GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Cloudy to start, getting sunnier, still unusually warm. It'll be a calm day, and the clouds that moved in last night look like they should be starting to clear out by mid-morning, though there'll be a mix of sun and clouds all day. Back into the mid 40s today, winds from the south. Lows will only be in the mid or lower 30s, meaning there's a good chance we'll get into the 50s tomorrow.Full circle. Two years ago this week, Erin Donahue and Ted Levin began their remarkable biweekly series of videos and commentaries with a gray fox. They're still at it. And so are the foxes. Ted writes: "While psychologists unravel the emotional life of gray foxes, evolutionary biologists unravel their history in North America. Here are a few facts: they're primitive—an ancestry older than wolves, coyotes, and red foxes; pair bonds may be either monogamous or polyandrous (one female and two males), and some mated pairs hang together all year; gray foxes arrived in northern New England less than five thousand years ago from glacial refuges in the Deep South, took a hit during the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850) and returned during the warming trend of the past 150 years. On the rim of Valentine's Day, it's your guess what these two are up to."Ideas to revive town meeting. For years, local officials in both NH and VT have worried about declining participation in the bedrock event of participatory democracy. Now Alex Torpey, Hanover's town manager, has spearheaded a months-long effort with town moderators, clerks, and other officials in both states to highlight ideas for pulling more people in each February or March. They range from making sure every household in town gets an informational mailing to clearly explaining warrant articles—including why they came up and benefits and risks—to providing food and babysitting. Guide at the link.Hartland School Board chair on taxes: "I'll be honest, it feels broken." Nicole Buck spoke with the VT Standard's Tess Hunter this week about the dilemma the board and taxpayers face as a vote on the school budget nears. Latest estimates have Hartland's homestead education tax rate soaring nearly 24 percent this year, thanks mostly to a severe drop in the town's Common Level of Appraisal (CLA explained here). Last year, two-thirds of Hartlanders were deemed unable to afford their tax bill; now, she points out, "We’re voting on a budget based on a CLA that says that we have these incredibly expensive properties that nobody can afford to live in.”USPS considers moving mail sorting from WRJ to Hartford, CT. It's part of a nationwide plan to improve efficiency that would also shift mail sorting from Manchester NH to Boston. As Patrick Adrian writes in the Valley News, the WRJ facility collects, sorts and dispatches both incoming and outgoing mail "for 150 post offices in Vermont and New Hampshire, including all the towns in the Upper Valley." The plan, which is under study now, would have WRJ process only incoming mail, while outgoing mail would be sent to CT for sorting. Local handlers, Adrian reports, believe this will result in delays.SPONSORED: It's about time! After the hottest year on record in 2023, climate negotiators finally agreed it’s time to end use of fossil fuels. Not only that, they are calling for tripling renewable energy use by 2030. Are you ready to take up the call? Hit the burgundy link to find out more about what came out of the recent COP28 climate meeting held in Dubai, UAE, and how you can translate its big clean energy goals into action right here at home. Sponsored by Solaflect Energy.After months of off-and-on renovations, the Chandler Music Hall reopens this weekend. The august old Randolph venue has not only gotten an interior paint job, write Tim Calabro and Reilly Laware in the Herald, but a new sound system, curtains, and a new stage floor—the flooring contractor noted "there was about a sixteenth of an inch of built-up paint on the surface of the stage floor, which made locating screws and nails nearly impossible," Calabro and Laware write. There's still lots to do, Chandler director Chloe Powell points out, including fixing the roof—but at least the hall feels "grand" again, she says.VT cartoonist laureate's newest project began with this pitch: "So there were these two lesbians in the