Category: Featured Content

News & Notes 26/06/04

Tick reminder

The most common tick bite-spread infections in New Hampshire are “Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Powassan virus, and hard-tick relapsing fever (Borrelia miyamotoi),” according to a May 27 press release from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.

The release also reminds residents that mosquitoes in New Hampshire “can spread illnesses such as Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), West Nile Virus, and Jamestown Canyon Virus.”

“Ticks are typically most active from April to November, with tick encounters peaking in May and June. … Warmer weather also brings mosquitoes, and the risk of diseases spread by mosquitoes begins in the spring and continues throughout the summer and into the fall. DHHS partners with municipalities across the state to trap and test mosquitoes from June through October, using test results to inform communities of local risk for diseases carried by mosquitoes,” the release said. At dhhs.nh.gov, you can see the press release and find a link to the Department’s tickborne diseases page, which offers tips on protecting yourself and an explanation on the blacklegged tick (deer tick) life cycle.

According to a May 29 press release from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, while at a press conference in New Hampshire, Department Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “announced a series of major initiatives to strengthen the nation’s response to Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses.” See hhs.gov/press-room.

NH’s own Seth Meyers

Comedian and host of NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, Manchester High School West alum Seth Meyers will perform at the SNHU Arena in Manchester on Friday, Aug. 7, at 8 p.m. The performance will benefit CASA of New Hampshire and the Granite State Children’s Alliance, according to a SNHU Arena press release. See snhuarena.com for tickets.

Conference update

The New Hampshire Writers’ Project has changed the date and venue for its upcoming 603 Writers’ Conference, according to a press release. The conference will take place Saturday, Nov. 14, at Grappone Conference Center, 70 Constitution Ave. in Concord, the release said. The event will still feature keynote speaker author Chris Bohjalian and “expert-led workshops, a moderated AI panel discussion, the signature Pitch Party & Social, catered meals, and networking opportunities,” according to a press release. See nhwritersproject.org to register.

NH’s outdoors

The Granite Outdoor Alliance will hold its “Outdoor Industry Day 2026: The Barn Raiser” on Wednesday, June 10, from 5 to 8:30 p.m. at the Barn on the Pemi in Plymouth, according to a press release. “Outdoor Industry Day is GOA’s annual gathering celebrating New Hampshire’s outdoor economy and the businesses, nonprofits, public partners, and leaders helping shape the sector statewide,” the release said. See graniteoutdooralliance.org/nh-outdoor-industry-day for tickets.

Concord Parks & Rec and Merrimack River Watershed Council will hold a Park Clean Up Day on Saturday, June 6, from 9 to 11 a.m. at Healy Park and Exit 13, on Basin Street, according to the City Manager’s May 29 newsletter. Volunteers must be 18+ and sign a waiver; wear long pants and boats and bring work gloves and bug spray, the newsletter said.

Allenstown will hold a townwide yard sale on Saturday, June 6, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., according to allenstownnh.gov, where you can check for a listing of addresses holding a sale.

The summer Free Fishing Day in New Hampshire is Saturday, June 6, when residents and nonresidents can “fish any inland water — or saltwater — in New Hampshire” without a fishing license, according to wildlife.nh.gov, which noted that season dates and other fishing regulations still apply.

The Nashua ER, a free-standing emergency room that is a campus of Catholic Medical Center at 338 Amherst St. in Nashua, will hold a community event and open house on Saturday, June 6, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. featuring a touch-a-truck, free hot dogs and snow cones, kids’ games and free stuffed monkeys (while supplies last) and live entertainment, according to a press release.

Coming home

Nashville story has a New Hampshire ending

Amanda McCarthy is back in New Hampshire, after living and working in Nashville for the past several years. The singer-songwriter is still following her dream of music success, but she’s returning with a clearer sense of purpose, along with something she found harder to hold onto in Music City: joy.

“I’ve just been very disenchanted by Nashville,” she said by phone recently, while packing up her husband’s and daughter’s things and readying for final shows there in mid-May. After a Kentucky date on the return drive, her first Granite State gig is May 27 at Fratello’s Italian Grille in Manchester.

