Mark your calendars! Please join your fellow ADKers on Friday, October 23 for our annual Chapter Dinner.

After years trekking to Glens Falls for dinner, our Saratoga County members will be closer to home this year. The newly-redone Holiday Inn on South Broadway in Saratoga Springs has off-street parking, reasonable prices and friendly, home-town service.

We are honored to welcome the wonderful, funny, charismatic Christopher Shaw. Chris is the real deal. In a musical age where surface often replaces talent, and sincerity is an endangered species, an evening with Chris's music and stories feeds the spirit like none other. He's a darn fine guitar player, too.

Christopher Shaw was raised in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. He was born the son, of the son, of a commercial steamboat pilot on Lake George. Chris worked the big boats and grew up listening to the songs and stories passed down in those mountains from generation to generation, never suspecting he would bring those same songs and stories to audiences all over the world.

For over ten years Chris toured for Taylor Guitars as a clinician demonstrating American Folk and country style guitar from Anchorage to Berlin. In addition to his trips for Taylor, he has appeared at such highly respected venues as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, two appearances for the Smithsonian Institute, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Old Songs Folk Festival, and the Chautauqua Institute, as well as music halls, festivals, and coffee houses across the US and Europe.  He has produced a number of TV soundtracks for Public Television.  Chris wrote the soundtrack and was "the voice of Seneca Ray" on the television special "Seneca Ray Stoddard: An American Original" seen coast to coast on PBS.   Most recently, a live concert special called "Chris Shaw: Live in Concert" is showing on PBS stations across the country

Shaw has nine recordings under his belt with another to be released this spring. His 1988 debut, Adirondack, has been inducted into the Library of Congress Folk Archives. Performers who have contributed to Chris's recordings include such acoustic innovators as Artie Traum, John Sebastian, Garth Hudson (The Band), Vassar Clements, Cindy Cashdollar (Asleep at the Wheel), Tony Trischka, Jay Ungar, and Steve Riley.

He is married to singer/songwriter Bridget Ball, and together they have presented the highly acclaimed Christmas show "Mountain Snow and Mistletoe" at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall for the last 13 years.  The couple have two boys, Christopher (Tink) Shaw, and Silas Shaw.  Both, whenever possible, accompany their Dad on tour, and always accompany him on fly fishing treks into the Adirondack wilderness.

New members: This is a great chance to meet and socialize with your fellow ADKers!