early part of the 19th century..." That was how Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, director of VT Humanities, introduced the idea to Norwich's Tillie Walden of doing a graphic novel about Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake. The pair were a couple in Weybridge VT throughout the first half of the 19th century—living "as a married couple before the vocabulary existed to describe their relationship," writes Chelsea Edgar in Seven Days. Walden's got 900 pages of letters, poems, and journal entries to draw from—but only one image, a silhouette. She dives into the archives this summer.For Randolph and Sharon Academy's Charlie McMeekin: "This is my last production." Ever since the '70s, McMeekin has been a mainstay on the local high school and community theater scene—as teacher, director, volunteer, even theater reviewer. Now, writes Tim Calabro in the Herald, he's got "an aggressive esophageal cancer that carries an imminent terminal diagnosis." Cards have been pouring into his Braintree Hill home since he went public. Calabro details McMeekin's long, community-focused life and teaching career, which may include one outstanding record: "I have taught more Blue Man Group actors than anybody in the country!” McMeekin tells him.SPONSORED: The White River Indie Film Festival 2024 brings the best of new global and local indie cinema to downtown White River Junction Feb. 15-18. Come in from the cold for hot unreleased features from the Cannes, New York, and Berlin Film Festivals, Oscar nominees—including Wim Wenders' Perfect Days and animated feature Robot Dreams—along with top-tier work by local filmmakers, "Filmmaker Friday" master classes, an Emerging Filmmaker brunch, filmmaker talk-backs, the Opening Night gala, and after-hours parties. Passes and tickets available at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by JAM.Charlestown-Springfield bridge due to close for eight months in 2025. The $6 million project on the two-lane bridge is focused on replacing "rust elements" and then on repainting, NHDOT engineer David Scott tells Patrick O'Grady in the VN. The alternative river crossings are 10 miles north, between Claremont and Ascutney, and nine miles south, between Walpole and Bellows Falls. NHDOT will give public presentations on its plans at Monday's Springfield Selectboard meeting, and again in Charlestown on Feb. 21.VINS names new executive director. Alden Smith, the longtime director of the Mountain School in Vershire, will take over for longtime VINS executive director Charlie Rattigan on April 1. Smith ran the Mountain School from 2002 to 2022; Rattigan has led VINS since 2014, taking over a decade after it opened in its current spot in Quechee, and steering it through a period of rapid growth—including its Forest Canopy Walk. "The world needs the mission of VINS more than ever, and my hope is to build it into an even more impactful force for good," Smith says in the organization's press release.Hiking Close to Home: Lovewell (or Lovell) Mountain and Pillsbury State Park, Washington, NH. With Valentine's Day around the corner, the UVTA recommends this beautiful 8-mile loop. After parking in the off-season lot outside the Park gatehouse, make your way on Clemac Trail along the northern edge of May Pond. Then take two left turns, first on to Bear Pond then on Five Summers. Follow this trail 3+ miles to Lucia's Lookout and its beautiful views. To complete the loop, travel back down on the Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway until you see the right turn back onto Bear Pond Trail toward the parking area.So... Think you know what's been going on in the Upper Valley? Because Daybreak's News Quiz has some questions for you. Like... Which Hanover institution is getting itself some Teslas? And how are things going with that effort to raise blight-resistant GMO chestnut trees? Those questions and more at the link.But wait! How closely were you following VT and NH?
Because Seven Days wants to know if you know what project VT officials are reconsidering for Newbury after going all the way to the state supreme court for the right to build it.
And NHPR's got a whole set of questions about doings around the Granite State—like, why, according to Portsmouth residents and filmmakers Chris Stinson and Amy Greene, are more movies being made in MA than in NH?
