Seven Days, June 24, 2020 by Seven Days

INSIDE!

Introducing Staytripper, a monthly road map to adventures around Vermont

V ER MON Tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S INDE P ENDE NT V O IC E JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020 VOL.25 NO.39 SEVENDAYSVT.COM

JULY 2020

Paddle Pushers Vermont Canoe & Kayak dips into the Lamoille River

Remote R&R A Green Mountain getaway to Highland Lodge

Hit the Road Sightseeing in Barre, Shelburne and Hubbardton

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Paddle Pushers

Vermont Canoe & Kayak dips into the Lamoille River

Remote R&R

A Green Mountain getaway to Highland Lodge

Hit the Road

Rising Stars How the pandemic propelled a Vermont baking company into the national spotlight BY MEL I SSA PASAN E N, PAGE 2 8

Sightseeing in Barre, Shelburne and Hubbardton

Kitschy Cool

Offbeat attractions around the state

To-Go Go-Tos Local snacks to pack for the drive

Are We There Yet? An activity page for little travelers

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SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

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WEEK IN REVIEW JUNE 17-24,2020

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JAMES BUCK

COMPILED BY GILLIAN ENGLISH, SASHA GOLDSTEIN & MATTHEW ROY

GRILLING THE CHIEF Protesters last week in front of Mayor Miro Weinberger’s house

Burlington city councilors quizzed acting Police Chief Jon Murad for more than two hours on Monday night about the police department’s budget. The conversation centered on demands from activists that the city cut 30 percent of its police force, remove officers from schools and fire cops who have engaged in violent behavior. Department brass and the police union have argued that an immediate 30 percent cut would be dangerous. “It’s got to be done in a way that is intelligent and intentional,” Murad said Monday night. “You can’t turn off the only responsive agency without building viable alternatives.” Most councilors gave no real indication of how they’ll vote on — or seek to modify — Mayor Miro Weinberger’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal, which includes trims of $1.1 million, or 6 percent, from the police budget he originally proposed. The vote is scheduled for June 29. The mayor’s plan would leave 12 officer positions vacant but otherwise keep the department intact. Just $300,000 of the savings would be diverted to programs that promote racial justice; the remaining $800,000 would help fill a $12 million coronavirus-related budget deficit. “If we’re cutting 6 percent, that money needs to be reallocated directly to communities,” Councilor Perri Freeman (P-Central District) said. Freeman suggested funding programs that help people of color, the homeless and those struggling with mental illness.

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Vermont will implement its plastic-bag ban on July 1, though other states have delayed theirs because of the coronavirus pandemic. Waste not.

GAME CHANGER

VTDigger.org reported that at least 50 people may have gotten the coronavirus after attending a March UVM playoff basketball game. No-win situation.

DENUCLEARIZED ZONE

A tractor-trailer hauling a cask used to store Vermont Yankee’s spent nuclear fuel rods overturned in Andover. At least the container was empty.

TOPFIVE

MOST POPULAR ITEMS ON SEVENDAYSVT.COM

1. “Magic Hat Brewing Is Leaving Vermont, Zero Gravity Will Expand” by Sasha Goldstein. Magic Hat Brewing will shift production from South Burlington to Rochester, N.Y. 2. “Vermont’s Back-to-School Rules Mandate Masks, Temperature Checks and Sanitizer” by Alison Novak. Vermont’s schoolchildren will return this fall to vastly different school systems, with temperature checks to board school buses and mandatory face coverings. 3. “Inked Over: A Vermont Artist Covers Up Hate Tattoos for Free” by Sasha Goldstein. Mountainside Tattoo & Piercing in Bellows Falls will cover up or remove anyone’s racist or hateful tattoos. 4. “Scott Extends State of Emergency to July 15” by Colin Flanders. The designation extends Gov. Phil Scott’s authority to enact broad measures aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus. 5. “VT House Republicans Decry Reference to ‘Racist’ Trump Tweets in Juneteenth Resolution” by Paul Heintz. Seventeen members of the Vermont House opposed a resolution commemorating the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth last Friday.

tweet of the week Lené Gary @leneagary A view from Vermont today...

STILL NO. 1

Vermont had a historic maple syrup haul this year, clocking in with 2.2 million gallons. That was more than half of the total amount produced in the United States.

WHAT’S KIND IN VERMONT

DAIRY GOOD

COURTESY OF THE AGENCY OF AGRICULTURE, FOOD AND MARKETS

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Freeman was among the protesters who marched to Weinberger’s home last week to amplify demands from the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance. The advocacy group is pushing to divert police funds to other community services. “I just do not think police should be a permanent fixture in schools, period,” Councilor Zoraya Hightower (P-Ward 1) said during the council meeting. “There’s so much evidence, just so much overwhelming evidence, across the country about the negative outcomes that they have.” Cutting 30 percent of the roster would leave Burlington with 75 cops, down from the current 90. The union contract dictates that the newest hires would be the first to go, Murad said, displaying a PowerPoint slide with portraits and bios of the latest recruits. “These are officers who have amazing stories, stories of real dedication to this job,” he said. Murad added that many have “diverse backgrounds” and have been trained in deescalation and how to help vulnerable populations. Councilor Brian Pine (P-Ward 3) said he was pleased to hear that Murad is open to discussing how to reform policing in Burlington. “We may have different ways of getting there, but I think that’s our shared purpose and our shared goal,” he said. “Hopefully we can find a way to do this together by a week from tonight.” Read Courtney Lamdin’s full story and keep up with developments at sevendaysvt.com.

BYE-BYE BAGS

That was the temperature of Lake Champlain in Burlington on Monday — the warmest June reading in records that date back to 1973.

Ploughgate Creamery butter

When Martin Cohn heard the state was purchasing raw milk from struggling farmers to process into goods for the Vermont Foodbank, he pulled out his proverbial Rolodex to try to help. Cohn has amassed plenty of contacts in his 15 years as a member of the Brattleboro Rotary Club, including a one-year stint as club president in 2012. The group is one of 100 Rotary clubs in Vermont and is part of Rotary International, a volunteer service organization whose members work together to solve problems in their communities. Cohn’s calls paid off. In just 10 days, Rotary clubs and members from around the state

donated more than $10,000 to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Market’s milk recovery program. That donation, plus a $60,000 grant from the Vermont Community Foundation, kept 32,000 gallons of milk from going down the drain. The haul will be processed into 48,000 cups of yogurt, 11,500 gallons of 2 percent milk and 440 pounds of butter that will be distributed at the foodbank in Barre. Holy cow. “As Rotarians, we are part of the community,” Cohn said. “This is just a great example of being able to collaboratively help the public.” The state ag agency started the milk recovery program in May to help farmers who were forced to dump milk when COVID-19 shuttered schools and restaurants. Instead of being wasted, the surplus is being processed by

HP Hood in Barre, Green Mountain Creamery in Brattleboro and Ploughgate Creamery in Waitsfield. Dairy giant Cabot Creamery is trucking the goods to the foodbank, where demand has doubled during the pandemic. Ten Rotary clubs contributed to the effort, including those in Manchester, Wallingford and White River Junction. Many drew on funds earmarked for charitable causes, according to Cohn, who hit up his former club first. “I know where the money’s hidden,” he said with a laugh. Carla Lineback, the current president of the Brattleboro Rotary Club, was happy to help. “I don’t like the idea of waste [or] the idea of people going hungry when there’s something literally thrown out,” she said, adding: “It’s something where we could easily make a difference.” COURTNEY LAMDIN SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

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READER REACTION TO RECENT ARTICLES

TO CLARIFY…

Kudos to Margaret Grayson for writing about the impact of the pandemic on chronically ill people [“High Stakes,” June 17]! Chronic illness frequently means invisibility, and fighting to be heard is hard — especially when you have very limited energy, as most of us do. Grayson did a great job of amplifying our voices and sharing complex stories and issues in very few words. I want to clarify some of my comments that were shared in the article. I do receive EBT (food stamp) benefits. The original article stated that I also run a “profitable” life-coaching business. Put those two statements together, and you might think I was scamming the system! There is a lot of information missing, though. I’ve been working toward getting off Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, which is really going against a system that is designed to keep people trapped. It should be simple to get off disability, but it’s next to impossible. I receive food stamps because I’m a participant in a Social Security program called PASS — Plan to Achieve Self-Support. It requires more documentation than you can imagine. It’s even more convoluted because I must use multiple different work incentive programs to achieve my goal, each requiring a whole different set of documentation (under close government scrutiny). My business can’t support me yet, and what I’m doing is the opposite of scamming the system. I’m actually doing all I can to become completely self-sufficient and to end my reliance on government benefits. Cara Sachs

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NEXT DOWN: ETHAN ALLEN?

[Re Off Message: “Burlington Council Passes Mask Mandate, Orders Controversial Mural Removed,” May 19]: Perhaps now is the time to retire Ethan Allen from the steps of the Statehouse. Most Vermont history paints him as a patriot and founding father. What he and his brother Ira found were communities: villages of Abenaki living along the rivers, fishing, farming the land, hunting the forests and joining in confederacy with other Indigenous nations to preserve sovereignty over it. Well, how do we think the Allen bros acquired real estate and declared Vermont Indian-free? Why, they went to the Continental Congress and swore there were none living in Vermont; they had all gone away

WEEK IN REVIEW

TIM NEWCOMB

or died of disease. To avoid extermination after seeing the damage the invaders could render, the Abenaki hid in plain sight in caves, in swamps and deep in the woods. Both of the brothers would benefit from the genocide of Abenaki, if not directly participate in it. It’s all good to kick Christopher Columbus off his pedestal and raise flags against injustice and racism, but the very heart of racism in this state lies in the breast of the European invasion and ensuing colonizers. Ethan Allen is a symbol of the wrongs done to Abenaki who never ceded land, abandoned it nor were conquered — the three criteria for transfer of property in 1776. Perhaps his statue could be moved to the entrance of the Ethan Allen Homestead or the entrance of the Vermont Air National Guard — the so-called “Green Mountain Boys,” named after Rogers’ Raiders, who carried out the Abenaki massacres at Odanak.

of individual empowerment in competition with others. We might be friends and neighbors, but we are not communities. In order for us to wake up to who and what we are as human beings, this must be honestly faced and frankly admitted. What this means is that we have a choice: Go back to the status quo of us versus others, of participating in an economic game that destroys the fabric of community and the ecological foundations of our well-being and the well-being of all life; or transition to a just, ecologically sustainable planetary society. The idea of a unified humanity, rich in its wondrous diversity and pregnant with the promise of unleashing its immense creativity, is before us like never before. I am not hopeful that we will ever reach this humanity. But we can at least speak it. We can at least try to hear the call. Nicholas Marconi

SHELBURNE

Joelen Mulvaney BARRE CITY

POST-PANDEMIC ‘OPPORTUNITY’

COVID-19 has brought home a deeper crisis and an opportunity [“How Can We Help You?” June 10]. Unfortunately, our contemporary sensibility tends to focus on crisis as a pathology that needs to be cured or denied. The word itself comes from the Greek, krisis, “turning point,” from krinein, “to separate, decide.” We now have an opportunity to turn and to decide on how we want to live differently. The great turning, to borrow a phrase, can be summed up neatly: a turn from the “I” to the “we,” from power-over to powerwith, to mutuality. Most of us, whether we realize it or not, operate within power-over,

KEEP IT CIVIL

Gordon Spencer’s personal, meanspirited and inaccurate attack on Katherine Sims and Craftsbury [Feedback: “Trust-Fund Candidate?” June 17] did not have the reasonable tone I think of Vermonters as having when they air their differences. I hope we can all be civil during this long election season. Sam Thurston

LOWELL

WORDS AREN’T ENOUGH

[Re Advertisement: “Burlington Businesses Support Black Lives,” June 10]: What great sentiments Tom Torti and Kelly Devine express about the commitment of their

member businesses to equal treatment: “equal justice” “respect” and “opportunity for all people” in the case of Torti of Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, and the need for justice to create a “vibrant economy,” as Devine, director of the Burlington Business Association, put it. How easy the words are compared to actual change. I’d challenge both of them and their organizations to take an anonymous poll of members that would include these questions: How often have your staff members followed people of color around your store? How many times have potential customers of color waited longer than white customers to be waited on? What have you done or will you do to change disdainful attitudes among your staff toward potential Black or brown customers regardless of cultural differences in dress or manner? How many Black and brown staffers work for you? How many business owners of color are among your members? When you release the anonymous answers, we’ll see how real those fine words are and how strong that commitment to equality and justice for all really is. Or maybe not: Given the outpouring against law enforcement murders of Black people, even some white conservatives can see what they need to say. Euan Bear

BAKERSFIELD

NO COMMENTS

I find it unbelievable that your paper continues not to allow readers to comment on articles, with all that is happening today, both locally, statewide and nationally. Not the publication you once were. Bill Lowell

BURLINGTON

Editor’s note: Seven Days discontinued commenting on its stories in April, prioritizing the production of responsible journalism over moderating reader feedback online. FEEDBACK

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contents

Summer Snacking

JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020 VOL.25 NO.39

AT ITS BEST

Rising Stars ON THE COVER

8 SO. MAIN STREET ST. ALBANS

524-3769

Curbside pick-up available

RAILC IT Y M ARK E T V T.CO M 6/22/20 10:35 AM CODE STYLE CLUB

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How the pandemic propelled a Vermont baking company into the national spotlight

IS NOW OPEN!

B Y MEL I SSA PASANEN , PAGE 28 COVER IMAGE JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR • COVER DESIGN REV. DIANE SULLIVAN

FOOD

Near and Beer 12

NEWS & POLITICS 11 From the Publisher Racial Remnant

ARTS NEWS 20

FEATURES 36

Short takes on five Vermont books

Page 32

PAGE 40

In Their Own Words

It’s time Vermont renamed Negro Brook, activists say

Origin Story

Theater artist Jarvis A. Green and cartoonist Lillie Harris talk about difficult conversations and Black joy

Five Candidates for Five Sisters

Naming Names

Unsentimental Journey

Open House seats touch off free-for-all in Burlington’s South End

Couch Cinema: Fast Color Matthew Evan Taylor reacts to police violence with a new album

Three new breweries work to open during the pandemic

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135 College St., Burlington, Vt. Call 802.540.2427 or book online at codestyleclub.com

Book Review: Swan Song: An Odyssey by Lisa Alther

Crushing It

David Stromeyer’s boulder moves at Cold Hollow Sculpture Park

STUCK IN VERMONT

Online Thursday

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COLUMNS 26 34 44 46 48 69

WTF Bottom Line Side Dishes Soundbites Album Reviews Ask the Reverend

SECTIONS

A group of St. Johnsbury Academy students calling themselves NEK Girls for Equality organized a candlelight vigil and a protest in Lyndonville to honor Black lives lost to police brutality.

SUPPORTED BY:

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Life Lines Food + Drink Music + Nightlife Classes Classifieds + Puzzles Fun Stuff Personals

6/22/20 8:10 AM

We have CHANNEL 1074

Find a new job in the classifieds section on page 53 and online at sevendaysvt.com/jobs.

STEAM LAB WEDNESDAYS > 4:00 P.M. GET MORE INFO OR WATCH ONLINE AT VERMONTCAM.ORG

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Visit local farmers markets, farm stands, & pick-your-own farms.

PICK-YOUR-OWN

FARMERS MARKETS

FARM STANDS

Enjoy the beauty & bounty of Vermont’s farms! Local as usual, safer than ever! Farmers markets, farm stands, and pick-your-own farms are opening, but it’s not business as usual! Markets and farms are required to follow state guidance to ensure the safest environment for shoppers and farmers alike. Please be patient with farmers

& market vendors as they are doing their best to comply with the guidance and still be able to offer local products to their communities. Get outside & enjoy the farm season!

FIND FARMS & MARKETS NEAR YOU: NOFAVT.ORG/BUYDIRECT 10

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

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FROM THE PUBLISHER

Staying Power

JULY 202 0

On a summer day in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, you can ply the crystal waters of Caspian Lake; behold a luminous, room-size painting of “The Domes of Yosemite” at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum; and sip the highest-rated beer in the world. Next day try a mind-blowing political history lesson told through papiermâché puppets and a million-dollar view of glacier-sculpted Lake Willoughby before happily driving miles out of your way for gourmet pizza at a general store. Two summers ago, my family spent a few memorable days being tourists in our own state. My partner and I used my nonagenarian mom as an excuse Paddle Pu shers Remote R&R to take a short Vermont vacation in the Northeast Kingdom, with the homey Hit the Road Highland Lodge in Greensboro as our base camp. We got my walker-wielding mom up the barn ramp at Bread and Puppet Theater, face-to-snout with the stuffed bear collection at the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium, and to the front of a long line at the delicious Scale House restaurant in Hardwick. It felt more like an eating experience in New York City than one in Caledonia County. My only regret, other than skipping the quirky Museum of Everyday Life, was that we hadn’t done it sooner, before my mom moved here at the end of 2017. Sometimes it takes a newcomer to open your eyes ”The Domes of Yosemite” to the beauty in your own backyard and its viability as by Albert Bierstadt a vacation destination. This year, alas, the motivator is a global pandemic that imperils the state’s tourism sector. Vermont’s inns, restaurants, museums and attractions need you. That’s the message of the inaugural edition of Staytripper, the monthly pub we created and inserted inside this week’s Seven Days. With a mix of business profiles, suggested day trips, and helpful suggestions for food and kids’ activities, we mean to suggest: If ever you thought about a romantic getaway at Hotel Vermont, a week with friends at Basin Harbor or exploring the “Fun Zone” at Smugglers’ Notch, now’s the time. You don’t have to spend a ton of money to help. Warning: Not all of the attractions described above are currently open, so be sure to check before you go. Fish and chips at the Scale House Many in the tourism industry don’t believe that business from native Vermonters can make up for the financial losses they anticipate this season. The majority Want to help Seven Days and of their out-of-state customers hails from more local journalism? Become a Super Reader. populated areas with higher rates of COVID-19. Look for the “Give Now” buttons at the top Until our state relaxes restrictions, those folks of sevendaysvt.com. Or send a check with may have to self-quarantine for up to 14 days your address and contact info to: before they can check in to a Vermont hotel or SEVEN DAYS climb a Green Mountain. C/O SUPER READERS Prove the local purveyors wrong. Show these P.O. BOX 1164 BURLINGTON, VT 05402-1164 Vermont businesses some love. Chalk it up to your locavore duty. The best way to preserve the For more information on making a financial beautiful state we all cherish is to get a good, long contribution to Seven Days, please contact look at it. Then buy a creemee — or two. Corey Grenier: 6

Vermont Canoe & dips into Kayak the Lam oille Rive r

A Green Mou to Highlan ntain getawa y d Lodge

Sightsee ing in Bar re, Shelbur ne and Hub bardton

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MORE INSIDE

ACT 250 OVERHAUL DERAILED PAGE 14

EDUCATION

PRISON PROBE GETS NEW LIFE PAGE 17

SPAT OVER ‘SNIPPY’ EMAIL PAGE 18

LUKE AWTRY

Back to School 2020 Means Masks, Temperature Checks and Sanitizer B Y A LISON N OVA K

HISTORY

Alex Hazzard and Evan Litwin

Racial Remnant It’s time Vermont renamed Negro Brook, activists say B Y DER EK B R O UWER

ike postcards in any Vermont gift shop, Daniel DeMasi’s Instagram account features covered bridges, white steeples and sylvan homesteads, each captioned with brief historical notes. Lately, DeMasi has used his Southern Vermont Living page to showcase the stone arch bridges that have spanned the region’s streams for more than a century. But when he posted a photo earlier this month of one charming 15-foot-long arch in Townshend, DeMasi didn’t feel comfortable printing the brook’s name. He typed an ellipsis in place of a word he considers a racial slur. “Words like these are hurtful,” DeMasi said, noting that he comes from a multiethnic household, “and when I hear them, I just think, Why?” Negro Brook, which flows down Bald Mountain in Townshend State Forest northwest of Brattleboro, is a vestige of race-based place-naming conventions that were pervasive until the civil rights 12

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

era. Hundreds of mountains, rivers and places around the United States still carry official names that are either overtly racist or include outdated language increasingly considered derogatory. In recent years, Townshend’s Negro Brook moniker has fallen out of favor.

WE DON’T WANT TO JUMP ON ANYTHING JUST TO CHANGE THE NAME OF THE BROOK. RO BE R T D UGR E NIE R

Vermont State Parks officials have already removed the name from some maps and signs, and it is not used in trail descriptions at Townshend State Park, where the stream flows by the campground entrance. “We think it’s offensive,” said Tim Morton, a stewardship

forester with the Department of Forests, Parks & Recreation. But an effort to formally rename the brook has been stalled by a surprisingly fraught question: Rename it to what? No other federally recognized geographic feature in Vermont bears a racial signifier, according to a 2015 analysis by online news site Vocativ that compared a list of racial slurs to a U.S. Geological Survey place-name database. Last year, Burlington resident Evan Litwin, who studied the state’s social geography as a University of Vermont undergraduate, learned of Negro Brook after reading about race-based place names. Excited by the idea that Vermont could shed its last such name, Litwin formed the Rename Negro Brook Alliance to push for the change. Alex Hazzard, Litwin’s coworker at the UVM Prism Center for queer and trans communities, joined him. RACIAL REMNANT

» P.14

Vermont’s schoolchildren will return this fall to vastly different school systems that feature temperature checks to board school buses, mandatory face coverings, closed cafeterias and handsanitizer stations at school entrances. Those measures are included in 23 pages of guidance for K-12 public and private schools that Vermont’s Agency of Education and Department of Health released last week. “A Strong and Healthy Start: Safety and Health Guidance for Reopening Schools, Fall 2020” aims to decrease the risk of COVID-19 transmission among staff and students. The guidance may evolve. What is certain, though, is that schools will look and feel markedly different than they did when students were dismissed in mid-March. Guidelines include a daily health screening of students and staff — involving both verbal questions and a temperature check. Students dropped off at school will be checked before they enter the building. Those who take a bus must be screened before they even board. If a student has a temperature of 100.4 degrees or higher, they will be sent home. If COVID-19 is confirmed in a student or staff member, the areas they had used will be closed off, cleaned and disinfected. Additional measures include handsanitizing stations and the disinfecting of frequently touched surfaces throughout the day. Both students and staff must wear cloth masks or clear facial shields inside schools. If they can’t maintain six feet of social distancing when outside, their faces must be covered. That requirement can be waived for certain students with medical or behavioral conditions. When feasible, the same group of students should stay together in their designated classroom, and the same teachers and staff should remain with those students all day. Within classrooms, desks should be spaced six feet apart. The sharing of art supplies and computer and lab equipment should be limited. Communal spaces including the cafeteria and gymnasium should be closed unless they are needed for additional classroom space. Students will eat lunch in their classrooms. Group activities with the potential to generate increased respiratory droplets and aerosols, such as singing and music involving brass and woodwind instruments, are to be avoided. Contact: alison@kidsvt.com

Five Candidates for Five Sisters Open House seats touch off free-for-all in Burlington’s South End BY COL IN F L ANDERS

hen Scott Pavek declared last spring that he was running for the Vermont House in Burlington’s two-seat South End district, he was prepared to challenge two longtime Democratic lawmakers. A year later, Pavek finds himself in a much different race than the one he expected.

no evidence so far of a serious challenge brewing behind the scenes. “The primary is the election,” Donovan said. Candidates with the best shot to succeed Sullivan and Donovan are those who can appeal to a broad constituency. The two lawmakers have been reliably liberal voices in Montpelier, championing causes ranging from the climate crisis and early education to support for lowincome people. Their district includes both subsidized apartment buildings and owner-occupied homes. Many young families view education as a top priority, while concerns about the health of Lake Champlain and the high cost of living are also common. Beyond any single issue, however, South End voters value politicians they can trust, said Burlington City Councilor Joan Shannon (D-South District), who represents most of the legislative district. “The constituents aren’t necessarily looking for somebody that they agree on every issue with, but somebody that they trust as a decision maker,” she said. Donovan noted that South End voters seem to appreciate representatives who understand a variety of issues — even if that means doing some homework. “There’s no way you can know all the answers,” she said. “The issues are so broad, so deep.” Donovan hasn’t endorsed any of the candidates vying to succeed her; Sullivan is supporting Stebbins and Bluemle. With less than two months until the August 11 primary, the five candidates face the difficulty of differentiating themselves in such a crowded field. They share many characteristics: None of the five has held elected office. All five have a background in nonprofit or education work and are running on progressive platforms that support such policies as a higher minimum wage and mandatory paid family leave. Three of the candidates — Stebbins, Bluemle and Warren — even live within shouting distance of one another.

2020

ELECTION

Scott Pavek

Mary Sullivan and Johannah “Joey” Leddy Donovan separately announced this spring that they plan to hang it up after a combined 36 years representing Chittenden 6-5, a left-leaning district that includes most of the city south of Maple Street, including the Five Sisters and Lakeside neighborhoods. Their retirements busted open the race for the Democratic nomination. Instead of facing an uphill race against the old guard, Pavek finds himself in a five-way free-for-all with recently announced candidates Gabrielle Stebbins, Jesse Paul Warren, Tiff Bluemle and Annie Wohland. The primary winners are unlikely to face much opposition come November. So far, there are no Republican candidates. Democrats have owned the district for decades, and Warren, who hopes to run as a Progressive/Democrat, said he would not continue on if he did not secure the Democratic nomination. Republicans and Progressives could still nominate one of their own after the primary, but there’s

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news Act 250 Bill Hits Quagmire in the Latest Act of a Legislative Drama BY K E VI N MC C A L L UM

An effort to loosen environmental laws in downtowns while toughening them in rural areas unraveled Monday after senators labeled the bill an inappropriate attempt to weave together unrelated pieces of legislation. The procedural snag is the latest in a long legislative drama over how Vermont should modernize Act 250, the 50-yearold landmark environmental law. Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, acting as president of the Senate, on Friday and again on Monday agreed with objections that the environmental amendments were not “germane” to the underlying affordable housing bill. That prompted Senate President Pro Tempore Tim Ashe (D/P-Chittenden) to pull the bill from consideration — for now. The setback was disappointing but not fatal to the effort to update the law, said Sen. Chris Bray (D-Addison), chair of the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. “I’m a patient person,” Bray said Monday. “We’ve been working on some of these issues for six years.” His committee planned to begin work on a new bill this week that will mirror the Act 250 changes outlined in the environmental amendments, he said. Signs of trouble emerged last week when Sens. John Rodgers and Bobby Starr, both Democrats from the rural Essex/Orleans district, objected to how an amendment from the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee had been drafted and passed. Rodgers, who sits on that committee, owns significant timber land and objected to new requirements for Act 250 review of roads and driveways more than 2,000 feet long. Both suggested that the committee process, undertaken via videoconference, had been less than transparent, especially for people in rural areas with spotty internet connections. Rodgers had been unable to vote on the amendment because of his connection. The intent of S.237 was to make it easier and less expensive to build housing in downtowns and neighborhoods identified for growth, Sen. Michael Sirotkin (D-Chittenden) explained. Bray’s committee proposed adding an array of Act 250 changes in an effort to balance the relaxation of environmental restrictions in downtowns. But Zuckerman said he had little choice but to rule that many of the Act 250 pieces of the bill could not piggyback on the housing bill. m Contact: kevin@sevendaysvt.com

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Racial Remnant « P.12 Hazzard, who is Black, said the name sends an unwelcoming signal to people of color. “Having something called Negro Brook in the state of Vermont means people are OK with that,” he said. By state law, the seven-member Vermont Board of Libraries reviews all requests to change geographic names. Petitions must include 25 handwritten signatures and must propose a new name. The board is required to give preference to labels that refer to historical events or persons, native flora or fauna, or to those that are “characteristic” to the state or local traditions. If the board votes in favor of a name, the application moves to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which controls federal nomenclature. Having no personal connection to Townshend or its 1,100 residents, Litwin initially did not consider what to rename the brook. But soon historical researcher Elise Guyette caught wind of the initiative. For years, Guyette has been on a mission to recover Vermont’s largely overlooked immigrant and Black history; her 2010 book Discovering Black Vermont traced three generations of early Black settlers in Hinesburg. Though their stories had been forgotten, the forested hill where the two families farmed in the 19th century was identified on local maps with a racial slur through the 1990s. After hearing of the Townshend brook’s name, Guyette studied census and other records and identified a Black family who lived in Townshend for several decades before the Civil War. Her preliminary research suggests that Susanna Toby, James Huzzy and their children moved to the area from Massachusetts around 1810. Huzzy was a Revolutionary War veteran who served two terms of enlistment as a substitute for his slaveholder’s sons, plus a third term to gain his freedom. After he died in 1822, Toby continued living in Townshend, first on her own and later in the household of a white farmer. She died in 1855 at the age of 104, Guyette found. They weren’t the only Black residents in Townshend at the time — census takers in 1810 recorded 15 — but the Huzzys appeared to have lived there longer than any other pre-Civil War Black families. Guyette contacted Litwin and suggested renaming the brook after Susanna Toby. “I think highlighting her and her experience as a woman of color during this time would be fantastic,” she explained in a recent interview. When Litwin took Guyette’s idea to the Townshend Historical Society last fall, members had a lukewarm response.

