GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Just a reminder: No Daybreak next week or the week after. However, you can sign up for Daybreak Diversions—a short weekday-morning newsletter with some vintage items of fun stuff (and some new ones thrown in for kicks), music, and, of course, the Vordle—to fill the void during those two weeks. More info at the burgundy link. Daybreak will be back mid-morning on Monday, Aug. 21.More rain. With a flash flood watch through this evening. This front's moving somewhat slowly, with a chance of heavy rain, thunderstorms, hail, and high winds, especially this afternoon and evening. That flood watch is in effect for a good bit of VT, including Windsor and Orange counties, and of NH, including Grafton, Sullivan, and Merrimack counties. Mostly cloudy when it's not raining, highs today reaching the mid 70s. Down to the high 50s overnight, as things start to dry out and we turn toward a mostly sunny day tomorrow.A coyote in two coats, winter and summer. Caught at different times of year by Erin Donahue's trail cam in E. Thetford. Ted Levin writes: "In 2013, Kate Upton appeared in a fur-lined hooded parka on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Coyote fur. The haberdasher Canada Goose provided the parka and offers a head-to-toe coyote snowsuit for over $9,000. Looks better on coyote and serves a real purpose: dense underfur insulates and long guard hairs waterproof, camouflage, and protect the skin. Online furriers counter that fake fur releases microplastics."And a moose in summer. In Suzanne Stofflet's yard in Norwich, with a yen for the lily pads in her tiny pond. "After never seeing any in 44 years," Suzanne writes, "I had two separate moose visits on the same day"—a younger one also stopped by, about an hour before this one.In downtown Woodstock, which didn't flood, businesses are still trying to recover. In their case—unlike their colleagues' to both the east and west—it wasn't excess water that caused problems, but the nearly two weeks many of them went without any water at all, along with lodging cancellations by out-of-towners. In the Standard, Village trustee and local business owner Jeffrey Kahn tells Robert Shumskis that even businesses that didn't have to close saw "daily economic decline of 25 percent to 50 percent compared to historic averages"—continuing even after restaurants and lodgings reopened.Norwich hires former VT Capitol Police chief as town's interim chief. The move to bring on board Matthew Romei was announced at Wednesday's selectboard meeting and took effect almost immediately: Romei's first day on the job was yesterday, says assistant town manager Miranda Bergmeier, with a six-month offer letter. He replaces Wade Cochran, who announced his resignation last week. Romei stepped down from the Capitol force in May after six years on the job. At the time, Ethan Weinstein reported in VTDigger, neither he nor the Capitol's sergeant-at-arms would go into detail on his departure.SPONSORED: Solaflect introduces solar EV charging for workplaces. Recent extreme weather makes cutting carbon emissions—by, say, switching to EVs—more urgent than ever. But EV charging stations are way behind what’s needed to meet the rapid growth of EV driving, and much grid-energy just isn't clean. That’s why SolaflectEV has just launched an exciting solar charger for workplace EV charging. Find out more at the burgundy link, with 10 reasons to encourage your workplace to plug into the sun! Sponsored by Solaflect.Royalton Community Radio's Ralph Molinario: "A lot of people don’t know they like bluegrass music until they hear it." Molinario, a semi-retired electrician from Randolph, has a weekly bluegrass show on the station, and in the Herald, Darren Marcy traces his evolution from Deadhead—"When Jerry died, it was over for me"—to devoted festival-goer and on-air bluegrass promoter with an international audience. Constantly on the search for new music at festivals like Albany's Gray Fox and Tunbridge's Jenny Brook, he's also a believer in homegrown musicians. “Vermont is full of talent,” he says.