Author: Susan Viebrock

The Telluride Film Festival is now recruiting candidates for the Production Apprentice Program. From the Telluride Film Festival's website: "Sure, there's the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with the film elite. But plenty of elbow grease goes into producing the four-day Telluride Film Festival. Our...

[click "Play" to listen to Erika Gordon speak about Sunday at the Palm]

 The Telluride Film Festival's Sunday at The Palm series continues this weekend, March 14, 4:00 pm, with a film that brought critics to their knees:

"BEAUTIFUL!"
- New York Times

"MAGNIFICENT! ENCHANTING!"
- Variety

"PURE MAGIC!"
- Hollywood Reporter

"Is it too early to announce the most beautiful film of 2009?"
"It's hard to imagine a more transporting cinematic experience!"
- Chicago Tribune

"Azur & Asmar: The Prince's Quest (2006, 99 minutes, PG), the whimsical, epic animated feature from award-winning director Michel Ocelot, is the story of two boys raised as brothers. This masterpiece premiered as part of the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 . It had its American premiere in 2008 in New York.  The opening was meant to run for one week, but sold- out shows triggered a second week of screenings. When those sold out, a third and final week got tacked on before the film made the rounds to other lucky American cities.  Now "Azur & Asmar" comes to Telluride on the big screen to enchant children of all ages.
[click "Play" to hear Scott Doser speaking with Susan]

Phenomenal Women's Week, an annual initiative of the San Miguel Resource Center, continues with a screening of "America the Beautiful" in the Program Room of the Wilkinson Public Library. The event takes place March 12, starting at 5 p.m. A panel discussion follows the controversial documentary.

According to an Economist  survey on beauty, medieval noblewomen swallowed arsenic and dabbed on the blood of bats to improve their complexions. Forget bleaching agents, women in 18th-century America coveted the urine of young boys to erase freckles. Cher was by far not the first: Victorian women removed ribs to give themselves waspish waistlines. The desire to be conventionally beautiful dates back to the dawn of civilization.

[click "Play" to listen to Susan's conversation with Richie Havens]

Unknown Richie Havens has been performing in Telluride since the 1970s. Everything old will be new again when the folk icon returns to town for a concert at the historic Sheridan Opera House on Saturday, March 13. Show time is 8 p.m. Box Office and Vaudeville Bar open 30 minutes prior.


August 15, 2009 marked the 40th anniversary of the momentous Woodstock Music & Art Fair, a festival billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music," held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York. Bethel, in Sullivan County, is 43 miles southwest of the town of Woodstock, New York,  in adjoining Ulster County and it was where Richie Havens became an enduring star.
DSCN0068 It is a widely held belief that Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is one of the most phenomenal among legions of phenomenal women in the Telluride region: as talented as she is beautiful and as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. Here is one of a number of original poems Rosemerry plans to read Thursday night at open mic and arts event at the Ah Haa School for the Arts, part of the San Miguel Resource Center's Phenomenal Woman's Week celebration.
[click "Play" to hear a free-wheeling conversation with Jerry Joseph]

Stockholm_courtesy1_2-25_t620 Fair warning: We have it on good authority that around 7 p.m. on Friday, March 12, the Telluride region will be held hostage by an unruly band of men and worse, fall in love with their captors, thereby conforming to the psychological definition of the Stockholm Syndrome.

The band, the Stockholm Syndrome, takes the town by storm, performing in concert  at the Telluride Conference Center in the Mountain Village. Doors at 6:30 p.m. Show time at 7 p.m.
[click "Play" to hear Susan's conversation with Megan Rood]

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Megan Rood

Telluride's San Miguel Resource Center presents an Artists' Showcase & Open Mic Night, part of the continuing celebration of International Women's Day and Telluride's homegrown Phenomenal Woman's Week. The event takes place Thursday evening, March 11,  6– 8 p.m. at Tellurie's Ah Haa School for the Arts.


The suffragettes. Their names come back to us in waves, like way distant echoes. Even the name Betty Freidan, the woman who presided over the birth of modern feminism, resonates like some fire-breathing dragon of yore, which she was, in a way. Freidan's compatriots and love children, Gremaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Wendy Shalit, Katie Roiphe, Naomi Wolf, and Susan Faludi all paved the way, but still, women continue to struggle to find the ideal mix between feminism and femininity. Except perhaps in Shangri-Las like Telluride, where no one has a problem with women having it both ways. In Telluride, we paint our nails and break them too. In Telluride, where women run companies and mountain trails, a poet is a mom, a singer, and helps run a family orchard; KOTO's musical director writes music herself and plays a flaming guitar;  and a gallery director moonlights as a lead singer in an all-women's rock and roll band (with the music director).