Wisconsin Life

The Grateful Dead played at Alpine Valley Music Theatre 20 times from 1980 to 1989. Fans trucked to the southeastern Wisconsin venue from all over the country. Producer Steve Gotcher attended most of those shows. On the day that turned out to be their last concert at Alpine in July of ’89, he decided to record the sounds of the scene in the parking lot. Here’s what he found.

Araceli Esparza’s grandmother picked vegetables for canning factories in Wisconsin. Among the vegetables she picked were beets, which stained her hands with both their color and smell. Araceli tells us about how the smell of beets unleashed memories of her grandmother’s hands.

As a kid, knocking around the neighborhood with your friends can be a formative time. The experiences from those years can resonate for decades. Matthew Lewis of Milwaukee shared a story about finding his identity. He told it at Ex Fabula’s StorySlam ‘Identity’ event held in March 2020. (The following story has been edited for brevity

When he’s not on tour, the 25-year-old rapper Ted Park keeps busy making music videos on the streets of New York City, writing songs for rising artists in Korea and the U.S., and cooking up sizzling hip-hop tracks of his own with longtime producer and fellow Madisonian, DJ Pain 1. Listen closely, and you’ll hear

Mackenzie Martin of WXPR in Rhinelander, Wisconsin brings us the following story as part of their “We Live Up Here” series. == Birch bark canoes take a long time to make. But according to master artist Wayne Valliere from the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, the process is just as important as

Saving lives is something a doctor does. Writer Patti See shares this story of a western Wisconsin physician whose life-saving skills extended beyond humans into the animal world as well. == Generations of Chippewa Falls children knew family doctor Charles Kemper as “The Birdman.” Southside kids — like me — often rode our bikes through

Music stages across Wisconsin (and around the world) have been silent since March as the COVID-19 pandemic forced venues to close. This has moved artists to Facebook and other virtual stages. Now, some venues are starting to bring back live music — with smaller audiences permitted and precautions in place. This includes The Jazz Estate

There are few fishermen like Mike Valley left on the Mississippi River.

Valley is a third generation fisherman, the work is in his blood. He’s one of the many people who have fished this water for about a thousand years.

He grew up hunting, trapping, clamming and working with his father. His dad also had a shop on the river and sold his fish to markets in Chicago, New York and Boston.

Musician Madison Malone got her start at 16 playing in her uncle Kevin’s bar, Malone’s Blarney Stone. It’s in her hometown of Portage, Wisconsin. “He said, ‘Hey, how about you come sing here,” said Malone. “I brought a karaoke machine with me and started singing in this bar.” The pay? Fifty bucks and a slice

Anne Marie Herman will spend an entire afternoon cooking food and frying fish cakes — but as soon as she places a plate of fish cakes on the table, they’re gone.

“Sometimes I even try to hide it but they find it before the meal,” Herman said.

Herman said her fish cakes are always a hit among her friends in the Caribbean Association of Madison (CAM). She orders small boxes of codfish from Canada, prepares a batter, and fries them in a large pan so she can make a lot of them at once. Members often ask her if she brought “fritters” to meetings or gatherings.

“Fish cakes are another thing I make often. You take codfish, you boil it — because it has a lot of sodium in it, so you wash it first. Then, you put it in the pot to boil,” Herman said.