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Melissa Etheridge: Rockin' On with the Revival Tour "Fearless, committed, compassionate, and grounded: Melissa Etheridge embodies my idea of strong women," declares 35-year old Sherry Hutto, a registered nurse in Burlington. The inspirational qualities that Hutto points to, as do so many of her fellow Etheridge fans, are what make the singer so much more than just a pop rock star. The Grammy - and now Oscar - award-winning musician will bring her "Revival Tour" to Vermont with a July 26 Shelburne performance, in support of her latest album, The Awakening. Released last September, it was named one of Rolling Stone Magazine's Top 50 Albums of 2007, a year that began with the 47-year-old Etheridge celebrating a career milestone by winning in the "Best Song" category at the Academy Awards for "I Need to Wake Up," written for Al Gore's global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth. About The Awakening a Rolling Stone reviewer wrote: "Melissa Etheridge finds both a depth and an ease that eluded her on previous releases. She's never had a problem with passion - which is still present in boatloads here - but now she has discovered restraint, fun and the joys of pop." |
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After the Diagnosis: Living with Multiple Sclerosis Two years ago, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. My first reaction was relief. It was a beautiful, sunny October day in Vermont. I arrived in the parking lot of the neurologist's office, expecting little. This was just another in a long series of medical appointments I had shown up for over the previous four years. None of my doctors had been able to explain my puzzling symptoms. The fingers in my right hand were tingly and numb. So was the bottom of my left foot. I had repeated bladder infections, bright flashes in my eyes, thumping noises in my ears, dizziness, sudden and incapacitating fatigue, foot pain, leg cramps, unrelenting constipation, depression. I was 52. They'd tested me for many things, minor and major: Lyme disease, a spinal cord tumor, thyroid imbalance, carpel tunnel syndrome, herniated disc, prolapsed bladder, Achilles tendenitis. When I started bumping into things and falling down, my physician recommended I see a physical therapist. The physical therapist taught me a regimen of balance exercises but also suggested I might want to see a neurologist. |
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Mary Cassatt: Her Brilliant Career, a Retrospective Forever obscured to our contemporary eyes - by the array of serene mothers with their cherubic children, or images of refined Victorian-era young ladies replete in their formal wear sipping tea - is the extent to which the artist Mary Cassatt was a rebel in her own time. Personally, politically, artistically, and as a feminist - in all these ways this late nineteenth-century artist was among the cultural vanguard. Vermonters have the opportunity to enjoy a major retrospective of this extraordinary artist's work at the Shelburne Museum's Webb Gallery between now and October 26. The exhibit, Mary Cassatt: Friends and Family, features more than 60 works - by Cassatt, as well as several pieces by Cassatt's colleague and (on-again, off-again) friend Edgar Degas, and a Monet from the museum's collection. The inclusion of paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints by Cassatt reveal the scope of her artistic talents, which extended beyond Impressionism. And one of the "friends" referred to in the exhibit's title is Louisine Elder Havemeyer, a major figure in the history of art collecting and patronage in the United States. The close personal and professional relationship between these two women is a key dimension to the exhibition. Today, Cassatt is esteemed as one of the greatest women artists (though it took until the mid-1970s for her - or any women - to be grudgingly accepted into the sacrosanct pages of old school art historian H.W. Janson's History of Art), and she is also hailed as one of the finest American artists of her time. This is in large measure because she was an American, but was not working in America. Virtually Cassatt's entire career was spent in Paris where she lived as an expatriot until her death in 1926. She was in the right place at the right time as Impressionism took the City of Light by storm - and gutsy enough to ditch the art Establishment of the time (the Salon) and take up with a renegade group of artists who referred to themselves as the Société Anonyme des Artistes, soon to be called - disparagingly - "the Impressionists." |
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The Art of Aging in Style My Grandmother the Waitress "Life is no brief candle for me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations." - George Bernard Shaw My paternal grandmother Blanche was abandoned in Petersham, Massachusetts by my grandfather during the Great Depression. She was left pregnant and with two small children. She had no health or life insurance. No Social Security. No money. She lived in a small farmhouse, with water pump, wood cooking stove, ice box, outhouse… but with no central heat. |
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