21 minute read
Featured
IN THIS ISSUE
Worcester Magazine
Advertisement
100 Front St., Fifth Floor Worcester, MA 01608 worcestermag.com Editorial (508) 767.9535 WMeditor@gatehousemedia.com Sales (508) 767.9530 WMSales@gatehousemedia.com VP, Sales & Strategy Andrew Chernoff Executive Editor David Nordman Editor Nancy Campbell Content Editor Victor D. Infante Reporters Richard Duckett, Veer Mudambi Contributing Writers Stephanie Campbell, Sarah Connell Sanders, Gari De Ramos, Robert Duguay, Liz Fay, Jason Greenough, Janice Harvey, Barbara Houle, Jim Keogh, Jim Perry, Craig S. Semon, Matthew Tota Multi Media Sales Executives Deirdre Baldwin, Debbie Bilodeau, Kate Carr, Diane Galipeau, Sammi Iacovone, Kathy Puffer, Jody Ryan, Regina Stillings Sales Support Jackie Buck, Yanet Ramirez Senior Operations Manager Gary Barth Operations Manager John Cofske Worcester Magazine is a news weekly covering Central Massachusetts. We accept no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. The Publisher has the right to refuse any advertisement. Legals/Public Notices please call 888-254-3466, email classifieds@gatehousemedia.com, or mail to Central Mass Classifieds, 100 Front St., 5th Floor, Worcester, MA 01608 Distribution Worcester Magazine is inserted into the Telegram & Gazette on Fridays and is also available for free at more than 400 locations in the Worcester area. Unauthorized bulk removal of Worcester Magazine from any public location, or any other tampering with Worcester Magazine’s distribution including unauthorized inserts, is a criminal offense and may be prosecuted under the law. Subscriptions First class mail, $156 for one year. Send orders and subscription correspondence to GateHouse Media, 100 Front St., Worcester, MA 01608. Advertising To place an order for display advertising or to inquire, please call (508) 767.9530. Worcester Magazine (ISSN 0191-4960) is a weekly publication of Gannett. All contents copyright 2021 by Gannett. All rights reserved. Worcester Magazine is not liable for typographical errors in advertisements.
9
Featured ..............................................................................4
City Voices ........................................................................12 Cover Story .......................................................................14 The Next Draft .................................................................20 Artist Spotlight ................................................................21 Adoption Option .............................................................28 Games................................................................................30 Classifieds ........................................................................29 Last Call .............................................................................31
On the cover
A plate from Charcuterie Woo is a great touch to add to your holiday festivities this year.
PHOTO BY T&G STAFF PHOTO/CHRISTINE PETERSON
20
FEATURED
WPI professor eyes cost of hydrogen as energy
Veer Mudambi
Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
In 1842, Welsh scientist William Grove invented the first hydrogen fuel cell, which generated electricity with only water as a byproduct.
Sounds like just what we need, right? The climate crisis demands clean energy, and it seems like the solution has been with us for over a century and a half. Unfortunately, if it’s too good to be true, it usually is. As an energy source, hydrogen is just too expensive to use.
“Hydrogen is the cleanest fuel possible right now, but the cost is the issue,” said Yu Zhong, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Zhong and his team have received a $999,973 grant to iron out the kinks in the process of using hydrogen as a clean fuel. The WPI project is one of only 12 nationwide that has been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The grant is part of a larger initiative by the DOE to improve the production, storage and transportation of hydrogen as a fuel and as a means to reduce carbon emissions.
Our world runs on the products of fossil fuels, and the use of those is the largest source of carbon emissions by far. While it is clear that climate change must be addressed with radical change, we can’t live without fuel. It seems like a catch-22 but if Zhong has anything to say about the matter, cost-effective clean fuel generation may well be within reach.
Hydrogen is produced from a chemical reaction that breaks down water molecules into its oxygen and hydrogen components. Zhong has been contemplating a solution to make it more cost effective for about 20 years, when he started working on solid oxygen fuel cells before moving to electrolysis cells.
Along with the primary cost barrier, electrolysis, which is the use of an electrical current to drive a chemical reaction, is the key component in this process, and it is most often used in the separation of elements. The use of electricity generated by solar or wind power allows hydrogen production to be powered by renewable sources.
