The Times Argus/Rutland Herald

Food & Dining

Vermont’s chefs get fresh…

with the Vermont Fresh Network

His is no pig in a poke. When Walter Jeffries calls on prospective customers he is often asked if he is a member of the Vermont Fresh Network. Since last November, when he paid $30 to become a member, he has been able to say yes — and that’s been good for business at Sugar Mountain Farm in West Topsham, where Jeffries has been raising heritage-bred pigs for the past five years.
Upscale Vermont restaurants and co-ops are among Jeffries’ growing customer base, thanks in part to the exposure he is receiving on the Vermont Fresh Network Web site (www.vermontfresh.net.)(Click link below for complete article.)
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Sarducci’s has the recipe for long-term success

Yes, Sarducci’s was named after Father Guido Sarducci of late 1970’s “Saturday Night Live” fame.
That name, says co-owner Carol Paquette, was chosen from a top-10 list of other possible names compiled by the owners of the soon-to-be-opening restaurant.
While chain-smoking Father Sarducci has faded from pop culture, Sarducci’s Restaurant and Bar at

is still going strong and is one of Montpelier’s oldest dining establishments. On Jan. 19, the restaurant celebrated its 14th anniversary in a building occupied previously by a salvage company. (Click link below for complete article.)
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Finkerman’s BBQ closing;

to reopen as Ariel’s Riverside

It’s a sad day for barbecue lovers in Montpelier. In just under two weeks, Finkerman’s BBQ closes its door, on Feb. 17, after a four-year run as Montpelier’s only barbecue restaurant.
Four years is a lot of ribs and pulled pork.
A lot, but not quite enough, says Lee Duberman who owns the restaurant with her husband, Richard Fink. (Click link below for complete article.)
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The crème de la creemee

Tongues (and a few tails) are wagging in the Dairy Creme parking lot as the temperature hits 70 on this sunny Sunday afternoon in Montpelier, and owner Cliff Dodge, 50, is all smiles.
"All of my business, to be honest with you, is all based on the weather."
Today looks to be a winner as the lot fills with cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles and the line swells.
A creemee stand is not a hurry-and-get-the-people-served business, Dodge explains. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Macaroons in the Meadows

Might as well get this out the way since everyone asks. Yes, Gesine (pronounced Guh-ZEEN-ah) Prado, who owns Gesine Confectionary & Gourmet Market in the Meadow area of Montpelier with her husband, Ray, is indeed the sister of actress Sandra Bullock. And, yes, on opening day – Aug. 2, 2005 – Bullock worked the counter. The media gobbled this up, and while this publicity was good for the start-up business, the proof of Gesine’s success has been in the pudding – well, pastries, sandwiches and coffee actually.
Two and half years later, the business is booming, says Prado. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Bowled Over

Montpelier restaurant takes soup to another level

The late George Carlin, ever the linguistic wisenheimer, referred to soup as "food’s last chance," a notion that makes Pam Root cringe. "Americans are soup Philistines," says the owner of That’s Life Soup, a tiny eatery located off the beaten path on Montpelier’s Elm Street.
"In the United States people have no idea the amount of soup the rest of the world eats. In Italy and France, soup is dinner," Root says from a small table fitted with a crisp white linen tablecloth.
She knows her soup from the bottom of the bowl up and shudders at the American concept of soup born from refrigerator sweepings. (Click link below for complete article.)
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Fiddling about

Vermont’s culinary rite of spring

They’re sure signs of spring: tight green coils breaking through snow-free earth along riverbanks and forest floors.
The lucky ones escape and unfurl heavenward as 3-foot fronds. Others are gathered while still in their crosier or fiddlehead stage by hungry and determined foragers. Those end up in a pot, boiled, with a splash of vinegar and a pinch of salt, or in a sauté pan with butter and garlic.
Either way they’re pure heaven to the hordes of fiddlehead fanatics.
Their early May arrival heralds the end of winter (knock wood). Consider the fiddlehead the appetizer to summer and fall’s pending bounty. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Vermont Sunday Magazine

In Person

Bill ‘Rusty’ Fraser
City manager and musician, he is Montpelier’s main attraction

