Williston Observer

Aug. 26, 2010

Adams Apple Orchard & Farm Market held its first annual Summer Festival Aug. 21-22. The Adams decided to hold a Summer Festival this year in place of their traditional fall event due to damage to their apple crop from a late spring frost.

The festival featured a peach pie contest, with Forrest White of Williston winning the grand prize for his Peach ‘n’ Bacon Pizza.

Pizza dough

Pizza sauce

2 peaches

1 teaspoon butter

1 tablespoon honey

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper flakes

Pinch of salt

Bacon

Tomato

Mozzarella cheese

Blue cheese

Preheat oven to 550 degrees with pizza stone on bottom. Precook bacon and set aside. Prepare pizza sauce in sauté pan on low heat. Add butter, honey, puree of one peach, cayenne pepper and pinch of salt. Cook until ingredients are well combined. Toss pizza dough, lay out on pizza peel/tray. Spread sauce your dough. Sprinkle mozzarella on sauce. Place on toppings: 1 peach cut into 1/2-inch cubes, bacon, tomato. Sprinkle with blue cheese crumbles. Cook until cheese starts to brown.

Aug. 26, 2010

Buddy Dubay and the Minor Key performed at Maple Tree Place Aug. 19 for the Groovin’ on the Green music series. The final concert takes place Aug. 26, with Woods Tea Co. playing.

Aug. 26, 2010

Williston voters took to the polls on Tuesday at the Williston Armory to cast ballots in the Vermont primary election.

“Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” is a match made on the cutting edge

As inevitable as the rock opera was in the late 1960s, director Edgar Wright’s “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” creatively combines the audio-visual tools of a new generation in a kaleidoscopic mélange of mediums. It may not always be art, and may not care. But the process by which Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel is adapted is watershed striking.

While the comprehensive confluence of contemporary sensibilities humorously and arrogantly declares its turn at the palette, the ideas are sneakily inserted into a traditional, narrative structure. Which it then sets about to satirize and thumb its nose at whilst observing all its rules. There is method to the madness and an impressive consistency.

Almost as divergent as the mode of delivery, the portrayals come replete with a built-in hypocrisy. Title character Scott Pilgrim, a 23-year-old slacker played by Michael Cera, supplies the script with large portions of self-awareness prattle. In what are essentially stage whispers, he declaims his frailty, ineptitude and nobility.

It’s apparently his charm. How else could he be courting two gals? OK, so he’s in a band. Yet by his own admission, the group isn’t even that good. Still, when first we meet the geek, he’s apprising his gay roommate of the Chinese high school girl he’s dating. Oh, don’t worry, it’s totally platonic. It outrages his older sister, Stacey (Anna Kendrick).

The vociferous sibling, who owes her omniscience to the wittily lampooned cell phone milieu and Scott’s gossipy roomie, Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin), functions as Scott’s conscience. Interjecting her diatribes with milepost regularity, the authority figure is ludicrously subjective. But it doesn’t matter. Scott’s too self-absorbed to listen, anyway.

Plus, there is suddenly the matter of Ramona Flowers, a mysterious young lady funkily played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Arriving in Toronto to work as a delivery person for Amazon.com, she becomes, in a classical case of the adored Venus as perceived road to salvation, The One. Add a dramatic ploy from the ancient Greeks and you have the plot.

You see, in order to win Ramona, Scott will have to defeat the gal’s seven evil ex boyfriends. Interwoven with a series of band competitions his rock group, Sex Bob-Omb, has entered in hopes of winning a recording contract, it makes for plenty of inventively orchestrated action. Surprisingly, Scott is quite the warrior for a nerd.

The seemingly endless string of battles, interspersed with comical scrutinization of Scott’s moral dilemmas — including, but not limited to high schooler Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) — is presented with cutting edge savvy, nuance and technological pizzazz. I.e.-Video game scoring and graphics are part and parcel of the comic-book-like mêlées.

Filmmaker Wright confidently shuns presumption with an incorporated self-effacement, and gains validity by chidingly reminding with intermittent footnote that his whirligig of a film shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Humbly, it’s just a logical evolution. That said, this is good, smart sociology, delivered with poetic skill.

If this Brave New World’s attention deficit-inspired argot isn’t your native tongue, however, then once the survey course in modern, youthful mores and folkways paints its enlightenment, the scenario grows a bit wearying. The boom, bang and kapow of the rock music-enhanced images lose their dazzle. Alas, the love story salvages our interest.

