Category: Q&A

Queen City Black Market offers art, oddities, hot dogs

Queen City Black Market is an event focused on the alternative, antique and oddity culture in New Hampshire. The market is being put on by Janelle Havens, who runs and operates Lustshroom, Etc. with a focus on “unique footwear for unique people,” according to its website. Havens spoke to the Hippo about the event. Visit lustshroometc.square.site for more information on the event and business.

What is the Queen City Black Market?

The idea is that we get a bunch of weird vendors, right, taxidermy or like weird art, prints and designs. They’re from all over New England, but we get them all together under one roof in Manchester and we have a night where it’s free to enter. People can come in, obviously meet some cool people, buy some cool stuff, and then be on their merry way. We’ll have an after party afterward at the Shaskeen, which is more of that typical, informal, everyone gets together at a bar.

How did this all get started?

It’s the first year. Hopefully, if all goes according to plan, it will be an annual thing. I had started my own business a little over a year ago at this point so I was traveling all over New England doing markets and shows and conventions. I was doing a lot of tattoo conventions and then I ended up going to the Worcester Punk Rock Flea Market in Massachusetts and I was so inspired … I was like, ‘Wow, I wish I had something like that in my backyard, this stuff doesn’t happen in New Hampshire,’ and I feel like a lot of people that I meet say the same thing, but it can be in New Hampshire, we just have to do it.

What is your business Lustshrooms, Etc. and what do you do?

My business is selling platform shoes, so the typical big goth boots type of deal. I also sell oddities. I’ll take animal teeth, mount them, frame them, for a nice wall decoration. Also just like weird stuff that I might come across. So like a Last Rites kit I’ve come across a couple of times, so I’ll sell that but basically weird stuff and then also platform shoes. My partner tattoos and so we were at a tattoo convention for his work and I was just sitting around looking and I was like, ‘You know, everyone here either wears platform shoes or would buy a pair, right, and I had my own experience with buying them, you can really only buy them online. There’s no store that sells them other than like in Salem, Massachusetts, which can be a hike and can be prohibitively expensive for people. Well, why not have a pop-up business where you can go to these places where this clientele would be, they get to go, they get to try it on in person, they can see if they like it, they know who’s selling it to them …

Is weird just something that’s not normal or how would you characterize that?

I would say it’s just really not mainstream. It’s not your typical stuff that you might find at Marshall’s. … The first reaction is, ‘Oh, that’s really weird,’ but then it’s ‘Oh, but that’s cool, though.’ It’s so weird, it’s cool. … [T]he idea that this is somewhere that my dad would probably be at, and he’s a 50-year-old dude that listens to Guns N’ Roses. He doesn’t necessarily fit that stereotypical goth or punk or whatever, but he would still go and have a good time. I will have a good time as someone that might be more stereotypical punk, right? It is also all ages, so, you know, if a 12-year-old kid is kind of in their angsty phase, that’s a great spot for them. … it’s just really anyone that would find it cool.

What are some of the logistics of the event and after party ?

It’s Saturday, Feb. 1, 1 p.m. to 8 p.m., all ages, free at the door. There will be a food truck, it’ll be Teenie Wienies food truck …Right after the market, 8 p.m. is when doors open at the Shaskeen for the after party. That will be Cytokine, Ratblood, and Graveborn playing that, all three local hardcore bands. That’s 21-plus $10 at the door.

So what types of vendors or stalls will be there?

We have quite a range. We have Vericatures, who is a woman from Boston who does caricatures. … We’ll have Hallowed Harvest Oddities, which is someone down in Connecticut… and they do bug pinning and taxidermy and that kind of wet specimens stuff … Then we have a couple local artists like Ghost Ship Art and Emily V. Arts. We’ll also have Karen Jerzyk, She’ll be there selling prints of her photography. It’ll be a lot of Manchester-based people because obviously that’s also the point. We have Evol-Eye Co. … and they do clothing, pins, beanies, stuff like that and it’s traditional tattoo streetwear-type designs but it’s all centered around mental health awareness and recovery. There’ll be a whole lot of fun people and weird stuff. We also have Crown Street Grillz. She’s based in Nashua and she does teeth grills, like the gold teeth and silver teeth. She does all kinds of funky designs with it, which is pretty uncommon around here. So she’ll be in person fitting people and making those, which would be fun and different. That’s just the five that I thought of off the top of my head.

