Apr 1-7, 2015
Does Vermont Cut Farmers Too Much Slack on Water-Quality Violations; A Vermonter’s Virtual Placebo; Armed With Hall & Oates; Vermont’s Worldly Brunch Spots
Cover Story
Sacred Cows: Does Vermont Cut Farmers Too Much Slack on Water-Quality Violations?
Imagine a business breaks a law. The state agency tasked with enforcement takes notice and sends out a warning letter. A year later, when the problem resurfaces, the offending business gets a cease-and-desist order — followed, five months later, by an official notice of violation. More than a year and a half after the problem…
Elowen Pear Kiper Phelps
On March 7, 2015, at The University of Vermont Medical Center, Kate Phelps and Chris Kiper welcomed a baby girl, Elowen Pear Kiper Phelps.
Hunter-Michael James Martin
On February 27, 2015, at The University of Vermont Medical Center, Kristin Williams and Michael Martin welcomed a baby boy, Hunter-Michael James Martin.
Obituary: Carol A. (Shappy) Palin, 1936-2015, Colchester
Carol A. (Shappy) Palin, 78, passed away March 29, 2015 on Palm Sunday surrounded by her loving family. She worked in the health care industry for many years. She loved playing card games with family, cake decorating, fishing, traveling, most of all she loved laughing and joking with everyone. Left to cherish her memory are…
Obituary: Beal Hyde, 1923-2015, Shelburne
Beal Baker Hyde died on March 31, 2015. He was born in Dallas, Texas on June 26, 1923, the first of two boys born to Alice Beal Baker and Mark Powell Hyde. He spent his boyhood in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. In his young life, he was fortunate to attend two summer camps, one in Vermont…
Vermont Poet Laureate Kicks Off New Lecture Series
One day last summer, Vermont poet laureate Sydney Lea read a poem in the New Yorker that he found “thoroughly impenetrable.” “Poetry, in my view,” Lea says in a recent email, “is not a matter of taking something basic and turning it cloudy; it’s the opposite — taking something that’s difficult to express, yes, and…
Hotel Modern’s ‘The Great War’ Brings Horror Down to Size
Hotel Modern’s live performance of The Great War begins when humanity’s deadliest conflagration did — Europe, 1914, in a bucolic field surrounded by tranquil blue sky. The audience watches as puppeteers build scenery as they go, positioning a village, road, bushes and trees — a miniature tableau captured by video cameras and projected live on…
Old Sky, Green on Fire
(Self-released, CD, digital download) Playing an easygoing medley of country-folk, Americana and bluegrass, southern Vermont outfit Gold Town spent the last few years creating listenable, carefree mountain music. The band worked the summer festival circuit in 2014, appearing at the Frendly Gathering in June and at Grand Point North in September, but seems to have…
Restaurant Exits in Montgomery, Lake Placid & Montpelier
While one northern hostelry expands, another one implodes. The Black Lantern Inn and Brewpub in Montgomery served its final meal on Sunday, March 29. On the inn’s website, the owners posted a thank-you to loyal customers along with a phrase in Comic Sans type: “It seldom turns out the way it does in the song…”…
When My Boyfriend Says ‘I Trust You,’ I Feel Like He Doesn’t Care
Dear Athena, A while back, my boyfriend was getting together regularly with another girl to play music. I got a bit jealous and asked him not to see her anymore. With some resistance, he did stop. Recently I met someone in my grad program who is male and asked me to have lunch with him.…
An All-American ‘Figaro’ at the Hop
Shaking things up in the opera world generally means setting an old opera in a more recent era — as in the Metropolitan Opera’s recent version of Rigoletto as a Las Vegas Rat Pack tragedy — or, perhaps, staging an operetta as musical theater, such as the Met’s recent The Merry Widow. As operatic possibilities…
The Dead Souls, Chasing the Shadows
(Beautiful Music CDs, CD, digital download) It’s hard to say whether it’s better to be in a good mood or a bad one when approaching Chasing the Shadows, the latest recording from Burlington duo the Dead Souls. If you’re an upbeat sort, the band’s ethereal goth rock could act as a sort of musical sedative,…
Free Will Astrology (4/1/15)
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Choconiverous” is an English slang word that’s defined as having the tendency, when eating a chocolate Easter Bunny, to bite the head off first. I recommend that you adopt this direct approach in everything you do in the coming weeks. Don’t get bogged down with preliminaries. Don’t get sidetracked by minor…
Jeffersonville Fiercely Debates Proposed Public Art
Beside the traffic roundabout in the middle of Jeffersonville stands a vacant lot, site of the Bell-Gates Lumber Corporation until its closure in 2002. Two concrete silos remain, relics from the mill’s boom years. One of them bears the painting of an incongruous zebra. Created by an anonymous graffiti artist some years ago, this native…
Big Fish: Sorrell Nets Corren, but Did He Catch the Wrong Guy?
