Take a walk through the Canterbury Shaker Village (288 Shaker Road in Canterbury; shakers.org, 783-9511) on Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. The walks are free; masks are mandatory and social distancing will be in place, according to the website. No reservations are needed; arrive five minutes early.
Walk in the galleries
The Currier Museum of Art (150 Ash St. in Manchester; currier.org, 669-6144) opens to the public on Thursday, Aug. 20. The current exhibits include “Open World: Video Games and Contemporary Art” and “Richard Haynes: Whisper Quilts.” The museum will be open Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Friday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (and closed Monday through Wednesday); for the rest of August, 10 to 11 a.m. will be reserved for members and seniors, according to the website. The museum will have timed tickets, which will be available for purchase online or via phone two weeks in advance. Admission costs $15 for adults, $10 for students, $5 for youth (age 13 to 17) and free for children under 13.
Books to go! Manchester has a brand-new Bookmobile, and it was scheduled to get rolling after a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Tuesday, Aug. 18, according to a press release. Books and kids activities are put in bags based on subject or reading levels. Weekly stops are from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. throughout the week — Mondays: Livingston Park (156 Hooksett Road), Tuesdays: Beech Street School (303 Beech St.), Wednesdays: Kelley Falls (440 Kelley St.), Thursdays: Jewett School (130 Jewett St.) and Fridays: Elmwood Gardens (83 Trahan St.). Score: +1 Comment:Everyone is asked to wear a face mask and practice social distancing at each stop — worth it for a few good books.
Baby-friendly New Hampshire The Granite State ranks 6th in the nation for the best state to have a baby, according to a study released by WalletHub, which looked at factors like cost, health care accessibility and baby-friendliness. Some of New Hampshire’s top rankings were for Infant Mortality Rate (first in the nation), Hospital Cesarean-Delivery Charges (second) Hospital Conventional-Delivery Charges (third), Pediatricians & Family Doctors per Capita (fourth) and Rate of Low Birth-Weight (sixth). Score: +1 Comment:Massachusetts, Minnesota and Vermont were the Top 3, respectively, according to the study.
Pedal for Hope The 15th annual Pedaling for Payson will be held Saturday, Sept. 12, at Elm Brook Park in Hopkinton to raise money for the Pedaling for Hope Fund to support programs at the Concord Hospital Payson Center for Cancer Care, according to a press release. The Hope Fund specifically helps support the Payson Center’s Nurse Navigator Program, which coordinates medical treatment and community outreach for the most vulnerable cancer patients. Bicycle rides range from 16 to 57 miles; there’s also a mountain bike adventure that makes a pit stop at Henniker Brewing Co. After the rides, there will be a socially-distanced barbecue lunch and live entertainment at the park. Score: +1 Comment:Anyone interested in participating can register online and create a fundraising page at pedalingforpayson.org.
Great American Ribfest canceled The second annual Great American Ribfest, originally scheduled for June, then postponed to August and then to October, has now been canceled altogether, an Aug. 10 post on the event’s Facebook page announced. The Merrimack Rotary Club is instead looking ahead to Father’s Day weekend in 2021 to hold the next festival, which is expected to feature barbecue vendors, food trucks, live music and more. Score: -1 Comment:“Despite developing new safety and hygiene protocols, now is not the right time to gather thousands of people together,” the Facebook post reads.
QOL score: 52 Net change: +2 QOL this week: 54 What’s affecting your Quality of Life here in New Hampshire? Let us know at [email protected].
Information from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services
Covid-19 news
On Aug. 11, Gov. Chris Sununu issued Emergency Order No. 63, an order requiring face coverings for scheduled gatherings of 100 or more people in the state. The order does not apply to children under the age of 2, nor to day-to-day operations for schools, local or state governments or nonprofits, or to gatherings where attendees are seated and separated by at least six feet from any person except that they are a member of that person’s household, party or table.
Although the daily number of new cases of and hospitalizations from Covid-19 continues to fluctuate up and down, the testing positivity rate in the state has remained low, state epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan said in an Aug. 11 press conference. Chan said the rate has stayed at around 1 percent, while the most recent three-day averages prior to Aug. 11 had been below 1 percent. “We do not believe we’re seeing another surge of Covid-19,” he said, but added that Granite Staters should continue to take all precautionary measures necessary.
