NEW TUBE: Television is not a subtle media. Secretly setting up a station is next to impossible — especially when your downtown neighbors work Seven Days a week. Steve Schuyler and Jeff Loper almost managed it — until their first editing console tipped us off. The proud new owners of the “first interactive television station in Vermont” are not saying much about their new media venture, except that it will cover the state better than Channel 3. How? With field reporters delivering “the kind of news people want,” Loper explains. And a still-top-secret marketing strategy along the lines of Vermont Teddy Bear meets Channel 17. Still no sign of a broadcast tower. “Let’s just say we are not going to be your typical commercial television station,” Loper says of WWIN-TV, a Time-Warner affiliate. And Schuyler, who spent nine years managing the plant at Small Cities Cable, knows his frequencies. The cameras start rolling sometime in October.
TRUE CONFEZZIONS: What about those Shriners? Grown men tooling around in toy cars — and sober, no less. The Burlington Free Press pulled out all the stops last week, in hopes Fezheads would buy as many papers as did Deadheads. But if the Shriners spent money on newspapers, they did not drop much cash on culture. “Shriners don’t buy art, they buy scooters,” observes Pascal Spengemann from the Firehouse Gallery. Mary Morris, manager at Robert Paul Galleries, agrees. “We had a great view of the parade,” she says. By November, however, Robert Paul will be changing its vantage point. After a year at the corner of Church and Cherry, the gallery is moving to new as-yet-undisclosed location in greater Burlington. With more foot traffic.
DEAD RIVER: Cultural casualties are rare in Vermont, and River City Arts did not seem particularly prone. When the organization suffered a devastating fire two years ago, it rebounded. Not so after a summer of soft ticket sales. Last week the board of directors voted to pull the plug on River City, the organization that produces the annual White River Theater Festival. Three days later, all six staff members were laid off. Representative Matt Dunne is one of several community members trying to resurrect the organization — yet again. Without it, he says, a renaissance in White River Junction will be “all the more difficult.”
IN BRIEF: Some foliage flack has the right idea. Last Sunday Vermont was all over The New York Times. The travel section carried two glowing stories on the Green Mountain State: Vermont author Barry Estabrook took on the Northeast Kingdom. Novelist W.D. Wetherell, who lives in New Hampshire, offered a well-researched profile of Montpelier. Virtually every restaurant in town was mentioned, from La Brioche to the Main Street Bar and Grill. The Savoy also got a well-deserved plug for being the “best art theater between Boston and Montreal” The Magazine played a little looser with its film facts in an article about the “rise of the college city.” Burlington came off like the Parisian Latin Quarter — the writer likened Church Street to a Green Mountain St. Germain-Des-Pres — but the story erroneously credited the city with “two independently owned cinemas.” Maybe someday.
This article appears in Fall Performing Arts Preview • 1995.
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