Soup Night Helps To Feed The Hungry

PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTOS

For the seventeenth year in a row, Bread For Life held its soup-and-bread dinner this past Wednesday. The event drew more than 420 people to the cafeteria at Southington High School for a celebration of soup, music, and community. All proceeds from ticket sales went to support Bread For Life’s mission of feeding bodies and lifting up spirits.

Eighteen local restaurants made it all possible, each donating several gallons of their specialty soups to the cause. Their names will be familiar to anyone who goes out to eat in town:

Pedro Rodriguez, the manager of Senor Panchos, was present with members of his staff:

Attendees were treated to a unique form of table service. A team of students from DePaolo Middle School’s Leadership Club, organized by the school’s principal, Christopher Palmieri, circulated through the cafeteria bearing trays full of soup in paper bowls. They announced the type of soup to each table and handed them out to anyone who chose to sample it. There is an element of chance and surprise to the operation – after Italian wedding soup, for example, another server might come offering something very different, like clam chowder, or Polish pickle soup:

Bread from Longhorn, dessert donated by the Calvanese Foundation, D’Agostino Catering, and Lewis Farms, along with a little music, made it a complete dinner:

Missy Cipriano, the executive director of Bread For Life, spent much of the evening racing back and forth. She bustled from the kitchen, helping the middle-school students load their trays, to the cafeteria floor. There she greeted community leaders, Bread For Life clients and supporters, and the occasional young soup fan:

Soup Night is one of Bread For Life’s two major fundraising events. Combining the $10 ticket price from each attendee, extra donations, and revenue from the event raffle, Soup Night brings in several thousand dollars. That money is used to cover Bread For Life’s operating costs and to pay for things like the delivery containers that hold meals delivered to 85 people’s homes each day.

When asked why the night is devoted to soup, and not some other food like hot dogs, Cipriano listed a number of reasons. First, Bread For Life is the modern incarnation of what used to be called a ‘soup kitchen’ – the difference being that the nonprofit usually serves a much wider variety of fare, and it offers nourishing social connection and support services along with meals. Second, soup is a kind of food that many different restaurants in town offer in their menu, and it is easy to serve, requiring little more than a cup and a spoon.

Finally, soup is something everyone likes – and with 18 different choices, everyone can get the kind they like best, or learn to enjoy something that is new to them.

At The Apple Harvest, Some Wait, Some Dance In The Streets

TheLAB dancers PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTOS

This past Saturday downtown Southington was filled with people in various degrees of motion. Some inched patiently along while waiting for apple fritters in a line that started near the booths for the Democratic and Republican candidates --

-- and ended two blocks later at Zion Lutheran’s busy tent:

Thousands more moved up and down the side streets at a measured pace as they tried to decide among lobster rolls, fried dough, kielbasa, "tots, brats, and hots," and dozens of other food choices:

Yet there was one place where people were moving fast. In the middle of the afternoon, performers from TheLAB took to the stage next to the town green. TheLAB is a Cheshire-based dance academy that specializes in various kinds of modern dance, including hip-hop, Latin fusion, and street jazz. The director of the school, Gerald Lovelace, shown here with his instructors, emceed a show that got performers and spectators all moving together.

Initially the dancers kept to the stage:

But later the energy shifted to the street. There Lovelace taught his students, along with any spectators who wished to join, a short, dynamic routine:

At that point the group began moving around the green with Lovelace as their Pied Piper, stopping occasionally to repeat the routine. Eventually they made it to Main Street, skipping along near the fritter line while moving from one dance to the next:

TheLAB’s street-dance experiment grabbed the crowd’s attention and added to the festive atmosphere, just as Apple Harvest organizer, Melissa Cocuzza (shown here on the left with her fellow organizers Bob and Barbara Paré), had hoped they would:

Thus fritter-fans, food tasters, and street dancers all got the thrill they were looking for.

Yet perhaps no one who attended Saturday was as thrilled as one young boy who chanced upon his favorite Pokémon character, Pikachu, while walking down Center Street:

Apple Harvest Festival Kicks Off Second Weekend

The much-sought-after Apple Fritter Line Speed Pass CT DRONE SOURCE PHOTOS

Friday evening at 5pm the streets of downtown Southington will be closed to traffic once again as thousands of visitors flock to the Apple Harvest Festival's many attractions.

The second weekend of the festival will see ten different acts take to the main stage over the course of three days. On Friday night, the Yale a capella group Mixed Company will perform for one hour starting at 5:15. They will be followed at 7:30 by Charley T, a Nashville-based artist originally from Connecticut whose songs mix together rock and soul.

On Saturday afternoon the stage will feature three different dance acts: local studio Dance City & The Arts at noon, which performs in a variety of styles, Irish dancers from the Shamrock School at 1pm, and finally a hip hop-style show put on by the Cheshire-based studio The LAB at 3pm. On Saturday night a Beatles tribute band, Studio Two, will be performing starting at 6:30.

Finally, on Sunday there will be a martial-arts performance by Southington's Valentin Martial Arts school at noon, a Fritter Eating contest at 1pm, and a dance party hosted by DJ Greg at 3pm.

Sunday morning there will also be a 'Road Rally' - a kind of car-based treasure hunt that involves participants driving around town to find and photograph select local features. Pre-registration is required for this event - call (860) 637-0010.

The following selection of scenes from the festival was taken by Outsider photographer John McDonald last Saturday:

Drone view of Apple Harvest Festival

Guitaro5000 sings with a passerby

Bradley Mountain Farm goat in hat

The Gulf Shrimp team

Rosie's, Southington's specialty chocolatiers, in their booth

The Masons' tent

Erin Gibney performing on stage

Gibney with the crowd

The view from Center Street up Riccio Way

For more photography by CT Drone Source, see this link.