ZACH STEPHENS

ENVIRONMENT

Negro Brook

Historical Society members were aware of Huzzy and Toby, but their earlier research indicated that the family lived elsewhere in town, not near Negro Brook. In fact, vice president Robert DuGrenier said, Townshend history buffs have long pondered the origins of the name Negro Brook, which appears on historical maps as far back as 1854. Their periodic research, however, has failed to uncover any specific association with Black residents. The origin of the name remains a mystery. “We’re super interested in getting it right. We don’t want to jump on anything just to change the name of the brook,” DuGrenier said. There is reason to believe that such an association is still waiting to be found. In northern states, place names often referred to locations where free Black families settled, State Librarian Jason

Broughton noted, or areas where they passed en route to safe harbor. That would distinguish Negro Brook from Vermont’s most notorious place name debate 50 years ago. In the early 1960s, the federal government decided to wipe the N-word from all geographic features — in some cases inserting “Negro” as a replacement. Nonetheless, a mountain, brook and pond in Marshfield continued to carry the name “Niggerhead” for several more years. A 1966 effort by civil rights activists to change the names was voted down by the Board of Libraries after more than 350 Marshfield-area residents signed an opposing petition. They claimed that the name was merely a lumberjack’s term for a stubborn log. A second push in 1971 by a Black-led group of UVM and Goddard College activists succeeded, despite continued public

SINCE 1982

opposition. J. Paul Giuliani referred to A Townsend Civil War veteran named the activists as “deluded do-gooders” in a James Otis Follett constructed the letter to the editor published in the Burl- bridges between 1894 and 1911, decades ington Free Press. Giuliani, a Montpelier after fighting at Gettysburg. If local histoattorney, told Seven Days last week that rians can’t link a Black family to the land “of course” his thinking on the issue has abutting Negro Brook, historical society changed. members have suggested renaming it “What was a local matter then, now after Follett. is of universal interest,” he wrote in an “He wasn’t a Black man, but honoring email. “What I can say is that no offense him makes sense to us also,” DuGrenier was intended.” said. Though the terms and tenor of today’s Petitioners believe it’s essential to Negro Brook discussions are different, preserve the brook’s implicit acknowlquestions linger about who gets to edgment of the early Black presence in rename a place. The Board of Libraries Vermont. wants Litwin and Hazzard to secure “Even history that we’re taught in local support for their petition to avoid a schools erases Black history altogether, contentious public hearing so to rename the brook after or a situation in which the a white person just really board must choose between echoes that sentiment,” dueling petitions. Hazzard said. That’s what happened in Guyette agrees. “Some 2003, when two groups jockof these place names, as eyed over what to rename horrific as they are, they 14-acre “Negro Pond” in the help us understand someNortheast Kingdom town thing that is going on in of Westmore. The board the community,” she said. selected “Mud Pond,” which “I think that relationship had some historical usage, needs to stay.” over a proposal to name it Vermonters tend to ALEX HAZZARD after a former state legislaimagine the state’s history tor. Just last week, a Dorset as one of white people who angler penned a letter in were early opponents of the Bennington Banner suggesting that slavery, Guyette said. Roughly one in five “Negro Pond/Mud Pond might better be Blacks in Vermont fought in the Civil known as ‘Humanity Pond.’” War, but only one public monument — The Rename Negro Brook Alliance’s installed in Rutland last year — recoginitiative “is not coming from the local nizes their contributions. area,” Board of Libraries chair Bruce Post One Black Civil War veteran appears said. “I want to be certain the folks who live in a comprehensive Townshend town down there are included in the process.” history, A Stitch in Time, published by Litwin said his group shouldn’t be seen the historical society in 2003. Winfield as interlopers, given that the brook flows Scott Montgomery lived there for nine across state land for most of its course. years following the war before attendHe noted that state law does not require ing Dartmouth College. The historical petitioners to live in the same town as the society has been working to commisgeographic feature they wish to rename. sion a historic marker to honor him, “A lot of things wouldn’t have changed, DuGrenier said. especially around race, were it not for But the book otherwise tells the story ‘outsiders,”’ he said. of Black history in Townshend through Hazzard and Litwin still hope to gather its white abolitionists and its purported local backing before filing their petition connections to the Underground to the Board of Libraries. They have Railroad. contacted some social justice organizaThose who want the name changed tions in search of broader support, but see balancing the historical record as a their conversations with the Townshend step toward ensuring that people of color Historical Society petered out last winter. are equal community members across “There is … an opportunity for more Vermont. communication and dialogue,” Litwin “This is more than just renaming said. some brook,” Hazzard said. “It’s about The effort comes as the historical making a statement that Vermont is society is dedicating most of its energy willing to right some wrongs and take to raising money to preserve a series of ownership and recognize that we want stone arch bridges, including a small one to make a place for people of color in that crosses Negro Brook. That bridge is our state.” m known locally as the Negro Brook Bridge, and the society refers to it as such. Contact: derek@sevendaysvt.com

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news STATEHOUSE

Vermont House Republicans Decry Reference to ‘Racist’ Trump Tweets in Juneteenth Resolution BY PAUL H E I N TZ

Seventeen members of the Vermont House — all white Republicans — opposed a resolution commemorating the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth last Friday. Several of those who voted against the measure criticized its authors for including in it a line referring to President Donald Trump’s rhetoric as “highly inflammatory and racist.” “Today, Madame Speaker, you have allowed this body to sink to a new low,” Rep. Bob Bancroft (R-Westford) told House Speaker Mitzi Johnson (D-South Hero). Bancroft said that, while he had not voted for Trump and frequently disagreed with the president, he was “ashamed” of the House for adopting a “divisive and politically inflammatory” resolution. “I’m embarrassed that this body has descended into a political gutter,” Bancroft said. The resolution, authored by Rep. Kevin “Coach” Christie (D-Hartford) and cosponsored by a majority of his colleagues, pays homage to Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when slaves in the Confederate state of Texas were finally declared free. It also describes the recent death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by Minneapolis police, and names six other people of color who died in similar circumstances. It declares that Vermonters of color have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic and are “subject to disparate law enforcement treatment.” In total, 128 Democrats, Republicans, Progressives and independents supported the measure, while 17 Republicans voted against it. Several of those who opposed it joined Bancroft in explaining their position, and each referred to the line describing Trump’s reaction to Floyd’s killing: “Whereas, the majority of President Trump’s tweeting in response to the death has been highly inflammatory and racist, and he has advocated a much-criticized militaristic response.” Rep. Pattie McCoy (R-Poultney), the House minority leader, said she and her fellow Republicans had hoped to support the Juneteenth resolution. But she said they could not “in good conscience participate in trying to match President Trump’s deliberately provocative and inflammatory rhetoric with more of our own deliberately provocative rhetoric.” m Contact: paul@sevendaysvt.com

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Five Candidates « P.13 All five hopefuls believe their experience remains their most convincing asset. Stebbins, 44, works as a senior consultant with Energy Futures Group, a clean energy consulting firm, and is the former executive director of Renewable Energy Vermont, a trade organization. The roles have often brought her to the Statehouse to weigh in on energy-focused legislation. “I really understand how you make good policy and how you negotiate, and then how you take that bill over the final line,” she said. Stebbins said she would push the state to adopt a long-term economic strategy that emphasizes green tech and sustain-

and photography work for advocacy issues and political campaigns. He came up short in a 2018 race for the Burlington City Council but said he believes his creative approach would be particularly useful in the Statehouse as lawmakers confront the pandemic’s wideranging disruption. He said he would push for a higher minimum wage, a green new deal and universal health care. “COVID is helping people realize how malleable the world really is, because so much has changed so quickly,” he said. “They’re also realizing how so many things are broken all at once. It’s really opening people up who weren’t really receptive to big changes.”

Gabrielle Stebbins

Tiff Bluemle

able agriculture. “We need to step back and stop trying to just create a budget year by year,” she said. Bluemle, 58, enters the race with similar leadership experience. She has spent the last 22 years leading organizations that seek to improve economic security for women, first Vermont Works for Women, and now Change the Story VT. She said her advocacy has offered her a crash course in the lawmaking process, teaching her that legislators must actively seek out viewpoints across the spectrum if they wish to make lasting change. “That is hard work, and it requires a lot of humility and willingness to admit that you don’t know everything,” she said. “It also requires you to be curious and [to have] a lot of persistence to hang in there when the process gets ragged and difficult.” Bluemle said she’d strive to address the long-standing “inequities and vulnerabilities” that the pandemic has laid bare, by supporting paid family leave, workforce development and assistance for small businesses. Warren, 30, runs his own nonprofit, Democracy Creative, a design studio located in Burlington’s Soda Plant complex whose services include design

Wohland, 31, is a part-time online graduate student studying social work. She has led efforts to raise the minimum wage statewide and lobbied for a citywide advisory vote that passed in 2017. She served as youth outreach coordinator for Bernie Sanders’ Senate 2018 reelection campaign, and her résumé includes five years at the Howard Center. She said her direct service experience is just as important as “being the executive director of some place.” “You’re not telling people what’s going to happen; you’re actually listening to them and asking them, ‘What do you want to happen?’” she said. She listed a number of priorities including police reform, investments in mental health services and combating food insecurity. Pavek, 28, said he would bring to the Statehouse a different perspective than his rivals for the nomination. “There came a point in my life where I found myself without a job, without safe housing, without food, without health care, in the throes of addiction — essentially waiting to die,” he said. Seven years into recovery, Pavek works at the University of Vermont, where he manages a program that helps low-income, in-state students receive financial support. He said he wants to focus on addressing

the opioid crisis, climate change and the exodus of young families from Vermont. “On any given policy, my first question is going to be: How does that impact the most vulnerable people among us?’” he said. As they compete, all five South End contenders must cope with the way the coronavirus pandemic has upended the traditional campaign playbook, which in Vermont House races emphasizes personto-person contact with voters. “Campaigns can be won and lost by whichever candidate can knock on the most doors, talk to the most voters faceto-face, one-on-one,” said Scott McNeil, executive director of the Vermont Democratic Party.

Jesse Paul Warren

Not this year. “Shaking hands and kissing babies? Yeah, we’re now staying eight feet away and saying, ‘Let’s talk later!’” Pavek said. Social-distancing guidelines have made door-to-door canvassing a harrowing prospect. Most large gatherings have been postponed or canceled. The internet offers one way to fill the void. Campaigns have become increasingly digital in recent years, a trend that the pandemic has “turbocharged,” McNeil said. The South End candidates appear to recognize the opportunity. Four of the five have official campaign websites, and most have spoken at virtual house parties or local meetings. At the same time, they acknowledge that online campaigning can only take them so far. “With everyone on nine hours of Zoom every day, I think people are so tired of technology,” Stebbins said. “We still have to do social media; we still have to do Instagram and Twitter and everything. But people are feeling saturated.” In response, candidates have sought to supplement conventional campaigning with new approaches. Warren launched his candidacy with a campaign video and sent out 2,000

JUMP START magnets to people with the slogan “It is possible.” He’s also stationed a bulletin board in front of his house that he’s coined the “Wall of ‘Impossible’ Ideas.” He’s asking people to tack on messages detailing their most important issues. A handful of papers and Post-it notes have appeared on the board so far; some call for defunding police agencies or establishing universal health care. One note asks for a ski tow rope in Burlington’s Calahan Park. “Be kind when it’s hard,” reads another. Down the block, Stebbins has rolled out her own crowdsourcing effort: a whiteboard on her front lawn that asks, “What do you care about?” Responses include requests for investments in childcare and mental health services.

Annie Wohland

Stebbins and Bluemle, who have endorsed each other, organized a “walking parade” through their several neighborhoods to chat with potential voters. Traditional campaign methods still have a place. Wohland has spoken about her candidacy at a recent online neighborhood forum and said she expects to soon send out mailers to homes in her district. Pavek is banking on mailers, including several hundred handwritten ones that he hopes will help him establish a personal connection with voters even if he can’t meet them in person. The candidates say they hope they may be able to resume more robust campaign activities before the primary. But given all the other challenges the state must address in the months ahead, including an ailing economy and a state budget in disarray, figuring out how to campaign is “a really small problem,” Warren said. “If we can solve that problem,” he added, “then we move on to the next level, which is: How do we … solve the really big problems that need creative solutions in this unprecedented time?” m Contact: colin@sevendaysvt.com

LAW ENFORCEMENT

State Plans to Resume Probe Into Prison Abuse Allegations BY C O L I N FL AND ERS

Vermont officials say they hope to soon resume an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing at the state’s only prison for women, though a new inmate coronavirus case could jeopardize their timeline. Human Services Secretary Mike Smith initiated the independent probe last December after Seven Days uncovered allegations of sexual misconduct, drug use and retaliation within the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility. Smith told Seven Days earlier this month that the investigation had been suspended, citing safety concerns related to the pandemic. But last week, he said the state must forge ahead with the review in light of yet another allegation of misconduct — this time involving a Department of Corrections probation officer from Brattleboro. “We can’t allow this to happen,” Smith said at a press conference last Friday, one day after the officer was arrested for alleged sexual misconduct with a woman he was supervising. “This is not the department that the commissioner nor I envision as we move forward,” Smith said. “This is not going to be tolerated in this department. And if you are in this department, and you want to perform this sort of behavior, then this is not the department for you.” Smith has hired former U.S. attorney Tristram Coffin to lead the investigation. At a press conference Monday, the secretary said he hoped the review would start again within the next 14 days. “We’ll use all testing protocols to make sure that the inmates are safe with visitation of the various investigators,” he said. But an Agency of Human Services spokesperson later confirmed that the state’s timeline will depend on results from mass testing now under way at Chittenden Regional, where a recently admitted inmate tested positive for the virus on Saturday. Smith shared several details about the new case on Monday, confirming that the inmate came into contact with some guards and inmates while her test results were still pending. He said the state is now investigating why that was allowed to happen. Vermont has increased testing at its six in-state prison facilities. Every inmate is tested at intake, and the state has conducted one round of mass testing at every facility in recent weeks, swabbing roughly 1,250 inmates to date. m

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6/17/20 10:42 AM

news Sen. John Rodgers

FILE: ALICIA FREESE

lifelines lines OBITUARIES Raymond Keating

STATEHOUSE

JANUARY 4, 1923JUNE 12, 2020 MONTPELIER, VT. Raymond F. Keating passed from this Earth June 12, 2020. He lived a full and loving life of 97 years. Born in Meriden, Conn., on January 4, 1923, he left to join the U.S. Navy in 1942, shortly after the outbreak of World War II. His Navy adventures took him across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, with memorable posts from Algeria and Morocco to the Philippine Islands; Casco Bay, Maine; Key West, Fla.; and finally to Tokyo Bay at the Japanese surrender, ending the conflict. Ray returned home in 1946 and to his job at the Miller Johnson company, where he worked as a printer for 35 years. He met Helen Frances Bride, and they were married on May 1, 1948. Helen predeceased Ray on April 4, 2015, ending a loving and nourishing 67-year union. Their mutual Catholic faith was a consistent and lifelong feature of their relationship, first at St. Rose parish in Meriden and later at St. Augustine’s in Montpelier. They raised six children who survive them: Tim and wife Valerie of Los Angeles, Calif.; Peter and

Rodgers Lashes Out as Senators Criticize His ‘Derogatory’ Email B Y PAUL HEINT Z

wife Kathleen of Burlington, Vt.; Kevin and late wife Carrie of Peoria, Ariz.; Nancy and husband Kevin of Ridgecrest Calif.; Paul and partner Jennifer of Montpelier, Vt.; and Tom of South Berwick, Maine. Ray also leaves nine grandchildren: Brendan of Burlington, Vt.; Maeve and husband Mik of Burlington, Vt.; Alyssa and partner Wesley of South Portland, Maine; Myles of Portland, Ore.; Devlin of Santa Barbara, Calif.; Bennett of Los Angeles, Calif.; Owen of Burlington, Vt.; Davis of Juneau, Alaska; and Liam of South Berwick, Maine. All of them seemed to inherit his entertaining wit and prankster-like sense of humor. Ray was expressively grateful, perpetually content and happiest when surrounded by his large, loving family.

Ray and Helen retired to Montpelier in 1985. They loved their retirement years in Vermont, often volunteering at the Montpelier library, food pantry and Knights of Columbus bingo in Barre, where Ray had a longtime presence. Ray spent his last nine years at Heaton Woods in Montpelier under the loving care and dedication of their remarkable staff. The family would especially like to express their heartfelt thanks to Darcy Warner, who was a caregiver to both Helen and Ray for many years, and to the kind staff at Heaton Woods. In lieu of flowers, please consider remembering Ray with a donation to the Montpelier Food Pantry at 137 Main St., Montpelier, VT 05602, or to your local food shelf resource.

Mark your family’s milestones in lifelines. sevendaysvt.com/lifelines 18

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Sen. John Rodgers (D-Essex/Orleans) apologized last Friday for employing the phrase “snippy little bitch” in an all-Senate email. But in an interview on Monday, he lashed out at two colleagues who had criticized his rhetoric, arguing that they — not he — should be apologizing. Other senators told Seven Days that they viewed Rodgers’ words as sexist or homophobic — and certainly intolerant. Members of the Senate’s Committee on Committees, meanwhile, said they expected to meet in the coming days to determine whether Rodgers should be sanctioned for his actions — first reported by VTDigger.org — though it appeared unlikely that they would strip him of his committee assignments. The Senate drama began last week when Rodgers accused leaders of the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee of working “behind the veil” to push through a rewrite of Act 250, the state’s landmark land use law, without participation from committee members and the public. The committee’s chair, Sen. Chris Bray (D-Addison) pointedly noted that Rodgers had been absent for more than a month, and its vice chair, Sen. Brian Campion (D-Bennington), accused Rodgers of defaming the committee. In an early morning email to his colleagues last Friday, Rodgers explained that personal financial difficulties had prevented him from taking part in the extended Senate session. “I do not intend to go bankrupt and lose the farm that’s been in my family for almost 200 years to attend Senate meetings on nonessential legislation,” he wrote. Rodgers accused the Senate of discriminating against members who are “Internet connection challenged” because they have trouble accessing remote video meetings and said the Act 250 reforms would only hurt rural Vermonters. “So if any snippy little bitch wants to question where I am during committee meetings and what my values are I would challenge them to walk a mile in my shoes,” he concluded. “My bet is that few could keep up with me until lunchtime say nothing about until 9 o’clock at night.”

During a committee meeting later Friday morning, Rodgers apologized “for losing my temper and sending out a ill-sounding email.” Later that day, however, Senate President Pro Tempore Tim Ashe (D/P-Chittenden) upbraided Rodgers in an email that Ashe eventually forwarded to the full Senate. “I’ll cut to the chase - it’s totally unacceptable in your Senate role to employ any kind of name calling regardless of who it is directed at,” the pro tem wrote. “It is still worse to use derogatory terms.” Ashe wrote that it appeared Rodgers had directed his remarks at Bray and Campion, noting that the latter is gay, “which raises larger concerns about your choice of words.” The pro tem said the three-member Committee on Committees, which doles out committee assignments, “will reach out promptly to set up a time to discuss this further, and to discuss any implications for your committee assignments.” In an interview with Seven Days on Monday, Rodgers said he had been referring to Bray in one part of his email but denied that his “snippy little bitch” remark was directed at Bray or Campion. “That last comment was not referring to anyone,” he said. Rodgers said he stood by his Friday apology but thought Ashe should also apologize to him for sending an “angry email” that “was just as offensive and bad as using derogatory names.” And he said Campion should apologize for his comments on the floor last week. Rodgers denied that his words were homophobic, noting that he had lost reelection to the House after voting to legalize gay marriage in 2009. But other senators — particularly members of the LGBTQ community — said they interpreted the remarks differently. “They could be taken as homophobic,” Campion said, calling Rodgers’ words “completely unacceptable.” According to Sen. Debbie Ingram (D-Chittenden), who is also gay, “When you use really derogatory terms that imply insults towards women or females, you have both sexism and heterosexism that enter into it.” She added, “The implication is really insulting.” m See sevendaysvt.com for a more in-depth version of this story. Disclosure: Tim Ashe is the domestic partner of Seven Days publisher and coeditor Paula Routly. Find our conflict-of-interest policy at sevendaysvt.com/disclosure. Contact: paul@sevendaysvt.com

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5/27/20 10:56 AM

arts news Wicked Groovy Lauren Courcelle, self-published, 539 pages. $25 paperback; $3.99 ebook.

Mom had cautioned me about the overabundance of crunchy, hipster yuppies in Burlington, and I didn’t see a need to meet any of them.

Short Takes on Five Vermont Books B Y J O R D A N B A R RY, CHELSEA E DG A R , MA R GA R ET G RAYSON & M AR GO T HA R R I S ON

even 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 prickle of porcupines. So this monthly feature is our way of introducing you to a handful of books by Vermont authors. To do that, we contextualize each book just a little and quote a single representative sentence from, yes, page 32. Inclusion here implies neither approval nor derision on our part, but simply: Here are a bunch of books that Seven Days readers might like to know about.

The Somnambulist and the Good Life David Cavanagh, Salmon Poetry, 76 pages. $14.95.

You’d swear I know what I’m doing. You’d swear I’m hearing instructions. I may have to grow old this way, drifting unbruised, unrecollected, directed — or not — from afar.

n his latest volume, Burlington poet DAVID CAVANAGH uses sleepwalking as a metaphor for the anesthetized state of automatic doing that characterizes everyday wakefulness. His poems are slightly daffy, with a trancelike quality that mimics the delirium of an Ambien trip. In “Handbasket,” he turns one of the English language’s most befuddling idioms into an extended farce, which reads like a dispatch from a sold-out Amtrak car: “Strange but mostly comfortable, hellbound / in this crowded tote. Charming, even quaint, / cozy it sounds, like the word cottage, / or hot chocolate.” Another traveling-to-hell-adjacent poem in the collection, “Faust Airlines,” begins with a chortle-inducing sales come-on (“What a deal!”), then proceeds to this sizzling description of economy-class malaise: “Now I breathe the air I just did breathe.” There are also “serious” poems in The Somnambulist and the Good Life — reflections on death, love, climate change, the determinedly hell-bound state of the world — but the more playful ones seem to have the most profound things to say. C.E.

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Since 2012, Vermont author LAUREN COURCELLE has been publishing a series of novels about Persephone Smith, a girl with paranormal powers and pop-star connections living in the humble environs of Vermont. In the first book, Wicked Normal, Persephone is a 10-yearold middle grader; having aged with the series, she’s starting her first year at “Vermont U” at the opening of the eighth installment, Wicked Groovy. Bubbly, opinionated and prone to frequent italics in her narration, Persephone is also prone to inconvenient crushes — for instance, on her dorm’s hot RA and her gay best friend. And did we mention she can resurrect the dead? Rambling from everyday college experiences to fantastical ones and back, this novel takes Persephone through a range of “firsts” on her way to adulthood. M.H.

The Intern Peter Hogenkamp, TouchPoint Press, 264 pages. $16.99.

She could see Bobby lying in his bed, clutching the comic book with his only hand. At the center of this medical drama is Maggie Johnson, an intern at a hospital in East Harlem in New York City who struggles under the weight of her physician father’s expectations. While a vast array of doctors, nurses and patients floats in and out of Maggie’s orbit, the through line of the tale is her relationship with Bobby, a 12-year-old with terminal cancer and a wisecracking mouth. Written by PETER HOGENKAMP, a doctor living in Rutland, the book displays impressive knowledge of the inner workings of hospitals. Some lines feel like they must have been pulled directly from his own experiences. At times, the plot goes full “Grey’s Anatomy,” with Maggie getting into a knife fight with a patient’s abusive boyfriend and performing an illicit, off-the-books treatment. But at other moments the story eschews the drama to delve into the hidden emotional depths of a young person grappling with the beginning of a medical career. M.G.

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kt Mather, Whiskey Tit, 395 pages. $16.

Ripley puts it on and is like ... I mean, I don’t know how to write the sounds of the machine, cause it’s really the sounds that render the scene, but let’s just say she has a Class BAMF rating and does all the things the exo-forklift can do and lifts this giant crate of Marine-alien-colony gear and is all sexy voice, “Where do you want it?”

M.H.

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Sixteen-year-old Elaine fantasizes about being as badass as Ripley in Aliens — badass enough to do something about climate change and injustice and the plastic clogging the oceans instead of sitting in class thinking about it. She convinces her moms to let her unschool, only to realize she’s lost her excuse for inaction. The resulting odyssey puts her on a collision course with an unscrupulous trendy YA writer, coffee-shop hipsters and her own best friend. While Rage Is a Wolf is longer on funny, voice-y monologue than on traditional plot, Vermont author KT MATHER makes that voice sound loud and clear. Bristling with anger over a surplus of information and a deficit of avenues for meaningful action, Elaine reminds adult readers that idealism can be both absurd and necessary — a powerful lesson for now. The book’s publisher is pretty badass, too: In the words of owner MIETTE GILLETTE, Whiskey Tit is “based here on my pig and goat farm in the middle of nowhere, VT” and devotes itself “to texts that would otherwise be abandoned in a homogenised literary landscape.” Check it out.

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The Land of Milk & Honey: A History of Beekeeping in Vermont

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As Vermont was joining the national beekeeping revolution, another agricultural transformation was underway in the state.

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HISTORICAL & SPORTING AUCTION

Beekeeping has always been tied to other farming endeavors. Before forage is dried into hay to feed sheep and cows, its flowers feed the bees. In the late 1800s, that symbiotic relationship created an “agricultural paradise” in the Champlain Valley — literally, the authors point out, a land of milk and honey. In this detailed history, the authors — all highly respected local beekeepers — track beekeeping’s buzz from oral histories of early settlements to a swarm of modern apiculturists around the state. By the time we reach page 32, we’ve traced how bees made their way to the Green Mountains, seen diagrams of hive patents held by early Vermonters and learned how litigiousness got one patent holder into sticky situations. For casual readers who want to help save the bees and experienced apiarists alike, this book puts Vermont honey’s sweet history in context. And, if the closest you’ve been to a hive is the honey in your cupboard, a six-page glossary can help you out — from “acaricide” to “worker bee.”

