(no audio) (no audio) (text thudding) (bird singing) (no audio) (lively music) (engine humming) - Howdy, howdy, coming to Vermont with love.

- [Videographer] Okay.

- I really appreciate what your folks are doing here.

Member Veterans for Peace, also committed to impeach the president out in Dallas.

Here comes, here comes the guys.

Here comes the soldiers.

Iraq veterans against the war.

Hey, Cindy.

- Hi.

- John Nicholls.

- Hi, Cindy.

- Hi.

- Hi, nice to meet you.

- Thanks for coming.

- Go back to California.

- [Veteran] Oh, yeah, We got back to Vermont.

We're glad to be here.

- People, all their things in the ears, our nose, their lips.

- This is not the Vermont that I grew up in.

- Not the Vermont I came to either.

It was a good conservative state at the time.

Right now, I don't know what it is.

(audience applauding) - You know, as I travel around, a lot of people are coming up to me and saying, "Well, you know what?

I don't think you really have a right to criticize this war."

But you know, I never signed up to use weapons of mass destruction on a civilian population.

- We have an opportunity to very democratically as a people come together and say, "No, we want our troops to come home.

You are tyrant.

You are our dictator."

- And we need to say to our representatives that they need to impeach George Bush.

- [Member] Yes.

(audience applauding) - It's radical.

It's unreal.

What do you expect with a bunch of liberals in Washington?

- And I look out at you Vermonters.

Couple hundred years ago, you sent a guy named Matthew Lyons up to Congress, and Matthew Lyons, you know, when John Quincy Adams did the Alien and Sedition acts and acted as a tyrant, Matthew Lyons, the representative, the congressman from Vermont, went to jail rather than cooperate with that president.

- He wrote a letter to the editor attacking President Adams and was thrown in jail.

And in fact, his situation, being in a jail, became a major, major campaign issue in the election of Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was very close to Matthew Lyon and worked to repeal the Alien and Sedition Act.

And that was a very important moment in our state and in our country and helped shape American history in that process.

- [Videographer] What do you think of Bernie Sanders?

- Hah, what?

Oh, you don't want to hear it?

No, no, come on, please.

- [Videographer] He's won every single election.

People must like him.

- You know why?

'Cause he speaks at nursing homes where most of them got Alzheimer's, and they don't know what he's talking about, and he doesn't either.

- [Announcer] Please give a warm welcome to our senator Bernie Sanders!

(audience cheering) - Thank you.

Today, I am extraordinarily proud to be a Vermonter.

- I remember when he ran for the Mayor of Burlington, and I remember picking up the paper in the morning and saying, "Oh my god, he won."

- Jewish boy from New York came up and cleaned up Burlington.

- What we are here for today is some very basic principles.

We believe that healthcare is a human right for all people regardless of their income.

- He's a down to earth type of person.

He doesn't stub his nose at people.

He is, he's just like you and me, and he cares about people.

- Morning, how are you?

- Good morning.

- How you doing?

- Morning, Bernie.

- Bernie really knows how to connect with people.

His message about domestic policies, class stuff, I mean, he so gets it, always has.

And he's so committed to it.

- My father came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 without a nickel in his pocket.

Many of your parents and grandparents did the same.

They came to a vision, which said that we have a middle class where if you work hard, you can do well.

But here's what is going on.

- Vermont likes mavericks, and Bernie appeals not only to the liberal progressive vote, for lack of a better term, he also appeals to the redneck vote.

- Unemployment, sky high, poverty at the highest level.

- I know there's been a lot of fun made of Bernie and his Jewish accent.

- He talks like what he, he's part of the old New York, early 20th century, New York, Jewish left.

It is a great tradition.

It is an intellectual tradition.

It's a fiery tradition, and that's who and what he is.

And Vermonters love that.

He's not a Vermonter, He is nothing like a Vermonter, except he doesn't, can I say bull (beep)?

- Well, I guess he just doesn't take any bull (laughs).

- I've got a big favor to ask you and the Vermont State legislature.

I want you to pass a single-payer healthcare program in Vermont.

(audience cheering) - When you look at a long stretch of history, it happened fairly quickly, that Vermont became a more progressive state.

Now, some people, you know, say it was all those outsiders who came in and changed Vermont.

But I also think the seeds for that change were always there in the Vermont soil.

We never were an ultra right wing conservative state.

(playful music) - When the mayor and the city council made it official, John Dewey Day, I thought, okay, well, why don't I make a big giant puppet of John Dewey, and we can do a parade and make Halloween masks because his birthday's on the 20th of October just before Halloween, and so we did.

John Dewey's birthday, John Dewey, the philosopher educator, born here in Burlington, 1859.

Hands-on learning, not learning by rote, but learning by doing.

That's what Dewey was about.

So we're going to form a circle and hold hands and sing "Happy Birthday."

♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ Happy birthday John Dewey (spring bouncing) ♪ Happy birthday to you (lively music) (group cheering) - If you read Dewey carefully, I think you'll see how much we relied on Dewey.

Dewey believed that learning was most effective if the person who wanted to learn felt the need for that learning.

- Goddard was based on Dewey's philosophy.

Pitkin had studied with Dewey at Columbia, and Goddard was an attempt to embody Dewey's philosophy really.

- Well, Dewey philosophy, it's hard for me to sort out the principles of what was actually Dewey and what was actually Goddard principle.

And what I think was really the most important part of it was that your education should not be separated from the real world around you.

- I just think it was Dewey who said that a farm and a community that gathers around a farm will be the best vessel in which you can try out progressive ideas.

- I grew up on a farm, living on a farm most of my early life.

This was the beginning really of thinking about educational principles and how a school ought to be run.

- I think coming from the farm in Marshfield, Vermont, and being a a farmer's son and not being extremely wealthy, Tim Pitkin decided that if he were gonna create a school, it was gonna be based on real living and real problems so that students were ready for real life when they left.

- [Pitkin] And so we drew up a proposal for this college.

First was the education of young men and women of college age through the actual facing of real life problems.

- So what would've been called an internship now was an essential part of Goddard.

- In fact, I remember one parent coming up, being around for once, said, "Well, where's the school?"

- Part of my Goddard experience was to go work in a daycare center.

And then I worked at Sprague Electric, which was an electrical capacitor manufacturing plant.

Quite a large operation in Barry.

And I worked on an assembly line.

I joined the United Electrical Workers of America, went to union meetings.

You know, I'm still pretty young.

I'm in my twenties, and I'm long-haired kind of hippie guy.

And I'm working there with these old Barry Italians and farmers.

And that may have revolutionized me more than anything else I've ever done, even more than what we talked about and read in books on campus, was going to those union meetings.

