Suffolk County Legislator Rob Trotta invited Northport High School senior Kaitlyn Ruiter and her parents, Anna and Walter, to the Legislature’s General Meeting on May 23 to recognize Kaitlyn for winning a Grammy as a member of the New York Youth Symphony, where she plays double bass. The New York Youth Symphony won a Grammy for its album, “Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery, and Valerie Coleman.” This is the first youth orchestra ever to win a Grammy. Legislator Trotta congratulated Kaitlyn on this major achievement and expressed his admiration for her musical talent.
Pictured with Grammy winner Kaitlyn Ruiter (center) are, from left, Suffolk County Legislator Stephanie Bontempi, Kaitlyn’s parents Anna and Walter, Northport High School orchestra teacher, Michael Sussino, and Suffolk County Legislator Rob Trotta.
Shhh. Listen. If what you hear is nothing, then maybe you’re onto something.
Noise envelops us. Some of it, like the sound of a Broadway musical, the waterfall laughter of a giggling child, or the deep resonant breath of a humpback whale surfacing amid floating cubes of ice in Alaska can give us peace, pleasure and joy.
Many noises, however, are irritants or worse. We step out of a loud airplane onto a jetway, where loudspeakers announce the boarding in group four of a flight awaiting takeoff. We walk through a crowded airport, as fathers shout to their children, a woman calls to ask Breanne if she “wants fries with her burger,” and a man informs his wife that he “has to pee so badly that he’s not sure he’s going to make it.”
We step outside of the airport, where whistles from people directing traffic echo in our ears and where officials in orange vests bark orders at drivers to “vacate this spot immediately!”
We try to ignore many of the harsher and more abrasive sounds, even though our nervous system tracks noises as a way to protect us in case someone yells something we need to hear.
And then there are those wonderful moments when we hear nothing, not even the buzzing of a lightbulb, a dog drinking in the next room, or a cat cleaning himself on a nearby chair.
Silence.
If it lasts long enough, it’s the pause that refreshes, giving our ears a rest and our brains a chance to hear an inner voice that might otherwise get lost.
We can find those moments when we’re on our own. When we’re surrounded by others, the silence is harder to discover, as we either speak or hear the noises they make as they unwrap a newspaper, chew their gum, or shake their leg up and down so rapidly that the material from their pants makes a repetitive rubbing sound.
But then, we can go to a meditation or yoga class or a religious or memorial service and reflect with others who sit still like a slope of shaded stones in an Ansel Adams photo.
During those moments, we can slow our breathing, think beyond the constant fast twitch need to act and react to our phones, and can allow our minds to make unexpected connections.
During one of those recent times, I pondered symmetry in nature, where you can draw a line down the middle of something like our faces, and see that the image on one side, excluding freckles, beauty marks, and that scar from the time we tripped and got stitches, is incredibly similar to the one on the other.
With so much chaos in nature, I wouldn’t expect such symmetry. At a distance, most leaves have remarkable symmetry, as do the shape of most animals. Human designs often have a pleasing symmetry, with windows, flying buttresses and A-frame houses looking remarkably similar on the left and right. Almost every field or arena for a sporting event has some symmetry, except for those with irregular outfield fences.
During a recent service, I enjoyed time when I couldn’t look at my phone and when I could read religious text. I haven’t considered these texts in a while and was drawn in by their drama and story value, as opposed to the spiritual and life guidance I often imagine. Basic struggles for power, sibling rivalries, and the search for food and stability dominate these narratives, which makes it clear why religion (and mythology) continue to offer connections for people whose lives, at least on the surface, are considerably different from the ones people lived lo those many years ago.
Ultimately, silence can be refreshing, giving us auditory time and space to reflect and to clean a cognitive filter cluttered with chaos and cacophony.
Suddenly it’s June. Didn’t we recently put our holiday decorations away? Wasn’t it mid-winter break just a couple of weeks ago? Time warps, especially if we have busy lives. We look up and five months of the year have already passed.
But of course, June is most welcome. It is the month of high school graduations, of weddings, of the official turning to summer with the summertime solstice and the most daylight hours of the year. For those readers interested in random data, June is the second of four months to have a length of 30 days and the third of five months to have fewer than 31 days. Take that to “Jeopardy!”
June is also the month when all the trees are dressed in their finest, lushest leaves, when the weather beckons us outdoors because it is neither too cold or too hot quite yet. June is when the swimming pools in the neighborhood shed their covers and offer to the eye patches of refreshing blue as we drive along the local roads. June is when allergy season begins to recede with the gradual lessening of tree and grass pollens.
