19 minute read
The Local
10 hrs.2mins.
Time it would take on the treadmill for the average American male to burn off 4,500 Thanksgiving calories
46%
Share of people who try to avoid talking politics at the Thanksgiving table
2.7
Average number of drinks consumed at Thanksgiving
—Wallethub.com
Don’t-Miss Events
OCT. 31-NOV. 6: Boca’s TimberTech Championship is part of the PGA Tour Champions tour, bringing together great names like Bernhard Langer, Mark Calcavecchia, Nick Price and Hale Irwin. It’s part of the Charles Schwab Cup Playoffs and will be played this year at Royal Palm Yacht Club. Visit timbertechchampionship.com for more information.
TUES., DEC 20, 7:30 P.M.: The RoofClaim.com Boca Raton Bowl at FAU Stadium is a hometown crowd pleaser; affiliations for this year’s matchup include the American Athletic Conference, Conference USA, Mid-American Conference, Mountain West Conference, Sun Belt Conference and selected independents.
HOLIDAY CELEBRATIONS
• The Boca Center Community Tree Lighting event is scheduled for Fri., November 18, 5:30 to 8 p.m. The Boca Center Community Menorah Lighting event is scheduled for Wed., December 21, 5 to 7:30 p.m. • In Boca Raton, The “Light The Lights” tree lighting will be at Mizner Park Amphitheater on Saturday, November 19 from 6 to 9 p.m.; Merry in Mizner every Friday (Dec. 2, Dec. 9, Dec. 16, Dec. 23) will feature strolling entertainment from 6 to 9 p.m.; the Holiday Street Christmas Parade on Wed., Dec. 7 will march down Federal Highway from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m.; the Holiday Boat Parade will be on Sat, Dec. 17, from 7 to 8 p.m. • The Delray Tree Lighting is Tues., Nov. 29—along with a Yuletide Street Fair. The Boynton-Delray Boat Parade is Fri., Dec. 9.
Locals sound off on issues affecting our community.
What would be your idea of a Christmas miracle this year?
“My idea of a Christmas miracle is to have all of my holiday shopping and wrapping done before my vacation time. That would allow me to actually relax and enjoy the holiday with my family. “
—Lauren LeBas, RN, BSN, Senior Endocrinology Diabetes Care Specialist, Novo Nordisk
“My Christmas miracle would be no more holiday party hangovers and eating my weight in truffle pasta with no consequences.”
—Christie Galeano-DeMott, Food Editor, Boca magazine
“Practically, I’d like to use my miracle on something like construction on I-95 being totally complete (I’ve lived here 20 years … it’s still under construction). But I’ll settle on South Floridians adopting what us Texans call “driving the friendly way” (using your turn signal).”
—T.A. Walker, Entertainment Reporter, WPTV Channel 5
5GREAT WHISKIES FOR UNDER THE TREE
With brown spirits surging in popularity, we asked John Fitzpatrick, Spiritual Advisor at Warren American Whiskey, to give us his recommendations on great whiskies our readers can actually find at their favorite local liquor stores. (And without breaking the bank!) Here’s what he said:
RED BREAST 12 YEAR IRISH
WHISKEY: Single pot still, triple distilled and aged in ex-bourbon barrels before being finished in Oloroso sherry casks, this smooth spirit boasts all the smoothness of Jameson (they’re made at the same Midleton Distillery) with much more depth and character. $79
WOODFORD DOUBLE OAKED:
This might be the best readily available bottle of bourbon under $60. “Toasted” barrel (finishing the whiskey in a second oak barrel before bottling) is all the rage these days, and Woodford’s Double Oak delivers all the deep richness and vanilla, toffee and butterscotch notes—and takes it to the next level. $59
MICHTER’S AMERICAN WHISKEY:
Michter’s American Whiskey might be the best of its baseline US1 options. Not a bourbon or rye (it has corn, rye and malted barley, without any grain dominating), this unique dram is aged in pre-soaked (used) bourbon barrels rather than brand-new American Oak. An unusual spirit with remarkable creaminess and classic flavor. $49
John Fitzpatrick
OLD FITZGERALD 17 YEAR WHEATED BOURBON:
This release from Heaven Hill Distillery might be the smoothest of the smooth, with rye (the spiciest and sharpest of grains) removed and replaced by Kentucky Winter Wheat to create an undeniably easier drinking bourbon. When people are over the overpriced Pappy, I will offer them Old Fitz at less than half the price. We call it the Pappy killer!
