Leading Lady

Leading Lady

From civil rights-era Mississippi to modern-day Milwaukee, Thelma Sias has taken a deep interest in her community, supporting local causes while making a national splash. Not to mention rubbing elbows with everyone from the Obamas to Oprah.

Milwaukee Magazine, March 2013

Excerpt from original source:

There’s a subtle shimmer hovering over the hot pavement on North 17th Street as I pull up to Thelma Sias’ Lindsay Heights home. It’s caramel with cream trim, a new construction, subtle but relatively massive at just more than 3,500 square feet. It would fit perfectly in any upscale suburb, but its owners are deeply committed to their Johnsons Park community, and so it stands, proudly, here. Sias, 58 years old, greets me at the front door in a dress suit and heels, a short shock of salt-and-pepper hair worn natural, her carved chin held high, her long purple nails deftly gripping the door frame. She’s striking. I instinctively straighten my spine.

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Person of the Year: The Dairy Farmer

Person of the Year: The Dairy Farmer

The worst drought in decades brings Dane County’s rich and varied agricultural community into sharp focus. Dairy farmers in particular have been hit hard, but surviving—even thriving—in hard times is all in a day’s work.

Madison Magazine, October 2012 Cover Story

Excerpt from original source:

Jeff Endres snaps his flip phone shut and climbs out of his pickup, offering his hand in polite greeting. There’s an earnest crease on his brow tucked just beneath a red ball cap, his white T-shirt already work-stained by late morning. He’s so soft-spoken you have to lean in to hear him against the constant thrum of the dairy farm that beats like an enormous heart, a living, breathing thing. A calico kitten shoots out of the calf barn and fiercely weaves itself around his dusty brown boots. I nod toward the lush-looking crops across the road and tell him how healthy everything looks to me, how vibrant and alive, when just a month ago all the world seemed scorched, choked spikes of browns and yellows.

“Yeah, it’s kind of misleading,” Endres says, thoughtfully. “The damage has been done in a lot of it.”

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The Good Death

The Good Death

Thanks to Doc Rock, we know how to live life to the end of life

Madison Magazine, November 2010

Excerpt from original source:

I came up in a small town called Sterling, Illinois, about a hundred miles south of here. My father was a farmer turned dentist, and he had two maiden schoolteacher aunts who were keeners. A keener is an Irish woman who sits at all the wakes and funerals and helps people cry and pray. My dad would go to the wakes of all of his patients, and he would take me with him. We would all go together in the horse and buggy—me, my dad and his two aunts. I became accustomed to being around dying people.

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The Dairyland Renaissance

The Dairyland Renaissance

Who makes the best cheese in the world? We do.

Madison Magazine, October 2010

Excerpt from original source:

I've seen a thousand places just like it. A collection of white outbuildings on a corner in small-town Wisconsin surrounded by cornfields and, more than anything else, sky. I pull up next to a pick-up truck that looks not unlike my own brother’s, breathe in the settling gravel dust as I search out the entrance to the cheese plant, comfortable in all this familiarity.

Chris Roelli comes out from behind the vat, blue jeans and a white T-shirt, day-old scruff shaded by a ball cap pulled low, kind eyes. He looks like every guy I went to high school with, and I smile at his capable handshake.

And then he says, “We’re making Cheshire today, an English farmstead cheese. It’s very dry, picot, but silky smooth. Almost a kind of chalky texture to it, but it cleans up real nice on the palate,” and I realize I don’t know anything about cheese or good old Wisconsin farm boys at all.

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Scott Anderson is Loved By His God

Scott Anderson Is Loved By His God

Twenty years ago, he gave up his ministry because he's gay. Now he's fighting to get it back

Isthmus, 30 September 2010

Excerpt from original source:

On Feb. 20, 2010, 81 of the 106 minister members of the John Knox Presbytery voted to ordain Scott Anderson of Madison as a Presbyterian minister. The Presbytery, based in Richland Center, is the governing body for a section of the Presbyterian Church USA that includes parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.

On paper, it was a no-brainer. Anderson, 54, a Madison resident, lifelong Presbyterian and current executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, had completed all of the necessary requirements for ordination. His résumé was spectacular: a Princeton Theological Seminary graduate, 25-plus years in the field, a wealth of ecumenical service and a glowing list of referrals.

There was just one problem: Anderson was openly engaging in a same-sex relationship with his partner of nearly 20 years. That prompted the Caledonia Presbyterian of Portage to seek to block his ordination.

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