May 3-9, 2017
Mark Redmond Has Faith in Troubled Youth and Second Chances; A Vermonter’s Invention Could Reduce Ocean Pollution; Waking Windows 7 Is Ready to Rock
Cover Story
Spectrum Director Mark Redmond Tells Tales for Troubled Youth
Mark Redmond waited patiently in the wings at Flynn MainStage while a barmaid told her story of getting robbed at gunpoint, a gay motorist confessed his crush on a traffic cop and a cyclist for a lesbian-owned delivery company recounted witnessing a stabbing while delivering a box of vulva puppets. It was Friday night at…
The Parmelee Post: Civil Engineers Mystified by Presence of Human Life Within Winooski Traffic Circle
“In my 30-plus years of designing roads and bridges, I can assure you I’ve never seen anything remotely like this,” exclaimed veteran civil engineer and sidewalk advocate, Charles Enfarsi. “Everything I thought I knew about urban engineering fails to explain what lies before my very eyes.” The bewildered and bespectacled engineer stood motionless on the…
![The Many Faces of Mr. Guyette [SIV488]](https://i0.wp.com/www.sevendaysvt.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/episode488.webp?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1)
The Many Faces of Mr. Guyette [SIV488]
4/28/17: For 37 years, Charles Guyette taught art and French to Vermont elementary students, high schoolers and some adults too. Known as a colorful and unique mustached character who yodeled on occasion, Mr. Guyette kept his students laughing while also sharing his love of art and life with them. Always a cheerleader, he used to…
Tea, Cake and Talk at Middlebury’s Death Café
Thursday, April 27, was the first spring day that crept toward 80 degrees in Middlebury. The sun beamed, folks lounged on porches, a wood thrush chimed in just-greening branches and the line for creemees at Sama’s Café stretched along the curb. But inside the Champlain Valley Unitarian Universalist Society, sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows didn’t…
Scott’s Session: A Political Success, But a Mixed Bag on Policy
The 2017 legislative session has featured a distinctive pair of bookends — a matched set of budget proposals that required extremely quick action by a legislature not known for speed. In January, Gov. Phil Scott proposed forcing school boards to level-fund their budgets and move the savings into his general fund priorities. That plan was…
Soundbites: Lucky Clouds and Silver Linings
Alright, folks. Waking Windows is upon us. After six years, the monolithic extravaganza likely needs no introduction. But on the off chance the three-day festival somehow hasn’t entered your orbit, from Friday, May 5, through Sunday, May 7, downtown Winooski becomes a downright indie-music fustercluck. Aside from the numerous outdoor stages, virtually every business on…
Tracing and Chasing Musical Themes at Waking Windows
It’s finally here: Waking Windows, Vermont’s most cutting-edge music festival. From Friday, May 5, through Sunday, May 7, nearly 200 bands, solo artists, performance artists, comedians, speakers and DJs descend upon downtown Winooski. It’s a bona fide musical feeding frenzy. And the people are ravenous. If you’ve scoured the fest’s monstrous lineup, you might be…
Letters to the Editor (5/3/17)
About Vermont Slavery… I read with interest “WTF: Why Does a Sign in Richmond Tell Passersby to ‘Understand Slavery’?” [April 26]. However, I wish people would stop saying that Vermont outlawed slavery in 1777. No such thing happened — the Vermont Constitution outlawed adult slavery only. Young men could be enslaved until age 21; young…
Hackie: What Happened in Naples
“Oh, it’s so warm now, even this close to midnight. When I left, it was single digits.” Sally was smiling at me with her pale blue eyes as we walked together, me pushing a cart stacked with her extensive luggage collection toward my waiting taxi. She’s in her late fifties, but age has done little…
Feds in Florida: Burlington College Probe Goes the Distance
Ron Leavitt was driving from a master gardener class to his Naples, Fla., home three months ago when he received a surprising call from his wife. “She said, ‘The FBI is here to talk to you about Burlington College,'” he recalled. “‘When are you going to be home?'” The semiretired orthopedic surgeon had moved from…
Eric George Twangs Up the Burlington Music Scene
Eric George is trying to be better about living in the moment, taking risks and listening to his instincts. Those are admirable traits in a musician — or anyone, really. And they generally serve the young Burlington songwriter and bandleader well, musically speaking. But in other facets of his life, George’s newfound daring has seen…