McCarthy said she began thinking about coming home after a harrowing moment about three years into her stay in the city. A tornado tore through her neighborhood, leveling nearly every building around her. Miraculously, her apartment was barely touched. However, she was shaken.

A 17-year-old boy was pulled from a unit that McCarthy originally was scheduled to occupy herself. That fact haunted her.

“I kind of had an existential crisis,” she recalled. “I just started thinking … music is fun, but what really matters? When I’m 80, what do I want to matter to me?”

Along with missing the ocean and the mountains, she desired the freedom to be herself and stop worrying about industry expectations. Another factor was her daughter, now in grade school. “Tennessee education is going downhill,” she said. “Opening that door allowed me to be honest with myself about myself as well.”

Still, McCarthy is clear-eyed about Nashville’s upside. Her second album, Looking for the Light, is evidence of that. The sophomore effort is a confident, layered collection of songs that swings from Nashville-flavored rockers to personal and confessional songs.

A through line from her debut LP Road Trip is both clear, and deliberate. The first record was about escaping challenges in her home town. Life ultimately worked out in Nashville, but she realized, “I can’t go back to New Hampshire until I can tackle the things I ran away from up there.”

The move, McCarthy concedes almost grudgingly, was a success. She credits the city with sharpening her craft in ways that wouldn’t have happened anywhere else.

“Even the bad parts really helped me,” she said. The relentless pace of Nashville’s live circuit, with longer sets, fewer breaks and lower pay, built a stamina she now takes for granted.

“Now, when I go home and I do a three-hour show with breaks, it’s really easy,” she explained. “I’ve always compared singing longer gigs to running. You don’t run 3 miles overnight. You start with a half mile and work your way up.”

After Fratello’s, she’s at Washington General Store for its music series May 28, and Exeter Brewing on May 30.

Her craft also evolved. Collaborating with a bevy of talented songwriters, she absorbed new techniques — sometimes at the expense of her own voice.

“At one point, I was writing with other people so much, I almost forgot to write by myself,” she said. “So I took a step back … to get back in touch with that part of me.”

When she’s back home, McCarthy is eager to rediscover something Nashville’s music economy had slowly drained out of her performing life — the simple pleasure of making people happy. She’s also eager to leave behind the Nashville norm of demanding twenty bucks to play a song request.

“At home I would just take everyone’s request and they’d probably tip me $20 or more anyway,” she said. “It really took out the joy of performing. I love making money from music, but I want it to be natural, not forced.” She didn’t comment on whether her policy applied to playing “Free Bird” or “Mustang Sally.”

Regarding whether Nashville was worth it, and if she accomplished what she set out to do, McCarthy offered an answer that reflected the work she’s done on herself.

“A lot of my obsession around trying to be famous… was from wanting to prove people wrong,” she said. “Through a mix of therapy and reassessing … it’s like none of that matters.”

What does matter, she concluded, “is what I’ve accomplished.” McCarthy is returning to where she began having bought a home with money she made as a musician. Beyond that, she’s written songs that hold up, that are true to who she is. “I do feel like I should be proud of myself for that.”

Amanda McCarthy
When: Thursday, May 28, 6 p.m.
Where: Washington General Store, 29 Main St., Washington
More: Full show schedule, including a June 3 gig at Homestead Restaurant in Merrimack, at amandamccarthy.com

Featured photo: Amanda McCarthy. Photo credit: Phil Silverberg

Adventures in baking

Sourdough has a life of its own

April Repoza and her daughter Bailey own and operate Bigfoot Sourdough in Milford, a sort of a combination homestead bakery and mad science lab that goes well beyond simple loaves of bread.

“We do make artisan loaves,” April Repoza said, “and then we do all of the very standard ones like jalapeno-cheddar and pesto-parm. We make bagels and they’re sourdough obviously, but they’re New York-style where they’re boiled in malt syrup and then baked. We make hamburger buns. We make stuffing cubes for Thanksgiving, cookies, and brownies. We do sourdough pizzas. It’s endless. But what we’re known for is when people reach out and say, ‘Hey, can you make this flavor?’ and if it’s something I’ve never done, I’ll say, ‘Of course — you know, let me try that.’”