Bill Sorrell couldn’t keep a smirk off his face last Wednesday as he outlined the evidence against his new public enemy No. 1. Standing before the television cameras in his Montpelier office, the Democratic attorney general looked like he’d just reeled in the biggest fish of his career. In the past five months, he said…
The ‘Lamentations’ Sculptures Return to UVM
Jeffrey Sass is no Tin Man, but he works in a variety of metals —including steel, bronze, brass and stainless — at his shop near White River Junction. He repairs and restores antiques, fabricates metal, welds high-end stainless steel pieces, and creates his own art. In recent years, Sass, 62, has been lovingly restoring a…
Get Hard
Perhaps your entertainment radar has picked up the drumbeat of denunciation against the Will Ferrell-Kevin Hart comedy Get Hard. Since its SXSW premiere, numerous reviewers have leveled charges of racism and homophobia. At one point, things got so weird that the film’s stars and first-time director, Etan Cohen, canceled interviews with the press. Could a…
A Burlington Entrepreneur Aims to Market a Placebo
Uwe Heiss has long been intrigued by the power of pills. He’s seen how they can improve people’s lives — often for reasons that have little or nothing to do with their active ingredients. Now Heiss wants to help people treat their own minor ailments by selling them pills they know are nothing but little…
It Follows
More than any other genre, horror films suffer from hype depreciation. If too many people tell you It Follows will scare the crap out of you, it won’t. So, instead, I’ll simply describe this second feature from David Robert Mitchell as an arty drama that might happen to creep up stealthily behind you and haunt…
Book Review: ‘Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women’ by Nina Gaby
Although pop songs and romantic comedies might present it otherwise, many anthropologists say that our homosocial relationships — that is, same-sex friendships and kinships — have historically been more important to our daily lives than romantic ones. For some women, a falling out with a close female friend is no less heartbreaking than a breakup…
News Quirks (4/1/15)
Curses, Foiled Again A burglar used the homeowner’s devices to log on to porn, YouTube and his Facebook account, but authorities in Monroe County, Fla., quickly identified him because he forgot to log off Facebook. Sheriff’s official Becky Herrin said the 16-year-old suspect also ate a Pop Tart and drank a soda. (Miami Herald) Burglary…
Double Take: argonaut&wasp, Future Protocol
One of the wonderful things about music is that no two sets of ears hear the same thing in quite the same way. And even though the goal of music criticism — or any serious arts criticism — is objectivity, in some ways that’s nearly impossible to achieve. Musical taste is subjective. So what sounds…
![Spectrum’s Sleep Out [SIV393]](https://i0.wp.com/www.sevendaysvt.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/episode393-4-e1755132085527.webp?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1)
Spectrum’s Sleep Out [SIV393]
3/26/15: The 4th Annual Spectrum Sleep Out was held last Thursday on the lawn of the Unitarian Universalist Church in the heart of downtown Burlington. One hundred fifteen business and community leaders raised $192,000 by sleeping outside and showing their support for the homeless and at-risk teens that Spectrum serves. Cold temperatures, rain and mud…
Tropical Restaurant to Open in St. Johnsbury
Just as the ice melts, a taste of the tropics is making its way to the Northeast Kingdom. This weekend, Chad Roy, owner of St. Johnsbury’s Maplewood Lodge, will open the hotel’s second restaurant — and it has a tropical theme. Roy, a construction and restoration industry vet, purchased the long-shuttered lodge in January 2014…