“It’s like a benevolent dictatorship,” Montpelier City Manager Bill Fraser says with a wry grin from his office at Montpelier’s City Hall.
Fraser, 48, is referring to his lead role in Rusty Romance, the “roots ‘n’ roll” band he fronts under his alter ego, Rusty: cowboy-hatted, often hidden behind shades, and always closing the show with his upbeat song, “We Brought The Fun.”
The band functions somewhat like the city, Fraser says, in that it has “really great people” who bring in ideas and initiatives. “We sort them out. … I might try to say, ‘Well here’s the general direction I’d like us to go in,’ and then everyone figures out, as a team, how were going to get there.”
Ah, spoken like a true diplomat.
Diplomacy, it seems, is city manager Fraser’s forte. (Click link below for complete article.)
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Verandah Porche
The truth be told of Guilford’s reigning poet

“Excuse me. Is that Verandah Porche’s house?” “That all depends on who you are,” says one of her neighbors as two white geese send out warning honks from a nearby pen.
“Here for an interview.”
“Then that’s her house.”
Inside her home Porche grins when she hears about her neighbor’s remark.
It’s par for the course in these parts, she says. Up here, neighbors watch out for one another.
Seated at her wooden kitchen table, Porche brings out a framed photograph that shows seven hippie kids in front of an old building. It was taken in August 1968, she says, the group’s first day at Total Loss Farm. (Click link below for complete article.)
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Kim Bent and Kathleen Keenan
The spotlight shines on Lost Nation Theater’s directors

Hunkered down on a well-worn sofa in the tiny Green Room backstage at Montpelier’s Lost Nation Theater, Kim Bent, founding artistic director,is recovering from a bout with pneumonia. He’s a bit subdued today as he sucks on throat lozenges. But he still has plenty to say about the 30-year-old theater. So does his wife and producing artistic director, Kathleen Keenan, sitting next to him.
”Lost nation is an area near where I grew up. There are lost nations all over the country. They are always rural. Their boundaries are nebulous. Sometimes they are on the map; sometimes they’re not. I wanted to come up with a theater that was based here, one that would be relevant to the area,” he says. (Click link below for complete article.)
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Giuliano Cecchinelli

A sculptor who cares from ‘the littlest job to the biggest job’

Saint-like, 63-year-old Giuliano Cecchinelli offers his hands, palms up, for inspection. The palms are leather tough. Fingers and thumbs are calloused and crooked from 53 years of carving stone. But, says their owner proudly, they are pliable and never sore. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Dave Keller

The thrill endures for a Vermont blues-and-soul man

Thank Jimi Hendrix and his impossible-to-duplicate guitar wizardry. If Dave Keller had come even close to copying Hendrix’s acid-rock riffs, he would not be here in Montpelier, covering the state’s musical landscape with its patches of blues and brass.
Legend has it Keller (who was born during the Summer of Love, the same year The Jimi Hendrix Experience made its U.S. debut, at 1967’s The Monterey International Pop Music Festival) went straight to Hendrix’s sources.  (Click link below for complete article.)

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Elliot Morse
Seventh-generation Vermonter lives by (what else?) the Morse code

Gov. James Douglas take note. If you are looking for a spokesman to capture the hearts and souls of our fine state, a genuine article in flannel shirt and Carhartt jacket, whose seventh-generation Vermont accent is the real McCoy and not some faked-for-radio nonsense, then drive up to East Montpelier’s Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks and watch Elliot, the Morse family’s elder statesman, in action. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. A picture of his grandfather, hangs in our Statehouse: Gov. George Aiken. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Geof Hewitt
Vermont’s slam poet laureate doesn’t mince his words

“The points are not the point: The point is the poetry,” says Geof Hewitt (quoting fellow poetry slammer Allan Wolf), as the crowd settles down at the first Vermont Statehouse Poetry Slam.
Emcee Hewitt reminds the 20 slammers to be mindful of their language. The event is, after all, being held in the hallowed House chamber. Plus, there are kids in the audience. As it turns out, one of those kids, 11-year-old Sophia Scoppettone of Montpelier, ends up winning the event with her satirical “God Bless My SUV” and claims the first prize: a copy of the recently published Hewitt’s Guide to Slam Poetry and Poetry Slam. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Steve Gillette
He heard the songs of the Kingston Trio and has been singing and composing ever since

Several times a day, from oldies radio stations around the globe, the Sunshine Company’s 1967 hit “Back On The Street Again” travels through time and the airwaves and into cars, homes and businesses.
For its composer, 64-year-old Steve Gillette, that song was his one, and only, AM-radio pop hit. It was also the title of his 1968 Vanguard Records folk album, his second. Other artists have recorded that song over the years, too. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Patti Casey