“We love taking on crazy ideas,” Repoza continued. “We made a Pizza Night Loaf that we actually folded cooked spaghetti into. We used a tomato sauce-based dough and added cheese and it was literally a whole meal. You’d cut it and there’d be pieces of spaghetti inside. We made a Demogorgon Loaf for Stranger Things that went kind of viral. But yes, so we make regular loaves, too. Our English muffins have definitely been our best seller recently. We make standard sourdough English muffins and then we do a flavor of the week; this week we’ve got banana-nut ones and then we do a sourdough coffee cake of the week. This week we’re doing a Cosmic Brownie Coffee Cake. We make a cinnamon roll of the week and this week it’s based on the concept of a ‘kitchen sink’ cookie; we call it Bigfoot’s Junk Drawer. There’s a viral trend of people holding their sourdough like men hold their fish when they’re showing off their catches, so I upgraded my sourdough one week and made it into a fish shape”

Getting creative with sourdoughs began with April’s daughter Bailey, Rapoza said.

“She had gone to college and came home for Christmas break and said, ‘Mom, I got us a sourdough starter. Let’s try to make some bread.’ I was like, ‘OK, sure,’ I’ve never done it before. I went to culinary school 500 years ago, but I was like, ‘Alright, let’s try it out.’ We both just fell in love with it and fell in love with the science. We did hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of research before we even offered it out to friends or family or anything like that. I wanted to really try to perfect it before we went any further. Eventually we started getting known for our unique flavors and the different projects that we take on. Every product we make is sourdough-based, from cookies to king cakes, which we made this year. It was insane! I think we sold about a hundred different king cakes this season.“

The Rapozas started with a purchased starter, April said, but after developing thousands of batches of dough, their dough has evolved to the point of being uniquely suited to their needs. “It’s funny,” she said, “because people will say, ‘Well, I use a 200-year-old starter…’, and that’s partially true, but once you start feeding it your own water and your own flour, it changes. So it’s not the exact sourdough starter from 200 years ago. Ours is definitely its own thing at this point. My family jokes that if we go on vacation I have to arrange babysitting for our dough. My mom will come over to feed it; she’s like, ‘We never expected for you to have another child.’”

Working with sourdough, and learning to think about it as a living organism, has changed the way she looks at her baking and at food in general, Rapoza said. “We constantly look for ways to make not-so-healthy things healthy, but we also like to go kind of over the edge and make healthy things a little crazy too. I feel like you can do both.”

Bigfoot Sourdough
Where: 33 Cortland Road, Milford, 801-6265, facebook.com/BigfootSourdough
When: open Thursday through Sunday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pickups can be arranged seven days a week by appointment. Special orders require notice 48 hours in advance.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Books and strawberries

Time for the annual Strawberry Festival

FLOW, the Friends of the Library Of Windham, who support the Nesmith Library, is holding its biggest fundraiser of the year this weekend, its annual Strawberry Festival and Book Sale.

Mary Connelly, a FLOW member, said the event is time- and labor-intensive.

“We start meeting in September [the year before],” she said, “and then go all the way up until the end of May with the actual event. FLOW supports the library; we give about $7,000 in programming money for the teen, children and adults programs. We have supported some of the physical needs that they had this year. We helped pay for a new fence around the storybook garden that they have outside and bought a picnic table for them. The Library needed a new book return this year, and if there are other things that we can help out with as we go along, we try to support those. The Library here is a wonderful resource and we’re very proud of it. We hold two book fairs each year, one in December and then this one that’s part of the Strawberry Festival.”

The book sale goes on for four days, Connelly said.

“It starts next Wednesday,” she said, “and on Wednesday it’s for FLOW members, senior citizens and teachers. And then Thursday and Friday it’s open to anybody, after which we’ll pack up whatever’s left and take it over to the High School for the Strawberry Fest on Saturday.” By the end of the day on Saturday, the book sale will become a Bag Sale. “We provide the bag,” she said, “but then for $5, whatever you can fit in the bag, you can take home with you. Over the years, we’ve learned that we need to provide the bags; we’ve had people be a little too creative in the past.”

