Rebecca Mamy and Kongwa Shangalume stepped off a plane at Burlington International Airport in February 2019, anxious to settle into their new country. A refugee caseworker escorted the Congolese couple to a cluster of townhouse-style apartments in Winooski, where a two-bedroom unit at 300 Main Street had been reserved for them and their two young…
The air was cool and crisp as I walked out of the lobby of a posh urban hotel in Washington, D.C. I was three years sober, and I was about to perform a set of songs that told the story of my addiction and recovery for an audience of politicians, doctors and health care industry…
Welcome, Jamie Lewis! Jamie Lewis is the new general manager of the Plainfield Co-op. The Plainfield Co-op is pleased to welcome Jamie Lewis as our new general manager! Jamie grew up in East Montpelier and has lived in Vermont his whole life. He says that, professionally, he feels “most at home” in co-ops, having worked…
Farewell, Peter Youngbaer! Thank you for all you have done as general manager to help us survive during such perilous times. Despite dozens of challenges unique to the Plainfield Co-op — many of them rooted in our lovable, cranky building — you stuck it out. Despite being served up dozens of reasons to scream and…
Values of faith, family and hard work formed the foundation of a Burlington woman’s life
There’s a special place in my heart for any book that breaks a reading slump. I had been pushing books aside in favor of scrolling through the Twittersphere and falling more and more behind on my Goodreads challenge. But when I picked up Sarah Stewart Taylor’s A Distant Grave, the second novel in her Maggie…
new in theaters CLIFFORD THE BIG RED DOG: The children’s books about a beloved giant pet come to the screen in a semi-live-action adventure starring Darby Camp, Jack Whitehall and John Cleese. Walt Becker (Old Dogs) directed. (97 min, PG. Starts Tuesday, November 9, at Essex, Star.) ETERNALS: The latest Marvel adventure introduces a new…
Brad Kessler’s North is a novel about being rooted in a sense of place — and uprooted. It opens with a May blizzard forecast for northern Vermont. Christopher Gathreaux, the cloistered abbot of Blue Mountain Monastery, rushes to cover his precious Northern Spy saplings. Out plowing the next morning, Teddy Fletcher, the monastery groundskeeper and…
When people think of Alzheimer’s disease, they often think of tragic stories of decline and loss. But South Burlington author Dana Walrath saw a different side when her mother, Alice, developed the disease and moved in with her. In her 2016 graphic memoir, Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass, Walrath, a medical anthropologist, tells of…
Shira Habermehl didn’t see many cows growing up in Queens, N.Y., or on Long Island, where her family moved later. Even after she started at the University of Vermont in 2015, Habermehl had never had a close encounter with a bovine, though Burlington, she realized, “is a bubble.” By the time Habermehl moved to Richmond…
(Self-released, digital) I love a good mystery album. They usually arrive by email in the form of a link to a record the artist invariably recorded at home. No lyrics, no descriptions, just that link to a passion project, often made by someone with no designs on pushing the record. Louis John Louis’ self-titled debut…
More than 1,000 new apartments are expected to be ready for occupancy in Chittenden County by the end of 2022. But they probably won’t make a dent in the area’s housing shortage, planners and analysts say. It will take years of construction before Vermont’s most populous county reaches a healthy balance between the number of…
(Self-released, CD, digital) In 2021, the best reason to release a CD as opposed to going digital-only is to offer an extra with the disc. Newfane trip-hop duo Coyote Reverie, consisting of singer-songwriter Meadow Eliz and rapper/producer Stresselbee, included an eye-catching lyrics-and-art booklet with its debut recording, Imah. Eliz’s surreal collage work lines the booklet’s…
Cover Contrast [Re Seven Days cover, October 27: “Rescue Lines: Public health expert Tracy Dolan readies Vermont for Afghan arrivals” and “Scenes From Sears Lane: Burlington shuts down a South End homeless encampment”]: Anyone see the irony? Homes for Afghan refugees — many of them never vetted — coming from a 12th-century “culture” and homeless…
To an ice hockey team, going “net-zero” sounds like a crushing defeat in which no pucks landed in the opponent’s goal. But for Union Arena Community Center in Woodstock, achieving net-zero was a hard-fought win that should keep the indoor ice rink in the game for years to come. In mid-June, the nonprofit community skating…