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SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

6/18/20 3:29 PM

arts news

Origin Story Streaming video review: Fast Color B Y M AR GO T HA R R I SON

CODEBLACK FILMS

here do we find entertainment these days? On our laptops and in our living rooms. The streaming options are overwhelming — and not always easy to sort through. So, in this weekly feature, I review a movie or series that might otherwise be easy to overlook. THE MOVIE: Fast Color (2018)

WHERE TO SEE IT: Amazon Prime Video, Hulu;

rentable on iTunes. THE DEAL: The future is here, and it’s parched. In the world of Fast Color, rain hasn’t fallen for eight years, water is strictly rationed and grocery-store shelves are sparsely stocked. But Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has bigger problems to worry about: We meet her fleeing from a warehouse with rope burns on her wrists. As she drives across the wasted landscape, we soon learn who imprisoned her and why: Ruth has seizures that can cause earthquakes, opening new seismic faults. Hunted by government agents, she’s continually being betrayed by a power she can’t control. Out of options, Ruth eventually makes her way to her childhood home, an isolated farmstead where her mother, Bo (Lorraine Toussaint), welcomes her with misgivings. Bo has devoted herself to providing a safe haven for preteen Lila (Saniyya Sidney), the daughter whom Ruth abandoned in her infancy. In recovery from drug addiction, Ruth is eager to reconnect with Lila, who has her own powers. While Lila tries to teach Ruth to channel her power safely, though, the government scientists are busy closing in. WILL YOU LIKE IT? Cowritten and directed by Julia Hart, and given a meager theatrical release in 2019, Fast Color is a superhero film with the budget and values of an indie. As Ruth tells Lila, “We’re not superheroes. We’re just trying to get by.” In this human-scaled story — with just enough CGI to offer magic when it’s needed — the superpowers are passed down quietly through a family of Black women who might just be able to save an ailing world. Initially, as it follows Ruth on the road, Fast Color feels a bit underpopulated and disjointed, despite some gorgeous shots of 22

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Fast Color

Mbatha-Raw in the New Mexico desert. But when it reaches Bo’s farm, the film hits its stride. That’s due partly to the convincing familial chemistry of the three leads and partly to the evocative setting. Isolated Middle American farmsteads are a staple of superhero lore: think Ma and Pa Kent’s home in the Superman mythology. Bo’s home is lovingly designed, full of vintage furnishings and family mementos — a fitting container for the legacy she carries.

For one Black critic’s compelling take on that legacy, check out Monique Jones’ review on Shadow and Act; she links the powers in Fast Color to “the recognition of the traumas Black women inherit through their bloodlines.” The ending of the film leaves more teasing questions than answers. Clearly there’s

more to explore in this story and, with any luck, it will be explored: As of 2019, a TV series based on Fast Color was in the works at Amazon Studios. IF YOU LIKE THIS, TRY...

• Miss Juneteenth (2020; rentable on various services): While it doesn’t involve any literal magic, critics are praising the tender mother-daughter story in this directorial debut, along with Nicole Beharie’s performance as a pageant winner turned single mom. It all pivots around a scholarship pageant celebrating the titular holiday. • A Wrinkle in Time (2018; Disney+, rentable on various services): Literal magic does figure prominently in Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of the Madeleine L’Engle classic, featuring Storm Reid as the resourceful, STEM-loving heroine and Mbatha-Raw as her mom. • Beyond the Lights (2014; Netflix, rentable on various services): Mbatha-Raw has been due for stardom for a long time, as anyone knows who’s seen her incandescent turn as a self-destructive pop star in this romantic drama directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. Contact: margot@sevendaysvt.com

NOW PLAYING Sunset Drive-In Wednesday, June 24, through Thursday, July 2 Jurassic Park & Jaws Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban & Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Irresistible & The High Note Baby Driver & Infamous

Bethel Drive-In Friday, June 26, through Sunday, June 28 Zootopia

Fairlee Drive-In Friday, June 26 My Spy & The Goonies Saturday, June 27 Encore Live Presents: Garth Brooks: A Drive-In Concert Experience Sunday, June 28 My Spy

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COURTESY OF KATE BAUMWELL

or multi-instrumentalist and composer MATTHEW EVAN TAYLOR, only music could sufficiently express his reaction to the recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and the subsequent worldwide protests. The Middlebury College assistant professor of music decided to process his multitude of thoughts and feelings in a series of free jazz improvisations. Seven of them comprise his new album, Say Their Names. The title nods to popular rhetoric associated with the ongoing killing of unarmed Black Americans at the hands of police. At first, Taylor didn’t watch the highly circulated video of Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis cop, nor did he initially think it would spark the kind of outrage that has ensued. But, as he saw the protests take root and “reach a fever pitch,” he felt his “anger was building up,” he said. “This is one way I can find to support people who are putting their lives on the line,” Taylor told Seven Days by phone, noting that he’s donating sales of the album, as well as a personal matching contribution, to Black Lives Matter. The origin of Say Their Names began in December 2019, when Taylor launched an ongoing musical social media challenge dubbed Project 39. Having just turned 39 himself, he pledged to post a daily improvisation at least 39 seconds in length. But as he watched the coverage of Floyd’s death, and as new details emerged about Breonna Taylor and Arbery, he decided to focus his improv sessions solely on the resulting unrest. “Most of the time, as a musician, you don’t get to comment on events as they’re happening,” Taylor said. “As far as the intention of the music, it’s documentation. It’s my attempt at journalism.” Taylor began posting his reflections on May 29 and decided to release them as an album by the fifth day of updates. He says the tracks, composed of layers and layers of live loops, express many things: encouragement, outrage and — in “The Yellow-Haired Coward Goes to Church” — ridicule. (The piece refers to President Donald Trump’s much-criticized photo op, in which protesters were cleared out with tear gas so that he could brandish a Bible in front of a church in Washington, D.C.) Taylor plays flute, clarinet, saxophone and hulusi, an instrument of East Asian origin also known as the cucurbit flute.

MUSIC

Say Their Names album cover

THIS IS ONE WAY I CAN FIND TO SUPPORT PEOPLE WHO ARE

PUTTING THEIR LIVES ON THE LINE. M AT T HEW EVA N TAY L O R

Matthew Evan Taylor

Naming Names Matthew Evan Taylor reacts to police violence with a new album BY J ORD AN AD AM S

The album has minimal postproduction and is largely expressionistic. Taylor wields his instruments with incredible dynamic range, drawing out sounds in beautiful crescendos and curtailing them with sharply punctuated squalls. “I tend to avoid having a narrative that’s meant for the audience,” he said about his work.

However, Taylor explained that some sounds and techniques he used in Say Their Names have more literal interpretations, such as the breathy sounds at the beginning of “Why Can’t We Breathe.” And on “Footfalls for Justice,” staccato blasts of his horn coupled with siren-like squeals conjure images of protesters marching against a heavy police presence.

“I Only Have Two Cheeks” begins with a sample of podcaster and radio host Danielle Moodie — the only sound that Taylor did not create. She castigates those who took more offense at the riots’ destruction than at what motivated them. “If you are more concerned with the fire of a fucking Target than you are that you sat and watched on video for over eight minutes a white police officer kneel on the neck of a Black man like he was a fucking dog, then you are the problem,” she says in an episode, titled “Palpable Pain,” on the podcast “In the Thick With Maria & Julio” “I only have two cheeks. How many times am I supposed to turn them?” As Moodie’s words begin to overlap and swirl together, Taylor’s horn slides in. The two begin a sort of conversation that spins and spirals into oblivion. Taylor plans to continue producing music in this way “until things become ‘normal,’” he said. “It’s a model for still producing music [during a pandemic], but also [responding] to this incredible historical moment,” Taylor continued, “where there seems to be actionable change happening due to people’s outrage over the mistreatment of people like me, of Black Americans.” m Contact: jordan@sevendaysvt.com

INFO Say Their Names is available at matthewevantaylor.bandcamp.com. SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

arts news COURTESY OF PAUL ROGERS/COLD HOLLOW SCULPTURE PARK

ART

David Stromeyer (right) preparing for the boulder drop

Crushing It

David Stromeyer’s boulder moves at Cold Hollow Sculpture Park B Y C A RO LY N SHA PI RO

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

plates were too large to fit in the press, Stromeyer explained. It wasn’t the first time he has used a rock to shape metal, but the last one was almost 40 years ago, he said. Before releasing the boulder, Stromeyer had displayed a scale wooden model of the eventual sculpture. Built at the Stromeyers’ winter home and studio in Austin, Texas, the model shows the double steel plates as the center of multiple appendages. These extend from the top and below, like a table with legs pointing in both directions. COURTESY OF DAVID STROMEYER

n mid-June, David Stromeyer stood under a large boulder that hung from the arm of a crane some 30 feet high. On the ground lay a pair of stacked steel plates, each 10 by 16 feet, atop a bed of gravel he had shoveled into place with painstaking precision. The world-renowned artist would be using the giant rock, which he had plucked from his Enosburg Falls property, to crush the metal into a very specific dent and curvature. Stromeyer wore a ball cap, jeans and an Army-green shirt that read, “I do all my own stunts.” Indeed he does. For 50 years, he’s been producing massive steel sculptures. More than 60 of them are scattered about 35 acres that Stromeyer and his wife, Sarah, established as Cold Hollow Sculpture Park in 2014. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the park is closed to the public this summer. But that hasn’t stopped the 73-year-old sculptor from making more art. Preparing for the dramatic drop, Stromeyer climbed into the cab of the crane and adjusted it slightly to maneuver the boulder into position. An assistant pulled on a rope to keep the stone, about 3,000 pounds and shaped like an oversize potato, in the exact spot. Stromeyer then got out of the crane, picked up a rifle and aimed it at the winch that held the straps around the boulder. The first shot hit but didn’t release the hook. On the second shot, the rock plunged onto the plates on the ground with a thunderous thud, sending up a cloud of dust. And so Stromeyer’s latest sculpture was launched. It has yet to be titled. For most of his works, Stromeyer uses a self-built, 150-ton hydraulic press to coax massive steel sheets, beams and pipes into curves and corners. The press allows him to better control the force and timing. For this piece, though, the

"Portrait of the Artist" by David Stromeyer

In explaining his inspiration for the new piece, Stromeyer noted that, on a trip to South America in 1978, he observed ancient Incan walls covered repeatedly over many years with stucco and paint. Last year, when Cold Hollow hosted a series of programs around the theme “diving beneath the surface,” Stromeyer said he began to ask himself, “How can I bring that kind of narrative to steel?”

He hesitated to ascribe too much of his intentions or meaning to the latest creation; he prefers that viewers draw their own conclusions. Stromeyer will, however, happily discuss his process and methods at length, spouting off measurements and calculations and the characteristics of his materials. The sculptor has produced more than 470 works that illustrate the suppleness of steel — that is, how an inflexible material can bend to an artist’s will to execute his vision. Most of his elegant, contemporary pieces play with geometry. Many are painted in vibrant colors that change according to the angle of light and proximity of the viewer. The Stromeyers intended for the boulder drop to kick off the 2020 season at Cold Hollow. A party was to follow, with local craft beer and music. COVID-19 dashed those plans, along with all programming and fundraising. Just a handful of onlookers watched the rock fall: a couple of assistants, a reporter and a videographer who’s a longtime friend. “It’s really powerful to see something so physically built,” said Vera Gates, a landscape architect who lives in Franklin and serves on Cold Hollow’s advisory council. “It’s pretty cool. There’s a lot of engineering and preparation.” Gates acknowledged the extensive deliberation that goes into Stromeyer’s work. “Then it’s serendipity,” she said. “It’s magic, and you get what you get.” Stromeyer has added at least one new sculpture each year at Cold Hollow, siting them in carefully selected spots among the rolling fields and meadows. When he moved to Vermont in 1970, the artist chose the former farm precisely for its contours, which complement the shapes of his towering sculptures. “Early on I used to think about individual pieces,” Stromeyer said. “Now, especially with the formation of the sculpture park, I think about the whole park as one artwork, with its components.” Rosemary Branson Gill, Cold Hollow’s executive director, said that despite their disappointment over the loss of the 2020 season, the pandemic has given her and the Stromeyers a chance to meditate on the park’s future and the role it could play in inspiring creative thought in Vermont. This moment marks a shift for Stromeyer artistically, as well, Gill said: from introspection into his own art making to a broader, longer-term vision of what he will leave behind. In early June, he installed “Portrait of the Artist” — the only artwork at Cold Hollow that includes text. It spells out “Dreamer” in bold, bright-red blocks. “This is a real pivot in his career, where he’s making sculpture beyond the sculpture itself,” Gill said. “He’s always said, ‘I set myself problems, and then I solve them.’ So this is not solving the problem of one piece but of the whole park. I really feel like he’s approaching the work differently.” The newest sculpture will be the subject of a book project that Stromeyer hopes to publish, to “document one piece from concept to completion.” As he gets older, he said, he has grown more compelled to chronicle his creative trajectory. After the rock drop, Sarah Stromeyer asked her husband if the concavity of the plates turned out the way he wanted. “That end kicked up more than I planned,” he said, studying one edge, “but I’ll make it work.” Contact: shapiro@sevendaysvt.com

INFO Learn more at coldhollowsculpturepark.com.

Feedback « P.7

CRAFTSBURY CALLING

NO ‘DEFENSE’ FOR F-35S

[Re Off Message: “Data Show Vermont Air Guard F-35 Flights Spiked in April,” April 24; Feedback: “The $116 Million Question,” May 6]: I am glad that someone finally brought up the issue of what these F-35 aircraft cost. Each one costs approximately $100 million, give or take a few cool million. The cost of each and every training flight is about 40 grand per flight. To all of you patriotic Americans who think these F-35s are actually necessary, I have to ask the following question: What about defense of our economy? What role do these aircraft actually play in defending our country? At the same time we splurge on these aircraft in the name of “defense,” we are told that we don’t have enough money for everything else that we actually need. America is the poorest rich country in the world, and I believe this is a big part of the problem. Ask questions; it’s good for your health. Jerry Trudell

BARTON

STUDENT VECTORS

[Re Off Message: “UVM Details Plan to Resume In-Person Classes This Fall,” June 15]: The University of Vermont’s plan to bring students back this fall is ill advised and possibly catastrophic. A psychologist writing in the June 15 New York Times points to research showing that 18- to 24-year-olds are the most likely segment of the population to engage in risky behavior and that it may not be such a good idea to flood the community with thousands of them returning en masse to college campuses this fall. This is a case in which social science research corroborates common sense and experience. Especially considering that the much-feared “second wave” is expected to strike in the autumn, it is a very poor choice to “reopen” the university for on-campus education while tools requiring self-discipline and a careful weighing of risks — namely social distancing, mask wearing and handwashing — remain our only effective means of coping with a deadly pandemic. Concentrated populations of college students, however well meaning, cannot be trusted to maintain the social discipline needed to maintain these controls. A realistic, adult assessment of risk should lead UVM officials to conclude that they can best serve the community by persevering with distance learning for the time being, until effective medical treatments and a vaccine are in place. Otherwise, they are playing dice with Vermonters’ health in a

We got a lot of feedback on last week’s Off Message news story “Trio With Confederate Flag Interrupts AntiRacism Rally in Craftsbury” [June 16]. Author Sasha Goldstein did not attend the event but used provided video footage to write about how it was disrupted by some guys displaying the Confederate flag. Many of the protesters felt the story misrepresented their gathering, which was otherwise peaceful and hopeful. A minuscule Vermont town that is 99 percent white held an awesome event, on its iconic country green, surrounded by white picket fences and white houses in celebration and recognition of Black Lives Matter. But, with no more content than “he said, she said” or any consideration for the larger issues playing out in the United States, the article reduced the event to a sideshow that was reflective of something that might be featured in the National Enquirer. In a town of 1,200, 200 showed up, three people counterprotested, and 997 were not present. This makes me ask, where were the other 997? At home because of the virus? Supportive from a distance? Did they choose to remain silent or have valid concerns for being afraid of conflict? (I was not asked any of these questions, but rather if I went to school with the counterprotester.) There was an opportunity to examine the differences and similarities between the protests in New York City and the one here in Craftsbury — the challenges and successes the city has had, versus a country town that does not have a police force. Opportunity missed. P.S. In reference to the quote that suggested native Vermonters like me might view Jasper “Jay” Wright and his buddies as “ignorant, harmless racists,” let it be noted that there was nothing “harmless” in that situation or any situation that threatens, scares or targets a race of people, whether or not you grew up here. Anne-Marie Keppel

CRAFTSBURY COMMON

casino owned by the coronavirus. And, as we all know, the house always wins. Seth Steinzor

SOUTH BURLINGTON

DUMB RESOLUTION

You have so portrayed the members who said no as villains against Juneteenth [Off Message: “VT House Republicans Decry Reference to ‘Racist’ Trump Tweets in Juneteenth Resolution,” June 19]. You couldn’t have been more wrong.

The headline should read: “Large Craftsbury Anti-Racist Rally Goes Ahead Despite Disruption.” The headline shouldn’t mention the guys with the Confederate flag. Further, it was in extremely poor taste to print a picture of the driver and flag. You gave the flaggers more importance than the rally and undercut the attendees’ message. Quotes from the flaggers are sufficient. Headlines and pictures give them too much attention. That the flagger doesn’t understand how he could scare people illustrates the need for communication on both sides. This is a perfect example of when someone with proper de-escalation techniques could’ve intervened, because the protesters or the flaggers could’ve been hurt. Jill Allen

BURLINGTON

I was deeply saddened to see a Confederate flag used to disrupt an anti-racism rally in Craftsbury. It got me thinking about something I’d noticed before but not thought much about: As I’ve driven around the state, I’ve certainly spotted the flag flying several times. This leads me to my question: Why do Vermonters fly that flag? The Green Mountain Boys mustered for the Civil War (which started, in the words of the founders of the Confederacy, explicitly for their continued ability to keep Black people as slaves). Many Vermonters fought in the Union Army — in fact, Vermont regiments were credited with stopping Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. Many towns in Vermont even have memorials dedicated to those who served! Beyond that, the flag commonly associated as the flag of the Confederacy is not actually the original flag of the Confederacy — it’s a niche battle flag that was flown by Robert E. Lee’s troops that only became popular after states started flying it in support of segregation laws. Setting aside that the Confederate States of America existed for a mere five years, that flag has been associated with I am so totally not a racist. I have biracial grandchildren that I love dearly and worry every day when they head out of their home if they are going to be a target. But just because the Dems want to pass a resolution to call out the president as a racist and our police force to be cut to nothing is totally pathetic. God only knows when any one of them may need the police in an emergency. Sorry, 911 is off police duty today... That was totally a political venture in the House last Friday. They should

untold suffering and the denial of human rights for its entire existence. Which brings me back to my question: When our armed forces branches are banning the flag and considering renaming bases named for Confederate officers, and it’s no longer welcome at NASCAR, can we assert it has no place in our state? John Sayer

WINOOSKI

Perhaps because Seven Days writer Sasha Goldstein was not at the Craftsbury Black Lives Matter rally, he wrote a piece that misses the most important point! That it was a worthwhile examination of Black Lives Matter issues, not a couple of wing nuts. I was there from 5 to 6:10 p.m., when it seemed to be winding down. Many people had made statements from the gazebo. I did not feel completely safe from COVID-19, so I left. There were careful handmade signs by kids, teens, adults and grandparents. For example: “No Justice — No Peace,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Only White People Can End Racism” and “All Lives Can Not Matter Until Black Lives Matter.” I have been going to demonstrations since 1963, when I went to the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech. This Vermont one was inspiring in its own way. I did not see police; there was no tear gas, no flag of the people who fought the Civil War because they did not want their enslaved people set free. There were some signs about ending police brutality. Everyone practiced social distancing and wore masks. The Confederate flag you write about must have happened later. It was not the main happening. I did see the “Small Dicks Matter” smart alecks. I am disappointed that Seven Days, such an excellent paper, chose to focus on and even use the name of one person there to make a ruckus — and not talk about the rest. I think that was shallow. Marjorie Kramer

LOWELL

be ashamed using today’s movements to further their agendas. So sad for the people of Vermont. We will recess Friday and return August 25 … More to come, I am sure. Marcia Martel

WATERFORD

Martel (R-Waterford), a rep from Caledonia County, voted against the resolution.

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT BY KEN PICARD

he skies over the Winooski River and Lake Champlain normally teem with avian species this time of year. But anyone who was near the river or happened to be driving Interstate 89 through Burlington on the morning of Friday, June 12, may have noticed a pair of unusual “birds” migrating from Burlington International Airport to Plattsburgh, N.Y. Like the mythical stork that delivers babies, the larger of the two had the smaller one dangling beneath its belly like a swaddled bundle of joy. The “stork” — a massive, five-blade Sikorsky S-61 helicopter, similar to those used by the U.S. Coast Guard for ocean rescues — was delivering a newborn breed of aircraft: an electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, or eVTOL, which combines the flight characteristics of a helicopter with a drone and a fixed-wing airplane. The full-size prototype, named “Alia,” was completed last year by South Burlington startup Beta Technologies and just received its airworthiness certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration in January. Why did Alia have to be airlifted across the lake, requiring a half dozen law enforcement agencies briefly to shut down Interstate 89 and other roads in its flight path, rather than fly itself? In short, because it needs more tests. To date, the FAA has never certified a commercial electric aircraft. The folks at Beta Technologies aim to build the first. But before the company can reach that milestone, its craft must undergo many more months of testing, all of which must be done at Plattsburgh International Airport, which lies in a less populous area than BTV, where Beta is headquartered. “It was a pretty striking event,” Tom O’Leary, Beta’s chief operating officer, said about the June 12 lake crossing. The company hadn’t yet unveiled its new bird to the public, mostly to avoid the hassle of fielding queries and photo requests from nosy reporters and aviation enthusiasts, he said. However, after federal, state and local authorities made it clear they wouldn’t allow the airlift to happen under cover of night simply to keep Beta’s experimental aircraft a secret, O’Leary said, “We figured, people are going to take pictures, so we might as well do a soft reveal.” Alia — not its final production name — is a sleek, 40-foot-long craft with a 50-foot wingspan. It tips the scales at

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

6,000 pounds once its rechargeable batteries and other equipment are in place. (It was stripped to a lean 3,800 pounds for its 17-mile trip to Plattsburgh.) The eVTOL has four fixed horizontal rotors on top and a fifth vertical rotor in the rear for forward propulsion. Beta’s performance goal for the craft is flying 250 miles on a single charge, then recharging in less than an hour. That benchmark was set by its main client, United Therapeutics, which is developing artificial organs for human implantation. Eventually, Beta’s aircraft will have other possible uses, such as delivering packages and transporting passengers. As first reported by Wired magazine, which got the exclusive heads-up on the June 12 airlift, company founder Kyle Clark based the aircraft’s design, including its arched wings and tapered wingtips, on the Arctic tern, which has the longest flight migration of any creature in the animal kingdom.

PHOTOS: ERIC ADAMS; COURTESY OF BETA TECHNOLOGIES

Why Did a Chopper Haul Another Aircraft Across Lake Champlain?

Sikorsky S-61 helicopter delivering eVTOL “Alia”

Beta Technologies’ flying formation

To date, Beta hasn’t released all the specs on Alia, including its maximum airspeed. O’Leary noted that, by normal flight standards, the 20-minute transport from BTV to PBG happened at a veritable crawl — a mere 60 miles per hour. Why so slow? If the hauling helicopter had flown any faster, he said, the air moving under the eVTOL’s wings would have made it fly on its own. Speaking of unusual flyovers seen in and around the Burlington area: A reader wrote in last month to ask about four single-engine airplanes he spotted flying in a tight diamond formation and being trailed by a red helicopter.

As it happens, that formation was also the work of Beta. When Clark, himself a pilot, founded the company in 2017 and assembled his team of engineers, software designers and aviation industry experts, one of the perks he offered was free flight lessons. The rationale: There’s no better way for developers of an experimental aircraft to understand the language, mechanics and physics of flight than by learning to fly themselves. Last month’s aerial formation, O’Leary explained, was at the request of Gene Richards, BTV’s director of aviation. On August 15, the airport will mark its 100th anniversary, and the recently rehearsed flyover will be part of that celebration.

It’s no wonder Beta is getting so much buzz of late. With global aviation responsible for about 2 percent of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, industry experts see a promising future in electric aircrafts. Aerospace companies have been racing to get their eVTOLs off the ground, and Beta is among the leaders. The company has grown from 21 employees in 2018 to 75 today — and, according to O’Leary, it’s looking to hire about a dozen more. Not a bad gig if one has the right skills and wants to learn how to fly. A fringe benefit for all of us: Unlike the newly arrived F-35 fighter jets, Beta’s bird isn’t loud enough to rile up its neighbors. m Contact: ken@sevendaysvt.com

INFO Got a Vermont head-scratcher that has you stumped? Ask us! wtf@sevendaysvt.com.

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SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Rising Stars

How the pandemic propelled a Vermont baking company into the national spotlight

aurie Furch, a former bakery owner, has answered calls for the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Hotline for almost six years. Every shift, she handles dozens of questions from anxious bakers. She’s used to troubleshooting problems such as Why are my cookies taking an hour to bake? Or, Can I substitute all-purpose flour for bread flour? But not even the holiday baking season and its deluge of calls prepared Furch and her teammates for the tsunami of home baking appeals that struck the weekend of March 14. That Sunday, the hotline handled a 50 percent spike in calls. As the coronavirus pandemic shut businesses and schools, and shelter-in-place orders rolled out nationwide, homebound Americans were baking at an unprecedented rate — and they needed help. Millions of those bakers turned to Norwich, Vt.-based King Arthur for advice — and for flour to fuel the new national pastime. The crescendo of phone calls was something the company could handle by redeploying staff from its temporarily shuttered baking education center and retail operation. Addressing a nationwide run on flour that left grocery store shelves bare was a bigger challenge. 28

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

“Not only were people all learning how to bake,” Furch said, “then Americans decided they all needed flour at the same time.” King Arthur started as a regional New England brand and eventually developed national distribution for its products. In recent years, when customers from Florida or California emailed to ask where to buy the flour, they could be referred to a nearby supermarket. The pandemic changed that — and shone a national spotlight on a beloved Vermont company and how it does business. It’s a welcome story that demonstrates nice guys can finish first.

‘Playing With the Big Boys’ King Arthur was founded as Henry Wood & Company in Boston in 1790 to import high-quality European flour. In the 1980s, fifth-generation owners Frank and Brinna Sands moved the family-owned company to Vermont, where it began its transformation into the go-to source for home bakers. In 1990, the company marked its bicentennial and hit $6 million in sales. That was also the year PJ Hamel was hired as employee No. 6. One of her tasks was to

help expand the company’s reach beyond New England. The owners told Hamel, “‘We’re starting a catalog. Can you write a catalog?’ And I said, ‘Oh, sure,’” she recounted. The original goal of the catalog, Hamel said, was to get the company’s flour to fiercely devoted customers who had moved out of its New England distribution range, particularly snowbirds who spent winters down south. The brand was already firmly established as a regional favorite for its highquality, unbleached, additive-free flour. “People were writing to us and saying, ‘I’m in Florida and I can’t find King Arthur flour. Could you send me some?’” Hamel said. “And Brinna was going down to the post office in Norwich, wrapping flour in paper bags and sending it to Florida.” The first catalog went to 10,000 existing and prospective customers. Thirty years later, King Arthur flour is sold through a national roster of grocery stores. Catalog mailings have reached 8 million a year, offering customers traditional and gluten-free flours and mixes, along with a wide range of specialty baking ingredients and tools. Annual revenue has climbed to $150 million, including flour sales to food

B Y M EL I S S A PA S A N EN

service accounts such as bakeries and restaurants. The company also sells direct to consumers from a robust website; in addition to products, the site is filled with friendly, instructive posts designed to help people master piecrust or parse the difference between cream and butter scones. Until the pandemic, an easy cheesecake recipe — with no flour unless you count store-bought graham crackers — had long ranked in the top three recipes among more than 1,500 in the online database. In 2004, Frank and Brinna Sands completed the sale of the company to their employees; in 2016, King Arthur was named the company of the year from a field of 16 finalists by the Employee Stock Ownership Plan Association. The association highlighted “the inclusive nature of the company,” demonstrated by King Arthur’s application letter signed by 100 employee-owners. While the company built its early reputation on European flour, now it proudly touts that all its wheat is U.S.-grown and milled through partnerships with millers and farmers from Buffalo, N.Y., to Washington State. The company blends and bags its mixes and has one direct-sales fulfillment center in Norwich, but all

PHOTOS: JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR

Baker Marc Levy removing fresh-baked baguettes from the oven

remaining packaging and fulfillment is contracted out around the country. King Arthur employs about 365 people, all but 30 at its Norwich headquarters, making it the second largest employer on the Vermont side of the Upper Valley. Its flagship retail store, bakery, café and baking education center drew half a million visitors to Norwich last year. That statistic puts it on par with Ben & Jerry’s Waterbury factory, which has long claimed the title of single largest attraction in Vermont. According to Nielsen tracking data shared by King Arthur, the company currently ranks No. 1 nationally for retail sales of unbleached, all-purpose flour. It is the second overall flour brand behind Gold Medal, owned by food giant General Mills. Hamel retired last year just shy of her 30th anniversary with the company; she still writes for the King Arthur recipe blog from her home in Cape Cod, Mass. Over her tenure, “the little Vermont company became a big national company,” she reflected with a mix of awe and pride. “We’re playing with the big boys.”

