James Bairaktaris James Bairaktaris

Town of Westport Virtual Meeting Schedule: 03/29/21

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James Bairaktaris James Bairaktaris

Fog Rolls Through Longshore Park

Before downpours drenched the area, thick fog rolled through the coastal neighborhoods and across the greens at Longshore this evening.

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COVID-19 James Bairaktaris COVID-19 James Bairaktaris

Sunday COVID-19 Summary: Connecticut Passes 300,000 Cases

This summary includes the total cases, deaths, vaccines, and current hospitalizations in our town, county, and state.

The State does not publish any data on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday - so this summary does not include any information collected on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.

Data from the past three days will be published cumulatively in tomorrow evening’s daily update.

All data comes from Connecticut Open Data portal. Numbers as of 03/25/21:

COVID-19 Cases

Westport:

  • 1,622 positive or probable cases (total) +69 from last week

  • 30 deaths (total) +/- 0 from last week

  • 54,340 tests (total) +1,815 from last week

Fairfield County:

  • 87,890 positive or probable cases (total) +2,665 from last week

  • 2,106 Deaths (total) +9 from last week

  • 120 currently hospitalized; +5 from last week (as of 03/25/21)

Connecticut:

  • 305,210 positive or probable cases +8,519 from last week(total)

  • 7,865 deaths + 33 from last week (total)

  • 456 currently hospitalized +54 from last week (as of 03/25/21)

State Daily Test Positivity:

  • 2.85% of COVID-19 tests administered came back positive (on 03/25/21)

  • 2.87% on 03/18/21

  • 2.47% on 03/11/21

  • 1.84% on 03/04/21

Westport Vaccine Coverage:

Data Current as of: 03/15/2021

All Ages (est. 28,491 residents)

  • First Dose Coverage: 32.75% vaccinated [+5.44% from last week]

  • First Dose Count: 9,331 [+1,550 from last week]

Ages 65-74 (est. 2,472 residents)

  • First Dose Coverage: 90.58% vaccinated [+3.36% from last week]

Ages 75+ (est. 2,132 residents)

  • First Dose Coverage: 85.41% vaccinated [+1.17% from last week]

The next update will be published tomorrow evening, and will include all data identified on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of this weekend.

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Arts James Bairaktaris Arts James Bairaktaris

WAAC Culture Corner: Eggshells for April

WAAC-culture-corner.png
Prepared by WAAC Member and Westport Poet Laureate Diane Lowman 

Welcome back to the Westport Local Press’s Westport Arts Advisory Committee’s “Culture Corner.” Each month, the WAAC will scour our 33.45 square miles and highlight one of the many artists – visual, written, performance, and other – who call Westport home. These artists create a spectrum of color that shines over town like the rainbows often seen over the Saugatuck, so we have made “color” our theme. Our profiles will feature art that, however tightly or tenuously, connects to a color.

For April, that color is eggshell white, not because of its ubiquity in home decorators’ palettes, but because it nods to the ovate object that figures prominently in two of the month’s celebrations as well as in our featured artist’s work. The egg (and please be prepared for proliferating puns), symbolic of rebirth and new life, shows up on lawns and in baskets at Easter, and on Seder plates at Passover, and by the thousands in this artisan’s home.

Linn Cassetta (http://www.linncassettadesign.com/), whose egg creations can be seen in the storefront 24/7 gallery at 47 Main Street until April 5, majored in apparel both as an undergrad at RISD, and for her MA at London’s Royal College of Art. The first American to graduate from the latter, Cassetta also studied apparel design there. Her designs garnered the attention of Vogue editors and shoe designers alike, and following a stint at Andrew Geller Shoes, she developed her eponymous – Linn Callahan -apparel label.

After a career move to a Japanese fabric manufacturer took her all around the world for work, Linn reinvented herself as a decorative painter so she could spend more time here in Westport with her family. Her fascination with eggs began during her childhood in bucolic Western Pennsylvania. There, she spent many hours helping out at her aunt’s farm and began to appreciate both the shape and promise of the egg. She learned how to “candle” the eggs to determine their condition. This experience, and her deep comfort with the sights and sounds of nature, led her to focus on the form and function of the egg in her art, including a photographic collaboration with her son which explores fresh and frozen eggs (the yolks sink in the former and rise in the latter). Some of these currently  hang on the walls at Sherwood Diner.

Linn has amassed a collection of thousands of eggs and has created egg images in many media, including painting, photography, and prints. For egg-ample the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, she began making encaustic collagraphs by sinking eggshells into plates – and has sold both the prints and the plates, which are, themselves, works of art. 

Both her collection and her work is eggs-traordinary, and we’d encourage you to have a look at it, both in downtown Westport, and on her website. 

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