- They taught you how to be really analytical and critical about information.

You go to school to make inquiry.

- Back in the thirties and into the forties, Goddard was one of several Vermont colleges and schools that were attempting to implement the ideas of John Dewey in terms of a transformative education, which is radical.

- Dewey enabled us to see that the deeper one goes, the richer the connections.

I think of it almost physically.

- Radical does come from the same etymological basis as radish.

So it does have to do with getting to the roots.

- Dewey is all through the founding of Putney School, of course.

Carmelita Hinton founded it on solid Deweyan principles.

She was constantly quoting him, you learn by doing.

- It kind of is like a good balance between classwork, hanging out with your friends, and then doing like the garden work or working in the farm.

- It's fun.

- The form that takes at Bennington, for example, is when a dancer committed deeply to professional excellence says to a student, if you want to be a great dancer, you have to do something besides dance.

This is the essence to me of of a Dewey insight.

- But the thing that you have to realize is that it's rooted in these very conservative, in a sense, values about work and the value of work.

- There certainly were students there who didn't want to take on that responsibility, didn't want to do their work program job in the kitchen.

That was one of the jobs, I washed dishes.

- And the rich don't get different chores than the poor.

The rich students were washing dishes right next to the poor students at Goddard College.

- There were jobs helping maintain the grounds, mow lawns, paint buildings.

It was part of the requirement of being a resident student at Goddard.

- Goddard had already earned a reputation of being a communist school.

And in between residential programs, the school would invite groups on campus to make use of the grounds year round.

And one of the things that Tim Pitkin thought would be really great is to bring the farm people and the labor people together who were at odds typically, and see if they could figure out a way to find common ground.

- They were very suspicious of each other.

At that time, the farmers were shipping milk to Boston, still do for that matter.

It was trucked down.

And of course the farmers who drove it were drivers, and they had the feeling that they were not getting enough money to do that.

The farmers thought they were paying them so darn much, that they weren't making any profit.

Took all that money to get the milk transported.

Of course, that subject came up, and they talked about it.

- Not only that, but this is the McCarthy era where labor and organized labor specifically are seen as dangerous to society, in a sense, and that Goddard was one of the first colleges in the country to have active labor leaders on campus.

- [Pitkin] And we had two big tables.

Curious enough, the farmers lined up all on one side and the labor on the other.

Nobody told 'em to, but it just went that way.

It was fairly natural, I guess.

And then these farmers and these labor leaders got, so they'd sit down together and talk with one another.

Got so they could call each other by the first name.

- Dewey, the same way.

Dewey had a lot of respect for where people were coming from.

- What stands out in my mind is that each individual is respected for their individuality, but also they're part of the community.

- I mean, when you get up at 5:30 every morning, and you get to the barn, and these are the first people you see, and you're half asleep, and to know that everybody's in it with you, it's a good feeling working together.

(upbeat music) Elena, we used, (indistinct) there's another.

- Kids need to be useful.

And if you think about a typical Vermont family or town in the time that Dewey was alive, those teenagers and even younger than teenagers, they were expected to be useful.

They were expected to contribute.

They had chores, they had responsibilities.

And that not only allowed them to grow up, but it allowed them to feel worth and feel valued and be valuable.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - Well, the other piece of the Deweyan principles that was really important beyond the Learn by Doing was the education for democracy.

Democracy was at the forefront of most of Dewey's writings.

Education and democracy, art and democracy, whatever and democracy.

- Vermont was established during the revolution.

And we had to get our citizens educated in order for them to be good citizens.

- Take my hometown of Newbury.

In that town of 1,435 people, there were two high schools, two!

- I mean, in order to exist in a republic, you have to have people who know how they wanna run their lives.

- When the model for that was the small New England town and the town meeting.

- We would like to propose this meeting passed the following resolution.

That'd be resolved that the school district of the town of Marlboro will reduce its carbon footprint through the conservation and use of cleaner renewable energy.

- We know how to make a motion and call for a second.

All those technological things about democracy are taken in Vermont in the town meeting tradition as a given.

- I just want to thank you for the climate in town.

It's a wonderful town to live in it.

Thank you for all the work you do.

- I just wanna thank you for the climate.

I think there's too much snow, and it's too cold.

But I would like to thank the road crew.

- The idea that you have a say and you can show up and put up your hand and have your opinion and carefully consider an issue and then put up the hands in a true show of democracy and decide whether or not to buy that loader or that grader.

- Case of town meeting, people come together once a year and have a free exchange of ideas and decide the fate of the town for for the next year or so.

Pitkin instituted that as a staple of the Goddard process.

- [Pitkin] Community meetings were something fearful and wonderful to behold, they were compulsory.

This was not by order of the faculty, this is by vote of the community.

Everybody had to come on the theory.

This again, democratic theory, that if you're gonna enjoy the benefits of democracy, you jolly well gonna make a contribution.

One of the contributions is to come and listen.

- Freedom, freedom to say, freedom to speak.

A lot of things surfaced.

My whole sense of feminism surfaced.

As a lesbian, I came out at Goddard.

- It's that you question and you know what's happening in your community.

- We had to spend all day in town meeting whether we liked it or not.

We helped paint the church.

We went down to square dances.

Some of the kids were very puzzled by this.

They couldn't understand why they had to go dance with a smelly old farmer.

(laughs) That's one of them told me.

- And I think we tried very hard not to get students to work for the teacher.

The idea was the student worked for himself.

- What do you want to learn, is what they said, and how do you wanna learn it, was the second question.

This went right up my alley because I was not a conventional student.

I was 25 years old.

I had a 2-year-old.

I was self-employed, didn't have a lot of funds, didn't have a lot of support, family support.

- [Pitkin] It worked just as well, if not better, with the adults than it did with the college age, because they tended to be a little more certain what they wanted to do.

- So I did an independent study and completed a 15 credit course for Goddard College in Organic Garden.

- And it started to draw people like Allen Ginsburg here to speak.

We have Joseph Campbell in 1968.

Jonathan Kozol, Howard Zinn.

I mean, Ginsburg really brought it alive, you know, with the chanting and the singing and the music.

He brought it to this place that was not where it had been.

- Students would walk from the campus down to the village, probably not frequently, and probably not many of them, naked.

- Just imagine me coming from a firing brimstone Baptist background, and here I'm seeing all this going on.

So I'm going, (gasps), but everybody else is going about their business and doing what they had to do.

- There were things happening in Vermont that you didn't see everywhere.

It's like Bread & Puppet Theater was living as the artist in residence at Goddard.

And I remember going to the first Bread & Puppet circus, - [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Bread & Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus.

- Our theater was invited to be theater in residence at Goddard in 1970.

