- [Voiceover] Tonight on WPBS Weekly, Inside the Stories.

His name is Wilson Bickford and he can be seen worldwide online.

We get up close and personal with the comedic artist.

- If you tell me I can't do it, I'm going to say, watch this, hold my, hold my drink.

- [Voiceover] And a dedicated group of people in Ottawa, are singing songs of hope and songs of protest.

Gil's Hootenanny can be enjoyed as a short film this year.

Also tonight cats really do have nine lives and a story out of Plattsburgh, confirms it.

All of this and more coming up on WPBS Weekly, Inside The Stories.

(gentle music) - [Voiceover] WPBS Weekly, Inside the Stories, is brought to you by, the Watertown, Oswego, small business development center.

And Carthage savings, mortgage solutions since 1888.

- Good evening, everyone.

I'm Stephfond Brunson.

Welcome to another edition of WPBS Weekly, Inside the Stories.

Bob Ross, is that name familiar?

Without a doubt many of you conjure up an image of that iconic curly haired artist.

Perhaps the same thing happens when you hear the name, Wilson Bickford, minus the curly hair.

The producer of his show, Tracy Duflo, took some time between takes, to talk to the nationally known artist, and shed some light on his national fame.

- [Tracy] Wilson Bickford is a household name for many.

Wilson Bickford's show, Painting with Wilson Bickford, is seen on PBS stations across the United States.

He has an international following too, with fans as far away as Australia.

Fans in Northern New York and Ontario might be surprised to know, that this world famous artist grew up right here, in Gouverneur, New York and still calls the North country, home.

- Well, I still haven't really gotten used to it.

You know, people tell me you're, you're kind of a big deal now and I don't see it that way.

I just don't I'm I've said it from day one.

I'm just a guy who likes to paint.

- After graduating from high school, Wilson did, what many do, he got a job.

- Well, I worked at the Gouverneur, Talc mining company and I started there in 1978 and I worked there until 2003.

So I was there 25 years, but I'd been doing art since 1990.

I, I've always been interested in art.

I started doing it as a kid, but I never really got serious about it, until about 1990.

And that's when I started doing painting and entering some of the local art exhibits and shows.

And I actually started teaching in about 1991 or 92.

People were approaching me.

They'd see my artwork hanging in a restaurant and they'd say, can you show me how to do that?

And that's I got started with it.

I never dreamed, I would become an art instructor.

From there.

It's just been a fantastic journey, right to this point.

- [Tracy] Over the years, Wilson has built up a reputation as an art instructor.

It's become a very lucrative career for him.

His goal?

To get everyone to recognize their creative side.

- I think what stops most people from attempting art, or a lot of things in life is just the fear.

Fear stops people from doing many, many things.

How many Kenny G's and how many Eric Clapton's are out there that could probably play just as well, but they've never picked up an instrument and tried it.

So I think it's very important to just get in and try.

So I try to instill that in people and let 'em know that they can do it.

You can do this.

It's a learning process.

You don't have to be born with a skill.

You learn it.

It's a learned skill.

It's an acquired skill.

It's not an inborn talent.

And that goes for art, music and just about anything else.

- [Tracy] And speaking of music, Saturday nights might find the multi talented Wilson, playing in a local band.

- Yes, yes.

I'm a musician too.

And have been, and I I'm the type, that's not afraid to try something and never have been.

Oh, I can play guitar, I can play banjo.

I play a little bit of keys.

I, I've always been a take charge type of guy.

That is, if you tell me I can't do it, I'm gonna say, watch this, hold my, hold my drink.

(laughs) I'm going to do it.

- [Tracy] Wilson's television program, showcases his talent and often his sense of humor.

- Did you hear about the two balloons that were floating through the desert?

One balloon says to the other, "look out for the cactus" and the other balloon says, what cactusss oh (balloon deflating sound) (laughs) Well, I try to inject a little humor into it because I've seen a lot of art instruction, that is kind of very serious and they tend to talk over the people's heads and, you know describing art techniques.

I like to keep it fun and light and everything very, very fun and not too, too nerve wracking.

You know?

So I have, I have a lot of people write into me and they say, they tell me that.

They say you make it fun and it's enjoyable.

I can follow what you're saying 'cause you describe everything fully.

And there's no gaps.

I'm not left hanging.

Even though I try to be funny and put some humor into it, I'm still getting my point across as far as the lesson.

So people learn about perspective and contrast and all those art principles.

Art can be very intimidating.

A lot of people are afraid of it, because they don't understand it.

So I try to just do it in a lighter mood and it's easier for everybody to relax and enjoy themselves.

