Hair Say: Why an otherwise normal mom refuses to be “locked” into one color
This morning, when I dropped my 6-year-old off at school, I was a blonde. This afternoon, waiting to pick her up, I’m fingering locks that are decidedly brunette. My daughter had cried for days when I first bleached my hair, begging me to go back to red, my “real” color. In fact my hair is…
The Word on the Feet: A mud-season shoe crew pounds the pavement
Mud season finds Burlington pedestrians of divided opinion when it comes to footwear — some are shod for winter, some for spring, and some are simply dressed for mess. Vermonters might tread lightly when it comes to high fashion, but a recent random survey on the Church Street Marketplace suggests that people take their soles…
Montreal Makeover: The ouis and nons of French-Canadian men’s style
As one who subscribes to the maxim, “You only feel as good as you look,” I find hanging out in Montréal can be an ego-deflating experience. When I head out the door in small-town Vermont — my usual home — there’s at least a reasonable chance I’ll feel as fashionably put-together as the next guy.…
The Kids are All Right
One of my coworkers has this phrase that he overuses. “As a for instance,” he says, and then goes on to give you an illuminating example. You can count on hearing that phrase a dozen times if he’s giving a speech. Sorry, Hank, but I’m using you “as a for instance” this time. You see,…
Happy New Yorkers
A steady stream of cars pulled into the nondescript gas station on Rt. 149 in Pawlet, Vermont, on Easter Sunday. Nine out of 10 had New York license plates. That’s not surprising, since the New York state line was within sight, just 175 yards up the road. On the other side sits the community of…
Motel Tale
In the wee hours it’s rare to pick up a fare who came into this world much before the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The after-midnight downtown scene looks like a scene from the sci-fi flick, Logan’s Run, in which malevolent powers-that-be surreptitiously terminated every citizen at age 30. The slender man hailing me from the…
Back Talk
Here’s the skivvy, er skinny, on Tania Kupczak. As a Burlington underwear artist, she’s fully out of the drawer. The Oberlin grad earned a Master’s in visual art at Vermont College with a panty project designed to “reclaim underwear as an empowered object of identity.” She put out an APB for worn undies that would…
Flick Chick
Why do some towns go mad? In 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, was paranoid about witchcraft. In 1951, the populace of Pont-St. Esprit in France began wildly hallucinating after eating moldy bread. But nobody has ever been able to explain what triggered a bizarre decade in Black River Falls, a Wisconsin hamlet overtaken by disease, disaster and…
