On Friday, July 23, at 6 p.m., a restaurant event by the Indonesian pop-up Kaki Lima will precede a screening of Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017), a feminist tale of vigilante justice that was only the fourth Indonesian film to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
The dinner and screening will take place in the parking lot of the arts organization Epsilon Spires at 190 Main St.
Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts tells the story of a young widow who exacts revenge on the band of men who rob and assault her in her home in rural Indonesia. The film, which was shot during the dry season in a region of the country that resembles the deserts of the American West, draws stylistic influence from the Italian “spaghetti westerns” of the 1960s and 1970s - albeit with a distinctly feminist twist.
“I love the film's message about women's struggle every day in a male-dominated society,” chef Retno Pratiwi of Kaki Lima said in a news release.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the annual Grace Cottage Hospital Fair Day from the Townshend Common to the virtual realm, but the community stepped up and the hospital raised enough money at the 2020 fair to purchase six new hospital Stryker beds. While Vermont's state of emergency was lifted last...
Brattleboro begins summer paving projects BRATTLEBORO - This week, D.M.I. Paving (a contractor of the town) began the town's summer paving project on Highland, Central, Pearl, Thomas, Pellet, and Blakeslee streets and White Birch Avenue. Cold planing (removal of the existing pavement) and new paving operations will be taking...
The Windham County Museum and the West River Railroad Museum are open for the season through Indigenous People's Day weekend in October. The West River Railroad Museum comprises the old Depot and Water Tank House, both of which were built in 1880. The museum houses a large collection of artifacts, documents, and photographs documenting the railroad's impact from its conception in the late 1800s through its 50 years of operation in the West River Valley. The Railroad Museum, on Cemetery...
The skies were gray with intermittent rain. The southbound train was 45 minutes late. And no one on the crowded platform at the Bellows Falls station cared. The train was back. That was all that mattered. After a Covid-imposed hiatus that began in March 2020 when Amtrak shut down all passenger rail service to Vermont, the Vermonter made a triumphant return on July 19 at this historic rail junction. Every rail station in Vermont had a welcome-back celebration to mark...
College news • The following local students graduated from the Practical Nursing program in the spring 2021 semester at Vermont Technical College: Jessica Curran of Bellows Falls, Timothy Haineswood of Marlboro, Alexandra Kennedy of East Dover, Breanna Webb of Vernon, and Lisa Ryan of Wilmington. • Hope Divello of Townshend, who is in the biomedical engineering program, and Nina King of Bellows Falls, who is in the hospitality and tourism management program, were named to the Dean's List for the...
In spring 2020, when COVID-19 became a daily threat, I quoted to myself the fragment of a verse from Psalms, recalled from Sunday School days in Tennessee: “he that hath clean hands and a pure heart.” I timed myself one day: From getting up in the morning and including trips to the bathroom at night, I washed my hands 21 times and used a hand sanitizer five times. I had clean hands and hoped I had a pure heart. Eventually,
The Brattleboro Concert Choir is planning an outdoor community sing on Sunday, Aug. 8, at the Brattleboro Music Center. The 4 p.m. event is free and open to all, although registration is required by Sunday, July 25. The Concert Choir was in the midst of preparations for a performance of J.S. Bach's motet Jesu, meine Freude when in-person activities were shut down due to the pandemic. Now, 17 months later, the event will allow the Concert Choir to gather with...
Slowing and eventually reversing the fast moving effects of climate destruction is the existential challenge of the 21st century. It is early days of the summer of 2021, and yet we have already witnessed prolonged, intense heat that nobody, including climatologists, thought would even be possible in the Pacific Northwest. When four of us went to northern Minnesota, in an area with a similar climate to Duluth and Fargo, N.D., for the four days we were there, the temperatures were...
Three New England novelists who love to weave stories with strong characters who prevail against the odds will visit Village Square Booksellers, 32 The Square, on Thursday, July 22, at 5 p.m. Rev. Jane Willan, Eileen O'Finlan, and Eileen Charbonneau, who call themselves the Scribe Sisters, invite all to join them for a talk about their books and their writing process in what will be the bookstore's first in-person event since the pandemic and shutdown. Willan is the author of...
Education finance in Vermont is an often-hard-to-understand-and-quite-complex system. Act 59 of 2021 created the “Task Force on the Implementation of the Pupil Weighting Factors Report” and a group of eight Vermont legislators who will spend time this summer determining, as the name implies, the best path forward to implementing its recommendations. This isn't an overhaul; this is correcting two decades of harm caused by a flawed formula. “The major recommendations of the [2019 Pupil Weighting Factors] Report are straightforward, specifically...