“You should never believe that you’re not an artist. If you’re a human being, you can be an artist.” It's been two decades since Kathleen Dolan, then the newly arrived mom of a two-year-old and pregnant with her second child, launched Artistree in a Woodstock storefront as a place for hands-on arts activities for kids. In the years since, writes Ray Couture in a Standard profile of the organization, it's grown by leaps and bounds, in part because Dolan kept expanding into new spaces in a building she'd moved into on Barnard Road: a kiln led to ceramics classes, a part of the building became an art gallery. By the time it moved to S. Pomfret in 2014, much of its breadth was in place.And speaking of expanding: Brandon's Barn Opera is launching Opera Vermont. "Our ambition is to, within a short time frame, facilitate a live operatic performance within 30 minutes from every Vermonter," founder and artistic director Joshua Collier said in the announcement. As a first step, reports Susan Apel in Artful, the opera is collaborating with Greensboro's Highland Center for the Arts and the Southern VT Arts Center in Manchester, each of which will stage a live opera during the 2024 season and host an opera/musical theater mashup in September.SPONSORED: Your local farm needs your help! There is no community resilience without farm resilience. And farms have been hit hard by the climate crisis. Buying from local producers and donating to a farm emergency fund are tangible ways to support your local farms. Or you can purchase a t-shirt, tote bag, or poster from local artist Cecily Anderson’s Farm Flood Relief Collection. 100 percent of the proceeds will be given to the NOFA-VT fund to support farm recovery. Explore all of this at Vital Communities' Climate Farmer Stories page. Sponsored by Vital Communities.In Leb and Enfield, Patch Orchards' proposal to trade trails draws opposition. The Patch family's hope is that the city will close a set of historic roads now used as trails that cross their property and, they say, interfere with their sap lines. In exchange, they've proposed creating a public recreation trail. At a city council meeting exploring the idea Wednesday, reports the Valley News's Patrick Adrian, several residents opposed the idea, arguing that the old roads should remain open to public use, even if they're partially overgrown; Enfield also opposes the idea, as two of the roads connect to class VI roads there. There'll be a public hearing Aug. 16.Hiking Close to Home: Toonerville Trail, Springfield, VT. This three-mile easy paved pathway offers scenic views along the Black River. Many benches provide opportunities for rest and birding—keep an eye out for kingfisher or blue herons. To reach the Springfield trailhead, take I-91 to Exit 7 and follow VT-11 north toward Springfield for approximately 2.5 miles. Look for the Robert B. Jones Industrial Center on the right. There are many parking spaces there.Constabulary notes from all over. As if newspaper publishers aren't having enough trouble getting their print editions into subscribers' boxes, the Laconia Daily Sun reported yesterday that a delivery truck containing some 2,000 copies of yesterday's paper was stolen after leaving the printer in Concord (like the VN and the Herald, it's printed there). The vehicle was found in Fairfield, CT yesterday afternoon. No word on whether the papers remained on board.NH aims to cut energy consumption, costs in its 700 state-owned buildings. With the Exec Council's approval earlier this week, the state's departments of energy and administrative services will use $180,000 in federal funding to encourage energy reduction, "responsible energy behavior," and energy efficiency in the state-owned facilities, reports Hadley Barndollar in NH Bulletin. The move comes in the wake of a state report noting that agencies had identified more than $30 million in potential energy-saving projects, including audits, building automation, insulation, and employee training.With new law, NH makes it easier for deer, elk farms to to process meat. The measure essentially allows them to sidestep USDA-certified slaughterhouses—which are already full-up with farmers' demands for cattle, sheep, and pig processing—and use state-licensed facilities. That, the owner of Bonnie Brae Farm in Plymouth tells David Brooks in the Monitor, will allow the red deer he raises to be slaughtered on-farm—"doing the slaughter here on the farm, their home base, is a lot more humane"—and then taken to a state-licensed butcher. The new law applies only to commercial farms, Brooks notes.Been paying attention to Daybreak? Because the Upper Valley News Quiz has some questions for you. Like, what are downtown Hanover business owners concerned about these days? And has the Appalachian Trail grown or shrunk since it was first created? And why is the Lebanon Opera House about to close for five months? Those and other questions at the link.But wait! How closely were you following VT and NH?
Because Seven Days wants to know if you know why Middlebury College is offering students $10,000.
And NHPR's got a whole set of questions about doings around the Granite State—like, what are two newspapers in southwest NH planning to train community members to do?
