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CONTENTS AUGUST 2018
58
Behind the scenes: Eliza McNitt interviewing NASA astronaut Anousheh Ansari, on the set of Dot of Light
DEPARTMENTS
58
78
16 | EDITOR’S LETTER
Finding Her Space
The Anxious Generation
20 | NOTABLE NOTES
BY TIMOTHY DUMAS
Twenty-six-year-old Eliza McNitt is a breakout star in the virtual reality world, truly taking us where no man has gone before.
66
Talking Shop BY JAMIE MARSHALL
Five female entrepreneurs talk about the challenges and rewards (of which there are many) of forging ahead in today’s tricky retail market.
BY TIMOTHY DUMAS
Living amidst affluence comes with its perks, certainly. But it also comes with intense pressure to perform and succeed. Couple that with a 24/7 social-media culture, and the result can be debilitating anxiety and depression. Here’s what the experts want parents to know. On the Cover: Eliza McNitt PHOTOGRAPH BY HULYA KOLABAS
23 | STATUS REPORT BUZZ: Broadway star Abby Mueller; Jonas Philanthropies SHOP: Tween and teen fashion GO: Travel like an uber-VIP DO: Fairfield County Hospice House EAT: Myx Creative Kitchen; Skinny Pizza
43 | PEOPLE & PLACES YWCA: Live, Laugh, Love; Green Fingers Garden Club; Bruce Museum: Art of Design; Greenwich United Way: Sole Sisters; Young Artists Philharmonic; Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy; Greenwich Town Party
57 | V OWS Smeriglio–Masterson
89 | C ALENDAR
40 | G-MOM
95 | INDEX OF ADVERTISERS
Wrapping up summer and getting ready for the new school year
96 | POSTSCRIPT An eerie calm at Tod’s Point
greenwich magazine AUGUST 2018, VOL. 71, ISSUE 8 greenwich magazine (USPS 961-500/ISSN 1072-2432) is published monthly by Moffly Media, Inc., 205 Main Street, Westport, CT 06880. Periodical postage paid at Westport, CT and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes (form 3579) to greenwich magazine, PO Box 9309, Big Sandy, TX, 75755-9607.
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Fall trends, glittering gems, fun pick-me-ups, we’ve got lots of ideas to take you into fall fashionably.
Summer Living Out enjoying the easy-breezy days of the season. We’ve got all the party pics!
COME PARTY WITH THE BEST! Join us as we celebrate the Best of Greenwich on Monday, August 6 at the Delamar Greenwich! greenwichmag.com for tickets
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GREENWICH LIFE TO LIFESTYLE SINCE 1947 VOL. 71 NO. 8 AUGUST 2018 CREATIVE DIRECTOR
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Take a look at Palm Beach County from a whole new perspective: Our educated workforce, multilingual skilled labor, training programs, incentives, intelligent infrastructure, appealing corporate tax structure – against the backdrop of an unparalleled lifestyle. For a personalized, confidential look at our competitive assets – and how they can work for you – call Kelly Smallridge, President, at 561.835.1008 or visit bdb.org/InnovationLocation
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SOME OF THE BEST CHILDREN’S DOCTORS IN THE COUNTRY ARE MOVING TO NEW YORK. (AND IT’S NOT FOR THE BAGELS.) New York City attracts the best of the best. So, it’s no surprise that some of the most accomplished children’s doctors in the country are coming to Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone to join our renowned team of pediatric specialists. Now, we have more than
400 doctors across 35 specialties providing expert care for everything from common conditions like broken bones and tonsillitis to the most complex neurological and cardiac problems. And, our new, state-of-the-art children’s hospital facility provides the ideal setting
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our network of worldclass pediatricians and specialists can diagnose and treat virtually any childhood condition. And, if patients need more involved care, they’ll have access to our new, state-of-the-art children’s hospital facility. Wherever you find us, our
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EDITOR’S Letter
CRISTIN MARANDINO
TEN YEARS AGO WE KICKED OFF OUR ANNUAL
