Tag: 250710

Born for it

On stage and screen, Stacy Kendro finds the funny

Though she didn’t start performing until her thirties, Stacy Kendro’s journey to the standup spotlight started much earlier.

Before starting college, she waitressed at a restaurant in Framingham, Mass., when it became a suburban outpost of Nick’s Comedy Stop. For someone who would eventually major in art and minor in theater, whose dad loved comedy and had a record collection that included Rodney Dangerfield and Spike Jones, it was timely.

Since then, “it’s kind of been my whole adult life,” she said by phone recently. Urged by coworkers, she did characters for the Nick’s crowd a few years in. “It was awkward, but I got laughs,” she said, “There were like 15 waitresses, and none of them did standup, but I did. So it was already in me, I think.”

Later, she sporadically duoed with her now ex-husband, an experienced comic. When the two weren’t working, she crafted a solo set and tried out her nascent act at one of her friend’s shows.

“I didn’t tell my husband at the time,” she recalled. “I wanted to not have anybody looking at what I was writing, just go do it, fail a bunch of times and see how it went.”

When Kendro got serious, she headed to L.A., doing shows at the Comedy Store’s female-centric Belly Room, along with the Ice House, which had an annex for young comics. All the while, she’d hit every open mic she could find. Then she headed home. “I kind of cut my teeth in Boston,” she said.

Later, she performed on cruise ships. “That was interesting…. I met singers, but mostly it was piano players and magicians that I became really good friends with. Then I went to New York in 2000…. I came back at the tail end of the pandemic.”

Kendro’s comedy is street-smart and world-weary, with sharp wordplay leavened in. She’s written a series of film shorts called Albanian Assassin set in Las Vegas. She’s won accolades, including placing second in a national Ladies of Laughter competition in 2019. Kendro’s writing is also getting noticed. She wrote a couple of pilots, one of which was picked up by Women in Film Video New England for a table read and more. “We’re also going to block, which is great, because you can see everybody act it out, but also network with filmmakers.”

Since returning home, Kendro has become a regular on Rob Steen’s Headliners circuit, which includes a show in Gilford on July 12 with Jody Sloane and Amy Tee at Beans & Greens’ Notch Biergarten called Ladies of Boston Comedy. She’s not crazy about the name, even while understanding the marketing of showcases like Mothers of Comedy and others.

“It’s like we’re a novelty,” she said. “You know, there’s never an all-male show, there’s just a show…. Interestingly, bookers are still in the boys’ club in their heads. They kind of base a lot of who they book on what their tastes are, not realizing that half the audience is women. In that sense, it’s harder to be a woman.”

Kendro once opened for Joan Rivers at a New Hampshire women’s expo and recalls watching her perform as revelatory.

Her set mixed humor and reflection. “She managed to talk about her personal life and some triumphs. She even said to the audience, ‘You think just because I’m famous that my life is easy? I got fired off the Tonight show. My husband committed suicide. I’ve been through some trials.’ But she made it funny, she was very skillful in that.”

Later, the two talked about Rivers’ early years in a comedy world even more dominated by male comics than today’s. “I asked her what it was like,” Kendro said, and the answer exemplified the legend’s no-BS worldview. “She said, ‘Oh, it was easy, because I was friends with Richard Pryor, and Carlin, and we drove around the Village, and I did stuff with them.”

Ladies of Boston Comedy w/ Jody Sloane, Stacy Kendro, Amy Tee
When: Saturday, July 12, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Notch Biergarten by Beans & Greens, 245 Intervale Road, Gilford
Tickets: $27.50 at beansandgreensfarm.com

Featured photo: Stacy Kendro. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/07/10

Local music news & events

• Song pull: Led by quirky Austin singer-songwriter Matt The Electrician, Family Game Night is a unique variation of a writers-in-the-round event. Natalia Zukerman, Kris Delmhorst and Erin McKeown join Matthew Sever to swap stories and share songs, the latter coming from “playful prompts” that result in “plenty of laughter, camaraderie and the occasional audience participation.” Thursday, July 10, 7 p.m., The Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter, $25 at thewordbarn.com.

• Good mix: Blending elements of alt country and harmony-rich classic rock, Slim Volume is a breath of fresh air on the local music scene. At the core of the quartet is the songwriting team of Trent Larrabee and Jake DeSchuiteneer, who met as coworkers at SNHU’s Manchester campus, bonded over a shared love of ’60s bands, and found their mojo at Strange Brew’s downtown open mic. Friday, July 11, 7 p.m., Pembroke City Limits, 134 Main St., Suncook, slimvolume.band.