Brattleboro police probe death of person found near base of Harris Hill Ski Jump. The body was discovered Wednesday afternoon, and in a press release issued yesterday, report VTDigger's Alan J. Keays and Kevin O'Connor, the town's police said they consider the death suspicious. The ski jump property gets "a large number of hikers and walkers in the spring, summer and fall," they note. Authorities yesterday afternoon said the soonest they'd release new information about the possible victim or the incident is today.In VT, dams that are old, dangerous, and years away from repairs. Remember that Seven Days story last week about many dams' state of disrepair? Yesterday, VT Public's Mary Engisch interviewed one of the reporters, Kevin McCallum, about the problem. Among other things, he singles out the Ascutney Mill Dam in Windsor, which was built in 1834. "That's a pretty old structure, and to have it in poor condition and in danger of harming people and property is not a good situation," he says. The state's aware of the problem, he adds, but with a small team of inspectors, "they're overwhelmed."The Vermont Atlas of Disaster. Kind of a catchy name, isn't it? It's the title of a report released yesterday by Rebuild By Design, a non-profit based at NYU that aims to help communities adapt to climate change. Using data from 2011 to 2021—and mentioning the December 2022 winter storm, freeze last May, and flooding in July—it finds some eye-opening figures: the state's had 19 federal disaster declarations, each county in the state has had at least four disasters, and the state's seen the fifth highest per capita spending on climate-related disasters in the country. Kevin McCallum's Seven Days writeup here.You may think your iPhone only gets so-so photos, but the iPhone Photography Awards beg to differ. And on the evidence of this year's crop of winners, they'd be right. There are photos from all over the world—helpfully place-stamped by the photographers' phones—in categories that range from Travel, Landscape, and Architecture to Animals, Portraits, and Lifestyle. All of them are gaze-worthy.18 builders, four days, 100,000 little wooden planks, 82 feet of structure... and a few seconds to make it collapse. Though it does take longer in slo-mo. And while the effort to build—and topple—the world-record-setting tower takes up just four minutes in domino artist Lily Hevesh's video, as she points out, there's a ton that can go wrong: like, the higher you go, the planks inevitably become uneven, and the tower can buckle. Or, as it does, shift 10 centimeters the night before it's due to fall. But man, that collapse is a work of art!The Friday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak. Vordlers: you'll get the usual weekend reminder this weekend, then Daybreak Diversions will kick in on weekdays—with Vordle words starting Tuesday chosen from the local news. Reminders will go out again next weekend and the weekend after.
Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
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mug from DB Johnson for you? Or maybe a Vordle t-shirt? Or, of course, Daybreak tees, long-sleeve tees, and mugs. Check out what's available and wear it (or drink from it) proudly! Email me ([email protected]) if you've got questions.
Today from 12:30 to 2 pm, the Montshire is hosting bee expert Sanaa Siddiqi for a Q&A about bumblebees. Siddiqi is the Arctic Program manager for the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth, and among other things, studies Arctic bumblebees and how climate change is affecting their place in the ecosystem. She'll be at the honeybee show hive on the second floor.
At 5:30 this afternoon, AVA Gallery hosts a talk by Coralea Wennberg, whose exhibition, "Plant Stories"—inspired in part by a 12th-century Arabic book on plants and their uses—is currently on display at the gallery.
And at 6:30 in VT Law & Grad School's Chase Center in S. Royalton, filmmaker/farmer George Woodard and Hanging Mudflap Productions will be screening The Farm Boy, his WWII epic. They'll also be at the Randolph Playhouse Theater Aug. 13-14 in a benefit for Montpelier's Savoy Theater.
This evening at 7, BarnArts opens its weekend run of Newsies, this year's Summer Youth Theater production. The musical is based on the newsboy strike of 1899, with script by Harvey Fierstein and music by Alan Menken (who also did the music for The Little Mermaid and Little Shop of Horrors, among lots else). The cast and crew, which range from age 7 into college, have been working on the full-on production, which includes a live band, for the last few weeks. Through Sunday in Barnard Town Hall.
Also at 7, the Thetford Arthouse Cinema is showing Young and Innocent, Alfred Hitchcock's 1937 thriller about a young man on the run from a murder charge who enlists the chief constable's daughter to help. "We think this rates with H's more famous mid-30's gems (39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, etc) as it demonstrates his mastery of the camera and trademark admixture of comedy, suspense, romance, crime and the ineffable element of British mise en scène," writes organizer Arthur Kahn. "Do come and see if it doesn't put a smile on your face!" In the Martha Rich Theater at Thetford Academy.
Note that the 7 pm Pentangle Music by the River show with Wesli that was scheduled for Woodstock tonight has been postponed until next year.
Saturday
From 10 until 5 tomorrow, VINS is hosting Magnificent Mammals Day, with a chance to check out pelts and skulls of mammals from across the world, goat-keeping with Five Rooster Farm, how to read tracks and scat, and more.
At 11 tomorrow morning, Burlington Taiko will give a free performance on the Dartmouth Green, sponsored by the Hop. "Their performance interweaves drum and dance, showcasing elements of martial arts, jazz and Shinto and bears witness to the majesty of nature's Tsunami on the giant Odaiko drum," the Hop writes. There'll also be a Shi Shi Mai Lion dance, and a chance for audience members to go on stage to learn Taiko first-hand. Preceded at 10:30 by a storytelling session at the Howe Library.