“Teens to Watch” feature in the September issue. It’s where we highlight kids who excel in all areas—from sports and arts to science and technology to philanthropy and business. As the name suggests, they are teens who we believe will go on to do amazing things—teens that are very much worth keeping an eye on. We sure do like being right. Eliza McNitt, who graces this month’s cover, was one of those teens back in 2009. (We’ve revisited others over the years, featuring in our pages their incredible successes as young adults.) As a teen, Eliza caught our attention for her research and subsequent documentary of the honeybee colony collapse disorder. The film won C-SPAN’s student documentary competition, as well as the Grand Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (where Eliza had to defend her research for nine hours). Fast forward nine years, and I get a call from a Eliza’s mother, Audrey, eager to tell me how her daughter had just taken 16
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Sundance by storm, making a recordbreaking seven-digit deal for her virtual reality film, Spheres: Songs of Spacetime, featuring Hollywood A-lister Jessica Chastain. Eliza had transitioned into the realm of astrophysics, endeavoring to allow audiences to experience space the way no human can—as an actual star. For someone who is, let’s just say, less than gifted in the science and technology departments, wrapping my head around what Eliza does is tough. But one doesn’t need to fully understand the science to appreciate the sheer talent it takes to create such awe-inspiring and complex beauty. (“Finding Her Space,” page 58) At seventeen, Eliza told us: “Exploring science through film is my passion.” At twenty-six, she tells us she’s ready to make a science fiction feature-length film. I have a feeling it’s not going to be another nine years before we speak with Eliza again.
WILLIAM TAUFIC
Star Power
AT OUR CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, FAMILIES RECEIVE WORLD-CLASS TREATMENT, TOO. Children are more responsive to treatment when their families are involved in their care. That’s why we consider a patient’s family an integral part of our care team—along with our doctors, nurses, and other pediatric specialists. In fact, we collaborated
closely with families to design our new, state-ofthe-art children’s hospital facility. The result is an experience that involves the family, both physically and philosophically, with more play areas for kids, all single-patient rooms, and comfort spaces for parents. Here, children
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NOTES Notable
ROCK & ROLL LEGEND DARYL HALL
Marandino and her amazing team for the expansive coverage of the Bruce and its future, and for everything the Mofflys and Moffly Media do for the Bruce and the entire community. We are deeply grateful to you. I can’t begin to imagine the deep void you all feel at the office from Jack’s passing. The community has truly lost an extraordinary man whose spirit will continue to guide us all.
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NEWSWORTHY
Thank you so much for the chance to be a part of the magazine. I really enjoyed my time with Tim [June: “Network News” by Tim Dumas] and sincerely appreciated Cristin’s Editor’s Letter [“Navigating the News”]. JEFF GLOR, GREENWICH ANCHOR, CBS EVENING NEWS
PHOTO FINISH
I just wanted to let you know that it was absolutely thrilling to see my image on a full page [January: Photo Contest 2018]. Thank you so much. It was a great way to start the New Year. I honestly could not believe it. MELISSA MCCANN SANTANGELO, GREENWICH
Editor’s Note: Melissa won the Grand Prize “Magic”—a boy with a sparkler.
SPRUCED-UP BRUCE
Just a fan letter of heartfelt thanks for the wonderful article on the New Bruce [April: “The New Greenwich Gateway”]. Timothy Dumas wrote a marvelous text and the layout is beautiful. Moffly Media has once again outdone itself! PETER SUTTON, GREENWICH EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE BRUCE MUSEUM
Wow! Tim Dumas wrote such a beautiful article about the Bruce and the new Bruce project, with the history setting the stage for the future and what is to come for all to enjoy. The cover of the issue is gorgeous and the entire magazine a great joy to read, as always! Congratulations to Cristin
WHITNEY ROSENBERG, GREENWICH THE BRUCE MUSEUM
JUST FOR LAUGHS
Wowzers! What a wonderful article [February: Status Report: Buzz—“Funny Business” by Beth Cooney Fitzpatrick]. Beth certainly brightened my day. Thank you, thank you, thank you—to Cristin Marandino and Trish Kirsch, too. Love the Feb. issue! JANE CONDON, GREENWICH
Via Facebook Editor’s Note: Comedian Jane Condon and illustrator Bobbi Eggers came out with a book entitled Chardonnay Moms, a “greatest hits” collection of their favorite cartoons.
