Concert for all ages

The Cornell Symphony Orchestra performs its first concert of the spring semester March 9 at 3 p.m. in Bailey Hall, with pre-concert events including an Instrument Petting Zoo for young audience members. Presented by the Department of Music, the events are free and open to the public.

The concert program is suitable for all ages and includes Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with featured soloist Aditya Deshpande ’22, winner of the 2018 Cornell Concerto Competition. Deshpande, a computer science major and accomplished pianist, has won several music competitions in Houston and India, and placed highly in competitions in Seattle and Germany.

Hickey’s Music Center sponsors the Instrument Petting Zoo at 2 p.m. in the lower lobby of Bailey Hall, for young people interested in music and musical instruments.

Conductor Adrian Slywotzky leads an onstage presentation at 2:30 p.m. about the music on the program. Slywotzky is associate conductor and artistic advisor of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras.

Underground Yiddish culture

Author Eddy Portnoy will share tales from his book “Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press,” March 11 at 4:30 p.m. in 142 Goldwin Smith Hall.

The event, sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program, is free and open to the public. The first 30 Cornell students with ID will receive a copy of the book. A book signing will follow the talk.

Portnoy is academic advisor and exhibitions coordinator at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Published in 2017, “Bad Rabbi” is an underground history of downwardly mobile Jews in pre-WWII New York City and Warsaw, Poland, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Portnoy relates the stories of drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets and beauty queens and their misadventures immortalized in print.

Sapphic satire

Performance artist Holly Hughes presents “A Sapphic Sampler Platter,” March 12 at 4:30 p.m. at the A.D. White House. Presented by the Society for the Humanities, the performance is free and open to the public.

Hughes is a professor of theater and drama at the University of Michigan and an internationally acclaimed performance artist whose work maps the troubled fault lines of identity. Her autobiographical performances have gained wide attention, centering queer feminist experience through a combination of poetic imagery, political satire and ribald humor.

Hughes is also among the guest artists participating in “Feminist Directions: Performance, Power and Leadership,” a symposium March 15-16 hosted by the Department of Performing and Media Arts.

Native narratives

Nonfiction writer Elissa Washuta will read from her work March 14 at 4:30 p.m. in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall. Part of the Spring 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series, the reading is free and open to the public.

Washuta’s books will be available for purchase courtesy of Buffalo Street Books. A free, catered reception and book signing will follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall.

Washuta is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio State University and a member of the Cowlitz Tribe. She is the author of “Starvation Mode” (2015) and the essay collection “My Body Is a Book of Rules,” which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in 2014.

She also is co-editor (with Theresa Warburton) of the upcoming anthology “Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers.” Washuta’s honors include fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Hugo House and the Potlatch Fund.

The Rumpus said “My Body Is a Book of Rules” “explores Washuta’s bipolar disorder, her place in the world as a Native American woman and writer, and the very form and structure of the essay with a voice that rings out unmistakably: at once young and weary, gem-like and fire-like in its intelligence.”

American Sign Language interpretation will be provided at the reading. The venue in Klarman Hall is wheelchair accessible and equipped with assistive listening technology. For more information, email lbl3@cornell.eduor call (607) 255-7847.

Student stars in “Beale Street”

Cornell Cinema presents the 2018 romantic drama “If Beale Street Could Talk” March 14 at 6:45 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre, with cast member and Cornell undergraduate Dominique Thorne ’19 in person. Advance tickets are available at CornellCinemaTickets.com.

Thorne will speak about “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel of 1970s Harlem, and her role in the film as Sheila Hunt, the sister of main character Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (Stephan James). A policy analysis and management and human development major, Thorne has appeared onstage in Schwartz Center productions at Cornell including “The Awakening of Spring” and “All God’s Chillun Got Wings.”

The film also screens March 15 at 9:40 p.m.

Also showing: “Jessica,” a video screening and live performance with filmmaker Maura Brewer, March 13 at 7 p.m.

The program includes “The Surface of Mars,” a meditation on Jessica Chastain’s role in the Ridley Scott film “The Martian” and the third part of Brewer’s Chastain trilogy; and “Jessica Manafort,” a video essay on convicted Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his filmmaker daughter, Jessica. Brewer also will perform her live tribute to Chastain.