After 10 years here, Sabine Rhyne will leave the Brattleboro Food Co-op at the end of this year. The general manager says she is looking forward to new challenges, but hasn't planned her next steps. “I haven't made those decisions yet,” Rhyne says. “I'm an all-in kind of person. I'm really focused on completing my time here, and I've got a lot going on. I'll deal with all that next year.” The BFC board will create a hiring committee to...
Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts, 183 Main St., presents “Dappled Light,” an 80-year retrospective of paintings and prints by artist, teacher, and neighbor Homer Johnson. Born in 1925, Johnson began drawing and painting in elementary school and was able to pursue his passion until his death in 2020 at age 95. As described in a news release, “He was always fascinated with movement and light, and his gestural watercolor and ink drawings of dancers, angels, or models demonstrate his proficiency and exquisite...
More and more people are using the third person plural - they/them - as their personal pronoun. I understand why people would want to do this. Many of those who call themselves “they” are simply expressing that they do not want to be characterized by the rigid gender norms associated with either gendered personal pronoun. Others are re-defining their own gender identity by identifying as nonbinary or trans. I get it. But I don't like it. I first thought my...
At its July 7 breakfast meeting, the Brattleboro Sunrise Rotary Club officially welcomed resident Mona Williams as its 24th club president for the 2021-22 year. Williams, the payroll and benefits coordinator at Cota & Cota, Inc., has been an active member of Rotary since 2017. She previously served as co-chair for community service, as well as the student exchange coordinator. “What I am most excited about this year is being able to get back out in the community and volunteer,”
In yet another ironic development, the Delta variant of the coronavirus that is now starting to spike among the unvaccinated in all 50 states may become known as the Republican virus. Republican extremists and their news media enablers are largely responsible for these mounting deaths and hospitalizations, though anti-vax and anti-mask extremists of all stripes must accept their share of the blame. We really could have all been through this by now in the U.S. by following the simple, scientific...
In reading Nick Biddle's essay, I found myself taken aback by the words, “Our democracy began not as an ideal but as a con by our Founding Fathers to spur colonists to war.” But then it was meant to be provocative. And though I am not ready to see our Founding Fathers as cons rather than idealists, I was reminded of something I learned in college many years ago: to accept an idea or concept for hypothesis' sake long enough...
Thank you to Shanta Lee Gander for her interesting column regarding Lucy Terry Prince. There does seem to be a some confusion, however, regarding the history behind Prince's poem “Bars Fight.” Ms. Gander states that Prince was a “bearer of witness” of the “famed Deerfield Massacre.” The Deerfield Massacre occurred in 1704 when French and Native American forces assaulted the settlement of Deerfield, Mass., killing 47 villagers and taking 112 as captives. Lucy Prince was born around 1730. The Bars...
A batch of heavy showers and thundershowers on July 17 and 18 dumped about 4.5 inches of rain in the area and caused flash flooding that damaged roadways, flooded basements, kept emergency personnel busy, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to roads in town. No injuries were reported. According to a release from the Brattleboro Fire Department, most of the flooding took place in West Brattleboro, which received the most rain from the storms. Some flooding also...
Residents in Newfane village want drivers to slow their rolls on Route 30 and for the Vermont Agency of Transportation (AOT) to step up to help in a more substantial way than it has to date. Patricia Johnson and Aaron Naparstek, the two members of the Newfane Traffic Calming Committee, say the situation requires more than signage, which AOT has provided. “People are ripping along on a curvy road,” says Naparstek. Johnson would like to see Route 30 through all...
The box score for the three Brattleboro Little League All-Star teams in their respective District 2 tournaments last week was a championship for the 11-and-unders, the runner-up prize against an unstoppable Bennington team for the 12-and-unders, and a series loss to Bennington for the 10-and-unders. • 11-U: Brattleboro knocked out Rutland to win the District 2 tournament with a 22-4 victory in four innings on July 14. Brattleboro pounded out 20 hits and winning pitcher Logan Waite scattered six hits...
On Wednesday, July 28, at 7:30 p.m., artist Scott Boyd joins Endangered Alphabets Project founder and author Tim Brookes for a free Zoom conversation presented by the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC). Boyd will speak about “Endangered Alphabets,” a 10-foot-high obelisk he created, on which he inscribed characters, symbols, and scripts drawn from the writing systems of endangered languages. The obelisk is on view outside BMAC through November. Boyd and Brookes will also discuss the project and its influence...