Book Review: ‘Burntown’ by Jennifer McMahon
Montpelier author Jennifer McMahon can write a killer first scene. Over the course of eight suspense novels, she’s always excelled most at hooking the reader, even as her themes and structures have grown more ambitious, her characterizations deeper. Where she invariably falls short — in this reader’s estimation — is in satisfying the breathless expectations…
S.P.A.C.E. Gallery Conjures a Witchy Exhibition
On Friday, May 5, a band of witches will take over the S.P.A.C.E. Gallery on Pine Street in Burlington. That’s right, witches. Kind of. The show, titled “Conjuring: She Rises,” is a group effort loosely curated by artists Beth Robinson, Jules Polk, Morgan Stark and Athena Kafantaris. “Curated” in the sense that those four women…
Bhutanese Women Launch Beauty Businesses
When Doma Thapa arrived in Vermont in 2012, she had a high school diploma in hand but wasn’t sure she’d find a job. A year later, she told her distant relative Chandra Pokhrel, “Uncle, I want to open my own store.” Now in her twenties, the Bhutanese woman grew up in a refugee camp in…
Heart Opener: Susan Cline Lucey Helps New Moms Care for Themselves, Not Just Their Babies
Susan Cline Lucey was in the middle of demonstrating goddess pose in front of a postnatal yoga class when she glanced at her shoulder and noticed a wet spot. Was it spit-up? Tears? A mark left by a baby’s sweaty head? Whatever it was, she shrugged it off and continued teaching. Cline Lucey, 42, embraces…
Magic Hat Opens Full Tasting Room With Food, and a Party
It’s been 23 years since Magic Hat Brewing sold its first beers to the public. While the brewery’s Artifactory has hosted hundreds of events since then, on Monday, Magic Hat celebrated a new milestone when it sold its first “everyday pints” during regular service. That’s right: You can now get full pints of beer — along…
The Doctor Is Out: Lawmakers Seek ‘Lifeline’ for Independent Physicians
It was hard to roam the Statehouse last week without encountering hospital lobbyists and insurance executives huddled together in the hallways. The subject of at least some of their scrums: how to appease increasingly impatient senators seeking to level the playing field between independent doctors and large medical institutions. “We’re trying to preserve independent practices…
Album Review: Humble, ‘Premonition’
(Self-released, digital download) Vermont rapper Humble, aka Jeff Philie, has been a credit to the local scene for nearly a decade. Known for his work on the mic with Bless the Child, he’s equally respected as a community builder. Hosting open mics and helping with charity events are the least of his contributions: He’s also…
Ask Athena: I Want the Passion Back in My Marriage
Dear Athena, I feel like my marriage is a mess. I don’t know what to do. We have only been married for six years, but it feels so empty. I love my partner. I think they are a wonderful person and a good parent and they have a good job, but we never have sex…
Album Review: Orange Julians, ‘Option’
(Self-released, digital download) Julian Rumney DeFelice’s solo project Orange Julians is exploratory pop with grandiose aspirations. His latest release, Option, contains 12 tracks with musical influences spanning hip-hop, disco and southern rock. The album follows his 2016 release, Object, which was laden with ’80s synth samples and romantic themes. With Option, DeFelice is a long…
Political Revolution and Horror in Two Vermont-Made Films
In 2014, before people across America began to “feel the Bern,” University of Vermont ecological economics professor Jon D. Erickson pondered the possibility of a documentary about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). He had a series of conversations with Sanders’ policy adviser Jacob Smith about the stirrings of a resurgent progressive movement, and the pair decided…
Butterfly Bakery Evolves in New Montpelier Space
Until recently, Claire Fitts Georges, owner of Butterfly Bakery of Vermont, spread her business out across three locations: a tiny spot on Barre Street in Montpelier, the Vermont Food Venture Center in Hardwick and her home kitchen. “It was getting kind of ridiculous,” she said. Now she’s consolidated the operation in a 3,000-square-foot space at…
Theater Review: ‘Fences,’ JAG Productions