In NH, dueling headlines on school choice vote. Sorry, couldn't help but notice. Here's the AP: "New Hampshire House rejects broad expansion of school choice program but OK’s income cap increase." Here's NH Bulletin: "House passes ‘education freedom accounts’ expansion bill, sends it to Senate." The long and short is that the House passed a bill to raise the income cap for families to be eligible for the Education Freedom Account program to 500 percent of the federal poverty level from its current 350 percent. But it axed bills that would have eliminated the cap. AP at the burgundy link, NHB here.Former NH prison guard charged with second-degree murder in death of inmate. Last April, state officials had announced the "untimely death" of 50-year-old Jason Rothe at the Secure Psychiatric Unit in Concord. There's been little update since then, but yesterday, reports NHPR's Paul Cuno-Booth, prosecutors alleged that one of six guards who'd been involved in an altercation with Rothe had knelt on Rothe's “torso/neck area” while he was handcuffed and face-down on the floor, asphyxiating him. The former guard's lawyer said at arraignment yesterday that he will plead not guilty.In Salem, NH, a family with four school-aged children opens its home to people recovering from opioid addiction. Diane Tsai made her documentary about the O'Learys in 2021 for TIME Studios; it's now the latest feature for VT Public's series, "Made Here". When it first came out, Tsai explained to Women and Hollywood, "Every year, Lydia O’Leary asks her kids, 'Are you willing to give up a year of your life, so that someone can have the rest of their life?'" and that as a filmmaker, she was drawn especially to the kids, with "a maturity beyond their years and an openness to new people without judgment."Flooded VT municipalities will get education tax relief. On Wednesday, Gov. Phil Scott signed into law a measure that will reimburse towns and cities for what they owe the statewide education fund from properties that got a tax abatement for damage after last July's floods. VTDigger's Erin Petenko reports that Barre City, for example, expects between 60 and 90 abatement requests, "and could owe the state education fund between $200,000 to $250,000 if all are approved." Under this measure, it will be made whole. The Joint Fiscal Office estimates the FY24 cost to the education fund at about $1.1 million.The people have spoken, and the winners are… After more than 50,000 wildlife photos came pouring into the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, the judges whittled them down to 25 “memorable” photos, then asked the public for their favorites. Not surprisingly, animals—air, sea, land, and iceberg—had the most fans. From the heartwarming lionesses grooming a cub to the ice-cool moon jellyfish in a Norwegian fjord, every one is a stunner. If you happen to be in England before the end of June, you can stop by London’s Natural History Museum to see them in person. The photos, not the animals.Oops. Danny McGee, a Hawaii-based filmmaker and drone videographer, was in Iceland last year when he decided to see if he could get some close-up drone shots of a volcano. He was down to his last SD card and battery, but decided to give it a go, sending the drone down toward a crater—when suddenly, it was engulfed by shots of lava. Unbelievably, the drone escaped and made it back, melted propellers and all. Which means, we get to see the unreal footage that came out of it.The Friday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak. And are you new to Vordle? Fresh ones appear on weekends, using words from the Friday Daybreak, and you can get a reminder email each weekend morning: Just sign up here.
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There's SO MUCH going on this weekend. Let's get started:
For one thing, there's the Dartmouth Winter Carnival, which officially began yesterday but is mostly today and through the weekend. There are ski races at the Skiway and at Oak Hill, a broomball tourney at the rink on the Dartmouth Green, ice sculptures, and lots more. The annual polar bear plunge at Occom Pond has been canceled because of concerns over unsafe ice.
Today at 4 pm, the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock hosts performing artists Ham Gillett, Michael Zerphy, and Marv Klassen-Landis, who'll be kicking off a series of workshops, "We’re Never Too Old to Play", with a performance for the general public of their "creative play for seniors" approach: introducing "the humor and pathos of aging" along with samples of what they have in mind, including readings, storytelling, poems, songs, skits, play excerpts, and improv.
At 5 pm today, New Hampshire Humanities presents an online webinar, "Congress's Power of the Purse and Why It Matters". Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, will talk over spending bills, shutdowns, how Congress came to hold the power of the purse, and why it's getting so hard to exercise it.
Also starting at 5 pm today, it's Piano Night at the Main Street Museum in WRJ—this time celebrating Chinese New Year on the museum's 1930's Aeolian Stroud Player Piano with Oriental Fox Trots and—not on the piano—"homemade treats meant to bring you good luck in the New Year!"
This evening at 7, the West Newbury Open Mic continues its run. It happens every second Friday, and performers are encouraged to pop on stage with anything from music to poetry, theater, juggling, magic, performance art, storytelling, whatever. The final hour (9-10) is devoted to an open jam session. In W. Newbury Hall at 219 Tyler Farm Road: email organizer Jay Saffran at [email protected] to sign up, or just sign up at the door. (No link.)
