Community Calendar

Welcome to a Juneteenth perspective on Fairfield history. Historian Alec Lurie and Fairfield Museum & History Center program coordinator Walt Matis will share the rich history of enslaved and free Black people in our community, offering a unique look at slavery in the North. The lecture will be introduced by Sustainable Fairfield Equity Committee member Steve Bogan, and Fairfield First Selectman Bill Gerber will read a proclamation. A Q-and-A with the audience will follow.

Registration encouraged for this event.

The Bethel Pride book club meets the third Saturday of each month in person at Rainy Day Paperback at 3PM or online via Discord (see below).
March: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
April: Nicked by M.T. Anderson
May: Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
June: Man O'War by Cory McCarthy
July: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
August: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

If you cannot attend in person, book club is also hosted via text chat on Friday & Saturday via Discord. Please visit store website for a link!

Join us for an educational and culturally artful afternoon featuring both a lecture and a musical performance:

1:45 PM: Wine and Cheese Reception

2:00 PM: "How do cultural landscapes shape our shared public memory?"
A Lecture by Charles A. Birnbaum

Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, is the president, CEO, and founder of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). He spent fifteen years as the coordinator of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative and a decade in private practice in New York City, focusing on landscape preservation and urban design. Birnbaum currently serves as a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

3:15 pm: A musical performance, Living Space: Exploring the Intersection of Music & Cultural Landscapes.

A performance of original work inspired by spaces meaningful to the award-winning jazz quintet, DARUMA

Support for Bruce Presents is generously provided by Berkley One, a Berkley Company.

On June 23, 2025, at 6:00 PM, Hamptons Observatory will present a free lecture, in-person at Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton, by Dr. Jonathan Schachter, a member of the original Chandra creation team. In the talk, “The Chandra X-ray Observatory: An Insider’s Perspective,” Dr. Schachter will discuss Chandra’s history, its pivotal discoveries, and touch on the history of X-ray astrophysics and its key personalities. Details and registration info may be found on: https://HamptonsObservatory.org Note: This lecture will be recorded and later posted on Hamptons Observatory’s YouTube channel.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched in 1999, was named after the esteemed Nobel laureate and pioneer white dwarf theoretical physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of U Chicago. It had only a five-year expected lifetime, but Chandra is now in its 25th year and is still making momentous discoveries. This telescope was specially designed to take X-ray images and spectra from collapsed compact objects with strong gravity (e.g., neutron stars, and black holes, including at galaxy centers). It can also observe extremes of temperature and pressure in planets, stars, supernova remnants, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. Chandra has traced the separation of dark matter from light matter in the collision of galaxies and has contributed to studies of both dark matter and dark energy. As its mission continues, Chandra will continue to discover startling new science about our high-energy Universe.

The TRW Inc. engineering firm collaborated with scientists from Harvard, MIT, and Penn State to design and build Chandra. Key testing of the X-ray optics was performed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Harvard and MIT then deployed the satellite and served as mission control. Dr. Jonathan Schachter, the only Harvard astronomer on the TRW software test team, joined the project in 1996; although he left the team in 2000, he has continued to follow Chandra as it takes observations in its elliptical orbit around the earth. Dr. Schachter will discuss the development and history of Chandra, as well as touch on the history of X-ray astrophysics and its key personalities. He will also present some of Chandra’s pivotal discoveries, many of which have resulted from collaborations with Hubble and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.

The Bethel Pride book club meets the third Saturday of each month in person at Rainy Day Paperback at 3PM or online via Discord (see below).
March: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
April: Nicked by M.T. Anderson
May: Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
June: Man O'War by Cory McCarthy
July: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
August: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

If you cannot attend in person, book club is also hosted via text chat on Friday & Saturday via Discord. Please visit store website for a link!

The Bethel Pride book club meets the third Saturday of each month in person at Rainy Day Paperback at 3PM or online via Discord (see below).
March: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
April: Nicked by M.T. Anderson
May: Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
June: Man O'War by Cory McCarthy
July: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
August: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

If you cannot attend in person, book club is also hosted via text chat on Friday & Saturday via Discord. Please visit store website for a link!

The Bethel Pride book club meets the third Saturday of each month in person at Rainy Day Paperback at 3PM or online via Discord (see below).
March: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
April: Nicked by M.T. Anderson
May: Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
June: Man O'War by Cory McCarthy
July: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
August: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

If you cannot attend in person, book club is also hosted via text chat on Friday & Saturday via Discord. Please visit store website for a link!

The Bethel Pride book club meets the third Saturday of each month in person at Rainy Day Paperback at 3PM or online via Discord (see below).
March: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
April: Nicked by M.T. Anderson
May: Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
June: Man O'War by Cory McCarthy
July: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
August: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

If you cannot attend in person, book club is also hosted via text chat on Friday & Saturday via Discord. Please visit store website for a link!

The Bethel Pride book club meets the third Saturday of each month in person at Rainy Day Paperback at 3PM or online via Discord (see below).
March: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
April: Nicked by M.T. Anderson
May: Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
June: Man O'War by Cory McCarthy
July: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
August: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

If you cannot attend in person, book club is also hosted via text chat on Friday & Saturday via Discord. Please visit store website for a link!

The Bethel Pride book club meets the third Saturday of each month in person at Rainy Day Paperback at 3PM or online via Discord (see below).
March: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
April: Nicked by M.T. Anderson
May: Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
June: Man O'War by Cory McCarthy
July: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
August: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

If you cannot attend in person, book club is also hosted via text chat on Friday & Saturday via Discord. Please visit store website for a link!