‘The New Hot Category’ Normally, the flour business is pretty sleepy and doesn’t tend to grab headlines. Plain wheat flour is a low-margin business that many consumers consider an undifferentiated, basic commodity. “If you want to make money, you don’t grow potatoes; you sell potato chips. You don’t sell flour; you sell breakfast cereal,” explained Jeffrey Hamelman, a certified master baker and retired original director of King Arthur’s Norwich bakery. But COVID-19 has affected almost everything, including the flour world. March is the slowest time of the year for flour sales, although it leads up to Easter, which is the second busiest baking season after the winter holidays. So Bill Tine, King Arthur’s vice president of marketing, was surprised when, seemingly out of the blue, hotline call volume took its giant leap in mid-March. Tine said he recalls a late Sunday evening phone call to check in with colleagues about the unusual numbers. But, honestly, he said, that period of time is a blur. King Arthur, like every essential business, was busy figuring out how to keep going and keep its employees safe. Then, unexpectedly, they were simultaneously faced with the sudden spike in demand for flour and baking advice. The week of March 16 was when grocery store orders started to pick up in an unseasonal way. Over the next four weeks, they leapt 600 percent over prior year sales, Tine said. There were wellpublicized shortages of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, but, he said, “It was a little

Justin Severance filling mail orders at the fulfillment center

Not only were people all learning how to bake … then Americans decided they all needed flour at the same time. L AU RIE F UR C H

bit of a shock that all of a sudden flour became, like, the third thing that started to go out of stock.” In response to empty grocery shelves, more consumers ordered direct from King Arthur than ever before, reaching six times normal sales. On April 19, the company tallied a new one-day website traffic high of close to 1 million user sessions and 2.3 million page views. It blew past the previous record of 542,000 sessions on the day before Thanksgiving 2019. And the orders looked different, Tine said. Direct sales were traditionally a mix

of harder-to-find specialty products. But now consumers were ordering the core supermarket item they could not find: King Arthur’s signature 5-pound red-andwhite paper bag of flour. While management was scrambling to get those bags back on grocery shelves nationwide, Furch, her hotline colleagues and the team that handles social media interactions were on a never-ending hamster wheel. As call volume snowballed, it started to feel “like a continual Christmas season,” Furch recalled. All told, the calls, emails, social media interactions and web

traffic across April and May saw a sixfold increase. Management did what it could to deepen the bench. The four-person digital engagement team grew to 17, thanks to bakers and baking instructors whose regular jobs were on hold or much reduced. The hotline similarly drew on six reinforcements from within the company, bringing its ranks to 21. At no time, according to Tine, did the company technically run out of flour. What it ran out of was enough bagged flour to RISING STARS SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

» P.30 29

PHOTOS: JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR

Rising Stars « P.29 feed the newly voracious appetite of Americans stuck at home. During the initial spike, Tine explained, King Arthur had enough flour to fill orders because the pipeline was full in preparation for Easter. In fact, throughout the whole flour “shortage,” he said, there was never insufficient grain or even milling time to turn the grain into flour. The roadblocks were bagging capacity and speed of distribution. Starting in mid-March, King Arthur was in constant communication with its milling and distribution partners to add shifts and speed up delivery, Tine said. The company paid the extra cost of shipping flour from mills by truck instead of the usual railcars. And King Arthur signed a contract with a new distribution center to get grocery shelves restocked as quickly as possible; it also negotiated a partnership with an additional mill. But no matter what company leaders did, it felt like they were just plugging holes in a leaky bathtub. There simply were not enough additional bagging lines at any of their partners to fill the orders. “As soon as a truckload of flour came in, it was sold that next day,” Tine said. Unlike toilet paper hoarding, he pointed out, people were using all the flour they bought and heading back for more: “People were actually baking.” To the surprise even of those in the flour business, it turned out that the quarantine was compelling people to bake, whether because they couldn’t get out to buy their daily loaf, they craved comfort food or they simply had a lot of time on their hands. Suddenly, social media feeds were filled with photos of pies, cakes, cookies and crusty loaves of sourdough tagged #quarantinebaking. Nielsen data for year-to-date retail sales of wheat flour through May 16 shared by King Arthur show the category up almost 70 percent over a year ago. “We were one of the highest-growth categories in the grocery store,” said Tine. “That’s not normal.” The media jumped on the at-home baking trend, too. King Arthur was inundated with interview requests from the Los Angeles Times to the Wall Street Journal, NPR’s “Marketplace” to CNN. “I don’t know if I can name someone that hasn’t been in touch,” said Tine. “Baking’s kind of the new hot category.” The company’s baking experts were featured on national TV, discussing the jump in calls and sharing King Arthur’s French-style country bread recipe on CBS’ “Sunday Morning,” among others. Management explained to business 30

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Head bread maker Carrie Brisson making rolls

publications such as Forbes how they’d ramped up to ship more than 6 million bags of flour in March, a 268 percent increase over March 2019. All that exposure helped more people around the country learn about the Vermont company — which was both an opportunity and a challenge. To feed the growing demand, King Arthur took a risk. Throughout its milling partnership network, all bagging lines that could handle King Arthur’s 5-pound bag were maxed out. It would take nine months to construct a new one, Tine explained. But one mill did have a 3-pound line available. With record speed, King Arthur designed a new 3-pound bag and had it

printed and shipped to the milling partner; the first of a planned million bags came off the line the week of May 4. The new item is more expensive to produce, and the plastic bag doesn’t fit the company’s sustainability goals, but it allowed King Arthur to fill direct-toconsumer orders while getting its 5-pound paper bag back on grocery shelves.

#quarantinebaking As Americans took to the kitchen in March and April, baking anxiety rose. Home cooks worried about how to keep their sourdough starter alive and wondered just how long to not-knead that loaf of no-knead bread.

King Arthur has staked a claim as America’s baking expert. Reminiscent of its logo, the company is the white knight of baking, ready to gallop in and save people from baking misadventures. “King Arthur is like the best grandparents to bakers in the world,” said Mitch Stamm, a longtime professional baking instructor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., and board vice chair of the Bread Bakers Guild of America. Ever since King Arthur launched its first web page in the mid-1990s, Hamel, the original catalog writer, recalled, “We just really wanted to connect with people — not just to sell them things but to educate. Brinna was very, very strong on wanting to teach people,” she added, referring to Brinna Sands, who, along with her husband, is no longer directly involved with the company. To this day, when Hamel writes a blog post, such as her recent “10 Tips for New Sourdough Bakers,” she explained, “I want to take people by the hand and say, ‘You can do this.’” This approach is not wholly disinterested, of course. “Almost everything we do, we approach it like, What would help consumers bake?” said Tine. “If we help consumers bake, it will come back to benefit us.” That thinking is what drove the 1993 launch of the Baker’s Hotline, as well as the 2000 establishment of the Norwich bakery and education center. It offered

about 800 classes last year, including kids’ baking boot camps, British classics and professional intensives. The company opened a Washington State education center in 2016. Hamelman recalled Brinna Sands running across the parking lot to ask if he’d start their bakery and school. “She’s a visionary,” he said simply. “She’s the one who felt like King Arthur would never be a truly complete company just selling flour. It’s got to be showcasing what the flour can do.”

King Arthur is like the best grandparents to bakers in the world. M I TCH STAMM

Anyone can call the hotline and ask for free help. Furch and her teammates do ask callers what flour brand they’re using, mostly in order to help them efficiently. King Arthur is known for its tight quality specifications, including protein percentage, which can impact recipe results. Consistency is one of the reasons many bakers, particularly professionals, favor the company’s flour. During the height of the quarantine, when yeast was especially scarce, the hotline saw a huge jump in questions about sourdough baking, which relies on a combination of wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria to leaven bread and other baked goods. “It was insane,” Furch said. “Everybody and their brother was trying to start a sourdough starter.” For her evening shift, Furch would start at 5 p.m. “You check your emails, you put your headset on and almost immediately there’s phone calls waiting,” she said. “People are on the West Coast; it’s still two o’clock, so they’re wondering if they can make sourdough bread in time for dinner.” Furch found herself spending more time with certain callers, some elderly or living alone. She recalled a man who called from New York City. “He said, ‘I just came home from work, and I’m exhausted,’” Furch said. It turned out he was an emergency room physician. “He would come home, and he would just want to work on his sourdough starter.” Many people, she said, would describe how “they were baking things and leaving them on doorsteps for neighbors — you

know, trying to share and build some community themselves by just making little gifts.” To supplement the advice offered on the Baker’s Hotline — and in hopes of helping people before they picked up the phone — King Arthur amped up its online content with video tutorials on how to bake sourdough bread and blog posts on baking with less yeast. It also launched several new video shows. In “Martin Bakes at Home,” King Arthur baker and instructor Martin Philip demonstrated perfect baguette technique. In “Baking With Kids,” King Arthur instructors made granola and whole grain pancakes with the help of their own kids. “The Isolation Baking Show,” a partnership of King Arthur and Vermont-based cookbook author/pastry chef Gesine Bullock-Prado, offered serious instruction and corny jokes with retired bakery director Hamelman. The two-part April 18 show featuring braided challah and a Great Depressionera chocolate cake recipe has racked up almost 5 million views.

Doing the Right Thing Sharing is deeply baked into King Arthur’s core values. During the pandemic, it has kept its education center instructors busy baking bread to donate to community organizations; retail employees sewed more than 1,000 masks for King Arthur employees and to donate. The company also launched a new For Goodness Bakes program, which has paid 31 bakeries hard-hit by the pandemic to bake for those in need in communities around the country. Since 1992, King Arthur has also offered free baking lessons and supplies to middle school students. That program has evolved into Bake for Good, which sends three employees to teach at schools around the country. Its video version has come in handy this year. In a normal year, some 35,000 youngsters participate, and each receives a kit of supplies to bake two loaves of bread: one to keep and one to give to someone in need. “I have seen fifth graders fill their wagon with bread and walk it down to the food shelf,” said program manager Amy Driscoll. Driscoll is starting her ninth year with King Arthur. She grew up with the flour in Massachusetts, where her mother bought 50-pound bags to bake for five kids. As a young person, Driscoll said, she took King Arthur flour for granted. But now, she admitted, “I have drunk the Kool-Aid.” She was referring to the fact that she won’t bake with anything else, but it could RISING STARS

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Swedish Pit —

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SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

6/15/20 1:29 PM

New Normal

Rising Stars « P.31

Pastry chef Gesine Bullock-Prado on “The Isolation Baking Show,” cohosted with retired King Arthur Flour bakery director Jeffrey Hamelman COURTESY OF MICHAEL SAVINO

just as easily apply to her appreciation for the employee-owned company, which has also been a B Corporation since 2007. B Corps are evaluated by an independent certifier to ensure that profit does not come at the expense of people, communities and the environment. Driscoll sums it up as: “The company gets to decide what to do based on what is the right thing to do.” She rattled off a list that started with transparent, regular communication from management at all times, but especially during the pandemic. Since mid-March, every employee has been able to access four weeks of paid leave to care for kids, as well as free mental health and ergonomic consulting services. Driscoll emphasized that the company has avoided layoffs by redeploying workers to meet both business and community needs. It reflects back on something several longtime employees cited. “Frank used to have a plaque on his desk,” PJ Hamel said. “It said something along the lines of ‘Just do the right thing,’ or ‘Do the right thing always.’”

Michael’s Cookie Jar donating cookies to Kids’ Meals in Houston, Texas, supported by King Arthur’s For Goodness Bakes program

Speaking Up King Arthur’s management team is well aware that there is always room to do better. Last November, senior leadership started ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion training. The program was to be rolled out to the entire company, until the pandemic put it on pause. “We’ve got to be more proactive and more forward-looking on how to make sure that we’re actively getting all people to our table,” said Tine. While women are well represented in management at King Arthur, the company has very little racial diversity. “We live in a white state,” said co-CEO Karen Colberg, quickly adding, “That doesn’t absolve us from trying to talk about [race], to raise awareness, to make change and to be in it.” On June 1, King Arthur reacted to the protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd with a social media post condemning “the devastating racial injustices that continue to plague our country” and announcing a $200,000 fund to support racial justice changemaking organizations. This was a big step for a company whose potentially controversial statements had previously been limited to “Say no to raw dough” (due to the risk of E. coli in raw flour, not salmonella in raw eggs). Only a few hundred of the 39,000plus Facebook reactions to the racial justice post were negative. The social 32

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

If we can’t speak to what is unfair … then we are not being responsible leaders to our organization and our society as a whole. KARE N CO L BE R G

media team responded with a firm but empathic reiteration of the company’s position. Social advocacy, Colberg acknowledged, “is new for King Arthur, and it’s the right thing to do for us.” The company had been planning to launch a Pride Month campaign instead on June 1 but decided to postpone it. Although some have accused big consumer brands of jumping on the cause bandwagon, King

Arthur felt compelled to take a clear stand, she continued, “not because of some expected payoff — though I do believe people value it.” To those who say King Arthur should stick to baking, Colberg responds, “If we can’t speak to what is unfair … then we are not being responsible leaders to our organization and our society as a whole. There are so many injustices out there and we have to do better.”

At about 9:30 a.m. on Friday, June 12, the bread bakers at King Arthur’s Norwich headquarters were wrapping up their shift that had started at 3:30 a.m. Masked and well spaced, two bakers lifted rounds of dough, folding and shaping them deftly. On the pastry side, the scent of cinnamon was so strong it seeped through the glass viewing windows and visitors’ mandatory masks. During Vermont’s “Stay Home, Stay Safe” period, the King Arthur bakery continued to bake at reduced volume for local customers. The retail store had just reopened with strict safety guidelines. Jeanne Seymour had driven 70 miles from Guilford as soon as she heard the news. Her basket was soon full of baking tools and ingredients. “I love that it’s Vermont, that it’s one of our companies,” she said, “and that it’s employee-owned.” In a classroom, a pair of education center employees were bagging loaves they’d baked for local community groups. The tally had just reached 10,000 loaves donated during the pandemic — 15,000 including those baked at King Arthur’s Washington education center. Both locations are targeting late July or early August to restart classes — albeit with fewer students to ensure social distancing. The Norwich complex fondly known as Camelot by King Arthur employees is slowly moving back toward normal. The question for King Arthur is what “normal” will look like, at that facility and around the country. Baking usually slows in the summertime, Tine said, but as of midJune, sales are up more than 50 percent compared to a year ago. “I would say that they’re settling in, not settling down,” he said. “We’re settling in to a new normal.” The company feels confident it has developed systems to respond to any future spike in demand. The challenge, Colberg explained, is to figure out how to nurture the new interest in baking hatched by the pandemic. “How do we engage people that have shown some interest in baking and keep them baking?” she pondered. The bigger question, perhaps, is whether baking during the pandemic has taught Americans anything. “I think people like the tactile aspect of it: the touching, the smelling, the feeling. We don’t always engage all of our senses in what we do,” Furch of the Baker’s Hotline said. “Baking also forces you to pay attention to somebody else’s rhythm, which is the rhythm of the dough. I think people are learning patience.” m Contact: pasanen@sevendaysvt.com

INFO Learn more at kingarthurflour.com.

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BOTTOM LINE BY KEN PICARD

Them’s the Brakes

In a clutch, Yankee Driving School went virtual and now road tests its own students

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

JON OLENDER

t should come as no surprise that Gabriella Netsch, a driver’s education instructor and the owner of Yankee Driving School in Wallingford, describes herself as a strict rule follower. Whenever her local school districts declare a snow day, she does, too. So when Gov. Phil Scott ordered all Vermont schools to cease in-person instruction no later than March 18, Netsch did the same for Yankee Driving School. For some driver’s ed instructors, shifting gears from classroom to online lessons was no big deal. But Netsch admitted that, at age 69, “To move to a computer was a learning curve for me, big-time.” But learning to negotiate curves is a part of driver’s ed, so Netsch rolled with it. Demand for her classes remained high. After the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles canceled all written exams and road tests, Netsch personally called all 50 families enrolled in Yankee Driving School for the spring and offered them full refunds. “How many do you think took it?” she asked. “Zero. They want their kids driving, and we’re their best shot at it.” Netsch first moved to Vermont from New Hampshire in the 1980s for a job as an elementary school principal in Killington. She got licensed as a driver’s ed instructor as a backup plan for her retirement. But after getting divorced in her fifties and losing her passion for being a public school administrator, she changed course in January 2009 and opened Yankee Driving School. Netsch had never taught teenagers before. “It didn’t take long before I said, ‘Wow! These are people I like to be around,’” she said. “High school kids are great. They keep you young.” Yankee Driving School quickly grew from about 20 students a year in 2009 to more than 300 today. Netsch now employs two other instructors, with whom she offers classes in Bennington, Windham, Windsor, Rutland and Orange counties. Though most of their students are teens, Yankee also gets adult students referred by Vermont’s Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, Vermont Adult Learning and other social service organizations. “When a kid didn’t pass driver’s ed in high school, there’s usually a reason,” she explained. Sometimes, the students have learning disabilities or didn’t do well in classroom settings. But most of the time, she said, they didn’t have an adult at home

Gabriella Netsch

who could take them driving. Often that’s because the family lacked a vehicle or money for gas. “If you want to work in Vermont, you need to know how to drive a car,” she said. “And the bottom line is, you’ve got to practice to get your license.”

IF YOU WANT TO WORK IN VERMONT,

YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW TO DRIVE A CAR. GABRIE LL A NE TS C H

Indeed, under DMV rules, student drivers are required to spend at least six hours behind the wheel with an instructor and another six hours observing from the back seat. Students practice safe vehicle handling, as well as the three maneuvers required to pass a road test: a hill start, a “turnaround” or K-turn, and parallel parking. For more than two months, socialdistancing rules made it impossible for Netsch and her team to do in-car

instruction. Theoretically, she could have offered one-on-one instruction, with just one student in the car at a time. “But by our own standards, we’re not supposed to be out in a vehicle alone with a kid,” explained Netsch, who typically has other students in the car, too. “It’s not safe, if you know what I mean.” Thus far, Netsch hasn’t felt the financial pinch from the pandemic because students have continued to enroll in her classes. But the weeks that she couldn’t be on the road have prevented some students from logging enough hours behind the wheel — meaning she won’t be able to teach new students while she’s still training the previous ones. “I think we’re all going to pay the price in the fall, because I don’t think we’ll be done driving yet,” she said. “The real loss of income is down the road.” But driver’s ed programs recently shifted back into drive again. On June 1, Scott announced that the DMV was offering online tests for student drivers to get their learner’s permits. And as of June 8, DMV examiners resumed road tests. In order to move through the backlog of canceled road tests more efficiently, the DMV also announced that it’s allowing certified driving instructors to administer

road tests and issue temporary licenses themselves — a policy Netsch initially opposed. “I always felt like I wanted another professional to check my work,” she explained. “However, these are unusual times.” Though she’s eager to get her traditional classes back up to speed, Netsch suspects that some changes adopted during the pandemic could become permanent. Notably, she may continue offering some online classes, especially for parents who have to leave work and make long drives to drop off and pick up their kids. And though teaching classes online has “never been my thing,” Netsch said, she’s getting used to it, with some computer help from her own students. “They know more, and they know they know more,” she added. “But they also know that I know more about driving. So it creates a balanced relationship.” m Contact: ken@sevendaysvt.com

INFO Bottom Line is a series on how Vermont businesses are faring during the pandemic. Got a tip? Email bottomline@sevendaysvt.com.

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6/23/20 12:39 PM

In Their Own Words

Theater artist Jarvis A. Green and cartoonist Lillie Harris talk about difficult conversations and Black joy

AG Productions is a theater company in White River Junction that focuses on works by and about Black people. In early June, founder and producing artistic director Jarvis A. Green released a statement condemning the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Within eight days, JAG had received more than $10,000 in unsolicited donations. Over the past few weeks, Green has also received a flood of inquiries from media outlets and cultural institutions seeking comment and artistic collaboration. But in this moment of painful, long-overdue reckoning with systemic racism, Green feels that the assumptions behind many of those requests — that he would lend his voice to predominantly white organizations, that he would use his own pain to educate white people — were misguided. “My demands are way different than they were before,” he said. “I think white cultural institutions that want to engage with Black folk right now should just step out of the way and let the people that are doing the work do it.” In that spirit, Seven Days recorded a conversation between Green and Lillie Harris, a 28-year-old artist from Maryland who just completed their first year at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction. Harris declined to be photographed for this story.

Jarvis A. Green at JAG Productions

CULTURE

CHELSEA EDGAR

JARVIS GREEN: I have to be honest: Until moving here, I hadn’t met any Black cartoonists. So I’m interested in talking about what that actually is like. LILLIE HARRIS: When I first moved, there was a cartoonist here named Robyn Smith. And I saw her, and she was like, “I was the first Black woman to graduate from CCS.” So I’m thinking, When did you come here? Like, 2006? And she was like, “2017 is when I graduated.” She told me, “You got it, you’re fine, but just know that if you need help…” There might not be a lot of people that look like you in this academy, but there’s this culture of Black illustrators and cartoonists and graphic designers looking out for each other. JARVIS My hometown is in Prince George’s County, a predominantly Black county in Maryland. But, in full disclosure, I think growing up around Black people made me have blinders on — like, I don’t understand why it’s necessary to have specific Black collectives if, you know, we’re always here. But we’re not always here. My hometown is an anomaly in America; it doesn’t look like that anywhere else.

all getting paid, that everyone is taken care of, because we can’t necessarily rely on our environment to do that when our environment isn’t always us. JG: God, I want to visit this town! LH: Please come! Where are you from? JG: I’m from Anderson, S.C. There’s a Black community, but it’s pretty integrated. And in doing theater, I was around a lot of white folk … How did you find a Black community here? LH: Well, I found you, and you found me, in the first two or three weeks after I moved here. I was at Piecemeal Pies, and I don’t know if I approached you or you approached me, but it basically boiled down to [you saying]: “I’ve never seen you before, GREEN and I know every other Black person here.”

I’M THINKING ABOUT

WHAT OPPORTUNITY CAN BE CREATED FOR BLACK FOLK.

So, having moved and having seen just how spaced out we all are really does make me appreciate that we do need each other. We need to make sure that we’re 36

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

JG: A couple weeks ago, we hosted this virtual healing space for Black folk called Come as You Are. Part of that is about refueling — what are ways in which we can express joy, fuel each other, share some light? And I loved what you had to say about Black joy as a form of resistance. What is your practice right now to use your joy as a form of resistance? LH: I actually practiced that [last week], because I found all these old Crayola chalk pastel things, and I

started scribbling and drawing this really cute kid. For me, it’s impossible to feel angry or sad while drawing a child. I just want to draw a little being! I just want to draw a kid who’s smiling and feeling happy! I think there’s so much pressure on Black artists to draw pain. The only way you can illustrate a story is for it to be a teachable moment, for you to bare your soul and open old wounds so that people see you as a human being. If I want to tell a story detailing struggle or racial issues, I’ll do that. But maybe I want to make a story

about a couple of werewolves, or people who rent an RV and go on a cross-country trip. It doesn’t inherently have to go back to pain. If it bleeds in, it bleeds in; and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. JG: So Seven Days reached out to us and asked whether they could take a photo to accompany this article. When I reached out to you with that request, you were like, “Umm…” LH: I was thankful that you pulled it out of me. JG: What was that feeling?

SARAH PRIESTAP

done in this newspaper right now to be anti-racist. What are the practices, what are the values, how are you working on dismantling white supremacy within your own organization? And two, how can you amplify Black and BIPOC voices in the state of Vermont before we get to a collaboration?”

my life to making sure that one person gets it. And then you feel guilty at times, because you’re like, “I didn’t use my voice to make sure that person No. 533 can understand!”

There are books! There are books from scholars, people who have studied this. So then [Seven Why me? I know Days said], “Instead about my very of us interviewing specific interests, you, how about you and I have lived interview someone experience, you admire and but I am not an LILLIE HARRIS whose voice you “academic Black want to amplify?” person.” Angela And I was like, “I have a perfect person.” Davis can help you out.

I THINK THERE’S SO MUCH PRESSURE

ON BLACK ARTISTS TO DRAW PAIN.

LH: How do you honor emotions that aren’t seen as positive or inspirational for other people — the anger that you feel with all these things happening? JG: I say it. I have a board that is actively doing the work — a combination of Black folk, white folk, Indian folk, Latinx folks. The cochair and the treasurer are white, and I’m very quick to remind them of moments when that whiteness— LH: It’ll jump out. JG: It will jump out! And particularly with my cochair, I get to express that anger, that part of me. I just do it. And I have really good therapy. And my family down South — we’re on a family [text] thread, so I talk to them quite a bit. What about you? LH: I do “vent art.” I do a lot of sweeping motions, just to get it out. More consistently, it’s been talking with friends back home. And knowing when to stay away from conversations when I know I’m being petty. JG: Ooh! You’re giving me another nugget!

LH: My friend told me once that she is afraid we are National Geographic-ing ourselves at times. And it hit — as if, when there isn’t a photo of you to put to your words, people won’t listen, the heartstrings won’t be pulled. But what you’re saying deserves to be heard, regardless of whether there is a photo attached. You don’t need to see someone on the brink to know that what they’re saying is impactful. JG: In my field, it’s always been about how many people are engaging with your work and how you’re visible. Especially

going into [JAG Productions’] fifth year, I want people to see it, and it is deserving of attention. But in this moment, I don’t have a filter. If I’m going to be in conversation about things that are really difficult, there’s no moderate Jarvis. I’ve been getting so many responses from cultural institutions and media outlets asking about how we’re responding to this, how we feel. Seven Days reached out with some questions. I declined the interview. And then we got to this point where I was like, “One, I want to know what work is being

LH: Because I know myself well enough to say, “Lillie, is this founded, or is this you wanting it out, because you’re mad about something else?”

