Pleasant Diversions While We Wait for Spring

The Hudson Opera House announced its Winter/Spring 2014 season today. As I scrolled through the diverse list of offerings, two things caught my eye. The first is a concert called Songs for Unusual Creatures, described as "an awesomely geeky audiovisual presentation of some of the most bizarre animals that roam the planet." The music is performed by Michael Hearst (that's Hearst in the picture, with a couple of the unusual creatures) and a five-piece band, who play suitably unconventional instruments: theremin, claviola, daxophone, and stylophone. There will be two performances on Saturday, April 26: a family matinee at 2 p.m. and an evening show at 7 p.m.

Another Gossips pick is a solo exhibition of the work of R. O. Blechman, an illustrator heralded as one of the great cartoonists, with fourteen New Yorker covers to his credit, the author of one of the first modern graphic novels, and an Emmy and Cannes Film Festival award-winning animator with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition runs from March 29 through April 27, with an opening reception on March 29.

Now here's some shocking news for people who have a hard time dealing with change: the Movable Feast, which started out two decades ago as a Valentine's Day event and gradually crept closer and closer to spring, is now going to be an autumn event, to take full advantage of the bounty of the harvest, and the Harvest Ball is becoming the Spring Fling! Saturday, May 3, is the date for gala redubbed the Spring Fling, and Saturday, October 18, is the date for the Movable Feast.