KENT — Ten Kent Center School students in grades one through six put on their thinking caps for this year’s Inventor’s Fair, which was held in the school library on Friday, April 8. This the 20th year for the fair under the direction of reading intervention teacher Lee Sohl, who started the program when she ran the gifted and talented program at the school. The Inventor’s Fair is entirely voluntary, although the participating students were awarded extra credit. (The students weren’t made aware of this fact until the day of the fair, though.) It is open to students in first through eighth grades, although the older students often find it hard to make time with their heavy course loads. The inventors document every step of the creative process. They begin by finding a problem that needs to be solved. Then they imagine a device that will solve the problem. Their contraptions must be made with materials that cost less than $25 total. Using recycled materials is encouraged. Getting help from parents is strongly discouraged.At the beginning of this year’s program, about 80 students signed up, but only 10 persevered through the entire process. The 10 that made it were true multi-taskers: four of them were in the school play, and one even participated in the fair after a week of being out sick. The inventions came in every shape and size, filling the needs of the children who created them. Sixth-grader Lily Bournival made a heater for her trumpet, keeping the instrument warm when it had to be left in the car. “If I play my trumpet after it’s left in the car, the mouthpiece gets stuck and the keys don’t work,” she said. “I wanted to be able to practice right away without waiting 30 minutes for my trumpet to warm up.” Bournival made her Instru-heater out of a heating pad that was inserted in her trumpet case. First-grader Leah Darby constructed a Catamascratcher, a device that solves a problem that most cat owners are familiar with: a cat that wants attention in the middle of the night. “I have a cat at home that keeps meowing in the middle of the night,” she said. Leah built her Catamascratcher out of a box, inserting scratchy objects into the top of the box so the cat can walk in and scratch itself. Health-conscious second-grader Katherine Cortese created a Be Healthy Bracelet. The bracelet was decorated with beads of different colors, each of which represented a different section of the food pyramid. There were different numbers of each color bead, representing the amount of each food category that a person is supposed to eat in one day. At the end of the fair, a panel of three judges chose two winning inventions: the Be Healthy Bracelet and Katherine Starr’s Dinner Decider, which helps families decide what to serve for dinner. The two Katherines will now move on to the state Invention Convention at the University of Connecticut in Storrs on May 14. Lily Bournival and first-grader Max Von Seufert (who constructed a tube that would prevent his favorite keychains from breaking) received honorable mentions.
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Greg Fricke and James Boehmer, co-owners of Peggy Mercury in Kent, recently launched their first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts.”
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Fricke and Boehmer are not there to stock their shelves with the same products customers find at standard makeup retailers. They’re there to help customers find what works for them. That usually means asking customers about themselves and learning about their beauty habits, skin, style and the way they like to present themselves. Fricke and Boehmer believe it’s their job to help customers bring out the qualities that suit them and determine what works best for their look.
So much of the Peggy Mercury world is about emboldening people to become more creative, and possibly bolder, versions of themselves. Some of this comes through the store’s creative collaborations with artists, designers and stylists.
It’s part of an ethos that encourages them and their friends to use the shop as a kind of laboratory, trying out new creative experiments without knowing how they might turn out. Whether in fashion, painting, fiber arts or photography, the projects almost always turn out marvelously.
A line of sterling silver charms they sell started as a small project by their friend Nolan Percival. In the beginning, the pieces were for close friends and loved ones. But Boehmer and Fricke encouraged Percival to get a little more serious about the project and create a whole line for the store. Today, it’s one of their top-selling collections.
Classic styles, bold colors, and creative concerts make up the “Imaginary Concerts” line at Peggy Mercury.Provided
“Imaginary Concerts” has the duo taking their own advice.
The project started as a way for Boehmer to connect with his mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Taking old concert shirts from his own collection, Boehmer and his mother began cutting out the graphics with the idea that they would make a quilt together. Unfortunately, she died before they could complete the project in 2025. The pieces, which were ready for production, were put on the back burner as Boehmer and Fricke dealt with their loss and the whirlwind of projects that never seemed to cease at Peggy Mercury.
But the harsh winter of 2026 presented an opportunity to take some time and focus on themselves. Part of that meant revisiting and redefining the concert T-shirt project. This time, instead of looking to the warmth and comfort of a quilt, they turned to another passion — fashion.
Taking a page from their own book, they wanted to create something that felt comfortable to them. They took two disparate loves — one rooted in simple preppy style, with clean lines and classic silhouettes, and the other in the nitty gritty worlds of punk rock and pop — and blended them together to create something entirely new. Pulling from the staples of vintage Brooks Brothers and Charvet collections, they applied the graphic elements with bold stitching reminiscent of punk jackets of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but with a much more sophisticated air.
But the remixing isn’t just the pairing of prep and punk. The pieces are not canon. They take liberties with the realities of concert tours, combining one band’s dates with another band’s logos, mixing them all up until the reality is lost and imagination is the only truth.
Shirts from Peggy Mercury’s first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts,” hang on display.Provided
Adding to the mix is an element of perpetual creativity. Art can be messy, both figuratively and literally, and many of Fricke and Boehmer’s artist friends carry evidence of their work on them at all times. As a nod to these tireless creatives, the duo added haphazard splashes of bright color, giving the line an even more distinctive feel.
For them, “Imaginary Concerts” passes the “Peggy Test.” The mythical Peggy Mercury is a fictional figurehead for the company, a character who thrives on creativity and change. The name, much like the clothing line, is a mixture of interests: Mercury is a planet, a deity and an elusive, transformative element, while Peggy is the wonderfully stylish and boundary-pushing Peggy Guggenheim.
Everything Fricke and Boehmer put in their store has to pass this test: Would Peggy Mercury approve? For their first collection, the answer is a resounding yes.
Peggy Mercury is at 9 Maple St., Unit 2, Kent.
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