I hate to break it to you, dear Final Reader, but if you think you had a romantic Valentine’s Day, Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone, D/P-Burlington, probably had you beat.
Minutes after Wednesday afternoon’s House floor session came to a close, dozens of lawmakers giddily gathered in the Statehouse lobby to witness Stone’s marriage to jazz singer and U.S. Air Force Captain Ryan Fischer.
Stone and Fischer got engaged but a few weeks ago, when Fischer proposed to an unsuspecting Stone from the House gallery during a floor session. It was shortly thereafter that Stone sneakily approached me in the cafeteria, asking if I wanted to hear a secret. (The answer to that question is always yes.) She and her then-fiance would elope at the Statehouse on Valentine’s Day night, she told me, almost exactly one year after they met at a Farmer’s Night Statehouse concert.
Just after 5:20 p.m. on Wednesday, Stone’s officiants — Rep. Angela Arsenault, D-Williston, Rep. Chea Waters Evans, D-Charlotte, Rep. Daisy Berbeco, D-Winooski, and Rep. Emilie Krasnow, D-South Burlington — proceeded down the lobby’s spiral staircase, all with different colored feathers tucked in their hair. “It’s happening!” exclaimed Sen. Becca White, D-Windsor.
That’s when Stone descended the stairs in a white suit, as a violinist played. The teeny wedding party (plus a few close friends and family, photographers and a certain reporter) walked outside into the freezing February evening and onto the Capitol steps. “Where is the groom?!” Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, cried out, and within minutes, Fischer emerged in his Air Force uniform.
Standing before the Statehouse’s giant bronze double doors, the officiants gave short speeches. Waters Evans read the “sassiest” Bible verse she could find. Krasnow read aloud a Mary Oliver poem. More legislators watched from inside the Statehouse windows’ warm glow, smiling or wiping away tears, some holding up their hands in the shape of a heart.
By 5:40 p.m., Berbeco declared Fischer and Stone husband and wife and said, “You’re clear for takeoff.”
Rep. Bobby Farlice-Rubio, D-Barnet, then reopened the front doors to introduce the newlyweds to the crowded lobby. Stone and Fischer were met with joyous applause, and danced to “Fly Me to the Moon.” I’m not crying! You are!
— Sarah Mearhoff
In the know
With a new bill aiming to regulate social media design code for child users, Vermont lawmakers are taking on Big Tech.
“We’re in a David and Goliath situation, certainly,” Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D/P-Chittenden Southeast, who chairs the Senate’s economic development committee, told her colleagues Thursday morning at the bill’s first hearing. “At the same time, the U.K. has successfully regulated the code that our kids and families interact with, that everyone interacts with, to err on the side of privacy and safety.”
Ram Hinsdale is the lead sponsor of S.289, Vermont’s version of a bill being spearheaded in six other state Legislatures by the national advocacy group Kids Code Coalition. The California state Legislature passed its version of the bill in 2022, and was promptly met with a lawsuit by the tech industry group NetChoice.
Rep. Monique Priestley, D-Bradford, is sponsoring S.289’s House companion bill, H.712. She told VTDigger on Thursday that state lawmakers, in tandem with Kids Code Coalition and the Center for Humane Technology, are taking the California lawsuit into account as they craft Vermont’s version of a “kids code” bill with the goal of avoiding litigation.
“They’re doing it on purpose, right?” Priestley said of social media companies’ coding schemes. “Their design mechanisms are on purpose to get people to stay in the app, so we’re trying to make it so the addictive features are lessened and/or removed” for child users.
The Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs is slated to hear more on the bill next week.
— Sarah Mearhoff
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Reporter’s note
It has come to my attention that some readers do not appreciate our occasional turn to areas of Statehouse romance, and are of the opinion that we here at Final Reading should stick to THE NEWS. That’s fine. VTDigger.org is simply awash with fresh news every day — I encourage you to look there and let other people be happy!
— Sarah Mearhoff
It ain’t over ’til it’s over
Yesterday morning, I gulped my coffee and opened my laptop to an ominously titled email: “Yogi Berra or Lenny Kravitz?”
The note was from none other than former-state Rep. and apparent Final Reader Charlie Kimbell, responding to Tuesday’s newsletter, in which I attributed the quote, “Baby, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over” to Lenny Kravitz.
“Lenny Kravitz may have borrowed his line ‘Baby it ain’t over til it’s over’ from Yogi Berra,” Kimbell wrote. “I may have missed the humorous twist in the citation, but it is one of Yogi’s classic one liners, like ‘Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.’”
I’m so sorry to the men sports fanatics out there, but I’m a child of the ‘90s. So when I write, “Baby, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” I’m quoting Kravitz, who, according to Wikipedia (for whatever that’s worth), was quoting Berra. And actually, sorry to the dad rock music aficionados out there, but Kravitz’s song has only reentered my general headspace in recent years thanks to Anna Weyant’s identically titled 2022 Gagosian exhibit. (Oh! She knows art!)
This all begs the question: Are any of us truly having original thoughts, or has every musical riff or turn of phrase been uttered already? Are we all just interpolating what’s been done before?
Do people actually like Ariana Grande’s new song “yes, and?” or is an entire generation just unfamiliar with the addictive groove of Madonna’s “Vogue,” which in of itself sampled a heavily litigated 0.23-second horn hit from Salsoul Orchestra’s 1976 song “Love Break?”
Is this very newsletter even all that original or am I just Carrie Bradshaw-ing — or, I guess, Candace Bushnell-ing — my way through Statehouse coverage?
— Sarah Mearhoff
What we’re reading
Vermont’s unemployment system glitches again in latest round of technical difficulties, VTDigger
Morristown and other small towns are convening to address rising crime in rural Vermont, Seven Days
Some Vermont dairy farmers, state officials urge caution about buzzy bill to ban neonicotinoids, Vermont Public