Queen City Black Market
When: Saturday, Feb. 1, from 1 to 8 p.m.
Where: Henry J. Sweeney American Legion Post #2, 251 Maple St., Manchester
Admission: free, all ages welcome
More: lustshroometc.square.site

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Janelle Havens. Courtesy photo.

Middle and high school students show their skills

The New Hampshire Science and Engineering Exposition Association will be putting on its first middle school science fair in May, in addition to its high school science fair in March. Both fairs will be held at NHTI. Deb Schuh is the president of the organization and her husband, Dana Schuh, is the treasurer. They both spoke to the Hippo about the upcoming science fairs.

How did the science fair come about?

Deb: So, many years ago, actually it was around early 2000 to 2003, there were … some science teachers. One of them in Milford who was really into life sciences and bio sciences got together with another couple of teachers and people who were interested in doing a competition. I think someone had a connection to Manchester Community College, they had Manchester Community College run a fair back in 2003. It was mostly Milford and I think Seacoast Technology that played in it. That was sort of the first fair. So it started from then, and it’s changed over the years … it kind of just got started because science teachers wanted to get more involved.

Dana: The name of our organization is, all spelled out, New Hampshire Science and Engineering Exposition Association. The Association is really the group that runs the fair, but the fair is known as Expo….

Why did you all decide to branch out from high school to middle school students as well?

Deb: We have for years been attending the New Hampshire Science Teachers Association conferences, usually twice a year, and we hear a lot from middle school teachers. … we clearly hear that there’s an excitement at that age group for kids to start to participate in science, the teachers have looked for it. We want kids to have gotten into the sciences when they’re a little bit younger and it’s a cool thing to do … Get that pipeline going a little earlier when the kids think it’s fun and interesting. There’s a lot of excitement at that age.

What sorts of projects or experiments do you expect to see in the middle school science fair as well as the high school one?

Deb: We went to one a couple years ago, I guess it was last year…. They had one that was fifth- and sixth-graders and they’re doing things that play with gravity or play with growing something or how things move in general. It can be a little bit physics-oriented, like what you can do with water or what you can do with falling water and how things in the world react. So those, they’re a little simpler, but they’re sort of fun. … When you get to high school, we have a complete range. We have plenty of projects that if you’re not a judge and qualified in that area, you can’t even understand it. So it’s very high level. There are high school students that are producing college-level projects. They are looking at photosynthesis and how that can help purify water, that kind of thing. They’re looking at environmental studies. They’re looking at biotech. …

Dana: Well, I was just going to say, one of the things that’s sort of reinforcing that it’s fun is we have many judges that have been coming for over a decade, year after year, because they enjoy the event so much. These are judges from the schools, these are judges from industry, these are just people that love seeing the young kids showing their stuff with enthusiasm and nervousness.

Why is it important for younger kids to get involved in the STEM field?

Deb: It’s kind of the same when you think about the big push for robotics. We need more high-tech skilled kids. … So, the younger you can get them attracted to those kinds of things and the more fun they have with it, the more they’re likely to stick with it. We want more schools. We sort of average anywhere between 11 and 18 schools a year. It goes up and down. … You want it to be more students. You want more energy around those fields. Mostly we need a workforce on biology, on biotech, on everything with life sciences, on everything with environmental sciences, right? We don’t have enough of the … even engineering and computers. We don’t have enough of that skill set and we need more.

Does a student need their school to be a part of the fair to apply?

Deb: A lot of the students come in individually without school sponsorship, and then there’s a bunch of kids that do come with school sponsorship. So it’s a mix. We also can get home-school kids. —Zachary Lewis

2025 New Hampshire Science and Engineering Expo

High School
When: Thursday, March 20
Where: NHTI Concord’s Community College, Dr. Goldie Crocker Wellness center, 19-23 Institute Drive, Concord
Registration deadline for participants is Sunday, Feb. 9

Middle School
When: Thursday, May 22
Where: NHTI Concord’s Community College, Concord
Registration deadline for participants is Tuesday, April 15, with final forms due by Sunday, April 27.

More: nhsee.org

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Courtesy photo.

