It's a Saturday evening and I'm standing barefoot in a Franklin County field with a dozen other unshod women and men. It's dark, and we're holding hands in a circle, chanting. In a few minutes, those of us who want to will be walking on hot coals. I feel as if I should be in Fiji or India, flanked by fakirs and readying my soul for purification. But the locale is Fairfax, my co-chanters have day jobs ranging from acupuncturist to AmeriCorps, and the path I'm readying my soles for is strictly secular.... Read more

"Hunters of the Sky," ECHO Center, Burlington. Through September 6.

Though I like to watch birds, I'm not the birding type -- I always get flummoxed by the focus dial on the binoculars. Until last Saturday, Jacques Perrin's 2001 film Winged Migration was the most satisfying look I'd had at birds. The in-the-air footage came dizzyingly close to my adolescent dreams of flying, and the "bird's-eye" cinematography brought customarily quicksilver specimens practically into my lap.... Read more

The sexiest plant I have ever seen is perched on a filing cabinet, reproductive parts unabashedly exposed, rouged flesh bedewed with thick, sticky, come-hither nectar. Its petals are waxen to the touch and have the delicate, maroon-to-yellow blush of a Gala apple. This Cypripedium, or Lady's-slipper orchid, is one of more than 300 orchid plants in residence at the Calais Town Clerk's office. Behind the photocopier, an open door leads to a small greenhouse, where the limpid green leaves and thick blossoms of orchids stacked floor-to-ceiling nearly block out the sun.... Read more

Bonnie Datillio is pointing a gun at my face. "Okay now," she says. "Close your eyes."

We're standing in a dark room, the shades pulled down against the sun. Outside, the traffic on Route 15 hums by, oblivious. I am standing, mostly naked, on a blanket that's been laid down to protect the carpet. I can feel the polar-fleece fibers between my pallid toes. Datillio pulls the trigger. I hear a sharp blast and wince at the shock of moisture on my forehead and cheeks.

"Good, good," she says, inspecting her handiwork. "You just needed a little bit of color to perk up your complexion."... Read more

Early in the evening of Friday, September 19, as the trees whipped to and fro in the fringe winds of Hurricane Isabel, Hurricane Amy -- a.k.a. Amy Goodman -- blew into Burlington. For her appearance at the University of Vermont, the journalist and host of "Democracy Now!" brought along a scouring critique of the national political climate, filling the sails of Vermont media activists and fans of the radio program. She drew a full house at UVM's Billings Theater and got a standing ovation even before her talk, "Amy Goodman vs. the Mainstream Media," began.... Read more

The red leather jacket in the window of Champlain Leather is impossible to resist. Slipping into the store -- and the fine leather coat -- is an experience quite different from pulling on the variously spun garments you're likely to have sitting at home. This coat is heavier, for one thing. Tauter. Tighter. It fits like a second skin -- which, of course, it is. The leather at the elbows gives a soft, creaky sigh reminiscent of saddle leather, James Dean and sex. The material itself is redolent not only of the tannery, but also adventure and glamour.... Read more

It's 5 a.m. on a recent summer day and the sky is a crisp, pale, predawn blue. At a gourmet organic produce farm in Greensboro, four young people are squatting and shuffling, razors and white plastic buckets in hand, among beds of ankle-high plants. The pungent aroma of shorn arugula drifts in their wake. Compared to waist-high fields of wheat or towering stalks of corn, this crop seems Lilliputian. The beds of greens are about the width of a city sidewalk; the plants, on average, six inches tall.... Read more

"All this is your heritage now," Leland Kinsey writes in a poem, "as it is preserved here, make of it what you will." The speaker is ostensibly referring to pickles. But he could just as well be stating the core theme of Kinsey's work and that of his sister, children's author Natalie Kinsey-Warnock. The writing of both siblings is grounded in their intimate knowledge, experience and love of the Northeast Kingdom farm that has sustained the Kinsey family for 200 years.... Read more

Viagra and penis-enlargement ads aside, discussions or information about men's reproductive-health matters are, well, hard to come by. But it's not for lack of trying on the part of organizations whose names are decidedly non-sexy.... Read more

I had noticed the terse and mysterious blurb last Wednesday: Montpelier Contradance: Move your feet to live piano, fiddle, mandolin and clarinet. Capitol City Grange, Montpelier, 8 p.m. $7. It was not the first time a contradance was listed in the paper -- it seems there's at least one every weekend -- but it was the first time I mustered the guts to actually attend one.... Read more