Correct me if I'm Norm

From Moscow to Nepal to Rhinebeck, Jennifer Neufeld and Jamyang Lodoe have made a habit of building businesses in unexpected places, collecting a few stories along the way. Jennifer went to post-Soviet Russia for an internship and stayed 14 years. While she was there she started a PR agency with an office on Red Square and kept it going through the 1998 crash. Jamyang was born to Tibetan refugee p...

This week Norm’s guest is Joe Phelan, a dedicated community volunteer and rock and roll keyboardist who spent 22 years as Superintendent of the Rhinebeck Central School District. Joe grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the son of a New York City firefighter and a mother who cared for his two sisters with developmental disabilities at home. He started piano at seven. He also hated practicing, a fact hi...

This week Norm’s guest is Betty Leigh: Reiki master, model, writer, meditation guide, actress, painter, and active member of Rhinebeck Rotary. Within minutes she has her hands on Norm’s face reading his energy (verdict: “solid”). She explains how a broken tailbone and an Olympic shot putter turned acupuncturist brought her to Reiki 20 years ago, and she walks listeners through a simple breathing p...

This week’s guest is a musician, a music lover and a Jack Benny enthusiast. He’s the host of a new show on RadioFreeRhinecliff.org called It All Comes ‘Round Again : Mr. Paul Kovit. Paul was the first student to spend all four years on the air at Vassar’s radio station, and he hasn’t been behind a mic since 1975. He tells Norm why he’s coming back now and how he plans his “genre fluid” show, which...

Norm's guest is a dad, a tennis enthusiast, a prolific painter, and an owner of the wonderful Rhinebeck Artist's Shop stores, Mr. Doug Shippee. Doug tells Norm about driving to New York with $400 and his best friend, sheetrocking a ceiling with no idea which side was up, and working at the legendary David Davis art supply store during the heyday of downtown art stores. Doug remembers a $650 Willia...

rom Manhattan, Kansas to Manhattan, NYC, and now Rhinebeck, this week's guests have been pursuing their dreams, one in designing the "scientific workplace" & the other as a designer turned painter: Camille Warmington and Paul Wilhelms. They met in architecture school at K-State and reconnected decades later over coffee (which turned into a margarita) in Houston. Norm talks with them about labs...

Norm sits with artist, curator, and arts administrator: founder of WomensWork. Art, a past board member of the National Association of Women Artists, and an incredibly thoughtful creative soul who works in asemic writing, Nansi Lent. Norm and Nansi talk through what asemic writing actually is (non-semantic, illegible-on-purpose mark-making with roots in Dada and a global following since the '60s a...

Norm sits down with bestselling presidential historian Alexis Coe, author of You Never Forget Your First, a New York Times history columnist, and Substack writer, for a wide-ranging conversation. Alexis talks about her path from NYPL curator to public historian, her move to the Hudson Valley during the pandemic, and what it was like testifying before Congress on JFK records alongside conspiracy th...

Norm sits down with Carla Melucci Ardito, a self-taught healer who's spent over 40 years studying trauma, emotion, and the body. They dig into her "dysfunction scale," the difference between real emotion and reactive frustration, how unresolved grief gets passed down through families (and even genetics), and why apologies only heal when they're truly felt. Along the way: her son's move to Paris fo...

Norm sits down with Rhinebeck artist William T. Ayton, known professionally as William T., to talk about his shift from traditional painting and ink drawing to AI-generated art. Ayton walks through how he prompts and edits images using Leonardo AI and defends the medium against critics who dismiss it as "AI slop." He discusses his augmented reality installation New Babel, a ten story virtual Tower...

Norm sits down with historian Gerry Protheroe — a Welsh-born, NYU-affiliated professor and longtime private school teacher — for a conversation that ranges from his working-class childhood in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales,to experiencing the impact of the 1966 Aberfan disaster as a child, to his path through Jesus College, Oxford and eventually to New York City. Protheroe, author of The Crisis of Security...

Norm sits down with Cathy and Roy Naor, the couple behind Rhinebeck's Aba's Falafel, just two months after they sold the business to a cousin. Roy talks about his path from Israeli Air Force fighter pilot training to squadron commander to captain at El Al, and the private jet charter company he now manages remotely from Rhinebeck. Cathy traces her own route from Austin, Texas to a philosophy of mi...