Early June is when I like to travel because each day is longer, and I feel I am really getting my money’s worth on a tour. That’s also when most families are still home, their young ones not yet finished with school, and therefore all services, from palaces to restaurants are less crowded. Unless I am in the southern hemisphere, where it is technically the start of winter, the weather in June tends to be perfect, not much rain, the temperature ideal.
June was probably named after the Roman goddess Juno, the goddess of marriage and the wife of the supreme deity, Jupiter, There are also other suggestions for how the month got its name, but we really don’t have to list them all because no one I know is actually preparing to appear on “Jeopardy!”
That said, you still might like to know a few of the month-long observances for June. There is:
African American Music Appreciation Month
ALS Awareness Month in Canada
Caribbean American Heritage Month
LGBTQ+ Awareness and Pride Month
National Oceans Month
PTSD Awareness Month
Great Outdoors Month
And my personal favorite, National Smile Month, which is celebrated in the United Kingdom and should migrate across the globe.
There is also:
International Children’s Day on the first Tuesday
World Bicycle Day on the first Wednesday
National Donut Day on the first Friday
Father’s Day on the third Sunday
Here is one to ponder: Seersucker Day on the second Thursday
And on the third Friday, National Flip Flop Day.
Hmmm. Maybe with all that said, we should give a second thought to “Jeopardy!”
When our children were in elementary school, I always welcomed June with enthusiasm. It meant that July and the end of the academic year were not far away, which in turn meant sleeping in and not having to prepare for the early bus to school, long, lazy days at the beach, family baseball games on the empty school fields on weekends and frequent outdoor barbecues. This year, June means, among more hedonistic pursuits, a month with five Thursdays, and therefore five issues of the papers and website to fill with local news that we will report to you.
On Thursday, June 1, the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum, 180 Little Neck Road, Centeport will host Scott Chaskey, poet-farmer and pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, for a presentation of his latest memoir, Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life (Milkweed Editions, 2023).
Scott Chaskey. Photo by Lindsay Morris
As a farmer with decades spent working in the fields, Chaskey’s worldview has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. His career as a writer has been influenced by these experiences, showing a profound commitment to the promotion of food sovereignty and organic agriculture. In both writing and farming, his efforts have been animated by a central conviction—namely, that humble attention to microbial life provides us with invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.
Soil and Spirit is a collection of personal essays, mapping the evolution of Chaskey’s thoughts on ecology, agriculture, and society through decisive moments in his biography. In its pages, he takes readers to his original homestead in Maine; the rugged Irish countryside, complete with blackberries, heather, and Nobel-Prize-winning poets; the ancient granite cliffs of the Cornwall coastline; Santa Clara, New Mexico, where he harvested amaranth seeds alongside a group of indigenous women; and finally, to Amagansett, in Suffolk County, where he recalls planting Redwood saplings and writing poetry beneath a centuries-old beech tree.
The lecture will take place at 7:00 pm in the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium. Tickets are available here. Support for the lecture series is generously provided by a grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.
About the lecturer:
Scott Chaskey is the author of Soil and Spirit. He is also the author of a memoir, This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm, and a book of nonfiction, Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds. His poetry, first printed in literary journals in the early seventies, has been widely published over four decades.
A pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, for thirty years he cultivated more than sixty crops for the Peconic Land Trust at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, New York, one of the original CSAs in the country. He is the past president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York and was honored as Farmer of the Year in 2013.
Chaskey was a founding board member for both the Center for Whole Communities, in Vermont, and Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, in Shelter Island, New York. He taught as a poet-in-the-schools for over two decades and as an instructor for Antioch International and Friends World College in Southampton. He lives and works on the east end of Long Island, New York.
Suffolk County Police Major Case Unit Detectives are investigating a bank robbery that occurred in Central Islip on May 30.
A man entered Bethpage Federal Credit Union, located at 233 South Research Place, at 9:36 a.m. and passed a note to a teller demanding cash. The teller complied and the suspect fled on foot with cash northbound through the parking lot.
The robber was described as 5 feet 6 to 5 feet 7 inches tall with dark skin. He was wearing sweatpants, a plaid hooded sweatshirt and a medical mask.
Detectives are asking anyone with information on the robbery to call the Major Case Unit at 631-852- 6555 or anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-220-TIPS.
Kara Vertucci stars as the rebellious Princess Ida in the Gilbert & Sullivan Light Opera Company of Long Island’s 2023 production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida. (Photo by NanMagna. Copyright 2023 The Gilbert & Sullivan Light Opera Company of Long Island.)
