a raccoon. At 13, Childs got Monty, a 5-year-old horse who remained her companion for the next 27 years.
Bronwen Childs, at 13, with Monty.Provided
Naturally drawn to science, Childs found her way to veterinary medicine through mentors at Kent School, including former Olympian Michael Page. “It was the way of treating animals like family that stuck with me,” she said.
A graduate of Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Childs trained in radiology at the University of Georgia. Today, she is a staff radiologist at Pieper Veterinary Hospital in Middletown, which provides general and specialty care for dogs, cats and exotic pets. She also consults on equine imaging and provides traveling ultrasound services to Litchfield County clinics through Berkshire Veterinary Imaging.
Radiology, she said, allows her to help animals and fellow veterinarians while living in Norfolk near her family. “Specializing in radiology has been the best decision of my career.”
Monty died recently, a significant loss after nearly three decades together. “He was a constant when things were changing,” Childs said. “I know I am who I am today because of our experiences together.”
At home, the family has a dog, Bandit, while Childs’ children regularly collect frogs, toads, newts and worms from the yard. “They keep the kids excited about being outdoors,” she said, “and that is the start of it all.”
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Veterinary assistant and clinic coordinator Trisha Burlingame with Scarlett.
L. Tomaino
First, “We are independently owned. Most other vet clinics in the area are corporate,” Hotaling said. He said corporate ownership can contribute to higher costs because of added pressure to show a profit.
Second, “We take pride in our AAHA accreditation. Less than 10% of veterinary clinics achieve it.” Copake follows protocols designed to deliver high-quality patient care and employee training.
Third, “We deliver high-quality, evidence-based care — which is not uniform throughout the profession.”
Copake Veterinary Hospital has an in-house lab and can provide ultrasounds, laser therapy and advanced digital X-rays.
To further expand services, Hotaling has also returned to school to learn new surgical techniques. He recently used his training in advanced orthopedic fracture repair and internal fixation to repair the leg of a puppy that had been hit by a car. He expects to soon complete a course in tibial plateau leveling osteotomy, or TPLO, which will allow him to repair cruciate ligament tears in dogs.
Offering these treatments in Copake rather than sending clients to more expensive specialty hospitals can help keep treatment costs down.
Veterinary assistant Ehren Melius examines Chloe, a Labrador retriever, at Copake Veterinary Hospital. Melius worked in animal welfare for nearly two decades before joining the practice.L. Tomaino
Dr. Emily Reilly, one of five veterinarians at the practice, added as she examined Chloe, a yellow Lab, “We try to keep it low stress and use low-stress handling.”
Veterinary assistant Ehren Melius described another element that benefits Copake’s patients.
“We believe in community-based medicine, which is vanishing in this day and age,” Melius said.
The staff also pointed to teamwork as an important part of the practice. Trisha Burlingame, veterinary assistant and clinic coordinator, praised the work environment.
“We are a very close-knit team. Everyone here is like family. Dr. Hotaling is a great boss, very flexible and family-oriented,” Burlingame said.
Copake Veterinary Hospital is located at 7915 State Route 22 in Copake Falls, New York. Its team welcomes new patients. It is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. The hospital accepts emergencies during regular business hours.
For more information, call 518-329-6161 or visit copakevethospital.com.
Trimmed to perfection at Rosie’s Grooming in Amenia, a standard poodle named Scarlett O’Connor is ready to strut. With 32 years of grooming experience, Rosie Urena has welcomed customers at her Amenia shop for three years.
Leila Hawken
Urena owned and operated her first shop at Trump Plaza in New York City for more than 16 years before moving the business to Ledgewood Boarding Kennel in Millerton, where she operated for another 16 years. She has been at her present location in Amenia for three years.
“Every dog is different,” she said, explaining that she does not post a rate schedule or quote prices over the phone. She needs to meet the dog first.
“Money is not everything,” Urena said, adding that her shop offers a service where the dog comes first. She believes in keeping customers happy, which may explain why she has so many repeat clients.
“I treat people and dogs the same,” she said.
“I speak to the dogs in Spanish,” Urena said, explaining that she calms them with her quiet demeanor. “My demeanor sets the stage for the grooming.”
While their owners are present, Urena explained, dogs can instinctively pick up on stress and react to it.
During the interview, a customer came to retrieve Scarlett O’Connor, 6, a standard poodle from Lakeville and New York City, who had finished her grooming appointment in great style.
“Not every poodle can support this haircut,” Urena said, describing the precision cut preferred for Scarlett, who proudly held her head high in a show of attitude.
Baby is ready to go home after enjoying a visit to Rosie’s Grooming.Provided
Another customer came to pick up Ollie, a pleasant, well-behaved shih tzu from Millbrook who had been in for a bath, trim and blow-dry for extra fluffiness.
