NICE TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!
Think you can stand another day of sunshine? Actually, it looks like three or four more days, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. After a brisk start to the morning, temps will climb into the high 20s by mid-afternoon, thanks to clear skies and high pressure that built into the region overnight. There's a warm front moving through to the north tonight, which might bring in some clouds and will keep the lows from dropping beyond the mid-teens.Well, at least we're not up in Island Pond. The Weather Service put up a map last night of this morning's expected lows. -15 up there. Around here, an entirely reasonable -11 to -8. RVCC eyeing business incubator for Lebanon campus. The River Valley Community College building on the Leb Mall goes mostly empty during the day, a victim of declining enrollment and a shift to night classes. A study commissioned by RVCC and the Centerra-based Dartmouth Regional Technology Center suggests using the building both to support startups and offer co-working space. College officials have embraced it, and plan to begin fundraising for the incubator. (VN)That was some drive. A Newbury, NH man has been charged with aggravated driving under the influence after he blew through the stop sign at the end of the New London exit ramp off I-89 in front of a sheriff's deputy, headed down 103A with the deputy and other officers in pursuit, turned onto Blodgett Landing, then drove onto and off of the boat ramp, dragging it out onto the ice. His car broke through the ice, coming to rest in shallow water. He ran off, cursing the officers trying to help him off the lake. A police dog eventually found him.Is there room in academe for "mathematical humanities"? Because that's where Dartmouth prof Feng Fu is headed. He teaches mathematics, but in an intriguing Dartmouth News profile, Fu says he is focusing his work on human behavior: "our social and prosocial behaviors like cooperation and other group dynamics." He's been looking at vaccine acceptance and rejection, and is developing algorithms to find ways of targeting influencers who might act as "social contagions" to promote vaccine use in the broader community.Learning to box is hard. Learning to box onstage in a way that doesn't hurt anyone? Even harder. "It's actually more tiring to have to exert so much control over where the blows land than to just swing," one of the actors in The Sweet Science of Bruising tells Seven Days for its look at the prep work for the Dartmouth Theater Department production. Tonight's the US premiere of the 2018 drama about four Victorian women drawn to the boxing ring, which explores both that world and the subversively fierce results. The actors trained an hour a day, five days a week, with RVC instructor Jennifer Karr. "We have got to produce this play next season." That was Northern Stage artistic director Carol Dunne last year after seeing a staged reading of Citrus at New Works Now. And sure enough, it premieres next week. The play is a "choreopoem" by Celeste Jennings, who wrote the first version as a student at Dartmouth. "I’m trying really hard not to make it a history lesson,” she tells the VN's David Corriveau. "It’s more about paying homage to our ancestors, to the women of right now, and to our daughters." Jennings is now Northern Stage's costume-shop manager and designed the garb for the upcoming production. NH House passes scaled-down pot legalization bill. The measure would legalize the personal use, cultivation, and gifting of marijuana. Unlike last year's version, which never made it out of the Senate, it would not allow commercial sale of the drug. Its advocates are hoping the new version has a better chance of making it. “I think that the legalization of cannabis is more popular than the legislature itself or the governor or any other political entity in the state of New Hampshire,” says the chair of the House criminal justice committee. NH House reprimands seven GOP members for disregarding anti-harassment training. The Democratic-run chamber took four hours yesterday to reprimand the seven for skipping out on training it mandated last year. Most of them avoided the sessions on principle. “I don’t need to be told by an all-knowing, all-powerful state exactly how I have to behave in public,” said Charles Burns, R-Milford. Responded Speaker Steve Shurtleff: “Ninety-five percent of the people in this House don’t need the training. But as with the laws we pass, we do it to tell the minority what to do."VT AG announces $740K settlement with nursing home provider. The agreement