- Painting with Wilson Bickford produced by WPBSTV, is now in its seventh season on, most PBS stations.

Earlier this year, Wilson filmed 13 new shows for season eight, which will be released in the winter of 2022.

Life is hard for the mighty cephalopod especially the bobtail squid.

Packed with protein, this little guy is easy prey, but he's also very valuable.

In this segment, discover how special bacteria gets sorted in a squid and how it sacrifices it's own immune cells to feed it.

(upbeat music) - I think you'd have to be nuts to not think about bobtail squid as cute, those big black eyes.

I think they're just the cutest things ever.

But Hawaiian bobtail squid are basically the couch potatoes of this cephalopod world.

They sit in the sand for much of their lives.

They do occasionally get up to hunt, but they're effectively like relaxing on vacation in Hawaii.

(gentle music) My name is Sarah McAnulty and I'm a squid biologist.

I study the symbiosis between Hawaiian bobtail squid and their beneficial bioluminescent bacterial partner.

A bobtail squid is a small squid that lives off the coast of Hawaii.

They're nocturnals.

And they're about the size of a lime.

So these squid swim around at night and it's basically like the squid has a constantly glowing light bulb, situated sort of in the center of the squid's body on the underside.

And that light bulb is all chock full of bacteria, called Vibrio fischeri.

(gentle music) If you're a cephalopod.

You're super easy to eat.

You're basically like a swimming protein bar.

So you have to be very good at camouflaging.

Typically, if this squid wasn't glowing it would look like a little squid shaped shadow or silhouette.

With the help of the bacteria, they match the moonlight precisely, coming down from above.

That partnership is called symbiosis.

The bacteria gets a place to live, and if you're a squid, from the bacteria, you get light as camouflage.

Now in terms of how the bacteria get into the light organ.

This is a really cool process.

They go through this molecular gauntlet.

The squid is constantly beating cilia in the opposite direction of where the bacteria needs to swim.

So these bacteria need to be awesome swimmers and they also need to be able to put up with a lot of, basically insults from the squid.

You've got nitric oxide, you got acid, but this Vibrio fischeri is able to eventually swim actively down pores and ducts, into the depths of the light organ.

And we call that deep area where the bacteria trying to get to, the crypt.

And once they're there, the immune cells also play a role in this specific symbiosis.

(gentle music) My work is trying to understand how immune cells, which we call hemocytes are able to tell the difference between beneficial bacteria and others.

So I've developed a test and a method for watching the behavior of hemocytes.

The way I do this is I take a squid from downstairs in the squid room and I anesthetize it using ethanol.

It knocks them out completely, and I do a blood draw.

I only take out like a tiny drop of blood from these little squid.

And then I'll do what I call squid PR, which is just like CPR on a squid.

I'll blow water over their gills, using a pipette.

I'll tap them a little bit and they burst back into life with color.

(gentle music) So we take the blood out of the squid and then we stain the immune cells with a dye.

So we have bacteria in one color and then we have a different type of bacteria, in another color.

And then we have the immune cells in far red.

We look at these different colors to tell who's who and then I take time-lapse videos of these different cell types, all interacting.

When the immune cell finds a bad bacteria in this context, it just engulfs it and eats it and kills it.

But with Vibrio fischeri, it will bind, maybe carry it around for a little while.

And then it just sort of like leaves it behind.

So we think that there's some kind of education process, that occurs between the bacteria and the squid at the beginning of the squid's life, to sort of teach the immune cells, that Vibrio fischeri is the beneficial bacteria.

The immune cells will migrate into the crypts, where the bacteria live at night and they will basically sacrifice themselves to feed the bacteria.

This is totally nuts and super cool, because normally you would think of an immune cell as being just like a destroyer, not as something that would be feeding bacteria, of all things.

But this group found that this is what's going on.

The bacteria in the squid have been living together so long, that they've both adapted to helping each other and being the perfect life partners.

It may seem bizarre, but it's really important, because these squid, are giving us a really unique opportunity to understand how animals and bacteria relate and how the colonization by bacteria affects your whole immune system, affects your whole genome.

And what far reaching parts of the body are affected, by having beneficial bacteria, live with you.

- Rounding the corner to Ottawa.

Now we take a peek inside a musical event, that's been going on there for over a decade.

It's called Gil's Hootenanny.

And this year it can be experienced as a short film.

What's a hootenanny you ask?

'Tis a fine, fine question.

(gentle music) (singing) - A lot of people don't know what a hootenanny is anymore.

Especially of the younger generation.

But a hootenanny is a place where people get together, to sing.

Not so much to hear performers, although that can be part of it too, but really to sing-a-long.