Asked about differences between city and country dogs, Urena said they are mostly the same. “In the country, though, we have a lot of sporting dogs,” she added.
Urena grew up on a small farm in a village in the Dominican Republic, hoping as a young child to become a veterinarian.
“We were in charge of all of the animals,” she recalled. “I loved that life.”
In time, she broadened her career plans and earned an associate degree in animal science.
Two rescue dogs, both described by Urena as great dogs, have joined her household. Brissa, 17, is a Chihuahua-terrier mix from the Dominican Republic, and Milo, 5, is a Havanese, the national dog of Cuba. Milo had been tossed from a moving car in Rhode Island and was picked up by state troopers.
“I would never make a dog suffer so the customer can see hair,” Urena said when asked what she would want a new customer to know. The well-being of the dog comes first.
“I refuse to brush a dog in need of a short haircut for hot weather or to counter coat matting, nor will I do a shave-down just to make more money or to please a customer’s aesthetic taste,” she said.
Rosie’s Grooming is located at 20 Lango Road in Amenia. For more information, call 845-332-5366.
akeylah wellington’s tapestries are made from hundreds of thousands of pony beads.
Natalia Zukerman
“In this sort of chaotic moment in our world,” she said, “Wassaic Project is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts awards for two really extraordinary, really radical artists working at the edge of their mediums and pushing us forward into the next generation of artists.”
wellington’s two 9-by-10-foot tapestries shimmered outside in the bright autumn day. Her “nineties resolving power” and “aughts resolving power” draw on Hubble Space Telescope images recorded between 1990 and 2009: supernovae, gas rings, binary star systems, globular star clusters and other distant phenomena. These cosmic phenomena are translated into pixels and then into hundreds of thousands of plastic pony beads, an ornament familiar from braided hairstyles, turning images of deep space into something tactile, domestic and culturally specific.
wellington said she became fascinated by the language used to describe Hubble, particularly its “resolving power” — its ability to render distant objects with what was touted as unprecedented clarity.
“Hubble is a time machine,” she said, describing how the telescope captures light that has traveled for millions of years. But when she began looking closely at the images offered as evidence of technological progress, she noticed something amusing: “A lot of those images were pixelated.”
That contradiction became fertile ground for the questions surrounding her work.
Inside the Gridley Chapel, Nielsen’s “Crystalline Resonance” approaches the cosmos from another direction. Twelve transparent photograms installed in the chapel windows turn Nielsen’s camera-less photographic process into a kind of stained glass. Circles, triangles, squares and other elemental forms assemble themselves into what Nielsen calls “dimensional beings,” while sunlight continually redraws the work across the chapel walls and floor.
Liz Nielsen’s “Crystalline Resonance” at Gridley Chapel. Jeff Barnett-Winsby
Nielsen described light as both material and mystery — “something that’s tangible and intangible,” behaving as both wave and particle.
“I’m coming from an immaterial world, bringing it into a material world, and then dematerializing it again,” she said.
That transformation is especially potent in the former chapel. Nielsen noted that stained glass historically was not simply about the glass itself, but about “the presence of the divine coming through” as sunlight became colored light.
“I’m not particularly religious myself,” she said, but spaces like the chapel have long been places for “meditation, community gatherings” and other forms of interior experience.
Her figures offer no prescribed theology. Some resemble guardians or guides; one looks like a mermaid, another a queen, another a baseball-capped figure. Nielsen wants the encounter to come before the explanation.
“Something resonates with you before you understand it,” she said.
Both artists take something difficult to grasp — ancient light, distant stars, invisible forces, deep time — and give it a body. Nielsen does it with transparent photographic film and sunlight; wellington does it with plastic beads and thread.
And both complicate the idea that technology necessarily brings us closer to certainty.
There is humor in that for wellington, whose work frequently uses the word in its less familiar sense: not simply comedy, but the act of enduring or tolerating something. There is something “kind of funny,” she said, about spending hundreds of hours reproducing an image of something she will never actually see — just as there is something funny about spending billions of dollars to produce an image of the cosmos that still arrives as pixels.
“Funny like ‘the milk is off’ funny,” she explained.
Asked about seeing her work outside, wellington reflected that her plastic tapestries create an intentional collision between the technological and natural worlds. Leaves, sky, buildings and passing trains remain visible around and through them.
Nielsen, meanwhile, has been searching for ways to move photography off the wall and into lived space. At Wassaic, the landscape itself completes her images as viewers look through them.
“What if the photograph is something that you’re moving through,” she asked, “not just looking at?”
For Nielsen, light itself may be the perfect vehicle for an experience that asks the viewer to slow down. She has spent years studying its behavior, how to manipulate it and, as she put it, “how to almost emote it.”
“Light is like love,” she said. “We know both, but we can’t hold either.”
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