Quaint and creative Empire already hosts the Asparagus Festival in mid-May and the revived Hill Climb racecar event in September. Next up is the village’s inaugural Hops Festival, which organizers hope will also become an annual event.
Drink and run! The third-annual Sleeping Bear Marathon and Half Marathon, held by Endurance Evolution, will take place on Sunday, Oct. 5 at 7:30 a.m. in Empire. That’s the day after Empire’s inaugural Hops Festival.
The Glen Arbor Art Association has announced the scheduling of tryouts for its December Reader’s Theater production of the movie/radio play A Christmas Carol. The date for the tryouts is October 6, at 7 p.m. at its 6031 South Lake Street, Glen Arbor facility. Directing the play will be Ron Smith, a Glen Arbor local who recently directed Casablanca.
On August 21, scientist Lukas Bell-Dereske gave a public presentation to a packed house at the Sleeping Bear Dunes Visitor Center in Empire that offered a window into how climate change will affect our cherished National Park.
Fifteen-year-olds Annabel Skrocki and Annie Lively, both sophomores at Glen Lake School, stood in complete silence with more than 400,000 other climate activists at the People’s Climate march on Sept. 21—mourning, for the melting glaciers, the rising oceans, the dryer mid-continents, the stronger storms, the disappearing islands and the paralyzed politicians.
The Empire Village Council voted yesterday to implement and enforce paid parking at Empire Beach next summer, following what members perceive as a successful trial run in 2014. The parking meter near the picnic area, which charged visitors $1 per hour, generated more than $23,000 between July 3 and September 10, despite summer weather marred by rain and cold temperatures. Empire’s popular beach, which has 87 parking spots, sits in the middle of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
Celebrated professional gardener, author, and historic landscape authority Peter J. Hatch will visit Leelanau County, Oct. 1-3, for a series of public lectures and programs. Hatch served as director of Gardens and Grounds at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello for 35 years and has published four books on Monticello’s botanic legacy including A Rich Spot of Earth: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello. He lectures extensively on Jefferson and the history of garden plants, and currently consults on public garden projects and private estate landscapes.
The League of Women Voters Leelanau County will host a presentation on Public Education: Past and Present on Wednesday Oct. 1 at noon in the lower level public meeting room of the Leelanau County Government Center. The October meeting will be the first session of a two-part discussion on public education.
I dreamed about him when I was working in the prisons of California. I felt him one night in the room as I was falling asleep and thought I could smell him. I missed him at a subliminal, subconscious level all the time but missed him consciously, in ways I’d never anticipated, on the days after work when I was tired and saw no hope for my students, most of whom were going to be behind bars for a long time and, if they got out, would have no families, no jobs, no future.
At the moment these words were put to paper, somewhere around 287,000 people in Michigan were barred from marriage. About 44,000 of these people have created a life together anyway. Some of them share in the task of raising children. We’re talking, of course, about gay Michiganders.