If Dawn and Art Adams seem a bit fatigued this week, cut them some slack. The Newtown couple was part of the 17th Annual Hole in the Wall Gang gala fundraiser last Saturday in Ashford. Dawn and Art were part of the wardrobe and costuming department, cutting, sewing, and organizing for four days prior to the talent show fundraiser that brings Hollywood stars like Alec Baldwin and Bernadette Peters together with children selected from the camp’s summer talent show. The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, initially funded by actor Paul Newman and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1987, is a camp for children with cancer and life-threatening diseases. The production and the pace of the show is intense for those behind the scenes as well as those on stage, said Dawn, but very worth the effort. This year’s gala raised $1.62 million for the camp.

Spinach sales may have been almost nonexistent this week, but The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company is thanking shoppers for their shopping efforts of previous months. Customers of Newtown’s Super Stop & Shop raised $16,000 as part of the 2006 Triple Winner Game. The $16,000 is the amount shoppers in our town contributed to an overall $4 million raised in the grocery chain’s stores across New England to benefit The Jimmy Fund this year. Fundraising is done through the purchase of scratch cards, at $1 each, donated by customers to fight pediatric cancer. The Boston Red Sox may have officially found themselves locked out of the ALE playoffs earlier this week, but at least the former World Championship Major League baseball team can sleep well knowing that it also supported The Jimmy Fund again this year.

Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital and The Tommy Fund for Childhood Cancer will host its 13th Annual Family Day at The Connecticut Tennis Center in New Haven this weekend. Lisa Pollock mentioned this week that more than 30 family members and friends are planning on joining her son, 10-year old Zachary, for the family event. The day includes a 5K road race, a two-mile walk and a .3-mile fun run for kids ages 10 and under, plus face painting, a moon bounce, blood pressure screenings, body fat measurements, chair massages, and more. “About half of the adults will run, and the rest of us will be walking,” Lisa said. Zach designed the logo for this year’s Family Day T-shirts.

We heard a familiar voice on the radio last week. Jeffrey White was a guest on The Leonard Lopate Show, a program on WNYC, New York’s NPR station. Jeff started his career here at The Bee back in the late 1990s, and we have watched as he left us first to finish graduate school in Boston and write for a paper outside the state’s capitol and then continue writing for other newspapers. These days Jeff is based in Prague, and is a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. One of his recent features in The Monitor, a September 6 story called “Report: Czechs, others sterilize Gypsies,” caught the attention of WNYC producers and Jeff was contacted to be a guest on the September 14 edition of The Leonard Lopate Show. So imagine our wonderful surprise — and feeling of pride — when we heard Jeff’s familiar voice coming over the radio as he was interviewed about this still controversial subject from his current base of operations in the Czech Republic.

Joshua Bailey almost was nearly the winner of Carl Kassel’s voice recording on his answering machine last weekend. Listeners of the NPR weekend show wait wait… don’t tell me! know that one of the prizes commonly awarded to contestants is a recording of Mr Kassell’s deep, rich voice for their answering machine. Unfortunately, Isaac Mizrahi — who was last weekend’s contestant for the wait wait segment called “Not-My-Job” — wasn’t able to land the much-coveted recording for the Newtown resident. Mr Mizrahi had to answer two out of three questions correctly in order for Joshua to win. Unfortunately for Joshua, the fashion designer missed the first question, about tractor pulls; nailed the second question, about a historic baseball game; but then he tanked on a question about a new form of recreation. Mr Mizrahi thought it might be competitive Yahtzee, when it fact the correct answer was fantasy fishing. Callers to the Bailey residence can continue to enjoy the dulcet tones of… the Bailey residents. Marian Wood and Shannon Hicks, each with her own groups of friends, were at Southern Connecticut State University on September 14 when the show was taped for its September 16 broadcast.

Nancy Murphy of Dylan Drive called last week, a little nervous about a pack of coyotes she had seen in her yard. Nancy was working on her computer Friday morning, she said, when a coyote crossed right in front of the window where she was sitting. She grabbed a camera, hoping to snap a photo of the animal, and when she went out her front door she saw a few more coyotes in her yard. “If you see one coyote, you can scare it away,” said Nancy, still sounding a little shaken up. “But to see a pack of them is a little scary. These guys just lurked around the front of the house longer than I expected they would, and then they went around to the other neighbors’ houses.” Nancy, who has a new puppy that had been left out on his own earlier that morning, wants anyone in the Dylan Drive-Glenmor Drive-Great Hill Road area to know to be alert of the pack, which she had never seen before. “I had been leaving my dog outside on his own, even for just a few minutes,” she said. “I won’t be doing that again.”

Labor Day Parade notes still continue to come in: ROOTS of Newtown has already received $10,000 for trees for next year’s parade. Pat Barkman, the 2006 Grand Marshal and a member of the environmental coalition that handed out 3,000 blue spruce saplings during this year’s parade, said last week that she had a wonderful time during the parade. She felt a lot of love and support as she rode down the parade route on September 4, she said, and is already looking forward to next year’s event. Pat also got a kick out of hearing that Joanne Cullinan, who spends a lot of time on Cape Cod, was planning to take her tree to the Cape to plant the next time she heads there.

Meanwhile, I’m going to head back into my favorite napping place until next week, when you can…

Read me again.