The battle of the sexes will break out into open warfare when the Gilbert & Sullivan Light Opera Company of Long Island brings its 2023 production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s classic Princess Ida to the Smithtown Performing Arts Center on Saturday, June 17, at 8 p.m. The production will feature a 23-piece orchestra.
Princess Ida—which debuted in 1884 at London’s Savoy opera, with book and lyrics by W.S. Gilbert and music by Arthur Sullivan—is a favorite with Gilbert & Sullivan aficionados, with its score in particular regarded as perhaps Sullivan’s greatest. The current production is the Light Opera Company’s first since 2007.
More dramatic in tone than any other Gilbert & Sullivan work, c In the end the story boils down to whether the opera’s young people are doomed to grow into their parents, repeating all their mistakes, or if they can escape the machinations of their parents, move beyond hatred and violence, and forge a new future for themselves.
In the new production of the opera, Kara Vertucci of Lindenhurst plays Princess Ida and Joseph Anthony Smith of Freeport plays Prince Hilarion, with Chris Jurak of Brightwaters as King Gama and Ben Salers of Northport as King Hildebrand. Lady Psyche is played by Patricia Gallagher of West Hempstead, and Lady Blanche by Terry Hochler of East Meadow, with Alyssa M. Mener of Massapequa Park as Melissa; Jordan Breslow of Bellmore plays Florian and Richard Risi of Locust Valley plays Cyril. Ida’s brothers, the formidable Warriors Three, are played by Henry Horstmann of Lindenhurst (Arac), John Benvenuto of Floral Park (Guron) and Marc Eliot Stein of Brooklyn (Scynthius). Tamara Shyngle of Brentwood plays Sacharissa, Claudia Arroyo of Port Washington is Chloe and Hanna Roth of Upper Brookville plays Ada. The director is Gayden Wren, and the music director is Leonard Lehrman.
“Princess Ida is unlike any other Gilbert & Sullivan opera,” said Wren, a longtime member of the company and also the author of an acclaimed book about Gilbert & Sullivan. “It’s Shakespearean in its scope, and its humor—which combines farce, slapstick, satire and burlesque—is in the service of a story of unique emotional power. Ida and Hilarion are two sides of the same coin, young aristocrats who’ve been pawns in their fathers’ rivalry almost since they were born. The story pits them as enemies, but as the opera progresses they begin to see something of themselves in each other, and to sense the outlines of a future different from the one they’ve always been told awaits them.
“Ultimately this is a story of generational conflict, of young people trying to get past the mistakes and hatreds of their parents, trying to forge a new world they might actually live in together,” Wren concluded. “When people ask me what it’s about, I say it’s about a prince, a princess and an arranged marriage … but also about climate change, racial and ethnic rivalries, inequality, social justice and pretty much anything else that’s going on in the world today. It’s funny, it’s beautiful, but there’s no Gilbert & Sullivan story that’s more directly relevant to the world of today.”
Princess Ida will be presented on Saturday, June 17, at 8 p.m. at the Smithtown Performing Arts Center, 2 East Main Street in Smithtown. Admission is $30, seniors and students $25. For further information, call (516) 619-7415 or visit www.gaslocoli.org.
A concept drawing of proposed plans for an African American museum in Huntington
An African American Museum will be coming to Huntington. It will be located on the former Naval Reserve center on Mill Dam Road on a roughly 1.5-acre parcel of town-owned land.
In April, the Huntington Town Board passed a resolution to approve a 99-year lease of the property for the museum. Although the project is still in its infancy, progress is being made quickly.
Councilwoman Joan Cergol (D) was primary sponsor of the resolution, with Councilmen Sal Ferro (R) and Dave Bennardo (R) signing on as co-sponsors.
Irene Moore, who chairs the African American Historic Designation Council in Huntington, and Barry Lites, president of the Huntington African American Museum Board, spoke before the unanimous vote, as did several other residents.
After the approval by the Town Board, the African American Museum Board established three new committees that will focus on the overall development of the project. These committees are the Development Committee, which will focus on fundraising; the Building Committee, which will work with architects to develop the design for the museum; and the Community Engagement Committee, which will involve the community, primarily in the realm of social media.
Lites, an attorney based out of Huntington and a longtime resident, is doing much of the planning and organization of the project at this stage.
While location for the museum is secured, in a phone interview Lites expressed that it will be difficult to do significant fundraising until a definite plan is made for the construction of the building itself. He has been conducting preliminary meetings with various architectural firms to try to come up with a plan and eventually hire one of these firms to design the project.
Lites also has a vision for what he wants the layout inside the museum to look like.
