November 8 • 2017
Researcher and Activist Bob Melamede Says Marijuana Is a Miracle Drug; Women Rock the Burlington Music Scene; UVM’s New Dining Hall
Cover Story
Researcher and Activist Bob Melamede Considers Marijuana a Miracle Drug
Bob Melamede was pissed off, which seemed out of character for a laid-back guy who laughs a lot. Plus, he’d begun the day as he always does — by ingesting 80 to 100 milligrams of oil containing tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive compound in cannabis. That’s enough THC to leave most stoners blissed out for hours. But…
Seriously: On the Cannabeat
In this episode, Bryan celebrates the launch of Seven Days’ new Vermont Cannabeat site and speaks with weed about efforts to legalize marijuana in Vermont. CREDITS Written, filmed and edited by: Bryan Parmelee Photography/artwork by: Matthew Thorsen, Bryan Parmelee, Dreamstime.com Logo/art direction by: Don Eggert Backdrop mural by: Anthill Collective Music/audio by: Bryan Parmelee/Freesound.org “Legalize…
Obituary: Robert Kort, 1951-2017
Embraced by family, Robert Lawrence Kort’s curious and courageous spirit left his body in Groton, Mass., on November 10, 2017, after a two-year experience with advanced prostate cancer. Born the son of Marion and Roy Kort in 1951, Robert grew up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He graduated from Syracuse University SUNY College as a forest engineer…
Obituary: Martin Levitt, 1926-2017
Martin Levitt died peacefully November 1, 2017, at Ethan Allen Residence in Burlington, Vt., his home for the past three years, surrounded by the loving kindness of staff and residents. Born February 2, 1926, in New York City, Martin was the only child of Sara (Hollander) Levitt and Samuel Levitt. Proud to be descended from…
The Parmelee Post: New Telecom To Provide Complete Loss of Faith in Local Government at Gigabit Speeds
A new bidder has emerged in Burlington City Council’s seemingly endless attempt to select a buyer for Burlington Telecom. Burlington-based Swirlington Telecom Inc. entered a bid Friday promising residents a complete and utter loss of faith in their elected officials at speeds well above one gigabit per second. “We took a long, hard look at…
Obituary: John “Ken” Lawless, 1939-2017
John “Ken” Lawless passed away on Friday, October 13, 2017, at the University of Vermont Medical Center. Ken was born August 28, 1939, in Saranac Lake, N.Y., and was the son of John and Marguerite Lawless. Ken Lawless was a writer, educator, performer and activist who had lived in Burlington since 1999. A lifelong activist,…
![Mill Girls [SIV510]](https://i0.wp.com/www.sevendaysvt.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/episode510.webp?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1)
Mill Girls [SIV510]
11/4/17: Mill Girls is a new play with music that illuminates the lives of 19th century young women who toiled in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. Compiled and written by Peter Harrigan and Tom Cleary, a lively cast of students act, dance and sing traditional songs and original compositions. The two weekend run at Saint…
Album Review: Blowtorch, ‘Justice or Else’
(Self-released, digital download, vinyl) By the time I arrived on Earth in the early 1990s, punk music was already in the throes of an awkward and possibly well-deserved death, its coffin lined with clearance-sale Hot Topic T-shirts. The formula was stretched too thin, the scene too toxic, and almost everyone needed a break from thrashing…
Album Review: Eastern Mountain Time, ‘Mountain Country’
(Macadam Blight Records, digital download, vinyl) Sean Hood is consumed with inevitability. Throughout the 10 tracks of his band Eastern Mountain Time’s latest album, Mountain Country, he writes and sings with a leery and foreboding self-awareness. Losing, he seems to suggest, is as habitual as the vices evidenced by the empty bottles and cigarette butts…
Ask Athena: My Wife Has a Health Condition— How Can I Reignite Our Sex Life?