However, the Solid Oxygen Electrolysis Cells, or SOECs, have a lifetime of one to five years before they must be replaced, as the oxygen electrodes in the SOECs rapidly degrade due to chromium poisoning. The frequent replacement of SOECs makes this method not worth the investment necessary for large-scale hydrogen production.
The key, said Zhong, is elongating that process and correspondingly lowering the hydrogen production cost. To do so, the DOE is funding projects that will build oxygen electrodes more resistant to chromium poisoning. “The DOE is really working to embrace a hydrogen society,” said Zhong.
SOECs operate in large stacks, each separated by an interconnecter of stainless steel, which contains chromium. The oxygen electrodes are the active material that will drive the chemical reaction to produce hydrogen. To continue this reaction, the electrodes must retain their electrical conductivity and must remain stable. At high temperatures, the chromium in the steel is released and as chromium levels increase, it reacts with the electrodes instead, reducing the SOECs performance.
Through computer modelling and laboratory experiments, Zhong’s team hopes to design entirely new materials for oxygen electrodes, which are currently ceramic based. “We have proved that the classic materials have issues so we want to propose some totally new materials,” said Zhong, which will be different down to the microstructure.
The current goal is to extend the lifespan of SOECs to10 to 15 years but hopefully as much as 25 to 30. However, the development progress is not measured in terms of years but in percentage degradation per a thousand hours. The target measure, said Zhong, is 0.4%, quite a ways down from where it can easily go into the double digits.
The project will go for two years, after which, results will be given to a local industry partner, Saint-Gobain Research North America in Northborough. For Zhong, the project represents breaking the cost barrier for the ultimate renewable energy source — one that can be drawn from the air itself. “As long as you have oxygen, you have hydrogen.”
Professor Yu Zhong at work in the lab. WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
Fall Of Troy will perform Nov. 18 upstairs at The Palladium. PROMOTIONAL IMAGE
Fall Of Troy celebrates ‘Doppelgänger’ anniversar y at Palladium
Robert Duguay
Special to Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
Every band has that one album that’s a testament to their music. It’s the shining gem, the magnum opus, the most popular one and — whether it was made 10 years ago or yesterday — it stands the test of time. Featuring a blend of progressive rock, math rock and post-hardcore, The Fall Of Troy has one of those albums: their sophomore release, “Doppelgänger,” which came out during the summer of 2005. At the time, it took the Mukilteo, Washington, trio of guitarist and vocalist Thomas Erak, bassist and backing vocalist Tim Ward and drummer Andrew Forsman to new heights with its hitting both the indie and heatseeker charts along with one of the tracks becoming part of a well-known video game series. It’s been more than 15 years since the album came out, and the band is currently ringing in its “15+1” anniversary as part of a current tour. With Jon Henry-Batts as their touring bassist, The Fall Of Troy will be making a stop Nov. 18 upstairs at The Palladium with Strawberry Girls, Kaonashi and Satyr opening up the show.
Forsman views “Doppelgänger” as an introduction for many fans to the band’s sound, because of the amount of attention it got upon its release.
“I think it’s the entry point for probably 90% of our fans,” he says about the album. “It has a song of ours that was included in ‘Guitar Hero 3,’ ‘F.C.P.R.E.M.I.X,’ which was a huge exposure for us, so I think for a large majority of our fans it was the first album they heard. I would call it our foundational album.”
In August of last year, the band put out their sixth album, “Mukiltearth,” on their own without a label. The album has an interesting structure, with an old-meets-new type of thing going on where six of the songs were written when Erak and Forsman were still in high school while there are also four brand new tracks. Forsman views the record as the closing of a chapter for The Fall Of Troy with the next chapters still to be unknown.
“It started out that we were going to do two EPs, one of re-recordings of the first six songs we’ve ever written and one of fresh, new songs,” he says of how the “Mukiltearth” came to be. “The more I listened to them as they were being mixed, mastered and stuff like that, I ended up listening to them as a whole piece of music. One of my favorite tropes in TV shows and stories is the kind of time-skip where something happens and the characters move forward a bunch of years in time, now you’re interacting with these characters and they have all this history together. There’s things you aren’t sure about but there’s these references to the past and stuff like that so we began to conceive that structure as an album. The first half is stuff we wrote during our first year as a band and the latter half is made up of the last songs we’ve written and recorded.”