“My vision is to incorporate, to blend, to bring together history and technology,” Lites said. “History because we’re telling stories. But I want to use technology to do that.”
He said that one thing he envisions is an LED wall with different images and videos and interactive maps for guests to experience. “I really want to blend in technology principally because our focus is the school districts,” Lites said.
Lites expressed that the goal is to really get the younger generation involved and engaged in the museum and that this will drive the design of the museum, both inside and out. He expressed that the way the land and parking lots are laid out should be specifically tailored for suitability and accessibility for school buses.
“Technology is what attracts young people,” Lites said. “I want it to be an attractive cultural center.” He wants this museum to be valuable to all local residents as well. “We want a museum that is going to be a permanent institution in the Town of Huntington.”
Lites has met with representatives from other museums to get an idea of what the layout might look like in terms of exhibit space, office space, conference rooms, storage space and possibly an auditorium and a media room for video presentations. He said that they could potentially incorporate an event space for renting out to other groups.
As the kinks in the design continue to be worked out, fundraising will become a more tangible focus with $10 million as a general starting goal. However, Lites said that it’s difficult to know exactly how much money will be needed until the design is ironed out. Fundraising will vary from big foundation donors to individual philanthropists to smaller scale local fundraising. They plan to utilize the Community Engagement Committee to get residents involved in this process.
They are planning to have social media accounts on all the major platforms and to develop a website soon so that the plans for this project are more shareable among the community. For residents who want to get in early and join the Friends of the Museum, they should email the board secretary, Beverly Gorham, at [email protected] to get involved.
Lites also expressed that he wants this museum to be for everyone, particularly for residents of Huntington.
“I think it’s really exciting for everyone, not just African Americans,” he said. “It’s already a great town and this just makes it greater by finding out about all these neat people who did all these neat things who struggled, succeeded, showed bravery.”
The content in the museum is planned to be Huntington-focused. Individuals like Jupiter Hammon, Samuel Ballton and Peter Crippen will be heavily featured, so that the focus will be on African American history specifically related to Huntington.
There is not yet a hard timeline, but in the coming months, as seats on the museum’s committees and subcommittees are filled, the timeline will become more apparent to interested residents of Huntington.
Today, we honor the brave men and women who gave everything for our country. As we all remember their service and sacrifice, we at TBR News Media wish you a safe and Happy Memorial Day.
The office will be closed today but will reopen tomorrow at 10 a.m.
Suffolk County Police Fourth Squad detectives are investigating a crash that killed a woman and seriously injured her passenger on May 29 in Islandia.
Erika Figueroa was driving a 2010 Ford Edge eastbound on the Long Island Expressway, between exit 58 and exit 59, with her boyfriend Juan Reyes in the front passenger seat, when the vehicle left the roadway, struck the center median, spun around, and struck the right guardrail at approximately 2:40 a.m.
Figueroa, 26, of Medford, was transported to Stony Brook University Hospital where she was
pronounced dead. Reyes, 34, of Medford, was transported to the same hospital for treatment of serious injuries. The vehicle was impounded for a safety check.
Detectives are asking anyone with information on the crash to contact the Fourth Squad at 631-854-8452.
As reported by TBR News Media, April 13, the Huntington Town Board will have two open seats in November, with Councilwoman Joan Cergol (D) and Councilman Eugene Cook (R) deciding not to run for reelection.
The Huntington Republican Committee has nominated two candidates: attorney Theresa Mari, and town director of labor relations, Brooke Lupinacci.
Democrats have put forward Don McKay, deputy commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Parks, Recreation and Conservation, and Jen Hebert, program director of Kerber’s Farm School and former Huntington school board president.
TBR News Media spoke to Mari and Hebert for the April 13 edition, and subsequently had the opportunity to sit down with McKay and Lupinacci to discuss their thoughts on the election, their background and what motivated them to run.
Don McKay
Don McKey
Running on the Democratic ticket, McKay was born and raised in Eaton’s Neck, prior to moving to Dix Hills 24 years ago.
Always interested in current events, he decided to pursue a career in journalism, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications in 1987 from Bethany College in West Virginia.
“I started reading Newsday since I could read,” he said, noting he served on his high school paper as a photographer, further fueling his passion for the industry.
After graduation he worked as an admissions officer for Bethany for a year, before returning to Huntington to launch his journalism career as newspaper reporter for the North Shore News Group in Smithtown, covering the towns of Islip, Brookhaven and Huntington.
“You just learn so much,” he said of his time in journalism. “It’s really one of the best jobs to prepare you for your future.”