BUZZ WORD
Thank you so much for the write-up in the February issue of greenwich magazine [Status Report—Buzz: “Pitch Perfect” by Valerie Foster]. We are so proud of the work we do, and it is an honor to have Pitch Your Peers featured in your publication. Valerie is a tremendous writer, and she brought our organization to life on these pages. Not only does it bring awareness of PYP during our very important recruitment season, but it highlights all the wonderful charities that were pitched last year. [I hope] all 2017 Grant
Champions ran out and got an issue in their hands! Your partnership manager Kathleen Godbold has been a great supporter of PYP since the day we met. And greenwich Editor Cristin Marandino [not only sees to it that the magazine] is always full of beautiful things and people, but also showcases people doing beautiful things all around this little corner of the world. We are forever in your debt for featuring the beauty of PYP, the first-of-its-kind collective giving group in Greenwich. NINA LINDIA, COFOUNDER PYP GREENWICH
PET PROJECT
We got the February issue, and the article on Witherell’s pet therapy program is amazing [Status Report, Do: “Pet Perfect” by Valerie Foster]. Thanks so much for such great coverage! MARY CRONIN, ARMONK, NEW YORK HARRISON EDWARDS PUBLIC RELATIONS
FINE DESIGN
I wanted to tell you that the February issue of greenwich mag is another excellent one— and not just because the Rinfret studio is in there [Status Report: Home— “J’adore Décor”]! I am continually impressed by Moffly’s editorial. Kudos to Cristin Marandino and the team! ELIZABETH MCGANN, GREENWICH ETHRIDGE MCGANN GROUP
Editor’s Note: Cindy Rinfret relocated her new design studio to 39 Lewis Street, the same space that GREENWICH magazine once occupied. You can bet that the level of charm of the setting has risen dramatically with her arrival.
greenwich magazine welcomes letters that are timely and relevant to material published in our magazine and do not exceed 200 words in legnth. All letters become the property of greenwich magazine, which reserves the right to edit them. Please include your name, address and day and evening telephone numbers for verification. Mail: Letter to the Editor, greenwich magazine, 205 Main Street, Westport, CT 06880; fax: 203-222-0937; or email editor@greenwichmagazine.com.
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BUZZ status report
ABBY MUELLER • JONAS PHILANTHROPIES
Woman Natural
Broadway star Abby Mueller talks to us about playing music legend Carole King and what brought her Beautiful voice to Greenwich
B
eautiful: The Carole King Musical is nothing short of earth moving, especially during its uplifting, emotionally charged finale, which brings audiences to their feet night after night. Winner of the Tony for best actress in 2014 and a Grammy for best musical theater album in 2015, Beautiful’s words and chords are as familiar as old friends. Perhaps it was kismet, then, that the role of its Tony-winning star, Jessie Mueller, would one day be assumed by her equally gifted older sister, Abby Mueller. Abby, who previously graced Broadway in Kinky Boots, played Carole King on the national tour of Beautiful and in 2017 assumed the role on Broadway. “The Beautiful experience is, as you can imagine, something I thought I would never end up doing, but in this amazing twist of fate it happened,” says Abby, who chatted with us about playing Carole and performing locally at the Celebrating Hope benefit for the Alzheimer’s Association’s Connecticut chapter, a cause close to her heart.
