Rumble Strip

Rose Friedman and Tara Reese were in the early stages of starting the Civic Standard, an organization that gives the people of Hardwick excuses to get together. Rose and Tara were explaining this idea to Brenda at a baseball game and Brenda said that what she really wanted was for them to make a mystery dinner theater show. Nobody really thought that this would happen. But Rose couldn't stop thinking about it...

Thanks to Brave Little State and Vermont Public for letting me run this episode on Rumble Strip. You can find Brave Little State wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can read more about them by visiting Vermont Public, at vermontpublic.org. Thanks to Myra Flynn, who worked with me on this show, and the rest of the Brave Little State team: Angela Evancie, Mae Nuguskey and Josh Crane.

This is a guest episode by my friend Bianca Giaever, producer of the podcast Constellation Prize. This is the first of a 4 part series called Nightwalking.

I drove around and asked people 'What class are you?'. Here's what they said.

For years I've been wanting to make a show about the terrible cultural divides growing in our country, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without getting into boring conversations about politics. So I backed into an experiment. I asked my editor at Vermont Public if I could drive around and ask people, 'what class are you?', just to see what would happen. And he said, 'uh...sure.' So I did. This is the series that came of that experiment...

A very intimate look at where food comes from

Mary Lake is a sheep farmer and sheep shearer and itinerant slaughterer. She is a tall, muscular woman in bib overalls and a baseball hat and dangly earrings she carved out of a ram’s horn. She wears a chain around her waist with a scabbard full of knives. And she loves sheep, which is one reason she participates in their slaughter. This is a story about where food comes from.

It's town meeting day. So let's TALK ABOUT IT AGAIN!

It's town meeting day here in Vermont. In most of New England, town citizens become legislators for one day a year. They get together in school gyms and town halls and vote in person, and in public. This centuries long practice of towns doing the slow and hard work of disagreeing and arguing and compromising on how to govern themselves—this has a profound impact on a place, and what it means to be from a place. Sometimes it’s contentious. Sometimes it’s boring...

Sheila LaPoint wrote a post in Front Porch Forum asking if there was anyone in town who could turn her grandmother's fur coat into a teddy bear. She didn't want to spend a lot of money. She can't wear the coat anymore. But she wants something that will help her remember her German grandmother. My friend Clare Dolan lives down the road from Sheila, and when she read Sheila’s post about the teddy bear, it called to her...