Letters to the Editor (4/1/15)
The Real World: Victory [Re “Threats, Lawsuits and Dead Animals,” March 18]: As I was reading about the town of Victory in Seven Days, I couldn’t help but think that eventually some investigation will lead to the discovery of who is responsible for all the alleged misdeeds in town, and that any individuals responsible will…
Record Time? Checking Vitals on Vermont’s Other Health Exchange
Most Vermonters know about the 2013 online health insurance exchange, in part because it launched without functioning technology. Even today it remains a crippled operation. But what about the state’s first health care exchange? The one that was going to comprehensively track patients’ electronic medical records and enable providers to share and access information? A…
Interviewing Hall & Oates (Tattoos)
Last Saturday, March 28, pop icons Daryl Hall and John Oates played a concert at the Hermitage Club in Wilmington, Vt. But it’s unlikely that many, if any, Seven Days readers attended. That’s because the Hermitage Club, which occupies the former Haystack Mountain ski resort, is an exclusive, members-only playground, and the show was for,…
How a Small-Town Detective Works a Big-Time Case
It’s not every day that the Middlebury Police Department gets calls from the BBC, People magazine and the New York Times. And until last week, detective Kris Bowdish had never run a press conference, let alone one with a full-house crowd of local and national media. The small-town police investigator, who plays ice hockey and…
Talking Art With Rory Jackson
Rory Jackson first traveled from Vermont to Ghana at age 14 on a transatlantic field trip sponsored by Mount Abraham Union High School. His aim was to study percussion with African master drummers, but by that time he was already turning his attention to painting. Visual artistry runs in the family. Jackson’s uncle, Woody Jackson,…
Free to Be Furry? Group Fights to Wear Animal Costumes in Burlington
Jessica Owens is 32 years old, lives in Milton and works as a secretary. On a rainy night last week, she agreed to meet at Wicked Wings in Essex Junction. She showed up in a black sweatshirt, but on a different day, might have been dressed in her custom-made corgi suit. Owens is part of…
Creature Comforts
I was motoring along the Northern Connector en route to a pickup on Macrae Road. The temperature outside my taxi was 37 degrees, which felt like 67 degrees in the context of this year’s Siberian winter. After three decades in the Green Mountains, I knew that March was far too early to proclaim winter’s end,…
Soundbites: Disco Phantom Marathon; Comedy Fest News
Record Time One of these years, maybe even this one, I’m going to do the Radio Bean Birthday Marathon. If you’ve never heard of the RBBM, that’s because I just invented it right now. The idea is to show up for the coffee shop’s annual birthday bash in November at the moment it opens the…
Havoc Meadery Creates Third Honey Brew
Later this month, mead drinkers will be able to enjoy another brand of local honey brew. In a couple weeks, Havoc Mead will join Groton’s Artesano and Colchester’s Groennfell Meadery as Vermont’s third mead maker, says head brewer Erik Benepe. Benepe works at Groennfell and has been homebrewing beer and mead for years. “I heard…
Vermont’s Internationally Flavored Brunches
Few symbols of fertility are more obvious than the egg: Life can emerge from it, and it feeds us. Early Christians adopted the egg as a symbol of Jesus’ emergence from his tomb, and the first Easter eggs were colored red to represent the blood he shed for our sins. Perhaps that’s why the start…