The ‘Gospel,’ and other things, according to singer/songwriter Casey

“I would rather take out my own gallbladder with an oyster fork than play solo,” says Patti Casey from her Montpelier home. “I get really nervous, but once I’m there I’m fine. As soon as I start playing I get totally goofy. And then I’m fine.”
It’s difficult to imagine Casey nervous. Full of energy, yes. She’s been performing professionally for some 20 years in a musical career that has taken from her hometown of Vergennes to the hallowed Prairie Home Companion stage in 2001. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Michael T. Jermyn
Photographer is a digital-age disciple of the old masters

Michael T. Jermyn looks down at stacks of photographs he’s taken recently. They’re spread across the floor of his home in Montpelier, which he admits is about to burst at the seams from all his photos. Another 200 framed shots hang from groaning walls.
His last name, he says by way of introduction, means ‘the German’ And it’s pronounced ‘German,’ but ‘Germaine’ in Ireland. His red hair (“Not much left after three kids, but I still have my boyish enthusiasm. Some people say I look like a leprechaun.”) can be linked to one of his ancestors – the Irish rebel “Red” Hugh O’Neill who lived in the 1600s.

(Click link below for complete article.)

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'Diner' Don Sawyer
Guilford watercolorist paints a pretty picture of classic eateries

Lunch-hour rush at the Putney Diner. Both regulars and tourists file in, and the din of clinking dishes and cheerful banter increases by the minute. This is the way a diner is supposed to sound.

Don Sawyer, 61, a regular fixture, sits at the counter on one of the well-worn stools and nurses a cup of coffee. His artwork stares down from the walls. It's also displayed in crates that are arranged strategically so that patrons can see it — bump into it is more like it — on their way in and out. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Harry Bliss

Laughing out loud with a New Yorker magazine cover artist and cartoonist

It's an innocent enough looking pen-and-ink drawing: a smiling Pinocchio, his head poking out from a stack of firewood. "I wasn't sure about the smile," says Harry Bliss of his latest creation. "I thought: Would he be smiling?

Of course he would. He's a wooden doll." Bliss laughs. A second, closer look at the picture reveals a cabin in the background with smoke curling from the chimney. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Rick Winston

Films are his life at Savoy Theater and Green Mountain Film Festival

Rick Winston, co-owner of Montpelier's Savoy Theater, says he can't remember a time when he wasn't a film buff.
As a kid growing up in Yonkers, N. Y., in the 1950s, he would be glued to the television set for hours at a time, watching old black-and-white movies with his parents, forging a life-long fascination with film.
He realized the emotional power of film when, as a boy, he watched his mother cry when Spencer Tracy died at the end of 1937's "Captains Courageous." (Click link below for complete article.)

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Hal Mayforth
Nationally recognized illustrator is ‘under the radar’ in Vermont and that’s OK with him

Hal Mayforth draws funny. Thousands of his stressed-out, bewildered, bug-eyed little men with bulbous noses and his arsenal of anthropomorphic animals, letters, fruits, vegetables, hotdogs and machines have accompanied articles in "The Wall Street Journal," "The New York Times," "U.S. News & World Report," "Time," "Newsweek" and various other publications for the past 20 years. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Harry and Norma Mazer
True confessions of Montpelier’s premier writing couple

Meet Harry and Norma Mazer, married 56 years, and experts at finishing each other's sentences.
When not finishing, they're at least critiquing, revising or rewriting. It's all in a day's work for the two internationally acclaimed authors of children's and young adult books who moved to Montpelier from New York two years ago. They're a handsome couple who look the way writers are supposed to look. (Click link below for complete article.)

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Grace Potter
Traveling the road from Waitsfield to Bonnaroo with amazing Grace

Grace Potter blew into her hometown for a few days of rest and relaxation after a recent show at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y.
That show, she says, was special because her band, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, formed there. "There's a lot of history and a lot of gratitude that we owed to those people. It was such an incredible show. I ripped my voice apart, but it was so great." (Click link below for complete article.)

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Mark LeGrand
With Hank Williams as a model, he thrives in the world of honky-tonk

It's Friday, 6 p.m. and show time. Honky Tonk Happy Hour is off and running, and the Pabst Blue Ribbon begins to flow freely at Montpelier's Langdon Street Cafe.
Bathed in the glow of red floodlights, lean and lanky, Mark LeGrand, 53, smiles at the crowd: "Good evening 'tonkheads," he says as his Lovesick Bandits ease into "Lost Highway" by Hank Williams. (Click link below for complete article.)

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