JG: I run into that, too, with donors and philanthropy. Eighty percent of our funding is from white folks. They’re contributing to the success of the organization, but it’s the balance of how much I’m going to allow some of these painful conversations to happen, waiting for this hour to end and that check to be written. How much do I keep my mouth shut in response to the craziness that comes out? LH: It’s rough. Literally, a lifetime of picking battles is what it is. JG: That’s right. I don’t do this work for white folk. Yes, white people benefit from the storytelling, and they donate, but when I do this, I’m not thinking about how I’m going to educate white people. I’m thinking about what opportunity can be created for Black folk. How can we break down these Western forms of theater? How can I liberate myself from these old forms, and how can we create more joy? The rage and animosity that we carry in us — what does that do to our insides? Right now, I’m focused on finding my joy, because that’s what’s going to sustain me. m

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

JG: [Stomps his foot.] I’ve been guilty of that this week. LH: I feel like, as a Black person, there is this weight on you to be the one to educate, to shelter people along, to help them understand the strife you’re going through. So it’s having compassion while also realizing that I’m not obligated to do this — and not feeling obligated does not mean that I don’t want my people to succeed. It just means that I cannot dedicate

Contact: chelsea@sevendaysvt.com

INFO Jarvis A. Green talks with poet Major Jackson, choreographer Felicia Swoope and writer Desmond Peeples about being Black culture bearers in Vermont on Wednesday, June 24, 7 p.m., on the Vermont Humanities Facebook page. JAG Productions, 5 South Main St., White River Junction, jagproductionsvt.com. Follow JAG on Instagram @jagproductionsvt. SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

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COURTESY OF JAN DOERLER

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he Idries Shah Foundation, a UK charity devoted to advancing the work of the eponymous late Sufi writer and mystic, recently inaugurated its Gold Medal Awards for Human Achievement. The 2019 honorees included such luminaries as primatologist Jane Goodall, BBC broadcaster David Attenborough, Nobel laureate Herta Müller and writer Lisa Alther, a part-time Vermont resident. For readers under 40 or so, Alther’s name may not ring a bell. The ISF Awards site describes her as a “novelist & bestselling author” who “became a close friend of Idries Shah” through her friendship with Doris Lessing. That groundbreaking British-Zimbabwean novelist blurbed Alther’s 1976 novel Kinflicks, declaring that “she had me 11:38 AM laughing at 4 in the morning.” “I am not surprised if you have not heard of Kinflicks,” Lizzie Skurnick wrote on Jezebel in 2009. “No one I know has heard of Kinflicks.” And yet, as Skurnick proceeds to detail, in the ’70s and early ’80s, the paperback of Alther’s madcap coming-of-age tale of a “nice” Southern girl gone wrong was on every mom’s shelf — or at least that’s how it seemed to precocious tweens seeking raunchy reading. Kinflicks is indeed raunchy; the narrator is frank about her experiences with multiple partners, men and women. But when I revisited the book as a college student, I was surprised to realize how dark it was. “My family has always been into death,” the narrator says. The reminiscences of her swinging ’60s escapades are interspersed with a present-day narrative of watching her mother slowly, agonizingly die. So it’s no surprise to find that Alther’s writing has darkened even further since her best-selling debut, as her protagonists aged and the ideals of the ’60s faded. Her ninth and latest book, Swan Song: An Odyssey, opens with a chapter called “The Death Magnet.” That death magnet is Dr. Jessie Drake, a Burlingtonian in her mid-sixties who has recently lost her parents and her longtime partner. When we meet her, she’s recycling her sex toys in anticipation of

her own death, so that her son won’t have to “[find] her antique VHS tape of Lesbian Hospital while searching for her will.” In her youth, Jessie scoffed at her doctor father’s anxieties. “But over the years she had learned that disaster really did lurk around every corner,” Alther writes. The first chapter certainly bears out this grim dictum: Gazing out her window at Lake Champlain, Jessie spots a corpse floating in the shallows. Swan Song is not a mystery, and the

corpse’s origin has no bearing on the plot. But the incident serves to convince Jessie that she needs a distraction from impending doom, and in the very next chapter we find her on a British cruise ship called the Amphitrite, serving as ship’s doctor on a jaunt through Southeast Asia and the Middle East. On shipboard, Jessie finds novelty, excitement and flirtation, even as she broods over her late partner’s final journal. Alther’s narrative takes its own jaunts into other perspectives, casting an ironic eye on the economic disparities between the pampered passengers and the harried below-decks crew. Perhaps the most egregiously privileged person on board is Gail Savage, a trophy wife and former beauty queen who gleefully sleeps her way through the male passengers and crew while her aged husband languishes in their cabin with norovirus. Gail’s subplot occupies so much real estate in the short novel that it’s a bit of a shock when Alther unceremoniously drops it without a clear resolution. Our views of both virus threats and cruise ships have changed since Swan Song was written, and readers right now may itch to see Gail punished for blithely disregarding the norovirus quarantine that Jessie has imposed on her. At the very least, one wants to see consequences. “The Amphitrite should probably have been flying a black flag,” Jessie muses at one point, “like the plague ships in the fourteenth century.” Yet no epidemic manifests on this ship, and a brush with Somali pirates is quickly resolved, too. As in Kinflicks, darkness coexists with lightness in Swan Song, but the darkness generally stays confined to Jessie’s reflections. Sometimes the book reads like a farce and sometimes like a travelogue, with long expository passages on the history and landmarks of sites such as Petra and Alexandria. Sometimes it even reads like the author’s jaundiced thoughts on kids today. Jessie’s partner was a novelist with a career similar to Alther’s; her journal contains an email from her agent suggesting that “if she insisted on writing another novel, its main character needed to be a vampire or a serial killer, preferably both.” There are no vampires or serial killers in Swan Song and, frankly, not much

Advance Your Career odyssey, either. While Jessie does experience a personal journey, one that is often relatable and moving, it doesn’t take her anywhere the reader can’t foresee at the outset. At the novel’s heart is a compelling duality that Alther never fully dramatizes or resolves: While Jessie is preoccupied with looming death and disaster, Gail lives like there’s no tomorrow. Toward the end of the book, Jessie muses that “Maybe Gail was her alter ego … a woman who had done as she pleased, without regard for what other people might want from her.” But, given what a cartoon of a callous narcissist Gail is, and how little she and Jessie interact, Gail feels more like a sideshow than a meaningful foil. While the book may fall short on a big-picture level, there’s pleasure in the details. Veteran readers of Alther will see that she hasn’t lost her gift for satire; the Amphitrite feels drawn from life. And when she breaks the luxury-cruise-ship bubble for an episode involving migrants rescued from a sinking raft, the scene is harrowingly effective. There’s a weariness about Swan Song; at one point, Alther tells us that “Jessie was old enough now to recognize that world crises came and went in perpetually recurring cycles.” At another, Jessie has harsh words for younger women: If they want to keep access to reproductive freedom, “Shouldn’t they sign off Snapchat and get out in the streets?” While young women may draw a blank at Kinflicks, its author seems equally unaware that the latest wave of feminism flourishes on social media, or that the same people who post memes are quite capable of getting “out in the streets.” And that’s too bad, because both parties could undoubtedly learn something from each other. m Contact: margot@sevendaysvt.com

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Swan Song: An Odyssey by Lisa Alther, Knopf, 240 pages. $26.95. On Wednesday, June 24, at 7 p.m., Alther speaks with fellow novelist Marcy Dermansky at a Zoom event hosted by McNally Jackson Independent Booksellers; RSVP at mcnallyjackson.com.

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| 802.654.2100 SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

4/17/20 10:10 AM

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food+drink

Near and Beer Three new breweries work to open during the pandemic B Y JORD A N BA RRY

Chris Kesler of Black Flannel Brewing

t might take an apocalypse to stop new breweries from opening in Vermont. Even then, a few would likely make it through. As the COVID-19 pandemic emptied out tasting rooms and halted growler fills, the state’s breweries pivoted to curbside pickup and local delivery. Some even offered drive-through can and bottle sales — including the Vermont Brewers Association, which recently hosted a “drive-through exbeerience” at which hopheads could fill their trunks with local brews. For the state’s breweries-to-be, the pandemic shutdown has altered timelines and business plans. Their owners have been watching what works for existing breweries, selling their visions to investors online or proving they’re up to code in virtual health inspections. As the

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hospitality industry begins to reopen and the taps start flowing again this summer, these new stops on Vermont’s ever-growing brew trail hope beer lovers will swing by for a taste.

Cut From a Different Cloth Black Flannel Brewing, 21 Essex Way, Essex, blackflannel.com

New breweries in Vermont often repurpose warehouses or barns. But when Black Flannel Brewing opens on the July 4 weekend, it’ll be in a former outlet mall. The brewpub — along with its sister distillery, also called Black Flannel — will occupy more than 18,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space in the rapidly redeveloping Essex Experience. The renovated quarters, just down the plaza from the Mad Taco, include production for the brewery and distillery, a barrel

From left: Justin Rito, Chris Kesler and Dan Sartwell of Black Flannel Brewing

and sour room, a full restaurant, a distillery tasting room, a front patio, and a beer garden. The ambitious concept has an equally ambitious team: founders Chris Kesler and Essex Experience owner Peter Edelmann;

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and four of Vermont’s 17 certified cicerones — head of brewing operations Dan Sartwell, assistant brewer Justin Rito, head of barrel and sour program Aaron Ritchie, and Kesler himself. Spirit master Dave Mosher and head

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distiller Travis Johnson will lead the amount of space — including the front distillery. Karen Bisbee is director of patio, which Kesler called “a COVID operations. Executive chef Trenton expansion” — will give patrons plenty of Endres will lead the restaurant’s kitchen, room to roam, though. cooking high-end pub food. “We have a good plan to open slowly “At first, I was a little hesitant,” Kesler and safely,” he said. said, when Edelmann approached him Black Flannel’s logo is a raven about opening a brewery in the Essex perched atop an anvil; like the tradesExperience. “I thought, Really? An old person’s cloth in the brewery’s name, the shopping mall?” anvil is a nod to the craft of brewing. In Kesler is an entrepreneur, a certified Norse mythology, Odin has two ravens beer judge and a graduate of the Univer- that gather knowledge — one through sity of Vermont Business of Craft Beer thought, the other through intuition. program. He had been considering open- That duality sums up the brewing ethos ing a brewery closer to Five Corners in at Black Flannel. “We have a mixture of Essex Junction when he teamed up with talent on our team: Some are intuitive; Edelmann instead. some are really about the science and “We hit it off and had pretty similar data,” Kesler said. “Combining those visions about developing a unique expe- forces makes everybody that much rience,” Kesler said. better.” They added the distillery to the mix about a year and a half ago. There’s Finding a Soulmate considerable overlap in equipment Soulmate Brewing, 74 Portland St., between breweries and distilleries, Morrisville, soulmatebrewing.com but finding both under one roof is rare. Sitting at a high-top table in the window (For licensing purposes, they’re differ- of his future brewery on Morrisville’s ent businesses with different ownership main drag, Jonathan Mogor looks like structures.) he’s ready to open. He’s decked out in “If you’re distilling, you need a a branded hat and brewhouse so you T-shirt that reads can do mashes “Soulmate Brewand then distill ing” on the front and “Find Yours” the product from t h e r e,” Ke s l e r on the back. The explained. “There company logo J ON ATHAN MOGOR are a lot of economatches the art on mies of scale that the walls, which depicts scenes set for soulmates: two we built into this.” That collaboration will extend to lakeside Adirondack chairs in front of products such as a true eisbock — a a saturated sunset, a truck full of dogs freeze-distilled product that’s illegal for ready to be man’s best friend. The scenes breweries to make in the U.S. The restau- were created by artist Patrick Reid rant will serve craft-distilled spirits and O’Brien, whose previous design clients beer cocktails, too, as well as up to 16 of include Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville its beers on tap at any given time. and PepsiCo. In the brewery, the team will concoct Soulmate is a fully realized, tradea wide variety of traditional ales and marked brand. All that’s missing is the lagers — from Czech pale lagers and beer. IPAs to imperial stouts and kettle Mogor and a business partner sours, as well as a take on the historic purchased the Portland Street building Kentucky common style they’re calling in 2014. Since then, it’s housed an art a “Vermont Common.” Black Flannel’s gallery, a woodshop and furniture store, first official brew was a fresh Kellerbier, and a series of short-lived restaurants. a German style. After a bad experience with a tenant, The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed Mogor brought in a few beer-industry things down at Black Flannel, which was NEAR AND BEER » P.42 originally scheduled to open in May. The

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The Vermont Department of Liquor & Lottery, Division of Liquor Control is seeking interested parties, with a suitable location, in or near the below towns.

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION • DANVILLE • SHOREHAM/ORWELL The VDLC requires retail space and storage space all devoted to retailing liquor; plus adequate parking, signage, loading and unloading facilities. Interested parties should apply by letter to: Kim Walker, Director of Retail Operations Vermont Department of Liquor & Lottery Division of Liquor Control 13 Green Mountain Drive Montpelier, VT 05620-4501 Applications can be found at liquorcontrol.vermont.gov Further information can be obtained by calling 800-642-3134 (In VT) or 802-828-4923 and ask For Kim Walker, Director of Retail Operations or email kim.walker@vermont.gov

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Jonathan and Carol Mogor of Soulmate Brewing

Near and Beer « P.41 friends to evaluate the space, and his brewery idea took shape. The Navy veteran is still in the process of securing funding for the brewery, even as he’s building the last few tables for the tasting room. Mogor and his wife, Carol, took on their first major investors last fall and have decided to offer shares via equity crowdfunding starting at just $250. That affordable price is partly due to the risk involved: There’s nothing for potential investors to taste because Mogor hasn’t yet ordered brewing equipment or hired his brewing team. He’s decided to focus on fundraising rather than taking on debt simply to open. “Now it’s just trying to find people,” he said. Not a brewer himself, Mogor is approaching this from a marketing and business standpoint. But he hopes that others will see the potential of a brewery in the heart of Vermont’s “IPA highway” and in an evolving downtown. Making his sales pitch during a global pandemic has been a challenge, though, so Soulmate’s timeline is up in the air. “Are we in 2006 or in 2047? COVID’s got me off,” Mogor joked. “The original target was a lot earlier, and COVID messed with everything. If we can raise the rest of the money in the next three to five weeks, though, we could open by fall.” Current investors, including Stone Hill Inn owners Todd and Kristie Roling of Stowe, have been important cheerleaders for Soulmate during the pandemic, Mogor said. The increase in alcohol sales while Vermonters were staying home is a good sign, too. “Nothing’s necessarily recessionproof,” he said, “but this shows that you’re probably not in a bad position if you were to own a portion of the brewery.” As a community-funded brewery, Soulmate will have special VIP seating, early releases and events for shareholders. Mogor envisions hosting private tastings in a planned cask room in the basement, highlighting the 1875 building’s beginnings as a hardware store. Tasting room staff will be “matchmakers,” Mogor explained, helping customers find beers they like from a wide range of styles. “Kind of like soulmates, our portfolio of beers will be as diversified as the people on the planet,” he said. 42

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Soulmate Brewing merchandise

OPENING A BREWERY IS ALWAYS A RISK …

BUT THIS WASN’T IN THE BUSINESS PLAN. JA C K D R O P PA

Window to the Future Weird Window Brewing, 82 Ethan Allen Dr., Suite A, South Burlington, weirdwindowbrewing.com

New business owners usually aren’t thankful that they didn’t open on time. For Jack and Emily Droppa, though, missing construction targets was a blessing. If all had gone according to plan, the couple would have been gearing up to open Weird Window Brewing in the former Farnham Ale & Lager space in South Burlington on March 21. “We lucked out,” Emily said. “We would have had all this beer and nothing to do with it.” The monthslong delay due to COVID19 has left them with a sparkling clean, fully renovated taproom and brewery. But it’s also left them without an income. “Opening a brewery is always a risk to begin with, and a huge investment,” Jack said, “but this wasn’t in the business plan.”

Weird Window Brewing merchandise

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Jack and Emily Droppa of Weird Window Brewing

Jack, who previously brewed for Otter Creek Brewing and Frost Beer Works, has spent the shutdown period making sure the beers are dialed in using the brewery’s smaller three-barrel system. Weird Window also has a larger 15-barrel system and a unique combined brewhouse, where both systems share a platform to save space and streamline workflow. In the future, Jack said, he’ll use the 15-barrel system to brew popular styles and beers destined for distribution, while the three-barrel will hold smaller runs of taproom-only releases. Rather than invest in a canning line right off the bat, the couple had planned to bring in Iron Heart Canning’s mobile line. Without the taproom open, canning small batches of beer from the threebarrel system hasn’t yet made financial sense. And they didn’t anticipate any demand for to-go growler sales at a brand-new brewery. So while Weird Window’s online store is up and running with merch, the Droppas have yet to release any beer. “We asked ourselves, ‘If we heard

of a new brewery right now, would we go try it out?’” Emily explained. “The answer was no.” The taproom is now ready to go, after passing a virtual health inspection, and Weird Window plans to open sometime in July. Emily will manage the taproom, which will have space for 49 people when regulations allow full capacity, 10 taps, and a small, easy menu of meat, cheese and popcorn. Eventually, the brewery aims to have outdoor seating and to host food trucks. Weird Window — named in honor of the diagonal “witch” windows found on houses throughout Vermont — will feature a variety of beer styles, including ales and lagers. Jack, who will handle the brewing solo to start, acknowledged the popularity of IPAs but said that people are starting to look beyond the state’s ubiquitous hoppy juice-bombs. “I drink a lot of different styles of beer, and I want to brew what I like to drink,” he said. “That freedom is why you open a brewery — the freedom to brew what you want.” m

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Maya Crowley

Rob Maynard

SIDEdishes SERVING UP FOOD NEWS BY MEL I SSA PASAN E N

Uncommon Connections

Burlingtonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Church Street, has been working since the fall to renovate the former NEW COFFEE ROASTERY Under Armour Factory OPENS FOR MAIL ORDER House at 21 Essex Way. She IN ESSEX is launching Uncommon MAYA CROWLEY, co-owner Coffee with business partof UNCOMMON COFFEE at the ner PETER EDELMANN, owner ESSEX EXPERIENCE, will take of the Essex Experience a step toward opening the and managing partner of new coffee shop, roastery the ESSEX CULINARY RESORT and restaurant on June 25 & SPA. when she makes houseFor now, customers roasted coffee beans availcan get coffee beans by mail, but Crowley anable for online ordering. Crowley, former ticipates starting curbside manager of the now-closed pickup of both beans and Uncommon Grounds on brewed coffee within the CSWD ScrapFoodWaste-QTR-H-7Dsnap.pdf 1 6/17/20

next couple of weeks. Onsite coffee consumption and breakfast and lunch dining are also in the works â&#x20AC;&#x201D; soon, Crowley hopes. Crowley grew up five minutes from the mall, she noted, and has seen many changes there. Also part of her childhood was chef MARK TKACH, who will bring the restaurant and bakery part of Uncommon Coffee to life; he most recently cooked at SWEETWATERS AMERICAN BISTRO 3:10 PM on Church Street.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I rode the school bus with him,â&#x20AC;? Crowley said. The two went on to work together at Burlingtonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s NEW MOON CAFĂ&#x2030;. Another of Crowleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s former coworkers coming to Uncommon Coffee is Uncommon Grounds veteran and longtime roaster ROB MAYNARD. The wood-paneled, bookshelf-walled space features benches â&#x20AC;&#x201D; former church pews â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that were salvaged from the Church Street coffee shop. Crowley said much of the equipment comes from Uncommon Grounds, too, and regulars will recognize the house blend and a couple of other signature coffees. In addition to its regular brews, the roastery will

offer a â&#x20AC;&#x153;second price point of higher-quality, smaller lots of coffee that are really exceptional,â&#x20AC;? Crowley said. Customers will be able to educate themselves by ordering virtual coffee tasting kits, including a scheduled video brewing and tasting session with Uncommon Coffee staff, beginning on Thursday, July 2. Crowley is also excited about offering Vietnamese coffee, by which she means both high-quality beans from Vietnam and coffee prepared with the Vietnamese filter system called phin (pronounced feen).

â&#x20AC;&#x153;There is an incredible Vietnamese coffee movement in the U.S. right now,â&#x20AC;? Crowley said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;As the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, I am eager to honor these unique and often overlooked beverages.â&#x20AC;? Meanwhile, Uncommon Coffee is percolating collaborations with other new businesses in the Essex Experience, including BLACK FLANNEL BREWING & DISTILLING (see story on page 40). â&#x20AC;&#x153;We hope to work with them to include coffee in their beer and spirits,â&#x20AC;? Crowley said. m

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“Our readers, who we’re fighting to keep informed, have been so appreciative.”

Matt Weiner CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Seven Days staffer since 2006

the people behind the pages

Matt Weiner spends every Wednesday morning waiting for a truck full of hot-off-the-press newspapers. Then he helps 18 drivers load up their vehicles with carefully counted stacks of Seven Days. Setting off in different directions, the group delivers a total of 35,000 papers to more than a thousand locations, from Plattsburgh, N.Y., to St. Johnsbury, White River Junction to Rutland. Weiner, 36, manages the distribution end of things at Seven Days. The South Burlington native started in circulation while he was a student at the University of Vermont. He had a paper route through all four years of college and, after graduation, parlayed that into a deputy director position. Six years ago, the sociology major took over the top job, which he embraces with cheerful gusto. There’s a lot of hard work involved in delivering so many newspapers in one day to three-quarters of Vermont: vetting and managing the drivers, many of whom are musicians; keeping track of “returns,” which we report to an auditor; mailing subscription copies; communicating with stores that want to carry Seven Days or any of the company’s seven other free publications. On Fridays, Matt goes out to some of the most popular pickup spots to monitor supply and demand. He restocks, straightens up and checks in with the people who make Seven Days available to readers. Witnessing the paper’s weekly assembly is “fascinating,” says Matt, who notes that his role in the relay is getting the finished product out to the people. “Sure, it can be a ton of pressure at times, but I love the feeling of overcoming the challenges,” he said. The biggest to date has been distributing the paper during the coronavirus pandemic. “Our readers, who we’re fighting to keep informed, have been so appreciative. That’s the rewarding side,” Matt says. “They are what keeps us motivated to go back out there.”

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PHOTOS: JORDAN ADAMS

music+nightlife

MITAL, confirmed that the shows did

Swimmer at Nectar’s

Show and Tell

Over the weekend, I did something I thought I wouldn’t do for a long time: I saw live music in person. With newly eased restrictions on large public gatherings and indoor spaces, Vermont saw the return of proper rock shows — “proper” being a relative term here. And as of this Friday, June 26, indoor limitations are set to expand even further, to 50 percent of indoor capacity or 75 people, whichever number is lower. That means we can expect the trend of live entertainment to continue pretty much indefinitely, barring another pandemic-related lockdown. After spending time out and about, I have some thoughts about the return of live music. Let’s dig in, shall we?

S UNDbites News and views on the local music + nightlife scene

B Y J O R DAN AD AM S

Put Up a Parking Lot

A Picture of Nectar’s

Last Friday, iconic Burlington nightclub Nectar’s and its upstairs sister venue Club Metronome kicked off a weekend of live, indoor shows. Because of strict guidelines from the Vermont Department of Health, the events had some caveats. Tickets were primarily sold in groups of four in advance online, and patrons had to order refreshments from servers rather than make trips to and from the bar. And as with all indoor dining at the moment, masks were encouraged but not required while seated. Those protocols are likely 46

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

indeed sell out. “I think people are just excited to see live music again, even at a lower, kind of weird capacity,” said Swimmer’s MATT DOLLIVER by phone later. “Every one of us has learned to adjust this year. It’s better than not having music, you know?” Indeed, a sold-out show does suggest that people are psyched to get back to rocking out. However, I’m of a different mind about it. Sure, the band sounded good and everything, and people seemed happy. I’m not here to take anyone down for having a good time. But there was an indefinable psychic energy clouding up the place. Watching 40-odd patrons more or less sit quietly while a rambunctious band tore up the stage felt utterly strange. The event seemed neutered, like it was missing the wild, visceral passion that you’d normally feel at a rock show. That isn’t a slam on Swimmer or Nectar’s. I don’t think there was anything the band or venue could have done differently or better. Nor is it a slam on the audience for not being visibly psyched enough. But all in all, the experience felt like eating a fat-free, low-carb ice cream sundae: It kind of satisfies the craving but is not nearly as delicious as it could be. Personally, I’d rather wait for the real thing.

Kat Wright performing at Higher Ground’s Drive-In Experience

to remain in place for the foreseeable future. I showed up a little after 9 p.m. to catch the first of local jam band SWIMMER’s two sets. I was pretty shocked to see that the restaurant side of Nectar’s had been completely cleared out. Ghosts of the pools tables that used to occupy

considerable space were visible on two untarnished blocks of linoleum. Naturally, the action was happening on the bar/performance side of the club. Swimmer took the stage just after I walked in. Most of the tables were already full by then. The club’s vice president of business development, BRIAN

On Sunday, I checked out Higher Ground’s Drive-In Experience with KAT WRIGHT at the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction. With an eye-popping $99-per-carload price tag, the show had an even longer list of guidelines and restrictions, which were explained via FAQs on the venue’s website. Most notably, attendees were allowed to bring lawn chairs and sit immediately outside their vehicles but were required to wear masks when visiting restrooms or patronizing the handful of food vendors present. Almost everyone appeared to enjoy the show from lawn chairs and picnic blankets, rather than inside their cars. Vibe-wise, things were pretty great. The show was well attended — I counted more than a hundred cars. People seemed to fully respect the rules and wore masks when venturing off for refreshments. And, honestly, it felt kind of nice to have some personal space while watching an outdoor concert. The

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up live video displayed on an enormous screen next to the stage revealed some truly blissed-out musicians thriving in their element. That was great to see. But there were some major issues with sound. Since the show was presented drive-in style, sound was broadcast via FM transmission so people could listen on their car stereos. Reception was crystal clear. However, the show did not have a proper PA system, so whatever sounds were coming from the minimal onstage amplification did not adequately reach the audience, most of whom were, again, enjoying the concert in the fresh air and sunshine. To combat the low volume, many people opened their car doors and let their stereos be their own personal sound systems. But the inherent fraction-of-a-second delay on the FM broadcast, combined with the natural acoustical echo heard at any outdoor concert, created a jumbled din. It kind of made my head explode. Drums became particularly muddy, making it extremely hard to find the beat. In an email, Higher Ground cofounder ALEX CROTHERS explained that there wasn’t a regular PA system because “a traditional concert PA creates a slew of issues: Cost and impact on community being the two biggest. We’re trying to have a light touch and keep costs down. “Everything we’re doing out there is an experiment and it’s going to be iterative,” Crothers continued. “We’re trying to think of all the potential issues and questions, but part of the process with anything new is there will be some bumps and then some evolution.” Fair enough. I understand the cost angle, and not just because of the overall economic downturn. Higher Ground isn’t making money from these shows. Rather, proceeds are being directed to the Vermont Arts Council, as well as other nonprofits such as Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington. But to Crothers’ point about impact on the community: Aren’t the people of central Essex Junction used to having live music and other entertainment blaring from the Expo on the reg during the summer months? I would think so. To my knowledge, those shows have never created a disruption on par with, say, what PHISH’s infamous Coventry concert did to the Northeast Kingdom town in 2004.

The next Drive-In Experience features DWIGHT & NICOLE on Saturday, July 4, which benefits the Loveland Foundation and Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington. Let’s hope the sound issues are resolved by then.

Who’s Next?

I checked in with a couple of other Burlington-area venues to see whether they might be offering live entertainment anytime soon. “We’re not setting a date for reopening,” said Vermont Comedy Club co-owner NATALIE MILLER. “I totally respect other business [opening up], and I understand financially it’s a huge strain not to be open. Personally, we don’t feel like it’s safe yet, and we care about our customers, staff and performers more than anything.” “We have the type of business with very little wiggle room,” VCC co-owner NATHAN HARTSWICK said on the same call. “We cram a bunch of strangers in a space breathing the same air. We can’t do curbside pickup of comedy.” BRIAN NAGLE, talent booker for the Monkey House in Winooski, said that the venue will continue to have DJs perform in the bar’s front window, and maybe some solo performers, too. “It feels a little too soon [to have indoor rock shows], considering the outbreak that happened in Winooski,” Nagle said, referring to the spike in COVID-19 cases that began on June 4. I’ll be keeping an eye on the everevolving pandemic-era live music scene. Got a tip for me? Send it my way.

