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When I was a teenager, I was fortunate to see Vermont poet David Budbill‘s play “Judevine” performed on the main stage of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont. If you’re not familiar with the play, it depicts a small, impoverished Vermont town and the people who inhabit it, lovingly but without illusions. For me that…
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The Vermont Tour of Piecework: When We Were French continues this weekend with performances at Marlboro College’s Whittemore Theater on Friday and Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater on Saturday. The Times-Argus called the show “fun, funny,” “fascinatingly entertaining and authentic,” and Seven Days said it was, “poetic and powerful…[Abby] Paige has assembled a patchwork of stories…
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The Vermont tour of my solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, is underway! Just before opening the first weekend of performances at Montpelier’s Lost Nation Theater, I was able to visit with Vermont radio man Mark Johnson at WDEV. WDEV is that increasingly-rare media animal: a locally-owned and broadcast radio station, and it’s a…
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Between the Vermont tour dates for my solo show, I’m pleased to be doing a little bit of performing in my own neighborhood. This week I’ll read some new poems at Jan Jorgensen’s Lawn Chair Soiree in the Plateau. Come out and warm up by the fire of three local writers’ words — and stay…
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The Vermont tour of my solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, kicked off this weekend with four shows at Lost Nation Theater in Montpelier, one of the best regional theaters in the U.S. according to the New York Drama League and certainly one of my favorite places to perform. Audiences were enthusiastic and effusive…
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Wittgenstein said, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This makes me suspect that philosophy and poetry are incompatible modes of inquiry, the former seeking to reveal the truths that language obscures, while the latter…does pretty much the same thing? Or something different entirely? Kate Hall plays with…
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In just three weeks, I’ll be performing my solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, as part of Winterfest, a festival of three plays at Lost Nation Theater in Montpelier, Vermont. This article from The Times-Argus describes all three shows: Maura Campbell’s “Rosalee Was Here,” Martin Sherman’s “Rose” and my Franco-American portraits (one of which…
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At the beginning of each new year, I eagerly anticipate an updated post from the World Question Center, a somewhat mysterious association of “scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world.” Each year, a new question is posed to a few dozen of the world’s biggest brains. In the past their answers have left me…
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I tend to get words and phrases stuck in my head the way a little bit of music would probably get caught in the mind of a musician. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a phrase from the Christmas carol “O Holy Night” echoing around in my head: the thrill of hope. May…
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Funny things can happen by accident — flatulence, Freudian slips, falls on errant banana peels — but jokes happen on purpose. Like poetry or music, jokes are composed, usually to provide pleasure, often a profound, unconscious pleasure that we might otherwise forbid ourselves. As Freud wrote in his abidingly unfunny treatise on the subject, “A…
ABBY PAIGE 