Happenings in Hardwick

Peter Johnson of Pete's Greens.
Photo by Paul O. Boisvert for The New York Times.

The October 8, 2008 issue of the New York Times has an article about the agricultural renaissance happening in Hardwick, Vermont.

"Facing a Main Street dotted with vacant stores, residents of this hardscrabble community of 3,000 are reaching into its past to secure its future, betting on farming to make Hardwick the town that was saved by food.

With the fervor of Internet pioneers, young artisans and agricultural entrepreneurs are expanding aggressively, reaching out to investors and working together to create a collective strength never before seen in this seedbed of Yankee individualism."
(Read the entire Times article here.)

Many curiosity-piquing enterprises are mentioned: Jasper Hill Farm and the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese at the University of Vermont; Claire's restaurant, a community-supported local food restaurant (the concept owes something to the Farmer's Diner in Quechee VT); and the Center for an Agricultural Economy and the the Vermont Food Venture Center.

I was happy to see a few mentions of Pete's Greens. In '03, I talked to Peter Johnson for a small piece in Seven Days. (This was back before 'locavore' was in anyone's vocabulary, and the piece clunkily frames the movement in terms of 'organic, small-scale farming.')

I'm heading up to Vermont - to Hardwick, actually - this weekend, and will try to check out Claire's and Jasper Hill Farm if at all possible.

It should be a good weekend for rambling around outdoors - I hear that the trees are on fire.

Enticed by Orchids

How a flower can grow on its owner

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.

Eva Morse, 65, has run the Town Clerk’s Office from her home for 40 years. Calais recently started construction on an office that will operate independently of Morse’s residence. But for now, citizens in search of voter-registration forms and other bureaucratic paperwork are bathed in the perfume of Morse’s orchids. What is it about these flowers that provokes such passion? “They’re so chiseled and so perfect,” Morse sighs. “You almost don’t believe they’re real.”

Morse isn’t alone in her “orchidelirium”; societies have sprung up all over the country for the flower, and there are enough orchidists in Vermont to support three far-flung clubs. The Twin State Orchid Society in Norwich, the Green Mountain Orchid Society in Warren and the one Morse belongs to: the Gardener’s Supply Orchid Club in Burlington, where orchidists meet monthly to discuss flower families such as Dendrobia and Cattleyas, and trade tips for growing orchids. At their April meeting this week, orchid-expert Steve Frowine talks about “Growing Orchids without a Greenhouse.”

Orchids have enraptured people for thousands of years: The ancient Greeks ate the bulbous roots of the orchis (meaning “testicle”) plant to improve their sexual prowess; Chinese emperors and poets saw the orchid as a symbol of nobility and purity — Confucius called the orchid “the king of fragrant plants.” Eighteenth-century Englishmen spent fortunes hunting and collecting wild orchids.

In 1838 the floral fad hit the United States. Until the 20th century, orchid hobbyists were usually wealthy; in 1800 a single plant could cost the modern equivalent of $1000. Reliable artificial germination (introduced in 1917 by Lewis Knudson) and cloning from tissue cultures (1960, Georges Morel) turned orchid growing into a relatively affordable hobby. Today, the price of a single plant hovers between $10 and $40.

No single gateway leads to the orchid habit. Some orchidophiles receive their first flowers as gifts. Others read about the flower in a magazine or attend an orchid show. After their initial orchid experience, aficionados’ stories begin to sound the same. One or two plants on the windowsill leads to 20 or 30 under artificial lights, which is replaced by a greenhouse addition accommodating hundreds of plants. No one seems quite able to account for the escalation.

Hope Riehle, 71, of South Burlington bought her first orchid when her son was 2 years old. That son now has children of his own, and Riehle has more than 200 orchids. “When I’m in the greenhouse, I completely lose myself,” she admits. Her collection has waxed and waned in the past 30 years — sometimes dramatically, as when her son shipped 150 plants to her from Thailand — but more often in plant-by-plant increments. “You can’t just buy one; you’re hooked,” she says. “It’s really a disease.”

Darrin Norton, 38, owns Mountain Orchids in Ludlow. He describes his current occupation as “a hobby that has gone basically nuts.” Norton went into the business to support his own orchid habit. He has been collecting the flowers for 24 years, and breeding and selling them for a decade.

As an orchid wholesaler, Norton is familiar with the variety of orchid hobbyists. People can spend a lifetime pursuing certain shades of pink, he says, or search out orchids that fit their home décor just so, or are of just one species. “You’ll have someone after a gigantic plant right next to someone who’s fallen for a little twig of a thing an inch-and-a-half tall,” he says.

Whatever people’s initial reasons for growing orchids, their first success jump-starts a “life-long passion,” Norton notes. “Orchids have a deep persona that the public recognizes one way or another. People with very little plant knowledge still recognize orchids. They may not know why, but somewhere in their psyche, they know.”

When asked to estimate how many orchids are in his own greenhouse, Norton pauses for a long moment, then offers a rough estimate of 20,000. Orchids are “sort of like potato chips,” he says. “You can’t have just one, you have to have two. Before you know it, the bag’s empty and you’re addicted.”

Morse started her first orchids on her windowsill, but soon moved them to her porch during the day and brought them into her living room in the evenings. Her porch started out enclosed by screens, which were replaced by plastic, then by glass, until the structure was finally expanded and finished as a 32-by-8-foot greenhouse. Orchids may intimidate growers, Morse observes, but their apparent fragility is misleading. “They’re fighters. They’re survivors… They seem to thrive on less care rather than more. If I had three I might kill them with kindness. Instead I have 300 and I get to them when I can.”

With more than 30,000 species, Orchidacae is the world’s largest, oldest and most varied plant family. In the wild they thrive in virtually every imaginable climate: at sea level and 1400 feet above it, underground and in the teeth of 60-mile-per-hour winds. There are orchids in Peru that will only grow on cactuses. Some grow in the ground, but many grow on trees with their roots in the air, absorbing moisture from the ether. Orchidists insist that, despite popular misconception, orchids are neither parasites nor carnivorous. But this is patently untrue: Orchids grow on and consume orchidists.

There is no 12-step program for orchid addicts, but botanical societies let them meet with their fellow sufferers. Horticulturist Anita Nadeau founded the Gardener’ Supply Orchid Club in Burlington 14 months ago. Already the GSOC has more than 100 members, many of whom have been collecting for years.

Orchids approach sexual maturity unhurriedly, Nadeau explains. It takes seven years for a plant to blossom for the first time, and thereafter, many bloom just once a year — some only for a day. It is difficult to imagine doting on a plant for such meager rewards, but these late bloomers’ fecundity is fantastic; one orchid seedpod might contain 3 million seeds. And as with sex, anticipation can be a big part of the allure.

To demonstrate the captivating properties of orchids, Nadeau points out one particularly sensuous plant. A Phalaenopsis, or Moth Orchid, is popular with beginners; it does well on windowsills and is not terribly demanding. It is also quite striking, with long sequences of large blossoms on a single spike. This particular plant has eight teacup-sized blossoms dangling from a whip-like stem. Their complexions are porcelain, and with their thick, pouting pink lips, they resemble a gaggle of geisha. Each blossom is full and fleshy, with thick, taut petals begging for a caress. Peering into the brazen heart of these flowers, one starts to get a glimpse of their sway over people.

Most orchids are hermaphrodites, with their male and female procreating parts fused into a single, all-purpose column at the crux of their blossoms. Beyond this physical sexual duality, orchids are powerfully sensual, and flirt heavily with both ends of the sexual spectrum. Some, like the cattleyas, have meaty, fleshy folds. These captivated painter Georgia O’Keeffe, whose canvasses brim with vulvaic botany. Others, like the Lady’s-slipper orchid, have pendulous, unlady-like pouches, immortalized in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of their dark, muscular blossoms. Orchids also have lips — a single distinct petal — whose aim is to attract pollinating insects, and whose aesthetic affect is often breathtaking. They are an orchid’s most ornamental feature, and may have crests, tails, horns, fans or teeth.

The greatest display of the breadth and depth of the orchid family takes place annually at the New York International Orchid Show. With 10,000 orchids on display and attendance figures hovering around 200,000, it offers the grandest display of orchids within reasonable driving distance of Vermont.

Under a tent on the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza earlier this month, there were orchids with yellow tongues perched on their lips; orchids with velvety petals of deep, stunning fuchsia; orchids whose complex buttery blossoms had shockingly maroon lips; orchids with petals like birthday ribbons. There were orchids with wingspans of a foot and some the size of a Tic-Tac. Some looked like trumpets; some resembled rabbits with bishop hats; some suggested jellyfish; others posed as pinwheels; or looked like beds of butterflies, like sea cucumbers, like bunches of grapes.

The Moth Orchids on display were crisp and luminous, like little moons. Minute Dendrobia with molten blossoms smoldered like beds of coal. Some orchids sparkled like crystals of sugar, while others had the complexion of 40-pound paper or glowed like hot blown glass.

One flower’s foliage suggested the coiffure of a monstrous Rapunzel, with thick leaves drooping languidly 5 feet out of its pot. Its blossom was a shapeless, brick-red mess. The crotch of this blossom smelled like fetid meat with a hint of sauerkraut.

The room had a haunting, spicy perfume — some flowers smelled like cinnamon or lemon-cake, others had no smell at all — and everyone at the show was bumbling around like drunken bees. It was easy to see how the orchid addiction can escalate. How could you stand to take home just three? Much easier to leave with 300.
* * *
Published in Seven Days 28 April 2004

Making Waves

The host of "Democracy Now!" turns up the volume in Burlington

IMAGE: CHET GORDON

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. The event, hosted by the American Friends Service Committee, was a fundraiser for WGDR Plainfield and the upcoming "Another World Is Possible" conference at Goddard College.