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(ANTI-GOLF, DIGITAL)

When the manager of one of the most successful music outfits Vermont has seen in years directs you to a new album from a completely unknown local, you pay attention. I came upon Bear, the debut EP from singersongwriter Will Keeper, through Calhoun Rawlings, manager of the now Chicago-based rap group 99 Neighbors. Rawlings had no official duty to advocate for the budding artist. He just liked the record a whole damn lot, and I can see why. While listening, I had one of those rare “Where the fuck did you come from?” moments. Real name Will Lynch, the 22-year-old Burlington-bred singersongwriter is unquestionably a phenom. His gorgeously textured debut straddles bleary-eyed soft rock and bathwater R&B with subtle queer overtones. It’s precocious, thought-provoking and one

Tha Truth, Animated Dreams (EQUAL EYES RECORDS, DIGITAL)

Tha Truth arrived in Vermont back in

2006, and the rapper has been an integral part of the local hip-hop scene ever since. Known to friends and family as Warren Stickney, he’s a genre superfan. Whether it’s a local lineup in some bar basement or a national act coming through Higher Ground, he is there and he is psyched. He’s also a tireless cipher veteran, always ready to freestyle and looking to build. All that energy and devotion pays off big on his debut album, Animated Dreams, which dropped last month on Burlington hip-hop imprint Equal Eyes Records. It’s easy to tell this project was a long time coming. Tha Truth positively overflows with ideas track after track, eager to share his testimony with the world. Rhode Island beatsmith ShoKass produced the LP and brings a distinctive, sideways style to the table. His compositions are more about building

of the most beautifully crafted albums the Queen City has seen all year. Lynch’s ephemeral, 13-minute debut stems from a more serious approach to songwriting he developed while attending the University of Vermont, he explained in an email. He also produced the EP and played everything himself. Bear is a quietly seductive record full of sensual imagery, romantic consternation and sweet little nothings, like the things you want to say postcoitus but don’t, scrolling your phone instead. Lynch writes clever, distinctive turns of phrase and laces his production with ornate details, such as slight hiccups in his beats, pitch-bent vocals and sleek effects that evaporate as quickly as they take hold. Opener “Ache” morphs from lo-fi acoustic to balmy R&B. Though more restrained than what follows, it sets up the EP’s touchstones: smooth vocals, pop beats and a sticky-from-the-heat vibe. Though the song is literally about

sharing a bed, the title of the subsequent track, “Queen,” could be a double entendre, given the proliferation of the word “queen” in queer circles. Sandwiched among an imposing bass line, elastic synth and briskly strummed guitar, his lyrics speak to “making space in my bed” for someone who might not be worth the time. On punch-drunk “June Bug (Remastered 2020),” Lynch sings with a breathy tenor that thrives in that slight space between chest voice and true falsetto, much like Rhye’s Mike Milosh. He continues this on the following tune, “Pep Talk,” which leans heavily on the pitterpatter of twinkling synths. Summer love thrives on the EP’s closer and title track. “Come and bind your fingers in my hair,” Keeper gracefully sings. It’s the kind of conflicted love song that never quite reveals itself, but the track bumps harder than the four that came before it. It’s almost like he’s saying that love can be more about feeling than thinking. Though only a tease of what’s to come, Bear is one of the strongest Vermont debuts in a long while. I’d like seconds, please. Stream Bear on Spotify.

space and creating a feeling than beating you over the head with drum loops, so he’s the perfect partner for this psychedelic voyage. And it’s a voyage, for sure. This track list is a complex recipe, by turns whimsical, philosophical and emotionally raw. In addition to his thematic range, Tha Truth is an unusually flexible MC. His flows can be simple and straightforward or tongue-twister intricate. In short, he goes where the beat takes him. (He even sings a few hooks.) Tha Truth is also a responsive collaborator, feeding off the energy of his guest rappers. On “Winds of Change,” he pairs with Just Cauz, part of southern Vermont’s 4 Horsemen crew, for a samurai-flavored revenge tale that’s one of the bluntest bangers on the album. Then there’s the surreal claustrophobia of “Am I Human,” a portrait of anxiety and alienation that features Pro of Burlington hip-hop legends the Aztext. Both artists deliver a tightly written flurry of layered wordplay. Album highlight “Get Back” opens with an urgent, extended verse that

sets the bar high and then features 802 heavyweight and Aztext cofounder Learic, as well as New Jersey spitter Ren Thomas, a rising underground star. It’s a gloriously greasy beat and proof positive that Tha Truth can hold his own alongside just about anyone. Yet competition doesn’t interest him much. Animated Dreams makes it clear he wants to speak his own truth, not dunk on rivals. That attitude, along with his mic skills, is why he’s long been a part of AZT Fam, the extended crew that’s grown around the Aztext. But to my surprise, this debut is far from a true-school hip-hop extravaganza. It’s a deeply weird and extremely personal project. And rather than “keeping it real” like a grumpy old rap head, Tha Truth and ShoKass embrace modern sounds and make them their own, from trap to emo to EDM. All of these threads come together on album closer “Please Don’t Tell Me,” a devastating autobiographical cut about grief and loss. It sounds both timeless and modern, the perfect capstone for such an ambitious album. Animated Dreams is an unexpected gem. The album is available on Spotify and at equaleyesrecords.bandcamp.com.

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Winooski School District : Notice of Finding of No Significant Impact AGENCY: Rural Development, USDA ACTION: Notice of Finding of No Significant Impact. SUMMARY: The USDA Rural Development has issued its Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) with respect to a request for possible financing assistance to Winooski School District for the construction of the FY20 School Renovation Project in Chittenden County, VT. FURTHER INFORMATION: To obtain copies of the EA and FONSI, or for further information, contact: Rebecca Schrader, Community Programs Specialist, 87 State Street, Montpelier, Vermont, 05601, rebecca.schrader@usda.gov or at (802) 4243151. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Winooski School District proposes to renovated and expand the educational facility serving Winooski public school students from pre-K through high school. The school campus includes buildings and expansions constructed between 1957 and 2000. These buildings are badly in need of renovation as facilities are undersized for current student needs, and in some areas not compliant with consistent educational standards. The proposed project would redevelop the existing facility and improve the existing site, including renovation and addition (71,600 square feet) to the school building, driveway realignments, parking changes, and stormwater improvements. The school campus includes two parcels totaling approximately 33.5 acres. Alternatives considered by USDA RD and Winooski School District include: No action; under the Action Alternative, RD would consider financing the proposed Project, and Winooski School District would construct FY20 School Renovation Project. Alternatives are discussed in the Winooski School District’s FY20 School Renovation Project EA. The USDA RD has reviewed and approved the EA for the proposed project. The availability of the EA for public review was announced via notice in the following newspaper: Seven Days Newspaper from June 3 through June 17, 2020, in print and online. A 14-day comment period was announced in the newspaper notice(s). The EA was also available for public review at the USDA Rural Development office and website as well as Winooski School District’s offices. One comment was received, but it addressed concerns of financial impacts on local property taxes, TM not environmental impacts. The commenter was offered a copy of the EA or an appointment to come in and review the EA and no response was received.

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drumming DJEMBE & TAIKO: JOIN US!: Digital classes! (No classes on-site for now.) Taiko: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Djembe: Wednesday. Kids and Parents: Tuesday and Wednesday. Private digital conga lessons by appointment. Let’s prepare for a future drum gathering outdoors! Schedule/register online. Location: Taiko Space, 208 Flynn Ave., Suite 3G, Burlington. Info: 999-4255, burlingtontaiko.org.

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martial arts SELF-DEFENSE BENEFIT FOR BLM: This three-hour seminar aims to equip people with the skills needed to keep themselves safe. We will cover situational awareness, common types of violent encounters, boundary setting, deescalation, patterns of physical assault, practical counter-striking and escapes. Payment is donation based, and all proceeds are being donated to BLM organizations. Jul. 11, 3-6 p.m. 3-hour workshop. Location: ONTA Studio, 373 Blair Park Rd., Williston. Info: ONTA Studio, 6838539, ontastudio@gmail.com, ontastudio.com.

VERMONT BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU: Brazilian jiujitsu is a martial arts combat style based entirely on leverage and technique. Brazilian jiujitsu self-defense curriculum is taught to Navy SEALs, CIA, FBI, military police and special forces. No training experience required. Easyto-learn techniques that could save your life! Classes for men, women and children. Students will learn realistic bully-proofing and self-defense life skills to avoid becoming victims and help them feel safe and secure. Our sole purpose

is to help empower people by giving them realistic martial arts training practices they can carry with them throughout life. IBJJF and CBJJ certified black belt sixth-degree instructor under Carlson Gracie Sr.: teaching in Vermont, born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A five-time Brazilian National Champion; International World Masters Champion and IBJJF World Masters Champion. Accept no Iimitations! Location: Vermont Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, 55 Leroy Rd., Williston. Info: 598-2839, julio@ bjjusa.com, vermontbjj.com.

massage ASIAN BODYWORK THERAPY PROGRAM: This program teaches two forms of massage: amma and shiatsu. We will explore oriental medicine theory and diagnosis, as well as the body’s meridian system, acupressure points, and yin-yang and five-element theory. Additionally, Western anatomy and physiology are taught. VSAC nondegree grants are available. FSMTB-approved program. Starts Sep. 2020. Cost: $6000/625-hour program. Location: Elements of Healing, 21 Essex Way, Suite 109, Essex Jct. Info: Scott Moylan, 2888160, scott@elementsofhealing. net, elementsofhealing.net.

on your financial needs. Contact yoga@evolutionvt.com. Single class: $0-15. 10-class pass: $100. $55 student unlimited membership. Summer unlimited pass Jun.-Aug.: $195-275. Scholarships avail. for all pricing options. Location: Evolution Yoga, 20 Kilburn St., Burlington. Info: 864-9642, evolutionvt.com.

yoga EVOLUTION YOGA: Now offering live online and recorded classes. Practice yoga with some of the most experienced teachers and therapeutic professionals in Burlington, from the comfort of your home. Sign up on our website and receive a link to join a live class; a class recording will be sent after class. Pay as you go or support us by becoming an unlimited member. Join us outside this summer for Yoga on the Lake and Yoga in the Park. Registration is open for our 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training for Health and Wellness Professionals. Now offering flexible pricing based

LAUGHING RIVER YOGA: Increase confidence and decrease stress. Enjoy inspirational teachings, intelligent alignment and focused workshops through daily virtual and live yoga classes. Check out our virtual library and practice with us outdoors at the Burlington Surf Club and limited capacity indoors at the Chace Mill. All bodies and abilities welcome. Daily classes, workshops, 200- & 300-hour yoga teacher training. $5-$15 single class; $44-$99/mo. unlimited. Location: Laughing River Yoga, Chace Mill and Burlington Surf Club, Burlington. Info: 343-8119, laughingriveryoga.com.

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Zeus AGE/SEX: 4-year-old spayed male ARRIVAL DATE: April 15, 2020 REASON HERE: Zeus was brought to HSCC due to behavioral concerns in his previous home. SUMMARY: He’s an extra-large and extra-goofy guy who can often be found bouncing around the play yard or asking for butt scratches from our staff. Zeus takes time to warm up to new people and tends to prefer the company of women to men, but once he knows you’re a friend, he’ll want to spend lots of time right by your side. He loves squeaky toys, treats and learning new skills in “dog class.” He’s even very gentle when taking treats, although there is a lot of drool involved. With even more consistent, positive training, there’s no limit to what he could learn! If Zeus could be the dog for you, visit hsccvt.org/dogs to schedule a time to stop by and meet with him.

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While “Gotcha Day” is an exciting one for your family, it’s important to give your new companion plenty of time and space to get acquainted. Some pets are outgoing and adjust quickly, while others need more time. Introduce new people or animals slowly, and watch your pet for signs of stress, giving space if you notice that they seem nervous, are trying to hide or cower, or are shaking, trembling or growling. Being patient now will help your new pet feel secure, comfortable and happy in their new home! Sponsored by:

DOGS/CATS/KIDS: Zeus may be most successful as the only dog in his new home. He has no history of living with cats. He would likely be most successful in a home without young children.

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PINECREST AT ESSEX 9 Joshua Way, Essex Jct. Independent senior living for those 55+ years. 1-BR avail. Jul. 15, $1,240/mo. incl. utils. & parking garage. NS/ pets. 802-872-9197 or rae@fullcirclevt.com. PINECREST AT ESSEX 7 Joshua Way. Independent senior living, must be 55+ years. 2-BR, 1-BA avail. 8/1/20. $1,400/mo. incl. utils. & underground parking. NS/pets. rae@ fullcirclevt.com or 802-872-9197. PINECREST AT ESSEX 9 Joshua Way, Essex Jct. Independent senior living for those 55+ years. 2-BR, 2-BA corner

STUDIO & 3-BR APT. AVAIL. 122-124 Intervale Ave. Completely renovated. 3-BR, 2-BA 1st-floor apt., $2,600/mo. 1st-floor studio in same building, full kitchen & BA, $950/ mo. Both new kitchens, BAs, flooring, etc. W/D hookup available. Housing vouchers accepted. 954-295-5850. TAFT FARM SENIOR LIVING COMMUNITY 10 Tyler Way, Williston, Independent Senior Living. Newly remodeled 1-BR unit on 2nd floor avail., $1,185/ mo. inc. utils. & cable. NS/pets. Must be 55+ years of age. cintry@ fullcirclevt.com or 802-879-3333. TAFT FARM SENIOR LIVING COMMUNITY 10 Tyler Way, Williston, independent senior living. Newly remodeled 2-BR unit on 2nd floor avail., $1,390/mo. incl. utils. & cable. NS/pets. Must be 55+ years of age. cintry@fullcirclevt. com, 802-879-3333.

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OFFICE/ COMMERCIAL OFFICE/RETAIL SPACE AT MAIN STREET LANDING on Burlington’s waterfront. Beautiful, healthy, affordable spaces for your business. Visit mainstreetlanding.com & click on space avail. Melinda, 864-7999.

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EDUCATION

SEEKING FULL-TIME NANNY Seeking full-time childcare for our boys (ages 3 & 1) starting in Sep. Must be CPR/First Aid-certified & have experience w/ children. Call 802-377-2979.

TRAIN ONLINE TO DO MEDICAL BILLING! Become a medical office professional online at CTI! Get trained, certified & ready to work in months. Call 866-243-5931. Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m.-6 p.m. (AAN CAN)

CLOTHING ALTERATIONS

ENTERTAINMENT

THE TAILOR SHOP REOPENS Thu. & Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m., 707 S. Main St., Stowe. Check out our lined, washable face masks: hydrophobic & 100% breathable. For purchase on-site or online, tailorshopstowe. com, 802-585-9422.

COMPUTER services

BIZ OPPS BECOME A PUBLISHED AUTHOR! We edit, print & distribute your work internationally. We do the work; you reap the rewards! Call for a free Author’s Submission Kit: 844-511-1836. (AAN CAN)

COMPUTER ISSUES? Geeks On Site provides free diagnosis remotely 24-7 service during COVID-19. No home visit necessary. $40 off w/ coupon 86407! Restrictions apply. 866-939-0093. (AAN CAN)

CREATIVE WRITER FOR BOOK Looking for serious writer to collaborate w/ about ideas for society’s problems & solutions based on history, psychology & philosophy. David: 881-5769.

DISH TV $59.99 for 190 channels + $14.95 high-speed internet. Free installation, smart HD DVR incl., free voice remote. Some restrictions apply. 1-855-380-2501. (AAN CAN)

FINANCIAL/LEGAL AUTO INSURANCE Starting at $49/mo.! Call for your fee rate comparison to see how much you can save. Call 855-569-1909. (AAN CAN) BOY SCOUT COMPENSATION FUND Anyone who was inappropriately touched by a Scout leader deserves justice & financial compensation! Victims may be eligible for a significant cash settlement. Time to file is limited. Call now. 844-896-8216. (AAN CAN) NEED HELP W/ FAMILY LAW? Can’t afford a $5,000 retainer? Low-cost legal services: Pay as you go, as low as $750-1,500. Get legal help now!

Homeshares ESSEX

Share home w/ bright woman in her 90s, seeking housemate for nighttime “just in case” presence & evening meal prep. Private BA, shared kitchen. No rent, just a share of utils in winter. No pets!

BARRE readers are hereby informed that all dwellings advertised in this newspaper are available on an equal opportunity basis. Any home seeker who feels he or she has encountered discrimination should contact: HUD Office of Fair Housing 10 Causeway St., Boston, MA 02222-1092 (617) 565-5309 — OR — Vermont Human Rights Commission 14-16 Baldwin St. Montpelier, VT 05633-0633 1-800-416-2010 hrc@vermont.gov

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Woman in her 60s who enjoys piano, VPR & growing veggies, seeking cat-friendly housemate. Shared BA. $400/mo.

SOUTH BURLINGTON Share a compact condo w/ woman in her 70s who loves literature, history & classical music. No rent in exchange for meal prep, errands, tech support & dog-walking. No add’l pets. Private ½ BA.

Call 1-844-821-8249, Mon.-Fri., 7 a.m.-4 p.m. PCT. familycourtdirect. com/?network=1. (AAN CAN) SAVE BIG ON HOME INSURANCE! Compare 20 A-rated insurances companies. Get a quote within minutes. Average savings of $444/year! Call 844-712-6153! Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Central. (AAN CAN) STRUGGLING W/ YOUR PRIVATE STUDENT LOAN PAYMENT? New relief programs can reduce your payments. Learn your options. Good credit not necessary. Call the Helpline: 888-670-5631. Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-5 p.m. ET. (AAN CAN)

HEALTH/ WELLNESS GENTLE TOUCH MASSAGE Specializing in deep tissue, reflexology, sports massage, Swedish & relaxation massage for men. Practicing massage therapy for over 14 years. Gregg, gentletouchvt.com, motman@ymail.com, 802-234-8000 (call or text). 1-STOP SHOP For all your catheter needs. We accept Medicaid, Medicare & insurance. Try before you buy. Quick & easy. Give us a call: 866-2822506. (AAN CAN) PSYCHIC COUNSELING Psychic counseling, channeling w/ Bernice Kelman, Underhill. 30+ years’ experience. Also energy healing, chakra balancing, Reiki, rebirthing, other lives, classes, more. 802-899-3542, kelman.b@juno.com.

HOME/GARDEN BLUE STORMWATER EVALUATION Free for Vermont residents, thanks to the BLUE program! An evaluator visits your property & offers solutions to manage your stormwater. Improve your water quality to help protect Vermont’s watersheds. Book now: blue.stormwater@ outlook.com, 802-8256392, salix-solutions. com.

Finding you just the right housemate for over 35 years! Call 863-5625 or visit HomeShareVermont.org for an application. Interview, refs, bg check req. EHO

BUY THIS STUFF » Homeshare-temp2.indd 1

6/19/20 11:16 AM

Using the enclosed math operations as a guide, fill the grid using the numbers 1 - 6 only once in each row and column.

24x

Online Public Auto Auction

Bidding Ends Mon., June 29 @ 12PM 298 J Brown Dr., Williston, VT PREVIEW Mon.-Fri. from 8AM-4PM

Consign Yours by Noon Tuesday

802-878-9200

42÷

Thursday, July 16 @ 11AM 25 Maple Ridge Rd., Westminster, VT Open House Thur., June 25 from 1-3PM

THCAuction.com 800-634-7653 6/19/20 11:54 AM

Difficulty - Hard

Say1 you 5 2 saw 3

it in...

1 5 THE 2 HOLDING LINE 4

ANSWERS ON P.56

9 4 8

13+

2 6 1 1 4 7 3

Fill the grid using the numbers 1-6, only once in each row and column. The numbers in each heavily outlined “cage” must combine to produce the target number in the top corner, using the mathematical operation indicated. A onebox cage should be filled in with the target number in the top corner. A number can be repeated within a cage as long as it is not the same row or column.

crossword

Untitled-26 1

7 4 6 3

DIFFICULTY THIS WEEK: HHH

2 1

13+

CALCOKU BY JOSH REYNOLDS

2÷

USDA Foreclosure: 2BR Home on 1.1± Acre

10x

Complete the following puzzle by using the numbers 1-9 only once in each row, column and 3 x 3 box.

No. 642

7 4 2

SUDOKU BY JOSH REYNOLDS

9 Difficulty - Medium

DIFFICULTY THIS WEEK: HH Place a number in the empty boxes in such a way that each row across, each column down and each 9-box square contains all of the numbers one to nine. The same numbers cannot be repeated in a row or column.

8 4 6 2 1 5 9 3 7 ANSWERS3ON P.556 1 6 9 7 4 8 2 H = MODERATE HH = CHALLENGING HHH = HOO, BOY! 9 2 7 3 4 8 1 6 5 7 8 4 5 6 1 2 9 3 6 3 2 9 8 4 7 5 1 1 9 5 7 2 3 8 4 6 2 6 8sevendaysvt.com 1 3 9 5 7 4 5 1 9 4 7 6 3 2 8 4 7 3 8 5 2 6 1 9

NOW IN

3D!

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONALS: List your properties here and online for only $45/week. Submit your listings by Mondays at noon to homeworks@sevendaysvt.com or 802-865-1020, x22.

BROWSE THIS WEEK’S OPEN HOUSES: sevendaysvt.com/open-houses CLASSIC MID-CENTURY HOME

MINI ORCHARD

PORT HENRY, NY | 3167 BROAD ST.

PRICE REDUCED Mid-century ranch with so many features of that period. Vaulted ceilings, stone fireplace and matching built-in planter in LR/DR. 3BR, 2BA, large family room opens to flagstone patio. Attached one-car garage. Beautiful 3/4 ac. lot. Close to golf, marinas, school, etc. and just a 35 minute drive from Vergennes/Middlebury. $124,900

RARE INVESTMENT

MONKTON | 295 CHURCH ROAD | #4807131

One level home in Monkton on ten acres with mountain & pastoral views. 3 BR/2 BA, newly renovated kitchen, open floor plan and three season sunroom. 2 car attached garage, 30x40 Morton outbuilding, workshop, rolling hills, gardens, blueberry bushes, and dozens of apple trees are part of the beautiful setting. $425,000

Sue Cook

518-546-7557 results@yahoo.com

BURLINGTON | 55-63 HARRINGTON TERRACE

55-63 Harrington Terrace is a rare investment opportunity located in a neighborhood in Burlington’s desirable hill section. Harrington Terrace runs north off Maple Street and is Fernando Cresta conveniently located within walking distance to fcresta@neddere.com Champlain College, The University of Vermont 802-651-6888 and downtown Burlington. The building is nedderealestate.com 10,400 SF wood frame and brick masonry structure that was constructed on or about 1901 with an addition constructed around 1932, and freestanding eight car garage. The structure has been improved onto nine two-bedroom apartments and has been used as a multi-unit rental. $1,950,000

Margo Plank Casco and Bill Martin 802-453-6387

6 2

HARMONICA LESSONS W/ ARI Online harmonica lessons! All ages & skill levels welcome. 1st lesson just $20! Avail. for workshops,

com, 201-565-4793, ari.erlbaum@gmail.com.

STUDIO/ REHEARSAL MIX & MASTERING SERVICES Analog console & analog hardware. We offer a mix-to-tape option. Give your digital tracks weight, warmth & depth. cosmichill.com, 802-496-3166.

REHEARSAL SPACE 6/23/20 10:21 AM Safe & sanitary music/ creative spaces avail. by the hour in the heart of the South End art district. Monthly arrangements avail., as well. Tailored for music but can be multipurpose. info@ burlingtonmusicdojo. com, 802-540-0321.

FOR SALE BY OWNER

List your property here for 2 weeks for only $45! Contact Katie, 865-1020, ext. 10, fsbo@sevendaysvt.com.

HINESBURG - INVESTMENT PROPERTY Duplex: Two large adjacent apartments, upstairs and down. Four bedroom unit 1,600 sq -ft . Three bedroom unit 1,269 sq-ft. Separate utilities. Strong rental history. Many upgrades. $307,000. Photos: bit.ly/hinesburgduplex Call 802.482.4659

24x

4 5 2 2÷ 8 32÷ 9 6 17+ 7

6 1 7 4 2 5 8 9 3

3 2 3-6 3 5 4-9 7 1 4 8

5 2 6 4 1

1 5 9 7 4 8 6+ 6 1 8 4 2 3 3 9 713+ 6 5 2 5-

4 3 1 2 5

9 3 7 2-4 8 2 1 6 5 2 9 3 13+ 7 53 1 8 4 6 5 7 4 3 2 8 6 Difficulty 1 -9Hard 10x

Using the enclosed math operations as a guide, fill the grid using the numbers 1 - 6 only once in each row and column.

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

GUITAR INSTRUCTION Berklee graduate w/ 30 years’ teaching experience offers lessons in guitar, music theory, music technology, ear training. Individualized, step-by-step approach. All ages, styles, levels. Rick Belford, 864-7195, rickb@rickbelford.com.

8 4- 3 9 17 6 1 52 5 4

Calcoku

fsbo-muroski031820.indd 1

No. 642

Difficulty - Medium

7 3

too. Pocketmusic.

fsb

FROM P.55

5-STRING GOLD STAR BANJO 2018 Gold Star 5-string banjo, w/ HSC, in mint condition. Mahogany neck/resonator, rosewood fingerboard, no-hole tone ring,

burlington

musicdojo.com. musicteachershelper. 6/18/20 3:22 PM hW-nedderealestate062420.indd 1

BASS, GUITAR, DRUMS, VOICE LESSONS & MORE Remote music lessons are an amazing way to spend time at home! Learn guitar, bass, piano, voice, violin, drums, flute, sax, trumpet, production & beyond w/ pro local instructors from the Burlington Music Dojo on Pine St. All levels & styles are welcome, incl. absolute beginners. Come share in the music! burlingtonmusicdojo.com, info@

FOR SALE

PUZZLE ANSWERS

music

MUSIC EQUIPMENT FOR SALE Mackie 1640, 16 inputs w/ pre amps, EQs & routing. Good for studio & live applications; $500. Dangerous D-Box, 8-channel summing amp; $600. RME Fireface 800 audio interface, 56-channel 192hz 24bit. firewire 800/400; $500. Yamaha WX7 woodwind Midi controller; $300. Call Peter: 496-3166.

ATTENTION, VIAGRA & CIALIS USERS! A cheaper alternative to high drugstore prices! 50-pill special: $99 + free shipping! 100% guaranteed. Call now:

2 THULE ROOFTOP CARRIERS Echelon 518 model, fork mount rooftop, rails not included. $350 new, asking $125. Used 20 times, stored in garage, like new. Karen Kish, 899-3739, wexcski@ comcast.net.

$1,350. 802-658-2462, guitboy75@hotmail. com.

MISCELLANEOUS

SPORTS EQUIPMENT

INSTRUCTION

3-ply maple rim.

Pro-level1 instrument; 8/26/19 hw-GreenTree062420.indd 1:41 PM

buy this stuff

888-531-1192. (AAN CAN)

RR-Cook-081419.indd 1

3/16/20 5:03 PM

PHOTO: OLIVER PARINI

At a time like this, it is certainly very important for Wake Robin to be fully staffed. We’re really proud of how everything has gone through the pandemic — our staff and residents all responded really well and really quickly. So far, we’re COVID-free. We realize this can change at any time and are working very hard to stay that way. We feel privileged to be in the company of other essential workers. Across the hospitality industry, many folks have lost their jobs. But we are open, and it’s business as usual for us. Residents still need support, and people still need to work. So we have been hiring for housekeepers and for waitstaff recently. We’ve always recruited with Seven Days, and we get quality candidates. We’ve felt like the mission and the values of our Wake Robin community really align with its readers. When we get candidates from Seven Days, they’re a great match for us. People heard that we had such a good response to COVID-19 and sought us out for a place of employment. We’re really happy with our response and the quality of our applicants. Advertising with Seven Days, the system works. It’s simple and easy. We definitely wouldn’t change anything up at such an important time to be recruiting.

MORGAN EVARTS Recruiter/Workforce Builder Wake Robin, Shelburne

…it works.

CALL MICHELLE: 865-1020, EXT.21 OR VISIT JOBS.SEVENDAYSVT.COM 1T-JobsTesti-WakeRobin060320.indd 1

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

6/1/20 1:34 PM

58 JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

ATTENTION RECRUITERS: POST YOUR JOBS AT: PRINT DEADLINE: FOR RATES & INFO:

JOBS.SEVENDAYSVT.COM/POST-A-JOB NOON ON MONDAYS (INCLUDING HOLIDAYS) MICHELLE BROWN, 802-865-1020 X21, MICHELLE@SEVENDAYSVT.COM

YOUR TRUSTED LOCAL SOURCE. JOBS.SEVENDAYSVT.COM HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE ASSISTANT The Town of Shoreham is accepting resumes for the position of Highway Maintenance Assistant. This full-time position requires a CDL with experience running equipment. Offers flexible schedule with the ability to work overtime, competitive wages and benefits including paid vacation, health insurance and retirement. Applicants mail resumes to: Town of Shoreham 297 Main Street, Shoreham, VT 05770. No later than July 1, 2020.