Two years later, he was hired as the government reporter for The Saratogian, a daily newspaper in Saratoga Springs, through a college friend who took over as sports editor. After four years there, McKay returned to Long Island to run The Huntington News.
McKay said several local topics he wrote about as a newspaper reporter still remain unresolved.
“It’s affordable housing, it’s taxes, it’s public safety, it’s quality of life, maintaining Huntington’s outstanding quality of life, and it’s protecting the environment, our bays and harbors to preserve and protect our marine environment,” he said. “So a lot of issues back then remain constant today.”
McKay, who worked as a commercial fisherman on the weekends while working as a journalist, said the transition out of the profession came when he was getting married, and a reporter’s salary became unsustainable. Still wanting to serve, he said getting into town government was the perfect fit. He served as a legislative aide to then Huntington Councilman Steve Israel (D), and joined the staff of former Supervisor Frank Petrone (D) as the town’s public information officer.
“I’ve always enjoyed public service,” McKay said. “I’ve always enjoyed helping people, resolving issues, resolving community issues, neighborhood issues, helping people get through issues of concern.”
In 2006, he was appointed director of Parks and Recreation for the town, overseeing the expansion of Veterans Park in East Northport, Manor Field Park in Huntington Station, Breezy Park in Huntington Station and an expansion of the Dix Hills Ice Rink.
In February 2018, McKay was appointed deputy commissioner of the Suffolk parks department where he oversees 50,000 acres of parkland, 14 major active parks and more. If elected, he said he would likely step down from the county due to ethics laws.
High taxes are among McKay’s motivation to run.
“I just think that this current administration and Town Board is not being responsive to the community’s needs,” he said. “I feel that I can bring a new perspective.”
Brooke Lupinacci
Brooke Lupinacci
The new Republican candidate said she is a lifelong Huntington resident, whose family has lived in the area for generations.
Originally a journalism major at NYU, she decided to go to law school after being inspired by a media law course she took.
“I had a phenomenal professor,” she said. “I was totally intrigued by the law and I wanted to write about cases and legal proceedings. It was at that time that I decided that maybe I could have a better edge in my journalistic writing, if I went to law school to get a legal background.”
Then, Lupinacci took an oral advocacy course at Touro Law Center, inspiring her to delve fully into the legal profession.
Her first job out of law school was as a Suffolk County assistant district attorney, working on misdemeanor level offenses, such as graffiti infractions, assault, bias crimes and vehicle traffic violations. She then joined the county’s Domestic Violence Unit, before focusing on white collar crimes, such as embezzlement, fraud, home improvement scams, welfare fraud and money laundering.
“I really did enjoy my time in white-collar crime because it was more than just a one witness-type case, or ‘he said, she said’ type thing, if you will,” she said “ It was a real challenge intellectually, because I got to work with forensic auditors and I had a specialized team of detectives when I was prosecuting prevailing wage cases.”
When Lupinacci had her first son in 2015, she decided to leave the county District Attorney’s Office to become a Huntington Town assistant attorney. Mentors also told her that after a decade as a prosecutor, it would be a good time to step down.
“Being a Huntington resident, I thought it would be great to be working for the town that I grew up in,” she said.
Throughout her time with the town Attorney’s Office, Lupinacci helped prosecute zombie homes, hoarder properties and squatter houses, and served as counsel to the town’s elected officials, departments and staff, her campaign said. She said she enjoyed appearing in District Court and, since she loves to write, drafting legislation.
Lupinacci now serves as town director of labor relations in the Office of Personnel, with responsibilities including negotiating collective bargaining agreements, handling complaints and managing recruitment.
“It’s very fulfilling,” she said. “I find that I’ve so far have been able to, I think, make connections between management and the employees. I’ve also been able to help the department heads in building their departments, and establishing some new titles while working with the Suffolk County department of civil service. And it’s really been great.”
For Lupinacci, public service at an elected level was the next logical step in her career.
“I think that I’ll build on the great things that have already been started,” she said. “I know the people in Town Hall that make the wheels turn.”
One issue she said motivated her to run, was Gov. Kathy Hochul’s (D) proposal to build 800,000 new homes over the next decade, which requires municipalities to rezone around train stations.
“I definitely plan to stand ground on and protect Huntington from overdevelopment and some of the initiatives that Hochul seems to be trying to put upon us,” Lupinacci said. “Local control is important. We here know our counties better than those that are far removed in Albany.”
Scott Chaskey is the author of Soil and Spirit. He is also the author of a memoir, This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm, and a book of nonfiction, Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds. His poetry, first printed in literary journals in the early seventies, has been widely published over four decades.
Prev
