Edmond Town Hall looked a little like Woodstock last Thursday night as aging hippies from throughout the area converged on Newtown to pay tribute to the late Rick Danko of The Band. The event was sponsored by WPKN, and most of the musicians who performed on the town hall stage until midnight were friends of the late, great musician, including Garth Hudson, an original member of The Band (who absolutely killed the audience with an encore rendition of “Chest Fever”). Many of the musicians had settled in Rick Danko’s hometown, Woodstock, N.Y., in the years since the town gave its name to the greatest rock and roll event of all time, and the colorful collection of musicians, balladeers, and storytellers were reluctant to give up the stage at Edmond Town Hall. Everyone was having too good a time, remembering their friend Rick, and reveling in the good spirits of the local audience.

No one was having a better time than Amy Fradon, one of the performers and daughter of Dana and Ramona Fradon. Amy grew up in Newtown and then migrated to Woodstock to pursue her career as a singer. She told the audience that she was thrilled to have brought so much of her new hometown with her to meet her old hometown. She noted that her parents were in the audience, which she said was “so cool.” Cool parents were not a hallmark of the Woodstock era, but Amy’s parents, famous as artists, cartoonists, and illustrators in their own right, always have been cool, no matter what the decade.

I ran into Jim Shpunt at the Sandy Hook Fire Company’s Lobsterfest Friday night. He informed me that he had sprained his ankle while, of all things, practicing his line dancing in the back yard.

There was a line at the Lobsterfest over the weekend, but the occupants of the line certainly weren’t dancing. One hungry line dweller with a passion for crustacean cuisine quipped that since the line gets longer and longer at the event each year, it would be nice if the lobsters would get bigger and bigger. Jan Anders had built up such a hunger, she said she even had to go out for a pizza afterwards.

I checked out the dumpster at the firehouse because I heard that a refrigerator problem caused Lobsterfest organizers to throw out about $2,000 worth of meat. That’s enough meat to make me a pretty fat cat. Despite some rather vigorous dumpster diving on my part, I couldn’t even come up with one measly filet. I guess the sea gulls got there first.

Gordon Williams and Tammy Marks stopped by the Parks & Recreation Department Tuesday night to give an update on the Treadwell Park playground project being undertaken by a group of local volunteers. According to Tammy, the playground committee has narrowed the list of possible names for the playground to: “Imagination Station,” “Adventure Quest,” and “Kidscape.” One name that had been considered was “Milennifun,” but organizers figured that might be hard to say, especially for the kids.

Speaking of Treadwell Park, the Parks & Recreation Department has now installed surveillance cameras around the pool area to cut down on vandalism. It is also expected to curb the number of midnight skinny-dipping incidents.

The Parks & Recreation Commission was holding its regular meeting Tuesday night at Canaan House when I overheard strange music coming from another part of the building. I have heard several stories about ghost sightings at the Fairfield Hills campus, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the music had some connection. I was relieved to discover later that the music was coming from Steve Driver’s radio.

The walls of the first selectman’s office at Edmond Town Hall are covered with drawings of Newtown this month. The artists’ renderings are compliments of Judy Pesce’s Hawley School second grade school.

Marilyn and Paul Alexander are just back from a visit to California’s wine country. Marilyn said they sought out two wineries, the Alexander vineyards and the Preston vineyards. “We bought lots of wine, tee-shirts, aprons, and everything else that had our name on it,” Marilyn said. “We went to Preston and did the same because that’s my father’s and my grandson’s name.”

Pat Denlinger is delighted to have found a $155 roundtrip airline ticket to fly to Savannah, Georgia, and accompany her daughter Julie when she drives to Connecticut later this month. They will drive back to Savannah in August, then Pat will fly back home. “I don’t want her driving alone with the grandchildren – they’re only three and five [years old],” Pat explained. The only thing she’s not so sure about is the size of the plane. “It’s a three-seater – one seat on one side of the aisle and two on the other,” she noted somewhat skeptically.

Newtown police were quite busy on the night of June 9 and early morning hours of June 10, stopping more than 700 motorists at a sobriety checkpoint as the drivers passed through the intersection of Mile Hill Road and Trades Lanes at Fairfield Hills. Traffic flow through the checkpoint was boosted by congestion on westbound Interstate-84, which caused many drivers to leave the highway at Exit 11 and drive onto Mile Hill Road looking for an alternate route. The wait for some of them on 84 and at the checkpoint was more than long enough for the tipplers among them to sober up. Only one arrest for drunk driving was made all night.

That’s all for this week. And remember, you don’t have to take a breath test to…

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