The dreams harbored by many young people of running away with the circus dates back well over 100 years. Who would not dream of boarding the train that carried the Barnum & Bailey Circus around the country, visiting far off places and performing death defying feats in front of enthralled crowds? For most who fancied that dream, it remained only that – a dream.

Some who did take the plunge likely discovered the dream was not what they planned as they ended up with jobs such as raising the tents, packing and unpacking gear, and cleaning up after a host of assorted animals. Still, for a rare few, the dream of performing in front
of awed crowds did, in fact, come true.

In the summer of 2019, two local teens and Hanover High School students William Ciardelli and Miki Hertog Raz realized that dream of performing in a circus without having to run away. These two seasoned performers toured with Circus Smirkus throughout New England as performers.

Miki Hertog Raz and William Ciardelli during the curtain call of the opening Circus Smirkus show in Greensboro, VT.

Although only sophomores at Hanover High School, these two young men are actually veterans in the world of circus performing. As students at the Marion Cross Elementary School, the two participated in the recreation department’s Van Lodostov Family Circus camps. In 2014, Miki’s family spent a year in Israel where Miki trained with Circus Florentine. William traveled to Zambia in 2016 and 2017 for a youth circus exchange with Circus Zambia. While home in Norwich, both boys worked on their acrobatic skills at Northern Lights Gymnastics.

Along with involvement at other regional circus training centers, the two participated in summer camps for youth sponsored by Circus Smirkus. As each of the boys began to specialize in individual acts, they received special instruction from renowned circus professionals, William in New York City, Miki in Maine.

Robin Allen LaPlante, director of external relations at Circus Smirkus, described her organization as, “A circus arts organization that inspires kids of all ages to develop artistic, athletic, and life skills through the power of performance. Our programs… blend the best of circus tradition and contemporary practice to create immersive experienc es that challenge kids to perform and live to the very best of their own abilities.”

The boys performing during Norwich Rec Department
Van Lodostov Family Circus camp

Auditions for the circus’s Big Top Tour, the one in which William and Miki participated, takes place in January 2020 for the upcoming summer’s tour. Applications for the tour come in from all over the world, with 40 to 45 kids selected for the live auditions held in
Brattleboro. Skill, personality, and the ability to work with a larger company play a part in the selection process. After the auditions, 30 young people are selected to perform in the upcoming summer’s Big Top Tour.

“The directors and coaches are looking at a variety of criteria to determine casting each year,” said Allen LaPlante. Besides skill and personality, those characteristics include stage presence, passion, versatility, maturity, and motivation, she said. Those selected show a high degree of competence and ability in all these areas.

Without question, the audition process is a stressful yet exciting time for the young performers. “The first time I auditioned, it was terrifying,” William Ciardelli said. “All the kids were so talented…but I really wanted to be on tour, so I trained all year for the (2019) audition and was lucky enough to be cast.”

Making the tour is especially tough for first timers. Past participants may re-audition for the next season, and Allen LaPlante said, “We see more than 60% of the Big Top Tour performers return each summer, leaving about ten spots for new performers from the live auditions.”

Not only did William make the cut, his lifelong friend and fellow performer, Miki, did as well. After making the Big Top Tour, Miki said, “I’m super excited to be part of a Vermont circus company.” The pair, along with almost 30 other young performers, then awaited the summer 2019 tour.

The Circus Smirkus Big Top Tour features performers ranging from ages ten to eighteen, Allen LaPlante said. “Younger performers present different characters and skills than older performers which adds variety to the show,” she noted.

Everyone in the tour works together very closely. “So, it’s important for the kids…to be willing to work well together behind the scenes,” she added.

The 2019 season was the 32nd year for Circus Smirkus’s Big Top Tour that begins in June and runs seven weeks, ending prior to the beginning of the next school year. The tour consists of about 70 shows held in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. The circus features a Big Top tent that seats around 750 people for each show. For the entire seven-week season, about 45,000 people attend the performances. Along with the performers and directors, a behind the scenes crew of over 50 individuals
work to make each stop and show success.

“Most of our shows are presented by community organizations, and they use the event as a fundraiser,” said Allen LaPlante. “Each year (these organizations) raise nearly $200,000 for education, the arts, and other worthwhile missions.”

Not only did Miki and William perform in these towns and states, they had the chance to perform for hometown friends and family. Circus Smirkus had several Hanover dates back in July.

Audience reaction is particularly important for the performers to help them get the most out of the experience. “I love seeing the kids in the audience sitting around the stage with their eyes wide and their mouths hanging open as they watch us perform,” said Miki.

