The Performing Arts Preview Issue 2015
Performing Arts Preview 2015-16; the Rising Cost of College in Vermont; Pondfest Organizers Allege Police Harassment; A Guid to Dining on Theater Nights
Cover Story
Performing Arts Preview 2015-16
“Good evening, and thanks for joining us at the beginning of the 2015-16 performing arts season! It is my duty and my honor to thank our sponsors, without whom we couldn’t do this…” So said Steve MacQueen last Thursday at his season’s debut act, the Sweet Remains, in the FlynnSpace, and the remarks are familiar…
Free Will Astrology (9/16/2015)
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I won’t go so far as to say that you are surrounded by unhinged maniacs whose incoherence is matched only by their self-delusion. That would probably be too extreme. But I do suspect that at least some of the characters in the game you’re playing are not operating at their full…
Anybody’s Business? Phil Scott’s Rivals Question Contract Conflict
For the past 15 years, Phil Scott has served as a state senator and lieutenant governor while simultaneously running DuBois Construction, a Middlesex excavation business he co-owns. During that time, DuBois did $3.79 million worth of business with the state — an average of $252,335 a year. Through eight election campaigns, Scott’s political adversaries never…
Impetuous Vixen
“So, is this a wedding up in Waitsfield?” I asked the two couples riding in my taxi. It was early afternoon. Oh, that was dumb, I upbraided myself. Though they were nicely attired, their duds were too casual for a wedding. “No, we have reservations for a dinner,” explained the blond-haired woman in the back.…
Pavement to Plate: Vermont’s Game Wardens Help Harvest Roadkill
“Last night it was pretty bloody in here,” Jeff Houde said with a slight grin, gesturing around his East Burke trailer. Dressed in camo Crocs and a Nike T-shirt, Houde explained that a game warden had stopped by with a dead moose that had been hit by a car. By the next day, Houde, a…
Barely Educational: A student exposes his summer job — at a strip club
Originally published August 26, 1998 Excerpt: Summer’s nearly over, and those of us heading back to institutions of so-called higher learning must be prepared for the perennial small-talk question: “What did you do over the summer?” I’ve had my share of pretty typical jobs — an ice cream stand here, a retail store there. But…
Composer Ben Vida on Process, Psychoacoustics
Ben Vida asks a lot of questions. In fact, asking questions — and rarely expecting to find an answer — might be the central tenet of the experimental composer’s voluminous body of work. Brooklyn-based Vida, 41, has been an acclaimed artist in the international experimental music world for two decades. He was a cofounder of…
Do the Math: College Tuition Is Rising Faster Than Inflation
Alex Reid, a 17-year-old from California, sat on the front porch of a dormitory at Champlain College, where she just started her freshman year. She typed on her laptop, swayed to music emanating from a portable speaker, and chatted with other students in shorts and T-shirts, happily soaking up their first tastes of college life.…
Art Review: ‘Memory Works’: SculptFest2015
Memory may seem like a puzzling rubric for a sculpture exhibit. Sculpture is generally permanent, whereas memory is ephemeral and unreliable. Yet “Memory Work” is the theme of this year’s annual SculptFest at the Carving Studio & Sculpture Center in West Rutland. Guest curator DJ Hellerman, chief curator and director of exhibitions at Burlington City…
The Fobs, Creepin On You
(Self-released, digital download) Despite the plural name, the Fobs are a one-man band. The guy behind the curtain is Ethan Tapper, probably best known for fronting the “kazoo-core” gonzo Americana outfit the Burlington Bread Boys. After dropping two full-length albums in 2014, that crew is on indefinite hiatus. Tapper’s newest project is about a billion…
Reviving the Bosnian Lilies Dance Group
The five dancers rehearsing at the North End Studios last Wednesday weren’t clothed in typical dance wear: They sported T-shirts, jeans, a tennis dress, work pants, sneakers and sandals. Their choreography was also atypical — it came from Bosnia. The dancers — four women and one man — are members of the Bosnian Lilies, a…
The Oleo Romeos, Haunted Hearts
(Lunch Pail Music, CD) Haunted Hearts is the third release from Vermont’s Oleo Romeos. As front man and guitarist Tyrone Shaw writes in a note to Seven Days, the album comes “a mere seven years” after their the group’s sophomore release, Check Please. Despite that lag, it doesn’t seem like too much has changed for…
Hospitals Oppose Proposal for an Independent Surgical Center
More than 5,000 freestanding surgical centers have sprung up across the country since 1970, including 23 in New Hampshire and 116 in New York. But Vermont has just one: South Burlington’s Eye Surgery Center opened in 2008. Now an investor group with nine members — most of them doctors — wants to open the state’s…
