• Alex Cummings is a traditional singer, accordionist, pianist, and dance caller hailing from Somerset, England, now living in Brattleboro. He performs songs and tunes from around the United Kingdom and America, sharing his knowledge of the tradition.
Cumming describes himself on his website as having made his mark on the folk scene with his “rhythmic, dance-able accordion style, strong voice, and his fun and engaging stage presence.” He performs with bands Bellwether and The Teacups around the U.S. and U.K. and serves as music director for Revels North in the Upper Connecticut Valley.
• Julia Friend is a singer of pub songs, sea shanties, and ballads. The Country Dance and Song Society (CDSS) says she “loves the power and vulnerability of the human voice. An occasional performer at folk festivals, she is happiest swapping songs and blending harmonies in dark corners in the wee hours of the night.”
She co-authored the CDSS’s Starter Kit for Folk Song Organizers, helped launch Youth Traditional Song Weekend, and generally cheers for singing in all genres. She lives in Brattleboro, where, she says, she hums incessantly.
The General Federation of Women’s Clubs of Vermont (GFWC-VT) announces the availability of scholarships for Vermont women, beyond the traditional high school to college age track, seeking to further their education, training, or to upgrade their skills in preparation for entering or advancing in the workplace. Applicants must submit...
A special after-hours celebration of local author GennaRose Nethercott and her debut novel, Thistlefoot, will take place on Friday, Jan. 27, at 7 p.m., at Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main Street. Steeped in the folklore of Eastern Europe, this tale journeys through generations of heartbreak, horrors, and heroism, from...
After two years of disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s 16th annual Northern Roots Traditional Music Festival returns on Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 28 and 29, with various in-person workshops, an evening concert, and three Sunday music sessions. Part of the traditional music calendar in New England, the Festival showcases the variety of northern musical traditions including Irish, Scottish, English, French Canadian, Shetland, New England, and, this year, French Bal Folk. Workshops at the Brattleboro Music Center are...
Now through March 4, Canal Street Art Gallery presents “Heroes & Villains,” an exhibit with artwork by Clare Adams, Thomasin Alyxander, Debi A. Barton, Jean Cannon, Mindy Fisher, Corinne Greenhalgh, Gregory Damien Grinnell, Yevette Hendler, Su Lin Mangan, Charles Norris-Brown, Gretchen Seifert, and Linda Udd. “The story of the hero and villain is told in many ways,” gallery organizers wrote in a news release. “Through art, music, performance, writing, and everyday life, the hero and villain come alive. The quest...
Brattleboro Common Sense has a broad and practical agenda to address the housing crisis, including emergency housing in RVs. Rights and Democracy (RAD) and BCS are working out a joint proposal not for eviction alone, but also for rent control. We hope it will be a model for the state campaign. Since BCS started negotiating with the Selectboard on the Fair Evictions and Rents Law (FERL) in 2020, we have consulted with many allies and are ready and eager to...
Deerfield Valley Communications Union District (DVCUD), operating as DVFiber, the communications union district serving 24 towns in southeastern Vermont, says it has connected its first customers with high-speed fiber optic Internet. According to a news release, customers in Readsboro were connected to DVFiber.net late in December. This pilot group is testing the DVFiber network for reliability of speed and access to the Internet for a three-month trial period. DVFiber says it will survey the pilot group for feedback regarding all...
Beginning Feb. 2 and continuing through April 13, AARP Foundation is providing tax assistance and preparation through its Tax-Aide program — and it’s completely free. AARP Foundation Tax-Aide volunteers are trained and IRS-certified every year to ensure they understand the latest changes to the U.S. Tax Code. Tax-Aide has two sites available in Brattleboro this year. The Brattleboro Senior Center, 207 Main Street, will be open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursdays. Call 802-257-7570 to schedule an appointment.
The Actors Theatre Playhouse (ATP) in West Chesterfield, N.H., will hold open auditions for its 2023 Ten Minute Play Festival at the Brooks Memorial Library Community Room on Saturday, Feb. 4, from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m, and Monday Feb. 13, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. According to ATP, this year’s festival winners were selected from national submissions of more than 250 10-minute plays, which will be presented for nine performances on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, June 8 through 24.