And that's when we moved from New York.

We'd been thinking of moving to the country for a while.

- I didn't want to be in the city.

I had been war child, Second World War, and I was 10 years old.

We became refugees, and for a few years we had to live wild, strange, running from the bombs and cleaning the fields and grinding the grain and making the bread.

So that country life for me became what the real life is.

- A guy who comes from Europe with personal history, tied up with authoritarianism, finds a free space, is inspired by the local people, creates an institution that's an inspiration for people all around the world.

- And naturally, we were deeply influenced by Urga's grandpa, Scott Nearing.

So when he came visiting us, he always reminded us, "Why do you pay rent here?

Why don't you go in the countryside and grow your own food," and things like that.

- [Urga] When he visited us in New York.

- In New York, when he visited us in New York.

- And with five children and an apartment that was not much bigger than this kitchen (laughs).

- So the invitation from Goddard to become theater in residence couldn't be refused.

- Irresistible.

- Irresistible.

Then we came to Vermont.

- And I remember going to see some of the performances and trying to make sense out of them.

And they were very esoteric and very symbolic, and you really had to pay a lot of attention and then talk about it after with your friends about what you thought it meant.

But it was very powerful theater and very, very visual.

- I had no teaching obligations.

But the understanding was that we would take students and professors into our system of touring and show making.

- [Urga] And a number of them joined the company and became long-term very wonderful performers.

- Well, one of them was Holt Saloom, Sue Bettmann, a whole row of people who later on became members for a short time or a long time in the theater.

And when we lived for four years playing field.

And in the meantime, this farm was acquired by Urga's parents.

And now we have among us.

- I was there with them in the Goddard College era.

But when they moved up here to Glover in '74, by then I was already in the midst of raising a family.

So we just worked here in the summers on the circuses.

(lively anthem music) (performers singing indistinctly) ♪ And see what I can see ♪ (indistinct) still shining bright ♪ ♪ Through the (indistinct) for me ♪ - And we had different stages.

We had a stage over here as part of the pine woods.

And then we were out in that field and a couple of different places, you know, over the years.

But now what we want to go to is the Pine Forest Village 'cause that's where all the people who have passed away who have been important to Bread & Puppet are memorialized always.

There's actually a memorial to the Nearings, various puppeteers who had passed away over the years, and they're built to disintegrate, and they do.

And it's kind of sad.

You remember somebody very vividly.

And then over time, the memory kind of gets a little faded, and the houses begin to lean over and then collapse, and our son Rafael has a little house, so I always like to go visit that.

He was five when he died in 1982.

So that's already 26 years ago.

It's a long time ago.

But it's nice to just come to a spot.

It's purely to remember him.

It feels really powerful.

You know, these things, they're integrated into the landscape, so they're part of the trees, they're part of the forest.

And that, that's a good thing.

(gentle music) - We felt, we really had to relearn how to do theater when we came to the country.

So to play in the landscape is a fantastic challenge.

You know, to go into nature and to enhance that nature and that sky and that forest behind you, and to come out of it and go in it, and to create the proper flocks of geese and the proper herds of horses.

We even have to learn to be careful, even that, to not just bombard the area with our politics.

- We had to learn the hard way after our first playing field parade on the 4th of July and got cherry bombs thrown at us by people who didn't agree with the politics, but also by people who just said like, "Who are these people, you know, walking into our town doing whatever they might feel like doing?"

But we are able to have our museum here now for 33 years with many strange things in it.

And sometimes people who don't agree with us at all do come and visit the museum.

And besides the message in it, they see the years of hard work that produced all these things.

And there's a grudging admiration for that part of our work, even if they disagree very much with the politics of it.

- The quantity.

- The quantity (laughs).

- Not the quantity naturally.

And since we are quantity people.

(audience cheering) (audience applauding) (vocalists singing in foreign language) - Goddard was really seeding, I think, the whole area of people that had gone to Goddard or were going to Goddard or came to work with Bread & Puppet and then settled in.

- It seems like every time I met someone, and they'll say, "Well, why are you here?"

I say, "I'm a Godard student."

"Oh, I went to Godard, and I stayed."

- Godard in those days had what was referred to as negative endowment.

There wasn't money there, there was debt.

- Supposedly Tim needed money, I don't know, to make payroll or something.

He needed $60,000, that was a lot of money.

And the story is that he called Senator Aiken, and George Aiken said, you know, "Gimme a day or two, and I'll get the money."

It is hard to imagine that the president of a little progressive school in any state could call a leading political figure and have that person value the institution enough to say, "Sure, we wanna keep it going."

- There was this idea that what we did here was not just a progressive education idea, but that it was actually coming out of the ideals and values that are held dearly by Vermonters.

- [Commentator] Incidentally, Ralph Flanders thought we should call the school a school for Vermont living.

- Flanders was a Republican, and Flanders was the guy who led the assault against McCarthy.

Where are these Republicans (laughs)?

- You know, it was Republicans really who led the environmental revolution of the sixties.

Deane Davis was a republican.

Arthur Gibb was a Republican.

- And it hit very strongly in Vermont with land use control and Green Up Day, Earth Day.

- This is our third bag, I think.

- And then Ted Riehle, conservative Republican who comes down from the Burlington area, you know, and outlaws billboards, remarkable.

- There was a place called Seashell City on Route 7 between Rutland and Middlebury.

And they had signs both north and south, big red and white signs saying, 10 miles to Seashell City, or only five to Seashell City.

Ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life.

And that really was the trigger.

- We bragged about the beauty of our state.

And yet here were these monstrosities that were blocking the view.

It was such a sensible idea.

- Tourism in some ways has this fascinating role with it because we're selling an image.

And once you sell that image, people get a little antsy if that image isn't here.

it's what makes this Vermont as opposed to every state.

- [Commentator] And it was this one fellow, Ted Riehle, who got it up and running.

- It was funny in a way.

I drove actually my dad around, I think he spoke about 125 times throughout the state, whoever would listen to him.

Garden clubs of course loved it, but the farmers were generating income from these billboards.

And obviously farming back then in the sixties was even more important than it is today.

And to try to explain, say, "Mr. Farmer, you're gonna lose a thousand dollars a year, but it's the best interest of the state not to have billboards."

So it became a very, very, very controversial issue.

There was a time at a grange and Dad speaking in front of a very hostile group of farmers, and he said, "Why did you wait in the car and keep the car running?"

- He didn't feel too safe, you know?

I mean, he was hitting free enterprise right in the teeth.

- Was it the right of the state government to determine what could and could not be done on people's businesses and on their farmland?

My dad's point was that if you have billboards all over the place, why would a tourist want to come up?

They can't see the fields, they can't see the mountains.

