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Lager laughs

Three Sheets host stops in Henniker

For over a decade, Zane Lamprey traveled the world and drank for a living.

His pub crawl series Three Sheets ran for four seasons starting in 2006. In 2010, Drinking Made Easy launched on Mark Cuban’s HDNet, followed by the crowd-funded Chug. Lamprey’s most recent series, Four Sheets, aired its final episode in early 2020.

Since then Lamprey has done a lot of standup comedy, primarily at places like Henniker Brewery, where his Another Round tour stops on March 22. He began playing the craft beer circuit out of necessity; clubs and theatres were slow to open after the pandemic, and he needed work. He’s now done more than 500 brewery gigs, with 10 in New England on the current run.

“I have a lot of great relationships at breweries because of the shows I’ve done, and I reached out to them,” Lamprey said by phone recently. “They loved the idea of having me come in and bring attention to their brewery, fill it with people, do a night of comedy, and so it was a very synergistic kind of thing.”

Unlike many who use stand-up to launch a television career, Lamprey took an inverse route, and after he finishes writing a memoir in progress he’ll begin a book about becoming a comedian at age 49. He says it’s all a natural progression: “I’ve always been someone, in all the shows that I’ve done, who needs to understand comedic timing and how to tell a joke.”

Through his years of imbibing across the planet, Lamprey has gathered more than enough material for multiple comedy specials. His latest, The Medium Club, premiered in January. “I’ve made a lot of poor decisions that have led to some great stories,” he said.

He’s also drunk many strange concoctions in his years, like rum aged in a bottle with a drowned snake. He once knocked back 23 shots, each containing a preserved scorpion. Later he realized that “your body is not designed to digest exoskeletons.” The shoot-and-chew experience led to an excruciating, barrel-full-of-monkeys situation.

But Lamprey has never declined a proffered glass, because entertainment.

“I always said that my job in any of the shows I’ve done was creating a water cooler moment,” he said. “Doing those shots are what people talk about. For that reason, I’m happy to do it … to take one for the team.”

Non-liquid challenges can be different, and Lamprey recalled one time he did draw the line.

“The only thing that I said no to is balut.” The popular Philippines snack is a two-thirds gestated duck egg hard boiled and served with salt and vinegar. “Basically a baby duck sitting on the yolk or the amniotic sack…. I was like, absolutely not. I tried drinking enough beers to bring myself to do it, and I couldn’t get to that place. It was too vile.”

Lamprey prefers to remember beautiful moments, like the time he rented out the Eiffel Tower for a Champagne party that wrapped as the sun was rising, or filming in Croatia a decade after their civil war. “It was very eye-opening,” he recalled. “These people weren’t war-torn and bitter because of what they went through, they were … embracing life and moving on — without forgetting about the past.”

While there, he ran into a restaurant owner singing with his friends in the street, and went in for a drink.

“We weren’t even going to shoot there … and it was one of the best experiences of my life,” Lamprey said. “But you could name any episode, and I would tell you about a moment in it that I was so grateful to be doing what I was doing.”

When Lamprey is asked why he left television, his response is that it left him.

“People every night are just like, ‘Please go back and do one of those shows again.’ I would love to.” Networks that ran his shows, like Spike, Fine Living and HDNet, are long gone, supplanted by YouTube and TikTok.

“I’ve had the privilege of being able to go and do some of the coolest things ever and be followed by a camera crew,” he said. “But the landscape of television has changed. Places where Three Sheets would have fit perfectly … no longer exist. They drop the vowels in their name, and all they do is paranormal shows.”

That said, Lamprey’s not about to stop telling jokes to crowds.

“I would actually choose the stand-up over those shows,” he said. “Which is probably why now discussions to do another TV show have resurfaced; but it would have to be perfect for me to do it.”

Zane Lamprey

When: Saturday, March 22, 8 p.m.
Where: Henniker Brewing Co., 129 Centervale Road, Henniker
Tickets: $25 and up at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/03/20

• Wine and comedy: An eclectic wine bar celebrates its third year with Mona Forgione, who leans into motherhood for laughs. She got into standup late in life, initially to talk about a pair of surgeries gone wrong, and has a colorful history that includes a stint in the roller derby. Klia Ververidis opens, ahead of her slot at New York’s Laughing Buddha Comedy Festival. Thursday, March 20, 8 p.m., Vine 32 Wine + Graze Bar, 25 S. River Road, Bedford, $25 at eventbrite.com.

