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From Moscow to Nepal to Rhinebeck, Jennifer Neufeld and Jamyang Lodoe have made a habit of building businesses in unexpected places, collecting a few stories along the way. Jennifer went to post-Soviet Russia for an internship and stayed 14 years. While she was there she started a PR agency with an office on Red Square and kept it going through the 1998 crash. Jamyang was born to Tibetan refugee parents high in Mustang, Nepal, and walked down the mountain as a young boy to go to school in Dharamshala. A trekking trip in Kathmandu brought them together. Norm also asks Jennifer about her first months as a Rhinebeck village trustee and about Jamyang’s habit of running into someone he knows wherever he goes. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

This week Norm’s guest is Joe Phelan, a dedicated community volunteer and rock and roll keyboardist who spent 22 years as Superintendent of the Rhinebeck Central School District. Joe grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the son of a New York City firefighter and a mother who cared for his two sisters with developmental disabilities at home. He started piano at seven. He also hated practicing, a fact his teacher next door could always hear through the shared wall. Then the church organist made him a deal: learn the big pipe organ, but you play the 9:30 children’s mass every Sunday. Joe took it, and he slipped some “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” in between hymns. He talks about Le Moyne College, 12 years teaching English in Weedsport, and his Southern rock band Kentucky Moon, which opened for Atlanta Rhythm Section and The Outlaws and was once stood up by David Crosby. He also tells a moving story about his father finally earning his high school diploma. Joe looks back on 4:30 a.m. snow day drives, having all three of his kids in the schools he ran, and the two tries it took to pass the referendum for what is now the Joseph L. Phelan Auditorium. In retirement he chairs Rhinebeck’s Autism Supportive Community Committee and the Town of Clinton Climate Smart Communities Task Force, and he is back gigging on keyboards. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

This week Norm’s guest is Betty Leigh: Reiki master, model, writer, meditation guide, actress, painter, and active member of Rhinebeck Rotary. Within minutes she has her hands on Norm’s face reading his energy (verdict: “solid”). She explains how a broken tailbone and an Olympic shot putter turned acupuncturist brought her to Reiki 20 years ago, and she walks listeners through a simple breathing practice built on one rule: breathe out longer than you breathe in. Betty grew up in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill, the daughter of a scrap metal dealer and a Southern Baptist mother from Arkansas. She worked as a fitting model on 7th Avenue for Bill Blass and others, walked runways for Halston, and signed with Ford. She spent 11 years in Nashville spinning Americana records on the radio and selling Beanie Babies on home shopping TV. She talks frankly about surviving cancer three times, about seeing Elvis in Las Vegas, and about Grey Fox, WKZE, Mark Knopfler and Patsy Montana. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

This week’s guest is a musician, a music lover and a Jack Benny enthusiast. He’s the host of a new show on RadioFreeRhinecliff.org called It All Comes ‘Round Again: Mr. Paul Kovit. Paul was the first student to spend all four years on the air at Vassar’s radio station, and he hasn’t been behind a mic since 1975. He tells Norm why he’s coming back now and how he plans his “genre fluid” show, which airs monthly on Sundays at 9 PM. Paul looks back on shooting cel animation on an Oxberry stand with fellow Vassar film grad David Hoffman, his switch to video editing, and playing Irish bars in Manhattan. We hear “Mood Vertigo,” his tune for the Celtic jazz band Whirligig, which featured future Klezmatics Lisa Gutkin and Matt Darriau. Paul also explains how a pandemic-era Jack Benny fan club convention led to No Soap Radio, his group’s recreations of classic radio shows, and we hear a clip from “This Is Jack’s Life.” Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm's guest is a dad, a tennis enthusiast, a prolific painter, and an owner of the wonderful Rhinebeck Artist's Shop stores, Mr. Doug Shippee. Doug tells Norm about driving to New York with $400 and his best friend, sheetrocking a ceiling with no idea which side was up, and working at the legendary David Davis art supply store during the heyday of downtown art stores. Doug remembers a $650 Williamsburg loft above a sweatshop, meeting his wife Lynn with a "Hey, Staten Island," and his "dark years" hauling mattresses in a Montgomery Ward warehouse. He also talks about why the real problem-solving in painting happens with the brush in hand, his very creative family, becoming a grandpa, and the 52-year-old shop at the end of Market Street. See his work at douglasshippee.com. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

