Aug 20-26, 2014
What Happens if Burlington College Drops Out?; Tales From the Health Care Queue; An Argentine Actor in Vermont; Remembering Kip Meaker; Prohibition Pig’s Michael Weneke;
Cover Story
Pass or Fail: What Happens If Burlington College Drops Out?
A liberal arts education is a tough sell these days, at a time when students are hesitant to take out large loans and online learning offers a cheaper alternative. But Burlington College is up against an even greater challenge. In addition to proving its academic value, the lakeside college needs to convince students of something…
Obituary: James Edwin Hodet
James Edwin Hodet, age 81 years, died early Saturday morning August 23, 2014, at his residence with loving family at his side. Friends may call at Swanton Village Municipal Complex, 120 First Street, on Friday August 29, 2014, from 4 to 7 p.m. Interment with full military honors will take place at the convenience of…
Obituary: Doris R. (Shepard) Parent, 1925-2014, Winooski
Doris R. (Shepard) Parent, 89, a lifelong resident of Winooski died Sunday, August 24, 2014 at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington surrounded by her loving family. Doris was born in Winooski on June 11, 1925, the daughter of Wilfrid and Viola (Guyette) Compagnon. She was married at St. Stephen Catholic Church in Winooski to…
Obituary: Gertrude L’Esperance Sheloski
Mrs. Gertrude L’Esperance Sheloski, age 94 years, died late Wednesday evening August 20, 2014, in the Franklin County Rehab Center with loving family at her side. Born in Ste. Armand, Quebec Canada on October 23, 1919, she was the daughter of the late Delphis and Germaine (Boucher) L’Esperance. She moved to the St. Albans area…
Obituary: Leona M. (Moody) Kirby, 1932-2014, Milton
Leona M. (Moody) Kirby, 82, of Milton, formerly of Colchester died peacefully on Tuesday, August 19, 2014 at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington surrounded by her loving family. Leona was born in Burlington, VT on August 9, 1932, the daughter of James William Moody, Sr. and Rose Idola (Vezina) Moody. Leona was educated within…
Weekend Ride Benefits a Huntington Food Hub
For years, Sarah Jane Williamson has hoped to enliven the space inside her historic white dairy barn in Huntington. As the owner of Jubilee Farm and its seasonal farmstand, Williamson sells organic vegetables from the barn on a self-service, honor-system model. She found a willing partner in Dean Menke, who runs Backdoor Bakery from his…
Front Line Stories of Vermont’s Online Health Exchange
Nearly a year after Vermont Health Connect went live, the state’s online insurance exchange still has a number of gaping operational holes into which plenty of Vermonters have fallen — even disappeared. When Seven Days put out the call to readers for stories about their experiences with the exchange, we heard tales of endless phone calls,…
Free Will Astrology (8/20/14)
ARIES (March 21-April 19): An American named Kevin Shelley accomplished a feat worthy of inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records. While wearing a blue satin martial arts outfit, he smashed 46 wooden toilet seats over his head in just one minute. Some observers may be inclined to dismiss his efforts as frivolous and…
News Quirks (8/20/14)
Curses, Foiled Again Police investigating the theft of a wallet found a photograph of the suspect after she used the stolen credit card at a beauty-supply store in Ocala, Fla. When the woman said she didn’t have photo identification, the clerk asked the woman if she would have her photo taken with the credit card.…
A Tango Music and Dance Community Flourishes in Vermont
It’s 45 minutes into Queen City Tango’s twice-monthly milonga, and my tango partner and I are nowhere near ready to join the other dancers. In a mirror-lined dance studio hung with paper lanterns at North End Studios in Burlington, half a dozen couples step, sweep and twirl counterclockwise around the room. As newcomers to the…
Magic in the Moonlight
Woody Allen pulls off a pretty impressive trick with his 44th film: He makes the charm of Emma Stone and Colin Firth disappear. Rarely have such appealing performers found themselves stranded in roles this underwritten and tiresome. Firth plays Stanley, a magician of the 1920s who performs in Oriental costume under the stage name Wei…
Soundbites: WYSIWYG Preview; VT Music Fest; Rock Candy
When Radio Bean’s Lee Anderson and Co. held last year’s Precipice music festival in the field behind Burlington College, it signaled the arrival of a unique new venue for outdoor concerts within city limits. It was a revelation. Somehow, the field is secluded enough to insulate against noise impinging too greatly on nearby North Ave.…
The Giver
Good dystopian fables make people uncomfortable. They inspire troubled reflections on the world we live in (Would I watch a televised fight to the death?), not complacency. They’re not fantasies about misguided adults who devise a ridiculous social system to repress the impulses of attractive teenagers; they’re veiled stories about the darkness in all of…
Ava Marie, In Our Garden. After the War. Your Eyes Close. I Breathe Out.
