A Reporting Trip Proves That One Good Story Leads to Another

This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2025.

Something I love about journalism is how one good story can lead to another, often when you least expect it.

In April, I was in New York City following around expat comedian Tina Friml for a cover profile before her run of homecoming shows in Burlington later that month. In a fortuitous twist, Friml had booked “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and just happened to be taping while I was in town. I couldn’t tag along for her set at NBC Studios, but Friml had invited me to crash the watch party with her friends and family later that night at a mocktail bar in the East Village. “It’ll be fun!” she’d texted. “And there’ll be some Vermont folks there, too.”

Indeed, the first person I encountered by the bar was local singer Josh Panda, looking ever the rocker in a sleeveless T-shirt and leather jacket. On a stool next to him was his bandmate in the Grift, Clint Bierman.

In my nearly two decades of covering Vermont music and arts, and many years performing prior to that, somehow I had never crossed paths with Bierman, a fixture in the Addison County music scene since the 1990s. We joked about having to come to Manhattan to finally meet, which was doubly ironic since we’re now basically neighbors: He lives in Middlebury; I’ve been in Vergennes for five years.

We chatted about what we’d been listening to lately, local and otherwise, before the conversation turned to … the Shweebee.

“I’m sorry, the what?” I said with a confused chuckle, not sure I’d heard him correctly.

“The Shweebee!” Bierman chirped. “It’s the yard game I invented.”

I slugged back my mocktail and looked him dead in the eye: “Tell me more.”

You see, I am something of a yard game aficionado. If it’s objectively dumb, has a silly name, requires a weirdly specific skill, and can be enjoyed on a lawn or a beach while holding a beer, there’s a good chance I’ve played it, own it and/or have spent an embarrassing amount of time getting good it. Cornhole? Polish horseshoes? Kan Jam? Mölkky? Game on.

Shweebee, Bierman explained, involves throwing a disc at or between a pair of poles topped by red Solo-like cups and includes a proprietary mechanism for ejecting said cups into the air when the disc strikes. The goofy name is a contraction of “Should we be” — as in: “Should we be playing Shweebee?” In short, I loved everything about it. And I knew we had to write about it.

My duties as an editor sometimes limit my availability to write, so I passed the idea on to reporter Ken Picard when I got home. He followed up the next month, as Bierman was putting Shweebee into production, and had a blast doing it, calling the game “serious backyard fun.”

Sadly, I still haven’t had a chance to play Shweebee myself. Here’s hoping Bierman and I won’t have to meet up in New York City again to rectify that.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Longest Distance Traveled for a Story Tip”