Women of the Roundtable:
A Quest for Sustaining Vermont's Vitality

Their leader is not a king, and their mission certainly isn't a search for the Holy Grail. But this Roundtable's quest is definitively a rescue mission.

"The Vermont Business Roundtable is a unique business organization. Our mission is to elevate the standard of living for all Vermonters, not just benefit the members themselves," says VBRT President Lisa Ventriss.

VBRT is an independent non-profit and non-partisan organization comprised of 120 CEOs from around Vermont celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Its focus is broader than a traditional trade association, utilizing research analysis and member recommendations to encourage public debate on a range of current policy issues, including education, economic health, environmental quality, health care, and technology.

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Tips on Scoring That Business Loan

Starting a business is an exciting time. Your new venture promises to make your future happy and financially secure. Family and friends support your idea and their enthusiasm adds to the excitement. What do you do, though, if some of the cash for your dream business is missing? The first place a new business owner often heads is the local bank. Before you take that step, here are some financial basics to improve your chances of getting the money.

Applying for a business loan takes time, energy, and motivation. Most importantly, the application requires a new set of skills. First, be sure your personal financial details are in order. Although you may be asking for this money for your new business, the loan officers want to know that you qualify for this loan. The new business venture does not have a financial history for the bank to review. The analysis comes down to you.

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Monumental and dynamic. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) is bringing together a very, very special gift - and we are the lucky recipients. Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque will feature more than sixty works of art in various media by fifteen artists spanning the approximate period of 1525 through 1665. To be perfectly blunt, the images distributed for advance publicity don't fully convey just what a treat this show is!

The exhibition will offer numerous pieces by the luminaries Anguissola, Gentileschi, and Fontana as well as some artists who have remained shrouded in obscurity, but whose inclusion illuminates and contextualizes the careers and lives of the more renowned artists. Works range from images of saccharinely-sentimental Madonnas-with-Child to grisly beheadings in progress; lovely still life paintings of fruit to intricate sculptural carvings of actual fruit pits; scenes of little childrens' faces imbued with truly delightful expressive personality to portraits of noblewomen whose expression reads cross me at your own peril.

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That Indomitable Pat Allen Morgan

This is how an editor's life sometimes goes: Pat Morgan was trying to put the finishing touches on the revised manuscript of Those Indomitable Vermont Women for a tight deadline at the printer; she also was scheduled for knee surgery.

Morgan left for the hospital at 5 a.m. on the morning of her surgery, but she was still working on the manuscript at 2 a.m. A friend and neighbor had to put on the final touches and email it to the printer, and it all came out right in the end. She can describe the experience in a single word: "Whew!"

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Irish Sing! The Celtic Trio O'hAnleigh

Irish American music is fun music. You've got your rousing pub songs, your storytelling ballads in which a jealous lover is always shooting someone dead, and tunes like "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" which are not actually Irish at all, but "tin pan alley" tunes, hailing from Broadway. What we think of as Irish music in America is really a conglomeration of American-modified Irish ballads (as is usual in an oral tradition), Irish dance sets, folk music and music that isn't Irish but American with an Irish theme.

What all these share is the common theme of place. O'hAnleigh, the Middlebury-based Celtic trio, brings all of the genres within Irish American music into one experience and one collection of music, Of Irish Crossings Told. The trio is able to draw from toe-tappers, knee-slappers, and heartstring-pullers alike. Such an inclusive range gives a thorough picture of the various styles that characterize "Irish music," and makes for a great listening experience, live or recorded.

O'hAnleigh is a Gaelic version of Hanley, the last name of the father-daughter duo who started it all. Tom and Becca Hanley debuted at an area group's St. Patrick's Day celebration in 2002; one year later lyricist and fiddler Cindy Hill joined them and the trio of O'hAnleigh was formed.

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