For the past several years (maybe longer?), a large number of twenty-somethings of Northfield who’ve gone off to other locales (jobs, college, life) return to town the night before Thanksgiving and gather with other patrons (mostly same-age) at J. Grundy’s Rueb ‘N’ Stein, AKA, The Rueb. I paid a brief visit on Wednesday eve to take some photos of the scene, including the band members of Down Lo who performed in the Upstairs Rueb.
Left photo, L to R: Will Nissen: Keys, Sax, Back Vocals; Mike Cini: Drums; Mark Grundhoeffer: Guitar, Vocals; Ryan Nielsen: Bass. Left Center: Jeff Paskell (Mr. Sticky) did the sound board. Right center:Kevin Stanke joined in for a set. Right: my son Graham Wigley with Northfield Police Sergeant Mark Murphy (recently a candidate for Rice County Sheriff) who was on-duty.
Click the photos to enlarge and see another 20+ in the Rueb photo album. Full disclosure: The Rueb, Mark, and Graham are/have been clients.
Grezzo (gallery, framing, studios) held a “Fine Craft Collective” artists’ reception last night at their new location on Bridge Square. Left: Grezzo co-owner, framer, and artist Stephen Delwiche with Cathy Collison, Glass Garden Beads. Other artists showing their work: Connie Conway, DeAnn Engvall, Gabriele Franklin, Sue Hammes-Knopf, Teresa Harsma, Jeanne Henke, Suzanne Klumb, Marisa Martinez de Silva, Colleen Riley (Eureka Pots), Arlene Rolf, Judy Saye-Willis, Elizabeth Schott, Amanda Stremcha, Leanne Stremcha, Tom Willis, and Jennifer Wolcott.
Each year, one week before Thanksgiving, National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness co-sponsor National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. During this week, a number of schools, communities and cities take part in a nationwide effort to bring greater awareness to the problems of hunger and homelessness.
My daughter Gilly, who’s an Americorps worker placed at the Northfield Public Library this year, took these photos of the new Booker bus arriving at the city garage last night. Left photo: Library Empress Lynne Young. Right photo: Diana Tallent and Kathy Ness. Click photos to enlarge.
The Friends of the Library will introduce the new Booker the Book bus at their annual meeting Thursday, Nov. 16, at the library. Tours of the bus will begin at 6:30 p.m., with the meeting starting at 7 p.m. Guest speaker at the meeting will be local psychiatrist and author Dr. Henry Emmons, who will talk about his book “The Chemistry of Joy.” Emmons combines western medicine and eastern philosophy in treating depression. Refreshments will be served.
The 2003 auction was significant for me. Just a few days earlier, we’d changed the N.org website over to a weblog (see this Oct. 31, 2003 “coming soon” blog entry). Having a blog made it easy to embed a photo into a blog post. My Nov. 2 post was my first to do this — a photo of the NHS auction in the recently vacated Jacobsen’s store — and it included a link to a photo album of dozens more.
The serendipitous reaction I got from people over the next few weeks who’d viewed the dozens of photos convinced me that this was another way to “strengthen the fabric of the community” as I’m fond of saying. The people who WERE there wanted to see themselves and other attendees. And they, in turn, wanted others who were NOT there to see what they’d missed. And then I’d hear from people who said to me that so-and-so “told me that they’d seen my photo at the auction and that’s when I went to the album…” And for months afterwards, the pageviews to the photos in that album continuously increased, ultimately into the thousands.
Yeah, I’m tooting my own horn here… I am proud of the thousands of photos of Northfield-related events I’ve posted over the past three years. But I’m also wanting to encourage more citizens to do this. N.org has a photogallery page that explains the various ways to view the photos. And they encourage people to submit photos, too. So take your digital camera with you wherever you go and help “weave community threads” by adding community photos to the pile. It’s “citizen journalism” in every sense of the phrase.
The Rueb ‘N’ Stein held its annual Halloween bash on Saturday night. Click photos to enlarge and see one of these photo albums for 4 dozen more: Picacasa, Flickr, Rueb.
After the Laura Baker auction on Saturday, my wife Robbie and I headed to the Contented Cow and there we discovered a couple of my Locally Grown colleagues. Co-host Ross Currier and his group, The Blue Moon String Band (band-members Jerry Johnson, Wendy Nordquist, and newcomer ??) were on stage, and Locally Grown producer/KRLX staffer Mathias Bell was in the audience with Clare Kazanski and her mother Madelyn Leopold, visiting from Madison, WI. Click photos to enlarge.
Laura Baker Services Association held their 10th annual auction at the Grand Event Center on Saturday night. Among the festivities, the Laura Baker choir performed jointly (left) with one of the Northfield Youth Choirs; center: some of the members of the LBS choir on stage; right: LBSA board member Cheryl Buck with Jane Fenton, Director of Community Relations. Click photos to enlarge and see the album for a dozen more photos.
