<body><div>GREENSBORO – Local legend Rusty DeWees brought his authentically Vermont and rather spicy comedy-meets-music act “The Logger and the Fiddler” to the Highland Center for the Arts (HCA) on Saturday, Nov. 7.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=44EO5b_1Gy39DmX00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=44EO5b_1Gy39DmX00" width="915" height="755" ><figcaption>Local legend “The Logger” Rusty DeWees acts the part of a constipated moose for his Prius-moose-collision monologue on the Highland Center for the Arts stage, Saturday, Nov. 7. photo by Foster Ledbetter</figcaption></figure>Wearing a trucker baseball cap and well-worn, rugged work boots, DeWees performed his signature character “The Logger,” connecting with the audience through his sidesplitting storytelling and spontaneous unscripted crowd work. <figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1t9RYv_1Gy39DmX00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1t9RYv_1Gy39DmX00" width="1819" height="465" ></figure>For half the show, he wielded his guitar just as heftily as he did his humor, singing along to a mix of covers and originals. Joining DeWees for the first set and final moments of the show, multi-instrument virtuoso Patrick Ross, “The Fiddler,” left the audience wide-eyed in amazement with his fiddle, mandolin and guitar prowess.With hints of Smothers Brothers influence, the duo went straight to their funny business as they began the show with a beautiful cover of Merle Haggard’s “The Way I Am” which was repeatedly halted by DeWees’ humorous interjections about his family’s acquisition of a splitting hatchet from the Calvin Coolidge estate. At the song’s end, he praised Ross’s fiddle playing and showed off the hatchet, noting, “Of course, we had to replace the handle and the head” as he carelessly tossed it to the back of the stage.After a few more songs and laughs, DeWees announced, “I was supposed to bring drumsticks but I forgot them. I gotta go get ‘em.” Abruptly leaving the stage, he called over his shoulder to Ross, “Tell them about the song.”Left in the spotlight alone, Ross said to the audience, “He’s done this before. He might not come back.”<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=4fzeoT_1Gy39DmX00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=4fzeoT_1Gy39DmX00" width="915" height="634" ><figcaption>Performing their comedy-meets-music act “The Logger and the Fiddler,” Rusty DeWees (left) and Patrick Ross appear at Highland Center for the Arts on Saturday, Nov. 7, in Greensboro. photo by Foster Ledbetter</figcaption></figure>A fifth-generation fiddle player born and raised in Canaan, “the pinpoint of the Northeast Kingdom,” Ross told the audience that the fiddle he was holding was his father’s. “My dad had a paper route in Berlin when he was a kid, and he came across a fiddle in a pile of junk outside an apartment building, picked it out and brought it home.” Ross’s family already had many fiddle players, he continued on with his story, and “my grandfather didn’t want him to play the fiddle…so my dad fixed up the fiddle and learned to play while his dad was at work.”DeWees returned with coat hangers, prompting Ross to announce the duo would be playing “Orange Blossom Special. This song is the reason I wanted to learn fiddle,” he commented.As Ross wowed the crowd with his shuffle bowing technique, DeWees brought his stool to the front of the stage, stepped his foot onto it and began to drum with the coat hangers on his boot and stool. The juxtaposition of comedic-yet-precise drumming with expert fiddle showmanship at lightning speed left the room flabbergasted.DeWees agreed with the applause. “You won’t hear anything better.”When Ross left the stage, DeWees’ comedy set began with his Prius-moose-collision monologue, telling the audience he decided to include this beloved staple of his classic Vermont routine as he imagined the HCA parking lot on his drive to the show. “I like it when I come up to the parking lot here and see a whole lot of Priuses. The bumper stickers really get me. My favorite sticker on the Prius is a moose.”Between taking swigs out of his maple syrup gallon jug, DeWees elaborated on the Prius-moose conundrum, painting a colorful picture of Prius drivers saving the world as they slowly creep up mountains, all while a troubled, constipated moose seeks relief.After impersonating both the driver and moose through cartoonish physical caricatures, he brought the story to a crashing end as the Prius barrels with racing speed down a hill and meets its match in the moose, and the moose’s unmovable bowels receive the green light.“You’ll see in The Hardwick Gazette the next day the headline, ‘Two die in Prius hit by moose, moose [redacted] itself and walks away,” he chuckled as he closed his joke. The audience erupted in laughter and applause, to which he returned, “Thank you. You’re so kind. And old. Did I say that already?”Throughout the comedy set, DeWees playfully poked fun at the audience, acted out hilarious stories of local Vermonters, and opened up about his life’s journey. He also smoothly steered the mood, navigating the theater into a somber place of inspiration for his final piece.“If you didn’t know Mert Pike, you knew Mert Pike, but you didn’t know it,” DeWees said as he began the story of Merton Pike, a hardworking Stowe farmer who passed away two days before his 98th birthday in 2018. Pike lost both of his legs in a farming accident, but not his resilience and love for life. “Not a year after the accident, Mert was back running tractors. He was back to farming. He lost both legs when he was 51, but kept moving and working, and living 47 more years.”DeWees explained that he had befriended Pike and conducted multiple video interviews with him over the last 20 years of Pike’s life. “Our visits were full of laughter, forward thoughts and singing.”During one interview, DeWees asked Pike what he had needed to get through something like his accident and loss of legs. Pike’s response: “Everything. You’ve got to have a lot of people who are rooting for ya…People like your folks. And…all my relatives and my family. Family is the root of all things that are good.”DeWees recounted how he inquired if Pike still saw beauty in the green fields as deep as when he was younger. He remembers Pike responding instantly, “I see it more and more every day. The longer I live, the more beauty I see.” The silent theater broke into appreciative applause.The Logger and the Fiddler played two more songs before leaving a crowd awed by their musical mastery, relatable storytelling and locally grown jokes, and fully cautioned to look both ways for a moose.</div></body>

Block Source: hardwickgazette.org

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GREENSBORO – Local legend Rusty DeWees brought his authentically Vermont and rather spicy comedy-meets-music act “The Logger and the Fiddler” to the Highland Center for the Arts (HCA) on Saturday, Nov. 7. Wearing a trucker baseball cap and well-worn, rugged work boots, DeWees performed his signature character...

Logger DeWees applauds Prius drivers for relieving constipated moose

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GREENSBORO – Local legend Rusty DeWees brought his authentically Vermont and rather spicy comedy-meets-music act “The Logger and the Fiddler” to the Highla

Logger DeWees applauds Prius drivers for relieving constipated moose

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