So the billboard bill slowly gained momentum, one by one, you know, legislator after a legislator, Dad was able to convince them.

Phil Hoff was the governor at the time, and he was, I think, generally supportive.

The difficulty was that my father was a Republican, Phil Hoff, a Democrat.

- The Republicans were determined this was gonna be their initiative, and they pushed that through without any sort of help from me.

And they told me to just stay away.

Well, what happened is that when they came down to show, they didn't have enough votes, so they had to come to me, and together we got the billboard bill through.

- And we still don't have billboards.

I went driving with my daughters when they were very young into Connecticut, and in the middle of traffic, one of my daughters goes, "What's that?"

And of course, I figured something semi was about to flatten us.

And I realized she was pointing at a billboard.

She'd never seen one before.

- A lot of tourists will come up from New Hampshire or from New York, and they'll say, "Oh my gosh, what's the difference?"

And it'll suddenly dawn on them, and they'll say, "Oh, that's it, there's no billboards here."

- As late as the 1970s, Much of what we're talking about in the environment is, is can you see it and can you smell it and how's it going to affect tourism?

The issue begins to change so that we begin to understand the impact on Vermont's water supply.

- Deane Davis, the quintessential progressive Republican, businessman, he was Vermont's first modern environmentalist politician.

- Down he went to southern Vermont where the ski area development was booming and actually saw raw sewage coming out of the ground, and he hit the ceiling.

- You heard about a development going on down in southern Vermont.

Now it was the International Paper Company, and they wanted to build 4,000 homes down in this land.

In Stratton?

- Yeah, Stratton.

- And you found out that there was not a thing the state could do about that.

- What I did in that case, I happened to know the president of International Paper Company.

So I decided to go directly to him to get whatever I could from him in the way of slowing down or even stopping the development.

- They came up with a set of emergency health board regulations that were tougher than nails, and they put in those emergency regulations until Act 250 took place.

(typewriter clicking) (light music) - The applicant is seeking a permit to subdivide 54.3 acres into 15 single family house lots, four bedrooms each, all with drilled wells and in-ground septic.

The three of us are charged with finding the facts, applying the law, and making a decision.

- Well, Act 250 created almost a little court system for dealing with environmental issues.

- Governor Davis had a lot of foresight in pushing Act 250 and seeing that it was enacted.

He recognized very clearly the threat to the environment, whether it's a shopping center or a new housing development or even a new school.

- The applicant has the obligation to produce evidence and to persuade the commission that the permit is within the confines of the law, the Act 250 law.

- Because often it's cheaper to build five miles out of town on open flat farmland.

But of course, you're taking farmland out of production.

You're making access to these facilities much harder and much more expensive.

- The roadway is designed to take best advantage of the topography and to disturb as little of the steep slopes as possible.

- What if my well fails and goes dry because of this?

- One of the things that's good about the Act 250 process is that it does involve individual citizens at a local level.

Abutting landowners can come and testify on a proposed development.

And that is really in the Vermont tradition of town meeting, citizen legislature, and an interaction between people and their government.

- This is where his property line is, which is why I don't understand why.

- Act 250, as you know, has always been controversial in Vermont.

I mean, I can't tell you how many debates occurred in the House about how terrible Act 250 was.

- Act 250 helped defeat a regional shopping mall in Taft Corners in the late seventies, the Pyramid Mall.

But it also permitted the big box retail that's happened at Taft Corners as well.

So it's a mixed bag.

- I've discovered that there is an awful lot left of Act 250, it's been weakened and weakened and weakened.

- When we do our site visit, I would hope to take you up into Red Mountain Road.

- This will be a private road?

- It will be a private road owned in common by the homeowners.

- The idea of preserving open spaces and building in existing developed areas, common sense, but still very hard to get people to do that.

(light music) - This is lot 12, the house site being right in here and the septic being down where the yellow flag is.

- Deane Davis once told me that more than 90% of all Act 250 permits were approved in the past 20 years, 100,000 acres of Vermont land have been developed.

- I think the difficulty is for some people, they look at some of the development that has happened, like the big box stores in Williston, and they think, "Well, Act 250 was a failure," but Act 250 wasn't meant to stop development.

- It's mostly a means of making sure that the development that is going forward is going forward in a responsible manner.

- It's good.

But if you're a farmer, and you have 300 acres, and you've paid taxes on all your life and your father did and his father before him, and you decide that you wanna sell off a couple lots, all of a sudden they make you sell a 10 acre lot.

It's very restrictive.

- But without Act 250, any of the ski areas would've run complete riot.

They could have done whatever they wanted to do.

At least with Act 250, it gave the public a voice to question what was going on and have some sort of sane control of what was happening.

- That keeps Vermont the way it was when they got here.

They came here, they didn't want Vermont to change, so they started passing all these laws and regulations because farmers say, "Jesus, what the hell's up with that?"

- I got a four wheeler, and we used to be able to ride 'em on the road.

Now you can't because people have moved in, and all they use it for is the farm work.

It's not a toy.

- People hate the word regulation.

It's just a natural instinct.

Well, I attended a Vermont Bankers Association meeting, and I heard words I never thought I would hear.

They said, you know, our neighbor New Hampshire had a lot of bank defaults about a lot of loan defaults.

We in Vermont did not have that.

And it is thanks to Act 250, because developers had to carefully think about the quality of their development.

So a lot of poorly thought out, flimsy, lousy developments never happened in Vermont.

- In Vermont, the early economy is all based on agriculture because the bedrock in Vermont weathered into pretty rich fine soils, very good for farming.

And if you're based on small farms, political power is evenly distributed.

Whereas in New Hampshire, which is underlaying mostly by granite and out washed sand, it was not as good for agriculture, but very good for growing pine and oak trees.

So the early economy of New Hampshire was all based on timber.

And very early on, you had timber barrens, like the Wentworth family, and a system that was very much influenced by them and became very, I'd say, corporate friendly.

- New Hampshire had no state taxes, there was no state culture there.

And therefore it became much more conservative.

There wasn't a statewide presence.

- In Vermont, the political system was very egalitarian.

There was really no one power broker who could influence the system.

And that gives rise to governance where people are gonna get together, and they're gonna decide in a community how things are gonna happen.

And you can see how these states have diverged in that way.

Vermont, one of the very first states to get a bottle bill 'cause farmers were worried about their cows feet being cut up by broken bottles.

New Hampshire, the only northeastern state that wouldn't endorse a bottle bill because it would be costly to business.

- There's something about the ferocity of New Hampshire, the wind blows, it's a little bit barren.

There's just maybe too many pine trees.

It's a bit rocky in places.

Vermont has a more yielding landscape, and there's tremendous variety here.