During an Aug. 13 press conference, state Department of Health & Human Services Commissioner Lori Shibinette announced new reopening recommendations for long-term care facilities in the state. “The goal is to gradually reduce restrictions so that our residents can get back to regular visits from their loved ones,” she said. All non-outbreak facilities had been in Phase 1 since July 1, but on Aug. 13 they entered into Phase 2, which adds limited indoor visitation for the first time. Phase 3, Shibinette said, will begin for long-term care facilities in counties that see a drop in cases over a 14-day period. “Once we get into this phase, we open it up a little bit more to visitors, which are up to two visitors per resident for each resident in the facility,” she said. “Communal dining … and group activities with physical distancing is also allowed.” Shibinette added that there is the possibility that the reopening guidelines will need to be pulled back should case numbers start to go back up.
On Aug. 13, Sununu issued Exhibit P to Emergency Order No. 29, which had been issued on April 9. Emergency Order No. 29 requires state agencies, boards and commissions to submit recommendations to Sununu if any regulatory deadlines should be adjusted in response to the state of emergency. Per Exhibit P, Section Ed 306.18 of the New Hampshire Code of Administrative Rules has been modified to include “distance education,” meaning correspondence, video-based, internet-based and online courses, or remote instruction. The term also includes hybrid instructional models utilizing both distance education and traditional instruction in any combination. The local school board is responsible for all approval, coordination and supervision of “distance education” courses offered by the school district.
Also on Aug. 13, Sununu issued Emergency Order No. 64, which requires school districts to continue to adhere to all state and federal special education laws, no matter the model they are reopening under, and Emergency Order No. 65 authorizes assessments of civil penalties against all businesses, organizations, property owners, facility owners, organizers and individuals who violate any emergency order. Fines of up to $2,000 per day are issued for those who fail to comply with any emergency order, or up to $1,000 per day for those who fail to cooperate in an investigation of a potential violation of an emergency order.
Details of all of Sununu’s Emergency and Executive Orders can be found at governor.nh.gov.
Mask enforcement
Last week, the New Hampshire Retail Association, the New Hampshire Grocers Association and the New Hampshire Lodging and Restaurant Association submitted a letter to the Nashua aldermen regarding the amendment they are considering to their mask ordinance that would require businesses and employees to enforce the requirement that customers wear masks. “Retail workers are not law enforcement professionals who receive specialized training to enforce public laws and deescalate confrontations,” the letter reads. It says instituting such a policy could create conflicts and make it unsafe for employees and customers. It notes that current ordinances allow businesses to say that masks are required, and that law enforcement can step in if customers become belligerent or violent. “But there is distinct difference between a requirement that allows the business owner or employees to tell a customer that it’s the law, and putting them in the position of being the enforcement arm,” the letter reads. “We respectfully request that you reject the proposed amendment to the current ordinance and leave appropriate law enforcement personnel to enforce the order.”
Manchester Clean-Up Day will take place Saturday, Aug. 22, from 9 a.m. to noon, according to a press release. Four city parks will have stations with trash bags, masks and plastic gloves for all volunteers: Livingston Park (156 Hooksett Road), Rock Rimmon Park (264 Mason St.), Sheridan Emmett Park (324 Beech St.) and Sheehan-Basquil Park (297 Maple St.).
A new patriotic mailbox at Phaneuf Funeral Homes’s Boscawen location has been decorated to match the mailbox at its Manchester location, and now anyone who wants to retire a torn or tattered American flag can leave it in either mailbox. According to a press release, Phaneuf will “give it a proper retirement, per the U.S. Flag Code,” which says a flag in bad condition “should be destroyed in a dignified and ceremonious fashion, preferably by burning.”
DraftKings Sportsbook at The Brook in Seabrook has opened, giving sports fans the chance to bet on major professional and collegiate U.S. sports at a retail location, according to a press release. The sportsbook is the first retail location of its kind in New Hampshire, and it offers betting kiosks and video walls within The Brook’s stadium sports entertainment space, according to the release.
