WASSAIC — While visitors are regularly welcomed to enjoy the artistic hamlet of Wassaic, the recent sudden appearance of a homeless person who came and stayed, upset the sense of calm.
A series of local break-ins brought state and county law enforcement to investigate, eventually resulting in an arrest and arraignment of Isaiah Garcia.
First reports came on Tuesday, July 23 of a disruptive person at the Wassaic Project creating a nuisance by smoking on premises and refusing to depart. The Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office responded to that call and resolved the incident with no charges being filed.
On Sunday, July 28, there was a report of a minor burglary at a private home, with surveillance camera footage showing a dark figure carrying an axe taken from a nearby property, and also on Sunday, July 28, a break-in at Calsi’s General Store for which the State Police answered the call and completed an arrest.
Arraignment occurred at Amenia Town Hall with a trial date set for Monday, Aug. 19. The person was released, all in accordance with existing law, and he returned to Wassaic. He has not been seen since July 28.
Reports and rumors flew freely throughout the area, live and on social media, demonstrating residents’ fears for safety within their community and on behalf of their children, in particular. Two lines of thinking emerged. The first would try to help the “stranger” as biblical teachings repeatedly recommend; the other called for more decisive action that would remove the perceived threat.
About 70 people came to the Wassaic fire station for Kirk Imperati’s visit Friday, Aug. 2. Photo by Nathan Miller
To clarify the issue and explain the role of law enforcement, a hamlet-wide meeting was convened at the Wassaic Firehouse on Friday, Aug. 2, inviting County Sheriff Kirk Imperati to speak, along with other county officials. More than 70 residents attended the session, organized by the Amenia Town Republican Committee.
Listening to residents’ safety concerns, Imperati advised that anyone who sees anything or anyone and is at all concerned, should call 911 to have an officer dispatched to the scene. Either his office or the state police will come right away, he said. Imperati also recommended “block watches” as a valuable exercise while emphasizing that no unilateral action should be attempted by residents for everyone’s protection.
The officers are trained in speaking with the person and determining risk.
Under current terminology, Imperati explained, the unhoused person is described as “a person in crisis.”
“We are held to a higher standard,” Imperati said, since the 2020 police reform and modernization measures were implemented by the State of New York. “We’ve been asked to do more with less in recent history,” he added, feeling that bail reform has hindered the ability of police to bring people into custody.
Imperati was elected to his office in 2022, having served the Sheriff’s Department over 23 years. He began serving as Sheriff in 2023.
“My job is to help everyone,” Imperati said, reporting that his office responds to 60,000 to 70,000 complaints each year, with 75% being for mental health issues. Closure of state and county mental health facilities throughout the area has meant that law enforcement has needed to take on the responsibility. Imperati said that his office has now hired a mental health professional, and he would like to be able to hire more.
“We need more facilities and services to get these persons the help they need,” Imperati said. Under current law, however, he added, a person needs to recognize his own need for mental help and then request it to get it.
The unhoused visitor is described by many who have encountered him as unwell, but not confrontational or uncooperative. During his court appearance, he gave a home address in San Antonio, Texas, indicating that he had come east to New Jersey to live with a friend, but that did not work out, so he came north to New York City, and then farther north to Wassaic.
“A person like that is at risk,” said Sharon Kroeger, owner of Calsi’s General Store. “We are all victims,” she added, concerned for the welfare of the visitor as well as residents.
“A system allowing for ‘preventive detention’ would benefit everyone,” Kroeger said.
Taken from her General Store, Kroeger said, was a violin and a package of dried white mulberries, only grown in Turkey. The violin was recovered from a nearby unlocked parked car.
Residents at the meeting asked what might be done to secure a few vacant local residences that might prove attractive to homeless people.
State Representative Anil Beephan (R-105), who attended the meeting, spoke of the state having removed mental health facilities from Dutchess County and said that he is advocating for more local control.
Other residents have commented on an apparent lack of an organized local team of qualified professionals who could coordinate a response to similar situations as they might occur. Help has been offered by individuals and organizations, but there has been no coordinated system to implement it.
Kenneth Weiss (above) will play a solo recital performance in honor of Wanda Landowska, a harpischord virtuoso, who lived in Lakeville for many years.
Landowska fled Nazi Germany in 1941 with two of her students one of whom was Denise Restout, who later became her companion of many years, and a harpsichord in a box. They landed in New York. Landowski performed the Goldberg Variations of Johann Sebastian Bach at New York Town Hall to “Incredible success.” She then looked around for a place to live and found Lakeville where she resided until her death in 1959.
Kenneth Weiss made “a pilgrimage “to Lakeville in the 1980’s. “Madame Restout received us in the kitchen of the home she shared with Landowska. From the two Pleyel Harpsichords to Landowska concert gowns on display it felt as if Landowska had just stepped out.”
Madame Wanda Landowska, world famous harpsichordist and resident of Lakeville from 1941 until her death in 1959, will be honored in a concert presented by Crescendo and featuring a performance by Kenneth Weiss, renowned harpsichord soloist and professor at the Paris Conservatoire.Provided
Wanda Landowska was a child prodigy. Christine Gevert, Founding Artistic Director of Crescendo said that Landowska “went way beyond the harpsichord to other instruments.”
