By Julie Fay
Contributor
6/26/08
Milton High School junior Kendall Stewart may have found her “gift.”
A former dancer with the Atlantic Studio of Dance, she currently studies voice and musical theatre at Riverside Theatre Works in Hyde Park and counts several musicals among her performing credits.
But the dedicated performer became a playwright and director this year with the creation and premiere of her one-act play at Milton High School.
According to Stewart, the project began as something fun to do and later took on a greater earnestness.
“I started writing it in October,” she says. “I gave it to every English teacher at the high school for comments, and it became an assignment (because) I took a creative writing class and I needed a final project.”
That final project proved to be an ambitious undertaking, and Stewart is quick to acknowledge the assistance and expertise of her creative writing teacher at Milton High School.
“I made it my goal to get through John Radosta’s English class as a freshman,” she says. “Now, in his creative writing class, I go home a little happier every day. He saw a few drafts (of the play) and he marked them up. He really helped with dialogue and characterization. It really became a story with him.”
Radosta says he’s never had a student write and produce a play before, but downplays his role. “She’s giving me a lot more credit than I think I deserve,” says the 15-year teaching veteran. “I gave her advice on trying to work it into an actual narrative. I just told her what the gaps were.”
The play, set in the present, follows a group of teenage friends through the ups and downs of their friendships and romances. Inspired by Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, Stewart used the death and memorial service of the main character as a device to explore themes of eternal youth and immortality.
According to Radosta, death is a common theme in teens’ creative writing. “A funeral is something students have experienced or something they’re afraid they’re going to,” he says.
Stewart says that the other characters couldn’t talk honestly about their feelings for Alex before the funeral because they never felt a sense of urgency.
“We (as teenagers) may need each other, but we’ll never say it,” she says. “We think, ‘I don’t need to tell my friend I love them. I’ll just tell them tomorrow.’”
“Students know intellectually that they don’t always have tomorrow, but a lot of them tell me they choose not to think about it,” says Radosta. “Kendall is wise. She reads more deeply and more extensively than many students I’ve had. She absorbs a lot of it. She has an idea about what’s going on.”
Looking ahead to her senior year, Stewart will serve as co-editor-in-chief for The Observer, the Milton High School newspaper. Her senior project will be a work of fiction, which she hopes to bind and include with her applications to creative writing programs at colleges across the country. “Hopefully they’ll let me in,” she says.
Radosta is confident of Stewart’s abilities and optimistic about her future as a writer. “As a freshman she was getting into other people’s heads (in her writing), not writing about a fictional ninth-grade girl. She was trying out all different personas. With that kind of a tendency, and where she’s stuck with it for the last three years, I can see her giving it a go,” he says.

By Kathy Kurtz Ferrari
Contributor
6/19/08
It looks like a typical scene at Shields Park: a bunch of kids playing soccer, a mixture of sizes and shapes, some girls and some boys, but one thing is different: The shouting and chatter isn’t in English. This group is speaking French.
While this may not be very unusual in Milton, with its French Immersion program, these children are not local school students. They are actually French students visiting Milton, part of a group of 26 here for just under two weeks from Bordeaux, France.
They are all fifth graders, with an average age of 11. There are 17 boys and five girls, along with four adult chaperones, attending the town’s four elementary schools’ immersion classes. While here they lived with 13 different Milton families. All across town parents spent time brushing up on their French and digging out French-English dictionaries.
“The pick-up soccer game was really amazing and fun,” says host-family mother, Kathy McLaughlin. “Some middle school kids just happened to show up and jumped in the game, and they all started speaking French with each other. Ironically, they were French Immersion students. Only in Milton!”
The trip was planned through e-mails and phone calls between Selectman Kathy Fagan, working in her other capacity as a mother, and French native Christine Nogues, whose family lived in Milton for a short time a few years ago. Their families became friendly through their sons, Eric and Lucas, during the Nogues’s brief time here, and upon their return to France the friendship continued.
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By Chris Campbell
Contributing Writer
5/6/08
With Memorial Day weekend past, many boaters are working hard to get their boats back into commission so that they can tackle the summer seas.
At Milton Yacht Club, members can be found painting, grinding and sanding their boats in preparation for the upcoming season. However, many other boats sit dormant as the number of “For Sale” signs increases with the significant rise in gas prices.
Raymond Carlson, 82, has been a member of the Milton Yacht Club since 1955. An engineer, he constructed his boat, the Laura V, from scratch over 20 years ago. He estimates that he will have to devote 50 hours to working on his boat before he can launch it.
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By Dawn Aberg
Contributor
5/29/08
Tom Gavin grew up in Norwood. Outside of the Blue Hills and the Ulin Rink, he didn’t know much about Milton. But in 2000, practical commuting concerns brought him here with his new wife Audrey.
She was in graduate school at Harvard. He was building a software company in Boston. And they fell in love with the town.
Residents have probably seen Tom and Audrey Gavin around. “We’re the crazy family that walks a lot,” Tom says. Before the recent addition of baby Lia (she was born April 8), the Gavins could be seen with a triple jogging stroller “bouncing around” (Tom’s phrase) with their older three children settled in for the ride. “It’s so great to be able to go down the street with them,” Tom says of Jack (5 1/2), Ella (4) and Charlie (2 1/2), “So great to practice riding bikes on the bike path, to head down to the Radio Coffeehouse for ice cream.”
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By Nate Leskovic
Staff Writer
5/22/08
Haircuts for men are generally a necessary evil. Fortunately some barbershops swap the lost half hour for a painless and often entertaining experience.
East Milton Square’s Milton Barber Shop and Mackie’s Barber Shop on Central Avenue are two such shops: Stories, confessions, advice—a barber is often like a shrink with a chair instead of a couch.
“They tell me everything,” says Marianne Colligan, better known as Mackie, a nickname given to her by her sister who was unable to pronounce “Marianne.” “There’s something about barbers that makes everyone comfortable.”
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By Kathy Kurtz Ferrari
Contributor
5/15/08
Did you ever wonder where animal experts like Jane Goodall got their start? It might have been in a program like the one third and fifth graders in the public schools are doing as part of their science curriculum.
The students are taking part in a junior naturalists program. In conjunction with the Blue Hills Trailside Museum, they are learning about animals indigenous to the region.
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By Julie Fay
Contributing Writer

Spring is in the air and for distance runners that can only mean that the grueling challenges of the Boston Marathon call to them again.
What motivates runners to enter the oldest marathon in the world? We caught up with four of Milton’s marathoners to chat before race day.
Bob Falconi
Bob Falconi will run his 12th consecutive Boston Marathon this year. The 56-year-old from the Falconi Companies thrives on pushing himself, he says, whether its completing marathons and Ironman triathlons or climbing Mt. Everest, as he attempted in 2006.
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By Julie Fay
Contributing Writer
Emma Jean Moulton is a musical visionary. The longtime Milton resident and music teacher saw an opportunity not available to music students in 1987, so she created the Milton Young Musicians’ Festival to fill it. Now in its 22nd season, the Festival gives local student musicians a chance to perform for each other and receive critical feedback from professionals in the field.
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