"Democracy Now!" is an independent, nonprofit organization whose news program reaches more than 160 stations nationwide. Goodman's reach in Vermont, however, is decidedly abbreviated — confined to the airwaves of WGDR, community-access TV stations and a handful of unlicensed low-power FM stations. But over the past year, a number of listeners have been trying to get her show on Vermont Public Radio.

Goodman can usually be found in the garret of a 19th-century firehouse incongruously nestled among tall, boxy buildings in New York City's Chinatown. There she puts out her program with co-host Juan Gonzales — president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and a New York News columnist — and a cadre of producers whose credentials range from Fox News to Z Magazine. The show features news and voices the mainstream media typically overlook or ignore.

In the past week alone, for example, Goodman interviewed reporter Craig Unger, who broke the story that some 140 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were flown out of the country in the days after September 11, 2001, when all other flights were grounded; invited Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting senior analyst Steve Randall to debunk the characterization of former General Wesley Clark as an "antiwar warrior"; and hosted a debate among activists, farmers, U.S. and Third World WTO representatives on the collapse of the Cancun talks.

The last item Goodman broadcast before coming to Vermont revealed that JetBlue — which flies between JFK and Burlington airports — provided five million passenger itineraries to a defense contractor in September 2002 for a database project. In the wake of a three-way on-air discussion between Wired.com contributing writer Ryan Singel (who broke the story), JetBlue Airways spokesperson Garreth Edmondson-Jones and Dontspyon.us founder Bill Scannell (who has launched an anti-JetBlue campaign), Goodman joked that she'd be driving to Vermont.

None of this makes for easy listening. But as WGDR General Manager Amanda Gustafson observes, the controversy attracts listeners, most of whom would rather hear what's going on even if it does raise their blood pressure. "Over and over and over again we hear from people how much they like [‘Democracy Now!']," Gustafson says. "They hear news on that program that they don't hear anywhere else."

The show is unapologetically pro-human rights, pro-civil liberties and anti-war — though not anti-soldier; a recent guest was the first homeless veteran of the Iraq conflict. It has earned Goodman a solid following among liberals and progressives. And "Democracy Now!" outreach coordinator Denis Moynihan notes that the show also has received appreciative feedback from self-described conservatives and Republicans. Michael Powell, reporter for the typically reserved Washington Post, observed, "In this age of corporate media conglomeration, when National Public Radio sounds as safe as a glass of warm milk, ‘Democracy Now!' retains a jagged and intriguing edge."

Liz Blum, with the Strafford, Vermont-based Upper Valley Peace and Justice Group, is coordinating a petition effort to bring that edge to VPR. She says the group has gathered more than 2000 signatures. David Goodman — Amy's Waterbury-dwelling brother and a contributing writer for Mother Jones — says that many VPR listeners have independently requested the program during fundraising drives, albeit in a scattered fashion. It's not clear whether lobbying the station — however coordinated the effort may be — will have any effect; VPR doesn't want the show.

Members of the Community Advisory Board (CAB), who serve as the station's programming focus group, generally concur that the show is an "advocacy-type program." As Mimi Clark, secretary and former chair of the CAB explains, VPR "strives for journalistic neutrality. It doesn't want to come across as advocating one side over another. It just tries to present all sides."

VPR has heard criticisms of its news coverage — particularly during the build-up to the Iraq invasion — from listeners who were both hawks and doves. "The station feels that if they get comments from both sides, then they're doing a pretty good job of presenting all sides. If everybody's complaining, then that's a good sign," says Clark.

VPR President and General Manager Mark Vogelzang — who is also on the Board of Directors of National Public Radio — has the final say in programming decisions at the station. He expresses a firm disinterest in airing the show. Noting that 180,000 listeners count on the station to "provide them with the programming they've come to expect," Vogelzang describes VPR's criteria for evaluating potential programs: "Does it meet the broad mission of service to the community? Is it a program that has the kind of quality and accuracy and fills the role of a program that would match "All Things Considered," "Morning Edition" or "Performance Today"?... We try to hold up that standard for every program that we carry — and I'm not sure that [we found that] in our hard look at ‘Democracy Now!'"

David Goodman, who has been a guest on NPR's "Fresh Air" and "Talk of the Nation," disagrees with VPR's appraisal of his sister's show. Noting that VPR hosts frequently editorialize ("Weekend Edition" host Scott Simon, for example, aired his support for the Iraq war on NPR and in the Wall Street Journal), Goodman explains, "We don't say that Scott Simon should be pulled off the air because he supports the Iraq war, we just note that he comes to his job with a strong viewpoint. Why is his acceptable and that of Amy Goodman is not acceptable? There's a simple answer: Scott Simon, when he speaks in favor of the war, is echoing the government line. When you speak out in any way that disagrees with the government, that's called advocacy."

Amy Goodman notes that dozens of NPR affiliates already carry the show. "When ‘Democracy Now!' comes to an NPR station, what we have found across the country... is that in terms of fundraising, it beats ‘Morning Edition' and ‘All Things Considered' hands down … and it brings in audiences that they don't traditionally reach."

Denis Moynihan of "Democracy Now!" points to the show's many professional accolades, among them the George Polk Award -- one of America's most coveted and respected journalism honors -- and the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton. "Those awards don't go to ‘advocacy journalists,'" he says. "They go to the real journalists."

You get a sense of what real journalism means to Amy Goodman when she delivers her speech. In a low-pitched but bitingly clear voice, she speaks urgently of the new Federal Communications Commission rules ("unprecedented in giving the few media moguls unbridled power"), of George W. Bush's "28-page gap" in the September 11th investigative report, and of the sanitized coverage of the war in Iraq. And she returns repeatedly to the galling unwillingness of the mainstream media to criticize or question the powers that be.

"You've got a government and an establishment that does very well protecting itself," Goodman says. "We've got a fourth estate — a media — that's supposed to be there as a watchdog for civil society. And we [the media] have a responsibility to go to where the silence is, and to investigate these stories."

Goodman has seen little from the mainstream media to make her think they have the public interest at heart. But she also has anecdotes that suggest the media do play — and can continue to play — a vital role in society. Goodman cut her journalistic teeth on Pacifica Radio (which launched "Democracy Now!" in 1996) at WBAI in New York. In 1970, Pacifica's station KPFT was blown up by the Ku Klux Klan.

"When the Exalted Cyclops went on trial, he said it was his proudest act," Goodman relates. "Why? Because he understood how dangerous Pacifica Radio is. Dangerous because it is a forum for people to speak for themselves, and when you hear someone speaking about their own experience, it breaks down racism and bigotry, caricatures and stereotypes."

Despite having witnessed and experienced some of humanity's most disheartening episodes (she once survived a massacre in East Timor in which 250 Timorese were killed around her by Indonesian soldiers wielding U.S.-furnished weaponry), Goodman is somehow not bitter. She was present in East Timor as the country achieved independence in 2002, and this gives her hope.

"As we move into election year in this country, it really is a global election. People all over the world deeply care about who will lead, or mislead, this country," she says. "And it's up to us to decide what we want to present to the world; the sword or the shield."

As Goodman wrapped up her talk in Burlington, her voice frayed at the edges — she'd been speaking for more than two hours. A clutch of listeners kept her corralled at the podium another half hour before the events' organizers finally shooed them away. Even without the broadcasting range of VPR, Goodman clearly is reaching a lot people — now.
* * *
Published in Seven Days 24 Sept 2003.
More information at the Democracy Now website.

Hide and Sleek

Champlain Leather's Jeremy Bond gives the clothes horse some skin

IMAGE: JORDAN SILVERMAN

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.

Jeremy Bond, the master craftsman behind this and many other jackets, doesn't notice the aroma of the leather anymore, he says. The materials' possibilities are what keep him in business. "It has such an incredible variety of uses," says Bond. "It's been used for thousands of years. I like to joke that [leathersmithing] is the world's second-oldest profession."

Bond began pursuing the craft when he was 19. A roommate who was working at a leather shop would bring home what he'd made. "I decided to try doing that until I got sick of it," Bond says. "It hasn't happened yet."

In 1975, when he was 26, Bond and his wife Nancy Kirby opened Champlain Leather on Cherry Street in Burlington. Twenty-eight years later, Bond is 54 and divorced. The couple still works together, though — she handles retail, he manufactures and repairs and does "everything else." The store has outlived other leather shops in town.

Bond had no formal apprenticeship or training as a leathersmith. For several years, he says, he got to know people "here and there" who worked with leather and he asked them a lot of questions. "My employees get more detailed tutelage," he comments. "I did things on my own, kind of hit or miss." Looking around the store, you can't help but conclude that Bond has turned out a definite "hit."

The store is small but capacious. A few leather-upholstered furnishings beacon from the corners, but the merchandise is overwhelmingly geared towards wearables. Racks of meticulously stitched leather garments, thick, heavy and sumptuous, line the walls. Walking around the store, it's hard to keep from petting the goods and marveling at their creamy, buttery textures.

"Leather is a very unique material," Bond notes. "It comes in so many shapes and sizes, you can have two skins from the same kind of animal, from the same tannery, and each will have unique characteristics." He finds manmade materials, with their uniform textures and patterns, a bit boring.

