Every year the Champlain Valley Fair brings an influx of new faces to Chittenden County. Artists, cooks, salespeople, ride operators and agricultural aficionados from all walks of life set up shop in Essex Junction, and attendees come from every nook and cranny of the state to take it all in.
Borrowing a concept from Brandon Stanton’s popular photoblog Humans of New York, we took to midway, barn and booth and asked strangers to share their stories. The results were sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartwarming and, invariably, human.
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Fowl Play
Thirteen-year-old Noelani Rupp of South Burlington hustles around the Poultry Barn in a shirt that reads “O.C.D.: Obsessive Chicken Disorder.” The shirt says it all. Rupp is a fifth-year 4-H member who specializes in poultry, and her knowledge is vast. Before settling on chickens as her bird of choice, Rupp tried her hand at raising turkeys (too big for showmanship competitions relative to her small stature), ducks (too much projectile pooping), quail and even a pheasant.
Holding Mr. Hyde, a rooster with a brother named Dr. Jekyll, she and a flock of Feathered Friends 4-H clubbers rattle off breed names such as Crèvecoeur, partridge brahma and mille fleur bantam cochin. That last one, Rupp explains, is French for “a thousand flowers,” in honor of the bird’s lily-white spots. Amid the barnyard chatter, Rupp gestures toward her friend Nora Allen and declares, “Nora’s actually really good at hypnotizing chickens.”
Wait, what? To hypnotize a chicken, the teenagers explain, you pick it up, lay it on its back, and sway it back and forth until it’s relaxed and eerily still. Rupp and her friends demonstrate, rocking their precious poultry in their capable hands. And for all the clucking and cacophony echoing through the cage-lined barn, the birds are as calm as sleeping babies.
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The Ties That Bind
Handcrafting is alive and well in Vermont, and Leah Rosenthal intends to keep it that way. Seated at an ergonomic spinning wheel in the Fiber Loft, situated between the Sheep/Wool Tent and Old McDonald’s Farm, the Williston resident deftly guides a colorful blend of merino, silk and bamboo through the apparatus, transforming it from unwieldy fluff into a fine thread. “My kids think I’m crunchy granola,” Rosenthal says, referring to her penchant for homesteading. For her, that includes growing and foraging for natural dye sources for her wool and other fibers.
Rosenthal, now 55, taught herself to make her own pigments, but family members initially drew her into the fiber arts. When she was about 8, a cousin took her to a traditional handcraft retreat in Putney. There she completed her first sheep-to-potholder project, which, she claims, “was an embarrassment to the world.”
Rosenthal took a long break from working with fiber, but years later, her mother’s legacy inspired her to pick up the craft again. “My mom started a tradition in our family of giving every baby born to our family a blanket,” she says. “And when she passed, I really didn’t want to have that tradition die.”
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Behind the Lens
Scott Kenneway has been on the road since he was 9 years old. The Massachusetts native, now 49, is the proprietor of Scotty’s Photos, a one-stop mobile shop for souvenir photos preserved in key chains, magnets, buttons and prints. Kenneway earned his stripes as the resident gofer before his late father, who founded the business, trained him in the booth’s darkroom. There, he would spend 10 hours a day processing photos during summer vacations.
Over the years, as technology transformed photography, business began to suffer. “It was horrible for us, ’cause we were ’70s kids growing up who knew how to run a darkroom. We didn’t know how to run computers,” Kenneway says. Although grosses are down from years past, the charismatic salesman has weathered the digital storm and believes customers still find value in what he has to offer. “They got thousands of pictures on their cellphone,” he explains, “but they don’t have a picture that they’re hanging on their wall.”
Plus, people love him. Adults who were photographed by Kenneway’s father as children now bring their kids to Scotty’s Photos. “I gave 20 people hugs today, and I’m gonna get at least 150 hugs before I leave here,” Kenneway says.
