Jubilee Teaches, Tech Meetup & the Music of Grease
About Town covers Hoboken events. Send an invitation to alanskontra@hotmail.com
If aliens landed and said they would destroy the Earth unless someone stood outside all day in this heat wearing a stocking cap and ski parka, About Town wants you to know that we would be the one to save humanity.
The hot sweaty weather didn't deter us from attending several events this past week. Though we did blow through $40 worth of deodorant.
On Monday we went to this month's entrepreneurial Hoboken Tech Meetup at the Babbio Center. Readers should recall About Town's buffoonish appearance at the meetup two months ago.
The group just added its 900th member. At this meetup we saw St. Patrick's Day parade grand marshal Bill Noonan, Living Harmony guru Cathleen Campbell, financial planner John Petersen and social butterfly Peta Moran.
As always the meetup featured presentations from start-ups. This month members met an easy-to-use template website developer called Onepager, a personal recommendation networking site called Tagify, a blog marketplace application called Smarketplaces, and a data security firm called Authy.
The headline speaker was Eric Hippeau, former CEO of Patch's sister publication the Huffington Post and the guy from the insurance forms. Hippeau told the audience about his current venture capital firm Lerer Ventures and inspired everyone to become entrepreneurs. About Town hoped to meet Hippeau and impress him with our unique wit (who else makes HIPAA puns?) to where he'd introduce us to Arianna Huffington, who would make us a HuffPost editor and we'd go on Bill Maher's show and start dating Scarlett Johansson and sip whiskey with Christopher Hitchens in strange locales.
But Hippeau left early, so none of that happened. Anyway, spots are filling up quickly, so anyone interested in attending the tech meetup in August can register here.
On Thursday About Town visited the Jubilee Center, which had invited sponsors of its summer camp for refreshments. The sponsors, including the local branches of Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Haven Savings Bank helped the Jubilee Center organize an educational component to its camp.
New Jubilee executive director Armstead Johnson gave About Town a tour and showed us how the safe haven helps over 110 kids stay sharp in math and language arts over the summer. Johnson said many students forget over the long break and teachers have to spend too much of the fall reteaching.
“We're trying to show the community that there is a need for an educational component like this,” Johnson said.
The Jubilee Center recruited certified teachers and volunteers to tutor the students in small groups for three hours per day for four days a week (on Fridays the students take field trips to places like the Bronx Zoo). Johnson said that the camp classes are less rigorously structured than traditional school.
"We know that it's summer, so we try to keep it fun,” he said.
The Jubilee Center has and will test the students before and after to check the effectiveness of the classes. Johnson said the Jubilee Center hopes to raise enough money to teach in its summer camp next year.
Finally, on Saturday evening About Town saw The Theater Company sing songs from the musical Grease at the Sinatra Park amphitheater. The company performed all the hits, including "Summer Nights," "We Go Together" and "You're the One That I Want" (is there a song more fun?).
The youthful cast members performed in period costume. The T-Birds squeezed into tight jeans and tee-shirts with leather jackets and slicked hair, while the Pink Ladies wore billowing hoop skirts with poodles silhouetted towards the hem.
Hoboken actor Matthew Levine did fine job as Kenickie, and Kristy Magee showed ample sass as Rizzo.
The show welcomed a lot of audience participation, with clapping and singing along suggested. The cast drew audience members onstage for some songs. About Town was asked to go onstage during “Freddy My Love,” but rather than look awkward dancing onstage we preferred instead to look grouchy resisting the actress coaxing our arm.
The Theater Company will continue its Grease run on Friday through Sunday the 29th-31st at 7 p.m. The free show lasts an hour.
Alan Skontra was a big dork who never went anywhere. Then he started writing the About Town column for Patch, and now he's everywhere. Have a hot tip on an event in Hoboken? Send an invitation, questions and comments too, to alanskontra@hotmail.com, and peep his tweets @alanskontra.