• Java jam session: A monthly coffeehouse gathering features a headliner set from The Treetellers, an acoustic string trio led by Scott Heron of married bluegrass duo Green Heron, on banjo, mandolin and vocals, with guitarist Joey Clark, who also sings and plays harmonica, and upright bassist Larry Houghton. The show kicks off with an open mic; signups at 6 p.m. Friday, March 21, 8 p.m., Highland Lake Grange Hall, Route 11 and Chase Hill Road, East Andover, andovercoffeehouse.org.

• Before The Beatles: Early on, the Fab Four were a five-piece, with drummer Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe on bass. Though Ringo Starr replaced him, Best continues the raw sound The Beatles had during their days at Liverpool’s Cavern Club and in the raucous Hamburg, Germany, bar scene. An area show from Best and his band includes music and memories from the days prior to world fame. Saturday, March 22, 8 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $50 and up at tupelohall.com.

• Junk rock jubilee: Thirty years after a trio of Goffstown High kids played drums in a talent show, Recycled Percussion continues its unique junk rock sound, and a local show celebrates the anniversary of the group, which went from a humble start to playing shows across the globe, including a years-long Las Vegas residency following their big run on America’s Got Talent. Saturday, March 22, 3 and 7 p.m., Dana Center, Saint Anselm College, Manchester, $50 and up at anselm.edu.

• Poetry and music: Soon after graduating from Berklee College of Music in 2010, Liz Longley was regularly selling out area venues months in advance, powered by sensitively crafted songs like “Unraveling” and the metaphor-rich “Camaro.” . Sunday, March 23, 7 p.m., Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter, $19 at portsmouthnhtickets.com.

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang


We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth, 256 pages)

It was inevitable that after K-pop, or Korean pop music, conquered America, K-lit would soon follow, with a suitable time for translation. But one of these things is not like the other. Unlike the frothy music genre, the latest Korean novel to be published in the U.S. is a serious work that challenges readers to confront evil and pain, while not closing our eyes to love and beauty.

At the center of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part are two friends who had fallen out of touch, an urgent request and a small white bird.

The events of a short but precarious journey are woven into a larger tapestry of a horrifying period in the history of South Korea, in which an estimated 10 percent of the population of Jeju Island were murdered in a violent campaign in 1948 that, like 9/11, came to be known by its date: Jeju 4.3.

The story begins with the nightmare of the narrator, Kyjunga, who repeatedly dreams that she is seeing a graveyard about to be overtaken by water. In her dream she is desperate to save the remains. She is unsure whether the nightmare — a “black-blue sea billowing in to dredge the bones away beneath the mounds” — is her mind processing a book she had written in the past, or an omen of horrors to come.

Kyjunga once had a family — people to cook for and dine with — but now lives alone in Seoul in poor health and suffering from insomnia and migraines. She is spending her days writing, and perpetually rewriting, a will and letters to be sent after her death. It is all she can do to summon the energy to leave her home and get a meal every now and then. It is all she can do to go on living.

One day, however, she gets a text from a friend she has not communicated with in a while, asking her to come to a hospital and bring an ID. Kyjunga leaves immediately and goes to her friend, who is being treated after a horrific accident. The friend, named Inseon, asks Kyjunga to travel to her home in Jeju to feed her bird, a white budgie (or parakeet) that has now been alone for several days and is likely near death without food or water.

It is an enormous ask. A fierce snowstorm is moving in, Inseon’s home is not easily accessible, and she wants Kyjunga to not just check on the bird but to stay with her for several months, until her treatment is complete. But Kyjunga cannot say no, not only out of pity for her friend and the bird, but also because she is, in a convoluted way, partly responsible for the accident her friend suffered.

And so she sets out in a snowstorm that is rapidly shutting down public transportation, leaving her friend to endure an agonizing treatment alone, and hoping she can find the house, which she has not visited in some time, and that the bird will still be alive.