You've got the Champlain Valley, you've got these beautiful fields, you've got the variety of forests.

You've got the mixture of deciduous trees, fur trees.

You've got the Green Mountains, which I think are more accepting than the White Mountains, which I find a little terrifying.

- And he really can go to Robert Frost.

You know Robert Frost, in his poem, New Hampshire has said to anything you can say about Vermont and as well be said of New Hampshire.

Or maybe it's vice versa, except for their mountains.

That Vermont's mountains stretch straight and true.

And New Hampshire's curl up in a coil.

I dunno if he was referring to snakes, but after all, he was a poet.

- Frost's great long poem of the thirties called "New Hampshire" concludes with this line: At present, I am living in Vermont.

- [John] And it was these bedrock geologies that gave rise to these different systems.

- [Jay] I spent seven years in New Hampshire.

Coming to Vermont for me was like coming home.

- It certainly was a refuge for me.

I remember the first Halloween, we had a chimney fire, and our neighbor, Ronnie Squires, who was a teenager then who grew up on the dairy farm down the hill, Ronnie came over and put out our chimney fire.

Now he put it out by, started having a bucket brigade and pouring water down the chimney, which was really more than needed to happen.

But he told me later that he just so wanted to meet us.

- [Shirley] Believe it or not, at one point he was very shy.

- No kidding.

- But in later years you wouldn't realize that because he was very outgoing.

- The joke was that, you know, down there on the Henry Farm where Maynard and Shirley lived, and of course Ronnie, that was the real commune, you know?

- Yeah, it certainly was.

(both laughing) We had everybody, you guys too on stormy nights.

- That's right.

Not you, but two or three of them.

- That's right.

Stayed overnight at the house when they couldn't make it up the hill to Packer's Corner.

- Ronnie got to be a really important person in the state of Vermont.

'Cause I don't know if you know about him, but he was the first out gay state legislature.

- This was when he was being sworn in the first term up in Montpelier.

And these were the other new people that were sworn in that year.

And so he served two years, and then he won reelection again after that.

And he worked with the Democratic party.

And when he was in Montpelier, they never knew how he was gonna vote because he'd vote whatever his mind told him was the right thing to do.

And so they all respected him up there, including the Republicans.

- That was Ronnie's partner.

- Yeah, right there is a picture, John.

- He was a sweet boy.

Oh, there's Ronnie and Governor Kunin.

Graham Down was gay, and another guy who lived up here was gay.

And I know that Ronnie just loved visiting.

I mean, I think Ronnie knew he was gay.

He said that he grew up on this farm and the cows would mount each other, and he knew the church was wrong.

- My husband had, we all had a little bit of problem to begin with, but we all came to terms with, he was still the same person he always was.

And that it really didn't, I mean, he didn't try to talk about his lifestyle to us.

He just, his lifestyle was his own.

And everybody accepted him for who he was because of what he did.

- I think of Ron Squires who stood in this chamber.

I feel like I stand on his shoulders.

Must've been 1992, I believe.

That's when we passed the non-discrimination law.

We, you.

- And he got up on the floor, and he gave just a shattering speech that they just were all floored with.

And if it wasn't for that, it would never have passed.

- For the first time, back in 1992, for the first time as a gay man, state had said, we're on your side.

- He just said, it's not about giving more rights to people, it's about giving us the same rights that you people already have.

- [Verandah] He was a native son, and he was a tireless connector of people.

- He was the eighth generation of Vermonters.

And everyone knew his family.

He was connected to the hippies because they were liberating.

- [Shirley] Ronnie enjoyed you folks.

He got a lot out of being able to go up with you people.

- [Verandah] Yeah, it widened both of our worlds.

- You know, people forget rural America at this time, even Vermont was not yet, you know, that gay friendly.

- At the time that I met Ronnie Squires, Ray was in the closet, Marshall was in the closet, and a whole host of other people were in the closet.

- Yeah, I mean, there was always, you and Ray were gonna have a baby also.

- Oh, I forgot all of that.

- Yeah, really.

That was going on for years.

- That's right.

It would've helped if we ever had sex.

- Yeah, right, you know?

- My best friend Richard Wazowski was gay, and he was out.

You know, this was long before people had the language gay.

- Oh my god.

- But Richard always said, "Oh, so and so is gay."

And I would just go, "Oh, you just think everybody is gay."

But it turned out that, hello, everybody was.

- There were a lot of young gay people in Vermont who would've probably gone to New York City or left.

And Ronnie loved Vermont, and he didn't wanna leave.

- My family knew his family, and my sisters went to school with his sisters, and I met him.

So that was very exciting to me.

And also a really strong message about, here he is as an out gay man already really prominently welcome and accepted in the state.

And that was very powerful for me growing up.

You know, I was 18.

- And when the hippies came, all of a sudden a gay culture started happening here.

- But Ronnie's very private in that matter.

He didn't, he never really came right out and said it, but we just knew.

He didn't tell any of us much of anything.

The fact we didn't know he had AIDS until about three months before he died, and he'd known it for six years, and he accomplished all he accomplished, knowing that he didn't know how much time he had.

- He was able to stand up and make that great passionate speech.

- It didn't stop him.

- He died six months later or something like that.

- And there were two buses that came down from Montpelier, from the representatives and the senators.

There were over 400 people at the service.

- You know ,those connections.

Vermont, this new group coming in, really connected for Ronnie, and his mother continues.

She has raised $155,000 in 17 AIDS walks.

- He was 41 when he died.

- Yep.

- [John] So he is a very important figure.

(disjointed live music) - We find ourselves at a historic moment, a historic place and time where people all around us are daring to dream for the first time, a full inclusion of full equality for a group of our community that's previously been disenfranchised.

- People like me love to go around bragging about Vermont because we kicked off the Civil Unions movement, and I love the fact that Vermont did it, but if the truth be known, it wouldn't have been done anywhere near as quickly as it was done in Vermont had it hadn't been ordered by a court.

- Because of five Supreme Court justices made a decision, does not necessarily mean that they were correct.

This is not a case.

- People woke up one morning and found that the Vermont Supreme Court had ordered the legislature to pass civil unions.

- What happened is the Supreme Court says, there's discrimination in legislature.

You need to resolve it.

- Make no mistake about it, Vermont in 2000 is Selma in 1963.

It is the Seneca Falls Convention when the first wave of feminists set out to attain the right to vote.

- I find it very difficult to swallow that people who claim can have a civil rights problem were never pushed in the back of a bus, were never denied school, never denied accommodations, were never denied anything that people were really legitimately have a civil rights problem were denied.

- This was done in my hometown in 1970.

I shook during the entire thing.