Forsman adds that, “We haven’t recorded or written any new music since the writing and recording of those songs. I thought it was a really interesting way to compare the beginning of the band to the end of the band and honestly, at the time the album was being put together and even now still I’m not sure if there will be any new music from The Fall Of Troy so it feels like a really nice bookend. Not to say that we definitely won’t record any new music but it felt like if we put out this album with our earliest stuff and our newest stuff then it’s kind of like a nice book cover on each end of the band’s career.”
Looking ahead, Forsman says, “We have a couple kind of local-ish shows, one in Seattle, one in Tacoma and one in Portland. Then, we’ll take some time off for the holidays and next year in 2022, I think the plan is to do some shows for the 15-year anniversary of the album that came after ‘Doppelgänger,’ ‘Manipulator.’
“In theory, there will be a tour happening next year to celebrate that album. It’s both nice and not nice to have everything being pushed back a year due to COVID-19 because normally there would be two years between those anniversary shows for those two albums but in this case they’re rolling right into each other. As a band, we like revisiting albums as a whole and it’s a nice chance to look back on where we were at the time and some of the risks and chances we took as far as songwriting.
“There are things that haven’t aged perfectly but they’re still fun to play,” he adds. “People should expect more anniversary shows in the future.”
See ‘Harley ’s Funhouse’ show at Ralph’s Rock Diner
Veer Mudambi
Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
“I’m an artist. Drag to me is a medium that lets me experiment with gender and it kind of makes me feel like I’m heightening myself and making myself into art. That’s what my entire life is about — making art.”
Jay Gaudette, whose drag name is Harley Queen, is also a graphic designer and illustrator with a new children’s book coming out next year titled, “I Don’t Know.” In the meantime, he’s hosting a new monthly drag show, “Harley’s Funhouse,” starting Nov. 18 at Ralph’s Rock Diner. There will be an open stage drag competition for any performers who need a stage and the first prize is a paid guest spot in the next show.
Gaudette has performed at Electric Haze and Bull Mansion in Worcester, as well as locations in Boston but this is his first show at Ralph’s. “When I started doing drag in Worcester four years ago, it was one of my goals to have my own show at Ralph’s,” he said, so this is a personal goal fulfilled.
He first got started when he moved out of Boston after college and met his friend Henry, whose drag name is Poison Envy. “There was a drag night at Clark, so we decided to start doing drag as a hobby every so often, like going to parties in drag.” At the time, they just wanted to play around with makeup and “live our best life” but then they got noticed and one of the drag queens in Worcester asked if they wanted to perform at a charity show. After that, they started getting paid gigs and their hobby underwent a metamorphosis and became a job.
Gaudette is humble when he recalls that he came into Worcester not knowing what the scene was like in the past but now “some people even credit us with bringing drag back to Worcester, because it was kind of in a dead zone.”
He was frank about how much of a weird transition it was to relearn how to perform for an audience. “The pandemic was pretty rough — we were doing digital drag shows and had to get even more creative. We had to record ourselves and come up with crazy ideas and use editing to make these entertaining videos.” Prior to the pandemic, he was crowned Miss Gay Worcester 2020, a title which he still holds because there was no Pride Pageant in 2021.
The first post-pandemic show was at the Summit Lounge, and getting back to performing in person for a visible audience, as opposed to on screen, was nervewracking. “It’s different,” he explained, “because we spent a whole year not being on stage and so the nerves come back, ‘what if I’m not good enough,’ but overall a lot of us drag performers have performance in our blood so we get on stage and do our thing and worry about it afterwards.”
When asked how he chose his drag name, Gaudette elaborated on how he has always loved the Batman comics and the Harley Quinn character who was created in 1992. “Growing up, you’re told she’s a girl and I couldn’t be her but now I realize as an adult that gender is just a construct — so I used drag to get into that persona and delve into being Harley Quinn.” Along the way, he said, he found out more about himself and evolved what he does and what he wants to put out in the world. “I’m not Harley Quinn, but there are parts of her that resonate with me. Be who you want to be.”