Abby Mueller
AUGUST 2018 GREENWICH
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BUZZ
WERE YOU ABLE TO WORK WITH CAROLE KING?
Carole was asked to sing on the Today show [in August 2015], and they asked me and Chilina Kennedy, who was playing Carole on Broadway at the time, to sing “I Feel the Earth Move” with Carole. To meet her in person, your brain kind of explodes. She’s just so warm and down to earth, just like you think she would be. She still has the Brooklyn accent and said, ‘Hey, do you want to take a video on your phone of me playing the piano that you can watch?’, which I did. She also surprised us on our first night of the national tour in Boston. Everyone was called back to the stage after the show when we were out of costume, which was unusual, and they said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Carole King!’ Every time she comes to see the show, she comes in disguise in a wig and glasses because, as you can imagine, if she was spotted in the audience she’d get absolutely mobbed. She’s stunningly
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WHICH OF CAROLE’S SONGS WAS YOUR FAVORITE TO PERFORM? It’s such a hard question because they’re all so good. It’s like picking a favorite child, I swear. The show is so well-crafted, so each song is special in its own right…but I’d have to say “Natural Woman.” Because of where it is in the show, and how that moment just naturally builds, that was definitely one of my favorites to sing every night. All of them kept me on my toes because the songs themselves are so honest. That’s why people relate to Carole so much. There is no artifice whatsoever. Patrons would say this every night, men and women, they adore her because she really does feel like a friend. She just gets right to the core of the emotions that everyone feels, and you feel less alone.
SPEAKING OF WHICH, CAROLE’S “YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND” WAS SUCH A MEGAHIT FOR JAMES TAYLOR. HOW DID THAT COME ABOUT? Carole started out as a songwriter for other
WHAT LED YOU TO PERFORM AT CELEBRATING HOPE IN SUPPORT OF THE ALZHEIMER’S ASSOCIATION’S CONNECTICUT CHAPTER LAST MAY? Alzheimer’s has certainly affected my family, and I don’t know if there’s anyone nowadays who hasn’t been affected by Alzheimer’s or dementia in some regard. It is a heartbreaking illness. I think what is so special about the song I sang, “Life Is Beautiful,” is that it comes from the
perspective of people living with Alzheimer’s. We often hear from caregivers and those living with family members with this disease, but this approach was so unique. The beauty of the song is that its writer, Beth Styles [Stamford resident and creator of the Living Voice Chorus], was able to take the information from group sessions with people with the disease and how they really feel. The song encapsulates that feeling of, ‘I’m still here, I’m still the same person.’ It speaks to the need we all have to know that we are understood and we are still valuable. It’s also just such a gorgeous song. It stirs up a lot of emotion. Bringing awareness through any kind of medium that can increase empathy and compassion in society today I think is something to be applauded, and I was really honored to be a part of it all. —Riann Smith
The cast of Beautiful: Noah Pelty, Alan Wigeons, Kerissa Arrington, Abby Mueller, Yasmeen Sulieman, Melvin Tunstall, Sara Shepers, Paris Nix, Rob Marnell, Julia Knitel, Ben Jacoby, Laurel Harris, Josh Garon, Rosharra Francis, Jessie Hooker-Bailey, Dashaun Young, Evan Todd, Kris Roberts and Adam Dietlein
CONTRIBUTED
Q&A
beautiful with crystal blue eyes and that iconic hair, which she wet down after the show so it went back to her natural curls. She gave us all big hugs onstage. It was surreal and awesome.
people. That was really her bread and butter and it really wasn’t until the “Tapestry” era that she thought, ‘Maybe I’ll sing my own songs.’ James Taylor recorded her song, but he was really the one who pushed her out there and made her take a leap and sing her own songs, and the rest is history. He and Joni Mitchell, who he was dating at the time as the story goes, sang backup on Carole’s Tapestry record for “You’ve Got a Friend.”