We've been selling out for the last number of years with 300 plus participants attending and singing along and leaving with their hearts and spirits, full of music and community.

- So where do you do this?

But the bigger question is why, why do you do this?

- [Tamara] We do this, in part, to remember my dad, whose name was Gil Levine and who died in 2009, at age 85.

Because Gil loved hootenannies.

And in his obituary, there were three important words about this, which were, plan a hootenanny.

He had hootenannies every year, at my parents' home and invited people to come and to bring a song and to share their song and to sing together.

And my dad was a strong trade unionist, social activist and really believed that singing together, could create, a kind of solidarity of spirit.

But it grew and grew over time.

It changed over time.

One of the things that changed, was we moved away from singer songwriters, simply performing, to having more and more singing along.

And people asked for that.

Participants said "we want to sing more".

And so we would have more and more and more sing-along-able songs.

(singing) We even had a songwriting contest that ran for a number of years.

And the idea was to generate new songs, that were on the theme of protest and hope, but also were highly sing-along-able.

In other words, had great choruses, easy lyrics.

- They stick in your head, they're easy to remember.

- And they stick in your head, catchy melodies.

(gentle singing) Themes, relevant themes.

And, and so our, our sing-along-ability scale, I would say we've gone way up with more and more and more, singing along.

- So we are expecting this in just a few days, May 1st.

It's going to be different this year.

Where can folks go or what can they expect and how do you want them to show up?

Are you imagining everyone singing along online even when they were able to in-person?

- Yeah, obviously it's different in COVID times.

And last year of course, was our first year, doing a virtual hootenanny.

One of the hard things about the virtual part is that we can't hear each other's voices.

So it's singing along, but we, we only hear whoever is singing on screen and, and myself.

As long as, as long as we sing, there is life.

There is hope and there is solidarity.

Thank you.

- Thank you Tamara, very much.

We appreciate it - Because of COVID.

There is no live zoom event this year.

However, a short film titled "Singing Together Apart", was created and will be available on Gil's hootenanny website, on May 1st.

The link is on the bottom of your screen, so that you can still sing along.

(gentle music) (beeping sound) What is it about historic grand mansions that attract our attention?

There are certainly plenty to ogle at, right here in Northern New York, but in Brockville, Ontario, there's one, that stealing the hearts of visitors.

- [Narrator] The Canadian side of the river was no exception to grand mansions.

The Fulford Place Mansion in Brockville, Ontario was built in 1901, for Senator George T Fulford.

Fulford made his fortune selling pink pills for pale people.

And at one time was the richest man on the river.

He was one of the first people to use testimonials in advertising, which became a very successful technique.

The stone for the mansion came from a quarry at Gouverneur, New York, just across the border.

Inside, the house features intricately carved woodwork, all fashioned by hand.

(gentle music) George Fulford became the first Canadian, ever to die in an automobile accident in 1905.

- [Voiceover] He had a son George the Second, who was born here in 1902.

And it's because of George the Second basically, that we have this house today.

George the Second died in 1987 and before he died, it was in his will that he wanted this house kept, to show people what it was like to be very rich and live in the nineteen hundreds.

So he, he donated the house to the Ontario heritage foundation.

At the time, his son, George the Third, donated all the contents to the house.

And so therefore, when you come into the house, you'll see what it was like in 19, 1901 when they moved in.

Because, when they moved in here in 1901, they took pictures of every room.

(gentle piano music) - [Joseph Brosk] Today, this 35 room mansion is owned and operated by the Ontario heritage trust and is open for tours.

Original furniture, china, silverware, paintings and more are showcased throughout the house.

- No doubt.

The pandemic has been hard on all of us.

For fellow pet lovers out there, we count on our fur babies to keep us company.

So imagine the trauma of losing your pet at the height of the pandemic.

This is the case for one Plattsburgh woman, who was already struggling with a health crisis of her own.

But fear not, this story doesn't end the way you think it might.

Thom Hallock of our sister station in Plattsburgh, has more.

- [Thom] Even before the pandemic started, the months leading up to it in 2019, had been tough for Mary Castine.

- I have a super rare kidney disease.

I lost my right kidney in January of 2019, and then my left was really bad.

- [Thom] Then in November, things only got worse, when her beloved house cat, Tarzan, got out.

- [Mary] I don't know what spooked him or what happened, but out he went and into the woods he went.

We kept searching all night.

We sat on the deck all night.

And, nothing kind of like vanished.

- [Thom] And even though the weeks turned into months and two winters, Mary never gave up hope.

She posted pictures of Tarzan often on a Facebook page, dedicated to finding lost pets in the Adirondacks.