Dear Athena, My wife and I are in our forties and are in a strong relationship. She has, however, been struggling with a chronic health condition for several years that leaves her in pain and sleep-deprived most of the time, despite consultations and interventions with many medical experts. So, she is understandably not in the…
Questions Arise About Heroic Response to DCF Worker Shooting
Washington County State’s Attorney Scott Williams stood on the floor of the Vermont Senate a year ago to accept a national award for heroism. In front of an audience that included Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and then-governor-elect Phil Scott, Williams received a Carnegie Hero Fund Commission medal for attempting to save the life of Department…
Work: Stephanie Cramer Helps Deaf Bhutanese
Name: Stephanie Cramer Town: Waitsfield Job: Sign language interpreter Stephanie Cramer has made a career out of learning new languages. And key to mastering any language, whether spoken or signed, she says, is cultural immersion. After graduating from college with a major in communication disorders, Cramer learned American Sign Language by living and working with…
Soundbites: View From the Top; Robots in Disguise
Just under a year ago, Burlington bid adieu to the city-owned, all-ages DIY venue 242 Main. The club provided a substance-free creative space to Vermont’s youth for more than 30 years. Municipal entities such as Burlington Parks, Recreation & Waterfront, the Fletcher Free Library, and Burlington City Arts each retained governance over the scrappy music…
Art Review: ‘El Yuma: Contemporary Cuban Art,’ McCarthy Arts Center Gallery
Since former president Barack Obama eased restrictions on Cuba-U.S. relations in late 2014, America’s awareness of its island neighbor has slowly grown, seeping into public consciousness from a foggy realm of exile. Maybe you know someone who’s made the trip, returning with the requisite photographs of 1950s cars or even with the classic contraband of…
Page 32: Short Takes on Five Vermont Books
Seven Days writers can’t possibly read, much less review, all the books that arrive in a steady stream by post, email and, in one memorable case, a gaggle of geese. So this monthly feature is our way of introducing you to five books by Vermont authors. To do that, we contextualize each book just a…
Eat This Week, November 8 to 14, 2017: Sharing the Wealth
The requested price of admission to the ninth annual Food and Wine Festival at Shelburne Vineyard is a donation of food for the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf. Bring a non-perishable food item (or two or three) to mark the harvest’s end and the approaching holidays. The vineyard offers wine tastings all day, with food from…
14th Star Brewing Considers Options as Smokin’ Butt’s Moves On
Smokin’ Butt’s Bar-B-Q, which opened in September 2016 at 14th Star Brewing in St. Albans, will close on December 17. Owners David and Terry Burbo, who operate their business in the brewery at 133 North Main Street, are moving to North Carolina, according to bartender Eric Hodgson. A post on the 14th Star Facebook page…
Vermont Legislature Poised to Approve Legal Weed in 2018
Bettors could prudently put their money on this prediction: Effective July 1, possession of up to an ounce of marijuana will be legal for adults in Vermont. After two years of dramatic legislative twists and turns over whether to make marijuana legal, all indications are that this proposal is headed for passage in 2018. When…
Book Review: ‘Telling My Father’ by James Crews
In the early 2000s, just as cellphones became ubiquitous, I inadvertently overheard my seatmate on a train tell his father he was gay. “Dad, Frank is not just my best friend,” the stranger said into his phone. Inches away, I pretended to be engrossed in my book, but my whole body tensed, anticipating the father’s…
Master Storyteller Recille Hamrell Has Inspired Generations
The Shelburne Vineyard routinely attracts visitors who come to sip wine straight from the source. On those occasions, oenophiles gather around the large wooden bar in the center of the tasting room. But, once a month, a small group ventures upstairs to a loft-turned-stage that looks out over the bar. The participants vary in age,…
Queen City Brewery Expands in Burlington
Queen City Brewery has rented the storefront space connected to its brewery and tasting room at 703B Pine Street in Burlington, brewmaster Paul Hale said. The brewery that opened in June 2014 is leasing the space that previously housed Swish, a cleaning supply company. The two sections of the building were once connected, and reconnecting…
Lake Carmi Pollution Triggers Call for Stricter Regulation of Dairy Farms
The thick layer of toxic blue-green algae that shut down late-summer swimming in Lake Carmi is receding. Whitecaps moved across the water on a gray November day last week, and trees bearing flashes of autumn color dotted the sloping landscape that surrounds the lake in dairy-rich Franklin County. The water, though still tainted here and…
Letters to the Editor (11/8/17)
Some Switcheroo [Re Off Message: “City Councilor Quits Job to Vote on Burlington Telecom Sale,” November 2]: Are there no ethical standards in Burlington politics? Sam Conant Milton Fully Nelson [Re “Fifty Years, 13,450 Students and 5,000 Interviews: UVM’s Garrison Nelson Calls It a Career,” October 18]: Garrison Nelson was one of the best professors,…
