Saturday Night in Vermont

Yes, it's hard to keep up with the wild pace of life in Vermont. Recently I had the opportunity to experience it first hand. My friend Mike Lange invited me to attend the St. Albans Maple Festival Banquet. He had received two tickets for having judged the maple bake-off competition (which apparently almost put him into a diabetic coma, but what a way to go). So, after spending some time walking around the Maple Festival itself in the lovely town of St. Albans (it's about a half-hour or so of Burlington), we headed over to the banquet itself. Mike and I ended up sitting at a table with three very nice older couples from northern Vermont - and I did my best to try and convince them that the two male professors from the sin capital of Burlington were not actually married or CU'd (civil unioned) by starting every other sentence with the words "so, as I was saying to my girlfriend the other night . . ." (and if I actually had a girlfriend this wouldn't be so pathetic of a story). Of course, during the door prize session of the evening I won a flower, which wasn't helping my argument, so I immediately gave it to one of the nice ladies at our table - although Mike won another flower three drawings later and kept it. The meal was classic small town - the slab of ham they gave me was so big that it literally covered the plate (all of the other food was safely protected until the pork product "roof." The best part was maple on snow - that is, fresh maple syrup on vanilla ice cream. Oh my good god.