Along the way, we learn more about the two women’s lives — how they met on a work assignment (Kyjunga is a writer, Inseon a photographer and filmmaker) and supported each other over the years. Kyjunga knows a little about Inseon’s complicated relationship with her mother, whose immediate family members perished in the JeJu Massacre. She had met her mother, at a time when the mother was descending into dementia. But neither woman had a complete understanding of what Inseon’s mother had suffered as a child, a story that is revealed in slow-motion over the course of the novel.

Snow is a secondary character in this novel — coating the faces of the dead, clinging “desolately” to Insenon’s hair as the friends walk together, and providing an eerie and tangible link from the present to the past. At one point Kyjunga reflects on how the snow falling around her is the recycled water from decades past and might well have fallen on the mounds of bodies bloodying the ground in 1948: “Who’s to say the snow dusting my hands now isn’t the same snow that had gathered on their faces?”

Kang, the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was honored in 2024 for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Kang has said that she herself had the dream that haunts Kyjunga, and that We Do Not Part came from it. She wrote the novel over two years while living in a rented room on Jeju Island. The questions the novel is probing, she said in her Nobel speech, are “To what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human to the end?”

We Do Not Part arrives in the U.S. four years after it was first published in Korea — late, perhaps, but exceedingly welcome. Kang and her translators have crafted an achingly beautiful story that will send readers to her previous novels, which include 2017’s Human Acts and The Vegetarian, published in the U.S. in 2016. Bring on the K-lit. A

Featured Image: We Do Not Part, by Han Kang

Album Reviews 25/03/20

Diane Coll, I Am Fire (Happy Fish Records)

Musically, Coll, a professional couples therapist from Atlanta, Georgia, is a true DIY warrior, having released three full-length albums since 2022 along with several EPs and singles, the latter of which this is, a three-songer released in honor of International Women’s Day (March 8). Coll’s muse for these songs is the goddess Kali, “destroyer of ignorance and liberator of the ego; a benevolent and unapologetic warrior who takes on the torment caused by those who operate from their own ignorance and the need to dominate others.” Sounds like my gender for sure, yes, and if you want to know (or don’t, it’s all good), I’m considering wrapping up my trilogy of internet-culture-focused nonfiction books with one about how women are subliminally oppressed on social media. Anyhow, to the music, tally-ho: In short, I’m very impressed. “Starting a Fire” is a brilliant deep-house-rooted exercise, its beat consisting of AM radio patter and a synth that becomes more menacing by the moment while Coll incants various warnings and calls for “accelerated action,” which was the theme of this year’s IWD observance. “Timeline Shift” is yoga-class soundtracking, reminiscent of Anugama, if you have any idea who that is; “Je Suis Feu” ends the set with a polyrhythmic tribal dance-along that’s both hypnotic and, well, catchy. Very nicely done, great-sounding stuff. A+

Luke Marzec, Something Out of Nothing, Side A (Swift Half Records)

Technically, this odd bird submits this as the “first half of his debut album,” which might play in Poughkeepsie but not with me; nevertheless I’ll play along and not tell you it’s an EP; let’s just proceed. Marzec’s a multi-instrumentalist Londoner who led a bunch of classical and jazz bands during his high school days, nowadays he’s a reformed music-academic who put out several other EPs prior to this release. He’s a terminally hip white kid whose gravelly singing voice evokes Satchmo and Little Richard, which screams “cultural appropriation” if you’re nasty, but you’d better be dissing Jamie Lidell too if you’re going to do that, not that this is the proper place to get into that. So what we have here is a jambalaya consisting of funk (“I Can’t Get You Out Of My Mind” is pure James Brown-ness), deep soul and random jazz phrasings that sound antiquated in all the right ways. Given that he’s racked up well over a million Spotify listens (and really knows what he’s doing) he’s certainly one to watch. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our country’s next “New CD Release Friday” is March 21, isn’t that the wackiest thing you’ve heard all week? We’ll get into it, but before I forget, everyone’s favorite local historian Fritz Wetherbee officially retired from his New Hampshire Chronicle post at WMUR TV, and so I am once again asking you, my loyal readers, to demand that the station hire me as his replacement and keep the tradition going! Hassle them on Facebook and MySpace or whatever, that’d be great!