FULL-TIME ACCOUNTANT

2v-TownofShoreham062420.indd 1

Year round, full time positions. Good wages & benefits. $16.50 per hour minimum; Pay negotiable with experience. EOE/M/F/VET/Disability Employer Apply in person at: A.C. Hathorne Co. 252 Avenue C Williston, VT 802-862-6473

CAREGIVERS

6/19/202h-ACHathorne030619.indd 1:50 PM 1

Work with purpose! This full-time, salaried position offers fulfilling work, great benefits & the best team in Central VT! For full job description and to apply: downstreet.org/careers

downstreet.org

6/24/19 6:28 PM

Enhancing the lives of aging adults and their families. Make a world of difference right down the street. Join Home Instead Senior Care and do meaningful work in your area. Work flexible hours to fit your busy life. Must be able to work a minimum of 12 hours per week. No experience necessary! Visit our website to apply today.

FLAGGER Now Hiring in VT/NH. • $16.50 starting pay • $500 SIGN on bonus - restrictions apply • Must be 18, have a valid driving license and reliable vehicle • Must have an email address and a cell phone Apply at adavt.com. Or call: 802-923-3074

2v-AdaTrafficControl062420.indd 1

6/22/20 3:10 PM

homeinstead.com/483

We are a mission-driven non-profit organization dedicated to achieving social justice through the power of housing.

Looking for CAREGivers in Stowe and surrounding Burlington area.

School Nurse

Orange Southwest Supervisory District for Braintree and Brookfield Elementary schools has an opening for 1 6/18/20 4t-HomeInstead062420.indd 11:30 AM 1 6/22/20 4:55 PM an elementary level school nurse. Candidates must have a Bachelor’s degree, a RN license, CVOEO addresses fundamental issues of economic, social and and hold or be eligible to hold racial justice. The Racial Equity Director will promote equity in a school nurse endorsement. staffing, programs, training, and policy throughout CVOEO. They will understand diverse perspectives of stakeholders, The ideal candidate will represent CVOEO within our community and address systemic have a background in school change in racial injustice. nursing, be skilled at forming relationships with children and A Bachelor’s degree in human services, business or other Silver Maple Construction specializes in high-end families and be interested in appropriate discipline – Master’s degree preferred; and two to three custom home building and exquisite renovations supporting child health years of relevant business experience or community service, or a with a focus on flawless customer service from start and nutrition. combination of education and experience from which comparable to finish. We are seeking energetic, agile carpenters knowledge and skills have been acquired is required. Please send your resume & with experience from framing to finish. The position 3 references to:

We are an equal opportunity employer.

Untitled-19

Commercial Roofers & Laborers

DIRECTOR OF RACIAL EQUITY

Experienced Carpenter

is full-time and long term.

To preview our work please visit silvermapleconstruction.com. For an application please contact drey@silvermapleconstruction.com.

4t-SilverMapleConstruction062420.indd 1

To learn more about this position, visit cvoeo.org/careers. To apply, please send a cover letter and resume to: racialequitydir@cvoeo.org. Review of applications begins immediately and will continue until suitable candidates are found. CVOEO IS AN E.O.E.

6/22/204t-CVOEO062420.indd 2:01 PM 1

Pat Miller, Principal Braintree Elementary School 66 Bent Hill Road Braintree, VT 05060

6/22/20 3v-OrangeSouthWestSD052420.indd 12:55 PM 1

6/23/20 11:02 AM

NEW JOBS POSTED DAILY! JOBS.SEVENDAYSVT.COM

59 JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

FINANCE MANAGER WE'RE HIRING!

Part-Time Beertender Seeking positive minded professionals dedicated to providing world class hospitality, beer & food. Evenings & weekends required. For more information visit: lawsonsfinest.com/aboutus/join-our-team.

Nonprofit organization is seeking an individual to provide financial management, including financial reporting for federal, state, and foundation grants, balance sheets, and analyses of income and expenses; maintain all fiscal records and files; ensure compliance with accounting standards and regulations; oversee audit and budget planning processes and cash flow. Must have excellent communication skills to explain complex financial data and 5+ years of increasingly responsible experience which includes grant fiscal management in the nonprofit sector; degree in accounting or finance desirable. 20- 25 hours per week. Resume with cover letter to HR@vtfn.org or mail to: HR, Vermont Family Network, 600 Blair Park, Suite 240, Williston, VT 05495

INSTRUCTIONAL 6/23/20 4t-VTFamilyNetwork062420.indd 12:24 PM ASSISTANTS

2v-LawsonsFinest062420.indd 1

WE’RE HIRING

HUUSD has anticipated openings for instructional assistant positions at Waitsfield Elementary and Crossett Brook Middle Schools beginning in the 2020-2021 school year. There are opportunities at various grade levels, from preschool-8th grade. We have both full-time and part-time positions following the school calendar and offer competitive pay and benefits. Love of children and prior experience preferred; Associate’s degree or equivalent required. Contact Principal Kaiya Korb at kkorb@huusd.org or 496-3643 for more information and/or to apply.

2v-HarwoodUnifiedUnionSD061720.indd 1

GLOBALFOUNDRIES IS HIRING! We are hiring facilities and equipment technicians, manufacturing operators, and still have openings available in our Paid Apprenticeship program. • All positions are full time and eligible for benefits on Day 1! • All technician candidates must have a high school diploma and at least one year of relevant experience. Associate’s degree in Electrical or Mechanical Engineering strongly preferred. • Manufacturing Operators must have a high school diploma and relevant experience is preferred, but not required. Visit our careers site: globalfoundries.com/about-us/careers Questions? Email: Melinda.Antonucci@globalfoundries.com

OVER 70 PART-TIME JOBS TO PICK FROM

6/23/20 4t-GlobalFoundries062420.indd 11:22 AM 1

6/23/20 11:16 AM

Medical Assistant

• NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

Seeking full time experienced medical assistant to join our busy OB/GYN practice clinical team. Experience in women’s health is preferred but not required. Looking for someone that can work accurately and efficiently in a fast paced environment. The position requires competency in taking vitals, phlebotomy, immunization administration, assisting with medical procedures and medical intake. Candidate should also be comfortable with EMR systems, medical terminology, and general computer skills.

• CAREER SKILLS TRAINING • SERVICE TO COUNTRY • LEADERSHIP TRAINING

VTGUARD.COM 1-800-GO-GUARD

Looking for an individual with good interpersonal and communication skills, who understands the importance of providing quality customer service and has a willingness to be flexible with duties in order to meet the needs of the patients and the clinic. Interested candidates should send a cover letter and resume to jobs@maitriobgyn.com.

COOKS

6/15/20Untitled-25 3:19 PM 1

6/11/20 4t-Maitri072419.indd 12:38 PM 1

7/19/19 5:10 PM

Full/Part Time

Do you have a passion for culinary excellence? We are seeking fun, outgoing, and high-energy individuals to join our team as part-time and/or full-time Cooks in Williston, VT.

ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICE WORKER

Looking for a Sweet Job? Our mobile-friendly job board is buzzing with excitement.

Start applying at jobs.sevendaysvt.com

2v-jobFiller_workerbee.indd 1

Sign On Bonus - Up to $2,000 with a starting salary of $14 an hour.

Responsible for the cleaning of all areas of the facility with the exception of the OR. Responsible for cleaning all areas of the facility with the exception of the OR. Must be resourceful and know how to adapt.

LEARN MORE & APPLY: uvmmed.hn/evs

6/23/20 4t-UVMMedCenterEnviron061720.indd 12:31 PM 1

Join us in our mission to deliver delicious recipes and provide a dining experience to keep our Guests coming back for more! When you join our team, you will be the backbone of our success. With this in mind, we dedicate ourselves to supporting you with comprehensive benefits and development opportunities. Apply in person at Chili's Grill & Bar: 125 Cypress Place, Williston, VT 05495. Apply online at chilisjobs.com.

6/12/204t-Chili's(bayard)062420.indd 2:52 PM 1

6/19/20 1:28 PM

ATTENTION RECRUITERS:

POST YOUR JOBS AT JOBS.SEVENDAYSVT.COM FOR FAST RESULTS, OR CONTACT MICHELLE BROWN: MICHELLE@SEVENDAYSVT.COM

JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

WHERE YOU AND YOUR WORK MATTER...

HOUSEKEEPER Full-Time

When you work for the State of Vermont, you and your work matter. A career with the State puts you on a rich and rewarding professional path. You’ll find jobs in dozens of fields – not to mention an outstanding total compensation package.

DEPUT Y CISO – MONTPELIER The Agency of Digital Services (ADS) is seeking an IT Security professional with proven leadership experience to be our next Deputy CISO. If you have been looking for opportunities to advance beyond middle management to the executive level, this could be the right job for you. Strong health insurance benefits, generous paid time off, pension & deferred compensation for retirement, and reimbursement for continuing education are just a few of the benefits of working for the State of Vermont. For more information, contact Scott Carbee at Scott.Carbee@vermont.gov. Status: Full Time. Reference Job ID #7502. Application Deadline: July 9, 2020.

Learn more at: careers.vermont.gov

Vermont’s premier continuing Care Retirement Community seeks a member to join our housekeeping team. Housekeepers work collaboratively to support residents who live independently as well as those who live in residential care. Housekeepers are critical to the well-being of residents and the quality of the Wake Robin environment. Candidates must have housekeeping and/or industrial cleaning or industrial laundry experience. Wake Robin offers an excellent compensation and benefits package and an opportunity to build strong relationships with staff and residents in a dynamic community setting. Interested candidates can send their resumes to hr@wakerobin.com or fill out an application at wakerobin.com/employment. Wake Robin is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

The State of Vermont is an Equal Opportunity Employer

5h-VTDeptHumanResources062420.indd 1

6/19/20 12:01 PM

Temporary Positions:

COOK - Full Time

4t-WakeRobin042920.indd 1

LEGAL HELPLINE COMMUNITY ADVOCATE / PARALEGAL STAFF ATTORNEY

4/28/20 10:56 AM

Vermont’s premier continuing care retirement community is adding members to its team! Wake Robin provides a fine dining experience with a focus on farm to plate freshness, and a work environment that is hard to find in the restaurant industry. • We work from scratch, not from a box • 40% of our produce is local/organic • Innovative on-site protein butchering and smoking • Manageable schedule ending in early evening • Superb kitchen facilities with excellent benefits

Vermont Legal Aid and Legal Services Vermont seek to hire several temporary, full-time positions for Staff Attorneys and/or Legal Helpline Community Advocates/Paralegals. We are adding several advocates to our staff to meet the community’s need for legal help resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. We are equal opportunity employers committed to building a diverse and culturally competent staff to serve our increasingly diverse client community. Applicants are encouraged to share in their cover letter how you can further this goal.

Our cook will have experience producing high quality soups, sauces and entrees from scratch, demonstrate experience in all aspects of cooking from grilling to sautéing, and pay strong attention to the quality of food consistency & delivery.

We are seeking staff to fill positions in the following areas: • Housing, Eviction Defense, and Homelessness Prevention (staff attorney position)

Wake Robin offers an excellent compensation and benefits package and an opportunity to build strong relationships with staff and residents in a dynamic community setting.

• General Poverty Law including unemployment compensation, public benefits, consumer law, and family law (staff attorney position)

Interested candidates can send their resumes to hr@wakerobin.com or fill out an application at wakerobin.com. Wake Robin is an E.O.E.

• Providing information, referral, and legal assistance on our Helpline (community advocate or staff attorney position) 4t-WakeRobin061020.indd 1

Temporary hires will be placed within Vermont Legal Aid or Legal Services Vermont. All positions will be on a temporary contract through December 2020, with duration depending on the availability of funding. We are looking for candidates with the ability to communicate in a diverse range of professional, cultural, and community contexts, strong writing skills, the ability to handle a large caseload, a demonstrated commitment to community engagement and social justice advocacy, and a collaborative work style.

6/8/20 3:36 PM

Vermont Frames and Foam Laminates of Vermont are established manufacturers of Timber Frames and Structural Insulated Panels (SIPS). Our companies have excellent opportunities for carpenters/laborers to join our team. Carpentry experience is preferred, but not necessary. We are looking for motivated and detail oriented individuals who work well in a team environment. Possession of basic tools, tool belt, and a valid driver’s license is preferred. Scope of work includes fabrication and manufacturing here in Starksboro, at our facility, as well as some time on the road installing our products. Benefits include earned time off, employer contributed health insurance, and matching 401k.

Staff may be asked to work remotely due to the pandemic, however the positions will be based out of one of our offices, which are located in Burlington, Montpelier, Rutland, St. Johnsbury, and Springfield. Some in-state travel may be required. Starting (annualized) salary is $51,893 for an attorney, $37,902 for a community advocate/paralegal, with salary credit given for relevant prior work experience. Four weeks paid vacation (prorated for length of contract), retirement, and excellent health benefits. Attorney applicants should be licensed to practice law in Vermont. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis. Your application should include a cover letter and resume, sent as a single PDF, and indicate your interest in one or more of the work areas above. Send your application by e-mail to Betsy Whyte at bwhyte@vtlegalaid.org with the subject line “COVID Response Hiring.” Please let us know how you heard about this position. 9t-VTLegalAid062420.indd 1

CARPENTERS/ LABORERS

Benefits: 401(k) Matching, Health Insurance, Paid Time Off Send resumes to: Mark@Foamlaminates.com Full description: bit.ly/2N9FkV

6/22/20 2:23 PM 4t-FoamLaminatesofVT062420.indd 1

6/23/20 11:12 AM

NEW JOBS POSTED DAILY!

Meaningful work. Flexible hours.

Join Community Health Centers of Burlington (CHCB), where we strive for and work toward our mission to provide health care to all people, regardless of their life circumstances.

Our employment opportunities are continually changing!

Red House Building is looking to expand their team of craftspeople with a skilled carpenter.

• Patient Services Representatives • Referrals Representatives • Scheduling Representatives • Network Technician • Medical Coders • Medical Assistants

Applicants must have: » At least 5 years of full-time homebuilding/renovation experience » Maintain a valid driver’s license.

• Social Workers • Registered Nurse • Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner • Physician • Health Care Associates

We are an equal employment opportunity employer, and are especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of the organization.

UVMHomeHealth.org

Please visit our website to learn more about our team at redhousebuilding.com and send resumes to jeremy@redhousebuilding.com

6/1/20

ATTENTION RECRUITERS:

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR (Full Time)

6/16/20 10:10 AM

The successful candidate will: • Manage a growing peer-run recovery center with a style of motivation and empowerment • Play a leadership role with the center’s ongoing fundraising efforts • Offer firm, compassionate leadership for people in recovery from alcohol and/or drug addiction from all walks of life and all backgrounds • Nurture partnerships with state and local entities to assist those in recovery Full job description at: turningpointcentervt.org. Qualified applicants should 8:43 PM reply with cover letter & resume by July 3 to: Gary De Carolis, Executive Director, Turning Point Center of Chittenden County, 179 South Winooski Avenue, Suite 301, Burlington, VT 05401 or to garyd@turningpointcentervt.org. The Turning Point Center of Chittenden County is a safe, substance-free environment, providing recovery support, social and educational opportunities, and fellowship to anyone actively interested in recovery from alcohol and/or drug addiction.

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POST YOUR JOBS AT: sevendaysvt.com/ postmyjob

6/8/20

Department Manager

Our Vermont business has a full-time position open for a grocery department manager. We are a small familyowned business with a great team and community. We are looking for a motivated and experienced person to manage the grocery department of our business.

PRINT DEADLINE: Noon on Mondays (including holidays)

The position will involve overall operation of this department, attention to detail, leadership, including managing staff, tracking and assisting with sales, inventory reviews, marketing, strategic planning, staff evaluations, training employees, and general floor management.

FOR RATES & INFO: Michelle Brown, 802-865-1020 x21

10 years plus grocery management experience required. Salary based on experience.

michelle@ sevendaysvt.com

Check out our careers at chcb.org/careers.

(802) 860-4433

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Hourly wage will depend upon the applicant’s skill level/experience. Generous benefits package.

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JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

Now Hiring!

HIRING EXPERIENCED CARPENTER

Our ideal candidate would possess the following qualities: » Good communication and sense of teamwork » Professionalism » Attention to detail » Strong organizational skills.

JOBS.SEVENDAYSVT.COM

Please email resume to: gayemarie@myfairpoint.net

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DISTRICT COORDINATOR/ HEAD OF ATHLETICS • Can you cultivate student leadership and promote participation in a diverse climate? • Are you interested in assisting our coaches to see themselves as leaders? • Do you have the experience creating a blueprint for building strong teams? • Do you have skills that can help to create a positive parent culture? If you do, we want you to consider an exciting opportunity to make a difference at the Burlington School District by applying to be our new District Coordinator-Head of Athletics for our Middle and High School D1 sports programs. It is our goal for this newly developed role to help the District reach maximum 2:11 PM participation for all of our students in interscholastic athletics using the safest & most effective coaching and training methods. Understanding the minds of the 21st century athletes is key to the success of our athletic program. We believe there are untapped opportunities for growth including creating a program implementing e-sports, creating a stronger NCAA pathway for our students, and supporting our middle-school athletes. Burlington S.D. is a public school that prides itself on cultivating caring, creative and courageous people without barrier to race, gender, or socioeconomic class. The District is committed to a policy of non-discrimination, equal opportunity, diversity & affirmative action. We are dedicated to providing educational environments that value the diverse backgrounds of all students and staff. The District is ideally situated on the edge of Lake Champlain and is flanked by Mount Mansfield which is less than a 30-minute drive to the ski slopes. Burlington offers a thriving cultural center and in only 95 miles away from Montreal, Quebec and 3 hours away from Boston, Massachusetts. For more information on this great opportunity and to apply to join our team, visit: BSDVT.org/Careers.

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6/16/20 10:59 AM

ATTENTION RECRUITERS:

POST YOUR JOBS AT JOBS.SEVENDAYSVT.COM FOR FAST RESULTS, OR CONTACT MICHELLE BROWN: MICHELLE@SEVENDAYSVT.COM

JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

JOB DESCRIPTION: Bottom Line Bookkeeping Services, Inc. is currently seeking a full time bookkeeper. Duties for this position will include but are not limited to: â&#x20AC;˘ Processing and management of Accounts Receivable â&#x20AC;˘ Processing and management of Accounts Payable â&#x20AC;˘ Cash flow management â&#x20AC;˘ Payroll processing to include filing of all returns to required federal and state agencies â&#x20AC;˘ Forecasting and budgeting â&#x20AC;˘ Reconciliation of accounts Time management is essential with the ability to prioritize workload. Candidate must be a highly organized and selfmotivated professional with problem solving skills and capable of working in a fast paced environment. Position requires effective communication with clients, co-workers and accountants. Applicant must be able to work independently and with co-workers. Ability to multitask is a must.

Town Planner & Zoning Administrator (part-time)

Requires B.A. degree & min. 1 year relevant experience, excellent written & verbal skills, customer service orientation, fluent MS Office Suite applications & email. Request complete job description &/or apply with cover letter & resume at: clerkbolton@gmavt.net. EOE

Email resume/application to: vermontbookkeeper14@gmail.com

LITERACY PROGRAM MANAGER

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Your passion for literacy and the worlds that open up for readers can soar at Vermont Humanities. Our staff needs a person to lead a dedicated team of trainers in providing professional development and workshops for educators/childcare providers/parents, camps for middle school students, and programs for adults in the corrections system. Learners of all ages will benefit from the collaborative guidance 7spot.indd and innovation you bring to these programs. We actively evaluate our programs for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and are searching for someone who is also driven by these goals.

COMMUNITY PROGRAM MANAGER This is your chance to help shape the cultural conversation in Vermont. Use your networking skills, program development experience, and your love for the humanities to create thoughtprovoking programs at our evolving organization. This position works on our First Wednesdays lecture series, Fall Conference, and Words in the Woods programs. As the needs and interests of our growing audience change, these programs may also change. We are committed to using a diversity, equity, inclusion, and access lens to meet our mission and are searching for a person who can creatively and collaboratively generate new programs and ideas to expand this vision.

6/15/20

6/23/20 11:00 AM

ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT

Vermont College of Fine Arts welcomes applications for the Assistant to the President. The Assistant to the President is an executive administrative position reporting to the President Responsibilities include: Providing executive level administrative support to the President and leadership teams including managing calendars, drafting correspondences and maintaining office files; manages special projects and assignments for President, executive staff, and supports the Academic Dean in accreditation efforts; assists with fundraising including keeping donor files up to date and supports Director of Development with correspondence and administrative tasks; provides smooth operation of the Office of the President to ensure the most 3:44 PM efficient use of the Presidentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time and energies; Supports the Presidentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s communications and work with the Board of Trustees. Full job description and application instructions are available at vcfa.edu/about/jobs-at-vcfa. For full consideration, please submit application materials by July 3, 2020. Open until filled.

T OW N O F J E R I C H O 1

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6/23/20 11:24 AM

Highway Maintenance Worker The Town of Jericho is accepting applications for a Highway Maintenance Worker Level II. This is a full-time position which requires a CDL and the ability to routinely work outside of regular working hours. The ideal candidate will have at least two years of experience in highway maintenance, snow plowing, construction procedures and methods at the municipal level. Equipment operation experience is a plus. The starting hourly wage is dependent on qualifications. The Town of Jericho offers excellent benefits, including health and dental insurance and a retirement plan. An application and job description can be downloaded from www.jerichovt.org. They are also available at the Jericho Town Hall, at 67 VT Rt. 15, Jericho, M-F 8:30 a.m. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2:30 p.m. Completed applications can be submitted to Paula Carrier in person, via email at pcarrier@jerichovt.gov or via mail to PO Box 39, Jericho, VT 05465. Position is open until filled.

Apply online at vermonthumanities.org/jobs.

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Honest and Reliable Awake Night Staff person needed to work part time weekends at an adolescent female group home. Friday and Saturday, 10 pm to 8 am. Starting pay is $15.00 an hour. Must be 21, have a clean background check and a valid driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s license. Job duties include bed checks, safety checks, and overall monitoring of the home.

Bolton seeks Planning & Zoning Administrator to process land use permits, staff volunteer town blaire.orc@gmail.com boards, coordinate project reviews & manage updates to the Town Plan. 16-20 2h-OnionRiverCrossRoads062420.indd 1 flexible hrs./week.

JOB REQUIREMENTS: Qualification requirement is a minimum of 2 years relevant experience. Qualified candidate must be proficient using QuickBooks and Microsoft (Excel, Work, etc). Experience with Peachtree and QuickBooks Online preferred.

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AWAKE NIGHT STAFF

6/22/20 1:02 PM

4/24/20 10:59 AM

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NEW JOBS POSTED DAILY! JOBS.SEVENDAYSVT.COM

63 JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

6/11/20 12:25 PM

Work at CCS to help support, and live, our mission to “build a community where everyone participates and belongs.” Named a “Best Places to Work in Vermont 2020,” CCS wants you to be a part of our team. Our current openings for Direct Support Professionals offer an opportunity to make a positive impact on someone’s life, and in yours. So why not enjoy your job, receive a comprehensive benefits package, be appreciated by your employer, and feel good about what you do! Be a part of it and apply today at www.ccs-vt.org.

ccs-vt.org

EMERGENCY ROOM RNs

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E.O.E. 6/23/20 11:09 AM

The Emergency Room at Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital (NVRH) is currently looking for experienced Emergency Room RNs. Full-time, night positions available. The Emergency Room RN position provides direct care, evaluates outcomes, consults with other specialties as required, and adjusts nursing care processes as indicated. Working well under pressure, RNs collaborate with other health team members to coordinate medical and nursing management of patient care. Our knowledgeable and passionate RNs continuously learn and grow within their roles at NVRH thanks to our tuition reimbursement, loan repayment, and scholarship programs.

New, local, scam-free jobs posted every day! jobs.sevendaysvt.com.

Apply: nvrh.org/careers. 12-postings-cmyk.indd 1 4t-NVRH061720.indd 1

6/12/20 2:57 PM

7/30/19 1:05 PM

fun stuff

FRAN KRAUSE

Have a deep, dark fear of your own? Submit it to cartoonist Fran Krause at deep-dark-fears.tumblr.com, and you may see your neurosis illustrated in these pages.

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

CALCOKU & SUDOKU (P.55) CROSSWORD (P.55)

RYAN RIDDLE

Feel Good. Do Good! Feeling disappointed about the things you can’t do this season? Here’s how to have a feel-good summer:

Step One: Explore Vermont. Step Two: Learn something new. Step Three: Be a Good Citizen. TAKE THE GOOD CITIZEN CHALLENGE, a youth civics program for young people in grades K-12. Each month we’ll announce new activities focusing on history, community, government, advocacy and news literacy to keep you and your family active and engaged.

Summer

2020 With support from:

Evslin Family Foundation

Say you saw it in...

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VIEW ACTIVITIES AT

NOW IN sevendaysvt.com

3D!

2/25/20 4:00 PM

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SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

6/16/20 5:11 PM

fun stuff JEN SORENSEN

HARRY BLISS

“Whoa, whoa, TMI, pal, TMI...” RACHEL LINDSAY

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY BY ROB BREZSNY REAL JUNE 25-JULY 1

gious MIT and his PhD from prestigious Princeton University. Later he taught at prestigious Caltech. But his approach to education had a maverick quality. “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible,” he advised his students. I think his strategy will work well for you in the coming weeks, which will be a favorable time to gather valuable information and polish your existing aptitudes.

CANCER

GEMINI

(JUNE 21-JULY 22):

“Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant?” Author Diane Ackerman asks her readers that question, and now I pose the same inquiry to you — just in time for your Season of Transformation. “We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors,” Ackerman says. I will add that you Cancerians now have the potential to be exceptional shapeshifters and magical reinventors. What new amazements might you incorporate into your life? What dazzling twists and twinkles would you like to add to your character? What will the Future You be like?

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In addition to being a magnificent storyteller, Aries author Barbara Kingsolver raises chickens at her home. “There are days when I am envious of my hens,” she writes, “when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.” Do you ever experience that delightful rush of assurance, Aries? I suspect that you’re likely to do so on multiple occasions in the coming weeks. And if you are indeed visited by visions of a perfect and sure purpose, your next task will be to initiate practical action to manifest it in the real world. TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Nobel Prizewinning Taurus physicist Richard Feynman got his undergraduate degree from presti-

(May 21-June 20): You’re entering a phase when you’ll have the potential to upgrade and fine-tune your relationship with money. In the hope of encouraging that prospect, I offer you the counsel of author Katharine Butler Hathaway. “To me, money is alive,” she wrote. “It is almost human. If you treat it with real sympathy and kindness and consideration, it will be a good servant and work hard for you, and stay with you and take care of you.” I hope you’ll consider cultivating that approach, dear Gemini: expressing benevolence and love toward money and pledging to be benevolent and loving as you use the money you acquire.

LEO

(July 23-Aug. 22): Qabalistic teacher Ann Davies asked, “If you stick your finger in the fire, do you then complain that it is unfair when your finger gets burned? Do you call the fire bad?” I offer you this caution, Leo, because I want to encourage you not to stick your fingers or toes or any other parts of you into the fire during the coming weeks. And I’m happy to inform you that there are better approaches to finding out what’s important to learn about the fire. The preferred way is to watch the fire keenly and patiently from a modest distance. If you do so long enough, you’ll get all you need.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In accordance with

upcoming astrological portents, I urge you to engage in a vigorous redefinition of the term “miracle.” That will open you up to the full range of miraculous phenomena that are potentially available in the coming weeks. For inspiration, read this passage by Faith Baldwin: “Miracles are everyday things. Not only sudden great fortune wafting in on a new wind. They are almost routine, yet miracles just the same. Every time something hard becomes easier; every

time you adjust to a situation which, last week, you didn’t know existed; every time a kindness falls as softly as the dew, or someone you love who was ill grows better; every time a blessing comes, not with trumpet and fanfare, but silently as night, you have witnessed a miracle.”