The atmosphere inside Champlain Leather sits comfortably somewhere between classy and casual. Bond himself wears fading jeans and sneakers, his Hawaiian shirt fluttering as he walks at a brisk clip among his creations. The store is more personalized than many retail spaces; conversation pieces abound, from the high-quality clothing itself to a collection of memorabilia. On one shelf, a photograph shows a fantastically Xenafied man sporting an award-winning costume that Bond co-created. Behind the counter is a snapshot taken beneath the awning of Champlain Leather of a group that includes Bond, Kirby, Colin Bennet — former bell-bottom jeans designer — and Lyle Lovett. A list of satisfied customers runs the gamut, from members of Phish to IBMers.

One headless dummy sports a chocolate-colored coat with a downy feel that fingers love. On the higher shelves are bags in dusky suede shades of silver-gray and light caramel. Soft leather caps mushroom among the luggage. Glass cabinets hold gloves whose dark fingers sit like thick beds of fronds. Stacks of wallets and hand-cobbled sandals occupy odd nooks. Rugged, brass-buckled belts pack a spinning rack. Two thick rows of coal-black biker jackets line one side of the store; they're unexpectedly plain, but in a sexy, black-leathery kind of way. Although a few accessories are made elsewhere, all the clothing in the store is crafted on site, and everything you see in the store — or don't see — can be custom-ordered.

One couple came in, having heard about the store from a biker who had a jacket custom-designed there. A jacket can be custom-made in two weeks, Bond told them, but the work can also be done more quickly; he once turned one out in 24 hours for Lyle Lovett's mother. The jackets start at $375 and cost the same whether they're bought off the rack or made to order.

"There are very few people who do what I do," Bond explains. Most leather stores are run by buy-and-sell retailers, who do little or no leatherwork themselves.

"A lot of our biker-jacket customers are thankful that our jackets don't have all the bells and whistles," Bond comments. "They like the simplicity." Most of the items in the shop are, in Bond's words, "not overly designed." The easy, classic spareness calls attention to the subtle textures and rich colors of the leather.

Leather is a deliciously dichotomous material, potentially tough — as in a rough-edged belt — or soft, as in feathered, melting suede — lending itself equally well to the boardroom and the bedroom.

The texture and color of leather is determined by the tannery that supplies Bond's materials. "In garments, chrome-tanned leather is soft and flexible, as opposed to stuff like belts, which use vegetable-tanned leather." To demonstrate the varieties, Bond leads the way to his upstairs workshop, where a riot of leather seems to explode from row upon row of tightly packed shelves.

Thick rolls of leather scroll off the shelves, some embossed, some plain. Most of the hide comes from cows — byproducts of the beef industry — but here and there is a buttery length of deerskin, lamb, python, an orange alligator skin brittle with age, and a downy chamois. Fat, heavy rolls of Crayola-colored leather sit on the shelves like giant Fruit Roll-Ups. When Bond turns out the lights, a folded square of what looks like white leather gives off a phosphorescent green glow.

"On the universal scale, I only have a small percentage of the variety of leather," Bond says. But even so, "[These] racks and racks of leftovers and of various textures and thicknesses and colors are invaluable when I get these custom odds-and-ends projects — it's rare that I don't find what I need in my workroom."

The versatility of his material ensures that Bond is rarely tired of his work. "It's impossible to get bored," he says. "A large part of what we do is a really wide variety of custom work." He's made butterfly chairs and backpacks for Dollywood, large leather signs for Utah skiing resorts and an array of custom clothing, from leather underwear to suede wedding dresses.

Working with and for fellow leather aficionados, he says, is part of what keeps the work fun. "A lot of [craftsmen] don't want to be bothered with the public, but I really enjoy meeting hundreds and hundreds of people a year," Bond insists. "It adds to the already interesting flavor that's born of doing the work."
* * *
Published in Seven Days 13 Aug 2003.
Champlain Leather website.

Growth Industry

Small Farmers bring new life to the Green Mountain State

IMAGE: JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR

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.

Directing the foursome is a young man in brown Carhartt pants whose rumpled blonde hair spikes up like a tattered sunflower. He's Peter Johnson, 31, namesake and proprietor of Pete's Greens. Johnson's minute mesclun greens point to possibilities beyond their petite, picturesque plot. Even as Vermont's dairy farms have been shutting down at an unprecedented rate — 77 in 2002 alone — the number of small farms in the state has been rising over the past decade. According to Lindsey Ketchel of the Vermont Fresh Network, 97.6 percent of Vermont's agricultural enterprises are classified as "small farms." Pete's Greens illustrates the viability of small-scale farming. His business is booming — in each of the last six years its gross income has grown by 50 percent.

Johnson's family moved to Vermont when he was 12, and his "homesteader-type" parents grew much of their own food, he says. "I pretty much always knew I was going to be a farmer." He got an early start. When he was 9, Johnson grew and sold pumpkins, with his mother's help, under the name Pete's Pumpkins. "My mom was really into me doing this kind of stuff," he recalls, "and I just happened to really like it."

Green thumbs run in the family — Johnson's two sisters also oversee garden-oriented businesses. Anners landscapes and is becoming a partner in Pete's Greens, and Danika sells fresh flowers for weddings through her one-woman company Blomma Flicka ("Flower Girl"), also in Greensboro.

While a senior at Middlebury College, Johnson built a solar greenhouse and sold the vegetables he grew to fellow students, who dubbed the produce "Pete's greens." He liked the name, and the occupation, enough to stick with both after graduating.

Pete's Greens was started literally from scratch on a miserly acre of soil Johnson carved out of the forest on his parents' Greensboro property. After liberal applications of cow manure and silage, the same turf is now "phenomenal," he says. Johnson uses no artificial pesticides or fertilizers to keep his kale hale and his harvest hearty. Preventative methods like crop rotation keep down bugs and weeds, he explains; he hasn't had to use even organic pesticides for several years.

"Around here, 'organic' still has a bit of a hippie connotation," Johnson says. A few other local farmers have expressed reservations about chemical-free agriculture. When giving vegetables to one skeptic, he jokes, "I could spray it with Roundup if it'd make you feel better."

But, occasional misgivings aside, his neighbors have been largely supportive, selling bags of mesclun and arugula in their stores and lending him equipment. "I like to point out that 'organic' is not this weird, new thing," says Johnson. "This is how their grandfathers and fathers did things."

Organic is far more than a farming fad; these days it's the fastest-growing sector in the food industry. According to a 2002 USDA report, the market for organic has increased 20 percent each year since 1990. Pete's has more than kept up with organic trends nationwide: Now in its sixth year, Pete's has expanded from a one-man, one-acre seasonal enterprise to a year-round farm on 11 acres. The farm grows an array of produce, from standard head lettuce to the more exotic French mâche. Pete's sells a minimum of 600 pounds of greens weekly during the summer to an expanding customer base, including Burlington's City Market, Montpelier's Hunger Mountain Co-op and restaurants around the state.

A florid mix of Pete's braising greens turns up, lightly sauteed with pork, at Smokejacks in Burlington. Chef Maura O'Sullivan is supplied by about 10 farmers, many in Burlington's Intervale, but added Pete's for the specialty items. "His stuff is beautiful," she says. "It's obvious that there's a lot of care involved."

Chef-owner Carl Huber of Tanglewood's in Waterbury agrees. A self-professed "potato freak," he rattles off the spuds he gets from Pete's. "By the time stuff gets here from California, it's often a little ragged," Huber says. "Pete's produce is slightly more expensive, but there's less waste and a better chance to use it before it spoils. With Pete, what I order today comes out of the ground tonight, and I'll have here tomorrow."

Pete's Greens are also dished up as far as Boston — at No. 9 Park Street Restaurant in Beacon Hill and Casablanca in Cambridge — and at the new Joe Allen Restaurant in Ogunquit, Maine. The far-flung chefs order gourmet greens but do not like pansies in their mesclun, says Johnson, explaining, "Down there they think flowers in salads is totally '80s."

Though many premier chefs serve his produce, Johnson himself cooks rarely, and then only primitively, he says. "My idea of preparing a meal, which I do several times a day, is grabbing a handful of whatever from the walk-in cooler and eating it." Though not a vegetarian, he subsists mostly on his mesclun. "It's the single biggest perk of this work," he vows.

As he leaps from row to row in his field, Johnson identifies some of the less familiar greens to a curious observer. A bed of neon frills is golden endive. It has a sharp taste. "Bitter is in," he says. The tall, vermillion amaranth variant is wheat whose heart-shaped leaves jazz up the mesclun mix. Wild purslane has salty, aloe-like leaves with the largest amount of good-for-your-heart Omega 3 fatty acids in the vegetable kingdom.

The mâche grows in delicate, deep-green rosettes. It has a nutty flavor with a hint of lavender soap. Wrinkled cress looks like parsley and tastes like horseradish. Johnson fills a bucket with tightly furled, butter-yellow zucchini blossoms. "[The chefs] serve these fried and stuffed with cheese, I think," he offers.

Johnson grows 11 varieties of lettuce. His carrots come in five colors, including red and purple; his beets come in four. He harvests a full spectrum of round and fingerling potatoes -- so-called because they are long and narrow. These include banana and rose gold (yellow), Tom Thumb (pink-fleshed), Swedish Peanut ("a little, brown, funny-looking thing"), blue and cranberry, and purple Peruvians.

