The New Year is here and with it a new palette of days to fill with events at your Beaver Island Community Center. We have a full schedule of exercise and social programs planned for the “off-season” months including Pickleball and the Arthritis Foundation Exercise Program, plus through our partnership with COA, Chair Yoga, Cardio Drumming and Tai Chi. There’s entertainment as well with Let’s Get Quizzical trivia nights (January 14th is the next one) and our movie lineup that now includes monthly Retro Movie Feature as well as a multi-show Film Festival (featuring a particular theme, series or artist) and, in collaboration with the library, a Read Watch Talk movie. For January, the retro show is Field of Dreams on January 4th at 6:00 p.m. Our featured new release is Maria showing on the 11th. It tells the story of Maria Callas, the world’s greatest opera singer, as she lives the last days of her life in 1970s Paris. Our Read Watch Talk feature is a classic bedtime story: The Princess Bride. And, with the recently announced release of Wicked to streaming, we’ve updated our Film Festival of the month to be One Short Day in the Emerald City. It will feature Wicked along side the classic The Wizard of Oz. Join us for an afternoon and evening of festivating and rejoicifying as we show both films (the Wizard at 4:00 p.m. and Wicked at 7:00) with special activities, concession stand offerings and more. Do you have ideas for the festival or suggestions for our February movie line-up ? Call us with your suggestions or send them in an email to info@biccenter.org.
The New Year will also bring big changes for WVBI, the BIC Center’s FM radio station. During November and December WVBI volunteers installed a new transmitter and, with the help of an off-island tower crew, “hung” a new antenna for the station. The new equipment will let WVBI operate with 3,000 watts of power (almost 60 times the power it now uses) and provide “indoor” listening to most locations on the island. The power increase also involves a change in frequency from 100.1 on your FM dial to 91.9. We’ve filed the necessary paperwork with the FCC and are now awaiting their final approval to make the change. We’re planning an “official” switchover as part of a small celebration at the BIC Center. We’ll let you know the date for that as soon as we have word from the FCC.
Our planning team has been working on our main season events schedule for 2025. We expect to announce the season very soon. We’ve also been working with other island event organizers to get events into the WVBI/BIC Center Community Calendar so you can use it to plan for the New Year. Check it out at “Community Calendar” on menu above or on the WVBI website. The calendar also appears on the Chamber website and is used by WVBI for their weekday Community Calendar Reports. All entries in the calendar also appear on the digital signage system you see around town and on the Emerald Isle (when she is running). Get the message out about your event (be it a garage sale, neighborhood meeting, concert or other community event) by adding it to the calendar using the “add my event” links in the calendar. Your Community Center is glad to help spread the word.
We hope that 2025 will be the best year ever for the BIC Center and WVBI, and we look forward to seeing you be part of it at your Beaver Island Community Center.
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