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Never Enuff VERMONT!!!!!
Oct. 8th, 2023 12:05 pmI texted Ichabod this picture from the old ramshackle barn:
Is it as impactful as the first time? he asked.
No, I answered.
And it wasn’t.
Part of that, of course, was that the first time was an experience I was sharing with a deeply loved son.
Part of it was that magic, like lightning, seldom hits the same place twice.
Part of it was that now I have actually seen a performance by the Bread & Puppets Theater, and they aren’t very good.
But part of it was the day, unseasonably hot and humid, and the way the day accentuated the deterioration of the puppets, subtly but noticeably more decrepit than they had been the year before. Their amazing Easter Island-ish vitality seems to have seeped away. The smell of mold was very strong.
They were still very beautiful, of course.
These puppets are from a 1971 play the theater did about the My Lai massacre:
These puppets are from a 1980 play about the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador:
This puppet is Uncle Fatso, an all-purpose villain who at various times subbed for Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush:
These puppets are from a morality play that the Theater took on a European tour, a two-hour condensation of both the Old and the New Testaments. (Glad I missed that one!)
This puppet offers sage advice that, sadly, I am wayyyyy too weak-willed to follow:
I visited the puppets twice, once in the late afternoon and once the following morning early. First time, it took 45 minutes for my lungs to fill up with fluid—I have a severe mold allergy; second time, it only took 20.
Seeing them a third time would probably kill you! I thought to myself.
“Northeast Kingdom” is the phrase some resourceful person (possibly associated with the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing) came up with to describe the northeast corner of the state comprised mostly of 2,000 miles of hardwood forest.
Its beauty in the autumntime is something to behold.
Mostly I beheld it from the front seat of a car speeding 70 mph down a completely deserted I-91, a very wide, four-lane highway. That was a distinctly odd experience. One indication that we weren’t inKansas upstate New York anymore: All the “Look Out for Deer” signs had been replaced by “Look Out for Moose” signs.
The area is very sparsely populated, so I was prepared for gritty towns.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the total desolation and hopelessness of the towns. You’d expect them, at least, to be capitalizing on leaf peeper season with all sorts of boutique hotels, adorable shoppes peddling maple syrup and quilts, and cozy festivals designed to extract maximum dollars from bottomless tourist pockets. That’s the way we do it in upstate New York!
But they weren’t.
I spent the night in Newport, a town on Lake Memphremagog (which I wouldn’t dream of trying to pronounce even if I was very, very drunk.)
Newport has everything necessary to turn it into a tourism Mecca, and God knows, that town needs an economic wellspring, however negatively its stony, self-sufficient, get-the-gub’ment-off-our-backs inhabitants may view tourism.
But two of the biggest businesses along Main Street are the Dollar Tree and Family Dollar, plus there was a long line of people standing outside a nondescript building as I sped out of town early in the morning that—judging from the vigor with which these people were scratching and picking at themselves—I’m fairly sure was a methadone clinic.
I got so curious that I Googled it when I got home:
In 2014, Newport razed a significant portion of its downtown.
Why?
Because the town fathers and civic boosters got sold on an EB-5 urban renewal scheme that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme that raised $450 million, $50 million of which got embezzled outright to purchase a condo in Trump Towers.
It was the biggest fraud case in Vermont history. It got nicknamed the Kingdom Con.
Amazingly enough, the chief architect of the scam only got sentenced to 18 months in prison. Bernie Madoff’s ghost wishes it had hired that guy’s lawyer.
The boys throw stones at frogs for sport.
But the frogs die in earnest.
Is it as impactful as the first time? he asked.
No, I answered.
And it wasn’t.
Part of that, of course, was that the first time was an experience I was sharing with a deeply loved son.
Part of it was that magic, like lightning, seldom hits the same place twice.
Part of it was that now I have actually seen a performance by the Bread & Puppets Theater, and they aren’t very good.
But part of it was the day, unseasonably hot and humid, and the way the day accentuated the deterioration of the puppets, subtly but noticeably more decrepit than they had been the year before. Their amazing Easter Island-ish vitality seems to have seeped away. The smell of mold was very strong.
They were still very beautiful, of course.
These puppets are from a 1971 play the theater did about the My Lai massacre:
These puppets are from a 1980 play about the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador:
This puppet is Uncle Fatso, an all-purpose villain who at various times subbed for Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush:
These puppets are from a morality play that the Theater took on a European tour, a two-hour condensation of both the Old and the New Testaments. (Glad I missed that one!)
This puppet offers sage advice that, sadly, I am wayyyyy too weak-willed to follow:
I visited the puppets twice, once in the late afternoon and once the following morning early. First time, it took 45 minutes for my lungs to fill up with fluid—I have a severe mold allergy; second time, it only took 20.
Seeing them a third time would probably kill you! I thought to myself.
“Northeast Kingdom” is the phrase some resourceful person (possibly associated with the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing) came up with to describe the northeast corner of the state comprised mostly of 2,000 miles of hardwood forest.
Its beauty in the autumntime is something to behold.
Mostly I beheld it from the front seat of a car speeding 70 mph down a completely deserted I-91, a very wide, four-lane highway. That was a distinctly odd experience. One indication that we weren’t in
The area is very sparsely populated, so I was prepared for gritty towns.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the total desolation and hopelessness of the towns. You’d expect them, at least, to be capitalizing on leaf peeper season with all sorts of boutique hotels, adorable shoppes peddling maple syrup and quilts, and cozy festivals designed to extract maximum dollars from bottomless tourist pockets. That’s the way we do it in upstate New York!
But they weren’t.
I spent the night in Newport, a town on Lake Memphremagog (which I wouldn’t dream of trying to pronounce even if I was very, very drunk.)
Newport has everything necessary to turn it into a tourism Mecca, and God knows, that town needs an economic wellspring, however negatively its stony, self-sufficient, get-the-gub’ment-off-our-backs inhabitants may view tourism.
But two of the biggest businesses along Main Street are the Dollar Tree and Family Dollar, plus there was a long line of people standing outside a nondescript building as I sped out of town early in the morning that—judging from the vigor with which these people were scratching and picking at themselves—I’m fairly sure was a methadone clinic.
I got so curious that I Googled it when I got home:
In 2014, Newport razed a significant portion of its downtown.
Why?
Because the town fathers and civic boosters got sold on an EB-5 urban renewal scheme that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme that raised $450 million, $50 million of which got embezzled outright to purchase a condo in Trump Towers.
It was the biggest fraud case in Vermont history. It got nicknamed the Kingdom Con.
Amazingly enough, the chief architect of the scam only got sentenced to 18 months in prison. Bernie Madoff’s ghost wishes it had hired that guy’s lawyer.
The boys throw stones at frogs for sport.
But the frogs die in earnest.