$199 THE MACALLAN HARMONY COLLECTION RICH CACAO:
This most recent release from the Speyside distillery is a blend of American and European oak casks, with a twist by the Spanish chocolatier Jordy Roca, who infused the blend with his famous chocolate husks for a perfect finish of lightly sweet cocoa. When someone is considering just one more “taste,” this is my slamdunk finish to any meal. $189
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THINGS THAT SAY THE HOLIDAYS
Lunch at Neiman’s Mariposa (with bubbly) after a morning of holiday shopping
Buying those big Costco poinsettias
Stone crabs Christmas Eve and New Year’s
Back-to-back “A Christmas Story” Red lipstick
Wild parrots showing up every day
Digging out the decorations and finding ones you forgot about Saturday afternoon football Swapping out the Tito’s for Macallan (left)
WHEN: Nov. 4-20 WHERE: Boca Stage, 3333 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton COST: $40-$50
CONTACT:
561/447-8829, bocastage.net Boca Stage opens its next season with this regional premiere from celebrated playwright Lucas Hnath (“A Doll’s House Part 2,” “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney”). The title refers to an area of space-time in which the veil between the living and the dead blurs. A self-described psychic, medium and spiritualist, Linda forms a friendship with a younger client who fervently believes in portals connecting the physical and spirit worlds—a dynamic that comes to a head in the show’s spooky and nerve-wracking final act.
STEVEN WRIGHT
WHEN: Nov. 12, 8 p.m. WHERE: Coral Springs Center for the Arts, 2855 Coral Springs Drive, Coral Springs COST: $31.57 to $52.97 CONTACT: 954/344-5990, thecentercs.com “I remember when I was a fetus, I used to sneak out at night when my mother was sleeping. I thought to myself, now is the time I should start stealing some stuff, since I don’t have any fingerprints.” For pure absurdist delight, the opening line of this Steven Wright joke is a sliver of genius in and of itself. The punchline only amplifies the surrealist humor already present, taking it up a notch. This bit is as old as dirt but hasn’t lost any of its immediacy. Like the 66-year-old Wright’s best material, it jettisons complicated setups and overly florid language to get right to the point. To read such jokes is one thing, and to see Wright perform them is quite another; his laconic, deadpan delivery is as inextricable to the comic affect as the words themselves. Though surviving mostly on the periphery of film and television, Wright’s influence in standup is vast and unquestioned; in 2017, Rolling Stone named him the 15th greatest comedian of all-time.
Steven Wright
WHEN: Dec. 3-Jan. 22 WHERE: Society of the Four Arts, 100 Four Arts Plaza, Palm Beach
COST: $10 CONTACT: 561/655-7226, fourarts.org This sculpture exhibition showcases 33 works, mostly from this century, by 16 Japanese artists who explore lacquer in novel ways. This lustrous coating, which is most commonly associated with ornamental bowls and boxes, is a polymer distilled from the sap of a particular tree. Lacquer artists often spend six months to a year on a single work—such is the delicacy and duration of the finishing process. Each piece is a resplendent labor of love, an inherent testament to the discipline and the rigor of countless hours of shaping, slathering and shining raw material into forms both familiar and imaginative.
