Friday, June 6, 2025: Couples Night, featuring Princess Peapod, and Martha Trachtenberg & Tom Griffith
7:30 p.m. Open Mic (7:00 signup), 8:30 p.m. show
Suggested Donation $20 (Cash or Check Only)
The lively acoustic duo Princess Peapod, features the animated vocals of Michele Frimmer with the inventive harmonies and multi-layered guitar style of David Cook. Princess Peapod combines a fresh lyrical approach with enough crunch and groove to make for third-millennium folk at its best. Their imaginative, often reflective, occasionally quirky songwriting appeals to young and old alike. With their feet on the ground and heads in the clouds, David and Michele’s candid performances are a joyful expression of the moment.
Princess Peapod began casually in late 1999, showcasing an uncommon mix of folk and kitschy 60’s cover tunes. As the pair began writing together  and started playing the coffeehouse and bookstore circuit in and around the metro New York area, they developed into an astute songwriting team, able to work together in perfect sync. Their critically-acclaimed self-titled debut CD Princess Peapod has been featured on a number of important acoustic music radio programs including: WFUV, WSHU, and WUMB.

Stuart adds, “If their personalities blend half as beautifully as their voices, they must have one of the happiest marriages in human history (snd I’m pretty sure they do).”

Martha Trachtenberg and Tom Griffith met over music many years ago, and have been making beautiful music in more ways than one ever since. Known as Long Island’s First Couple of Folk, their musical resumes extend far beyond those boundaries.
Martha Trachtenberg was a founding member of the Buffalo Gals, the first all-woman bluegrass band, back in the mid-1970s, aka the dawn of time. Her 1999 CD, It’s About Time, won straight As from Newsday and radio airplay both in the States and abroad.  Martha’s songs have been recorded by a number of artists from the bluegrass world, including Tony Trischka and Skyline, Nothin’ Fancy, Missy Raines and Jim Hurst, Dede Wyland, John and Cathy Cadley, and, most recently, IBMA’s 2024 Male Vocalist of the Year, Greg Blake. For the past three years, she has taught and/or performed at the prestigious Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival and is slowly but surely assembling songs for another CD.  So slowly, in fact, that the working title is Better Late Than Never . . .

Tom is an artist and composer who has written award-winning music for a variety of media. He won a couple of Clios and NYMRAD radio awards, and a Cannes Silver Lion for writing and producing jingles like “It’s As Real As It Gets” and “Welcome to Millertime” for the Miller Brewing company, “I’ve Got that M&M’s Feeling,” for Mars, and “Sometimes You Need a Little” for Finesse shampoo. He has produced such artists as Marc Cohn, Ry Cooder, Fats Domino, Dave Edmunds, Allen Toussaint, Jimmy Buffett, .38 Special, Kenny Rogers, and George Benson.

Tom has written music for the movies Girlfriends and Not a Pretty Picture which are in the Critereon Collection. The Key, which he scored with Jonathan Helfand, won the National Education Fiction Video Award. His most recent project, A Couple of Guys, has won numerous awards on the film festival circuit.

His first solo album, Hodge Podge, was chosen as an Album of the Year by the Long Island Voice. 40 Years Later was picked by Newsday as the Long Island Album of the Year. Prominence, a first-person adventure game for which he wrote the music, was an Indie Games staff pick for Game of the Year.

Stu says, “The partnership of Martha and Tom prove that the gods of love and the gods of talent can get together and do something really beneficent once in a while.”

***

Our Times Coffeehouse takes place at the Long Island Ethical Humanist Society, located at 38 Old Country Rd., Garden City, a half mile west of the Mineola Railroad Station. Its phone number is (516) 741-7304.