• Young gun: It’s been said that modern country music is a lot like Tom Petty in the 1970s, and Gavin Marengi is a good example. The Salisbury, Mass., native’s most recent album, Northbound, offers raved-up rockers like “Back to Boston” and the soulful title cut. On the latter he sings about being “with my old six-string in a bar in Boston without a drink,” which makes sense — he’s still in his teens. Friday, July 11, 7:30 p.m., BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $21 at ccanh.com.

• Summer fun: Canadian national treasure Barenaked Ladies top a ’90s throwback concert with Sugar Ray and Fastball, part of their Last Summer On Earth Tour. No worries, they called it that in 2022. Saturday, July 12, 7 p.m., BankNH Pavilion, 72 Meadowbrook Lane, Gilford, $30 and up at banknhpavilion.com.

• King looper: The reference point for many one-person bands is Howie Day, who was looping long before every bar act in the country discovered it. A few years ago, Day was so impressed with a parody of his biggest hit “Collide” done by three CERN graduate students that he volunteered to re-record it with them himself. The result is just lovely, and it’s definitely worth checking out on YouTube. Monday, July 13, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $42 at tupelohall.com.

The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Road To Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

Album Reviews 25/07/10

Afterz, The Midnight Cafe (self-released)

Mixed pot of trip-hop artistry here from a London, UK-based duo, professing to be influenced by Massive Attack et al but deeper and more world-music-rooted than that. These guys are inspired by the Alté movement in Nigeria (a fusion of genres that include Afrobeat, hip-hop, R&B, and alternative sounds), as well as the dance music culture of South Africa. They aim to bridge the gap between traditional Afrobeats and amapiano (a South African deep house/jazz-based hybrid) and more experimental-alternative and electronic sounds. This EP is like a collection of dream sequences, borrowing heavily from Tricky’s sounds but with the reverb set to 11; passages come and go, processed through the aural equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared lens. The title track may have the gentlest reggaeton undergirding I’ve ever heard, put it that way, while “Voltaire” comes off like a shape-shifting wave pattern that emulates a giant’s resting lungs. This is some exquisite stuff but could stand a little more layering. A

Black Sabbath, Never Say Die (Warner Bros Records)

Continuing with my inconsistent, totally off-the-cuff series on Classic Rock Albums Zoomers Need To Know, you know how you’ll go on social media and see someone talking about something you sort of like and then find out that the person really hates it? That happens to me every time someone mentions this 1978 album, the last record that featured the original lineup of Sabbath (yes kids, with Ozzy): everyone hates it. Now that the band has just (reportedly, and I don’t believe it for a second) scrapped itself forever, it’s safe to come out of the closet and admit that this one featured a few pretty good songs (the title track, “A Hard Road,” “Swinging The Chain”) and was actually quite a bit better than its 1976 predecessor, the absolutely dreadful Technical Ecstasy. Mind you, defending this LP is no hill I’d ever want to die on; the bad tunes are truly bad (“Johnny Blade,” “Junior’s Eyes,” the soggy “Over To You”), but it’s notable in that it was guitarist/bandleader Tony Iommi’s final desperate effort to keep the band interested in staying together. That was impossible: They’d been ripped off by their manager for years (fun fact: to this day they still get no money from their first five albums, yes kids, including Paranoid) and Ozzy was about done with it, yet Iommi persisted heroically. Obviously he knew the band was over, and it shows; there’s a deathly pall over the record that’s quite sad, but again, some of it is well worth knowing. B-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Ugh, this new-CD-release Friday is July 11, meaning the summer’s already half over. I hope you already visited the Atlantic Ocean (you know, the really waterlogged place that makes up everything to the right of New England), because I haven’t yet, except for a quick fish ’n’ chip basket at Bob’s Clam Hut in York, Maine, where I sat gawking at the muddy estuary next to it, where all the seagulls go to poop and make little seagulls. But be that as it may, it’s time to look at this week’s list of new albums, which I assume is rather long, given that almost no new albums were released last week, and, with the slightest modicum of luck, doesn’t have any holiday albums in it, because come on man, it’s way too early for those, please not yet, I beg of you. OK, no Christmas albums this week, that’s good, now let me see if I’ve even heard of any of these people who’re releasing albums this week (things don’t look promising). I’ll start with English singer Mark Stewart, a pioneer of post-punk and industrial music and a founding member of The Pop Group, whose most renowned song, “We Are All Prostitutes,” wasn’t the slightest bit industrial; more of a ska-punk joint that had a Trent Reznor tint to it. Stewart died in 2023, but as is wont to happen, some old recordings of his have been found and summarily compiled into a new album, The Fateful Symmetry. “Memory Of You” is one of those tunes; in a nutshell it sounds like David Bowie singing with a goth-techno band, which of course means that it’s worthwhile in its way.