College news • Jaden Conkling of Brattleboro and Bradie Harris of Bellows Falls were named to the fall 2022 Dean’s List at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. • Haley Frechette of Dummerston, who is pursuing a Doctor of Pharmacy degree, was named to the fall 2022 Dean’s List at the Albany (N.Y.) College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. • Emily Harris of Bellows Falls and Luke Missale of Brattleboro were named to the fall 2022 President’s List at Plymouth...
A community favorite event that began in 2013, A Night of True Stories, is back at Main Street Arts on Friday, Jan. 27, at 7:30 p.m. Creators of A Night of True Stories were motivated to offer encouragement and support to locals who aspire to tell their stories and to get them on stage. “Like The Moth format,” event organizers wrote in a news release, “the stories are true experiences, no more than 10 minutes long, and told without notes.
The Vermont Center for Photography (VCP) will host photographer Marco Yunga Tacuri for an Artist Talk on Thursday, Jan. 26, at 6 p.m. “Los Longos del Barrio,” Yunga Tacuri’s portrait project about Ecuadorian immigration, is on display in the Picker Print Gallery at VCP until the end of the month. “This project attempts to tell a story through images about the life of many Ecuadorian immigrants living in New York,” he wrote in his artist statement. “The majority of the...
Town polls RTM members on childcare options BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Town Manager’s Office is emailing out a poll to Representative Town Meeting members regarding their interest in town-provided childcare for the March 25 meeting at Brattleboro Union High School. This email will come from executive assistant Jessica Sticklor (email address: [email protected]). Respondents are asked to return the poll as soon as possible, especially if they are interested in childcare being provided. Workers’ Center offers information about Medicaid cutoffs BRATTLEBORO...
On Jan. 3, the Selectboard voted to hold Annual Representative Town Meeting as a strictly in-person event for the first time since 2019. The vote took place during the first board meeting of the year, and those of us with family obligations during the holiday could not attend. The Selectboard should reconsider this decision for two reasons. First of all, in the minutes of the meeting, I see that Selectboard members asked for the opinion of RTM members. However, no...
I came within inches of stepping in a steel-jaw leghold trap while hiking along an established trail on state land. While I would have suffered a lot of pain and significant injury had it crushed my foot, the fact that I was hiking with my dogs and grandchildren elevated my concern to another level and led me to give this issue a critical review. As demonstrated by my experience, these traps are entirely indiscriminate, maiming and often killing animals, wild...
Over the past year, I had the privilege of serving on an Afghanistan refugee cosponsorship team composed mostly of members of three local United Church of Christ congregations. Our team supported a family of refugees, which consisted of two parents and, until a recent joyful addition, three children. There were countless ways that our community inspired us with the welcome they extended to the family. I want to speak specifically about the area I helped facilitate — education. Our family’s...
All that state Rep. Seth Bongartz (D-Manchester) and his colleagues are doing is facing the fact that lovely Vermont just isn’t what it thinks it is anymore. The bill they’re proposing to enable housing development by banning single-family zoning and allowing duplexes and even three-and-four-unit homes in some municipalities just makes sense. A couple of decades ago I began to understand what Vermont had become. Driving from our Weathersfield house to a friend’s place a few miles down the Center...
As much as any provider within the state’s strained mental health system, the staff at the Brattleboro Retreat are attuned to the fact that every day Vermonters in crisis wait for care in emergency departments across the state. That’s why they are pushing to get back to pre-COVID-19 levels of inpatient beds as quickly as possible, and why they just launched a new ambulance transport service pilot program through a contract with Rescue Inc. “The Retreat will be over that...
Death denial in the United States is commonplace, according to a news release from Kasey March, a trained International End of Life Doula (INELDA) and Susan MacNeil, author of 18 Minutes: A Daughter’s Primer on Life & Death. March and MacNeil will offer a chance to talk about preparing for a good death through the lens of their unique experiences in two events planned for February: Wednesday, Feb. 1, from 3 to 5 p.m., at the Rockingham Free Public Library...