- I had seen her flyers throughout the, the last few months, or actually the last year, periodically on Facebook sites.

- [Thom] 15 months later, some friends called Kaysa St. Dennis, about an orange cat they found, frozen on the side of the road.

- They knew that I had done a little bit of rescuing.

We were able to get him into the vet, quite quickly.

- [Vet] He was found by a concerned citizen, on the side of the road and basically had appeared deceased at that time.

But when these folks stopped and actually picked him up, they realized he was still alive.

So at that point, they brought him directly here.

We began administering care.

I suspect he was within hours of death.

- [Thom] St. Dennis posted about the cat, online.

And almost immediately, people started pointing out its resemblance to Tarzan.

- I had matched up the pictures, and I was, I was positive right away, with some distinguishing markings, that it was him.

- [Thom] Tarzan spent five days in intensive care at Palmer Veterinary Care, fighting for his life.

But his doctors say he's now doing much better and is on the mend.

- [Vet] When he was discharged, it didn't really appear that he was going to have any major longterm, lingering effects from this ordeal that he's been through, minus, you know, some scrapes and scratches and that sort of thing.

But I think in terms of the life-threatening condition he was found in, that shouldn't have much for lingering health effects, down the road.

- [Thom] For Mary, it came just days after she returned home, after spending months in North Carolina, getting a kidney transplant.

- I had just gotten back, two weeks before I got the message, the night he was found.

So it's like the best welcome home surprise ever.

So it was just a miracle.

I don't know how he ever survived.

- [Thom] Mary's said she's grateful to those, who helped bring Tarzan home.

And for the help she's received since, many people have chipped in to pay Tarzan's medical bills.

- It's the best feeling in the world.

He's not just a cat, he's like a part of my family.

He's been my constant and we are working on readjusting him.

He has a little bit of a grumpy lion, as I call his new alter ego.

Some behaviors he has picked up from being out, maybe with a feral colony.

He's a little aggressive, or will hiss and growl, but he's slowly coming around.

He's eating well.

He's gained a little bit of weight.

He looks great.

He's got some stuff, that'll be probably long-term.

He has a bit of frostbite on his ears, as you can tell, his tail, coupla paws.

I can't thank everyone enough.

I mean, it took a huge, it took our community to find him.

So many people shared his story.

Anytime I would post it, there would be hundreds and hundreds of shares.

"Oh my gosh, your cat has been found like what a miracle".

I'm like, yes, what a miracle.

I don't understand how it's happened, but it did.

And it's amazing.

- [Thom] In Plattsburgh, - I'm Thom Hallock, for WPBS Weekly.

- That just about wraps it up for us tonight.

But before we go, we highlight another local musician.

Keep your eyes on the screen.

This one is also visually appealing.

Please enjoy the music of Benjamin Paul Plante.

(♪ Ben Paul Plante "Maybe" plays) ♪ Maybe ♪ ♪ You're doing this all again ♪ ♪ Safely ♪ ♪ We push and you defend ♪ ♪ You're walking tall ♪ ♪ big and bold ♪ ♪ You're looking both ♪ ♪ new and old ♪ ♪ You save yourself to lose again ♪ ♪ push away another friend ♪ ♪ only ♪ ♪ the animals figured out ♪ ♪ Nothing ♪ ♪ and something all about ♪ ♪ Situations messed right up ♪ ♪ drinking from an empty cup ♪ ♪ hang the hero till he's dead ♪ ♪ savage bed to lay his head ♪ ♪ only ♪ ♪ nobody left to blame ♪ ♪ maybe ♪ ♪ there's toxin in the name ♪ (gentle music) ♪ Maybe ♪ ♪ you're doing this all again ♪ ♪ Safely ♪ ♪ you push and you defend ♪ ♪ you're walking tall ♪ ♪ big and bold ♪ ♪ you're looking both ♪ ♪ new and old ♪ ♪ you save yourself to lose again ♪ ♪ you push away another friend ♪ ♪ Situations messed right up ♪ ♪ drinking from an empty cup ♪ ♪ hang the hero till he's dead ♪ ♪ savage bed to lay his head ♪ ♪ only ♪ ♪ there's nobody left to blame ♪ - And that's it for us tonight.

We're so glad you joined us.

Join us next week for another look, Inside the Stories, in your region.

We'll visit the Trudeau Institute in Saranac Lake, where experts joined the good fight against COVID-19 And, it's nearly auction time here at WPBS.

Get a sneak peek at items you can bid on, virtually, and if you don't have a computer, by phone.

If you have a story idea that you'd like to see us explore, email us at wpbsweekly@wpbstv.org.

Until then, goodnight.

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(gentle music)