I was so afraid.

- The fear was we were- - Someone's going to see me.

- And the photographer, we had to face him on the street, in church, and he knew there's no way you can look at this picture and not know.

- And remember, at that point in time, it was still illegal.

- Why would we, in fact, say to an individual, it's okay, it's fine with us and legalize and give the same rights and benefits of a traditional marriage to these people when they are enacting sexual activities that are detrimental to them.

- Come on, most of the gay and lesbian sex acts we conjure up in our dirty little minds are not exclusive to homosexuals.

- We are people.

Some of us in recent times endured the scourge of a terrible epidemic.

Don't tell me about what a committed relationship is and isn't.

I've watched my gay brothers care for each other deeply, and my lesbian sisters nurse and care.

- We were all there at the hospital the last week for Ronnie, and so he knew everybody was there, and he knew everybody he loved him in spite of everything.

- Mr. President, this subject has required me to confront my own prejudice.

- There were signs across some of our rural areas that said, take back Vermont, which as I understand it really meant that we wanted to go back to the traditional Vermont values.

Now, of course, traditional Vermont values are freedom and unity, meaning live in let live.

- Take back Vermont movement.

Ooh, I didn't like that at all.

I got in a big fight with my neighbor.

He came up here and started touting that bullshit to me.

- And of course there was also a lot of national interest in people coming here from all over the country to try to stop the recognition, the legal recognition of same sex couples and just really some nastiness also.

- [Protestors] One, two, three, four, love is what we're fighting!

- There were gays in our community.

It wasn't as open as it is now, but there was no hate.

There was no bigotry, there was no intolerance.

You just, that's the way such and such behaved.

- When we came to Vermont, we came as an openly gay couple to be teachers in the local public schools, and we never made any secret of our life together.

And never, I will say to the credit of these towns, was the fact of our relationship where its nature questioned or challenged.

It never posed an issue.

We both had excellent relationships with the parents of our students and with our school boards, with our colleagues.

And that's a testament to the large mindedness and tolerance of Vermont, even Vermont back in the early seventies, which is what we're talking about.

- It's when you start lying that they begin telling secrets behind your back and wondering, you know, "Is he, isn't he?

What are they doing together?"

If you're bold about it and say, "This is who I am.

Take it or leave it," then it's amazing how accepting people can be.

But again, it's Vermont, and there's a tradition for that.

I mean, we live in Vermont.

- Sure, sure.

Well, we chose to live in Vermont.

- Well, chose for good reasons.

I mean, for those reasons among others.

- Yeah, things are moving in the right direction, but it's still hard when it's a small town.

Everybody knows each other, and there's some people who are very accepting.

But in a high school setting, it can still be very hard, particularly for young men, because that middle school and high school age is when for at least young guys, there's a lot of homophobia.

- My understanding, according to what the governor put out, that this subject matter must be taught in the schools.

- Mr. Speaker, I'm not sure what the member exactly means, if he could be more precise about what he believes must be taught in the schools.

- Well, it's about the alternative lifestyle.

- It's a very revolutionary act.

Now, for most of us, it's an act that cannot be not taken.

I mean, we are gay, so we- - It's not a choice.

- It's not a choice.

I mean it's the way our genes have shaped us.

- I happen to have two sets of friends who both are girls.

They're not doing anybody any harm.

And I'm sure that Irene, who was my companion for so many years that I must have been tagged with that.

- Please consider the human being that you have decided to place a stigma on.

- Maybe many of you remember those days when we used to have cakewalk at the University of Vermont.

It was something that came from the days of slaves, and it was part of our winter carnival really.

I remember our shock when people said it was degrading.

Of course, the vast majority of us were white.

- What ended up happening is it became an interesting dialogue about the role of a legislature.

You know, are they a representative?

Do they go and simply represent the opinion of the people back home?

Or do they make their own independent judgment?

- Mr. Speaker, my constituents are of our mixed opinions on civil union.

My judgment is that this bill is not only the right thing for us to do, it's the only just and honorable thing.

- We are asked to prove whether we are as tolerant and democratic as we say we are.

- Mr. Speaker, I wish my grandmother had felt that she could have told me about my Indian ancestry.

65 years ago, it was not popular to be an Indian.

Well, she said nothing.

This is the reason I have joined this fight to reduce discrimination found among my neighbors here in Vermont.

- I feel very lucky to be here with this senate at this time.

I was not there to vote for the women's right to vote, but here I am with an opportunity to vote to extend civil rights in our state.

It is indeed for me a high honor, and one I will always treasure.

(gentle music) - [Speaker] The question is, shall the bill H847 pass?

Are you ready for that question?

♪ How sweet the sound - [Reader] Westman of Cambridge, Wheeler of Burlington, Willette of Saint Alban City, Winters of Williamstown, Whitlow of Bristol, Wood of Brandon, Woodward of Johnson.

Young of Orwell.

Zuckerman of Burlington, Wilhelm of High Park, home of Whitford.

♪ All is blind but now - Listen to the result of your vote.

Those voting yes, 76.

Those voting no, 69.

And you have chosen by your vote to pass H847.

(group cheering) (gavel hammering) ♪ This little light of mine ♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪ Well, this little light of mine ♪ ♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪ This little light of mine ♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪ ♪ Now in the dark - What's fascinating is we had the debate, civil union's law went into effect, passed, the sky didn't fall.

It's not an issue because Vermonters know that in the end it really didn't change much.

- I guess, but they sure their own, you know?

That's what they want.

As long as they keep it to themselves, you know what I mean?

- But Vermont farmers whose families have been here for generations, they could sense the end of an era.

Not only were they losing control, because over time there just were more and more of us, flatlanders, but the values were changing.

- [Member] On the shed at the old town garage.

- So this is the list.

He was in the office.

- Is that who you talked to?

- Well, he was there.

Wayne?

Hi, this is Dan Butler.

You were in the office when I got the marriage license from Susan.

Hi.

You know, we'd like, we'd like you to do, preside over this ceremony.

(lively music) - I'm not against the homosexuals.

I love them.

And I'm really against anyone who defies God's plan.

So I'm here on behalf of God's plan.

- You have already given homosexuals civil unions allowing every legal benefit at the state level.

Do not be deceived.

Homosexual marriage will redefine marriage, and we will all suffer, especially the dear children whom we have the responsibility to bring up with the word of God.

- On the very first day they were available, we applied for a civil union in our town.

We knew then that civil unions was not the full thing.

Civil union is not marriage, and to be treated differently hurts.

- This is our civil union ceremony, and it was a really, really nice time.

But it was, I mean, it was tinged with sadness because there were still this small percent that kind of said, wish this was a real marriage.

