Mid-July is when Vermont stops pacing itself. The Green Mountain Watercolor Exhibition is hanging in the Big Red Barn at Lareau Farm in Waitsfield all weekend — 60-plus artists, noon to 9:00 PM, closing Sunday — Bread and Puppet is finally opening its circus season, and Middlebury is about to close out its 47th straight summer on the Green. There is more happening this weekend than any one person can reasonably attend, which is a good problem. Here's what's worth the drive.
Friday, July 17
Middlebury has been doing this for 47 years, and the Summer Festival on-the-Green still doesn't charge a dime. Music runs 7:00 to 9:45 PM under the tent on the Village Green, with a Brown Bag set at noon if you're free midday. It goes on rain or shine, and the whole thing survives on the honest strength of people showing up.
Up in Stowe, the Count Basie Orchestra plays the Trapp Family Lodge Concert Meadow — doors at 5:30, show at 7:30. Spruce Peak Arts books this Music in the Meadow series well, and a legacy big band under Scotty Barnhart playing to a hillside of picnic blankets is about as good as a Vermont summer evening gets. Tickets run $21 to $58.50.
Rutland County goes upscale: Killington Uncorked: Estate Gala Tasting puts you on a gondola to Peak Lodge at 4,241 feet for curated tastings, 6:00 to 8:00 PM. The wine is incidental. The view is the point.
In Bennington, Concerts in the Courtyard hosts The Honey Badgers at the Bennington Museum from 5:00 to 7:00 PM, free, with the galleries open late. Over in the Mad River Valley, The Mammals bring their Touch Grass tour to afterthoughts in Waitsfield at 8:00 PM, $25 advance — a genuinely good folk-Americana band in a genuinely small room.
Woodstock puts Haley Reardon on the riverbank at East End Park for Music by the River, 6:00 to 8:30 PM, free. And at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury, it's Evil Dead 2 at 7:30 PM, which is exactly the right movie to see with a room full of strangers.
Vergennes gets the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum Summer Party, 5:00 to 8:00 PM — live music from the Unruly Allies, Pratt's barbecue, and after-hours run of the Fragments: Voices of the American Revolution exhibit. $50.
Orleans has a Moth Party at the Orleans Federated Church at 8:00 PM — a free community science night where you bring a lawn chair and a camera and watch what shows up at the light. The Friends of the Jones Memorial Library run it, and it's listed in the Kingdom Calendar.
Saturday, July 18
The 45th Annual Champlain Valley Gem, Mineral and Fossil Show takes over Essex Junction — the largest of its kind in the state, thousands of specimens, and the kind of event where the vendors know more than they'll ever get to tell you.
Out in the Islands, the Shore Acres Wine Market runs noon to 5:00 PM at the Shore Acres Inn in North Hero. Free, lakeside, northern Lake Champlain wines with the winemakers standing right there. Grand Isle County doesn't get many of these — go.
Killington's Grand Tasting fills the K-1 Lodge noon to 4:00 PM with wines, spirits, and artisan vendors. Down at Stratton, the Tour De Glaze Mountain Bike Race in Winhall is a timed cross-country race that shaves time off your result for every donut you eat mid-course. That is a real rule, and it is the most Vermont thing on this list.
The Irasburg Church Fair opens at 10:00 AM on the common at Routes 14 and 58 — food, crafts, raffles, kids' games, barbecue, a parade, an auction. This is the genuine article, and it's the kind of day that funds a small town's year.
Middlebury closes its festival at 7:00 PM with a street dance and the Vermont Jazz Ensemble. In Enosburg Falls, Wayne Tarr leads his Light, Sky, Sculpture photography workshop through Cold Hollow Sculpture Park — Franklin County's best-kept secret, 100 acres of large-scale work in a hayfield.
The Bennington Museum hosts the fifth Tattoo Living Exhibition, 6:30 to 9:00 PM — twelve live models, working shops and artists, $10 at the door and free for anyone 17 and under. It pairs with the museum's Vermont Vice exhibit, and it's a sharper piece of programming than most museums twice its size would risk.
Hyde Park's Governor's House puts on a Children's Afternoon Tea — full English service, sandwiches, warm scones with clotted cream. Montpelier gets Breaking Open: A New Musical at the Gary Library at 7:30 PM, a developmental presentation from Rebecca Fishman and Evan Premo — mature themes, and worth catching a new work before it's finished. Newport wraps the Warebrook Music Festival with a closing concert at the United Church of Newport at 7:30 PM, after a composer's forum at St. Mark's parish hall at 10:30 AM.
And Billings Farm in Woodstock has A Vermont Quilt Sampler open 10:00 to 5:00 — the 40th annual exhibition, 59 quilts from 40 Vermont towns.
Sunday, July 19
Bread and Puppet opens its season. The Upside Down World Circus starts at 3:00 PM on the circus field at 753 Heights Road in Glover, with the pageant following around 4:30 on the hill. Stilt dancers, papier-mâché beasts, a brass band, and sourdough rye with aioli afterward. Fifteen dollars, and no one is turned away for lack of funds. Fifty-plus years in and it still hasn't been sanded down.
Then get to Dog Mountain. Albannach plays the Levitt AMP series in St. Johnsbury at 5:00 PM — Scottish pipes and war drums, free, and dogs are welcome because it's Dog Mountain. Pack a chair and sunscreen, leave the booze at home, and take the free RCT shuttle from the Fairbanks Scales lot. New this year, it makes a 4:00 PM stop at the Welcome Center to run folks up from downtown.
In Bellows Falls, The Milkhouse Heaters and Phil Henry co-headline Stage 33 Live at 7:00 PM. Jan and Mike Sheehy live down the road; they came out of the Boston scene and rolled their punk roots into Americana when they moved south in 2007. Stage 33 sells forty tickets, $15 advance and $20 at the door if any are left. No bar, no kitchen — the stage is the whole mission.
Shoreham gets Lyracle at the Shoreham Inn at 3:00 PM, an early-music duo playing Purcell and his contemporaries for the Otter Creek Music Festival — free, but ticketed. In Montpelier, the North Branch Nature Center runs a free Wildlife Tracking Club Outing at 10:00 AM, no RSVP, about a mile of walking through a corridor that coyote, fox, fisher, and mink all use.
Waitsfield closes the weekend easy: the Sara Whitehair Band plays Lawson's Finest Taproom 3:00 to 5:00 PM. And Hannah Cohen with Paper Castles plays the Haybarn Theatre in Plainfield at 7:30 PM, $35. If you'd rather look at art, the Hall Art Foundation in Reading is open 11:00 to 4:00 with roughly 70 works up.
Twelve of Vermont's fourteen counties have something going on this weekend, and a good share of it costs nothing. The Kingdom is having a particularly good week — point the car north.