July 2010

[click "Play" to hear Susan's interview with Jennie Franks]

People like secrets. Knowing them makes us feel important, even powerful. Here's one: the Telluride Playwrights Festival. Like the Telluride Musicfest, the Telluride Playwrights Festival is one of the best kept secrets on Telluride's summer cultural calendar –  despite the fact both events feature blue chip talent and reinforce the Telluride brand on world stage.

Last year, for example, the Telluride Playwrights Festival presented a play by Jan Buttram. Her "Phantom Killer” went on to get produced at the Abingdon Theatre in New York City this past February and received great reviews. Another Playwrights Festival alum, Tracy Shaffer, will see her Telluride script, "(W)Hole," go up in Denver this fall. Given the track record, it is a safe bet the  scripts written by this year's crop of carefully vetted playwrights – Philip Gerson, James Still and James McLindon, each highly regarded in the fields of theater and television – will meet with similar success. The best part: You can say you knew them when.
[click "Play" to hear Susan's interview with Scott Blossom]

Scott Blossom and Chandra Easton arrive in Telluride from Tara Mandala just outside Pagosa Springs, where the husband and wife team teach a week-long workshop on the subject of "Shadow Yoga and Buddhist Meditation: the Pranic Pathway to Stillness," June 30 – July 7. All day on the opening day of the Telluride Yoga Festival, July 8, the couple teach an abridged version of the intensive for those interested in learning a set of practices for circulating and preparing the vital energies (prana) for meditation. They are also on the schedule with a variety of classes for all levels of practitioners throughout the long weekend.


Scott-2-IMG_0211e-print Scott Blossom was the very first  yoga instructor and therapist to sign on the dotted line when Telluride Yoga festival founder Aubrey Hackman needed a respected "brand name" in the industry to attract other high profile teachers to her nascent event. Blossom is also traditional Chinese medical practitioner and Ayurvedic consultant. A premise fundamental to Ayurveda is that all living things are innately interdependent. What sealed the deal for him three years ago was the fact the Yoga Fest would be a zero waste weekend and 25 percent of net profits would be donated to a local environmental non-profit. Blossom is now a Telluride Yoga Festival board member.

Scott is scheduled to teach an Introduction to Shadow Yoga, the Hatha lineage founded by his yoga maser Zhander Remete, a practice for Balancing our Inner Fire, and a session on Healing and Strengthening Bones, Joints and Nerves.

In addition to the 3 films already scheduled for tonight's Montainfilm in Telluride fundraiser, there is screening of "Bag It", all the stuff about plastics we have conveniently ignored. The program at Telluride's Historic Sheridan Opera House includes "Making the Crooked Straight", "Alone on the...

The 9545 Bar at the Inn at Lost Creek is right next to the Sunset Plaza in the Mountain Village above Telluride. Sunset Plaza is the venue for the Wednesday evening Summer Concert Series, starting at 6:00 pm. The first concert of this...

[click "Play" for Susan's interview with Jim Riley]

Sunset Show Summer traffic in the Telluride region is generally concentrated in our box canyon: the town of Telluride is central ops for all the major festivals, which tend, however, to concentrate their activities over long weekends. Mid-week the action shifts "uptown" to Telluride's sister town, the Mountain Village, where every summer Wednesday night, 6 p.m. rain or shine, the Telluride Mountain Village Owners Association presents the Summer Concert Series.

In its 11th year, the popular program draws on average 1,500 – 2,000 music lovers to the grassy slope known as Sunset Plaza at the top of the Chondala (Lift 1), where everyone seems to enjoy an opportunity to catch up with one another as much as revel in the sounds.

Lama Tsultrim Allione is among the presenters at the 3rd annual Telluride Yoga Festival, all deeply knowledgeable in the field of transformative practices, but primarily Yoga. Lama Tsultrim is the exception. She does not teach Yoga or the related science, Ayurveda. Lama Tsultrim...

[click "Play" for Susan's conversation with Dr. Cohen]

Mark-cohen-skull-02 Like the Telluride Musicfest  (just over) and the Telluride Playwrights Festival (ongoing this week through July 13) the Telluride Science Research Center (TSRC) is another of the towns well-kept secrets, despite the stature of the participants. The Research Center's mission: to inspire substantive scientific inquiry, breakthroughs, and discoveries by hosting scientific meetings in an open environment conducive to productive collaboration and positive contributions to research, policy, and education. To those ends, TSRC has provided meeting services for top scientists, who have met in the Telluride region every summer since 1984.

The Pinhead Institute, dedicated to teaching young people and adults bio-literacy, and TSRC collaborate from time to time, for example, to present Tuesday night Town Talks, 6 – 7:15 p.m., a program in its eighth year.
[Scott, Nancy and Elisabeth discuss the Dalai Lama's birthday party; click "Play"]

"For as long as space endures / And for as long as living beings remain / Until then may I too abide / To dispel the misery of the world," the Dalai Lama's daily prayer.

Newsletter 13 Telluride's five-star Wilkinson Public Library is throwing an all-day birthday party. The guest of honor is a man born Lhamo Dhondrub on July 6, 1935 to a humble farming family in the village of Takster in northeastern Tibet. At age two, this man was proclaimed the tulku or rebirth of the 13th Dalai Lama. He is now His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, living in India as the spiritual head of a government-in-exile along with the 80,000 exiles who followed him.