It's a week before Thanksgiving, but Tammy Parker is already stuffing her turkey -- not with breadcrumbs, celery and onions but with a twice-daily dose of antibiotics to treat an infected left foot. Forcing a sick dog to swallow a pill is child's play compared to getting a plastic syringe into the beak of a squirming, 40-pound gobbler.... Read more

In 1950s Syracuse, a young widow is haunted by the specter of the "Porter," an officious, invisible gentleman who harangues her whenever she gives thought to such unpleasant topics as "Death… Malice, Disease, Peeing in Pants, Deformity, Snits, Ignorance, Bad Manners, Sorrow, Rage, Puffery."... Read more

A sense of humor is not mandatory for composers of so-called "new music," but it must help. Since it's hard to make a living at something that exists in a land far, far away from that stuff called "pop" -- as in popular -- music, they might as well have a good time doing it. That said, it would be easy to think that Vermont composers David Gunn and Dennis Bathory-Kitsz had majored in stand-up comedy and accidentally fell into the weird world of contemporary electronic tunesmithing.... Read more

It has been four decades since Carolyn Russell Stonewell's mother died, suddenly, from an aneurysm. The daughter, who was just a teenager back in December 1963, did not revisit her grief until much later in life, when she underwent Jungian analysis. In the process, she tapped into the relevance of a certain fairy tale.
Seven years ago the Massachusetts-based Stonewell made Once Upon a Loss: A New Look at Cinderella, which screens November 14 at Burlington College with the filmmaker on hand.... Read more

Last week, a reader from Williamstown, John Taylor, while acknowledging that he and I are "generally on the same wavelength," complained in Seven Days' letters column that he was tired of my "rants about Dubya and California." He thinks I "need to get back to skewering the idiots amongst us," mentioning as examples people who "think they can get real news from Fox, MSNBC or CNN" or "the couple that brings their sniveling kid to a concert because a ticket is cheaper than a sitter."... Read more

Middlebury dance professor Peter Schmitz says the daring and specificity of Paul Matteson's talent was apparent even when he was a senior in college.

It didn't take long for the rest of the world to notice. Matteson won Dance Magazine's National Student Choreographer award, and only two years after he graduated, in 2002, he nabbed a Bessie for his body of work with the David Dorfman and Lisa Rare dance companies. To win one of the most prestigious awards in contemporary dance so soon after going pro "is sort of unheard of," says Schmitz.... Read more

Just as Howard Dean's campaign for the Democratic nomination appears a sure thing, the campaign of the once great Sen. John Kerry unravels.

The man with the longest, saddest face in American politics fired his campaign manager, Jim Jordan, this week. Long John quickly replaced him with a female political operative who few realize cut her political teeth right here in Vermont, the land of Dean!... Read more

Nothing shatters the innocence of a small town like a murder perpetrated by a teenager -- particularly when the victim is the killer's mother. By now, the story of 17-year-old Laird Stanard has all but faded from the public eye. But a new book by Theo Padnos offers new insights on the case. In My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun, the 35-year-old Vermont writer and Middlebury alum recounts his experiences teaching literature to Stanard and other inmates in the Woodstock Regional Correctional Facility.... Read more

Thursday, October 23. The first measurable snow of the fall collected in our field this morning. Always a signal day, the unofficial beginning of what seems to me the proper part of the year. I am aware that more people await the first crocus of spring, or the first robin on the lawn, but in fact at this latitude, spring and summer are the exception. There are only about four months a year when the leaves are green, and another few weeks when they're ablaze. Their natural state is gray, skeletal. And the ground is supposed to be white, crystalline.... Read more

Enigma Variations is full of surprises. And the biggest one is that by the time the play's over a lot of the things that are puzzling or unbelievable or irksome about it wind up making sense.... Read more