Johnson and his workers shear, pluck and uproot various vegetables with an eye towards consistency. Size matters in this market; the baby beets must only be so large, and mesclun greens cannot grow beyond certain dimensions. "You can never relax and say, 'I've got it made,'" says Johnson. "With biology, everything's always changing. The field conditions change, the environment changes, climatic conditions change... It poses a constant challenge."

Still, Johnson says, he wouldn't trade the work for anything, and that's not just lip service. Until recently, he was slated to run the farms for the Rockefeller Stone Barns Project -- an agricultural and education center with a world-class restaurant run by Blue Hill of Manhattan in Pocantico Hills, New York. When none of his workers were interested in shouldering Pete's Greens — even at a reduced scale — he decided to turn down the job offer.

Johnson is committed to his greens, and to the Greensboro area, for the long haul. He just bought 160 acres more farmland and is planning a trip to Europe this fall to explore more efficient organic farming methods. His central goal for the near future is to mechanize much of the cultivation that is now done by hand. Most of Johnson's workers are seasonal, and he's feeling some strain as the business grows. Increasing his profits will enable him to pay for "good, quality, long-term help" and continue to expand.

But getting bigger won't mean relocating to gentler climes, John-son promises. "I think I'd get really bored of anything predictable. In farming, there's always something there to surprise or astound you — especially in Vermont. It's endlessly fascinating how things change."

The proliferation of small-scale agriculture here is also a reason to stay. Though it means Pete's Greens has more competition, Johnson says, "It's really kind of neat. It seems like Vermont has something big going on with small alternative ventures. I see it as a real movement."

Farming is hardly a cushy occupation, Johnson concedes, but it suits him. "What I like best, I think, is that at the end of the day I've produced something good."
* * *
Published in Seven Days 23 July 2003.
More information at the Pete's Greens website.

The Kindest Cut

How John O’Brien shepherded Nosey Parker to the screen

IMAGE BY JACK ROWELL

Tunbridge, Vermont, is home to 1200 people, 13 active dairy farms, 0 traffic lights and one film trilogy. Since the early 1990s, resident director John O’Brien has turned out a series of fresh, genre-bending movies that are unjaundiced portrayals of small-town Vermont. With Vermont Is For Lovers (1993), A Man With a Plan (1996) and the recently relased Nosey Parker, O’Brien has become to Tunbridge what Peter Jackson is to Middle-Earth. But unlike the Lord of the Rings characters, O’Brien’s actors are neither heavily made up, costumed nor scripted; for the most part, they’re real people ad-libbing as fictionalized versions of themselves.

Vermont Is for Lovers follows a New York couple around Tunbridge as they seek out seasoned advice from long-married locals on the eve of their wedding. In A Man With a Plan, Fred Tuttle, a charismatic, septuagenarian dairy farmer with a 10th-grade education and a bad hip, assumed the role of, well, Fred Tuttle, a charismatic septuagenarian dairy farmer… who decides to run for Congress to pay his bills. A Man With a Plan made a national splash in 1998 when, in a twist of life imitating art, Tuttle beat out “carpetbagger” candidate Jack McMullen to become the Republican opponent of Senator Patrick Leahy.

In Nosey Parker, professional actors play a wealthy couple from New York settling into a million-dollar hillside home in pastoral Tunbridge. But the real star of the film is the late George Lyford, O’Brien’s farmer-neighbor and poker buddy. As in A Man With a Plan, it offers more than a touch of social commentary. But unlike the earlier film, which is largely structured around Tuttle’s political high jinks, Nosey Parker explores a complex personal relationship that embodies changing physical and social landscapes in Vermont. In the end, as O’Brien likes to say, it is “a love story about friendship.”

Following its premiere this spring at Montpelier’s Green Mountain Film Festival, Nosey Parker opens at the new Roxy — the former Nickelodeon Theater — in Burlington on May 30.

*

A visit to the Tunbridge headquarters of Bellwether Films — O’Brien’s home-based production company — starts with a steep sequence of serpentine dirt roads and ends in a shallow scratch of driveway before a yellow farmhouse. Here fat, tufted sheep mill about in a pasture hemmed with split-rail fencing, and a white dog the size of a young polar bear amicably noses a visitor’s crotch. A sliding glass door bangs shut and John O’Brien ambles outside.

The filmmaker wears 40 lightly. He has the gently masculine visage of a Renaissance David, and a crown of fluffy, dark-brown hair not unlike that sported by his Romney sheep. He has a subtle, wholesome effervescence about him and he smiles openly and often. You get the feeling that O’Brien would clean up nicely, but doesn’t bother. On the day of the visit, he’s wearing a dirty white T-shirt, lentil-colored pants and rubber boots. Even those unacquainted with fashion’s cutting edge in Hollywood can guess that O’Brien’s attire is not industry-standard. But then, neither is he.

“He’s not unaware of his own strengths, but he’s an anti-star,” says Ed Koren, a Brookfield-based cartoonist for The New Yorker who has been friends with O’Brien for years. “He could be a star, but he’s taking great pains to be a part of the landscape where he lives, where the people also don’t have an inflated sense of their own importance.”

Koren has a deep admiration for O’Brien’s films — especially Nosey Parker, which he deems the deepest and richest of the trilogy. “John uses experience and weaves it into a wonderfully complex and complete vision of the very deep feeling he has about [Tunbridge],” says Koren.
“It’s interesting, being a first-generation Vermonter,” O’Brien notes. “Not many my age have grown up here. I have a foot in both the native and the new camps. I know it takes about seven generations before you can call yourself a native — and it takes more than just paying taxes before you’re accepted.”

*

O’Brien’s abiding affection for Tunbridge is obvious to anyone who has seen his films. According to Rick Winston, co-owner of Montpelier’s Savoy Theater, where Nosey debuted in March, such warmth is unusual in independent filmmaking. “Apart from being a truly independent filmmaker, the kinds of films [O’Brien] makes are against the grain,” says Winston. “There are a lot of young filmmakers today who want to make their mark as dark, ‘edgy’ directors. We call them ‘Tarenteenies.’ John definitely is not interested in making the next Reservoir Dogs.”At the same time, O’Brien’s direction is far from saccharine. “Audiences are interested in seeing their lives up there — a recognizable way of life that’s treated with some respect,” Winston says. “Usually, in American films, the rural life is a source of fun or condescension.”

The filmmaker’s approach to rural life is nuanced, as well it should be. After all, he grew up on the farm where he lives today, milked a Holstein through high school, and, during his four years of college at Harvard, came home every other weekend to help out on the farm. These days, in addition to working on film and farm, O’Brien is involved in Tunbridge’s civic and cultural life as a Justice of the Peace and a debate coach for the nearby Chelsea high school.
Roberta Henault, librarian at the Tunbridge Library, says O’Brien is “really great at showing how people are here — not backwards, but laid-back and close to the earth.”

Kay Jorgensen of the Tunbridge Historical Society notes that one of O’Brien’s strengths is his attentiveness to the stories ordinary people have to tell. “Everybody has a story. John knows that,” she says. “You could go to any farmhouse in Tunbridge and get a good story.”

O’Brien’s story is no exception. After inviting his visitor inside, O’Brien pauses to check his answering machine. He does almost all of his business by phone, so this takes some time. Between calls to investors and filming arrangements for the Nosey Parker trailer, he dashes outside to pour Guinness down the throat of an ailing ewe — the beer is good for getting calories into a listless sheep — and to move some new lambs into the barn. It’s a good opportunity for the visitor to be a nosey parker herself and snoop around the first floor of the house where O’Brien has lived his entire life.

The rooms of on the ground floor of the house are light, spacious, and strewn with creative clutter. Plants crowd the kitchen. Innumerable books, records, periodicals and a foot-tall stack of unopened DVDs eddy around the furniture in the living room. Guides and encyclopedias solidly pack one windowsill. A thin, balding, black-and-white cat, sprawls on the couch, all but submerged in a thick sheep skin.

O’Brien’s attachment to hands-on craftsmanship, to doing things well and beautifully, manifests itself in curious ways. The entries in his Rolodex are meticulously inscribed and illustrated. For lunch, he puts out a ceramic bowl of couscous, broccoli, cilantro, lemon juice and tomato. Chives and slices of pear fringe the dish. A pin by the kitchen sink — “Beat the System: Unplug a Computer” — speaks not to a Luddite’s knee-jerk abhorrance of technology, but to an artist’s aesthetic aversion to digital media.

O’Brien jokes. “I really must have been born in the wrong century.” For personal correspondence he shuns email, which he feels circumvents the creative potential of the pen and fosters degraded grammar. Instead, he sends his friends postcards, which he illustrates and inscribes in a whimsical fashion. Koren, one recipient of these paper missives, comments, “Now there is an art form in which John excels, where his wit and artistic talent can be seen on a daily basis.”

When it comes to filmmaking, O’Brien is definitely not a Luddite. He is more than a little in love with the technical aspects of filmmaking.

Off to one side of his house, a hulking editing table dotted with large metal spools squats in the center of a dim, curtained room. The table is a Steenbeck 2000, built in Hamburg in 1976. It’s a good machine, but, says O’Brien ruefully, “Pretty soon this is going to be in a museum.”

Two reels of 16-mm film, one for sound and the other image, snake about the board at 24 frames per second. They hiss and rattle when in motion. Strips of film dangle from a metal rack in bunches, like drying beans. As O’Brien works with the skeins of film, he shortens and lengthens shots by cutting film out and pasting it in. When the blade slices through the film in a miniature guillotine, the celluloid makes a light snick! A spool of clear tape — perforated at the same intervals as the film — adheres shots together.