• Blub blub blub, nothing else is really jumping out at me, so let’s keep moving and I’ll babble something I hope is informative about No Sign Of Weakness, the new LP from Nigerian dancehall/Afrobeat singer/producer Burna Boy! In 2019, his fourth studio full-length, African Giant, was nominated for a Best World Music Album at the Grammy awards, but what you obviously want to know is whether or not his dancehall stuff is as fun as Mad Cobra or whatnot. It isn’t, but one of the singles, “TaTaTa (feat. Travis Scott)” is pretty authentic. Would I dance to it at a tiki bar? No, I do not do such things.

• Actress/singer Noah Cyrus is the sister of famous bothersome person Miley Cyrus, and toward that I have no comment at this time. Interesting how Wikipedia doesn’t even bother assigning a musical style category to Noah like they do with literally every other singer on Earth, given that anyone could take a wild guess, but let’s look and listen, shall we, actually wait, let’s not, I want to see what I’m about to deal with — OK, Wikipedia categorizes Noah’s 2016 debut single “Make Me (Cry)” as “electro,” which sure narrows it down, doesn’t it folks, do I really have to do this? Ack, I suppose I do, so here’s the skinny: Noah’s new album, I Want My Loved Ones To Go With Me, includes a single, titled “New Country,” and guess what, you’ll never guess, it’s not electro, it’s a country ballad duet with some obscure country singing dude named — let’s see — “Blake Shelton” it looks like, unless there’s a typo. The tune is unplugged Bonnaroo bait, pleasant enough I suppose, but come on, can Blake Shelton ever just get out of our face for five seconds for once, that’d be great.

• We’ll wrap up the week with seven-piece jazz/Afrobeat band Kokoroko and their new one, Tuff Times Never Last! The single, “Sweetie,” is “a salute to West African disco music from the ’80s/’90s,” so yes, it sounds like something Sade would listen to while she’s getting a foot rub. No brains required here, but it’s nice, sure.

Frozen Lemon Bars

  • 12 full graham crackers
  • 8 Tablespoons (1 stick) butter – melted and cooled
  • 2 Tablespoons sugar
  • ½ cup fresh squeezed lemon juice
  • Zest of three large lemons
  • 1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • 1½ cups (340 g) heavy cream

Line an 8×8” baking pan with parchment paper. Set it aside, reassuring it that you’ll be back; you’re not breaking up with it.

In a blender or a food processor, grind the graham crackers and sugar into crumbs. Set aside 2 tablespoons of the mixture, then transfer the rest to a medium bowl, and mix in the melted butter, one half at a time.

Transfer the buttery graham cracker mixture to the baking pan, and smoosh it flat and into the corners with the bottom of a measuring cup. Set it aside again. It should be used to it by now.

In another bowl — or wash out the one you just used, because, come on! It’s not like you’re made of bowls! — whisk together the lemon juice, 2/3 of the lemon zest, the condensed milk, and salt. The condensed milk is thick and will want to splash the lemon juice around. Stir the mixture slowly with your whisk in the center of the bowl, and when the condensed milk gets tired and starts mixing with the other ingredients, you can make larger, dramatic whisk sweeps.

With a hand or stand mixer, whip the cream to medium peaks, then fold it into the lemon mixture. Work it gently, until all the clumps of whipped cream have given themselves over to the Lemon Collective.

Spoon the mixture into the baking pan, completely covering the graham cracker crust. Smooth it out, making sure you get into the corners. Top it with the remaining graham cracker mixture and lemon zest. Pat the toppings down to make certain they’re stuck to the lemon stuff.

Cover the pan with plastic. Yes, you could absolutely use regular, sticks-to-itself plastic wrap, but there is another way. Every few weeks I go to the dollar store and buy a couple packages of super-discount shower caps. These are really good at covering bowls of leftovers or the occasional frozen dessert.

