The Barnstormers Theatre has been putting on shows in the village of Tamworth since 1931. It is one of the longest-running professional summer theatres in the country. On the afternoon of Sunday, October 11, it will host a rather different kind of production: a screening of the 2003 film Calendar Girls, the warm comedy about a group of Yorkshire women who posed nearly nude for a charity calendar and accidentally became an international sensation.
The film is the obvious choice, because Tamworth has its own version of that story. Twenty-five years ago, a group of local women produced the Women of Tamworth Calendar, a revealing fundraiser that, like its English counterpart, turned a small-town good cause into something people far beyond the town heard about. The October screening is both a silver-anniversary celebration of that first calendar and the launch party for its successor, The People of Tamworth 2027 Engagement Calendar. Proceeds from the new calendar benefit the Tamworth Community Nurse Association, the same organization the original supported.
The screening begins at 4 p.m. and runs to about 6:30. Tickets are $18, sold through the theatre's website, and the new 2027 calendar will be on sale at the event.
The Tamworth Community Nurse Association is not a newcomer to town either. It traces its founding to the turn of the twentieth century, when summer residents from New Haven, Boston, Providence, Hartford and New York began settling in the White Mountains seeking a haven from city noise. Among them were thinkers and writers — Henry and William James, e.e. cummings, friends and descendants of Julia Ward Howe — and, crucially, women like Elizabeth Lane Whittemore and Mrs. Franklin Balch, who came to Chocorua and became devoted to the town and its welfare. Whittemore, who had directed the New Haven Visiting Nurses and was remembered for "a strong vein of responsibility beneath her beauty," sensed that Tamworth could benefit from a nursing service of its own. She is chiefly credited with founding the association, which has been caring for Tamworth residents since 1921 and today provides free skilled nursing out of an office behind the town offices on Main Street, seeing residents there and in their homes.
That is the cause the calendars serve. The first Women of Tamworth Calendar appeared for 2002, and by the following year it was being cited in national press coverage of the broader phenomenon of mature women posing for charity calendars — a wave that included a spinning circle in Down East Maine whose members, lounging in a hot tub on a weekend retreat, decided to follow the example set by the women of Tamworth and by the original group in England. "They had heard about other mature women doing this sort of thing, including a group in England," one account noted. "And right next door in New Hampshire, a group called The Women of Tamworth produced their own very revealing calendar for 2002." The Tamworth calendar, in other words, was not merely a local curiosity. It became a reference point for other communities attempting the same trick: a good cause, a little daring, and a well-placed prop.
The current project has been deliberate about honoring that history. Over the past year the nurse association has been recording a podcast series called "Then and Now," in which director Julie Lanoie interviews the people behind both the old calendar and the new one. The July 2026 episode brought together the original creators of the 2002 calendar, identified as Margo and Annie, to talk about how it began. Later episodes interviewed Ashana Hayford, an original "calendar girl" who spoke about trusting the universe; Lindy Gray, on caregiving and "Steve's final gift"; Amy Berrier, on seeking joy; and George Cleveland, who posed for both the past and present calendars. Helen Steele was interviewed for the October 2026 installment. The series amounts to an oral history of a small town's most improbable tradition, told by the people who took part in it.
The new calendar is titled The People of Tamworth 2027 Engagement Calendar, a name that quietly signals the shift from the original: this one is not just women but "the people" of the town. It can be ordered through the nurse association's online shop, and copies will be available at the screening.
The Barnstormers has become something of a gathering place for the nurse association's fundraising in recent years. The theatre's own mission statement speaks of keeping vital "the value, spirit, and tradition of fine summer theatre in Tamworth," and hosting the town's calendar celebration fits that brief comfortably.
There is a certain symmetry to the whole affair. Calendar Girls, the film, is about women of a certain age in a quiet English village who decide that the annual calendar of countryside views will not raise nearly enough for their local hospital, and so hatch a bolder plan — posing with their crafts, their hobbies, and nothing else — and watch their village be thrown into delightful chaos. Tamworth's women did much the same thing a quarter-century ago, and the town has been marking the anniversary all year. On a Sunday afternoon in October, in a theatre founded by a president's son, the town will watch the movie version of its own story and then, presumably, buy the next calendar on the way out.
Tickets are $18 and available online at barnstormerstheatre.org. The screening starts at 4 p.m. at 104 Main Street.