Without question, the young performers with Circus Smirkus realize a great benefit from performing on tour. The parents and family members of these performers also see what a great experience this is for the young people. “The experience our son is having with Smirkus is truly life changing,” said parent Peter Ciardelli. “The show is incredible, but even more important is to see the self-confidence, teamwork, trust, and work ethic these thirty children build together.” That teamwork, the ability to work well with one another, is a critical component of the tour’s success. “Over the summer, the performers in the tour become one big happy family,” said Allen Laplante.

With the 2019 summer season over, Will had a chance to reflect on Circus Smirkus and what he learned. “Circus Smirkus was honestly a dream,” he said. “It was everything I could have gotten out of it. It was everything an aspiring circus artist could ask for. This last summer was a blast.”

What he learned about performing for a big crowd was important for instruction for a circus performer. “I learned a lot about how big your actions have to be in the ring for everybody to see you,” he explained. “There’re hundreds of (spectators) and only one of you. To stand out, you’ve got to be big.”

In the future, Will sees performing in circuses a very real possibility for him. “It is a personal dream of mine to not only tour and perform with Smirkus, but with other professional companies as well,” he said. “If it’s a possibility to do circus as a lifelong career, I would and will go for it. I’m aiming for circus college, but of course nothing is for sure.”

In the near term, both Miki and Will will head to Zambia with other area youthful circus performers for a youth circus exchange program in March, led by Will’s mother, Brooke Ciardelli.

How do you combine responsible investing, concern for the environment, and a desire to effect meaningful change in your local community? Norwich resident Norm Levy may have found one answer that you haven’t considered yet.

After working as a physician at Dartmouth-Hitchcock for 25 years, Norm retired in 2013 and began wondering what to do next. Aside from “for fun” projects – including wine tastings – he wanted to focus his ability on good works that would yield results in Norwich and the Upper
Valley. Starting from a passion for increasing sustainability efforts especially among lower-income members of the community, Norm started looking for a way to support local weatherization programs.

Starlake Village comprising a 14-home cluster

He joined the Norwich Energy Committee, through which he met with personnel at Twin Pines Housing Trust (now Twin Pines Housing) and organized free energy audits for moderate-income residents living in the Twin Pines-built fourteen-home cluster on Starlake Lane. The Energy Committee also promoted yearly Solarize campaigns, focused primarily on individual homeowners. Through these campaigns, he learned about community solar arrays, and that while some offer solar panels for users to purchase directly, others may be financed by a single funder who would then be able to sell the electricity they produced. He also learned that most projects were financed through Tax Equity Financing: incentives to private investors that go far beyond the 30% federal rebate offered to individual homeowners and are unavailable to non-profit organizations and municipalities. Typically these incentives would yield a full return on investment within five years and begin making profits. Finally, he learned about a community solar project in Colorado that was required to allocate 5% of its output to low-income customers, leading it to partner with non-profit organizations in order to meet this requirement.

Norm saw an opportunity to propose a partnership with Twin Pines and local installer Norwich Solar Technologies to finance and build a solar array on land adjacent to the Starlake housing cluster that would provide electricity to Starlake residents with no upfront costs to them. As the private owner of the array, with the puckish name Norm & Sun, LLC, Norm could access all of the tax benefits and control the cost of the service. He chose to share his benefits with the homeowners, charging them 25% less than their previous electrical bills and extending by two years the date by which he would recoup his initial investment and begin making a profit. The end result was a solar array generating electricity for at least the next fifty years.

As this was new territory for Twin Pines, the homeowners, and the property owner of the proposed site, there were a lot of concerns and
suspicions to overcome. But after numerous meetings with all parties involved, the land for the array was transferred to Twin Pines Housing, who in turn made it available to Norm for his project. The homeowners provided their yearly electrical costs, and Norm worked with
Norwich Solar Technologies to determine the amount of solar production needed to cover the expected usage. They ultimately chose a 65 kilowatt DC array, sufficient to cover the needs of the fourteen homeowners, an adjacent neighbor, and excess to extend a similar discount to Cover Home Repair in White River Junction. Norwich Solar Technologies designed and constructed the array. Now, just a few years after beginning the project, Norm’s project has “flipped the switch” and begun providing electricity as of July 1.

Starlake solar array on land adjacent to the Starlake housing cluster

The result is a win for everyone: for the planet and the environment, it’s a reduction in carbon dioxide generation; for Norm, it’s a responsible investment with an impact on his local community and a clear return once the project finishes paying for itself in a few years; for the residents able to take advantage of the solar electricity, it means clean energy, a reduction in their energy costs, a consistent, rather than fluctuating, bill, and money in their pockets that they can use as they wish. In addition, Norm wanted to make the project as accessible as possible, so instead of withdrawing payments directly from his customers on a set day, he provides a year of monthly payment vouchers to them. “I know people get their money on different schedules,” he says, “so this lets them pay when they are able.”