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): When Libras become authoritative enough to wield clout in their own sphere of influence, it’s often due to three factors: 1. the attractive force of their empathy; 2. their abilities to listen well and ask good questions, which help enable them to accurately read people’s emotional energy; and 3. their knack for knowing specific tricks that promote harmony and a common sense of purpose. If you possess any of these talents, dear Libra, the next eight weeks will be a favorable time to employ them with maximum intensity and ingenuity and integrity. You’re primed to acquire and wield more leverage. SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): There is only one kind of erotic intimacy between consenting adults that can truly be called “unnatural”: an act that is physically impossible to perform. Everything else is potentially vitalizing and holy. No one knows this better than you Scorpios. You’re the champions of exotic pleasure, the connoisseurs of blissful marvels, the masters of curious delight and extraordinary exultation. And from an astrological perspective, the coming weeks will be a time when these aspects of your character could be especially vivid. But wait a minute. What about the pandemic? What about social distancing? What about being cautious in seeking intimate connection? If anyone can work around these constraints so as to have sexual fun, it’s your tribe. Use your imagination! SAGITTARIUS

(Nov. 22-Dec. 21): When he was 22 years old, Sagittarian-born Werner Heisenberg received his doctorate in physics and mathematics from a German university — even though he got a grade of C on his final exams. Nine years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics because of his pioneering work on quantum mechanics. What happened in between? One key development: He was mentored by physicists Niels Bohr

and Max Born, both of whom also garnered Nobel Prizes. Another factor in his success was his association with other brilliant colleagues working in his field. I hope this story inspires you Sagittarians to be on the lookout for catalytic teachers and colleagues who can expedite your evolution. The planetary omens are favorable for such an eventuality.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): You Capricorns aren’t renowned for causing controversy. For the most part you’re skillful at managing your reputation and keeping it orderly. But there may soon be a departure from this norm. A bit of a hubbub could arise in regard to the impressions you’re making and the effects you’re generating. I’m reminded of Capricorn author J.D. Salinger, whose book Catcher in the Rye was for a time widely taught in American schools but also widely banned because of its allegedly controversial elements. These days the book is regarded as a beloved classic, and I suspect you will weather your commotion with similar panache. AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Novelist Tom

Robbins articulated a vision of what it means to be bold and brave. He said, “Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness.” I’m hoping you will make that formula your keynote in the coming weeks. The time is right for you to summon extra amounts of fortitude, determination and audacity. What new possibilities are you ready to flesh out in ways that might prod you to revise your beliefs and welcome transformation and expand your awareness?

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Joan of Arc per-

formed her heroic and magical feats in 1430 and 1431. But she wasn’t canonized as a saint until 1920 — almost five centuries later. It took a while to garner the full appreciation she deserved. I’m sure you won’t have to wait as long to be acknowledged for your good deeds and fine creations, Pisces. In fact, from what I can tell, there’ll be a significant honor, enhancement or reward coming your way sometime in the next four months. Start visualizing what you’d like it to be, and set your intention to claim it.

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SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

6/23/20 12:22 PM

Respond to these people online: dating.sevendaysvt.com WOMEN seeking... TRUTH, BEAUTY AND GOODNESS I’m told that I create art in every aspect of my life; in my business, in my gardens, in my home, etc. I’d love to find a friend/partner to collaborate and explore the world around us, all while laughing, sharing, planning the next adventure and creating amazing meals together. I am 58 years young. I am well traveled and true. Magicmaker, 58, seeking: M, l NATURE GIRL SEEKS NATURE GUY I am a kind and fun 50-y/o woman looking for a local man of similar age with similar qualities and interests. Enjoying the outdoors is a must. Having a sense of humor and free time to share would be great. I’d love to make new friends and, if we hit it off, maybe something more romantic/long term. SunshineHappyGal, 50, seeking: M, l HAPPY, COMPASSIONATE AND CURIOUS I love to cook, dance, but most importantly, laugh. Favorite movie: Miracle at Morgan’s Creek; celebrity crush: Cary Grant; post-retirement dream (or if Trump gets reelected): escaping to a cottage in Connemara, Ireland. I am looking for a confident, kind, intelligent and easygoing man with a great sense of humor. Nella26, 64, seeking: M, l

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See photos of this person online.

W = Women M = Men TW = Trans women TM = Trans men Q = Genderqueer people NBP = Nonbinary people NC = Gender nonconformists Cp = Couples Gp = Groups

LIVE, LOVE, LAUGH Fun, fit, outgoing, active woman who loves to laugh and live every day to the max! Love traveling, fine dining, live music, dancing, kayaking and skiing! I’m looking for a true gentleman who is educated, fit, and emotionally and financially secure to share similar interests! LightKC, 61, seeking: M ALTRUISTIC, ARTSY, ACERBIC As a newcomer to Vermont, I find that meeting folks is a challenge. Compounded by pandemic distancing, face masks and stay-at-home orders, my social life extends to my dog, two cats and a bunch of Zoom meetings. I enjoy nearly all sports and performing arts. I love nature in all its forms, hiking, biking, birding and good conversation. Chevie, 66, seeking: M, l NERDY SNOWBOARDER SEEKS REAL LOVE I’m loving life in Vermont and looking for that someone special to share it with. Not really interested in casual dating, because I find it to be a waste of time. A secure, committed relationship is what I’m dreaming of. I also need someone who will tolerate my nerdy side and be willing to play a board game with me. ShredBetty, 32, seeking: W, l THINKING ABOUT IT... Probably everyone thinks they’re smart, funny, and reasonably good-looking, so no news there. So, what I hope to find: a reader, thinker — someone who likes movies, theater, museums, travel, music, conversation, and the Oxford comma. Three years into widowhood, I realize I could really use someone to share experiences with. The range of those experiences would have to be explored. ZanninVT, 67, seeking: M, l FEMININE, FIT, FUN-LOVING FOREST WOMAN If the sun is shining, you’ll find me outdoors. If I’m indoors pursuing my artwork or piano, it must be raining. Silent sports, camping and canoeing. Swimming every day. Looking for a fit and active outdoorsman. I’d like to see if we can become best friends and then take it from there. Charley, 67, seeking: M, l SLIGHTLY STIR-CRAZY QUARANTINED WOMAN HERE! You: Zoom, dogs, cats, coffee, politics, companionship, early morning walks, sometimes hilarious, well-read, sexy, love good food, good books, outdoors and good women. Me: artist, Zoom, dogs, cats, critters, flowers, herbs, veggies, politics, good conversation, sometimes quiet, sometimes raucous, funny, sexy, love good food, good books, outdoors, mountains, conversation, hiking, skiing, touching. Looking for you. Lisarezz, 63, seeking: M, l REALLY? ME? THANKS! I love to make people laugh, and squirm, and wonder! I carry a six-foot stick to make people wonder ... and squirm. I’m overly fond of punctuation. Widowhood and viruses stink. 2020 was meant to be a year of new beginnings. Wanna suck some coffee through a cotton mask and give it a try? Boodles, 69, seeking: M

SEVEN DAYS JUNE 24-JULY 1, 2020

COUNTRY GIRL ON THE WATER I’m passionate about being outside. Walking, hiking, snowshoeing, paddling, horseback riding. I love food, going out or staying in. Wood fires on a snowy night. Family time. Conversation about anything interesting. I’m enjoying renovating my house. I love Vermont but enjoy traveling. Woodburygirl, 56, seeking: M, l LUCKY IN LOVE AND NICARAGUA I loved being married. Sadly, he died young. I own gorgeous land in Nicaragua and want a partner to develop it with me as an artist/surfer retreat (as soon as we get rid of the small problem of a dictator killing his own people). A perfect life is Vermont in summer and Nica in winter, but only with a terrific man. You? W, 72, seeking: M, l ARE YOU SEARCHING, TOO? Seeking kind, adventurous 60ish man who likes camping, fishing, walks, sunsets and Maine. I would like a partner who can surprise me with “Let’s go...” and off we go. I’m a true Vermont gal who needs adventure. Let’s have fun. BoredCat, 57, seeking: M, l ENJOY LIFE TO THE FULLEST I enjoy gardening, animals and reading, and I split my own wood (electric splitter). I love cooking and contra dancing, and I have a new hobby: shape note singing. countrygirl1, 77, seeking: M, l OUTDOORSY, HONEST, HEALTHY MUSIC LOVER Hi there! I’m an optimistic, funny, smart, nature- and animal-loving kind of gal. Spending time together with someone who makes you smile, and has your back, is a gift. I’m a world traveler who has recently returned to Vermont. I am looking for a friend first to enjoy life and Vermont. If it turns into something more, bonus! Bella2020, 62, seeking: M, l INSIGHTFUL, CREATIVE, ADVENTUROUS Outdoorsy, attractive brunette. Poet, explorer of spirituality and personal growth, lover of nature. I love hiking, paddling, exploring new mountains, towns and ideas with others ... feeling what we’re drawn to along the way, sharing thoughts and impressions. Fairly flexible and easygoing. Healthy minded; not big into alcohol, not into drugs. Waterpoet, 57, seeking: M, l

MEN seeking... DREAMY BOY WANTS A LADY I’m 6’, blond, thin, and I would love to meet and romance a fun lady (age is not a problem; I’ll bring out the girl in you) for one-time or recurring meetings. Please be naughty, eager to please and vivacious. LetmeEntertainU, 26, seeking: W, Cp TERPSICHOREAN EJECTAMENTA Hello! They say the early bird gets the worm. I’d trade my worm for a sweet female partner who enjoys gardening and intelligent conversation. Vermonstah802, 46, seeking: W, l

LOVING, FUNNY, COMPASSIONATE, HONEST I am not looking to get laid — at least not right away, LOL. I want a friend and maybe a lover/relationship. I’m a foodie and love to cook for others. I am a pro musician, special educator, chef and volunteer. I avoid snobs. I would prefer to hang in jeans and a tee. I love laughing, pranks, spontaneity and irreverence. Nomad, 67, seeking: W, l NEW FUTURE, UNSETTLED/EXCITING! Caring, kind, adventurous, passionate and a little bit funny seeking same (or similar). If you like the outdoors, excellent! If you own a mountain bike, we should be talking! My situation is new and unsettled. A friend to chat with, to hang out with, and who can be open to and patient with my “process” would be really nice. Maker2020, 47, seeking: W, l KILLER COUNTRY PIANO MAN Man seeks woman for companionship and property management of large B&B to assuage the wintertime blues. Must like skiing, coffee and Bernese mountain dogs! Get in touch ASAP to learn more! I personally enjoy all kinds of music, food and nature on my 30-acres of wilderness in the NEK. Special preference given to Canadians, but Burl’s OK too. BRB, 35, seeking: W, l BE HAPPY Looking for a woman to date/ friendship that could lead to longterm relationship. I’m an outdoors kind of guy ... hiking, kayaking, gardening, tennis, golf, camping. Hoping to do more foreign travel (after pandemic calms down). Been to Italy and Greece — would love to return or try a new destination. Try to eat a healthy diet and exercise. activeoptimist, 75, seeking: W, l FOUR SEASONS MAN LOOKING FOR FUN Hello. I consider myself to be a very open-minded, nonjudgmental, easygoing guy. I’m very well-rounded, a citizen of the world. I’ve been fortunate to travel and experience life. I want to keep experiencing life. What am I looking for: like-minded people, women or couples who want to enjoy life. Let’s start off meeting and see where time takes us. Fourseasonsman, 53, seeking: W, Cp, l HANDSOME I am looking for someone who can make me happy and who loves to have fun. I am a loving, caring person. My hobby is woodcrafting. I love to listen to music and sing. Fun things I like to do are camping, fishing, going for walks. I like to listen to classic country music. StarmanJohnny67, 52, seeking: W, l IT’S BEEN YEARS... And I still don’t find a connection! nickdoobs20, 30, seeking: W, TW, l LOOKING FOR UNDERSTANDING Recently affected by sudden tragedy. Looking for compassion and total release. Not interested in more talk. I need a compassionate vessel. Mor, 45, seeking: W LET’S HAVE FUN Let’s think about this: We meet up, have a good time, get married and have two children. Five years down the road, we begin to fight, get a divorce and kids are unhappy. Or we meet up, have a good time and hook up. I wear a condom, and one of us does the walk of shame ... Just think about the kids. Hiprocket69, 49, seeking: W, Gp, l

ACTIVE, AWARE, SMART, SUCCESSFUL, THOUGHTFUL Native Vermonter who lived and worked in NYC for many years, now back in the Green Mountains. Well traveled, curious. Enjoy good food and interesting conversation. Often listen to music (mainly adult alternative). I have a good sense of humor (Young Frankenstein and Airplane and so on). Avid skier. Enjoy hiking, biking. Active every day. Also handy; working on my house. DPfromVT, 61, seeking: W, l PURE ADVENTURE Young for my age in so many ways. Let’s enjoy each other’s company and “live this beautiful life.” Sailon, 56, seeking: W, l OPEN-MINDED, WITTY AND CHARMING Bisexual male looking for a couple to play with. Would be more interested in a longish-term relationship. Want to get with fun, open people and explore everything in a comfortable and fun environment. I enjoy the look, feel, smell and responsiveness of the human body. If you are looking for a switch-hitter to complete the set, ping me. nnuunn, 45, seeking: Cp, l THE LONG VIEW There are people, passages in books and landscapes that speak to my heart. I can find two out of three by myself. I love to cook and eat and garden and read and travel. I am warm and reserved, complicated, honest ... and might just stop it here, lest I overthink. I’m not sure quite how to do all this... LongView, 61, seeking: W, l

TRANS WOMEN seeking... IS THERE ANY HOPE? I’ve been a closeted trans ever since childhood, but just six months into transition now, at 64. So many regrets. Life has not been kind. Wondering if there’s anyone out there who can love me for who I am, and let me love them for who they are. I’m legally female now, and never going back. Are you interested? LaydeeBird, 64, seeking: M, l SUBMISSIVE SEEKING... Looking to expand my experiences. I am open to many different scenes and roles. tina1966, 54, seeking: W, TW, Q, NC, NBP, Cp, Gp GENEROUS, OPEN, EASYGOING Warm, giving trans female with an abundance of yum to share (and already sharing it with lovers) seeks ecstatic connection for playtimes, connections, copulations, exploration and generally wonderful occasional times together. Clear communication, a willingness to venture into the whole self of you is wanted. Possibilities are wide-ranging: three, four, explorations, dreaming up an adventure are on the list! DoubleUp, 63, seeking: Cp, l

COUPLES seeking... COUPLE LOOKING TO PLAY My soulmate/best friend and I are looking to add some spice. He is bi-curious; she is bi. We have an open relationship, but anything extra is done together. If you are open to some fun, we’d love to hear from you. For personal reasons, we won’t put a pic, but we will send you one if we talk. Meandmybestie, 46, seeking: Cp EXPERIENCE SOMETHING NEW We are a loving couple of over five years. Love to play and try new things. Spend free time at the ledges. Looking for people to play with. Perhaps dinner, night out and maybe breakfast in the morning. Looking for open-minded men, women or couples who enjoy fun times and new experiences. 2newAdventurers, 52, seeking: M, W, Cp, Gp

i SPY

If you’ve been spied, go online to contact your admirer!

dating.sevendaysvt.com

BIKE PATH DETOUR, LAKESIDE Passed you at the Lakeside RR bridge as you were heading for the beach and said hi. You: in a purple bikini and orange fishnet cover. Me: office nerd out for lunch. Want to find a shady spot by the water to chat? When: Thursday, June 18, 2020. Where: Lakeside RR bridge. You: Woman. Me: Man. #915073 DELI CASE CHAT We were both getting sandwiches from Sweet Clover Market. We chatted about what’s good (everything). You recommended the quiche and egg rolls, and I said I like the samosas and peanut noodle salad. I’m intrigued. Care to chat more? When: Tuesday, June 16, 2020. Where: Sweet Clover Market. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915072 MATTY Hey, does anyone know a guy named Matty? Mid- to late thirties white guy? If so, will you please show this to him? Matty, we met on Rose Street last summer while I was walking with my son, but we started smiling at each other from way down the street. I’m single now. :) When: Sunday, June 16, 2019. Where: Rose Street. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915071 USPS SPECIAL DELIVERY You delivered my Amazon package by USPS. We were cordial, but you were the special delivery. I was totally not prepared for company and looked like I had slept for five days. It is quarantine ... but I promise I clean up. Zebra PJs. Purple hair. You are probably 5’8, brown hair, clean cut. Sweet, professional. You can deliver to me anytime. When: Monday, June 15, 2020. Where: Colchester. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915069

BRANCHES COVERED STOP SIGN 13:30ish. Not sure if you were South Burlington or Williston. I was too distracted by your ink and your eyes. And you had black leather gloves on, so I couldn’t tell if there was a ring. We were driving a small commercial van. The driver would like to buy you a drink. When: Monday, June 15, 2020. Where: Gregory/Kimball intersection. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915070 NICE MOTORCYCLE You were behind me on the road in front of St. Mike’s driving a silver car and rocking a cute septum piercing. You yelled “Nice bike” to me and then pulled up alongside me to say it again. I’d like to take you for a ride. What do ya say? When: Sunday, June 14, 2020. Where: Winooski. You: Woman. Me: Man. #915068 CITY MARKET EMPLOYEE Petite, blond City Market employee. Would love to chat, but it’s kind of rude to while you are trying to work. If you think this might be you, and you are at all intrigued, send me a message. When: Sunday, June 14, 2020. Where: City Market. You: Woman. Me: Man. #915067 UMALL MAILMAN Saw you at the mall this afternoon with your arms wrapped around some boxes. I’d like a better look at those gorgeous tattoos you’ve got. When: Friday, June 12, 2020. Where: University Mall. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915064 YOUR NAME WAS ECHO You helped me out on June 9, and you caught my eye (even with a mask on). Let me know if you are interested in connecting. When: Wednesday, June 10, 2020. Where: at their workplace. You: Woman. Me: Man. #915063

APPLESAUCE... I gave you my heart, my soul and my life. I would have saved or burned the world for you ... with you. But you’re afraid of the fire, the pain that comes from truly holding another close, and being engulfed. I’ll never stop loving you, but I need to matter ... to you, but also to myself. —Always your waffles. When: Sunday, June 14, 2020. Where: on the shores of another life. You: Woman. Me: Man. #915065 SHORT HAIR, LONG SWEATER AT WALGREENS You made me smile a few times under my mask! Almost bumped into you. Maybe we will again. When: Tuesday, June 9, 2020. Where: Burlington Walgreens. You: Woman. Me: Man. #915062 SATURDAY MANSFIELD HIKER GAL You asked my friend and me how far to the top of Mansfield via Sunset trail while we were running down. I joked that it was right around the corner. Sorry, it definitely wasn’t. How about an Oakledge sunset drink sometime? When: Sunday, June 7, 2020. Where: Sunset Ridge Trail, Mount Mansfield. You: Woman. Me: Man. #915061 OUTBACK BARTENDER You waited on us this past winter. You were so nice and helpful. You had a black Dickies shirt on that held pens. We never got your name. We just heard Outback is not reopening and thought you might be a perfect fit for an admin job we had. Let us know if you are interested. When: Friday, January 3, 2020. Where: Outback Steakhouse. You: Woman. Me: Woman. #915060 MR. POST OFFICE VACUUMER You were vacuuming the post office lobby early Monday morning while I was mailing a few letters. We joked that we startled each other. You seemed very friendly and kind. Could we meet again for coffee and conversation? When: Monday, June 1, 2020. Where: North Burlington Post Office. You: Man. Me: Man. #915059 YOU LOVE TO GARDEN… I like cooking it. Waiting in line to get into Middlebury Aubuchon. You showed me pictures of your garden and gave me your address. I forgot it. You are very interesting. Would like to talk again. When: Friday, May 29, 2020. Where: Middlebury. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915058

Ask REVEREND Dear Bosom Bewildered, 

Irreverent counsel on life’s conundrums

Dear Reverend,

I’m a fan of breasts in all shapes and sizes, but the women I’ve been with have all happened to have small ones. I’m currently unattached, and I’m worried that I won’t know what to do should I encounter larger ones. Are they more or less sensitive?

Bosom Bewildered

(MALE, 37)

Boobs are like snowflakes: Big or small, no two are exactly alike. What else is not exactly alike? The people attached to the boobs. Some lucky ladies are able to achieve orgasm through nipple stimulation alone, while others don’t like it one bit. A study conducted at the University of Vienna found that large breasts were about 24 percent less sensitive than smaller ones. This is probably due to the fact that larger breasts have

AUTOMASTER SERVICE BENCH, NOON, THURSDAY You: black Nike hat, white T-shirt, black shorts, tall, killer smile. Liked my silver sports car parked next to your bench while you waited for a ride. Amanda? We chatted about mask protocols, cars, your Civic. You asked where I lived (across the pond) and what my name was. Escape the virus on an ADK convertible tour? Dogs in the park? When: Thursday, May 28, 2020. Where: Automaster service/parts outside waiting area. You: Woman. Me: Man. #915057

RE: AMOR If I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it? I mean, you need to hear this: Love is not just a verb, it’s you looking in the mirror; love is not just a verb, it’s you looking for it, maybe. Call me crazy. When: Friday, March 20, 2020. Where: across the stars. You: Woman. Me: Man. #915052

CITY MARKET CRUSH I’m far too shy to ask you out, it seems, so my best bet might just be writing to you instead. I know you’ve seen me in person in line at CM, at Battery Park during sunset and occasionally on the city streets. You’re just too cute for me to ignore. Look for me next wearing a sequined floral hat. When: Tuesday, May 26, 2020. Where: City Market/Battery Park. You: Woman. Me: Non-binary person. #915056 CUTE GUY, CM PARKING LOT To the guy who locked eyes with me in the parking lot and then said “Cute dog”: I froze in the moment and said thank you, but I wanted to say that you were cute. Grab a coffee from a distance sometime? I had the brown Tacoma; you had a white Silverado. When: Sunday, May 24, 2020. Where: South End City Market. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915055 BERLIN POND DOG CROSSING 7ish. You: blue canoe, fishing pole, Rottweiler, rib tat. I was on my knees on my paddleboard so my dog wouldn’t tip me in the water. You commented that it looked like I had a good companion. I fumbled. Can’t remember the last time someone captivated me like you did. I stood for the rest of the paddle — eff it. When: Thursday, May 21, 2020. Where: Berlin Pond. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915054

RICHMOND MARKET THIRD TRIP IN We were at Richmond Market and crossed paths a few times. I had to go back twice — the third time for beer for my little sister. You parked two away from me and mentioned it when I came out. I grabbed some cans from Stone Corral instead. Let’s go for a hike or a mountain bike ride. When: Wednesday, May 13, 2020. Where: Richmond Market. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915050 HOLD HANDS... You left ... My heart is broken. Best, what happened?! I’m so sorry. No closure. It hurts. I thought that This Must Be the Place. Now I don’t get you, or a job, or a place to live, or a chance. I hope that you love yourself. I’ll never forget you — the Waffles to my Applesauce. Please come back. —Fresh. When: Monday, March 19, 2018. Where: Higher Ground. You: Man. Me: Woman. #915046

JOJO, MONTPELIER RITE-AID It’s been quite a while. A little bird told me you might be looking. I’ve thought of you often. Haven’t met anyone who compares to you. I loved you at first sight and have never stopped loving you. Why don’t we meet up and chat, maybe around the Montpelier Rite-Aid? Drop me a line, please. When: Friday, August 21, 2015. Where: Rite-Aid. You: Man. Me: Man. #915053

more fatty tissue than glandular tissue, which is the more sensitive part, but that’s not always the case. How did you figure out how to handle small breasts? Experimentation and practice, right? Everyone has different turn-ons and -offs. There are all sorts of fun

PRICE CHOPPER/WALGREENS, HINESBURG RD. You: pretty brunette braids and an even more beautiful soul. Me: sitting in my Jeep in the parking lot. You made my day, week — oh hell! — my 2020 just by your simple act of kindness the other day. Thank you for taking the brief moment you took to tell me I was beautiful! I’m still smiling over it. You rock! When: Thursday, May 14, 2020. Where: Price Chopper parking lot in front of Walgreens. You: Woman. Me: Woman. #915051

W4W LOVE YOUR SHAVED HEAD You were far away from me, but it felt like you were close. I last saw you in a peach fur trench coat. I was the Chubby Muffin in a black jumpsuit. You always hold my attention, but I want you to hold more. Even if you don’t write me back, I hope you hang this ad on your fridge. When: Friday, April 24, 2020. Where: on Hood Street in Winooski. You: Gender non-conformist. Me: Woman. #915044

things you can do with large breasts if your partner is into it. As with all sexual escapades, communication is key. You can save yourself some worry by simply asking her what she likes. Any time you’re about to fondle someone’s bits and pieces, take it easy at first. Don’t jump right on the nipple; work your way up to it … and once you get there, be gentle. No teeth unless she asks. Good luck, God bless and happy motorboating,

The Reverend

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I’m a 58-y/o SWM seeking female 50 to 60 years old for companionship and fun! I enjoy hiking, biking, skiing, art and photography, good food and drink. Ideal F would be intelligent, compassionate, able to communicate. #L1409 I’m a 31-y/o woman seeking a fun and energetic 31- to 38-y/o man. I’m seeking a God-believing, Christian faith-based man. I don’t drink or smoke. I like to go dancing, listen to music, travel. #L1408 I’m a 59-y/o male seeking a male or female age 40 to 80 who is a nudist. Want company in the woods in northern Vermont. #L1407 48-y/o single male seeking 45- to 50-y/o single female who is kind, creative and healthminded. I enjoy the arts, writing, reading, vegan food, trail running, mountain biking and road trips. Seeking a woman for dating and friendship. #L1413 Gay white male looking for hookups, maybe more; see where it goes. 5’10 and a half, dark brown hair, good looking, brown eyes, slender. I clean and do windows for a living and run a rescue for animals and give them a forever home, so you have to be an animal lover. If you replied already, please contact me again. #L1412

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I’m a 61-y/o woman. Aquarian INFJ Reiki master looking to be part of or create a spiritual, artistic, self-sufficient community further south. Seeks kind, openminded, gentle kindred spirits, lightworkers, starseeds to explore life’s mysteries and help each other. Cat lovers very welcome! #L1406 I’m a GWM seeking GWM. Into everything except anal. Many interests including railroading and astrology. #L1405 Dirty old man seeks dirty old lady. Watching dirty movies. Dirty in bed. Dirty minded. Love kissing and oral. Alone and single. Age/ race, no problem. #1404

Reply to these messages with real, honest-to-goodness letters. DETAILS BELOW. I’m a 79-y/o retired teacher seeking a mature lady who can help operate a guesthouse together and enjoys gardening, nature walks and traveling. Nonsmoker. #L1402 I’m a 58-y/o woman seeking a mature 30- to 45-y/o male who likes a no-nonsense, worldly life “off the grid” and outside the lower 48. Fast and furious or slow and easy. Nothing in between. Only honest, fun-loving, industrious and adventurous men need apply. #L1401 Spring has sprung. Looking for guys to enjoy the change of season. I’m fun and intelligent, with varied interests. I like everything; mostly sub, but not always. No text/email. I want to talk with you. Central Vermont. Bears are a plus. #L1400 I am divorced of 34 years. I am 5’11 and 230 pounds. I am a very positive person, happy, thoughtful. Like good conversation and caring, honest people. I like the outdoors. I work and would enjoy good company. #L1397

A lady in jeans / prefers meat to beans / in the fall of life / not anyone’s wife / locally organic / not into panic / cooks on fire / Computer’s on a wire / well trained in art / a generous heart / spiritually deep / easy to keep. I’m a W, 52, seeking M. #L1399 GWM in late 60s, very friendly, honest, caring and understanding. I’m retired, home alone, and it is very lonesome. It’s been a long winter. Looking for a friend who can help me out once in a while. I don’t look or act my age at all. I have been recouping from surgery. I can tell you more later if you write. Should have a car. Live in central Vermont. #L1398 Looking for a fun friend. Me: woman 60 years young. Active, adventurous, creative, fit, friendly, flexible, fun, generous, improvisational, independent, outdoorsy, silly, smart, stubborn. You: man, 45 to 60 years young. Charming, educated, fit, flexible, funny, generous, independent, kind, outdoorsy and happy. #L1396

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