At 7:30 tonight, the Lebanon Opera House brings in comedian Mike McDonald for his 6th annual Comedy Extravaganza. He'll be joined onstage by "the brilliant Orlando Baxter, Ken 'The Viper' Rogerson, Andrea Henry, and 'Comedy Barbarian' Mike McCarthy." There are definitely seats left, but not that many.
Also at 7:30 tonight and across Colburn Park, the Anonymous Coffeehouse sets up again at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon. On tonight's bill: Plainfield singer-songwriter Devan Tracy starts things off with her acoustic folk/pop blend; then at 8:15, all-around performer, composer, songwriter, and entertainer Tommy Crawford takes the stage; and finally, at 9, the Seacoast duo of Betsy and Scott Heron, who perform as Green Heron, wind things up.
Also at 7:30, but on the other side of the river, Tracy Hall in Norwich hosts a Norwich Community Dances contra dance with western Mass. caller Hannah Johlas and music by the very local quartet Blind Squirrel: Erin Smith and Steve Hoffman on fiddle, Suzanne Long on fiddle and cello, and Chip Hedler on guitar, with a repertoire that draws on a broad range of New England, Quebecois, and Celtic traditions.
And also at 7:30, BarnArts in Barnard launches its two-weekend run of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. As they write of the production directed and designed by Linda Treash, "Absurd situations abound as two gentlemen traverse the realities of having multiple identities while falling in love in an age of ideals…not to mention family intruding at every turn." Oh, and all those cucumber sandwiches and teacakes being consumed onstage? They were made and baked by cast and crew, and they'll be available to the audience during the play's two intermissions. At Barnard Town Hall tonight and tomorrow night, Sunday afternoon, and then again next weekend.
And at 9 tonight, the stage at Sawtooth Kitchen in Hanover hosts the "hard rock power improv trio" led by singer and guitarist Seth Yacavone, who's been a presence in the region for years, with a devoted following.
Saturday
Starting at 9 am tomorrow and running until 4 pm, Sharon VT throws its first-ever Skills Swap. It starts in the gym at Sharon Elementary School at 9, where you can sign up for classes (which start at 10) in everything from small engine basics to fly tying to sourdough pizza-making to cutting circles with a table saw. Plus a whole lot more. There'll be a community potluck from noon to 1, to which everyone, class participant or not, is invited.
Also starting at 9 am and running through the afternoon, Orange NH artist and historian Gary Hamel will be at his studio next to Kalahari Crystals in Canaan showing his project, "Pages of an Unpublished Book". Hamel, who is also the artist behind the "assemblages" created from detritus plowed into the Indian River after Canaan's Great Fire of 1923, means it literally. The pages are his illustrations for a book on the history of Orange that never made it into print. As Alex Hanson wrote in yesterday's VN, "Hamel draws together disparate elements, from meticulously detailed paintings of livestock to passages of text and dreamlike backgrounds, to make works with a collage-like effect. They transport a viewer to an older, darker New England."
At 1 pm tomorrow, the Dunbar Free Library presents "Music in My Pocket with Jeff Warner" on the lower level of Grantham Town Hall. It's a New Hampshire Humanities event, and Warner will perform and teach "singing games, accessible 'pocket instruments' like spoons and dancing puppets, tall tales, funny songs, old songs," and other New England entertainments passed down through the generations.
Tomorrow at 3 pm and again at 7:30 pm, "junk rockers" Recycled Percussion take the stage at the Lebanon Opera House. The phenom band, LOH favorites, was born in Goffstown NH, but now calls Laconia home base. Finalists on America's Got Talent, stars of their own show on the Las Vegas Strip, and able to turn anything from a sink to a blender to roller skates, buckets, and ladders into a beat. There's a handful of tix left for the 3 pm show, a few more at 7:30.