But rather than delve into that any longer than my editors would want me to, it’s probably best to chat about the fact that Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco are releasing an album this Friday called I Said I Love You First! Those two are married, in case you didn’t know, and between Selena’s $1.3 billion fortune and Benny’s measly $50 million emergency fund, it’s safe to say that they’re able to afford to eat eggs every Sunday, in case you were worried about them. Where does this all lead us, fam? Well, where else: directly into the bizarre alternate universe of Bieberland. You see, Justin Bieber used to go steady with Selena, and they broke up (probably because he is insane) and last month the Biebs unfollowed former collaborator Blanco on Instagram, but not because he was envious of Blanco’s dating his ex, or so Bieber nation claims. That leaves only other two possibilities: Either he was hacked (in January he claimed he got hacked and the hacker unfollowed Biebs’s wife, Hailey) or Biebs is insane. You see, he (or the hacker) also unfollowed a bunch of other vacuous pop-culture celebrities, including Drake (who hasn’t?) and The Weeknd. Whatever, the title track from those two lovey-doveys’ new album is a chilled-down reggaeton thingamajig, featuring Selena singing like Lady Gaga like always. It’s cool, if anyone actually cares about this!

• You guys all know that English band The Horrors tabled the most disappointing sophomore album in rock history, but they’re back! Night Life, the band’s new LP, features the single “More Than Life,” a decidedly Depeche Mode-sounding thing. It’s very kyewl. They’re back!

• Louisville, Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket is also back, with Is, their new album! The single, “Time Waited,” sounds like Spandau Ballet trying to be Lynyrd Skynyrd, and if you have no idea what that might sound like, count your blessings.

• Aaand lastly it’s dream-poppers Japanese Breakfast with their new LP, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)! The single, “Mega Circuit,” is really mellow for a dreampop tune, kind of like Lana Del Rey meets Wilson Phillips. They’ll be at The Music Hall in Boston on May 7.

Featured Photo: Diane Coll album I Am Fire and Luke Marzec album Something Out of Nothing, Side A.

Chocolate Sorbet with Girl Scout Cookies

I have a rule in life — well, maybe more of a guideline. Anytime somebody says that a low-fat or gluten-free or vegan version of something is “just as good as the real thing” I become deeply suspicious. That is almost never true. If it were true, that version would be our default for that thing.

But then—

The difference between ice cream and sorbet is that sorbet is made without any dairy. We usually think of sorbets as being fruit-based, but that isn’t always the case. I make a lot of experimental sorbets, because a couple of the friends I use as guinea pigs for my recipes are vegan. On top of that, it is Girl Scout cookie season, and you might not have noticed but Thin Mints are dairy-free and vegan.

This chocolate sorbet might become your default “ice cream,” and the Girl Scout cookies only intensify its awesomeness.

The base of this sorbet is adapted from a recipe from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz.

  • 1½ cups (375 g) water
  • 1 cup (200 g) sugar
  • ¾ cup (75 g) cocoa powder, preferably Dutch-process cocoa, which has a slightly different pH than average civilian cocoa.
  • Pinch of coarse sea salt
  • 6 ounces (170 g) dark chocolate – preferably Trader Joe’s chocolate chips, which have a fairly high cocoa percentage (about 53%) and are also dairy-free
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • Another ¾ cup (180 g) water
  • ½ sleeve of Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies, broken roughly into quarters

In a medium saucepan, combine the first 1½ cups of water, sugar, cocoa powder and salt. Cocoa is hydrophobic, which means that it doesn’t like to mix with water, so you will probably have to force the issue with a whisk.

Heat the cocoa mixture until it comes to a boil, then let it boil for one minute before removing it from the heat. Stir the chocolate chips into the hot mixture until they melt completely, before stirring in the other ¾ cup of water, then the vanilla. Most vanilla extracts use an alcohol base. Alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than water boils, and by bringing the temperature of the mixture down with the chocolate chips, and then the water, you will keep more of the vanilla’s flavor in your sorbet.

Leave the mixture on your stovetop or counter to cool.

If you have an ice cream maker:

Chill the mixture for several hours, or overnight, then churn in your machine, according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

If you do not have an ice cream maker:

Transfer the sorbet base into a large sealable plastic bag. (Because I get nervous, I double-bag it to make extra-certain that there aren’t any leaks.) Lay the bag in your freezer, as flat as possible. This might require some reorganization. When the sorbet base has frozen solid, remove it from the freezer and break it into chunks. Blend the sorbet chunks in your blender until it comes together into a soft-serve consistency.

