Volunteers stepped up to the plate as did local officials and local businesses to do everything possible to get life back to normal—although that normal might be better renamed “the new normal.” We’ve got volunteers helping people with legal issues and FEMA and insurance and more.
The fund-raising efforts that have gone on have been heartening and heartbreaking. So many people have helped with time and effort and donations.
Central to making this all work, of course, is money and the Mad River Valley Community Fund has been happily overwhelmed by the fundraisers and donations that have come in since the flood. And central to a lot of that fund raising has been music!
The past 10 days have seen a record number of fund-raising events featuring music (as well as auctions and raffles and household goods) to help flood victims. The hills have been alive as locals have gathered their instruments and voices and showed up everywhere where a song was needed.
Special thanks to local songbird Grace Potter who stepped up to the plate to help her state and her community. At The Big Pic and at the Flynn Theater, via Vermont Public Television and at Sugarbush Resort, Potter donated her time and talent to raise money for The Valley, the state and our farmers. You made us all proud. Your parents too.
And huge thanks to all of the musicians who have made so much fine music for us since the flood, helping us dance in the streets, raise funds to help each other and just plain improving our mood with good music.
Thank you, Harwood students Liza Mackey and Naomi Koliba, for getting up on Harwood’s stage days after Irene to sing your funny and uplifting song about the storm that savaged your towns.
You can’t shake a stick around The Valley without running into a musician who has played some benefit or event since the flood. The Big Basin Band, Colleen Mari Mays, The Detonators, 440Hz, Phineas Gage, Abby Jenne and the Enablers, Makuru with William Noel and Friends, Last October with Erica Stroem and James Kinne, and others have used the gift of music to make us smile, to make us dance, to let us forget, if only for a few minutes, that our lives and community and state got turned upside-down by a mean storm named Irene. You’re all awesome. Thanks for the tunes.
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