DAN DENNEHY
“Kai-sa-o” by Yoshino Takamasa
Chibueze Ihuoma in “Hadestown”
KEVIN BERNE
WHEN: Dec. 6-11 WHERE: Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami COST: $35-$130 CONTACT: 305/949-6722, arshtcenter.org Arguably the most anticipated Broadway musical to tour since “Hamilton,” “Hadestown” is the brainchild of Vermont folksinger Anaïs Mitchell, who first released its alternately haunting, ethereal and rousing songs as a concept album before bringing the fully staged musical version off-Broadway. Her source material is ancient: the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the former’s harrowing journey into a hedonistic underground to rescue the latter. Hermes, Persephone and, of course, Hades figure into the plot as well, and the elaborate sets, costumes and songcraft helped propel the eventual Broadway production to eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
Agent of Change
A first-generation FAU graduate makes history
Written by JOHN THOMASON
Shyra Johnson had a clear goal in mind: “I always knew I wanted my own sports agency by the time I was 30.”
To the average person, this may sound like a lofty aspiration. But Johnson has never settled for average. She bested this goal by nine years when, in early 2022, the FAU graduate student passed the National Basketball Players Association Agent Certification Exam at 21, becoming the youngest certified sports agent in
history. She had already started Team Empire Sports, her own agency, where she now represents a roster of 10 to 15 athletes.
“They’re coming from all over; they have the most amazing stories,” Johnson, now 22, says. “There’s a lot of ethnicity, I would say. I have a young woman who’s a gymnast, who is from China. I have a lot of individuals from different parts of Africa—Ghana, Nigeria. And they cross different sports.”
Johnson is acutely aware of the relentless drive required to succeed in professional sports. It’s a mindset she has shared, from academics to athletics to business.
The youngest of three children, she grew up in Ocala, Florida, to parents who treated scholastic achievement as paramount. “You couldn’t get less than a B,” Johnson says. She became one of only three straight-A students in her middle school while excelling in a variety of sports, from cheerleading and basketball to track and tennis. (Athletic prowess runs in the family; one cousin, Tameria Johnson, plays college hoops for the University of Delaware, while another, Tony Johnson, is a wide receiver for the FAU Owls.) Her father seeded the career choice of sports representation when she was 14, and she has approached the vocation with a single-minded focus. “I was thinking of [studying to be] a doctor or a lawyer, but I knew that whatever I chose, I’d be really good at it,” she says.
She gravitated to FAU for its lifestyle and access to talent and capital. But it was her acceptance into the Kelly/Strul Emerging Scholars Program that fostered the environment for her to pursue her dreams. The program allows outstanding, first-generation, financially strapped students such as Johnson to graduate debt-free.
Johnson began at FAU as a sophomore, interning at ESPN while earning her bachelor’s in business administration and management. “I networked like crazy. I told everyone my dream. Everyone knew me as the sports girl. I didn’t know a soul moving here, and then I just started meeting the athletes, helping them get towards their goal, being in the gym with them practicing.”
In February, she took the exam to become a licensed sports agent— despite having only begun studying for the material two weeks prior. “I took a week off; everybody was very supportive,” she says. “I sat for the exam and I found out Feb. 28, which was my parents’ 20th wedding anniversary, that I became the youngest sports agent.”
Next year, Johnson is expected to graduate with her master’s degree in sport management, after which she’ll be able to represent athletes in the professional leagues. For her current clients with Team Empire Sports, she focuses on building their brands through name, image and licensing (NIL) agreements—a new
path for nonprofessional athletes to be compensated for their success, as decided by a unanimous Supreme Court decision in 2021.
“My goal is to have athletes be at the forefront of this creator space of social media,” she says. “With NIL, you’re building for your future opportunities. If you happen to go professional, now you know what marketing and endorsement deals look like. If you don’t, you have a reputation and brand to go into coaching [or] go start a business.”
