Rangers and staff at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (National Lakeshore) will be presenting short films from a number of National Park Service (NPS) sites on December 10 and 17. This two-day film festival over a couple of consecutive Saturdays will be the final NPS event of the Centennial celebration for 2016.
Matt and Katy Wiesen — owners of Crystal River Outfitters, the Cyclery and the M22 store on Glen Arbor’s east end — have acquired the former home of Great Lakes Tea & Spice on M-109 and will open a new apparel store called “Coastal” in spring 2017.
Auditions are over and director Teddy House has selected an outstanding cast for her holiday production of GAAA Readers’ Theater, The Bishop’s Wife. It’s a tale of a bishop’s struggles at Christmas-time to build a cathedral. While working to raise money for this mighty edifice, the relationships with his family suffer. When an angel, Dudley, is sent to help the bishop, Henry, really wonders what this charming Dudley was sent to help with. Will Henry’s love for his family be mended, or will an angel win out?
The Sleeping Bear Ale Trail celebrates half a dozen (relatively) new breweries along the M-22 and US-31 corridors in Leelanau and Benzie counties. Patrons could foreseeably visit all six over the course of a weekend. The Ale Trail complement’s the region’s already well-established wine tourism pilgrimages and traditional drinking holes.
They met in the summer of 2012. Still in college, she had come north from a suburb of Detroit to take a job as a waitress at the Cove in Leland. He was managing The Cyclery in Glen Arbor and beginning to think about ways to create a high-density apple orchard in the hills above Lake Michigan, land his family has farmed since they came from Bohemia in the 1870s. They had friends in common. Her best friend, Bradi Pasch, from college, was the sister of one of his best friends, Dave Pasch, a young man who was his partner in the orchard enterprise. He is Brad Houdek. She is Gina Wymore.
Totem poles are, historically, monumental sculptures carved from tall trees. The Leelanau School project got its totem tree from Art’s Tavern owner Tim Barr. He donated a 26-foot-tall cedar, which had graced the Barr home before the storm had turned it into a supine lawn ornament. McCue’s students resurrected the cedar through the transformative power of art. And like other historic totem poles, this one was endowed by it creators with a story to tell about their tribe.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore encourages all fourth graders to visit the park for free this year as part of the Every Kid in a Park program. The program gives fourth grade students, and those accompanying them, free access to more than 2,000 federally managed lands and waters. Visit www.EveryKidinaPark.gov to download the pass and obtain more information.
Art’s Tavern in Glen Arbor held its annual outdoor Pig Roast on Nov. 5. The grub was delicious, and free. Guests were asked to donate canned goods, or cash, for the Empire Food Pantry. Here are scenes from the pig roast.
If you are election-weary and searching for ways to honor the “best” in all of us, consider Four a.m. December 25. Written and illustrated by the local team of Bill O. Smith and Glenn Wolff, Four a.m. is a holiday picture book that takes the reader around the world at this one wondrous moment, then back home to the United States where a soldier is trying to get home in time for Christmas.
A special holiday tradition continues on November 12 as we kick off our annual call for children’s books. The Friends of the Library, in cooperation with Glen Lake School’s “Parenting Communities” program, are once again collecting donations of new children’s books for children whose families are in need of assistance this holiday season.