Meanwhile, also at 3 pm tomorrow, conductor Filippo Ciabatti and Upper Valley Baroque will be at the Chandler in Randolph with an orchestral program featuring "Handel’s beloved and regal Water Music, a group of suites first performed on a barge in the Thames River in 1717 to welcome King George to England" and then three short Handel works that feature small ensembles and soprano Mary Bonhag. They'll perform again Sunday, also at 3 pm, at St. Denis Catholic Church in Hanover.
At 7 pm tomorrow, and again on Sunday at 3 pm, the Junction Dance Festival puts on a “Shake the Cabin Fever Fundraiser" at the Briggs Opera House in WRJ. It will present three new works by local choreographers: Ellen Smith Ahern's Shell (you may know her from Vulture Sister Song); Elizabeth Kurylo's Shhh!, built off a poem by writer and dancer Calvin Walker; and Michael Bodel's Uncertain Wind. For background on the event and on each piece, Eric Sutphin has a writeup in yesterday's Valley News.
And starting at 7:30 tomorrow night at Woodstock's Little Theater, there's a Winter Music Showcase featuring Woodstock-based musicians organized by trombonist (and Village Butcher owner) Alex Beram and blues musician Sefton Stallard. It begins with a Japanese sword demonstration, then moves on to a solo acoustic set by singer-songwriter Laurie Goldsmith, a record-release party by bluesers The Freeze Brothers, and the Subnivean Soul Review—a name that hides an astonishing assemblage of talent: saxophonist Michael Zsoldos, Lake Street Dive drummer Mike Calabrese, guitarists Avi Salloway and Ben Kogan, trombonist Elizabeth Frascoia, and fellow trombonist Beram.
Sunday
At 11 am Sunday, the Hop throws a HopStop family celebration of Lunar New Year at the RW Black Center in Hanover. Traditional Chinese calligraphy, Tai Chi and traditional Chinese dance—including, at the end, a dragon dance featuring a giant 12-person puppet dragon making its way through the streets of Hanover to the Dartmouth campus and through Collis and Baker-Berry.
At 3 pm Sunday, Upper Valley Music Center faculty members Ben Kulp (cello) and Chenyu Wang (piano) will give a concert at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon with a program that includes pieces by Arvo Pärt, Andrea Casarrubios, Olivier Messiaen, Ed Sheeran, Samuel Barber, and Charlie Chaplin. The audience, UVMC writes, "is invited to slow down, taking a break from the speed of the modern world."
At 4 pm Sunday, Roots and Wings Coffeehouse at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Upper Valley in Norwich hosts the VTones, a longstanding vocal octet from both sides of the river (with Archie Apigo, Pat Autillo, Becky Bailey, Danae Carlson, Stephen Dunn, Julie Frew, Da-Shih Hu, and Katie Kitchel), with music including jazz, pop, folk, classical, spiritual, and religious pieces.
And also at 4 on Sunday afternoon, the Chandler in Randolph hosts CelloGayageum, the duo of Austrian cellist Sol Daniel Kim and Korean Gayageum player Dayoung Yoon that melds western classical and Korean traditional music. Their original pieces, they write, "combine the characteristics of their respective musical cultures and instruments, finding the right balance and forming a harmonic symbiosis in sound and style."
And to close things out...
Back in December, the astronauts on board the International Space Station found a tomato that had been missing for eight months. The Red Robin dwarf tomato had been grown aboard the station and given, in a ziplocked bag, to astronaut Frank Rubio. Who, somehow, let it float away. So, for all those months, he stood accused of eating it—something the crew had been told not to do, for fear of potential fungal contamination. A few months before his exoneration, Rubio gave an interview in which he insisted, "I did not eat the tomato, and I wish I had at this point because I think everybody thinks I did." Well. After the whole story came out, it got West Leb's Tracy and Brandon Hill thinking. Over the next few weeks, Brandon penned lyrics to be sung to Bowie's "Space Oddity". Tracy, who'd taken a workshop at JAM in the art and craft of felted animation, created the engaging visuals. And their friend, Boston-area musician and producer Mac Ritchey, set it all to music and provided the vocals.
Have a lovely weekend! See you Monday for CoffeeBreak.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
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