LIVING HERE
A graduate of Badger High School will be competing on American Idol season.
Genevieve Heyward is an indie-pop singer-songwriter now based in Nashville. She’s played Steel Bridge Songfest in Sturgeon Bay, Mile of Music in Appleton, and Summerfest in Milwaukee, and now Genevieve Heyward is taking a run at American Idol.
A 2017 graduate of Badger High School in Lake Geneva, Heyward quickly became part of the Door County music scene when her family moved to the peninsula after graduation.
The indie-pop singer-songwriter also plays guitar and piano. Auditions for the upcoming season of “American Idol” were filmed at Belmont University in Nashville last fall. The show will premiere Jan. 26 on ABC, where it’s in its ninth season since being revived after an original run on Fox. It will stream on Hulu the next day. Ryan Seacrest returns as host, along with judges Luke Bryan, Lionel Richie, and Carrie Underwood, with fan voting determining the winner. Good luck, Genevieve!
When in the course of human events…
is a phrase written by Thomas Jefferson as the leading words to the American Declaration of Independence, but it applies to so many things that have described about the United States. Legal Jurisprudence is one of the areas that could easily be precluded with those words. If you happen to go to the Walworth County courthouse and sit in on some actions and decisions by the workers dispensing justice in those courtrooms, it can be illuminating.
Watch in the first court to the left as you climb to the third floor. Judge Drettwan presides there. The other day, it was illuminating to observe and listen as she quoted from memory the rules and regulations long instituted to protect both plaintiffs and defendants, victims and accused. Judge Drettwan is emblematic of just how fair and even kindly her dispensation of justice is. There is no mean-spiritedness in her court or the other courts surrounding her.
After hearing such stuff on the mass media about how the U.S. Justice Department, ICE and even the FBI have ignored laws as if they are meant only for other people and not the politically or financially powerful it is relieving and gives hope to a country that appears to have lost faith in fairness being at the foundation of not only the Declaration of Independence but the United States Constitution, as well. The sheriff’s deputies who handle security for the building are polite, professional, as well as welcoming and kind, as they do their jobs so well. The court officers in uniform are helpful and understanding that there’s plenty of grief and loss circulating through the courts and corridors.
Walworth County is not alone among the other seventy-one counties in Wisconsin. Go in and regain some hope. It’s much better and more satisfying than watching the national television news these days. Further on in the Declaration are the words ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident,’ and that phrase about truth is so very needed in this modern, advanced world, so roiling in high emotion and unfairness.