Norm sits down with campaign strategist John Rossi, the operative behind Debbie Hecht's landslide win in the Rhinebeck Town Supervisor Democratic primary. Rossi walks through the mechanics of a winning local campaign: his "three Ms" of money, messaging, and mobilization, why door-knocking beats social media every time, and the numbers that told his team early on they had a landslide on their hands...

Norm sits down with Bob Wyant, the Town of Rhinebeck's highway superintendent, for a wide-ranging chat. Bob talks through the mechanics of the job: a seven-man crew, a budget he can't touch without town board approval, and so much more. He walks through his favorite and least favorite roads in town, including Old Post Road, which traces back to a 1700s mail route to Albany, and Stone Church Road,...

Norm welcomes his Rhinebeck neighbor Father Jeffrey Maurer, pastor of Good Shepherd in Rhinebeck and St. Christopher's in Red Hook, for a conversation about faith and vocation. Maurer traces his German and Irish Catholic roots to 1880s Kingston, his eight years of seminary formation between Manhattan College and priestly studies, and the moment as a teenager when he first grasped the Eucharist as...

Norm welcomes sisters Patty Hill and Susie Hendren for a chat that starts with Yuengling and ends with astrology. The two, raised between Brooklyn and Long Island with Scottish, Italian, and Irish roots, trace a musical education that runs from seeing The Beatles at Forest Hills Stadium as young girls to Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and the New York Dolls scene at Max's Kansas City. Susie fronted a...

Norm welcomes Sue Sie, a longtime Rhinecliff resident who arrived via an ex-husband, a Bard professor's house, and a lot of determination. She stayed; he did not. That was 1989, and she has been one of the most quietly essential figures in the local environmental landscape ever since. Sue is an architect by training. She designed Gigi Trattoria, Terrapin, and Gabby's, among others, but has not pra...

Norm sits down with Richard Marr, a Rhinebeck-based artist and Merrill Lynch financial advisor whose two careers have more in common than you might think. Richard's paintings are spare, reverent studies of water and light that grew out of his deep engagement with environmental issues, which also drives his investment work and his membership in the Citizens' Climate Lobby, where he helps lobby Cong...

Norm is joined by Dr. Greg Tumolo of Rhinebeck Animal Hospital, a born-and-raised Rhinebecker who followed his father into veterinary medicine and never really left, except for 15 years in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he went to vet school, skied as much as possible, and eventually realized he wanted to come home. The cover the practical to the philosophical: how Dr. Tumolo thinks about euthanasi...

Norm sits with Dana Polan, the Martin Scorsese Professor and Chair of the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch. The chat ranges across a lifetime of thinking seriously about American film. Dana grew up in New York and Westchester, did his doctorate in France, and was later knighted by the French Ministry of Culture as a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts. He explains how cinema s...

Norm sits down with Tate and Ola Rubinstein, the husband-and-wife team behind Quail Hollow Events and the 45th annual Woodstock-New Paltz Art and Crafts Fair, returning to the Ulster County Fairgrounds Memorial Day weekend, Tate grew up at the shows his father Neil and uncle Scott founded in 1982, and Ola, an art historian by training, took over day-to-day direction after the couple moved back fro...

Norm welcomes singer-songwriter Terence Boylan, who lives just down the road in Rhinebeck. Boona shows up with homemade margaritas and a lifetime of stories. He talks about the night he and his buddy stole a 1961 Corvette and drove from Buffalo to Greenwich Village at 15 to find Bob Dylan, and ended up lighting Dylan's cigarette outside the Gaslight. The next afternoon they were swapping songs at...

Norm sits down with longtime New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly for a conversation about her more than four decades in cartooning. Liza talks about tracing James Thurber cartoons as a kid in Watergate-era Washington, the two years she spent submitting to The New Yorker before Lee Lorenz bought her first drawing in 1979, and her parallel life as a digital live-drawing journalist for CBS News, CNN,...

Norm sits with Elliott Malkin, a parrot lover, artist (Graffiti for Butterflies), writer, podcaster, comb-over aficionado, and father who has taught cool shit at Bard, NYU, and Columbia and done cool shit for Google and so many others. Elliott takes Norm from a Chicago suburb bordering the famously targeted town of Skokie to a Brooklyn-to-Rhinebeck COVID migration that, like a lot in his life, he...

Norm chats with David Scheer, a long-time pro in healthcare and employer health plan implementation and management, an analytical mastermind and conversational gem. As a senior consultant at Willis Towers Watson, David spends his days helping enormous employers untangle the financial and strategic mess of providing health benefits to tens of thousands of workers, and he makes the whole thing genui...