Susan Hillary’s inspiring short The Pratt In The Hat screens at the Spring 2023 New Jersey Film Festival today Saturday, January 28

by Lauren Bromberg - published 2023-01-28

What, at first glance, may seem like a senior citizen’s decorative hat collection try-on haul video, is actually so much more. Pratt in the Hat (2021), directed by Susan Hillary, is a beautiful, 14-minute documentary about the inspiring, service-oriented life of Dr. Frances Pratt (otherwise known as Dr. Hat, Hat Frat, and the Pratt in the Hat), who is as poised and charming as her 100+ flowered, feathered, lacy, sequin-covered, rhinestone-covered hats that come in every color. Dr. Pratt is the President of Nyack’s chapter of the NAACP and she is the first black, head nurse of the Nyack Hospital Emergency Room. In this documentary, Dr. Pratt tells us about the importance of solidarity, education, voting rights, and, subliminally, fashion as we admire lovely, still photographs (taken by Susan Hillary, Dorice Arden, and Joe Zakko) of Dr. Pratt in her hats and matching outfits.

It’s a drizzly Thursday, January 12, 2023 evening in Red Bank, NJ as music lovers line up outside the Count Basie Center for the Arts’ Hackensack Meridian Health Theatre for a concert by The Immediate Family band.

Marjorie Eliot's Parlor Entertainment Harlem, directed and produced by John Decker, perfectly contextualizes, and captures the magic of Marjorie Eliot and the free theatre and jazz shows she has been putting on in the small, white living room of her Harlem apartment every Sunday for the last 30 years.

Jersey Shore singer-songwriter Pat Guadagno’s latest album, “1964,” is a tribute to the year that spawned such classics as Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather,” Pat’s cover of which is the Makin Waves Song of the Week

You could be forgiven for overlooking Isabella King’s contribution to The Center for Contemporary Art’s latest show. Because you may assume that you know exactly what you’re glimpsing out of the corner of your eye as you step off the elevator onto The Center’s polished second floor: a pair of regulation-issue orange traffic cones, a strip of yellow barricade tape draped between them bearing that standard warning - bold, basic, urgent, in two tongues: CAUTION CUIDADO CAUTION CUIDADO.

“I play guitar as my primary instrument but I grew-up playing the Alto Saxophone and I was really, really good at it; I was like first chair. I loved it but once I picked up guitar, I kind of dropped the saxophone and after I picked up the guitar, I really started focusing on songwriting.”  

Here below is the Opening Weekend Schedule for the 2023 New Jersey Film Festival. The Festival will be presented online as well as have in-person screenings at Rutgers University. All the films will be available virtually via Video on Demand for 24 hours on their show date. Each General Admission Ticket or Festival Pass purchased is good for both the virtual and the in-person screenings. The in-person screenings will be held in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ beginning at 5PM or 7PM on their show date. General Admission Ticket=$15 Per Program; Festival All Access Pass=$100; In-Person Only Student Ticket=$10 Per Program.

How do you build a better restaurant for a play set in a restaurant? You go out and get people who work in restaurants to do it, that’s how.

(RED BANK, NJ) -- Greensky Bluegrass performed at Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank on January 18, 2023 and photographer Chris Paul was there to take photos.  Chris also interviewed Mike Bont, banjo player for Greensky Bluegrass, ahead of the show and that interview can be found here.

Ocean City Monster Building directed by Chris Lane examines the question: How much can a position of power control what remains hidden behind the scenes - even after one dies?