Archive - Dec 9, 2010
MIDDLEBURY — Abigail Nessen Bengsen, 27, recalled with glee her long involvement with “Night Fires,” a winter solstice celebration in which since 1982 local performers had pierced the year’s darkest night with a creative cornucopia of music, dance, poems and stories from throughout the world.
“My family was involved before I was born,” Bengsen said. “I grew up in it.”
But Night Fires went dark in 2007 when its creator, Lincoln’s Marianne Lust, needed a break from the arduous tasks of staging what was then a traveling performance.
NEW HAVEN — For 13-year-old Elijah Pedriani there’s nothing like the rush of the icy track, the rapid turns, the way everything else around him blurs together as he speeds by.
Ever since the New Haven teen returned from a one-week screening camp at the USA Luge headquarters in Lake Placid, N.Y., a few weeks ago, Pedriani has been itching to get back on the ice.
Did President Barack Obama cave in to Republican leaders when he didn’t need to? Would it not have been better for Democrats to let the tax cuts expire on Dec. 31 — along with unemployment insurance for 2 million jobless Americans — and then watch to see if House Republicans would continue to push tax cuts for millionaires, while the unemployed went hungry and tens of millions of middle-class Americans contemplate tax increases?
SUDBURY — The people of Sudbury have spoken, and the town elementary school will continue to teach all 20 students it serves.
Residents voted 110-39 to keep the k-6 Sudbury Country School open on Monday night following a two-hour information meeting held by the Sudbury school board. The vote was scheduled after a petition was presented to the board on Oct. 11 asking voters to consider shuttering the school due to falling enrollment and tuitioning students to other area schools.
MIDDLEBURY — It was fitting that the crowd should be given the helm at last Thursday night’s panel discussion at the Ilsley Library about the next generation of democracy.
NEW HAVEN — A horse named J.Lo — and the two New Haven sisters who ride her — have been causing quite a stir on both the local and national horse show scene as of late.
The horse and her riders, Hailey and Brooke, daughters of Kelley and Scott Perlee of New Haven, took home the gold in six different classes at the 2010 Grand National and World Championship Morgan Horse Show, held in Oklahoma City in October. Horses in these competitions are judged primarily on appearance and gait.
BRISTOL — Though the Bristol Christmas pageant will include the traditional Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus, complete with manger and barnyard animals, this year’s pageant takes on a rather untraditional format.
Seventeen-year-old Thomas Ahern, who has been taking a film class at the Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center, volunteered to film and edit a video version of the Christmas story that will premiere at the First Baptist Church of Bristol on Sunday, Dec. 12, on 4:30 p.m.
The Christmas season is here and as an adult I am supposed to be completely stressed out. Shopping, family gatherings, overeating and Yankee swaps are supposed to push me to the edge. I am supposed to feel bad that I am not a kid anymore and get depressed that my quest to recapture the innocence of my childhood will never be fulfilled. I say “Bah Humbug” to all that. The Christmas season actually makes me feel really good and, frankly, I think kids are the one who experience the most stress during the holidays.