Freeze for at least three hours — maybe all day.

When you are ready for frozen, lemony refreshment, remove the pan from the freezer, then use the parchment paper to remove the bars from the pan. Use a large knife to cut the block into nine Brady-Bunch like squares.You will probably want to eat this with a fork — the bottom crust sets up super firm.

The crust gives these bars a crunchy, buttery element, which contrasts nicely with the smoothness of the lemon layer, which tastes — not surprisingly — satisfyingly lemony, but with a creamy richness from the condensed milk.

Once your ingredients are prepped, these bars will take about 10 minutes to make — not counting the time in the freezer. They have an extremely high reward-to-effort ratio.

Featured photo: Frozen Lemon Bars. Photo by John Fladd.

Taste the terroir of home

NOK Vino serves New Hampshire in a glass

What does New Hampshire taste like? Dunkin’ coffee? Pine needles? Poutine gravy? For Nico Kimberly, the owner of the new NOK Vino Tasting Room in Hooksett, it’s a serious question with a serious and complicated answer.

There is a term in the wine world, “terroir,” that is used to describe the taste that comes from particular growing conditions in a particular location. For instance, two wines in the same style and made with the same variety of grapes, but one from South Africa and the other from California, will taste different from each other. Each will carry a flavor influenced by the amount of sunshine the grapes got, the minerals in the soil, the amount of rainfall they received, and a thousand other factors.

So, what is New Hampshire’s terroir?

“New Hampshire’s a really good place to grow wine,” Kimberly said. “We have really sandy, really rocky soils. They shed the water, which the grapes love. We’ve also got a lot of elevation — we’ve got these hillsides. Grapes love to grow on a hill because the water runs off and the cold air runs off. Also, when you grow on a hill it actually changes the angle at which the sun hits the plant, which maximizes the photosynthetic capability.”

Growing grapes on a hill also improves the vines’ access to airflow, Kimberly said.

“The enemy of fruit trees and grapevines is mildew,” he said. “It needs wet conditions. It needs some warmth. But if you’ve got wind and you’ve got sun, you’re going to keep that mildew at bay just naturally. All these conditions really concentrate the flavor of the grapes. When we really get down to it — because the grapes are growing in these sort of like difficult conditions, this austere soil — they don’t have a ton of energy to grow super big and vibrant. They tend to be smaller and stronger plants, which means that every part of them is stronger, and so we get these flavors that are really complex in the wine.”

NOK Vino — which stands for “Not Otherwise Known” — is a collective of six New Hampshire vineyards that produces 18 hyper-local wines and ciders. To understand the relationship between New Hampshire wines and their terroir, Kimberly said, you have to understand the history of grapes.

“Up until Prohibition,” Kimberly said, “American grape and wine culture was thriving and it was all based on native grapes that grow here. Once Prohibition happened, a lot of those producers went out of business.” NOK Vino grows hybrids of those original native grapes.

“We’re coming back into more acceptance of those grapes,” Kimberly said, “mainly because of a few people who said, we’re going to treat these grapes as if they were the fancy European ones. We’re going to grow them.”

NOK Vino has opened a new tasting room in Hooksett to show off some of these wines.

“Our mission is to really change the way people think about New Hampshire wine,” Kimberly said. “We are providing this unfettered, clear view of what New Hampshire really tastes like. What we’re really passionate about is helping educate people about the difference between a grocery store wine and a wine that’s made in New Hampshire.”

The tasting room, which is open Friday, Saturday, and Sundays, is tucked away in an industrial park off the Londonderry Turnpike and seats 20 tasters.

“If there’s a holiday that lands on a Monday,” Kimberly said, “we also open up for that. We’re trying to make this a place you can come and learn about New Hampshire wine and meet the farmers. Everyone who works here is somebody who works in the vineyard and also participates in the winemaking. So no matter who’s working here you’re going to get the real-deal experience. They can answer any question you have about our wines.”

NOK Vino tasting room
Where: 146 Londonderry Turnpike, Building 3, Unit 23, Hooksett
When: open Fridays 5 to 8 p.m., Saturdays 3 to 9 p.m., and Sundays 3 to 7 p.m.
More: 315-5272, nokvino.com
A selection of cheeses, salami and olives is available for pairing.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

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