This year, State Rep. Emilie Kornheiser has hit the ground running. The Windham-7 district representative, a Democrat and one of three House members from Brattleboro, opened the legislative session when she was chosen to nominate the current speaker of the House, Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington). It was a high honor, she said. “We in the building tend to talk about people working tirelessly, rather than skillfully or compassionately,” said Kornheiser. “So when I was offered the honor, it was really important...
Joe Biden came to office in 2021 vowing to undo the disastrous and cruel immigration policies of the Trump administration. Instead, he has embraced and expanded them. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers,” the president said on the campaign trail in 2020. But on Jan. 5, the Biden administration announced that it will double down on its support for Stephen Miller’s baby, Title...
Gordon Hayward will give an illustrated talk at Next Stage Arts on Sunday, Jan. 29, at 4 p.m. on the design elements shared by the painter and garden designer. This talk comes out of Hayward’s 2008 book Art and the Gardener (Gibbs Smith). According to a news release, juxtaposing an image on the large screen of a classic fine painting next to a garden image, Hayward “will explore a variety of elements of composition: straight lines versus curved lines in...
For me, “friend” is an elevated concept seldom bestowed. I don’t make friends easily. And then, being a socially inept dumbass, I’m not always a particularly attentive friend when I get one. But somehow Gary Smith was one of my best friends. He was that for a lot of people. My friend Gary died. There’s a mountain of good things to say about Gary, and many of them are being said by famous people and not-famous people alike. I’m one...
Brattleboro boys’ hockey coach Eric Libardoni admits his team got beat up by the top teams in Division II in the first part of the season. “We had a ridiculously hard schedule to start the season,” he said. But a four-game homestand at Withington Rink against opponents that are at the same level as the Colonels enabled them to get things right heading into the final weeks of the season. The Colonels picked up their third straight win with a...
The Vermont Legislature has approved a two-year extension of COVID-19-era options for how and when the state’s 247 cities and towns decide upon local leaders, spending, and special articles. Bill H.42 mirrors legislation passed in 2021 and 2022 that allowed municipalities to make short-term, pandemic-safe changes to Town Meeting — traditionally held on or around the first Tuesday in March — and gather governing boards solely online. “With the rising cases of Covid variants, there’s a real question in a...
Latchis Arts announces the return of its Movies for Kids series after its suspension in March 2020 due to COVID. Family-friendly films will be presented on Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. beginning the weekend of Jan. 28–29 and continuing through March at the Latchis Theatre. Admission is by donation. The Movies for Kids series has been one of the most popular programs since Latchis Arts launched it in 2018. The intent is to present films for families to enjoy...
The closing of the 83-year-old Hotel Pharmacy on Elliot Street on Jan. 17 marked the end of so many eras like a Shakespearian tragedy without the poetry. Much sadness. Many tears. Emptying shelves. Emptying space. A sense of emptying lives. The end of family-run pharmacies in Brattleboro. The end of owner Mary Giamartino’s long-held desire to help people. The end of 20 important, well-paying jobs. The end of a small community of people who depended on the staff of the...
At noon on Wednesday, Feb. 1, Dr. Justin Murphy-Mancini will perform a recital that ranges in time from the 17th-century composer Dieterich Buxtehude to contemporary pieces by the Franco-Lebanese organist Naji Hakim and the 95-year-old American composer Emma Lou Diemer. The program also includes a sonata by Felix Mendelssohn and J.S. Bach’s Passacaglia in C. “Every piece on the program is a set of variations of one kind or another, allowing for the instrument’s great variety to be communicated by...
In 2020, Nurnia Bowart and Jared Williams, friends and colleagues who are both in the midst of life transitions, decided to become business partners and buy a 48-acre former inn. As they transform the property into an arts education nonprofit, The Field Center, they are creating what Bowart describes as “a center for contemporary art practices, with dance and performance at its heart.” No strangers to alternative education, Bowart and Williams met while attending The Putney School in the late...