Aug 7-13, 2024
Marshfield’s Jules Rabin Celebrates a Century of Intellectual Curiosity, Trailblazing Bread and Standing Up for Peace; A BTV Youth Center Abruptly Closes; Québec’s Lavish Floating Chalets; Late-Night Eats in Burlington
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Marshfield’s Jules Rabin Celebrates a Century of Intellectual Curiosity, Trailblazing Bread and Peace Activism
Help us pay for in-depth stories like this one by becoming a Seven Days Super Reader. Jules Rabin describes the current state of Montpelier’s Friday peace vigil as “kind of schleppy,” a Yiddish word for awkward or undistinguished. Despite his characteristically forthright assessment, Rabin has been a steadfast attendee for the better part of two decades. Most…
Vermont’s Incumbents Dominate in Legislative Primary Races
From Chittenden County to Brattleboro, office-holders proved tough to dislodge in the primaries.
Former Middlebury Selectboard Member Esther Charlestin to Top Democratic Ticket
She’s the first Black woman to win a major party gubernatorial nomination in Vermont.
iSun Sale for $10 Million Appears Likely
What the transaction would mean for iSun’s operations is not yet known.
In Memoriam: Ed White, 1934-2023
Remembering Ed White, father, grandfather and friend. Born in New York City but found his home in 1967 in the Green Mountains, leaving only to…
Obituary: Kathy Jo Dupuis, 1955-2024
Mother of two daughters gave the best birthday parties
Obituary: Ruth Ann (McSweeney) Pichler, 1931-2024
A wrong turn led her to Montgomery Center, where she met her future husband
Obituary: Amy Miller, 1981-2024
Theatrical spirit will be remembered for her razor-sharp wit and lightning-fast sense of humor
Obituary: Norbert G. Vogl, 1932-2024
Jack-of-all-trades and former IBM employee had several patents in his name
McKee’s Pub & Grill in Winooski to Close
McKee’s Pub & Grill in Winooski is permanently closing. In a shared social media statement on Friday, owners Ryan Johnston and Jamie Lacourse cited increased costs, rising insurance rates and taxes, and issues related to ongoing construction in downtown Winooski as primary reasons for shuttering the East Allen Street bar barely 18 months after they…
Vermont Folklife to Sell Its Middlebury Building
Vermont Folklife, a nonprofit that documents Vermont’s culture and history primarily through audio recordings, plans to sell the Middlebury building that has served as its headquarters since 2006. High maintenance costs for the historic building, greater emphasis on having a statewide presence and the rise in remote work all contributed to the decision to sell,…
In Memoriam: Ron Finch, 1965-2023
A celebration of life for Ron Finch will be held on Sunday, August 18, 2024, 1 p.m., at Texaco Beach in Burlington, Vt. We hope all who loved Ron can attend.
iSun Creditor Pursues Assets of Bankrupt Solar Firm’s CEO
A bonding company is suing the head of iSun, the bankrupt Williston solar installer, asking a judge to find CEO Jeffrey Peck personally liable for millions in losses that the insurer incurred when Peck’s publicly traded firm fumbled industrial-scale projects. Iowa-based Merchants Bonding Company also accused Peck of trying to shield his assets from creditors…
UVM President Garimella Is Finalist to Lead University of Arizona
Updated 3:15 p.m. Suresh Garimella, the president of the University of Vermont, is a candidate for the president’s job at the University of Arizona, that school’s board of regents announced Thursday. The U of A, which has 53,000 students, said in a press release that its board is planning to interview Garimella on Friday. The…
Theater Review: ‘Buried Child,’ the Parish Players
Sam Shepard’s plays feature symbolism and lyrical language, but his plots and settings are distinctly down-to-earth. His hallmark might be depicting an absolutely average day that somehow becomes a character’s breaking point. In Buried Child, an entire family unravels, but the patriarch never leaves the couch and an errand to get a bottle of whiskey…
Vermont Medicaid Overpaid Some Providers — and Wants the Money Back
A payment error by Vermont’s Medicaid vendor has snowballed into a bureaucratic conflict that is putting the health care of some low-income patients in jeopardy. Gainwell Technologies, which handles payments for most of Vermont’s Medicaid claims, mistakenly overpaid about 180 nurse practitioners over the past several years a total that’s in the hundreds of thousands…
Magnet Fishing Attracted Michael and Rose Jerome
Old bicycles, a gun, bullets, bolts and signposts — those are just a few of the items that Rose and Michael Jerome have recovered while magnet fishing. “You name it, and we’ve pulled it out,” Rose said. Using a very powerful magnet, the Jeromes retrieve pieces of metal from the bottom of harbors, rivers and…
From the Publisher: Games On
“August-itis” is upon us: the end-of-season scramble to check everything off the bucket list before school, or cooler weather, closes the window on summer. At Seven Days, lots of people are taking time off this month. It’s vacation season everywhere else, too, so meetings outside the office require nothing less than long-term strategic planning. Social…
M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Trap’ Spins Half a Good Thriller From a Sly Premise
What if a horror film were also a concert film? That’s the premise of Trap, the latest from M. Night Shyamalan, which stars the filmmaker’s daughter, R&B singer Saleka Shyamalan, as a pop star performing her own original songs. While it might be tempting to write this off as a case of nepotism, the Shyamalan…
Letters to the Editor (8/7/24)
Final Resting Place [Re “Final Act: Rita Mannebach Traveled From Florida to Vermont to Choose How She Died,” July 17]: I understand that many people from out of state struggle to find a place in Vermont where they can stay to take advantage of our “death with dignity” provisions. I am deeply committed to assisting…
Free Will Astrology (8/7/24)
LEO (Jul. 23-Aug. 22): I love the fact that Antarctica doesn’t belong to anyone. Thirty nations have research stations there, but none of them controls what happens. Antarctica has no government! It has a few laws that almost everyone obeys, such as a ban on the introduction of nonindigenous plants and animals. But mostly it’s…