Scottish Arts celebrates a night for the poet

Claire MacPherson is the president of Scottish Arts, an organization that has taught and preserved a myriad of Scottish musical traditions since 1984, including Highland dance, piping, drums and Scottish fiddle. Lezlie Webster, the founder of the organization, also provides weekly instruction to the New Hampshire Police Band. They host the Indoor Scottish Festival in April in Manchester as well as the Quechee Scottish Games and Festival in August in Vermont. On Saturday, Jan. 18, they will be celebrating the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns with Burns Night at Castleton in Windham. MacPherson spoke to the Hippo about the event. Visit scottisharts.org or call 227-0207 for more information.

What exactly is Burns Night?

It’s really a celebration of Scotland’s most beloved poet, Robert Burns. It happens around his birthday, which was the 25th of January, 1759. People gather together and celebrate his life and works. The night typically follows quite a set pattern, so it starts off with a welcome to dinner and then the haggis is piped out. We have something called the Selkirk Grace, which is a little poem that’s typically recited and then someone will do the “Address to [a] Haggis,” which was one of his famous poems. … then the speeches begin.

One of the first speeches will be ‘The Immortal Memory,’ which is kind of the main speech of the night and typically follows a pattern of talking about Robert Burns and highlighting some of his works. The person giving the speech can take it wherever they want to go, but it would typically involve a deeper dive into some of his poems or some aspects of him, because he covered so many different topics for his works…. Interspersed throughout the evening are some poetry readings. The night will usually end with a rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ which was his, what you could look at as a world anthem, really, because everyone sings it to bring in the new year. We typically have a lot of music in there as well, because he wasn’t just a poet.

It began as a Burns supper in a place in Edinburgh, and his friends would gather and just remember him and recite his poems because he is our national poet and our most beloved son. It just blossoms into this huge event.

Besides being a poet, who was Robert Burns?

He was a humanitarian. He was very proud of being Scottish. He’s probably best known because he chose to write in the Scots dialect. He was really keeping that language alive and infusing pride in it. … He did a tour of Scotland and he would pick up songs, maybe even just fragments of a song that had been long forgotten, and he would go home and work on it and get a tune going. … That way he was keeping our music alive, the words and the tunes, the old tunes. His songs are just as important as his poetry. He was an amazing lyricist as he was a poet. So … because we’re a school of music, we’ll have a lot of music infused throughout the night.

Who will be performing music on Burns Night?

We’re very lucky to have Kirsten Z. Cairns, who’s coming to sing. She has the most beautiful voice. She will be singing some of her favourite Burns songs. Then we have Celtic Beats, who will be doing our traditional Scottish music. That’s pipes and fiddle, drums. Then we always have a little bit of a treat where we have our pipe band join us. That’s our sister organisation, the New Hampshire Pipes and Drums. We end our night on a Ceilidh, which typically means a dance. It has an older meaning to do with coming together and telling stories and some dancing and singing at somebody’s house, but typically now the meaning is to get together at the end of the night to do set dances. So Lezlie, our founder, walks people through the steps and everyone gets involved. In fact, it’s more fun if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s a great community feel to it.

What is Scottish Arts and what do you all teach there?

Predominantly, we are a school of Scottish music and dance. We have about 50 students at the moment doing bagpipes with Lezlie Webster, who’s our founder and bagpiping teacher. She’s also a judge. She’s as highly qualified as possible to be, so our students are really getting an amazing pipe instruction from her. We have about seven Highland dancers at the moment. Then we have drumming, which we do through our sister organization.The lessons are done through the New Hampshire Pipes and Drums, which is separate but connected to us. A lot of our pipers end up going into that pipe band. Drumming is done through that [too] and that’s snare, tenor and bass drumming. We also have fiddle lessons as well. That’s like violin, but it’s a Scottish fiddle.

Do you all have any other events coming up?

We run some events throughout the year. So the first event that we have coming up is the Indoor Festival, which will be at Manchester Memorial High School and that will be on April 12. … There will be the usual solo piping, pipe band competition and then dancing and drumming. There will also be some workshops we are going to put on for our students too, just to help enhance their instruction. We have some amazing judges coming to that, Bruce Gandy and Bob Worrall, who is a legend in the world of piping in Glasgow. He’s hosted that for a long time, and then we also have a little judges’ event performance at the end. That’s really a treat to see some world-class professionals playing the pipe at the end of the event.

Burns Night
Where: Castleton, 58 Enterprise Drive,
Windham
When: Saturday, Jan. 18. Cocktail hour
5 to 6 p.m. Call to dinner 6:05 p.m. Ceilidh
8 p.m.

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Previous Burns Night.