Harley Queen in full costume. JAY GAUDETTE
Harley’s Funhouse will be held at 148 Grove St., Worcester, on Thursday, Nov. 18, at Ralph’s Diner. The show is 21+ and begins at 9 p.m. upstairs with $8 cover charge. Those interested in performing can reach Gaudette via email at jgaudetteart@gmail.com or on Instagram at @heartharley.
Richard Duckett
Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
The multi-platinum, progressive rock group Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s famed Winter Tour will be back starting Nov. 17 with a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the group’s landmark album, “Christmas Eve and Other Stories.”
If TSO’s tours have become a holiday tradition since the first one in 1999, so too have the group’s annual visits to the DCU Center in Worcester. What is now billed as a “multisensory extravaganza” production returns to the DCU Center for performances at 3 and 8 p.m. Nov. 27.
Last year TSO decided to forgo touring because of the pandemic and put on a livestreamed performance of “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” from a sound stage in Nashville. Special preshow content included behind-thescenes footage and interview segments.
The livestream was a success with about 250,000 households viewing the event.
Still, another year of not touring live would have been difficult to take for TSO music director and lead guitarist Al Pitrelli and longtime TSO drummer Jeff Plate.
“I think I could speak for Jeff on this one saying we’ll show up in hazmat suits and play, dude. We’re just like caged animals chomping at the bit,” said Pitrelli.
“To not do what we’ve been doing for 20-something years, to have that taken away from us last year, you love something this much, once you have it back in your hands, you love it, cherish it, protect it that much more. So I just want to put a guitar around my shoulders and stand out in stage center and say, ‘Let’s go.’”
Pitrelli and Plate were speaking with reporters from around the country during a recent teleconference to advance the tour.
Plate praised the work that had gone into the livestream show and keeping everybody safe last year. “Management team did a fantastic job. The production crew, everybody on board really did a great job and just making this thing look awesome. It looked great on the TV screen, on the computer screen. Let’s hope we don’t have to do it again, but if we do, I think we know we’re in good hands,” he said.
However, “I’d rather not do it again. I’d rather go out and play live. There’s something just so magical about playing live,” said Pitrelli.
“Absolutely,” Plate said.
“Who knows? Listen, we all learned one important lesson. We have no idea what tomorrow holds for us anymore. Whatever they say to do, I’ll do it,” Pitrelli said.
The 2021 TSO Winter Tour tour will visit 59 cities for 99 performances across America from Nov. 17 before concluding on Dec. 30.
In announcing the tour, Pitrelli said, “After an incredibly trying year for everyone we are beyond excited to be able to say that we’re bringing ‘Christmas Eve and Other Stories’ back to all of you. We were amazed by the turnout for last year’s livestream and how many of you continued to celebrate this tradition we have created together. It’s been 25 years since (TSO founder) Paul (O’Neill) first introduced all of us to this timeless tale. Let’s celebrate this milestone event together. God bless and stay safe everyone.”
“Christmas Eve and Other Stories” was where it all began for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
The band’s 1996 rock-opera debut album (which would become part of a Christmas trilogy) went triple platinum with tracks such as the song “Ornament” and the instrumental “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” becoming classics.
“Christmas Eve and Other Stories,” conceived by TSO founder/composer/ lyricist/producer Paul O’Neill, combines original music and adaptations of traditional music in instrumentals and songs with new lyrics written by O’Neil. The story is set on Christmas Eve when a young angel is sent to Earth to bring back what is best representative of humanity. The angel hears a man praying for his lost daughter.
The tour will feature the album and also have a second set containing some of TSO’s other greatest hits and fanpleasers, including “Christmas Canon,” “Wizards In Winter” and more.
TSO embarked on its first live tour in 1999 with a stage adaptation of “Christmas Eve and Other Stories,” and toured with it through 2011. Then in 2012 and 2013, the band staged its 2004 album “The Lost Christmas Eve” and in 2014 hit the road with 1998’s “The Christmas Attic.” From 2015 to 2018, TSO featured an adaptation of its 1999 TV special “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve.” “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” made its return to stages and arenas in 2019 and would have toured in 2020 but was performed as the livestream show.
