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to leave performance jitters behind when Mr. Treanor breaks in the middle of a song to ask his wife, “Kathryn, what’s the second verse?” or when Mr. Lewis admits “Oops, got those lines backwards!”
Others follow the leaders.
A guitarist from Winchester strums and plucks a fusion of classical and contemporary music, his original compositions worthy of a far more prestigious stage.
Then Mark Simms not only plays an original, a lively and lovely piece inspired by Rhodesian folk music, but he plays it ON an original. His instrument, the “tubes”, looks like a hammered dulcimer until the top comes off. Minus the top, it’s an arrangement of copper pipes that produce exotic tones reminiscent of xylophone and wind chimes. “I was studying at Shenandoah (College and Conservatory of Music) and I had to do this independent, self-directed research project,” Simms says, explaining how the tubes came into being. “I got credit for fooling around!” he jokes.
Although music predominates, the spotlight at Gallery Coffee House isn’t reserved for musicians. Stand-up comic Marque Kolack mixes humor with bits of new age philosophy. Artist blacksmith Nol Putnam reads a haunting essay he wrote as a tribute to Katya, the Jersey cow with the gentle eyes whose death left the bam on his New England farm empty of breath.
“The stage is open to everybody,” Lewis emphasized. “Singers, dancers, musicians, poets, comics, story tellers, puppeteers - anyone who wants to entertain.”
Between sets, folks gather around the coffee pot and the table of fresh baked sweets and pastries in the gallery’s front room or take a cup of herb tea back to a candlelit table. “We didn’t want alcohol,” Lewis noted. “We wanted to keep the things sober, laid back and cool.”
The off-stage conversation during the intermissions is as varied as the on-stage offerings. A light exchange of gossip at one table is counterpoint to a heavy exchange of political philosophies and save-the
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