Tomorrow from 12:30 to 2:30, former Juneberry Community Chorus director Patricia Norton returns to the Upper Valley to lead a community song circle along with Ann Arbor's Carol Bardenstein. Songs will be taught by ear, says Upper Valley Music Center, with harmonies or bass lines or percussion added. Registration encouraged but not required. At the First Congregational Church of Lebanon.
And from 3 to 4:30 tomorrow, Burlington Taiko will be giving a free taiko workshop in Leb's Colburn Park (if the weather's good; at the Kilton Library if it's raining), sponsored by UVMC, the Lebanon Libraries, and the Hop. Its slots for participants are already filled, but there's a waiting list — and you don't need to register to just go watch.
At 7 tomorrow evening, Hop Film brings in the 2023 version of the One Ocean Film Tour. Films about surfing off Bali and Lombok, snorkeling in the Red Sea, a hydrofoil crossing (and back) of New Zealand's Cooke Strait, surfing the huge waves off Nazare, Portugal, whale sharks in Indonesia, salmon in Alaska's Bristol Bay, and a bunch more. In the Loew Theater.
Also at 7 tomorrow, the Chandler in Randolph presents Windborne, the southern VT-based vocal quartet that ranges widely across centuries, continents, and styles for its repertoire—and makes a point of sharing stories about what they're singing and how it fits into the vocal tradition. Sliding scale.
Sunday
At 1 pm on Sunday, NYC-based, Vermont-bred songwriter and performer Shaina Taub—who wrote the music for Northern Stage's summer intensive production of Twelfth Night—will lead a master class and songwriting workshop with students in the program. You can't take the class, but you can watch it all unfold at Northern Stage's Barrette Center. Tix are free, but you'll need to reserve.
At 4 pm, Opera North closes out its season with Jazz on a Sunday Afternoon in its tent at Blow-Me-Down Farm in Cornish. Bebop saxophonist Greg Abate and the JOSA Ensemble—which has been backing guest performers for decades, with Bill Wightman on piano, Roger Kimball on bass, Tim Gilmore on drums, David Ellis on trumpet, and Richard Gardzina or Matt Langley on reeds.
And also at 4 on Sunday, it's 70+ minutes of cat videos at the Lebanon Opera House, as CatVideoFest 2023 hits the big screen there. In their words, it's "a compilation reel of the latest and best cat videos culled from countless hours of unique submissions and sourced animations, music videos, and classic internet powerhouses." A portion of the ticket proceeds goes to the Upper Valley Humane Society and the Sullivan County Humane Society.
And a few things to keep in mind over the next couple of weeks...
On Wednesday, Aug. 9, from 4-6:30 pm, you can go say goodbye to the Lebanon Opera House in its current incarnation, before it closes for the next five months. A chance to wander around, including backstage, and to learn more about planned upgrades.
And the Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival returns to the Chandler in Randolph and Woodstock's Unitarian Universalist Church for its 31st season, starting next Wednesday, Aug. 9 at 7 pm, with artistic director Peter Sanders performing the Bach Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor, open rehearsals and performances throughout the next two weeks, and on Friday, Aug. 18, Paul Woodiel and Jeremiah McLane giving a concert in memory of Vermont fiddle great Pete Sutherland at the Chandler.
There's plenty going on over the next couple of weekends thanks to the Hop and Hop Film, including the NY Theater Workshop. Here's the schedule.
Next weekend, LOH brings its Nexus Festival back to downtown Lebanon, with a stellar lineup of performers—circus artists Liam & Ripley, puppeteers Modern Times Theater—and musicians, including Ali McGuirk, Hans Williams, the East Bay Jazz Ensemble, Kyshona, BlacKLisT, Grace Wallace, Purple: A Tribute to Prince, plus silent discos and more.
And don't forget that one of the region's summer hallmarks, the Cornish Fair, starts up on Friday, Aug. 18.
And we'll head into the break with...
You were expecting bluegrass, right? Nope. Rockabilly. Or, well, kinda Rockabilly Ragtime. Or maybe it's Rockabilly Disco Ragtime. Whatever, it'll put extra bounce in your step today: Postmodern Jukebox with Nashville bass fiddle player and trickster Wild Bill,
As one commenter puts it, "The Bee Gees did a great cover of this."
Have a fantastic couple of weeks! See you Monday if you're a Vordler or signed up for Daybreak Diversions, on August 21 for CoffeeBreak if you didn't.
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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