As a first-gen college student with an ambitious career ahead of her, Johnson has seen her achievement ripple back home and beyond. “My grandpa goes, ‘do you know how crazy it is that I get to just Google Shyra Johnson, and all of this stuff comes up about you?’ So it excites them. … I’ve done all of this work to see the fruits of our name, our family legacy, going somewhere. … That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
—Shyra Johnson
Shyra Johnson
—Father Michael Driscoll
Michael the Miracle One
How a Boca priest and a Catholic saint are tied together by a life-saving thread
Written by TYLER CHILDRESS
In the summer of 2004, Father Michael Driscoll, a Carmelite pastor at St. Jude’s in Boca, was riding with three other priests north out of Florida. The long drive proved tiresome, and a weary Father Driscoll went to lay his head against the window when he felt a sharp pain shoot across his forehead. He knew right away there was something unusual about this pain. What he didn’t know was that he was dying.
A day later, a doctor took a biopsy of his forehead. “The next day he called me up and just said, ‘I want you in here,’” recalls Driscoll, and summarizes the diagnosis given to him in a single word: gulp. Advanced metastatic melanoma, stage 4. Reeling from the news, he was considering his options when one of his parishioners recommended he see a doctor in Boston.
Father Driscoll traveled to Boston and was operated on three weeks later. After 11 hours, 84 lymph nodes and the salivary gland on his right side had been removed. The doctors told him he would have to travel back and forth from Florida to Boston for radiation treatment.
For the next eight years, Father Driscoll flew to Boston in regular intervals. “I wanted to come back here and start working; I was getting bored,” says Father Driscoll. Then in 2012, he got his wish, when his doctor could find no trace of cancer in him. “He said, ‘you’re cured. Don’t waste your money flying up here to Boston anymore.’”
The five-year survival rate for stage 4 metastatic melanoma is between 5 and 19 percent. Father Driscoll’s miraculous recovery, he says, can be attributed to the intercession of a Dutch Carmelite priest that was killed during the Holocaust, Father Titus Brandsma.
Father Driscoll recalls first learning of Brandsma as a child while attending seminary in the Bronx from a Dutch Carmelite teacher. He learned that Brandsma was a vocal opponent of the Nazi regime in Holland, using his platform as both a priest and a journalist to speak out against the Nazis’ persecution of Jews. For this, Brandsma was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau, where he was killed by lethal injection. Driscoll recalls his teacher telling him, “Pray that he’ll be canonized one day and be as a model to Carmelites.”
In 1985, Father Driscoll attended the beatification of Titus Brandsma, the first step toward sainthood. All Brandsma needed was one miracle, and he would be canonized. Luckily for Brandsma, Father Driscoll was in need of one.
When Driscoll received his diagnosis, he requested that a newsletter be sent out in the Florida Catholic newspaper asking for people to pray that Titus Brandsma would intercede on God’s behalf and heal him. During this time, Driscoll also came into possession of a relic that belonged to Brandsma—a tiny sliver of the suit he wore when he arrived at Dachau. Driscoll happened to be speaking to a fellow priest about Titus Brandsma and how he would love to get his hands on a relic of his, and the priest, by chance, had one. “I said to myself, ‘that’s divine providence.’”
He began rubbing the small piece of cloth on his face in the weeks leading up to his surgery and after, when he was receiving treatment. “That can be [called] superstitious, but it’s not the relic that cures you; it’s the faith you have in the person who’s symbolized in this relic.”
When Father Driscoll got the news that he was cancer-free, it was both God and Titus Brandsma to whom he gave thanks. He said it was Brandsma who delivered this miracle, and that it was time he be recognized as a saint. Years later, the Church began its investigation for Brandsma’s sainthood. Officials pored over more than 1,300 documents related to the case, and in May 2022, Titus Brandsma was canonized at a ceremony in Rome, which Father Driscoll attended.
“Everybody [was] saying ‘you’re the man.’ the Italians used to call me ‘Michele il miracoloso’—Michael the miracle one.” Father Driscoll and Titus Brandsma had both received their miracles.
Now, Father Driscoll, 81, continues to be active in the Boca community and at St. Jude Church. “People have told me, ‘you are alive because you still have work to do.’”
