Daybreak Thursday, 6/11/26

Partly sunny again, and then a chance of showers and thunderstorms again. It’s pretty much like yesterday, with two differences: It’ll be hotter, and today’s the day humidity arrives. We’ll be getting up toward 90, with a heat index in the mid 90s, given today’s high dewpoints. There’s a chance of rain and thunder this afternoon, but things won’t get all that cool overnight: Lows in the mid 60s.

Light at play. Sometimes, it just makes you stop whatever you’re doing.

Lebanon police investigate car’s collision with man in a wheelchair. On Tuesday afternoon, the LPD reports in a press release, police and fire personnel were called out to the Walmart parking lot in West Leb, where “a 59-year-old male was struck by a motor vehicle while in a wheelchair and became trapped underneath the vehicle. The victim was extricated by members of the Lebanon Fire Department and subsequently transported to a local hospital for treatment of his injuries. The operator of the vehicle was identified as a 90-year-old female.” Valley News photographer James M. Patterson has a report and photographs from the scene.

Plainfield’s zoning board wants controversial cell tower built… in Lebanon. Atlantic Tower’s proposed project off Old Stagecoach Road sits in a zoning district that “doesn’t allow for cell towers, even with special exceptions,” writes the VN’s Sofia Langlois—but the company’s lawyer contends that federal law takes precedence if local zoning preferences block cell service. Now, Langlois reports, the board has asked Atlantic to consider two properties in Lebanon where zoning allows cell towers. One is owned by the Cole family (including city council member Eric Cole); the other by Patch Orchards. “We haven’t heard anything about it,” Barbara Patch tells Langlois.

SPONSORED: Curious about the scaly creatures in our midst? Join VINS for Remarkable Reptile Day on Saturday, June 13th! Discover amazing adaptations – from turtle shells to snake smells – through close encounters, hands-on activities, and crafts. Hear from the Vermont Reptile & Amphibian Atlas about local species and how you can contribute to real science. Meet native reptiles from the Vermont Natural History Museum and exotic species with Uncharted Wild. Don't miss this fun and educational event for all ages! Full schedule at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by VINS.

It’s snack bar season, and VT restaurant pros have some recommendations. The seven chefs and restaurant owners that Seven Days’ Melissa Pasanen asked came up with tips for all over the state, and yep, some are an easy drive from here. For instance, Vergennes’ Andrea Cousineau points to Arandas Mexican Cuisine, “a chain of gas stations that have the best Mexican food I have found in Vermont”—including the one in Fairlee just to the east of the I-91 North off-ramp. And Maggie Fischer, the chef/owner of St. J’s The Buttery, is a big fan of Woodstock’s White Cottage. But heck, if you’re going to be out and about in the state this summer, check the whole thing out.

At Parish Players starting tonight, “a very quiet meditation on the human condition of awkwardness.” Northern Stage marketing director (and sometime actor) J. Bailey Burcham didn’t much like Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation when he first saw it years ago, writes Marion Umpleby in the VN. Now he does, which is good, because the Parish Players’ production of it, with a preview tonight, marks his directorial debut. The play about a handful of theater amateurs “tip-toeing out of their comfort zone” features a set of “seasoned” actors, Umpleby writes. She sketches Burcham’s move here from big-time LA-area theater, and the show itself. (More below.)

SPONSORED: Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital Express Care is here when you need it. Our Express Care team treats adults and children over the age of one for non-life-threatening conditions. And with evening and weekend hours, you get the right level of care when you need it. Get immediate care for coughs, colds, rashes, and sprains right at APD Express Care, and all without an appointment. Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital Express Care. Part of the best health system in the region, Dartmouth Health. Sponsored by Dartmouth Health.

Plymouth NH’s Flying Monkey gets new owner: Habitat for Humanity. Or, at least, the Pemi Valley branch of the housing nonprofit. After 17 years, Common Man founder Alex Ray, who took over the defunct Plymouth Theater and turned it into the popular movie house and music/performance venue, is donating it. The venue “will remain an entertainment and community-focused location, while proceeds will help support affordable housing opportunities for low-and-middle income residents” in the region, writes InDepthNH’s Paula Tracy. Management will remain the same, and all current employees can stay with the venue.

In Loudon, NH, five cars crash after gas station fire suppression system activates. “It was a bit of an afternoon today,” the town’s fire department writes on FB. “The gas canopy extinguisher system accidentally got activated by a service technician. With a large cloud of agent being deployed with a strong wind from the west,” the white powder wafted onto NH Route 106, temporarily blinding drivers. “Meanwhile,” they add, “folks fueling vehicles and motorcycles got caught in the fire extinguishing agent.” One person was taken to the hospital.