A ribbon cutting ceremony to recognize the completion of the Manchester Road Pump Station in Derry was scheduled to be held Wednesday, Aug. 19, according to a press release from the New Hampshire Drinking Water and Groundwater Advisory Commission and the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. The release said the pump station is “a significant construction milestone in the Southern NH Regional Water Interconnection Project,” and that it will increase water flow capacity for Derry, Windham, Salem, Plaistow, Atkinson and Hampstead.
It’s finally time to reveal the results from the poll that readers took way back in February, plus results from a quickie poll we created post-quarantine. Find out where your fellow readers go for their favorite dishes, where they bring their kids on rainy days and what events you can look forward to (mostly for next year, probably).
Also on the cover, the Mahrajan Middle Eastern Food Festival is on, this weekend in Manchester, p. 29. If all the choices in the beer cooler or at the bar overwhelm you, we’ve got some suggestions, p. 32. And if you’re looking for live music, check out our Music This Week listings, starting on p. 38. INSIDE: Mahrajan food fest
Covid-19 updateAs of August 3As of August 10Total cases statewide6,6606,840Total current infections statewide395326Total deaths statewide417419New cases219 (July 28 to Aug ...
All quotes are from Climbing the Mango Trees, by Madhur Jaffrey, born Aug. 13, 1933.
Leo (July 23 – Aug. 22) It just so happened that some American tap-dancers were staying with us at the same time. … [A] system of open hospitality was the norm. Welcome the tap-dancers.
Virgo (Aug. 23 – Sept. 22) There were actually two types of family history. There was the documented version that sat properly in my grandfather’s office. But there was also the … fables, family customs, and hearsay passed along by my grandmother Bari Bauwa and the other women of the house. A combination of perspectives is best.
Libra (Sept. 23 – Oct. 22) The summer seemed endless. … Mangoes that could be eaten out of hand came and went, as did cherries from Kashmir and litchees from Dehradun. … After lunch we all tried sleeping through the long hot afternoons. Head for the shade trees.
Scorpio (Oct. 23 – Nov. 21)I would then rush to observe the daily churning of butter. … Much better than watching paint dry.
Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 21)My older sisters had sweet voices and could carry a tune and so had been cast in every convent musical, whereas I, after a stint at the age of five as the Brown Mouse in The Pied Piper of Hamelin, had given up on the theater. If it’s not your thing, it’s not your thing.
Capricorn (Dec. 22 – Jan. 19) All I know is that nothing tasted more heavenly than that simple combination: grainy whole-wheat roti, raw onion, and green chili. Synergy works in your favor.
Aquarius (Jan. 20 – Feb. 18) It was an uncommon pickle. We knew of no other community that pickled dumplings. But we did, and delicious they were, too. You will enjoy an uncommon pickle.
Pisces (Feb. 19 – March 20) Mrs. McKelvie was my history teacher. She didn’t just teach me Indian history and British history, which were part of the set curriculum; I also learned from her that any subject could be fascinating if I delved into it deeply enough. She showed me how history, for example, could be researched from a hundred angles…. Any angle you want.
Aries (March 21 – April 19) My mother … had already taught me knitting at the age of five. By now I was knitting the most complicated designs…. Sewing was another matter. The fact that you can knit doesn’t mean you can sew.
Taurus (April 20 – May 20)Until then, I had never been to an exhibition of paintings and did not apply the lessons I might have learned from my art books to myself. New insights await.
Gemini (May 21 – June 20) Lower mathematics, on the other hand, was a startling composite. It consisted of arithmetic, which I could just about manage, and domestic science, a catchall subject that must have drawn its inspiration directly from Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Math may come in handy.
Cancer (June 21 – July 22) There was one other way at school of sharing … that was at lunch, which we ate together, as far away from the stone school building as possible. We all brought our lunches from home. If you’re going to bring a whoopie pie, bring enough to share.
Beyonce writes, co-directs and stars in this visual album whose music and story are based on 2019’s photorealistically animated The Lion King, to which she lent her voice, and which inspired the album The Lion King: The Gift (the songs from which appear here).