- I mean, I ask you, which of the people married in this room has had to come before their legislature and begged for the permission to marry the person that they love?

- We always have the knowledge in the back of our head, someday we'll really get married.

You know, we're not not really married.

- There is such an incredible force that comes only from that institution, the institution of marriage.

The institution of civil union is not the same.

I looked at her very seriously and said, "Will you marry me?"

And I laughed.

I laughed.

I didn't think it was possible.

- It has been a long journey to this microphone for me, but with the love and support of my family and friends, here I sit alive and well.

I owe this to myself, to those who will not speak and for those that never got the chance.

Enough, Vermont, I am tired of being made to feel less than.

I am tired of being a second class citizen in a state I live and love.

I would like to remind those legislators who took their oath of office, discrimination is not written in our constitution.

To all the supporters out there, thank you.

I ask one thing of you, please stand up with me.

Stand up, stand up for equality.

Stand up for the fearful.

Stand up for our future.

Stand up for our families.

Stand up for love.

Stand up Vermont.

Stand up.

(audience cheering) - Folks, folks.

Folks.

- I mean, I don't think you can legislate any more than that.

Now it's up to the goodwill of the people.

Because I don't think you can legislate whether you're gonna like gay or lesbian people.

You can have laws because we've done as much as I think we can do with the legislature, starting with Ronnie Squires and all these other things, now is people doing a lot of work in their communities and talking to people and just getting, coming out.

- I think what I'll do is I'll put up the picture and say, which one of these women do you think grew up as a boy?

- See you Friday, I hope.

- I love, I love the poster.

- [Member] I think you did a great job, guys.

- We're planning on Sunday, September the 12th.

We don't know yet what time, but probably be in the afternoon or late afternoon, early evening.

- Early evening.

- Are you free?

Great, well, we're happy too.

Okay, anything?

All right, okay, have a good evening.

Bye-Bye.

We're on.

- Good.

(both laughing) We were in this book, it was a coffee table book about, called "Togetherness" or something.

It was about gay couples.

- By the time it got out.

- 80% of the couples had broken up.

So you're going, you know, yes.

No, it's not at that point.

- [Videographer] So what's your secret?

- What's our secret?

We moved to Vermont!

So how did we get here?

- It was a confluence of a bunch of things.

It was no one thing that got us here.

- I'm an actor.

I had a really good career going in Los Angeles film and television.

So things were good.

Richard was, is an acting teacher.

- And I still teach acting here, but I had a professional acting studio in LA, and I don't know if it was our age or just a time of our life or what, but we needed a change.

And then friends invited us out to Vermont, to Woodstock, Vermont for Thanksgiving, and I'm like- - Well, we went out with a realtor, which was a big mistake because we had no business.

- Are you gonna let me talk?

Jesus Christ.

- We moved in together, we'd given each other rings, but I was really, maybe some of was cold feet about commitment, but.

- Yeah, I think.

- But maybe.

- If Vermont had not been a gay friendly state, it would've influenced us not coming.

You know what I mean?

We weren't gonna be moving to Colorado, for instance, or a place that had some strong, I wasn't, I'm like, I'm not going there.

- Oh, hell, we lived in Arizona.

We had a cabin in Arizona.

- We didn't live there.

- So what brought us to Vermont?

- Yeah.

- Richard got very passionately involved in working on the house, and he, very quickly, when we were trying to figure out what did we do?

We bought this thing, what is it?

What we live in California.

I thought it was just a lark, but Richard said, you better be serious about this, 'cause I'm gonna be serious about this.

All of a sudden we're living in Vermont, and we're going, oh, oh, and we're living here full time.

Oh, hey guys.

Oh, look how beautiful.

Oh, and you're so still (laughs).

For me, what drew me to it was, it was so illogical, because you're going, what are you doing in Vermont?

If you want to act, you should be in New York or Los Angeles.

The places we're leaving.

But we both had felt some sort of undefinable connection to the land.

You know, our grandfathers were both farmers in the Midwest, and there's something that keeps coming back and resonating with that and learning much more about that.

I mean, Richard's become this poultry addict.

He's got geese and turkeys and chickens and loves them.

- I made my first incubator, and I hatched goose eggs in it.

It was amazing 'cause those baby geese hatching, it takes a whole 31, 31 to 33 days for these geese, and it was so fun to watch them hatch out.

It was unbelievable.

They were like little babies.

She's gonna sit right on your back (laughs).

- We were told not to help the geese.

That's so hard to do to keep your hands off.

I'd been around for the hatching of all the other chickens.

Richard was out of town, and so when the geese were hatching, he pushed, he pushed me outta the way going, "Imprint on me!"

He's not your father, me!"

- Come here, baby.

You know, we were together 12, it would've been then 12 years when we moved here.

But then moving to a new place like this, well, you see new parts of your partner.

Dan gardens, and I didn't really know that he had this.

He's really good at it.

He made pickles and sauerkraut, and he jarred things.

You know, he bought mason jars, and he bought the giant pot, and he got the pickling spices, and he enjoyed it.

We knew what the challenges were going to be, but we don't mind those, every place has its challenges.

I think work's a challenge.

- Yeah, Richard struggles a lot with finding work up here.

- I did find some work doing kind of like construction, and I work in part-time in a real estate office.

And I teach an acting class once or twice a week.

So I basically juggle three jobs, which I guess is common in Vermont.

I think a lot of people do that.

- Like dad worked at Copper Mines in Stratford, and he drove school bus too.

Plus, worked firemen.

- Vermont is mix and match because you have to be mix and match in order to make a go of it here.

- We had 15 head of young cattle running around.

We'd buy calves and raise 'em through the winter.

That was one of the ways Dad paid his taxes.

But he worked in the bobbing mill down here in East Corinth.

He was a foreman of the roughing room.

- I used to get up in the morning all through high school, you know, two, three cows before I went to school by hand.

- Like I said, you did what you had to do.

- And if it broke you could, you could fix it, and you could fix it with bailing twine, or you could fix it with duct tape, or something like that when there got to be duct tape and bailing twine.

- So with my three jobs, I guess I am like a real Vermonter.

I fancy myself that anyway.

(phone ringing) - I'll be right back.

- That's Andrew, his manager.

I hardly ever use a cell phone anymore, but Dan's work is still in New York.

There's, very, very little professional acting work here.

And so he's gotta take that call.

- I gotta go.

The audition is tomorrow at 11:00, so I gotta drive.

Sorry.

- Okay.

- I'll just pack up, can you get everything?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- I was trying to.

- I can't see you.

- Trying to, bye.

- Bye.

(geese honking) (both chattering) ♪ Da da da da - Okay, bye.

Don't speed.

