Chowder

Am I Blue?

Another month, another signature drink for Portland. [See “What Portland Needs is a Cocktail,” September 2008.] This one’s called the Blue Buzz. “Mix muddled blueberries, Stoli Blueberry Vodka, cinnamon simple syrup, and fresh-squeezed lemon juice, topped off with club soda,” says bar manager Andrea Spencer of The White Heart bar and cocktail lounge at 551 Congress Street.

Hey, We Warned You!

Before the Presidential candidates predicted it, before the $700 billion bailout, before MSNBC and CNN, our lobsters predicted 2008’s ‘economic crisis.’ And did anybody listen? No! [“Lobster Economics,” November 2007]. But just as the sale of lobster meat has more accurately predicted the vicissitudes of the Dow Jones Industrial Average than rising and plunging hemlines, so have the lobsters called our present brush with the future right on the dot (and yes, they do cry out when they’re steaming).

Consider this cry in the wilderness last November 2007: “As for the near future, day traders alert: the lobsters say sell. They, more than anyone, are equipped to peer ahead through the murky depths of this ‘sub-prime slime.’” Asked for a reaction to this ironic turn of events, a lobster was heard to say, “Now look who’s turning red.”

Shoot to Thrill

“You talkin’ to ME?” Seen filming Otter Cliffs from a 70-foot crane at Acadia National Park for Leonardo DiCaprio’s upcoming release Ashecliffe, based on Dennis Lehane’s blockbuster novel Shutter Island: crews under the direction of film great Martin Scorsese. The Oscar-winning director seems to enjoy Maine–he decompressed here at Portland Harbor Hotel immediately after shooting another of his collaborations with Leo, The Aviator.

Lehane (Mystic River) likes it here, too. He was a member of the original faculty who launched the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing.

A Clockwork Lighthouse

In this case, it’s an original Seth Thomas brass clock that through a wonderful twist of fate has been restored to its rightful home at the Cross Island Moorings Life Saving Station’s Little River Lighthouse, located on an island off Cutler.

“It was passed down to me through my family,” says generous donor George Morrison of New Brunswick, Canada. “It is highly likely that this clock was first used at the original station here before the facility was abandoned and replaced by new buildings that became the Cross Island Life Boat Station and later the Cross Island Coast Guard Station,” says Tim Harrison, publisher of Lighthouse Digest magazine.

Film Noir

“You can spit on me from Lewiston,” T. Joel Gurney, freelance musician says of how close his Auburn digs are to the city he’s coined ‘The Dirty Lew’ in a tribute music video now on YouTube, with over 3,000 views and climbing. “My bandmates Mike

Rafahee, Matt Dumont, and I just started asking people on the street, ‘How you diggin’ on Lewiston today?’” Just keeping it real. Still, what about Auburn? “The Dirty A music video? Maybe that’s next,” Gurney says. How’re you diggin’ on Auburn today? youtube.com/user/BummahGurney –Katie E. Fuller

Into

Thin

Glass

“I ran a subsistence farm for twenty years, was a teacher, a newspaper reporter, and a freelance writer,” says Bernie Huebner, 65. Today, Stone Ridge Glass in Waterville is his shiny calling, where he and wife Lucie Boucher, 51, create “glassscapes.” Boucher worked as a hairdresser before earning her doctorate in education at UMaine-Orono. Early Snow on Mount Katahdin (below) is available for $2,800. stoneridgeglass.com or 873-4102

Solar Nexus Solar Nexus

“When Ronald Reagan became president, the first thing he did was have them taken down,” Chellie Pingree has declared of the solar panels Jimmy Carter installed on the roof of the White House in 1979 to heat water. Truly? Discounting how spry the Gipper would’ve had to have been to pull off that physical feat–Mr. Gorbachev, tear down those solar contraptions!–the panels were actually removed in 1986, a year into Reagan’s second term, because of a leak in the roof. Warehoused in Virginia, the panels were spirited to Maine by a senior Unity College administrator who cajoled the boys in the Government Service Agency into donating them as a gift to the school. ”We brought them up here in an old school bus,” says former advancement director Peter Marbach, “installing them in our cafeteria in the spring of1990,“ where they were refurbished with a grant from actress Glenn Close, though they’re not in use today.