On January 28, 1986, the 17 students in Roger Crowley’s fifth-grade class at Union Elementary School in Montpelier, along with parents and other visitors, gathered in his classroom to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. The spacecraft crew included New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe, with whom Crowley’s students had corresponded. She had sent…
With “Unbound,” at Burlington’s BCA Center, curator Heather Ferrell has created a remarkably coherent exhibition of abstract work by Rachel Gross, Rob Hitzig and Kirsten Reynolds. All three artists work in painted wood and reject the rectangular frame, that impersonal and limiting traditional format in art and architecture. They’re also linked by a playful interest…
SCORPIO (Oct.23-Nov.21): To encourage young people to come to its shows, the English National Opera has offered a lot of cheap tickets. Here’s another incentive: Actors sing in English, not Italian or French or German. Maybe most enticing for audiences is that they are encouraged to boo the villains. The intention is to make attendees…
Travel nurses, who move from state to state and work on short-term contracts, are meant to be used as Band-Aids — temporarily filling jobs long enough for hospitals to recruit permanent staff. But as the pandemic drives health care workers from the profession, some Vermont hospitals have come to rely on travelers as a form…
It’s a Cinderella startup story: Vermont engineer/entrepreneur Kyle Clark teamed up with Martine Rothblatt, who built Sirius Satellite Radio, to create a company that aims to save people — and the planet. With Rothblatt’s help, Clark’s Beta Technologies is racing to build an electric vertical aircraft that can deliver cargo without leaving a carbon footprint.…
Dear Reverend, I have been out of the dating pool for quite a while, so when I recently put a toe back in the water, I was frozen out! I am concerned about sexually transmitted diseases, so I brought up the subject before things became too intimate — it’s not the kind of thing I’d…
The wind picked up, ripping through the tall grass and bushes and carrying a hint of the coming winter. Nicole Nelson walked out of the Burlington house she shares with her partner in life and music, Dwight Ritcher, arms loaded with firewood. While she fed the outdoor fireplace, Ritcher and I smiled appreciatively, two shivering…
Halloween has come and gone, but some of us like to watch creepy movies year-round. Netflix recently released Fever Dream, a Spanish-language film based on Argentine author Samanta Schweblin’s acclaimed 2014 book of the same name. Claudia Llosa (The Milk of Sorrow) directed from a script cowritten with Schweblin. The deal Something is wrong with…
Shelburne resident Rachel Smith feels like she’s living under a blanket of stress these days. Everyone in her household is vaccinated except for her 6-year-old daughter, and the family has assumed “an extra level of caution” in order to protect their youngest member, Smith said. She allows her 17-year-old son to hang out with just…
Last year, Kendra and Rob Knapik introduced a small flock of sheep to their vineyard in the Lake Champlain Islands. Established in 2018, Ellison Estate Vineyard is located on land in Grand Isle that was formerly occupied by East Shore Vineyard and is home to some of the oldest vines in the state. The couple…
For the April 2014 issue of Met Golfer magazine, 26-year-old Randy Camacho posed in spotless chef whites with a tall toque on his close-shaved head. The Westchester Country Club sous chef was maneuvering microgreens onto a plated salad — with tweezers. These days, Camacho, now 33, tucks his dark, curly hair into a knit hat…
Maudite Poutine has anchored Burlington’s poutine scene since it launched as a food cart on the Church Street Marketplace in December 2016. Now, co-owners Joe, Leah and Michael Collier are bringing their fries, gravy and cheese curds to the former Drifter’s space at 156 North Winooski Avenue. The brick-and-mortar location will be Maudite’s second; the…
Stephen Coggio, executive chef of Cloud 9 Caterers, has launched a Colchester pop-up called Qué Rico Taquería as a test for a planned restaurant. For his first takeout event, on October 28 at the catering business’ headquarters at 142 Hegeman Avenue, Coggio presold all 100 tacos filled with tongue or tripe within 40 minutes, he…
Wife, mother and former American Airlines agent loved travel and life’s simple pleasures
In the Margins Thursday 4 Vermont Studio Center presents a virtual poetry panel, “Borders Inside and Outside: Poets on Crafting Roots (Routes).” Indonesian American author of Fire Is Not a Country Cynthia Dewi Oka (pictured), award-winning Navajo poet Jake Skeets and accomplished Mexican American writer Vanessa Angélica Villarreal read from their work and discuss themes…