The first like five months, I think through May, Dan was gone this year.

He was working in New York, and that is not easy for either of us to be apart from each other for that amount of time.

That's probably one of the tough things about being here, but it's a necessity.

- They can hop on interstates and being here from Boston and New York City, just hours when he used to take his days to get here from like New York City.

- And I know he loves coming home after he is been in New York for a long time.

I love this building.

I've always loved the driving past it.

Newbury is one of the oldest towns in Vermont.

- Oh, he's on the planning board.

So he has all this.

- I know this, 1763.

It's small.

I mean, once you show up and you introduce yourself and tell a little bit about yourself, the town knows it quickly.

- [Dan] We've gone to all the town meetings.

- But I never ever had one sense, did you?

- Of, I don't know what you're gonna say yet.

- Homophobia.

- Oh, homophobia.

- That's what the question was.

- No, but I'm not a good, I'm not a good gauge at that unless someone stopped me on the, you know, stopped me and said faggot.

- Yeah, we had friends actually who told us that there's a community to just stay clear of.

It's near here.

It's very near where we live.

- Oh, the one with the "take back Vermont."

- Yeah, was "take back Vermont" painted on their barn.

- I don't know what the bloody hell this business of "Take back Vermont" is 'cause I don't know what it was that they're trying to take back.

- My gut feeling about the situation is that people tend to jump onto issues which are not directly related to the problem at hand.

As in the question of who gets married or who doesn't get married.

It becomes a substitute for the class anger and the conflict.

What I have to, I'm going to call class conflict, that really exists in every part of the state, but which is submerged and is denied.

- The Act 250 and the Act 60, and I think that's more what that sign was about than gay marriage business.

- Yeah, gays like zoning.

We like zoning.

We want things zoned.

- No, they come in from the city, and you know, next thing they don't, they wanted to get away from the city, but then they wanted the city things here.

- I think more of being outsiders.

Like not being Vermonters, what do they call it?

Flatlanders.

- Flatlanders.

- Yeah, no, they would start at out.

Some change was good, but they just would go too far with it.

- Grandpa!

- What?

- Come - What do you want, pumpkin?

- Come out (indistinct).

- Say what?

- Come out (indistinct).

- Alliance Union merger, unification, amalgamation, association, connection, coupling, hook up.

We're hooking up.

- I want to get married now because we have the right to, and I think people worked really hard to give us the right to, and I want to honor their work, but I also wanna honor people who still are striving for that in their states.

It's important that we do it 'cause we have the right to, and I think we shouldn't take that for granted.

- I don't take it for granted.

I still don't know why I'm getting married.

I mean, I want to, but.

- For a while I thought that it was difficult because we don't have a social construct for who does what in the relationship.

But the reality is nobody does now.

I mean, men and women both work, and, you know, there are fathers who stay at home, so nobody really is comfortable with this, with a social construct that used to exist anyway, so.

- Where's my dowery?

- Yeah, where's mine?

(both laughing) - It'll be good.

- Good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome to the Newbury Townhouse, one of the oldest buildings in the town of Newbury.

My name is Wayne Richardson.

I'm a justice of the peace for the town of Newbury and the state of Vermont.

I'll be performing the ceremony this afternoon to unite Dan Butler and Richard Waterhouse in marriage.

- You've won my heart so many times, Richard, and you continue to do so.

You turn me on.

Every day, you teach me how to love more deeply.

You help me be a better man.

- My dear, Dan, here we are 16 years into our adventure together.

It has been a roller coaster ride, but no matter how hard it gets or how pissed I am at you, when you hold me and tell me how much you love me, I'm yours again.

- And now by the power I vested in me by the state of Vermont, I hereby join you in civil marriage.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Richard Waterhouse and Dan Butler.

(audience applauding) (gathering chattering) - You know, like some of the old boys were pretty dead set against it, and no, it's one way or another, it don't really bother me.

- [Dan] I am sorry.

- You'll be sorry if he crapped in my drink.

- So this is to our friends and to everyone here and to Wayne, thank you very much for officiating.

And Patty, our dear friend from Los Angeles, who just happened to be in the area, was able to come to the wedding today.

- How fortunate am I?

- So good health and success to everyone?

- Hear, hear.

- God bless.

- I remember being in grade school and seeing some kind of geography or history book with this picture, this idyllic picture of this big red barn and these colored trees and everything.

And it said Vermont farm or something.

This would've been 40 years ago.

And I was like, wow, that's beautiful.

That's where I wanna live.

Isn't that funny?

- I grew up and went to school with a kid in Newbury that lived on a hill farm that when you drove by it, you looked away, it would be zoned out of existence today.

The pretty people wouldn't put up with that.

And within 5 or 10 years, someone had bought it, fixed it up, and now it was pretty.

And the people that did it were pretty, and they seemed to have pretty comfortable lives.

And this young guy got very bitter about that.

And you can't take this as a criticism of the newcomers.

They're coming to Vermont is hugely positive in terms of democracy, but don't get all bent outta shape because some of the locals took it the wrong way.

Look what they lost.

Look what they never had.

Look what they had to compare it with.

It's the same story of white men taking over Native American lands.

There's nothing different to it.

They had more technology, more resources.

I think by and large, those kids behave pretty well.

- You know, Vermont is an intentional community.

It's preserved the sense that from end to end, people come here with the best dreams.

And I think because it's a small population, the good always seems to outweigh the bad.

It's not a Babylon, it's a place where you feel the possibilities.

You feel people's desires for the good and the true and the beautiful.

- But the challenges of living here have been the challenges for more than a hundred years.

How are people going to survive?

(gentle music) ♪ Oh, my dearest dear ♪ The time has come that we must part ♪ ♪ Goes the inner breath of my parting heart ♪ ♪ Oh, farther, I set sail ♪ Oh, say, for the one I love so dear ♪ ♪ I wish that I could come with you ♪ ♪ Or you could tell me here (gentle music continues) ♪ I wish my breast was made of glass ♪ ♪ And in it, you might be whole ♪ ♪ Your name, in secret ♪ I would write in letters of bright gold ♪ ♪ In letters of bright gold ♪ True love, brave believe me what I say ♪ ♪ You are the one that I love best ♪ ♪ Until the dying days (gentle music continues) ♪ The grove that's black ♪ My dear will rest here will turn its colors white ♪ ♪ If ever I prove false to be the brightest days tonight ♪ ♪ The brightest days tonight, true love ♪ ♪ All in the beds shall mourn ♪ If ever I prove false to be ♪ The raging seas shall burn (gentle music continues) ♪ Your company, my dear, ♪ Rest in your company, to me ♪ Makes me think when you're away ♪ ♪ That everyday is dear (no audio)