President Roger Webb called the meeting of the Amherst Club to order at noon on Tuesday, May 19th, 2015, and welcomed us all. Announcements: Sunday, May 24th : 2:00-5:00 p.m. : Groff Park Pavilion, Mill Lane Amherst. Miriam Dayton‘s 90th Birthday Party! All Amherst Club Members are invited! RSVP: 413-253-2747 Sunday, May 31st, 2 p.m., Book launch of member Eileen Kennedy’s book of poems, “Banshees”, from Fluffy Press at Pioneer Valley Co-Housing Common House, 100 Pulpit Hill road, Amherst. See EileenPKennedy.com. Saturday, June 6th, 9:30-3:30. Phelps-Porter-Huntington House Community Day, 130 River Dr, Hadley. Free tours every half hour, with lemonade and cookies on the porch. Explore this 200 year old house and learn much about Hadley’s history. Activities: Friday, June 19th, 2015 Skinner Museum, 33 Woodbridge St., South Hadley2:00 PM. Tour by the museum's curator, Aaron Miller. He is on the staff of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, which oversees the Skinner Museum. The Skinner is a fascinating place, full of a wide range of artifacts that Joseph Skinner collected on his travels. For more information, please Google the Skinner Museum.. The building itself is a former 19th century Congregational Church rescued from the Quabbin. Please let me know if you would like to come along. It should be an enjoyable outing. (Unfortunately, the museum does not have a wheelchair ramp.) Larry Siddall for the Activities Committee, lsiddall@crocker.com . Poem: Jacquie Price read Adrian Henri’s poem “Any Prince to any Princess”. Raffle: Barbara Freed won the wine but returned it to be re-raffled because she has won it several times lately. Vivienne Carey then won the wine. Ellen Kosmer won the $10. Speaker: Member Jim Scott introduced our speaker, his wife Nina Scott from UMass. With degrees from Wellesley and Stanford. Nina told us how from earliest times she was fascinated by women’s literature during the colonial era. She called today’s story “One Habit and Two Undergarments for a Journey of Three Years.", an entertaining account written by a group of five Capuchin nuns who set out from Spain to found a convent in Lima, Peru, in the early 18th century – one of the few pieces of travel writing by women of the period. After a most harrowing journey made harder by being captured by pirates and by their own regulations, four of them made it and successfully founded a convent. As Nina’s title suggests, a basic problem lay in the regulations of their strict cloistered order that required them to eschew all belongings - and to be cut off from the rest of the world. Since on their journey they could not reside in private behind a screen, they used their heavy black wool veils as barriers to the world, covering their faces at all times, and hiding within their ship’s cabins or carriages as they travelled, with leather blinds covering the windows. A great delight when they finally arrived in Lima was to find out that their partially-built convent had running water in the laundry cistern! Your scribe, Linda Honan |
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