A new exhibition by a local artist and naturist who has long had an affinity for the woods, Pat Halverson: Woods & Water serves as the first 2021 exhibition at the Beréskin Gallery & Art Academy, with the exhibit's showcase at the Bettendorf venue (on display through January 27) taking guests through the diverse views of nature captured in painting.

With Wapsi River Center naturalist Becky Baugh leading what promises to be a fascinating presentation, the Davenport Public Library will host a virtual program for bird watchers of all ages in The Great Backyard Bird Count, a January 19 program offering information on an important annual event sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society.

Long before Martha Stewart, there was Betty Crocker, and from now until January 24, the Bettendorf Public Library will host exclusive access to the Community Connections presentation Betty Crocker: Her Cookbook That Changed How America Cooks, in which Leslie Goddard, Ph.D., highlights the history of the iconic advertising figure and her famous Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook.

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated Nicole Kidman film, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire's family drama Rabbit Hole will enjoy a one-night-only virtual reading in a January 8 event hosted by Princeton's Festival 56, with the acclaimed work lauded by Entertainment Weekly as “a transcendent and deeply affecting new play which shifts perfectly from hilarity to grief.”

Over the past two weeks, barring review-writing and performing general upkeep on the Reader Web site, I've been on vacation. And I did what many of my fellow stay-cationers likely did during the holidays this year: I watched movies. Lots of movies. A few of them at an actual movie theater.

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There might be a perfectly valid, comic-book-related reason for this that I neither know about nor particularly care about. But seriously: Why, in director Patty Jenkins' sequel to her 2017 smash, are we watching a Wonder Woman adventure set in the mid-'80s?

Avant-garde composer, multi-instrumentalist, and soft-music pioneer Harold Budd passed away earlier this month at the age of 84. Though considered a major forerunner of styles of music that would come to be named “ambient” and “New Age” in their various forms, Budd rejected these terms outright. From his viewpoint, his music floated in its own stratum, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20th-century minimalism or neoclassical composition.

A virtual dose of holiday cheer featuring some of Iowa City's and Coralville's most familiar performers, City Circle Theatre Company's online presentation A Christmas Cabaret will be available for home viewing from December 18 through 25, this collection of song-and-dance vignettes professionally recorded and edited by CoralVision, and boasting dynamically talented stars of stage and television.