Not surprisingly, Black Is King is vastly superior to the 2019 movie that served as its creative prompt. Even the song “Spirit,” which felt flat to me in the 2019 movie, feels fresh and cinematic and joyous as used here. The visuals of this movie blend images of Africa (the people, the culture, the land, the flora and fauna), with eyeball-grabbing high fashion and, just, like, Beyonce awesomeness. Each song fits into the overall narrative, which is sort of Lion King-ish in its examination of children and parents and ancestors and duty. Some songs are more literally connected to the throughline than others, but each also offers up its own set of ideas. In particular, the song “Brown Skin Girl” and its accompanying visuals and presentation are so sweet and lovely I feel like I’ll be thinking about its ideas and message long after I’ve stopped thinking about the overall project’s Lion King comparisons. (There are graduate theses to be written on that video’s use of the female point of view in praise and honor of Black and brown beauty.) It’s so cool that this much artistry exists in such a mainstream-accessible way. AAvailable on Disney+.
Radioactive (PG-13)
Rosamund Pike, Sam Riley
Marie Curie gets the biopic treatment in this movie directed by Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novels Persepolis and Chicken with Plums, among others. Her background (she also directed the movie adaptations of those books) makes sense here because this story is specifically adapted from the graphic novel Radioactive and it has an overall graphic novel feel. In between more straightforward depictions of Curie’s life, we get scenes from Hiroshima in 1945, Chernobyl in 1986, a nuclear testing ground in the American West, a hospital in the 1950s where a boy is getting cancer treatment. This narrative choice doesn’t always work great but it also doesn’t not work — it shows the wider ripples of Curie’s work, along with the things she saw in her lifetime (like the use of X-ray technology to help treat soldiers injured during World War I).
Of the more conventional parts of Curie’s life, I liked how Pike shows us how Curie is desperately in love with her husband and fellow scientist Pierre Curie (Riley) but also struggles with the way her field is more comfortable with lauding him for their work than praising them together. We also, delightfully, get a fair amount of that “great scientist, less than great co-worker/boss/parent” element of Curie, which is so common in stories of Great Men. Curie is, at times, an awkward, single-minded person uninterested in the squishy emotional or career-diplomacy side of things. BAvailable on Amazon Prime.
Animal Crackers (PG)
Voice of John Krasinski, Emily Blunt.
Circus family drama and a box of magical animal crackers are at the center of this very plot-stuffed animated movie that I first heard about on a Cinema Sins Sincast podcast episode (“The Curious Case of Animal Crackers”) a few years ago. That podcast, with this movie’s co-director Scott Christan Sava (who returned to a recent Sincast episode), delved into not only the making of the movie but also the strange and at the time ongoing process of trying to get it distributed. It was an interesting tale and I went into this movie pulling for it.
But…
Owen (Krasinski) grows up loving the circus run by his uncle Bob (voice of James Arnold Taylor) and aunt Talia (voice of Tara Strong). Regular circus goer Zoe (Blunt) grew up loving the circus too — and Owen. When he proposes, she blissfully accepts but her father (voice of Wallace Shawn) wants her to follow in his footsteps at the dog biscuit factory. He bullies Owen into leaving circus stuff behind and coming to work for him. Years later, Owen, an official dog biscuit taster, is miserable in his job. And yet, when offered a chance to run the circus after the death of Bob and Talia, he doesn’t jump at it — Zoe does. On the way home from the funeral, Owen eats one of the strange animal crackers left to him by Bob and Talia and, poof, turns into the hamster whose cookie form he just ate. While his young daughter, Mackenzie (voice of Lydia Taylor) is delighted with her animal-daddy, Owen is at first reluctant to assume the role of “animal performer” that is the true secret to Bob’s successful circus.
There are a lot of other subplots: a dog-biscuit-factory inventor (voice of Raven-Simone) looking to create biscuits that taste like people food who is constantly undermined by a suck-up ladder-climber (voice of Patrick Warburton); Bob’s jealous bad-guy brother Horatio (voice of Ian McKellen), who still thinks the animal crackers and Talia should have been his, and the various exploits of Horatio’s not totally competent henchman Zucchini (voice of Gilbert Gottfried). It’s all a lot, and a serious streamlining of story would have benefited this movie that does have a lot of good elements. There is also a bit of adult “what am I doing with my life” stuff in here that felt like it would just be a lot of action-slowing blah-blah-blah to the kids who should be this circus and funny animal movie’s core audience. B- Available on Netflix.