Norm hopes his story will inspire others of similar means and with matching interests. For new investors interested in following Norm’s model, it’s a huge win in that they can now learn from his model, simplifying their process substantially. Norm also reports that since the beginning of his efforts, local installers like Norwich Solar Technologies have seen the value of facilitating such private/non-profit collaborations, creating more options and opportunities.

Norm, who also buys LED bulbs in bulk and hands them out to people in the community in order to convince them to switch over to the more comfortable, sustainable, and cost-effective option, doesn’t see himself as a hero but as a member of his community with the responsibility to support it and the means to improve it. “It’s just fair, and I can afford it,” he reasons. Even when federal dollars go into weatherizing or solarizing a few homes, the benefits ripple out, in the form of lower energy costs for everyone, more resilient communities, a cleaner environment, and greater social cohesion. Now he hopes others will follow in his footsteps. “I didn’t want to encourage others to do it until I did it. Well, I did it. You can do it too.”

An investor-funded community solar array may seem like an odd opportunity, and that’s precisely why Norm wants others to know about it. “Financial advisors won’t tell you about this sort of thing. They’re looking at the conventional investment opportunities, with bigger programs.” In contrast, this is a local project with immediate and long-term benefits. The money customers save cycles back into the local economy. Without the ongoing energy production costs of other sources, solar arrays will pay for themselves and earn profit after the first seven years, meaning investors could then repeat the process elsewhere.

Norm is happy to talk with other investors who are interested in pursuing a similar project and in sharing his model; he can be reached at nblevy@icloud.com. He warns that the rebates will be shrinking over the next few years, though, so start now! In the meantime, he continues to seek creative and mutually beneficial solutions to providing clean, efficient energy in Norwich and beyond.

While perusing the pears at the farm stand, I heard a voice say, “Next week, we start impeachment.” I looked at the back of a head, and thought, “There’s an educator ready to walk his students through a constitutional complexity.” Then I remembered I lived in Norwich, and it clicked: that’s no social studies teacher; that’s our congressman. Over a couple of minutes, the farm stand employee, the congressman, and I chuckled, queried, and opined.

For a political nerd like me, those 100+ seconds were a unique gift: impossible to steal, replicate, or purchase. The experience got me thinking, in this season of gift-giving, how many presents we give each other in our community that simply cannot be wrapped.

In our neighborhood in the village, the woman in the house behind ours ignores my objections and spoons strawberry ice cream into dishes for my children, to their delight. The man next door found a basketball in some brush behind his shed. Instead of just chucking it back onto our driveway, he walked the ball up to our door and delivered it in person. One couple beams at my boys – calling them by the correct names – and tells them of an upcoming hunting trip to the Midwest. At the end of the road, no fewer than four adults have kept an unsolicited eye on our sons. Toward town, neighbors practically lay out a red carpet as invitation for us to use their property as a shortcut. Taken collectively,
it’s like having an advent calendar where each day one opens the little paper door to find a gift that is the glue of our town: goodwill, kindness, generosity, thoughtfulness, grace, selflessness, laughter.

At a Dartmouth football game, my sons lined up by the field house doors to greet the players as they emerged from Leverone. “Dad,” my youngest said, “if I got a high-five from Tom Brady, I would probably never forget it. But getting a high five from a college student is pretty awesome, too.” My oldest added, “Yeah, and there are not a lot of places in the world where you get to do what we just did.”

#mycuprunnethover
Not surprisingly, when I began to pay attention, Dan & Whit’s offered a gift, though you will never find it on the shelves. I saw the Book of Scottish Cookery over by the coffee. It seemed like a step into a Bizzarro-Norwich. I grew up in the 05055, and never – never – have I heard a fellow citizen express a craving for Scottish food.

As luck would have it, one Mr. Fraser – veteran, husband, brother, father, person who calls my sons “the helpers” and tells current cashiers that I used to ballroom dance with my fellow cashiers when I ran the register in the 1990s – was rearranging cardboard boxes by the shopping carts. “Now, Mr. Fraser,” I said, in direct defiance of his repeated efforts to get me to call him George, which I always did when I was a kid, but no longer do (except when I do), “this cannot possibly be a hot item.”

The proprietor of the general store that is the very definition of Norwich considered me with something in between amusement and pity. As usual, his pace was not rushed. “Actually, that book is selling quite well. We sold out of the first batch, and we have a whole bunch that customers have reserved in the office. There was a piece in the newspaper about it.”