Landowska commissioned music from composers and wrote some of her own. She also had harpsichords built to order. She founded a music school in Paris where she “invited her students to come and stay on the property as if they were her own children.” She often became a lifelong mentor to students.
Landowska also authored many articles, some of which were translated from Polish and French and made into a book by her life partner Denise Restout who was left to take care of Landowska’s legacy when she died. Most of Landowska’s papers are in the Smithsonian, unfortunately still boxed up.
One reason for Landowska’s fame was that “she changed the course of music and how people perceived and enjoyed it.” She had a Bauhaus architect, Jean-Charles Moreux, design a concert hall, near Paris in the 1920’s, which was filled with light, in contrast to most darkened theaters. She had a low stage built so she could be close to the audience and would bring a carpet and lamp from home “to create ambience” said Gevert. Landowska had a “Holistic concept and made performances more attractive and accessible. She was one of the first performers to talk to the audience.”
The concert will be at the Lakeville Methodist Church at 6 p.m. on Sept. 14. It is presented with special support by Leszek Wojcik, famed Carnegie Hall recording engineer who lives in Lakeville. Wojcik “understands the importance of Landowska’s legacy,” said Gevert, and works with Crescendo to preserve it.
Tickets are available at www.crescendomusic.org or at the door, first come, first serve, forty-five minutes before the concert. Prices are forty dollars for general seats, ten dollars for youths or seventy-five for an up-close seat.
Support for the concert has also been provided to Crescendo by the Connecticut State Department of Economic and Community Development/Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) from the Connecticut State Legislature, and NBT Bank.
The cover art for Seidelman's memoir "Desperately Seeking Something."
Susan Seidelman on set.Courtesy of MGM
Natalia Zukerman: How has it been for you watching the film all these years later?
Susan Seidelman: It’s been interesting to watch it with multi-generational audiences. You never know whether something’s going to pass the test of time, but I think it does.
NZ: You write in the opening of your memoir, “If how one sees the world is a reflection of who they are (and I believe it is), then you can look at the world reflected in any of my films and see little pieces of me. Like Where’s Waldo? I’m hidden somewhere in each of them.” So where are you hidden in “Desperately Seeking Susan?”
SS: Well, I’m not so hidden in that. I’m a little bit of both characters, really. I mean, I was a girl who grew up in the suburbs, but I was also that rebellious girl from the suburbs who moved to New York City to live a different kind of life. It’s really about wanting to be your authentic self, that within all of us, there’s this other person that we sometimes want to let out.
NZ: Was there pressure for you to top the success of “Susan”?
SS: You know, no one expected this movie to be successful. It was made for $5 million, which for a studio movie was low. We shot it in New York, and the studio in LA kind of thought, “Oh, it’s just a little bit of money, we’ll leave them alone.” And then surprisingly, Madonna became such a superstar at the exact moment that we were making the movie. That was something that we couldn’t have planned any better. So, suddenly the film got way more attention critically as well as commercially than we ever expected. I knew that at some point, people were looking over my shoulder saying, ‘What are you going to do next?’ People were paying attention.
NZ: And was that hard or demanding of you in a new way?
SS: There’s something in the film industry called “the sophomore slump” so I knew that whatever I did next was going to be viewed differently because of the success of “Susan.”
(Seidelman’s third film was “Making Mr. Right” which came out in 1987 and starred John Malkovich and Ann Magnuson.)
SS: “It’s an AI romantic comedy. It’s about a woman who falls in love with an android that she gets to program. It’s sort of a Pygmalion story. She creates what she thinks is the perfect man, and then she falls in love with her creation.
NZ: Tell me about “Sex and The City.” How did that come about?
SS: That came about because Darren Star was a fan of “Desperately Seeking Susan” and a few of my other movies that are about New York City as much as they are about the characters. He wanted “Sex and The City” to be about the women, but to also be about the city. So, he contacted me, which was interesting because I never really wanted to work in television. Back then, it was kind of like the ugly stepsister to the movie business. I mean, it was great for writers because there was some wonderful writing going on. But by the mid late 90s, HBO and Showtime really reinvented television and suddenly TV didn’t look like TV anymore — the language was bolder, the themes were more adult. So, when I got the script and I first heard it was going to be a pilot for a TV series, I was not that excited about it. And then I read the pilot, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty amazing.’ The writing was smart, and it was about women in their mid 30s, and there weren’t that many shows that starred women of that age at that time.
NZ: So how old are you now, may I ask?
SS: 71
NZ: Incredible. And how do you feel?
SS: I feel good. I mean, I think another factor of why I wanted to write this book was because suddenly I felt I was old enough to kind of look back on my career with enough objectivity, with a filter of time, and with enough to say about it and maybe enough distance. And I can’t believe it’s been more than 40 years now. You know, I didn’t want to tell tales out of school or be snarky or vindictive. It wasn’t about airing dirty laundry or anything. I wanted to tell my story from the inside out. I mean after 40 years of reading other reviewers or people writing about what they thought I was doing or thought my motivation was, I thought it was time to do it myself.