Good acting by the principals establishes a time-honored triangle, affirming that love is alive and well and every bit as mystifying among the high-tech generation. Mr. Cera is effective as the suitor atypical of his realm, his being comprised of a real self, an insecure id and a heroic alter ego. Naturally, we root for the latter to prevail over the evil exes.

But while we actually don’t learn much about Scott beyond his two-dimensional effusions, it’s a cornucopia of info compared to Miss Winstead’s purposely enigmatic, prized objet d’amour. Curiously, other than that she changes the color of her hair on a weekly basis and has gained the affections of seven bad boys, she remains a puzzle.

If it isn’t just a metaphor for the elusiveness of love, then it leads one to question the so-called liberation at this vanguard of our culture. Not that the men are depicted in such haloing light. Still, sister Stacey is a didactic nag; Knives is an adoring little girl; and Kim (Alison Pill), Sex Bob-Omb’s drummer still pining over Scott, is forever in a rage.

More emblematic is the nonchalance about sexual preference. Yet all the same, our protagonist is as hormonally perplexed as were Andy Hardy and Holden Caulfield. Illuminating while reasserting that the more things change, the more they stay the same, “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” amusingly competes for your moviegoing dollars.

“Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” rated PG-13, is a Universal Pictures release directed by Edgar Wright and stars Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Kieran Culkin.

Aug. 26, 2010

With football practices in their second week and the first days of workouts well under way in soccer, field hockey and cross country, the autumn athletic season at Champlain Valley Union High has hundreds of athletes working hard for varsity and junior varsity slots when the campaigns begin early next month.

All sports have solid 2009 seasons on which to build, or, in the case of boys soccer, to try and replicate. Coach T. J. Mead’s Redhawks captured the Division 1 championship last year.

The girls soccer team and the football team made it to championship games in Divisions 1 and 2, respectively. The girls cross country team is always a state and even New England contender, with the boys not far behind.

The field hockey team is coming off two seasons in the Division 1 championship game, with the big trophy a wrap in 2008.

Head coach Kate McDonald said in a Monday telephone conversation that only four starters return from the 2009 team that went undefeated until the championship game, when Hartford High took its revenge; CVU had popped the Hurricanes in the 2008 title test.

McDonald said three of the seven graduated starters from last year are already into their college careers. They are Kelsey Jensen (Colgate), KK Logan (Connecticut College) and Emmaleigh Loyer (Bates).

“We graduated nine seniors,” McDonald said. “We have some new faces.”

Returning to CVU are just four starters: forward Louise Gibbs, defender Aubrey Deavitt, forward Molly Burke and defender Lauren King.

To help fill some slots will be several players from last season’s junior varsity squad, which rolled through its 2009 schedule with only one loss and a tie.

McDonald, who has 10 years at the field hockey helm, said she is working with 62 girls who will be divided into varsity and two jayvee teams, which is about the same number of hopefuls as in 2009.

The varsity will travel to Bristol and Mount Abraham Union Saturday for an event in which the Redhawks will compete in half-hour contests against some of the several teams participating.

A scrimmage at Essex High is on the docket for Aug. 31, with the season opener against Burlington High at the CVU field on Sept. 8.

Cross country coach Scott Bliss has been working with more than 90 boys and girls as the cross country teams run up and down hills to get ready for the rigors of the season.

If youth is served, the boys team will be first in line with more than 30 freshmen among the 60 candidates. On the girls side there are more than 30 candidates.

The Redhawks’ season opener is a home invitational at Keenan Farm at 10 a.m. on Sept. 4.

Mead is currently working with 40 hopefuls at the varsity level. He expects to pare the number down to 22 to 25 players by the time the season opens Sept. 7, when Route 116 neighbor Mount Abraham Union motors to the Hinesburg field.

In all, Mead expects up to 70 players on the varsity, junior varsity and freshman teams.

Missing for at least much of the season will be Mike Clayton, last year’s top goal getter, who injured a knee in late winter and is undergoing treatment and rehabilitation.

“We had a pretty nasty conditioning test,” Mead said of the welcome to CVU soccer drill held on opening day Monday at 7 a.m.

The candidates, as is tradition, were to run a mile in six minutes, after a short rest, a half-mile in three minutes, another short rest and then a quarter-mile in 90 seconds and later a 200-yard dash in 45 seconds.

“It is really tough,” Mead said, adding that in general it went quite well.

“The legs being in good condition allows players to do what they want to do on the field,” the coach explained.

The defending champs have scrimmages set for 10 a.m. Saturday morning at home against Rice Memorial High and Bellows Free Academy of St. Albans.