One shot seems to linger too long. Snick! One shot might be better than another. Snick! O’Brien’s hands move quickly. As film is excised and patched in, a narrative emerges, along with a sense of rhythm and flow. The process is laborious but, even considering the fleet feats that editing software enables, O’Brien is committed to celluloid. “There’s something about light shining through the film that gives us a physiological pleasure,” he insists. Also, digital editing makes filmmaking too easy. “It makes a lot of non-creative people think they can make good films.”

Since O’Brien has his characters invent their own dialogue, he’s never sure what he will have to work with when shooting is done. “It’s a funny process,” he says. “I’m constantly rooting around for truffles.”

*

Editing is a critical phase in film production, but it was an especially laborious and defining stage for Nosey Parker. Originally, the story was about the redemption of old-timer George Lyford’s character: At first a grossly unethical “nosey parker,” he eventually becomes a mediator between the Newmans — the wealthy newcomers to the community — and the Tunbridge natives. Nary a whiff of that scenario remains in the final version.

Shooting for Nosey Parker was almost entirely finished by the end of 1997. O’Brien likes to joke that the reason for the delayed release is that “It took us five years to cut the plot out.” But that’s not the whole story. Part of the reason for the long wait, he explains, was that in 1997, A Man With a Plan was airing on PBS. Underwriters were needed and it was up to O’Brien to find them. (Ultimately, Ben & Jerry’s funded the film’s network appearance).

Then, in 1998, Fred Tuttle ran for Senate, and O’Brien was his handler. The footage for Nosey languished during election season. But most significantly, during that same year George Lyford — Nosey’s star — got cancer. The contrast between the healthy, vivacious character on film and the ailing friend in real life was impossible to reconcile, and the near-sociopath Lyford played now seemed false. O’Brien says it was “somehow a violation of how George Lyford really is.”

The project was further delayed by the media frenzy surrounding the Zantop murders in Hanover, New Hampshire. One of the killers — Robert Tulloch — was a member of the debate team O’Brien coached at Chelsea High School.

For a time, work on Nosey Parker was stymied.

*

After Lyford passed away, O’Brien discovered that some shots he had initially dismissed revealed the vibrant, real relationship that had developed between Lyford and costar Natalie Picoe. The New York-based actress says she expected major changes in the editing. “The plot just didn’t work. I remember thinking, there is just no way this is going to work. It wasn’t going anywhere.”

The most authentic scenes, where things really “clicked,” Picoe says, were those in which she was improvising conversation with Lyford. O’Brien ultimately decided to reorient the film, shaping it around this budding friendship rather than “plot stuff.”

The result is by far the most mature of O’Brien’s films. Elegiac and complex, it best embodies “cinema in which real American lives breathe through the pores of the narrative,” as Wall Street Journal drama critic Donald Lyons described O’Brien’s filmmaking.

In one scene towards the end of the film, Lyford stands outside in the sunlight playing a lively harmonica tune. In the context of the film it’s a cinematic non-sequitur; a segue away from what plot there is so the camera can linger on the play of sunlight on the instrument and Lyford’s craggy, smiling face. Remembering the scene, O’Brien he says, “that was the last day he went outside.”

*

Now that Nosey Parker is complete, O’Brien is working hard “to get the most out of it.” Local farmers have cooperatives that help them distribute their products, but there are few equivalents for independent filmmakers.

“This movie is made regionally, but we have to compete against the best —and the worst — cinema in the world,” says O’Brien. When he was trying to get A Man With a Plan into theaters, for example, the film was vying with such well-financed films as Sense and Sensibility and Leaving Las Vegas. “We barely got into Burlington,” he admits. “The film took off, but it was an uphill battle.”

Vermont filmmaker Jay Craven, whose latest works are In Jest (1999) and The Year That Trembled (2002), says it is increasingly difficult for independent filmmakers to break into the national — or even regional — consciousness.

“The overwhelming impact of hyper-commercialism in the industry makes it incredibly difficult for independent filmmakers to have a voice, ” says Craven. “That’s especially true for those working in a rural place, or with any regional sensibility.”

Thanks in part to the success of A Man With a Plan, O’Brien has been able to find some theater owners eager to show his new film — the Savoy was angling for Nosey Parker for three years before O’Brien was ready to show it.

Usually, it’s an uphill battle to place the film in commercial theatrical venues. Outside Vermont, O’Brien plans to focus on “semi-theatrical” venues such as museums for showing Nosey Parker. In the meantime, O’Brien is putting up posters for the film, booking with theaters, and trying to get the trailer out.

So what’s the film man’s next plan? After Nosey Parker has made the rounds, O’Brien wants to make a comedy about the “green” movement. “Like everybody else, I’m interested in what a model life would be, because we’re all living, to some extent, lives of contradiction,” he says. Whatever our intentions, none of us lives as purely as we like to imagine we do. “Somewhere in it all is a film about figuring out a design for living that isn’t preachy or polemical, but gets people talking and thinking.”

O’Brien plans to set this film in Vermont as well, though not necessarily in Tunbridge. “Think globally, act locally is the focus here,” he says. “I want to get at the universal through the particular.” As is his wont, the film will pair trained actors with real people playing themselves. “Some will be great, and some will make fools of themselves.”

At 40, O’Brien calls himself “a late bloomer. I’m at an embryonic stage. I hope to get better.” He looks forward to making films for the rest of his life. “There’s always a new story to tell; there are so many great subjects out there that no one’s making films of, and I’d like to make those films.”

Just don’t expect anything ordinary from O’Brien. Making Nosey Parker has crystallized his commitment to unorthodox filmmaking. “From now on, I don’t want to do anything by the book,” he says. “If I have complete artistic freedom, I might as well use it.”
* * *
Published in Seven Days, 21 Mar 2003
More from John O'Brien at Bellwether Films

Contra Diction

A first-time do-si-soes some old dance moves

IMAGE: JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR

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.



Friends and family who contradance assured me that lack of experience would earn me no black marks at the Grange. That's the only reason I was going, since I can dance about as well as I can fly. Though the directive in the calendar was simple enough, I suspected there would be more to the evening than "move your feet" suggested.

With the sun setting on Route 12 last Saturday, civilization seemed to ebb away as soon as the capitol dropped out of sight. The H&P Grange is easy to miss; the only indicator of its existence is a weathered wooden sign in the shadow of an I-89 overpass. The faded lettering on the peeling placard is barely legible from the road. If a veteran contradancer hadn't given me directions, I probably would have missed the turn. As it was, I successfully steered my decrepit Honda up the Grange's narrow dirt driveway and parked. And got out of the car. And blinked.

A big crowd had turned out. The windows of the Grange blazed with light and flickered with the silhouettes of careening dancers. The parking lot was packed and on my way inside, I noticed tags from Rhode Island and Massachusetts among their green-and-white Vermont brethren. A red Subaru sported a "Brattleboro Dawn Dance" bumper sticker. I've heard of the Dawn Dances -- they last from eight at night until eight in the morning. I swallowed, hard, as a kernel of apprehension formed in my stomach. These people were serious. Was this any place for a novice?

At the entrance to the Grange, a hand-painted notice politely spelled out the house rule: Clean shoes only on the dance floor. The kernel of apprehension became a peach pit: I hadn't brought any spare shoes with me, and the ones I was wearing had trekked through a section of yard my cats used as a toilet.

Fortunately, a staircase to the right descended to the basement, bathrooms, water fountain and "official shoe-cleaning station" -- a cardboard box of hard-bristle brushes and screwdrivers. I headed down and set to work dislodging pebbles and gum from my sneakers. The dancehall was directly overhead, and the basement ceiling rocked and creaked under the syncopated tread of hundreds of dancers. Muffled strains of lively music drifted downstairs, giving my shoe-cleaning efforts a sense of urgency.

As I brushed and picked at the stubborn sediment in my soles, a steady stream of new arrivals trickled down the stairs, with spare shoes in hand and no need for the cleaning equipment. They quickly changed and darted up to the dance floor. As soon as I could, I slipped back into my freshly flossed footware and huffed back upstairs to check out the action.

The Capitol City Grange was chartered in 1871. The walls were festooned with crumbling certificates and black-and-white photographs of 19th-century men with somber mustaches and regal sashes. They seemed to regard the evening's proceedings with approval. Contradancing is an old tradition in this area, and the monochrome men on the walls likely participated in a dance or two in their time.

On a stage at the far end of the hall, caller Susan Kevra stood by an eclectic acoustic scratch band that was churning out a roiling, Irish-influenced dance tune. At first I stood at the periphery, where I planned to watch and learn. But I had trouble divining the steps. My eyes were beguiled by the swirl of skirts and loose hair, the snappy sashays and spins of contradance regulars and the freewheeling turns and awkward allemandes of first-timers. Dazzled by the kaleidoscopic currents of motion on the floor, I soon realized that it was impossible to learn a dance without being in the thick of it.

I don't dance often, or well. I get self-conscious bobbing and shuffling at DJ dances, and, because I'm a control freak, I don't do well in couples dances where my partner is supposed to "lead." But contradancing moves too quickly for a person to remain self-conscious or inhibited for long. And based on what I could see from the sidelines, there seemed to be very little leading involved. In any event, I hadn't come all this way just to sit and watch other people cut a rug. When the dancers dissolved into new sets for the next number, I moved onto the floor.

Each dance was explained step-by-step. Some moves, like "do-si-do," I remembered from middle-school square dances, but most were alien to me. Ladies' chain? Balance and swing? Ripped and snort? Fortunately, most of my neighboring dancers knew what they were about, and helped me navigate the caller's instructions.