rom Manhattan, Kansas to Manhattan, NYC, and now Rhinebeck, this week's guests have been pursuing their dreams, one in designing the "scientific workplace" & the other as a designer turned painter: Camille Warmington and Paul Wilhelms. They met in architecture school at K-State and reconnected decades later over coffee (which turned into a margarita) in Houston. Norm talks with them about labs built so still that electron microscopes can see atoms, and about Camille's "stitch-like" paintings inspired by her mother's needlepoint and the garden she's constantly weeding. There is also the farmhouse they designed for family in Hamden, their own Hütte 2 going up in Milan, and the Golden Rock cocktail they reverse-engineered from The Corner in Tivoli. See Camille's work at camillewarmington.com. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits with artist, curator, and arts administrator: founder of WomensWork.Art, a past board member of the National Association of Women Artists, and an incredibly thoughtful creative soul who works in asemic writing, Nansi Lent. Norm and Nansi talk through what asemic writing actually is (non-semantic, illegible-on-purpose mark-making with roots in Dada and a global following since the '60s and '90s), and how Nansi backed into it in 2018 through journaling before "discovering" she'd invented her own visual vocabulary of scrolls and sigils. She talks about her wildly busy fall: 19 new pieces on fragile Japanese tea and gampi paper for a show at Cornell Creative Center for the Arts timed to Kingston Arts Week, ten pieces at Bank Street Newburgh, her annual Art Studio Views open house over Labor Day weekend, and a solo show, "A Thread of Longing," opening in October at BAU that spans five decades of her work. Along the way: her early career as a documentary and darkroom photographer printing for Martha Swope, a formative (and brutal) run through Ivan Karp's gallery world, a rocky stint in an MFA program at SUNY New Paltz, adopting her two children as a single woman, and how she met her husband while stalling in a laundromat on the Upper West Side. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with bestselling presidential historian Alexis Coe, author of You Never Forget Your First, a New York Times history columnist, and Substack writer, for a wide-ranging conversation. Alexis talks about her path from NYPL curator to public historian, her move to the Hudson Valley during the pandemic, and what it was like testifying before Congress on JFK records alongside conspiracy theorists and a very unhappy Nancy Mace. She digs into George Washington's complicated legacy around emancipation, the myth-making of early presidential biography, and gives a preview of her forthcoming book on young JFK. Plus: a study/marry/kill round with Karoline Leavitt, Beto O'Rourke, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Pete Buttigieg. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with Carla Melucci Ardito, a self-taught healer who's spent over 40 years studying trauma, emotion, and the body. They dig into her "dysfunction scale," the difference between real emotion and reactive frustration, how unresolved grief gets passed down through families (and even genetics), and why apologies only heal when they're truly felt. Along the way: her son's move to Paris for a PhD at the Sorbonne, her side gig fronting Brooklyn Bossa Nova, and an impromptu aria from Verdi's Falstaff. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with Rhinebeck artist William T. Ayton, known professionally as William T., to talk about his shift from traditional painting and ink drawing to AI-generated art. Ayton walks through how he prompts and edits images using Leonardo AI and defends the medium against critics who dismiss it as "AI slop." He discusses his augmented reality installation New Babel, a ten story virtual Tower of Babel built for Union Square Park to mark The New School's centennial, and a possible upcoming show at Tsinghua University in Beijing tied to a journal published by Leonardo, the arts and science organization run by his wife, Diana Ayton-Shenker. They trace Ayton's path from a working class upbringing in England, through art school in Edinburgh and years teaching English in Madrid, where he met Diana, to the move upstate to Rhinebeck twenty five years ago, where he raised three children and now works out of a home studio. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with historian Gerry Protheroe — a Welsh-born, NYU-affiliated professor and longtime private school teacher — for a conversation that ranges from his working-class childhood in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales,to experiencing the impact of the 1966 Aberfan disaster as a child, to his path through Jesus College, Oxford and eventually to New York City. Protheroe, author of The Crisis of Security: Global Politics from the End of the Cold War to the Present, weighs in on Brexit's economic toll, NATO's fragility under Trump, the fallout from the Iran conflict, and echoes of the Vietnam-era counterinsurgency debates in today's foreign policy. Along the way: Manhattans, Manchester United, dual citizenship debates, and a surprise Churchill impression. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with Cathy and Roy Naor, the couple behind Rhinebeck's Aba's Falafel, just two months after they sold the business to a cousin. Roy talks about his path from Israeli Air Force fighter pilot training to squadron commander to captain at El Al, and the private jet charter company he now manages remotely from Rhinebeck. Cathy traces her own route from Austin, Texas to a philosophy of mind PhD she never finished to a farmers market falafel stand that became a full restaurant. They talk through how they went vegan, the environmental change Roy has watched firsthand over decades of transatlantic flights and Cozumel dives, raising kids in Rhinebeck, becoming grandparents, and how the town has responded to them as Israelis living in the Hudson Valley. Vide now available HERE Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with campaign strategist John Rossi, the operative behind Debbie Hecht's landslide win in the Rhinebeck Town Supervisor Democratic primary. Rossi walks through the mechanics of a winning local campaign: his "three Ms" of money, messaging, and mobilization, why door-knocking beats social media every time, and the numbers that told his team early on they had a landslide on their hands. He addresses the more contentious parts of the race too, including the doxing controversy and Republicans who switched parties to vote in the primary, and gives credit to The Daily Catch for driving turnout. Rossi also traces his own path into politics, from a hazing scandal that pushed him onto a Long Island school board to his move to the Hudson Valley and his growing track record running campaigns for women candidates including Cara Gary and Lisa Cole. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm sits down with Bob Wyant, the Town of Rhinebeck's highway superintendent, for a wide-ranging chat. Bob talks through the mechanics of the job: a seven-man crew, a budget he can't touch without town board approval, and so much more. He walks through his favorite and least favorite roads in town, including Old Post Road, which traces back to a 1700s mail route to Albany, and Stone Church Road, which he says is just too long to love. Norm also gets Bob talking about his family. The Wyants have been in Rhinebeck since 1850, and the road he lives on is named after them after he rejected the town's original pick. He traces his family back through a Civil War ancestor buried in Rhinebeck Cemetery to German roots that got Americanized along the way. Bob also talks about digging up a 300-year-old millstone by accident while running an excavator, losing his first election and calling it one of the best things that ever happened to him, and his second career as a competitive karaoke singer with a soft spot for David Allan Coe and Elvis. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]

Norm welcomes his Rhinebeck neighbor Father Jeffrey Maurer, pastor of Good Shepherd in Rhinebeck and St. Christopher's in Red Hook, for a conversation about faith and vocation. Maurer traces his German and Irish Catholic roots to 1880s Kingston, his eight years of seminary formation between Manhattan College and priestly studies, and the moment as a teenager when he first grasped the Eucharist as more than symbol. He talks about writing sermons, presiding over deaths and baptisms, and why he thinks busyness does more damage to faith than outright sin. The conversation also covers Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic roots of cities like Los Angeles and St. Augustine, Florida, and Dorothy Day's farm up in Tivoli. Along the way, Maurer explains why he recently sat for the AP U.S. History Regents exam at a Kingston high school, in longhand, with a cigar waiting for him afterward. Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org Send comments to [email protected]