Album Review: thayerperiod, ‘All Dogs Go to Heaven’
(Self-released, digital) Things that used to be permissible in kids’ movies: smoking, drinking, gambling, death, shocking images of Hell — all of which appear in Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and Dan Kuenster’s 1989 animated classic All Dogs Go to Heaven. The ’80s were wild! Thematically, the film examines philosophical questions about life, death, altruism and…
Stay in a Floating Chalet at Bora Boréal in Québec’s Eastern Townships
Buoyant is better, if you ask me. Twenty years ago, while living near San Francisco, I envied residents of houseboats moored on the bay, no matter how damp and diminutive the dwellings may have been in reality. Or take pontoon boats: little more than porches set adrift but nonetheless brimming with boondocks élan. And so,…
Craftsbury Chamber Players Present a Concert of Arresting Music
Chamber music concerts seem eminently safe today, even an escape from whatever bad news one’s phone brings up next. But in musically rich Austria and Prussia in the first half of the 1800s, chamber concerts — occurring then in the rooms (or chambres in French) of private homes — could lead to arrests. Craftsbury Chamber…
Soundbites: The Debut of A Day in the Sun: The Spirit of Vermont Music Festival
We all have that friend (or friends): the ones who can’t remember a sibling’s birthday or where they left their cellphone, but they’re some kind of savant at procuring tickets and booking hotels. They have a dumb job, just like you, and they live in the economic shit show that is modern America, just like…
Album Review: Audrey Pearl, ‘Long Term Plans’
(Self-released, digital) There is no worse place to encounter a new artist than at a battle of the bands. With rushed set times and an icky competitive nature, it’s difficult to get a real sense of what a band or solo act is all about. Yet when I heard Audrey Pearl perform in a local…
On the Beat: Vermont Collectives Keep Festival Season Rolling
Speaking of local cats doing everything they can to pump up the local music scene: The folks at the Wallflower Collective are gearing up to throw their third annual Wallflower Fest. Held both outside and inside the downtown Burlington bar, this year’s iteration goes down on Sunday, August 25, with a strong lineup of touring…
Community Rallies Around Colchester Family Fundraising for Treatment of Child’s Rare Disease
Mary Saladino lives in fear of her 4-year-old son’s next seizure. Several times a week, she struggles to comfort Henry as his body convulses; sometimes, his breathing becomes labored. Henry’s condition also periodically leaves one of his arms temporarily paralyzed. Henry has alternating hemiplegia of childhood, or AHC, a neurological condition that affects one out…
‘Now You See Me’ Art Show Startles at the Bundy Modern
The Bundy Modern in Waitsfield is both unexpected and totally at home in its landscape. You could drive by the gallery a hundred times without knowing it’s there; when you turn off Route 100 and ascend the steep dirt driveway into the woods, the last thing you expect is a glass-and-brick modernist cube rising above…
‘Returning to Haifa’ Links the Holocaust and Nakba Tragedies
In 1948, following the establishment of the State of Israel, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in a mass deportation known in Arabic as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” That same year, about 140,000 Holocaust survivors, most of them Jewish refugees driven from their own homes in Europe, began settling in…
‘American Geography’ Offers Signs and Wonders at BigTown Gallery
Geography is a function of time as much as location. Even static-seeming places such as deserts or small towns are constantly in flux. How to depict that change, and in doing so convey the forces behind it, is the question that photographers Virginia Beahan and Jim Dow explore in “American Geography,” on view at BigTown…
Sara Holbrook Community Center Employees Saw Signs of Trouble
In 2020, the Sara Holbrook Community Center, a prominent Burlington nonprofit that provided summer, afterschool and early education programs for city youths, got a much-needed overhaul. Following a five-year fundraising campaign, its humble building, near the intersection of North Street and North Avenue, underwent a $3.3 million renovation that more than doubled the amount of…
Is There Any Truth to ‘Bad Things Come in Threes’?
Dear Reverend, I’ve had a string of bad luck recently. I won’t go into the details, but there have definitely been three bad things that have happened to me in a short span of time. A few people I’ve talked to have mentioned that bad things come in threes, and they all said my bad…
Nectar’s to Revive Late-Night Takeout Window in Burlington
A Burlington late-night dining staple will soon return. After a planned renovation to upstairs Club Metronome this month, Nectar’s will relaunch its takeout window, serving gravy fries and other dishes from a new menu to postshow revelers on Main Street. “Most of us were not here when the window was around,” said general manager Tyler…
Six Spots for Late-Night Food in Burlington and Winooski
Since the assault on restaurants that was 2020, we’ve gotten one reader question over and over again: “Where can I get a late-night bite in Burlington?” If we’re being real, the Queen City has never been a hotbed for 2 a.m. eats. But as nightlife has resumed post-pandemic, the wee-hours food scene has been slowest…
New Owners Expand Grocery Offerings at Montpelier’s Meadow Mart
Jean Myung Hamilton and James Findlay-Shirras bought Meadow Mart, a long-standing neighborhood grocery and convenience store at 284 Elm Street in Montpelier, last fall. They reopened it at the beginning of July with a mix of convenience staples and an expanded selection of locally grown foods and global offerings, including Korean snacks, pantry staples and…
The Magnificent 7: Must See, Must Do, August 7-13
Looking Back Ongoing Vermont Studio Center in Johnson began offering weeklong residencies to in-state artists and writers in 1984, providing studio space where they could generate new ideas and creative flow. To celebrate its 40th anniversary, “Vermont Week 1984” features works from that year’s artists-in-residence. Bones and All Thursday 8 Three trombones and a tuba…