A gap-toothed, grinning old man in a blue T-shirt helped me perfect my allemande, showing me the appropriate grip and tension to apply. Several people gave me spinning pointers -- one said gently, "It helps if you don't jump up and down." Some steps no one knew, like "ripped and snort," in which one couple forms an archway and six other dancers thread between them hand-in-hand. Mostly, though, I just watched other people and picked up the steps as the dances repeated themselves.

Even so, I did get hopelessly dizzy during a few dances and more than a little lost during most. The dances are rapid, with one step bleeding into the next in a fluid weave of movement. But as disoriented as I sometimes got, I never stopped having fun; the music was wild and vibrant, it felt good to be moving and my more accomplished dance partners were always forgiving -- even when I trampled their feet.

Towards the end of the evening, I took a break to speak with Todd Taska, who organizes the Montpelier contradance. In a voice raised to carry over the band, he affirmed my sink-or-swim approach: "The way people learn is by doing." Taska added that it's important for new dancers to be flexible about who they dance with, even if they come with a date. Partner-swapping is de rigueur in contradancing, and you're unlikely to learn much if you only dance with fellow beginners. (And you never know what might happen in the arms of a stranger; Taska met his wife at a contradance.)

Because of the rapid exchange of partners in a single dance, contradancing isn't just a social icebreaker -- it's an ice pulverizer. As Henry Rich, a young man from Connecticut, pointed out, "you might dance with 20 strangers in 10 minutes." Some might find this therapeutic; for others it's a great way to meet people. For most, it's a bit of both.

Contradancing is aerobic, social, cerebral and cooperative. Though the prospect of learning and memorizing steps, executing them with grace, keeping in time with the music and keeping track of your partner may initially daunt newcomers, the support of advanced dancers makes the challenges surmountable. As long-time contradancer Anna Seeger put it, "It doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing -- everyone helps you out."

One might be tempted to view contradancing as an archaic, Old World holdover, a dinosaur dance. This Montpelier contradance is 20 years old, but the activity -- derived from dance traditions that predate the "discovery" of the New World -- has a long history. For the last several hundred years, contradancing percolated in New England, where it has achieved a distinctly American flavor that sets it apart from its earlier incarnations. It has persisted in the face of societal sea changes and has recently begun to catch on in the Pacific Northwest. If the potpourri of people at last Saturday's event is any indication, contradancing is alive and literally kicking here in Vermont.

As the Grange dance wound down, I sat on one of the benches lining the hall and tried to take stock of the folks on the dance floor. A surprising cross-section of society was dancing to the same beat. Among the faces that surfaced and submerged in the froth of the dance, I spotted a woman with an eye patch and a girl with piercings in her cheeks. Graying men and women joined hands with flush-faced teens; well-groomed yuppies promenaded with colorfully attired college students. It was impossible to generalize about the crowd, except that they were all dancing and seemed to be having a hell of a time.

Now that I'm a seasoned contradancer myself, I can offer sage advice to anyone who has yet to try it out: Be flexible, not shy. Bring clean, soft-soled shoes. And don't be fooled by that simple calendrical direction, "Move your feet." It really does mean a whole lot more.
* * *
Published in Seven Days 7 May 2003

‘Chord Values

A Lincoln harpsichord builder keys in on an old idea

An inventory of just some of a harpsichord’s parts suggests the instrument is part animal, part vegetable, part building and part junk drawer. What are we to make of something that’s made up of spine, belly, balance rail, bridge, tail, bridge, cheek, compass, damper, frame, nut, rose, pins, skunktail sharps, split keys, short octaves, and jacks — and whose jacks themselves have slides and tongues, and might be doglegged?

I’ve been reading about harpsichords to prepare for an interview with Robert Hicks, who builds them in South Lincoln. When I called him to set it up, I admitted that I didn’t know my jacks from my elbow. He gruffly let me know I’d better bone up. Now I’m feeling anxious on two fronts — both the ancient instrument and the recalcitrant builder seem prickly and unapproachable.

After several miles on icy dirt roads, I reach Hicks’ cedar-sided house, its blue roof just barely visible from the road. Hicks lives and works on the outskirts of South Lincoln, a stone’s throw from the Green Mountain National Forest. His workshop, which he built with the help of a neighbor, is attached to his house. He can look in on his harpsichords-in-progress through his bedroom window.

When I first spot Robert Hicks in the doorway of his workshop, his blue corduroy pants and plaid shirt all but fade into the dim interior.

He waves me inside, and promptly launches into a lengthy monologue about harpsichord-building. He speaks in a soft, low-pitched voice, making quick, gentle gestures as he describes his work. After a brief tour of his workshop, I realize that what I took for gruffness over the phone is something more like shyness. Hicks is modest and meticulous about his work, and doesn’t like "talking down" to a harpsichord ignoramus.

The most common misconception about the harpsichord is that it’s like a piano. Though both have keyboards and strings, that’s as far as the resemblance goes. A piano hammers, a harpsichord plucks. Pianos must be heavyset to sustain the complex machinery that translates a touch on the keyboard to a plow on the string. Harpsichords call for a light, responsive frame capable of communicating the subtle vibrations of a gently plucked string. A modern grand piano is under about 38,000 pounds of tension while a modern harpsichord sustains a mere 6000.

Harpsichord enthusiasts are touchy about associating their instrument with the piano. When the piano eclipsed the harpsichord in the early 1800s — after the latter had enjoyed 400 years of popularity — harpsichords seized from the Paris aristocracy were burned for firewood. The instrument wasn’t made, played or much missed until a handful of 20th-century piano-makers revived it, creating heavy-framed hybrids whose pathetic sound bore little resemblance to that of a true harpsichord.

It wasn’t until the 1940s that light-bodied, historically derived harpsichords were built. Hicks’ instruments are all copies — but not slavish ones —of extant antique harpsichords. "I try to preserve the virtues of the instruments, but without duplicating their faults," he explains.

*

When Hicks talks about his harpsichords, he refers to them by the name of their original maker. Hempsch. Taskin. Right now, he’s taking his cues from a French harpsichord built in 1760 by Benoist Stehlin. To illustrate why this particular instrument caught his eye, Hicks produces a photograph in Wolfgang Zuckerman’s The Modern Harpsichord. With long, tapered fingers, he points out the elements that first attracted him: the larger-than-usual soundboard area; the deep plucking point; the straight nut — all attributes that promised a rich, full sound. But he needed more than a photograph to actually build a new Stehlin. Fortunately, the instrument in question was housed at the Smithsonian Institution and Hicks was able to obtain a drawing showing every inch of it in exact proportion.

Unrolled, the full-size blueprint of the Stehlin — at least 12 feet long — spills over the edges of Hicks’ long drafting table. Clean black lines unfurl in all directions. If I concentrate, I can almost see a harpsichord among the various lines, arrows and labels. Hicks, of course, has no trouble divining the instrument. He points out where the blueprint confirmed his initial impressions of the Stehlin, and more: "As I pored over the drawing," he says, "I began noticing things I didn’t like." After a careful appraisal, he visited the Stehlin in person, and played it. As he had expected, it had a sweet, full tone. With a smile, he says, "I really fell for it."

On a table in Hicks’ workshop, an unfinished Stehlin lies on its side like a great wing. It’s a rainbow of different woods: Sitka spruce, Douglass fir, poplar, and ash. "It’s going to be one of my best instruments," Hicks says. "I don’t care if it’s five different colors." As he identifies the different parts of the frame, his knuckles graze the soundboard. Though he barely touches it, it lets out a low, drum-like moan. The Stehlin’s soundboard is made from Sitka spruce – a rare, highly resonant wood from Alaska.

To see where Hicks stores his soundboards, we head up to the attic. It is cool and dark; exposed insulation buffers the low, pitched ceiling. Long, thin boards lie in a heap. Hicks sifts through the pile, lifts a piece to his ear and raps it with his knuckles. The first piece emits a dull thud, and he tosses it aside. "Englemann." The next piece let out a dim ring. "Sitka Spruce." He puts that one back in the pile. Another piece surprises him. "Swiss Pine, from Zurich. Not bad!" Last of all, he tries a piece of cedar clapboard left over from when he re-sided his house. He gives it a rap. It rings like a bell.

A finished Stehlin sits in Hicks’ living room. It’s the first one he ever built and he has no plans to sell it. As I scribble notes about the floral paintings on the soundboard, Hicks puts the Stehlin through its paces with a series of chord progressions. I put down my pen. Rich, golden notes roll out of the harpsichord. Each note is piquant, exquisite, with a harp’s deep resonance and a cascading liveliness like a handful of pennies flung down a flight of stairs.

The Stehlin is a double-manual, with a two-tiered keyboard. Hicks couples and uncouples it to switch and combine octaves, but I’m too lost in the sound to keep track of the transitions. The air glitters with rich, roiling notes, and I feel as if I’m being drenched in sound.

I am startled when Hicks reaches into the harpsichord’s maw and pulled out a long, narrow wooden tooth: a jack. The small, thorn-like thing jutting out from one side is the plectrum — the harpsichord’s plucking mechanism. Plectra are hand carved, traditionally from crow, raven, and goose quill, though most modern makers substitute plastic, which is more durable, and affordable.

Hicks uses both. To get his feathers, he heads over to the Addison Wildlife Preserve during hunting season and loiters by the game warden’s office, where hunters must check in with their booty. After getting the hunters’ approval, Hicks personally pulls the primary flight feathers from the dead geese; a process that he does not enjoy. "It’s kind of awkward," he says."I’m vegetarian."