(KTR Recordings, CD, digital download) If you’re looking for an uplifting record, then In Our Garden. After the War. Your Eyes Close. I Breathe Out. by local folk group Ava Marie — an inexplicable tweak to the well-known hymn “Ave Maria” — is not for you. The five-piece band’s debut album blends the cold, melancholy…
A Montpelier Design/Build Duo Lands a House on Reality TV
At 493 square feet, a brand-new house in the backyard of 4 Hinckley Street in Montpelier is pushing the limits of “tiny.” “I call this a medium house,” jokes Damian Taylor, 36. “Or a ‘reasonable’ house.” Whatever you want to call it, the diminutive home that Taylor and business partner Chris Kiper designed and built…
Missisquoi River Band, Plenty of Heartaches
(Self-released, CD, digital download) There’s something refreshing about an album that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. Such is the case with Plenty of Heartaches, the debut offering from Vermont’s Missisquoi River Band, released earlier this year. The album likely won’t go down as a groundbreaking work of bluegrass ingenuity or…
Biographer Jay Parini ‘Stars’ in Gore Vidal Documentary
Middlebury College professor and writer Jay Parini knew Gore Vidal well, and he agrees that the word “irascible” described the late author and commentator. “He had a very thin skin and he would flare up, and he had a wild temper,” says Parini. “Very few people stayed friends with him for long. I think I…
Eyewitness: Painter Julie A. Davis
Simply put, Julie A. Davis paints landscapes. Her depictions of mountains, waterfalls, lakes, fields and small Vermont towns adorn her white-walled studio in Burlington’s South End. One of the original members of the South End Arts and Business Association, Davis has rented the same studio for 15 years. Each year during the annual Art Hop,…
Road Trip: Vermont Festival of the Arts
In the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor, Faye Dunaway plans a getaway to Sugarbush Resort in Warren, only to be abducted at her New York City door by CIA operative Robert Redford. I can sympathize with the effect, if not the cause: Every year, I have planned and failed to make a road…
Letters to the Editor (8/20/14)
Program Trains Cooks [Re “Labor Pains,” July 9]: While the industry’s need for and availability of trained cooks has ebbed and flowed, as Alice Levitt’s article suggests, I’d like to let you know about a local job training program which frequently runs just a little under the radar. The program is the Community Kitchen Academy.…
A Vermont Exhibition Celebrates the Russian Kunstkamera
According to legend, the Russian monarch Peter the Great, while strolling along the wooded bank of St. Petersburg’s Neva River one day, happened on a curiously misshapen pine. Deformed by a semicircular branch that extended horizontally, the tree’s trunk reminded the tsar of the lock on a barn door. So astounded by this oddity was…
Theater Review: Love Letters, Unadilla Theatre
Little did audiences at the 1988 debut of A.R. Gurney’s play Love Letters know just how quaint its premise would soon seem. Performed entirely by two actors narrating correspondence their characters exchange from 1937 to 1987, the play celebrates a time-honored form of communication — the written, signed, sealed and delivered letter — that would…
Local Drummer Jeff Salisbury Publishes a New Instructional Book
About 15 years ago, Jeff Salisbury found himself stumped. The local drummer and drum teacher was approached by a student who had reached an impasse with his development and had a rather profound question for his instructor: How do I move around the drum set? To the casual observer, that might seem an oddly obvious…
Major Modifications at Salt in Montpelier
Salt in Montpelier is about to lose its chef of a year, Ryan Zacher. But owner (and former Seven Days food editor) Suzanne Podhaizer isn’t seeking his replacement. Instead, she says, she took the opportunity to rethink her culinary goals. “I’m trying to get away from all the ideas of what constitutes a typical restaurant…
Jeezum, Jim: What Ever Happened to Jeffords Republicans?
Even after the post-Watergate rout of 1974, when Democrats picked up 49 seats in the U.S. House, eight of New England’s 25 House members still hailed from the GOP. Among them was a 40-year-old freshman representative from Vermont who had carved out a reputation back home for his environmental activism. As a state senator representing…
Ask Athena
Dear Athena, I’ve been single for two years, since I got divorced. I’ve been throwing myself into work and building myself back from zero. I recently started browsing dating sites again and found only men who want to go to bed with me, no dates, nothing. My girlfriends have the same issue with finding good…
The Trickler
The middle-aged couple lingering on the corner of Church and Main needed a cab. They just didn’t know it yet. On weekend nights, I get a lot of calls from regular customers. When I’m not on a call, I troll Burlington’s downtown for random people hailing cabs in the street. (Yup, bona fide cab hailing,…
Remembering Kip Meaker
One night, Kip Meaker was at a table at the Iridium watching Les Paul play. This was some time in the late 1990s, when Paul, the “Father of the Electric Guitar,” played the famed New York City jazz club every Tuesday. Meaker was visiting the city from Vermont with friends, including his old band mate…
Institute for Social Ecology Marks 40 Years of Anarchy
“Can anyone here give me a three-sentence definition of ‘communalism’?” asked an earnest and befuddled audience member last Saturday. “No!” replied a chorus of voices amid laughter and groans at the 40th-anniversary celebration of the world’s most influential neo-anarchist think tank. Apart from the group gathered on a Marshfield hilltop last Saturday, few people have…
Contest for Votes Spotlights a Changing Winooski
The last time Winooski State Rep. Clem Bissonnette looked over the city’s voter rolls, the veteran local pol noticed something surprising: The names of fewer than half of his constituents were recognizable to him. “Twenty years ago, I knew 85 percent of the people who came when I stood outside the polls,” Bissonnette said. “Now,…
Vermont’s Long Trail Brewing Company Turns 25
On a dismal afternoon at the height of last week’s rains, Billy Gault stands in the basement of an 1825 woolen mill on Route 4 in Bridgewater. “Cellar dwellers,” he says, remembering long days and nights working underground. The room is dark. Water leaks in, pooling in inches-deep puddles in the low spots. Gault has…
Grilling the Chef: Michael Werneke, Prohibition Pig
Michael Werneke chose a career in the kitchen after Tom Cruise foiled his original plans. “I really wanted to fly Tomcats for the Navy. I went to school for aerospace engineering and wanted to be a fighter pilot,” he recalls. Werneke devoted his youth to ROTC and rigorous academics in pursuit of his goal —…
