Quogue Community Notes, April 1

If this is Easter weekend, there must be some kind of mad egg hunting scheduled in our beautiful village. In addition to whatever private egg safaris there might be, the Quogue Fire Department can be relied on for the mother of all egg collections.

This year, the QFD Annual Easter Egg Hunt for newborns to age 10 is scheduled on Saturday, April 3, at 10 a.m. sharp, and Chief Christopher Osborne is urging everyone to be on time, because, as he said, “The children are getting faster every year.”

The Lily Pad will be providing cupcakes with pink, green, and yellow and blue pastel icing for children of all ages, as well as a large Easter basket filled with chocolate goodies, interesting toys, and a cuddly bunny, and the lucky child who finds find a jellybean in his or her cupcake wins the Lily Pad Basket of Goodies.

After the hunt, check out the semi-annual 40 percent off sale at The Lily Pad. The shop with everything Quogue is making way for summer items and offering big discounts on all Quogue totes, tees, hoodies, hats and more.

And remember that there is a wonderful supply of Easter chocolate and bunnies and chicks (the kind that don’t need care and feeding) at the Double Rainbow store on Jessup Avenue.

The annual egg hunt at the Quogue Wildlife Refuge is slated this year on Easter Sunday, April 4, in two sessions, from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. and from 11 a.m. to noon. In this program for children age 2 to 4 accompanied by an adult, participants will first create a bunny craft and then hop down Peter Cottontail’s Trail to a special spot in the Refuge for an egg hunt. The cost is $8 per child and space is limited for this very popular program so reservations are required; call 653-4771 for more information.

Next Wednesday, April 7, there will be an “Organics for the Soul” program for adults at the QWR at 7 p.m. Jeff Frank, founder of The Nature Lyceum School for Organic Horticulture, will be lecturing about gardening and organics. The focus will be on understanding where we are in relationship to the planet and how to re-establish our relationship with Mother Earth.

All are invited to bring their gardening questions to this free program. For more information about the organization, go to www.thenaturelyceum.org.

Audiences have been responding very positively to the Hampton Theatre Company production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at the Quogue Village Theater in the Community Hall. The play by Dale Wasserman is based on the novel by Ken Kesey and focuses on a battle of wills and wits between Randle P. McMurphy and his merry band of inmates at a state mental hospital in Oregon and the severely repressed Nurse Ratched, who is dedicated to keeping the patients under her control. For ticket information or reservations, call 1-866-811-4111, or visit www.hamptontheatre.org.

“Birds in Art,” paintings and photographs by local artists, plus vintage prints and other works of art from the collections of East End residents and the Audubon Society, will be the April exhbition at the Quogue Library Art Gallery.

Birds have stirred man’s imagination since he first looked to the skies. Their depiction—from the cave drawings of Lasceaux to Egyptian friezes to the works of the natural history greats, such as Audubon and Catesby—has been a constant in the history of art and illustration. Birds have often been used as symbols, in mythology, folk tales, poetry and works of art—from renaissance religious paintings to the Dutch masters of the 17th and 18th centuries.

For the passionate bird watcher, as well as the uninitiated observer, birds transcend physical beauty to become creatures of magic and wonder: a blue heron in flight over a grassy marsh; a swan spreading its plumage in a pond or local estuary; a hawk soaring over the fields of the East End in search of prey. Painters have always been inspired by such natural beauty, and painters of birds have given us many compelling images, from the early naturalist-illustrators to contemporary wildlife artists.

Included in the exhibit are paintings and photographs from local artists and from the collections of East End residents and the local Audubon Society.

Artists submitting work include Pam Capozzola, Tara D’Amato, Lovejoy Duryea, Sara Elliott, Muriel Hanson Falborn, Amy Hess, Carolyn Munaco Haines, Joan Larson, Frank Latorre, Camille Marryat, Betsy McMahon, Florence E. Morrisey, Mark Ruddy, Meryl Spiegel, Mym Tuma, Pilar Turner, Pat Wiegand and Blanche Williamson. Committee member Lucinda E. Morrisey is Chairperson of the show.

This exhibit will be on view in the Art Gallery of the Quogue Library from April 1 through April 30.

The Quogue Village spring leaf pickup starts on April 4 and runs for four weeks. Don’t forget that the highway crews only pick up leaves; brush can be disposed of by homeowners at the Westhampton and Hampton Bays trash and recycling centers.

Quogue has lost another of the grandes dames of the 1950s and ’60s summer colony with the death this week of Cynthia Dougherty, the mother of Peter Botsford, Katharine Peiffer, and Andrew Botsford. A complete obituary will appear in a future edition of The Press.