*

In spite of the robust Early Music scene in the United States and the resurgence of interest in the harpsichord in recent years, the market for the instrument is slow-moving: Hicks builds and sells about one instrument each year. Though he has a modest Web site to advertise his instruments, he makes most sales through instrument exhibitions and the occasional convention. He goes to the Boston Early Music Festival to exhibit his harpsichords. Usually someone will buy an instrument there. Once someone bought one on the spot, though harpsichords are rarely an impulse-buy. Though Hicks prefers to retain some modesty about his work, he admits that in 1995, his debut at the festival, he "stole the show."

Harpsichord rentals have provided "a lot of bread and butter” in recent years. "When I buy a new car, I run around with a tape measure," he says. “The car’s got to be 104 inches from dash to tail on the diagonal, and it has to be five-speed — I don’t care about anything else." The Lane Series and the Vermont Mozart Festival regularly rent Hick’s harpsichords. If you’re at a harpsichord performance, you might spot him darting out to do a spot of touch-up tuning during intermissions.

Hicks builds all of his instruments "on speculation" rather than to-order; he hasn’t built any instruments on commission for 20 years. "Not building on commission means I don’t have a future," he says. But he’s willing to sacrifice security for the freedom to build according to his own curiosity and passion. As he writes on his Web site, "I suspect that the driving force behind a great instrument is a curiosity, an engaged perplexity which keeps a maker learning throughout his career."

* * *

Published in Seven Days 12 Mar 2003
Visit Robert Hicks' Harpsichords for more information.

Walking The Talk: Vermonters march on Manhattan

Lots of people
Originally uploaded by Leo Tilt.

Gutterson Field House, UVM: It is 3:30 a.m., Saturday, February 15. I am wearing wool-lined boot and mittens, two layers of socks, long underwear, blue jeans, five shirts, a wool sweater, a down jacket, a hat and scarf. Similarly bundled figures – too densely wrapped to make out features or gender – pile on the New York City-bound bus. “Peace and Justice!” yells the driver, as if he’s hawking hot dogs. “Peace and justice!”

My bus – a standard yellow school bus – is one of four leaving at this ungodly hour, sponsored by the Burlington-based Peace & Justice Center. The American Friends Service Committee, United Electrical Workers, and other organizations are transporting Vermonters to today’s peace rally near the United Nations – one of dozens of antiwar gatherings being staged in cities around the world.

The bus is full. Ahead of me, most people are trying to sleep. Behind me, it sounds like a party. Students from UVM – some drunk, some stoned, some giddy in anticipation of the demonstration – talk eagerly amongst themselves. A blonde, tin-voiced girl scoots into the seat behind me and confides to her neighbor, “I might not make much sense; I’m tripping on LSD.”

A girl in a green wool hat is pensively reading a printout of public bathrooms in midtown Manhattan – the NYPD has decided that Port-o-Potties would pose a “security risk.” A woman across the aisle announces the contents of her satchel. She has three apples and Kool-aid. The tripping girl asks her, “Did you bring anything to drink?”

“Yeah, I have some Kool-Aid.”

“No, I mean, like alcohol?”

“Oh. No.”

We get started. I try to sleep. The walls of the bus are cold. Condensation builds and freezes on the windows.

*

Five hours later, we stop for gas somewhere in New York. It’s warmer now, and I can see who else in on the bus. A blue-haired boy shares a seat behind the driver with his mother. A young woman with a plume of red and brown dreadlocks and a blue tattoo by her right eye dangles an arm over the back of her seat. A salt-and-pepper coifed woman sips from a silver thermos. An older lady with a white mohair hat has the wool collar of her jacket pulled up to her nose. I’m hungry. In my backpack I have crackers, a wedge of white cheddar cheese, a Fig Newton and a darkening banana. I eat some cheese.

As we move closer to the city, Vermonters look out the windows and make disparaging remarks about the flat suburban landscape. Hard-edged office buildings read above the highway: Daewoo. AGFA. Fleet. From a distance, the city skyline is an opaque blue-gray. As we move closer, it deepens and sharpens into a complex nexus of streets, buildings, taxicabs, New Yorkers.

The driver is talking on two cell-phones at once. People laugh nervously and speculate about the possibility of an accident. We head into Manhattan. As we spill out onto 34th street, disoriented and overdressed, I hear someone mutter, “I feel like the country mouse going to the city.”

I head toward the New York Public Library, where people are gathering to walk en masse to the demonstration on First Avenue. Along the way, I pass 15 police vans parked bumper-to-bumper, all filled with policemen in riot gear. In Times Square, under towering commercial signs, a skinny white guy with a beard is stopped by two policemen. They take his Bush-bashing sign, tear it in two and hand it back to him. They break the wooden stick to which the sign was affixed. No sticks allowed.

The walls of the Public Library bear an epigraph deeply etched in stone: “But above all things truth beareth away the victory.” Today, more transient slogans flutter below on fabric and paper: “Go Solar, Not Ballistic,” “Power to the Peaceful,” “Foreplay Not Warplay,” “Duct and Cover.” A group hands out free signs printed on recycled paper in vegetable-based inks by a union shop – sponsored by Working Assets. Graying men in military garb rally under a maroon banner: Veterans against the War. They face police officers across a narrowing swath of sidewalk.

Nearby, middle-aged men and women hold photographs of their sons and daughters in uniform. Military Families for Peace. I see people in jackets that read “United Steelworkers.” I stand beside a woman with a broad smile and dreadlocks reaching her ankles. GLAMericans For Peace, swathed in stylish faux fur, stand under a sign reading, “Peace—It’s the New Black.” Here and there, the odd spray of plastic beads – courtesy of the Mardis Gras Carnival Bloc – glitters in the sunshine. The crowd is diverse, and slogans and expressions vary, but they share a single message: No War.

As the crowd at the library swells, police line up along the streets to keep folks off the asphalt. An officer with a bullhorn directs people to move towards First Ave. People ignore him. They’ll move in their own time. The crowd gets bigger. Police in riot gear – helmets, batons, guns – arrive on the scene. They walk back and forth, ostentatious plastic handcuffs dangling from their belts. I cross the street and stand on the corner. From here I can see that the library steps are packed. The crowd stretches from the doors of the library down the curb and spans the city block.

Around noon, the crowd starts moving, oozing like a mountain of molasses from the library steps towards First Avenue. I tag along in the shadow of the GLAMericans to the sound of chanting: “La Peace, C’est Chic.” A sign dripping with blue tassels proclaims, “Peace is Not a Fringe Movement.” Police dart alongside the procession, jogging in the gutter. We pass people trapped under the awnings of Bloomingdale’s and Godiva chocolatiers. Some smile and wave. Many seem confused. One strangely stationary sign further adown the sidewalk catches my eye. It looks incongruous in the midst of all the moving signs, and the crowd splits around it. When I get close enough I c see that it reads, “Sample Shoe Sale.”

At Third Avenue, the city’s refusal to issue a march permit abruptly becomes irrelevant. The crowd has outgrown the sidewalk and spilled out into the street, filling it. The walk becomes a massive, slow-moving march. We inch forward, shuffling, squeezing. Some people carry radios tuned to WBAI, which is covering the demonstration. We hear that Third Avenue is full from 52nd Street to 72nd, and that a similar crowd is moving down Second Avenue. Cars waiting for the light to turn are trapped in the crowd like flies in amber; the people inside them look aggravated and uncomfortable. People are drumming. Syncopated chants of “Peace… Now!” thunder up and down the avenue.

Police prevent us from moving towards the demonstration on First Avenue. Every cross street has an aluminum barricade, and behind every barricade are officers persistently waving us north. Behind the police officers, we can see that the crowds on Second Avenue are surging southward. The handfuls of people leaving the rally are allowed to cross unimpeded.

“Where can we cross over? We want to go to the demonstration.”

“You can cross over at 52nd.”

At 52nd, another blockade. “Where can we cross over? They said we could use 52nd.”

“You can use 68th.”

At 68th, more of the same. “You can use 72nd.”

At 69th, the crowd plows through the barricades and begins a torturously slow walk south in search of a place to cross over to First. Again, the barricades block us at every corner. The police erect barricades across the Avenue, bringing the march to a temporary halt before protesters muster sufficient oomph to break through. In spite of the inevitable chanting that erupts at every whiff of confrontation with the NYPD, people are by and large reluctant to disrupt the arbitrarily erected barriers. Even so, discarded metal frames and blue wooden planks litter the open intersections, marking where the crowd, however recalcitrant, broke through.

At about 4 p.m., we finally arrive at First Avenue, but even though we are now within the rally’s officially “permitted” area, police are still erecting barricades. After crossing one intersection, I hear a scraping of metal on asphalt and turn around. Police are blockading First Avenue. I can’t believe it. “Isn’t there a permit for a rally on this Avenue?” I ask one officer.

“I only know what they tell me.”

When I pose the same question to a female officer, she’s a little more eloquent. “Do you want to negotiate with me?

“No, I’m just wondering – isn’t the rally permit for First? Why are you cutting us off?”

“It’s to keep mass chaos from breaking out,” she snarls. “ You have a problem with that? It’s so you don’t get trampled. You want to know what this is for? Wait until the ambulance can’t come for your bloody body. This is for your own safety.”

Finally, after a full day of marching, I arrive at the rally. The organizers are congratulating everyone on their participation. The demonstration is over.