The key element of the Strawberry Festival however, is the strawberries. FLOW sells a lot of strawberry shortcake over the course of the day, Connelly said, serving upwards of 2,000 strawberry enthusiasts most years.

“Last year, we went through 480 quarts of fresh strawberries. Anyone who wants to learn the recipe of our shortcake is welcome to come volunteer, but it isn’t complicated.” FLOW sells a classic biscuit-based shortcake with strawberries and whipped cream, she said. “And there’s ice cream too, for people who want it.”

The Strawberry Festival is a way of recognizing the start of strawberry season, Connelly said. “It was established in 1984. Originally it took place later in the season, but now we’re just a little bit outside of it. It’s a great community builder. Last year we probably had 2,500 people come over the course of the day. It was just kind of nice and steady and everybody seemed to be having a good time. It was typical weather — one minute it was sunny, the next minute it was overcast. Then it was rainy and we had to go indoors. It’s New England, though, so there’s nothing you can count on, but the high school is big enough that it can handle things indoors or outdoors.”

Strawberry Festival and Book Fair
When: Saturday, May 30, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Windham High School, 64 London Bridge Road, Windham.
What: There will be food trucks, live performances and a bicycle parade.
More info: Visit flowwindham.org.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The power pull

Less Leg More Heart raises funds with Fire Truck Pull

Christina Hurley has given the question of what kind of fundraiser to hold a lot of thought.

She is the Founder and Executive Director of Less Leg More Heart, an organization dedicated to helping amputees get resources to help them thrive.

“We started eight years ago,” she said, “and we sort of threw spaghetti at walls for years trying to figure out what our niche sort of flagship events would be. There are a lot of galas and similar types of events. We wanted to create something that was unique, that had a little something for everyone, and that was able to involve a larger demographic in the community and create a real sense of inclusion and accessibility and community spirit.”

Which, in a nutshell, resulted in this weekend’s Fire Truck Pull.

This Sunday, May 31, from 1 to 5 p.m., Less Leg More Heart will host its third annual Fire Truck Pull and Festival. Participants pay for the bragging rights to physically pull an antique fire truck with a rope, competing with other individuals or groups. It is the sort of event that fuels bragging rights and spurs competition. According to Hurley, it was inspired by another, even more grunt-filled event in Maine.

“Some of our mentors are in the veteran space,” she said, “and Travis Mills, who runs a wonderful foundation up in Maine to recalibrate veterans, does an airplane pull. And they were mentioning the facets of it and how successful it’s been over the years. And so we started to look in our area, southern New Hampshire, about doing something similar like that. But, you know, airplanes have a little higher barrier to entry; fire trucks seem to be a little bit more up our alley. They are certainly fun for the kids and something fun for the strongmen in the area and athletes. We toyed with that three years ago and found it to be really successful. And now we’ve done it every year. This is our third annual Fire Truck Pull and Festival. It is a multifaceted event that has a large vendor village and a car show, as well as a fire truck pull. Children lead it off by pulling power wheels, and they’re rigged and educated by local New Hampshire strongmen. And then individuals will pull an antique, smaller-sized truck and then teams sign up to pull our larger rig — the 40,000-or-so-pound rig.”

There is something primal about pulling a fire truck, Hurley said, that speaks to each individual in personal and different ways.

“We’ve actually added some divisions to our awards this year,” she said. “We have really great trophies for the fastest team pulls — for first, second and third, but then we also have the strongest singles for men and women. This year we’ve added a costume award, a spirit award, a crowd favorite award, and a grit award. There’s an opportunity for folks to come out and be part of a community. We celebrate having people with all different types of abilities and different types of accessibility devices. In fact, several amputees last year, even from wheelchairs, participated in a pull and the strongmen would push it.”

This event has even surprised Hurley with how successful it has become, she said. “It’s just been really neat to see how folks just keep pouring out. We were unprepared for the 400-plus people who came to the event last year, and that’s a great problem to have.”