With either method, layer the sorbet and cookie pieces in one large container or three or four smaller containers. Return to the freezer to harden up.

This might be the most intensely chocolatey “ice cream” you’ve ever had. You might suddenly re-examine your preconceptions of what chocolate ice cream is supposed to be. This might lead you to re-examine some of your major life decisions. It’s that chocolatey. Despite not having any dairy in it, this sorbet has an extremely rich taste and a fudgy consistency. You might think the chunks of Girl Scout cookies will be overpowered and are just there for texture, but much like an actual Girl Scout they are not to be underestimated. They do the dessert equivalent of locking eyes with you and staring you down.

This sorbet is not kidding around.

Featured Photo: Chocolate Sorbet with Girl Scout Cookies. Photo by John Fladd.

Taste wine, raise food funds

United Way helps Food Bank

According to the New Hampshire Food Bank, one out of every 10 New Hampshire residents struggle to find a dependable source of food. The number for children is one in seven. Michael Apfelberg finds those numbers unacceptable.

Apfelberg is the President of the United Way of Greater Nashua, an independent nonprofit organization controlled by local donors to address problems in southern New Hampshire. Each year it focuses on addressing a particular set of persistent problems. This year the focus is on hunger and food insecurity.

Apfelberg said that in recent years more and more people in southern New Hampshire have started to go hungry.

“In our community,” he said, “we see a lot of people that we hear from all the time who are just struggling with basic needs. Inflation over the past couple of years has made a real impact on people’s bottom lines, but also, you know, things like child care and the cost of child care have really affected people. Wages have been sometimes a little stagnant at the lower end of the scale, so people do struggle with food and we see that in a lot of different ways, whether it be the need for increased access to free and reduced lunch programs, or the ability of people to actually get the food that they need.”

In order to help fund its anti-hunger programs, the Greater Nashua United Way has had to get creative in its fundraising. With the focus on food insecurity this year, many of the fundraisers have had themes tied to food and drink. For instance, this Saturday, March 22, the United Way will host a comedy-themed wine tasting at Fulchino Vineyard, with wine and performances by comedians. Apfelberg said that this is a recurring event that has evolved over the years.

“This is our third year working with Fulchino Vineyard,” he said. “The first year, it was a wine and food pairing event with a sommelier who taught everybody about wine and its properties. The second year it was a little bit more about the history of wine and winemaking and wine culture with a sort of a lecture by the owner of the vineyard, who’s an aficionado. This year we decided to evolve it again to make it a comedy night. [There will still be] wine at the vineyard with food — in this case more pizza and hors d’oeuvres and a little buffet — but with a comedy night spin to it. We have a lot of the same people who come back year after year, and we want to give them a little something different this year.”

One of last year’s most successful fundraisers for the United Way was a poker hand pub crawl, where teams of participants would travel from tavern to tavern in downtown Nashua, collecting a playing card at each bar, trying to build a winning poker hand. “It was very popular,” Apfelberg said. “People loved the poker hand pub crawl theme, so we’re going to do a repeat on that.” One of the best aspects of the event, he said, was the involvement of local businesses: “That was really our biggest involvement with restaurants and bars.” Because all the money the United Way raises stays in the community, Apfelberg explained, it is especially fitting when businesses in that community can play such an active role.

Other dramatic fundraisers this year will include the United Way’s “Over the Edge” event in June, where more than 100 participants will rappel down 24 stories of the Brady Sullivan Building in Manchester, and two separate skydiving events.

“Our first one,” Apfelberg said, “which is May 17, is raising money to support our food initiatives, food security-related initiatives that I’ve talked about. The second one in the fall is actually designed to raise funds [for] our educational supports. Our first event will be when families face going into the summer months. Summer is a time of year when food pantries typically struggle to get food.” It’s also a time when kids can’t access lunch programs at school, he said.

The second skydiving event takes place in the fall to address needs brought up by students returning to school.

Cheers to the Community Night of Wine and Comedy
When: Saturday, March 22, from 6 to 9 p.m.
Where: Fulchino Vineyards, 187 Pine Hill Road, Hollis, 438-5984, fulchinovineyard.com.
Tickets: $100 each through the United Way of Greater Nashua’s website, unitedwaynashua.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

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