Unconvinced, I thumbed through the pages and found a recipe. “George, get real. There is no chance you are going home today to make vegetarian haggis nachos.” Unsolicited, the young fellow manning the back register chimed in, “People are buying the book.”

My eyes were rolling more than a bowling ball when a gentleman walked briskly up the ramp into the store, marched directly to the display over which I was presiding, selected a copy of the cookbook in question, and proceeded to the front register. He had not overheard a syllable of our conversation. As Mr. Fraser, the young fellow, and I looked on, he purchased his copy and made his way down the ramp.

If you could package and sell the gleam in Mr. Fraser’s eye at that moment, your financial worries would be over.

You cannot, of course.

You can, however, celebrate all the wonderful gifts we give each other across this little town nestled in eastern Vermont.

For Dr. Deborah Kennedy, food is not only what we eat each day, but also the key to good health. As a practitioner of nutritional medicine, Dr. Kennedy believes food has the power to transform our health for the better, and her upcoming textbook intends to expand upon that mission.

Dr. Kennedy’s life as a foodie started at the age 4 when she began learning how to cook, and led to her job as a cook and sous chef throughout high school and college. This passion for food eventually emboldened her to pursue cooking professionally and then to get her PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry from Tufts University.

Dr. Kennedy was almost finished with her doctorate when she was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma and given only two weeks to live. Instead of giving up, she was determined to survive this diagnosis. “It became a very difficult confusing time when I was trying to research what I should eat to be healthy,” Dr. Kennedy said about her diagnosis. Twenty seven years later, she is still here to tell the story, demonstrating food’s powerful potential for healing. She didn’t want anyone else to have to go through what she did, so she resolved to help others transform their diets when facing similar health challenges.

Dr. Kennedy has written three books centered around children’s eating habits. The books tackle children’s habits at the table based on their eating personality and re-empowers parents to help their children make healthy eating choices rather than giving children the power as a picky eater. Dr. Kennedy’s latest book, Culinary Rehab: A Comprehensive Resource in Culinary Medicine, will shift the focus from children, addressing instead culinary medicine.

The e-textbook addresses nutrition after diagnosis with illness, and is meant for the healthcare professional, the wellness coach, or the home cook who wants to change the health of themselves or their friends and family. The textbook, which will tentatively arrive in July of 2020, is created in partnership with over thirty-six nutrition experts and a dozen chefs from the US, Canada, and England. The e-textbook will feature embedded video interviews with different farmers and chefs, as well as cooking demonstrations. Additionally, after completing the textbook, you are given the opportunity to take a test in order to gain certification in culinary medicine.

In partnership with Dr. Kennedy are a wide range of organizations and individuals who are nutrition experts and expert chefs working to change the food system. Notable organizations include The Bread Lab, Torriberra Mediterranean Center, Food Tank, Wholesome Wave with Michel Nischan is making food affordable for those who are food insecure, and Dr. David Katz’s organization, the True Health Initiative, will receive five percent of the proceeds from the textbook sales.

By combining expert testimony with practical advice, the textbook provides accessible answers to nutrition. Dr. Kennedy refers to it as a modular approach, or how to eat healthier step by step, instead of presenting the information at once. “By giving someone an unattainable goal then that sets them up for failure,” says Dr. Kennedy. “I think we can get people to be closer to doing that [eating healthier] by being gentler with our message.” Her modular philosophy addresses one eating habit at a time rather than trying to tackle them all at once. “If there’s one message I can give patients, it’s try and make at least one or two healthful choices a day.”

Her modular approach extends to how each individual approaches the textbook dependent on their health status. Working with chefs, Dr. Kennedy created what she calls ‘culinary competencies’ addressing common chronic illnesses and diseases.

After diagnosis, education about different aspects of food such as how to select produce, how to prepare it, and how to cook it is important to change dietary habits. The goal, Dr. Kennedy states, is “to make healthful food crave-ful and delicious. As nutritionists we need to stop telling people what they can and cannot eat and just get out there and tell people ‘Hey come try this, it’s fabulous.’” Inevitably intertwined with nutrition is the culture surrounding eating.

Dr. Kennedy said that the biggest challenge when people are changing their diet is busyness. “…the real answer lies in taking a breath before you put something in your mouth,” Dr. Kennedy said. The modular approach in the textbook attempts to answer this problem by not overwhelming the reader with many goals, but rather allowing them the space to work on one issue at a time. “There are one-hundred-twenty choices every day that Americans could do to make themselves healthier. Choose on actionable step that you know you can be successful at and when you get there, you’re ready to make another change.”