Less Leg More Heart’s Third Annual Fire Truck Pull and Festival
When: Sunday, May 31, from 1 to 5 p.m.
Where: Arms Park, 10 Arms St., Manchester
More: lesslegmoreheart.com/events

Featured photo: Courtesy photo

World tour

The Phil presents wide-ranging music

Folk Voices and Fantasies, an upcoming afternoon of classical music from the New Hampshire Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by The Phil’s Music Director Mark Latham, offers three works from three composers, each from a distinctly different corner of the world.

What binds together Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, and Carlos Chávez’s Sinfonía India isn’t style or era but instinct, Latham explained in a recent Zoom interview.

“The main connecting thread is composers using folk music from their native traditions,” he said.

For Petrushka, Stravinsky borrowed Russian folk songs and even a few German waltzes; most of its melodies weren’t his to begin with. Bruch did the same with Scottish reels and airs, and Chávez went even further, working not from memory or nostalgia but from within a living indigenous Mexican tradition.

To honor that, an orchestra member hand-built a traditional güiro for the performance. The notched hollowed-out gourd is usually played with tines and produces a ratchet sound. “Because the percussion element in the Chavez is very strong and uses a lot of Mexican instruments,” Latham said. “It’s trying as much as we can to use those instruments.”

It reflects a late 19th- and early 20th-century trend of composers “very interested to explore what was going on musically in their native arena,” Latham offered. “Bartok, for instance, was going out into the countryside before the advent of recorded sounds, actually notating local folk songs and that kind of thing … very early musicology.”

The concert begins with Stravinsky’s tale of a carnival puppet who turns out to feel things too deeply for his own good. It’s an exhilarating choice for an opener, and it concludes not with a bang but with a ghost: Petrushka, apparently killed, reappears hovering over the theater in the final bars, leaving the question of his humanity forever unresolved.

A superimposed C major and F-sharp major, called the Petrushka Chord, recurs throughout the work. It denotes the main character’s many dualities: puppet and person, ridiculous and suffering, knowable and unknown. The motif became a go-to for composers like John Williams, who used it for his “Theme From Jaws.”

Fifteen-year-old violin prodigy William Yeh solos on Scottish Fantasy. Yeh is a student at the Juilliard School in New York and last year’s Sempre Musick Competition winner. The Phil has collaborated with Sempre Musick for the past few years, Latham said. “These days, the Grand Winner plays their piece with the New Hampshire Philharmonic the next season.”

The piece is a back-and-forth that Latham described as a conversation. With the young soloist still developing his voice, it has its own particular texture — the orchestra takes its tempo from listening to Yeh, and shapes its phrases around his. “The soloist provides the main musical impetus, and then we answer.”

The evening ends with Chávez’s percussion finale and its offbeat sparks that, Latham said, “aren’t quite agreeing with the rhythm,” and a frenetic ending that inspires both audience and orchestra. “It’s like a rock drummer … ‘Let’s just go for it at the very end,’ right? It’s percussion going crazy.”

Latham has made the case throughout The Phil’s current season that classical music belongs to everyone. Folk traditions aren’t less powerful when they’re arranged for an orchestra, and the barriers people feel entering a concert hall are mostly imaginary.

“If people at a classical music concert would be more like a rock concert,” Latham said, “that’d be fantastic.”

Beyond that, he believes music is a salve for challenging times, remembering Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache’s observation in an interview with a French journalist 30 or 40 years ago. “Beauty is a stepping stone to freedom,” he recalled him saying.

Latham added that the act of creation is, more often than not, a political one.

“Some people say, ‘art for art’s sake’ — I’m not one of them,” he said, citing Leonard Bernstein’s words in the aftermath of his close friend John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “This will be our reply to violence; to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

Folk Voices and Fantasies: Music Rooted in Culture and Imagination
When: Saturday, May 30, and Sunday, May 31, at 2 p.m.
Where: Seifert Performing Arts Center, 44 Geremonty Drive, Salem
Tickets: $5-$35, nhphil.org

Featured photo: Clockwise from top left Sean Williams, Pauline Berger, Margot Lasalle, Anna Multone. Courtesy photos.

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