Turning to leave, I’m surprised to see the end of the march. Litter is strewn everywhere. As I walk towards Grand Central Station, taking care not to jaywalk, my feelings are mixed. The experience overall has been encouraging. I’ve seen concerned citizens coalesce from all over the country to demonstrate their opposition to war. I have marched with the largest, most diverse group of people I’ve ever seen rally around one cause. But encouraging as it has been to march for peace, marching really isn’t enough.

One of the chants that I’ve heard throughout the day is, “This is what democracy looks like!” The earnestness of the voices raised in these choruses makes me wonder whether too many of us confuse marching with civic participation. Demonstrations are dramatic and make you feel good. But they dissipate quickly. We need to find more lasting forms of activism, more effective ways to register dissent. At the end of the day, I find myself asking: What else could democracy look like?

* * *
Published in Seven Days 19 February 2003

Food Fetish

Area chefs pay lip service to eroticism

On the Half Shell
Originally uploaded by Maxed (not me!).

My boyfriend and I sit at a small table, waiting for eggs benedict, sautéed vegetables and sourdough toast. Our breakfast arrives. He spears a red pepper and holds it out for me to eat. When I lean forward to nip the pepper off his fork, I do so furtively, blushing, as if the act of eating were somehow illicit.

In my mouth, the sliver of sautéed red pepper is soft, almost silken. When I gently bite down on it, it has the same gradual, fleshy give as my lower lip. I chew slowly, relishing the pepper’s smoky flavor and its slippery texture on my tongue. I swallow, and the aftertaste — and the look I’m getting from across the table — leaves me feeling a few degrees warmer. And hungrier. My mouth is wet with saliva, my appetite whetted for the next mouthful.

Valentine’s Day isn’t just about bad chocolate and pink hearts from the pharmacy. It can be an occasion for extraordinary dining. Whatever — or whomever — you eat on Valentine’s Day, the experience should make your toes curl with pleasure.

Food is sexy. The reverse — sex is foody — can also be true. But while chocolate body-paint or peach-flavored lubricants may taste good, they’re just dressing, not a full course. Food foreplay doesn’t have to be confined to the bedroom; you may be surprised at what a slow sit-down dinner can do for your libido.

For gastronomic guidance on the subject of sexy food, I looked to the experts: the chefs. What do these pros, who are so intimate with food, have to say about dining on aphrodisiacs? What entrées are especially erotic? What spices arouse the senses? What flavors suggest sex? Whether you plan on dining out or in, here's what some Vermont chefs suggest as a prelude to a kiss:

Sean Connory on a Plate

Bill Tecosky, Rainbow Sweets, Marshfield
Bill and his wife, Patricia Halloran, have developed a dessert that's something of a local legend. "We bake pastry balls and inject them with still-hot French pastry cream. Then we deftly dip them in hot caramel, so they are hard and crunchy on the outside like a crème brulée." Two of these one-inch balls, called profiteroles, sit atop a layered concoction of confections: a layer of puffed pastry, a layer of éclair pastry and a layer of "whippéd" cream. "You can't believe how many of these we have to make to avoid civil unrest.

"I stand behind these things all day, and when women come in, I see looks in their eyes that their men don't see. I see jaws hit chests."

The name of this fabulous confection? Officially, it's the Saint Honoré, but Bill defers to his "double-X-chomosome customers" who have dubbed the dessert "Sean Connory on a plate." For younger indulgers, he says, "It could be Edward Norton. It's in the mind of the beholder. For older guys like me, it might be Brigitte Bardot.

"I have a 1-900 number where I describe pastries. It's 1-900-TALK-PASTRIES."

Amuse Bouche

Steve Schimoler, The Mist Grill, Waterbury
"Let's face it — great sex doesn't happen in five minutes. It should take an extended period of time. Foreplay is essential to great sex." Accordingly, The Mist Grill's wide-ranging Valentine's menu offers sustained stimulation for an extended — and playful — prelude to a hot night at home. Schimoler serves up a kaleidoscope of classical aphrodisiacs in novel and suggestive arrangements. "It’s about imitation, about having great food that parodies the sex act."

Menu highlights: butter-soft salmon "with a texture of silk-panties." Duck Confit with Ibarra Chocolate and Chipotle Mole — to elicit "that bead of sweat on your brow for the main act." For vegetarians, there’s a luscious mushroom dish finished with white truffle oil, whose musky scent "smells like sex." And for the Sweet Finish, a tartlet for two: Adam and Eve's Apple Gallette with Warm Cinnamon Caramel. The smell of cinnamon and baking apples has been proven to get people in the mood, and the warm caramel’s texture is "like body paint."

And the white silky cream?

"That’s for whatever anyone wants to think it is."

Ooh, La La!

Carole Fisher, Mes Amis, Stowe
"The trick is to give an oral orgasm. You know that you've succeeded as a chef when you hear people going Oh... Mmmm! We want that to last through the entire meal."

At Mes Amis, sumptuous offerings are a matter of course. Or courses, if you're hungry enough. "We’re very sensual to begin with — we go through a lot of oysters here." Briney, satiny and decidedly feminine, oysters are a noted aphrodisiac. And, Carole adds, "Having the animal in your mouth makes some people a little wild."

A rack of lamb also might excite: "It's something you can eat with your fingers. It's a very tactile, basic, Raaarh! Red meat! kind of thing. It brings out the caveman — or woman — for the evening."

Yin-Yang

Steve Bogart, A Single Pebble, Burlington
Contrast and balance are key concepts in Steve Bogart's culinary philosophy; he talks about the Yin and Yang of the food. "Everything on the menu is balanced, so no matter what you order, it is going to go well with everything else."

A Single Pebble's most erotic dish, by Steve’s estimation, is also its most popular: mock eel. Bogart developed his version from a traditional Buddhist recipe, featuring strands of wok-fried shiitake mushroom in a salty, sweet seasoning. "With the crispiness of the outside, and the soft, almost velvetiness of the shiitake mushrooms on the inside, and the saltiness that is almost instantly counteracted by sweetness — I've had customers come up and tell me it's like eating sex."

Play With Your Food

Dale Conoscenti, Conoscenti, Montpelier
Dale Conoscenti identifies his "free-form lobster ravioli" — which incudes a lobster tail and claw slow-cooked with butter and drizzled with truffle oil — as his sexiest dish. Good sex, and good food, indulge sight, smell, and touch for a full sensory experience. "Whether we like it or not, we play with our food."

A mental flirtation with the subject never hurts, either. "There's a mystique around lobster. Here's this large, red, hard-shelled thing, and it's all mine... and I know what's under that shell: rich, sumptuous mouthfuls of delicate white meat." Plus, you get to eat it with your bare
hands.

"Food for me is about passion. A sexual relationship — if it’s a good one — is also about passion." And eating with the person you love? "That's double passion."

Acheiving O

Fleury Mahoney, O Restaurant, Burlington
"For a romantic dinner, I would choose something really beautiful. We serve it on big white plates. . . in a bare-bones kind of way, so the food is very erotic in its nakedness."

Mahoney recommends plump, fresh, flown-in, eco-friendly oysters, spiced and on the half-shell, resting on a bed of sea salt evocative of the beach, "so it looks like they've just washed up on the shore." Oysters may be consumed with several house sauces, and with caviar. For sensual food, "caviar with oysters is about as decadent as you can get."

Love, Italian-Style

Tom Delia, Trattoria Delia, Burlington
"Eat like the Italians do — 'cause they're the best lovers!"

Delia’s menu offers an eclectic — and authentic — Italian menu, with regional specialties. Anything with an especially erotic in the mix? "Wild mushrooms." A.k.a. funghi selvaggi.

How do the Italians eat? "In small courses, always sharing. You share the antipasta, the pasta, the main course, and, of course, a bottle of wine. Instead of a good dining experience, with the right wine, you have a great one."

Food Science

Tara Vaughan-Hughes, Eat Good Food, Vergennes
For food that get you in the mood, Tara Vaugahn-Hughes cites culinary critic M.F.K Fisher: "If you give someone a steak and a glass of wine, watch for when their earlobes turn red: that's the time to ask them for a favor. Or ask them to sleep with you. Because that's when they're in the best mood."

Of course, there's always "the old standby" of chocolate. The body responds to chocolate with the same chemical it produces when in love. And Eat Good Food has an "amazing" chocolate cake — layered, with dense, dark chocolate and almonds. "It's just chocolate, chocolate, chocolate! And served warm, it's just amazing. It has a nice give in your mouth, a silken feel."

Anything to avoid on Valentine's day? "Oh God — no beans!"

Share, Cherie

Gay Truax, Tully and Marie’s, Middlebury
"I like to mix textures so the desserts are exciting to eat. We have a midnight chocolate mousse, for example, that we serve with a star and a moon shortbread cookie, which is both crisp and soft." Also texturally tantalizing is the crème brulee, whose "hot, crispy sugary crust sits atop a mound of cool, creamy custard."

For visual stimulation, Tully and Marie’s midnight mousse is served "up," in a martini glass, and a V-Day special is in the works for a "very pretty" heart-shaped dessert for two.

Since sharing food is definitely sexy, T&M's is planning a chocolate and chambord fondue for two, with cubed coconut pound cake and fresh fruit, which "you can eat on your own, or feed to each other."

How to Chow

Jeff Brogan, Chow! Bella, St. Albans
"I would definitely suggest strawberries — either as an entree or to finish
with. And champagne."
* * *
Published in Seven Days 5 February 2003