Seven Questions for New Lyric Theatre Director José Rincon
In September, Vermont’s Lyric Theatre named a new executive director, José Rincon. The Burlington native replaces longtime Lyric ED Syndi Zook, who served in that role for 13 years. Her run culminated in the recent opening of new headquarters in South Burlington that, for the first time in the group’s 43-year history, house all of…
Johnson’s Bread Oven Draws Community Together
Just as a new home inspires a housewarming party, a new wood-fired oven beckons an oven warming. On October 28, Johnson residents answered just such a culinary call to action on the grassy Legion Field beside Johnson Elementary School. The town of about 3,300 was celebrating an event that was a year in the making:…
Movie Review: ‘Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold’ Could Make Viewers Re-Evaluate an Icon
Stand long enough on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., in front of the Harvard Coop, and every cultural figure of consequence will come to you. That’s not an exaggeration. Because it’s within the bubble of privilege that is Harvard, people who create the artifacts of our age are pulled…
Free Will Astrology (11/8/17)
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Remember the time, all those years ago, when the angels appeared to you on the playground and showed you how and why to kiss the sky? I predict that a comparable visitation will arrive soon. And do you recall the dreamy sequence in adolescence when you first plumbed the sublime mysteries…
Cartoonist Ali Fitzgerald Explores Immigration in New Novel
When cartoonist Ali Fitzgerald moved to Berlin, Germany, nearly a decade ago, she had no plans to write a graphic memoir. At the age of 25, wary of stagnating in a university teaching post, she decided to satisfy her curiosity about the European city. Now, Fitzgerald is wrapping up her first graphic memoir, a work…
Bev Colston’s Mission: to Serve UVM’s Students of Color
By the time Bev Colston attended college in the 1970s, the Black Power and Black Is Beautiful movements had left a deep impression on her. “I was a young teen in the late ’60s, when these movements were at their height, and benefited from the power and pride they imbued on young, black-identified folks like…
Canadian Brewery Moosehead Files Lawsuit Against Rutland’s Hop’n Moose
A Canadian beer maker has sued a Vermont craft brewery that it claims infringed on its trademarked logo: a moose head. The aptly named Moosehead Breweries, headquartered in Saint John, New Brunswick, alleges that Hop’n Moose Brewing, an establishment on Center Street in Rutland, uses such a similar image on its beer labels “as to…
Caroline Rose, Hammydown and Julia Caesar Present a Female-Forward Night of Music
Cultural conversations constantly fluctuate, expand and evolve, and the buzziest topic at this year’s roundtable is power: who has it, how they retain it and how it might best be distributed among those systemically deprived of it. Lately, formerly local singer-songwriters Caroline Rose and Abbie Morin have been thinking a lot about power, especially with…
The Brazile Brouhaha: New Book Underscores Strife In Democratic Ranks
The revelations landed like a bomb in Democratic Party circles last Thursday. Spicy excerpts from a new memoir by former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile included allegations that the 2016 primary was “rigged” against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and that the Hillary Clinton campaign had effectively seized control of the party. There’s been some…
Movie Review: The Funny Is Strong With ‘Thor: Ragnarok’
The Marvel movies use laughter as their secret weapon, walking a fine line between comic relief and outright self-spoofing. Comedy bridges the gap between lifelong fans and those who are just along for the ride; you don’t have to know what the Infinity Stones are (I didn’t) to enjoy jokes at the expense of tropes…
WTF: Why Do City Sidewalks Sometimes Just End?
Sidewalks have been around since ancient Roman times. City dwellers take them for granted, but — with a nod to children’s poet Shel Silverstein — there is a place where the sidewalk ends. One Burlington-based Seven Days reader, presumably expecting pedestrian walkways on both sides, wondered why some streets have just one sidewalk and some…
Eating and Learning in UVM’s New Dining Hall
When Melissa Zelazny was a student at the University of Vermont in the early 1980s, she ate a lot of macaroni and cheese. Zelazny was a runner and hurdler on the track team, and eating carbohydrates was standard practice for runners. And that was the kind of food readily available in the dining halls. “You…
Old Post to Open in Former Franny O’s
The black Hummer parked outside 733 Queen City Park Road in South Burlington has vanity license plates that read MRSRULE. Inside, you’ll find the owner of the car, Kim Rouille (pronounced rule). She’s the owner of the Old Post, a refurbished bar in the space that will serve casual pub fare. A soft opening is…
Mexican Restaurant Agave Coming to Maple Tree Place
The restaurateurs who own Grazers at Maple Tree Place in Williston are launching a neighboring business, Agave. Business partners Sam Handy, Patrick Stewart and Don Johnson expect to open the Mexican restaurant at 28 Walnut Street on November 28, Handy said. Agave will succeed Mexicali Grill & Cantina, which was in business at that address…