Spoiler Alert: How a Burlington Restaurateur Served Bernie Sanders
Bove’s Café is a landmark in Burlington, and Bernie Sanders is arguably the restaurant’s most recognizable regular. He has dined in the Old North End Italian joint for decades and touted its Old-World charm and reasonable prices during his presidential campaign. But his relationship with Bove’s goes well beyond heaping plates of pasta. Three decades…
The Visit
[image-1] Something in us yearns to see M. Night Shyamalan make a comeback. The writer-director’s early triumphs — especially The Sixth Sense (1999) — were so perfect that we don’t want to believe they were flukes. Surely there’s more where they came from, we tell ourselves, and time after time we come away let down…
Meru
Why do people climb mountains? Why do people do anything painful and arduous that they don’t have to do? Meru, a documentary about three climbers’ quest to be the first to conquer a 21,000-foot Himalayan peak, doesn’t answer those questions definitively — just memorably. In interview footage, Jon Krakauer, the journalist and mountaineer who wrote…
Letters to the Editor (9/16/15)
What About Adjuncts? Great, evenhanded article about this issue [“Are You My Employer? Labor Dispute Divides Vermont,” September 2]. How about a follow-up that asks the same questions about all of the adjunct professors who work for the University of Vermont, Champlain College, Saint Michael’s College, Community College of Vermont and other schools across the…
Are Police Profiling Music Festivalgoers?
Backwoods Pondfest is billed as a laid-back weekend of music, dancing, partying and camping in New York’s North Country woods. This year’s ninth annual festival was held from August 7 to 9 in Peru and featured 22 bands from around the country. But festival organizers are complaining that the overzealous police enforcement seen at the…
I Can’t Seem to Last Very Long in Bed
Dear Athena, I can’t seem to last very long in bed. I’m embarrassed. My girlfriend is being cool, but I think it’s actually bothering her a lot. That makes it worse. For some reason I just lose it really fast, and then she hasn’t had a chance to come. I’m not really into giving oral,…
Soundbites: Fall Rock and Roll Preview
Fall In If you’re like most people, you tear into this music section the minute Seven Days hits the newsstands every Wednesday, because you just can’t stand to wait any longer to find out what I have to say. OK, fine. Nobody does that. You probably first check the I-Spy section to see if you’ve…
New Book ‘Wines of Vermont’ Traces Vine Vintages
In the past two decades, Vermont’s wine business has grown from a hobbyist fringe ferment to more than a dozen commercial wineries. Most industry folks credit the development to new hybrid grapes — the vast majority released in the past 20 years — that marry the cold-hardiness of North American wild grapes with the more wine-friendly…
An Early Peek at Telluride Film Fest Faves
This past Labor Day weekend, the small ski town of Telluride, Colo., drew big stars such as Meryl Streep, Michael Keaton and Idris Elba. They showed up for screenings of their latest work at the Telluride Film Festival — an event to which snowy Vermont has no direct equivalent. But locals do have the chance…
Farrell Takes on g. housen’s Vermont Bevvies
Next month, two of Vermont’s leading beverage distributors, Farrell Distributing and g. housen, will become one when the former annexes the latter’s Vermont beverage portfolio. Besides dozens of domestic and imported brews, Farrell will represent Vermont’s Lost Nation Brewing, von Trapp Brewing, Foley Brothers Brewing, and ciders from Eden Ice Cider and Shacksbury Cider. The…
Where to Eat Before and After the Show
Most people who make a dinner-and-a-show date have their minds fixed on the glow of the footlights. But sometimes the meal ends up making the night. Take, for instance, the day my mom took me to see Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. Even as a musical-obsessed 9-year-old, I knew there wasn’t much memorable about slavishly restaged excerpts…
Public House Keeps It Fresh in Quechee
Restaurant lifer Andrew Schain and his business partner, Scott Bacon, took their time finding a space for their new business. The pair searched from Rutland to Woodstock before they chose 5813 Woodstock Road in Quechee, the former home of Shepard’s Pie. Their goal, Schain recalls, was to open not an upscale restaurant or gastropub, but…
Fried Chicken and Hospitality at Montpelier’s Down Home
Mary Alice Proffitt didn’t have much of a voice left on Monday morning following the soft opening of her Montpelier restaurant, Down Home kitchen. “When you cross over the threshold into Down Home, you’re crossing over the Mason-Dixon Line,” she said through a rasp. For Proffitt, southern hospitality translates to making friends with everyone who…