August Wilson’s Fences is a play to listen to as much as watch. The very rhythm of speech defines characters and reveals emotion, and Wilson’s words express cultural truths through individual stories. The language is colloquial, the setting a backyard in a poor neighborhood in Pittsburgh, but the speeches ascend to turning-point intensity. JAG Productions…
Movie Review: ‘The Circle’ Spins a Tame Tale of Digital Paranoia
The Social Network meets The Firm, sort of, in James Ponsoldt’s thriller, a cautionary tale that its creators would have done well to employ more caution in realizing. Adapted by Dave Eggers from his 2013 novel, with an assist from Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now), The Circle strains to create the illusion that it has something…
Movie Review: ‘A Quiet Passion’ Captures the Wit and Strangeness of Emily Dickinson
Movies about poets are a hard sell. Emily Dickinson (1830-86) lived the quietest of lives in Amherst, Mass., turning out mostly unpublished lyrics that would one day stun the literary world with their originality and modernity. How to convey the contrasts she embodied without sinking into genteel biopic clichés? English director Terence Davies (The Deep…
Fiddlehead Overharvesting Worries Conservationists
On a recent Tuesday in April, Dan Cahill, land steward at Burlington’s Parks, Recreation & Waterfront department, squatted in the woods of the city’s Intervale, digging with a hand in the dead leaves. Cahill was looking for the first signs of fiddleheads, the whorled shoots of the ostrich fern that mark the arrival of spring.…
An Ethiopian Graffiti Artist Visits Vermont
Many artists train themselves through mimicry and adaptation. For Ethiopian Behulum Mengistu, 24, that wasn’t feasible; when he was a teenager and budding graffiti artist, his native Amharic alphabet had no script workable for street art. He had to translate it himself. Mengistu’s inventiveness and creative enterprise have carried him around the globe — and…
UVM Prof and Cheese Book Author Wins James Beard Award
Last week, University of Vermont food sciences professor Catherine Donnelly took home a James Beard Foundation award for her 2016 book The Oxford Companion to Cheese. Working with an international team of writers and editors, Donnelly edited and compiled the 888-page encyclopedia over several years, covering topics ranging from cheese history to cultures and types…
Vermonter Aims to Save Our Water — One Laundry Load at a Time
Garbage-strewn beaches have always moved Rachael Miller. As a child, she doggedly picked up trash along the New Jersey shore, where her grandparents had a summer place, and would become outraged if she saw marine debris while sailing. When she was 16 and vacationing in Bermuda, her grandparents had to restrain her from berating a…
Gallery Profile: BigTown Gallery Vergennes
British transplant Anni Mackay opened BigTown Gallery in Rochester in 2003, several years after trading New York’s hustle and bustle for Vermont’s slower rhythms.* Over the past decade, Mackay has smoothed and polished her gem of a gallery. She’s built a quietly impressive roster of more than 30 artists from around the region and beyond. One of…
Free Will Astrology (5/3/17)
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): When poet Wislawa Szymborska delivered her speech for winning the Nobel Prize, she said that “whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.” She added that, for a poet, there really is no such thing as the “ordinary world,” “ordinary life” and “the ordinary course of events.”…
Eat This Week, May 3 to 9, 2017: Tipsy Trails
Time to don your walking shoes: Cocktail Walk kicks off its 2017 summer season on Main Street in Winooski this Thursday. Mix and mingle with other locals while sipping creative cocktails — many featuring crystal-clear Snowdrop gin from Saxtons River Distillery — crafted by the fine barkeeps at Misery Loves Co., Mule Bar and Waterworks Food +…
Dumpster Divers Go Gourmet — With ‘Garbage’
Rose Thackeray parked her Honda Accord behind the Price Chopper on Burlington’s Shelburne Road one recent afternoon and walked to the compost receptacles at the rear of the building. She arrived with a canvas Whole Foods Market shopping bag to fill with food and an open mind about what to cook for dinner. Thackeray, a…
Bove’s Creates Nostalgic Catering Room at Sauce Factory
In December 2015, after nearly 74 years in business, Bove’s restaurant on Pearl Street in Burlington closed its doors, and its fans lamented the loss. Now they can taste Bove’s specialties again in an atmosphere reminiscent of the restaurant … on special occasions. Last year, when the Bove family moved their sauce manufacturing operation from…