is with Genesis HealthCare, which owns nine nursing homes in the state. At three of them, mistakes or neglect led to residents' illness or death. In addition to the money, the settlement includes the creation of a new job of patient care coordinator to oversee resident monitoring and worker training. VT House passes ambitious climate bill. The measure, the “Global Warming Solutions Act,” carried 105-37, easily enough votes to withstand a veto. It would require the state — which has lagged New England in reducing greenhouse gas emissions — to reduce them to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and 80 percent below by 2050. Rep. Tim Briglin, who represents Thetford, Norwich, Sharon, and Strafford, spearheaded the legislation as chair of the energy committee. "We’re long overdue on pressing forward on this issue,” he said yesterday evening.Why has Vermont never sent a woman to Congress? That's the question VPR's Brave Little State asks. In 2018, after Mississippi elected Cindy Hyde-Smith, it became the only state in the country never to have done so, which seems surprising given its politics these days. The reasons, reports Emily Corwin: the state's small, with only three opportunities; and incumbency matters, especially when there's no real partisan competition. As Corwin puts it, "If the white men get there first, like they did? Chances are they’re gonna stay."VT may have been the first state to abolish enslavement, but there were slave-holding families as late as 1810. VPR's Vermont Edition sat down yesterday with Jared Ross Hardesty, author of a history of slavery in New England. The region may have been a hotbed of anti-slavery sentiment, but Hardesty points out it existed as late as 1865 in Connecticut. “Working on roads, bridges, buildings... digging aquaducts -- all of that sort of work was done by enslaved people,” he says. “Enslaved people were...central to building the place we live in now.”Is beer finally jumping the shark? Harpoon Brewery — yes, that would be our (and Boston's) Harpoon — is jumping aboard what appears to be a minor craft-brewing trend, and collaborating with Boston North End pastry mogul Mike's to create a cannoli-inspired brew. It'll have crushed cannoli shells, cocoa nibs, lactose, and vanilla in a bid to replicate the flavor profile of Mike’s Pastry’s best-known dessert. Launch is next week, and then available in cans near you.
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SO, FRIDAY, WHAT'CHA GOT?
Jorgenson has been around. He was part of Elton John's band for six years. He's played with Bonnie Raitt. And Barbra Streisand. And George Burns. But his quintet goes in an entirely different direction: the Paris gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, but with Latin, Romanian, rock, and who knows what-all else thrown in. This is a
. 7:30 pm on the main stage.
They're Vermonters, but they don't sound like it. Fronted by Pariah Beat's Nick Charyk, the band is outlaw country honky-tonk, with sly bows to Waylon Jennings, Steve Earle, Gram Parsons and a whole pantheon of country greats. They're just out with their first album,
The Clearlake Conspiracy
. And yeah,
. 8:30 pm.
This will be a monthly series, "alternating between Moth-style storytelling evenings and skill-building workshops," Still North says. On tap tonight: stories on the theme of "New Beginnings." That starts at 7, but if you're in the mood, you can show up an hour earlier for
Junction Mag
's editorial meeting. They've
, so heck, why not?
Before he got to Dartmouth and helped found Pilobolus and Momix, Moses Pendleton went to the Lyndon Institute. Which is one reason the shape-shifting troupe is doing an early Pendleton-choreographed piece tonight called
Walklyndon
. At the Lyndon Institute Auditorium, 7 pm. There are still a handful of tix left.
This is composer, bandleader — and Dartmouth jazz leader — Taylor Ho Bynum's oratorio based on Shakespeare's
The Tempest
, with libretto by poet Matthea Harvey. It melds jazz and classical, with the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra and the Coast Jazz Ensemble, guest vocalists, guest musicians, and guest appearances tonight of Prokofiev's
Romeo and Juliet
suite played by the DSO and tomorrow night of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's
Such Sweet Thunder
suite. 7:30 both nights, Spaulding.
You read about it above. Tonight looks like it's sold out, but it runs Saturday and Sunday as well, and then next Thurs-Sun.
See? And there's plenty more this weekend.
and
have the fullest calendars.
See you Monday.
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