Father Michael Driscoll
—Michelle Drummond
Following the Thread
Delray fiber artist Michelle Drummond spins her life story into her 3D creations
Written by JOHN THOMASON
Michelle Drummond was burnt out. Living in Washington, D.C., as a federal contracted project manager for 17 years with an art hobby on the side, she decided, circa 2018, that it was time for a career change and a lifestyle change. She favored Florida for its tropical climate, but the connection she would soon establish to Delray Beach was nothing short of kismet.
“I found Arts Warehouse before I came down, and I spoke to Grace [Gdaniec, now the Warehouse’s manager],” Drummond recalls. “When I clicked on her website and looked through it and called, Grace said, ‘How did you find us?’ She said, ‘I just hit publish [on the website].’ That was a sign that I was making the right move.”
Four years later, Drummond still maintains a studio in Arts Warehouse, but her reach extends throughout the city and county. She also runs a pop-up gallery of her work in the SofA District, and she was selected for the final exhibition curated at the Cornell Art Museum in 2021. In March, she premiered her first public art installation, “The Metamorphosis,” inside the Mandel Library in West Palm Beach, becoming the first Black female artist to be awarded a solo, permanent public art commission by the city.
Drummond’s specialty is three-dimensional fiber art whose bright hues echo the Pop Artists of yore—Kandinsky, Lichtenstein, Warhol—while occupying a space between representation and abstraction. In “Life’s Rhythm,” blue yarn conjures a heart monitor with its ebbs, flows and spikes, suggesting life’s peaks, craters and surprises. In “Let it Roll,” perhaps Drummond’s most meta piece, spools of yarn tumble off an outstretched tongue, suspended in midair. “Navigating the System,” with its swirls of teal and white bands converging into a vortex, resembles both a question mark and a river—an endless flow of uncertainty, a metaphor perhaps for life itself.
“I create based on what manifests itself to me,” she says. “The colors I pull from my culture, the Caribbean; I create vibrant art to uplift me and evoke some sense of happiness and joy and peace.”
To tour Drummond’s work is to experience her life story, as her biography and her corpus are intertwined. “Risk Taker 1,” for instance, which displays a hand pressing a button that opens a new opportunity, was completed a year after she left a financially sound career to make art full-time.
A native of Jamaica, Drummond took her first risk in 1995, leaving her family behind to attend St. Lawrence College, in upstate New York, on an academic scholarship. She played field hockey in college, achieved her bachelor’s in mathematics, and studied computer science and French. She didn’t have the opportunity to explore art seriously until her senior year. “I always liked art, but culturally, that’s not a career to pursue,” she says. “Jamaica is a very conceited environment. If you’re not a doctor or lawyer, your career path is not very respected. It’s a lot of status, money, classism.”
So Drummond played the corporate game for nearly two decades, only to find that as a woman of color, she faced hurdles in America too. “There were a lot of biases in corporate. I was tired of fighting—trying to earn recognition when I didn’t necessarily need to earn it. I didn’t think I was being fairly treated in most of the corporate arena, and needed to fight to keep my position, and for respect and acknowledgement. I said, what am I fighting for?”
At the time, she made art on the side and gifted the finished works to friends. One of them coaxed her into following this passion full-time, which ultimately inspired the web search that led to Delray Beach and Arts Warehouse.
These days, her C.V. includes more than 25 group or solo exhibitions in just four years, a remarkably swift ascent. In addition to her original artwork, she sells prints of her work, handbags emblazoned with her imagery, and textiles derived from her finished pieces. She would welcome gallery representation to handle the business side of her art.
“My work is so unique, it’s not the traditional oil on canvas, or sculpture,” she says. “I’m using untraditional material … and for a lot of people, it’s more of an acquired taste. I’ve exhibited tremendously, and everyone is fascinated by my work, but I I need to find the right audience, and the right person, who would want to collect my work.”