“They serve as a memorial to Jimmy Carter’s environmental ideas,” insists Unity College Sustainability Coordinator, Rob Beranek. “To try and restore the panels would ruin [their] historical significance.”

The urban legend is just getting rolling. Incensed by Reagan’s

‘tear-down caper,’ two Swiss directors, Christina Hemaner and Roman Keller, have made a movie about the panels to portray the U.S.’s dependency on oil at the expense of greener alternatives, A Road Not Taken. - Erin Donovan

Onramp To Nowhere

Some people study how to build bridges. In Bucksport, the Bureau of Homeland Security is studying how to take them apart. “From an engineering perspective, everything has an Achille’s heel,” says Bruce Fitzgerald, the Director of Homeland Security Division at Maine Emergency Management Agency.

“Observing the weakest link of the [now defunct] Waldo-Hancock Bridge might give [us] insight into the ways terrorists might think to blow it up,” says Doug Hecox with the Federal Highway Administration. Or, more chillingly, Brooklyn Bridge or Deer Isle Suspension Bridge, of similar construction.

The Naked and the Living The Naked and the Living

Look who’s living in Norman Mailer’s former Maine retreat near Rangeley… For 23 years, it’s been a sort of El Dorado for oureditorial staff: Find the secret Maine writing camp of famed novelist Norman Mailer (19232007), the two-time Pulitzer winner and co-founder of The Village Voice.

Follow Route 4 from Farmington, passing through Strong, Avon, and down into the little village of Phillips. Take a right onto Route 142, crossing winding Sandy River. Go halfway up the hill, and on the right you’ll find Wheeler Hill Road. Travel down this dirt road and you’ll come to number 72. Walk up to the front door, knock, and surprise! Music phenom Ray

Tattoo You

Envision a college class where you get extra credit for submitting a picture of your tattoo. “Now that’s incentive,” Maine Maritime Museum show curator Chris Hall says of Southern Maine Community College instructor Rachelle Tibbetts’s unique challenge to her students. The best part? This assignment is not just academically sound, it’s a sensitive and creative response to Hall’s breakthrough new show, The Sea Within Us. “We’re featuring maritime icons past and present, swimsuits, tattoos, they’ll be a part of it. Send us your tattoos by the end of December.” That is, give us some skin. mainemaritimemuseum.org –Katie E. Fuller

p ristina h c The Naked and the Living The Naked and the Living om house/ D n i gammon; maine maritime museum; ra D lockwise from top left: san c LaMontagne creaks it open. “No, I haven’t read Mailer,” he says. “I don’t think about [channeling the novelist’s creative energy]… but the house has its own special energy–it’s full of sunshine, with 200-year old maples out front. I’ve been here 2 years.” The cape was bought in 1972 by Mailer and former JFK speechwriter Richard Goodwin, husband of Doris Kearns Goodwin. Next resident? Mailer pal and former High Times editor Richard Stratton, a journalist/filmmaker, was imprisoned for smuggling marijuana; Feds seized the house in 1983. “I met Mailer in 1973 in Provincetown,” Stratton says today. “I lived [here] from 1975-1982. Mailer came here a lot, but he stayed every summer in houses his family rented near Bar Harbor. He was into sailing–he loved the coast.” –Katie E. Fuller

Visit our new gallery and workshop in Fort Andross, downtown Brunswick

Hatch Studio

Original designs in billiards tables and other fine furniture

For more information please visit www.hatchbilliards.com.

Fort Andross, 14 Maine Street Brunswick, ME 04011 207-721-0070