NH faces federal trial over at-home care program. NH Bulletin’s William Skipworth doesn’t mince words in his opening lines: “A federal judge is set to weigh in on whether New Hampshire’s at-home care program for the elderly and people with physical disabilities is so lackluster it violates federal laws meant to protect people from institutionalization,” he writes. The November trial will pit the state’s health and human services department against a coalition of advocacy groups who argue the state’s “severe lack of investment” in a program meant to help people avoid nursing homes has had the opposite effect—thus violating two federal laws.

MOTTAF!!! It could be an epithet, but it’s not: It’s the Museum of Things Tiny and Found, and it’s a recent arrival to Brattleboro, writes Seven Days’ Alice Dodge. Founded by Doran Hamm and Tabitha Celani, who last year created the town’s first Festival of Miniatures, it’s chock-full of little… stuff. “We like to consider ourselves a museum, a junk drawer, and an emporium,” Celani says in a short documentary on the MOTTAF website, which offers a glimpse of just how many tiny things it’s got. Like “a model woodworker’s garage studio, complete with a radio and novelty singing fish, built by HatchSpace founder Tom Bodett and his wife, Rita Ramirez,” writes Dodge.

Up at the border, Canadians get their own library door. Remember how, for generations, Canadian patrons of the border-straddling Haskell Free Library in Derby Line, VT and Stanstead, QC were able to use the front door on the US side—until last October, when the Trump administration, citing “illicit cross-border activity,” barred the way? Since then, the choice has been to go through customs or use a makeshift emergency exit. But yesterday, after a $700K renovation, the library inaugurated a new Canadian door. "Even though the Haskell library now has two different entrances, inside, we are people who appreciate literature, arts and culture,” said Sylvie Boudreau, president of the library's board. The CBC reports.

Hard feelings over soft roofs. There’s a war raging among the 800 or so professionals who craft and maintain Britain’s thatched roofs—though the people who live under those roofs don’t really seem to care. Pros who praise long straw, made from locally grown wheat, like the “soft, seamless look, as though a thick golden liquid had oozed over the cottage and its eaves,” writes the NYT’s Rukmini Callimachi (gift link). It’s great at insulating houses, but does have drawbacks like catching fire and attracting insects. Other thatchers prefer longer-lasting water reeds, imported from China or Eastern Europe. At one conference, the debate “nearly devolved into a brawl.”

The Thursday Crossword. It’s ace puzzle creator Laura Braunstein’s “midi”—a few minutes of diversion to start or end or give a lift to your day.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.

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HEADS UP
King Arthur Baking’s Summer Dinner & Music Series starts off with Beecharmer. It’s a BBQ dinner in the courtyard, with the duo of Jakob Breitbach and Jes Raymond bringing their flatpicking, clawhammer banjo, fiddle, upright bass, harmonies, and original songwriting to the patio. 4:30 to 7 pm, food until 6:30 or when they run out. Scroll down at the link.

The Public Assets Institute at the Norwich Public Library. The Vermont research and fiscal analysis nonprofit’s Julie Lowell will be offering a look at the impact of federal actions on the state budget and state programs as the feds pull back from some longstanding programs and inject uncertainty into others. She’ll also be talking about what the state and individuals can do to support initiatives they value. 6 pm.

The Ben Kogan Band at Feast & Field. The quartet of VT musicians— with Kogan on upright bass and guitar, Justin Park on mandolin and bass, guitarist Mark Burds, and drummer Ian Koeller—deliver “heartfelt lyrics and high-energy shows with original tunes and rich harmonies that speak to Vermont’s spirit and storytelling.” At Fable Farm in Barnard, gates and food at 5:30 pm, music at 6.

The Mudroom at AVA Gallery. The regular storytelling event features locals telling true stories around a particular theme. Tonight, we can all relate: “Over My Head.” 7 pm.

Circle Mirror Transformation at Parish Players. Annie Baker’s Obie Award-winning play (she won a Pulitzer for her next one) centers on a drama class at a community center in a VT town, in which a small group of amateurs—and their teacher and her husband—start out with theater games and slowly shift and change and reveal themselves. “The play is a lovely one, full of the jewels of connection and burdens of sorrow that happen every day,” The Guardian wrote last year. In the Grange Theater on Thetford Hill at 7 pm tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, and then next Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday.

And for today...

A bit over three decades ago, the famed French singer Francis Cabrel created a yearly gathering for singers in his home town of Astaffort. The idea was to bring together people who usually labor in solitude, giving them not just a chance to hang out together, but to come up with new songs together. So last time around, he invited a group of singers of French regional languages and dialects—Basque, Breton, Occitan, Catalan, Creole, Corsican, Alsatian—to work together, and over the course of three days they came up with this: “Un gramme de terre,” about which Cabrel writes, “I found that the idea of this little seed that works things out for itself despite the difficulties, so that history continues, is a beautiful image to talk about these languages that we don't want to recognize but that refuse to disappear.”

See you tomorrow.

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