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Game Changer
“You can ask anybody that knows me — I don’t talk very often.” This shy guy is New York City native Anthony Dirusso, a dough slinger at Marlena’s Pizza. How does a boy from the Big Apple wind up serving 18 years on the agricultural fair circuit? “I was getting into some trouble and needed to get out of the city,” he explains. What kind of trouble? “Nothing I like to talk about,” he says with a laugh.
Regardless of what malfeasance may have gone down in the past, 35-year-old Dirusso credits the carnival business with keeping him on the straight and narrow. “It’s changed my life,” he says. “I no longer do anything that I used to. It’s helped me a lot.”
When he first hit the trail, Dirusso’s biggest challenge was homesickness. With his tight-knit family based in New York, the cook has found camaraderie among other carnival workers. Despite the occasional loneliness, he loves the work. “It’s either in your blood,” Dirusso says, “or it’s not.”
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Still Life
Amanda Hackert didn’t have creative people in her life nudging her toward the arts, but something inside drew her to pen and paper. Growing up, she idolized illustrator Al Hirschfeld, whom she calls “every caricature artist’s hero,” and began drawing as soon as she could hold a pencil. Now an art school graduate, the Orlando-based 33-year-old was turned on to caricature portraits at Disney World, where she worked painting faces. She has spent the past six years running up and down the East Coast with her easel in tow.
As a manager for Caricature Ink, Hackert has indulged some wild requests — two men recently asked her to draw them both riding a corn dog like a ketchup-and-mustard-fueled rocket — but her specialty is cartoons. The self-professed “movie dork” loves giving her favorite stars the cartoon treatment. A terrifying-in-all-the-right-ways rendering of Steve Buscemi on her Instagram — @sourpussillustration — highlights the actor’s most fascinating facial features with detailed animation. The drawing looks like it could jump off the page and start reciting lines from Reservoir Dogs.
Hackert may describe her work as “silly pictures,” but through these exaggerated, distorted interpretations, she reflects the unique essence of each of her subjects.
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On Top of the World
E.J. Starks is the master of his domain. The reigning ride superintendent for Orlando-based James E. Strates Shows is responsible for the assembly, cleaning, lighting, staffing and operating of all of the company’s amusements, and he loves every minute of it. Starks got his start as a ride operator so long ago, he says, that he can’t even remember how old he was. “I just got tired of the same old humdrum routine, and the carnival came into town and looked exciting, so away I went,” he remembers.
Starks has never looked back, and he revels in the constant change of scenery and parade of new faces. Holding court in front of the towering Ferris wheel, he explains that, for him, the carnival business is now a family business. He met his wife, Gloria, about four years ago when they worked side-by-side in their company’s administrative office. They hit it off and began dating, walking around the grounds, hopping from one ride to the next like teenagers.
Eventually, in a fitting manner, the king of the rides crowned his queen on a Ferris wheel in Fort Pierce, Fla., popping the question as they sat suspended high above their carnival kingdom.
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Stand By Me
After six years together, Timothy Billow and Lisa Durkee are taking their first vacation. Well, it’s more of a staycation for the couple, who live in Winooski. Billow, who works for a beer-distribution company, and Durkee, who does data entry for the University of Vermont Medical Center, are on break from work — and from their two grandkids, whom they watch every day after school. Walking side-by-side through the food court, they seem relaxed and content.
Though the two aren’t married, they’re getting there, Durkee says with a laugh. They met by way of Durkee’s ex-husband, who is also Billow’s former coworker. As soon as Billow found out that the couple had split, he “made like a little mouse” and scurried after her. “He was very nice. He took me out on dates,” Durkee remembers, but it took some time for her to come around.
Billow’s kindness and patience eventually won her over. “[Timothy] was the only one that was nice to me, took my hand, didn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to do,” Durkee says.
These days, their goals for the future are simple, she adds: “We want to spend the rest of our lives together.”
Humans of the Fair
The original print version of this article was headlined “Humans of the Fair”
This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2015.
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