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MIDDLETON–Young artists can express themselves in an after-school program offered at elementary schools in Middleton, and around Dane County, as part of Young Rembrandts. The class teaches drawing with colored pencil and marker, crayons for the younger kids, and meets once a week, immediately after the end of the regular school day. The six-week class is available for preschool (3 1/2 to five years) and elementary (five to 12 years) students.

“It is purely focused in the skill of drawing,” said Karen Brown, owner of the Young Rembrandts franchise in Madison. “There is just nothing else like it. We really teach children how to by break it down line by line and object by object. That’s how I taught Georgia (her 11-year-old daughter), line by line.”

MIDDLETON–Driving rain and claps of thunder couldn’t dampen the spirits of local government officials and representatives of Miramont Behavioral Health as they held a groundbreaking to kick off the construction of 60,000 square foot mental health care facility.

Mike Garone, director of development at Strategic Behavioral Health, Miramont parent company, thanked the City of Middleton for recognizing the need to address mental health concerns in the community at the Aug. 9 event. “It didn’t take us long to see the need for mental health services in Dane County,” he said. The 72-bed hospital offers inpatient care for children, adults and the elderly, including drug addiction services. 

Dane County Board of Supervisors Chair Sharon Corrigan spoke and echoed Garone’s sentiments of the need for care and added, “We need the community to work together to find the gaps in our system.

MIDDLETON–Scott Kirkpatrick remembers getting in his car on the morning of July 1, 2017 to go to Weight Watchers. That would be the last thing the Middleton man would remember of the month of July.

Scott had a massive heart attack while driving and was doing 80 mph down Gammon Road near West Towne. Video cameras showed the car speeding down the busy street and turning sharply to avoid a head-on collision, instead, barely clipping another car before smashing into a tree.

“I have been a Christian my whole life, and I truly believe someone was in the car with me that day that turned the wheel,” he speculated.

When emergency personnel arrived on the scene, they had to extract Scott from the vehicle using the Jaws of Life. Scott appeared conscious and was talking to EMTs when they arrived. They rushed him to the hospital and had to revive him twice with a defibrillator.

Pardeep Singh Kaleka’s father, Satwant Singh Kaleka, came to the United States with $35 in his pocket. 

He clawed and scraped his way toward that pinnacle of goals, the American Dream. On his 65th birthday, he took joy in the fact that he was eligible for Social Security, seeing it as his adopted homeland’s recognition of his contributions and hard work over the years. He liked to spend time at the gurudwara (Sikh temple) he managed and had helped build.

Then, on August 5, 2012 a 40-year-old white supremacist and U.S. Army veteran named Wade Michael Page walked into the gurudwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and gunned him down along with five other worshipers, in cold blood. 

“It was kind of like my father was being told he didn’t qualify for the American Dream,” says the victim’s son.

“It’s a very interesting thing, as a writer, to be invisible,” muses celebrated poet Fabu Carter. “It is strange, because writing propels you into the world.”

Led by Fabu and fellow authors Catrina Sparkman and Sherry Lucille, an upcoming event at the Middleton Public Library called “Hidden Voices” will bring three vital 20^th century literary figures - Jean Toomer, Lorraine Hansberry, and Sarah Webster Fabio – into the spotlight. 

They hope to raise the voices of these writers from the past. They think in doing so, they can inspire readers to seek out the Midwest’s fresh new African American authors today, as well.

Sparkman believes a good author can transcend barriers such as race and gender. Or bring them tumbling down.

It’s -3 degrees Fahrenheit in paradise today.

Paradise, in this case, being Wisconsin in the month of January.

That’s the way the Ademi family sees it, at least. Babi and Viki Ademi came to the United States from their homeland in 1984, in pursuit of the fabled “American Dream.” Babi said that growing up in Macedonia, a country steeped in poverty, he fantasized about coming to the United States.

“To us, it seemed like paradise,” Viki agrees.

There’s something quintessentially American about the Ademi family’s story. Although their tale begins far, far away.

“We suffered there,” is all Viki likes to say of the country whose shores they left. In many ways, they found what they were looking for here. They ran restaurants for years elsewhere in Wisconsin, then took on factory work, all to support a growing family they hoped, in perfect keeping with this well-worn fable, would have more opportunities than they had.

The Middleton Police Department is seeking the public’s assistance in locating and checking the welfare of John Balistreri Jr, a 36 year old male who was reported missing on October 2nd, 2017.  John was last seen on September 15th, 2017. 

There is a passage in “Enchantress of Numbers,” in which Ada Lovelace reflects on her newborn son. While others marvel at the dark-eyed infant’s potential and dream of his future, she “so passionately adored the perfect little creature he already was” that she “gave no thought to what he might be five, ten, or twenty years in the future.”

There is an immediacy to her experience. It is not some far off, high-minded concept. It is here, now. There is immediacy to all of Jennifer Chiaverini’s upcoming novel, as well, which is an impressive feat in the realm of historical fiction.

Just before the fights began on Saturday night, a grandmother who was about to see her granddaughter get rocked by several hard right hands was at the breaking point. “I’m so damned nervous!” she cried out amid the din of the Red Mouse sports bar in Cross Plains.

As it turned out, she had nothing to worry about. Because boxing is a sport in which even the losers emerge with their honor glinting beneath the bright lights. Her granddaughter lost the fight, but she gained the crowd’s respect when she refused to go down, and refused to quit, even after a flurry of punches turned her knees to Jell-O.

This was the second annual White Collar Boxing Tournament, a fundraiser for the esteemed Bob Lynch Boxing Foundation. Twenty people entered the ring. Half of them won. Half of them lost. All of them learned what they were made of. They went home proud of their trophies and their various hematomas.