In 1999, TSO had hit the road with a relatively modest production set up. But the production values rapidly expanded as band members and singers were accompanied by lavishly presented visuals and special light and sound effects. There have been huge audiences to match, with total attendance at all the Winter Tour shows now at approximately 17 million.
“There’s always a trick up the production team’s sleeve every year,” Plate noted.
Pitrelli has been at a venue and “I see 21 tractor-trailer trucks (outside) … (I think) ‘Oh my God, this is the greatest thing ever.’ “
Sadly amid all of this, another story was O’Neill’s sudden death on April 5, 2017, at 61.
He had been a regular at the advance teleconferences, expounding on his love
Trans-Siberian Orchestra is returning to the DCU Center. PHOTO COURTESY OF JASON MCEACHERN
When: 3 and 8 p.m. Nov. 27 Where: DCU Center, 50 Foster St., Worcester How much: $25 to $95+. www.Ticketmaster.com
Orchestra
Continued from Page 10D
for Christmas. His family have kept the Winter Tour shows going.
When O’Neill founded TSO he had Christmas in mind from the very beginning and acknowledged a fascination with Christmas since growing up in New York City as one of 10 siblings.
Playing a classical-rock mix inspired by bands such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer and combining that with a holiday theme, TSO found itself on the right track.
O’Neill had recalled presenting his plans to the late Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun for a three-album Christmas trilogy. Ertegun had asked, ”‘Why a trilogy about Christmas?’” O’Neill said he replied, “Dickens wrote five books about Christmas, and when one of your predecessors asked Charles Dickens why he wrote five books about Christmas, he said, ‘Christmas is too large a subject to take on in one book.’ I said, ‘Ahmet, too large for Dickens in one book, too large for me in one album, and I’m going to break it into three.’ ”
Pitrelli and Plate said that before his death O’Neill was planning to bring “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” back on tour.
“Yes, this is my favorite show,” Plate said.
“I’ve said all along, I think this story is really the star of the show. This is what kept bringing people back every year, was when people connected with the story and realized it’s about them. It’s about everybody. This is just how people, just word of mouth, kept coming back. These audiences kept building every year. This … (was) our first venture with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, ‘Christmas Eve and Other Stories,’ so this has a lot of meaning. It’s very special for all of us. The songs, the story, everybody about it, I think is fantastic. “
Pitrelli said “As I get a little bit older these songs become a little more important to me, and I relate very deeply to the story. Then what I noticed was everybody in the audience was relating, too, because … everybody misses somebody. With Paul’s story, what it brings to everyone’s attention is at least you’re not alone in that thought. It doesn’t take away the pain or the worry as a parent or whatever, but at least you know that the person sitting next to you is having the exact same thought, and you can find a little bit of solace in that I think, or at least I can.”
One of O’Neill’s first musical forays was with a prog-rock band named Slowburn. It fizzled in the recording studio, but O’Neill made contacts that helped him learn the recording and concert business. Later, he was producer for the heavy-metal band Savatage, and the idea for TSO began to develop with O’Neill and two of its members — Pitrelli and composer and multi-instrumentalist John Oliva — along with well-known session keyboardist Bob Kinkel. Plate, a drummer for Savatage, joined up as well.
Plate had lived in Worcester in the early 1980s, playing for a cover band.
“We were fortunate to be working with Paul O’Neill when he created this thing,” Plate said.
“We were all trained by Paul … he’s always right,” said Pitrelli.
Pitrelli and Plate were asked at the teleconference if they can still find the passion for performing the show.
“When you love something, you love it,” Pitrelli said. “When you get it back in your hands, you cherish it that much more. I just love it so much, I’ll never get tired looking down at the smiles.”
“We all wondered if that last show in 2020 was the last show,” Plate said. “This is the real deal and this is what we do, and I can’t wait to get back.”
TSO said that once again a portion of every ticket sold will benefit select local charities. To date, more than $16 million has been distributed from TSO to charities across North America.
Fallissittingbyalake,withaspiced drinkinonehandandacomfortmeal intheother...nothingbetter!
Reservationsrequired