HAS YOUR BUILDER OR REMODELER MADE YOU HAPPY? WE HAVE FOR OVER 30 YEARS...
KARP R E N O VAT I O N S
C U S T O M
K A R P A S S O C I A T E S I N C . C O M
H O M E S
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Art Into Action A local couple’s personal journey to make a substantial impact on our nation’s health
component is to support the scholarship of nurses committed to addressing the healthcare needs of our veterans. “There is an acute shortage of nurses that isn’t getting the attention it deserves,” says Barbara. “Helping the next generation of nurses get the degrees they need is our way of addressing a high-need issue with a high-impact result,” adds Donald. This year, the couple took their philanthropy to a more expansive level when they launched the Jonas Philanthropies. While still deeply devoted to the training of nurses, they now support cures and research into childhood blindness and vision disorders as well as environmental health risks, particularly as they relate to children. “It’s an evolution of our work and personal passions that we hope will have an impact for generations to come,” says Barbara. —Beth Cooney Fitzpatrick
Barbara and Donald Jonas
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welve years ago, Greenwich residents Barbara and Donald Jonas sold their substantial art collection and invested the $44 million proceeds into changing lives with some carefully targeted philanthropy. The couple focused their generosity on what Barbara, a psychiatric social worker, refers to as “undiscovered beaches” of need. “We look for things that we feel passionately about and talk to all the experts in that field,” explains Donald, a retired retail executive, of their approach to developing a giving plan. “Then, we look for issues that aren’t being addressed. And from there, we consider ways we can do something that really matters and achieve results that can be scaled for the greatest impact.” They began their philanthropic endeavors by investing $17 million into fortifying the ranks of the nation’s nurses—men and women the Jonases describe as unsung heroes in the healthcare system—by endowing the Jonas Scholars program. So far, the program has helped more than 1,000 doctoral-level nurses advance their training at one of 157 universities. A key 26
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VISION
ENVIRONMENT
A few years ago, Donald Jonas learned he suffers from an inherited condition, late onset retinal dystrophy, which will lead to his eventual blindness. “I’m an old-timer. I’ve been around the block and had the benefit of eyesight for most of my life,” he says. “But as Donald began losing his vision, he started to think about what this kind of disease means for young children,” says wife Barbara. “The impact blindness can have on a child’s life is devastating, and we both agreed this initiative had the potential to change lives.” Jonas Philanthropies has invested $6.4 million into programs at Columbia University; the Barbara & Donald Jonas Stem Cell Laboratory at the Harkness Eye Institute, and Jonas Children’s Vision Care.
After two of her children suffered from chronic health issues, Lendi Purcell, the Jonas’ granddaughter, began to examine potential environmental links. “She came to learn of the impact that environmental toxins— in everything from furniture to cleaning products—have on the health of children,” says Barbara. Inspired by Lendi’s findings, Jonas Philanthropies invested more than $1 million to launch the Jonas Children’s Environmental Health Investments, which awarded a four-year grant to create an online source for parents researching environmental toxins. They also awarded a grant to the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine to advance efforts in making the connection between environmental toxins and child health. jonasphilanthropies.org
Today’s most advanced surgical procedures are in the most capable hands. Greenwich Hospital is at the forefront of today’s most advanced surgery. In fact, as part of Yale New Haven Health, our patients have access to state-of-the-art treatment options. From robotic-assisted surgery to minimally invasive procedures, our nationally recognized surgical teams use advanced techniques proven to improve outcomes and reduce recovery time. Even as our medical capabilities advance, we stay committed to our roots as a caring, compassionate hospital with a singular focus — getting you back to the life you love. Surgical Services: Cancer Surgery, Weight-Loss Surgery, Ear-Nose-Throat Surgery, Neurosurgery, Orthopedic Surgery, Plastic Surgery, Thoracic Surgery, Vascular Surgery greenwichhospital.org
Barbara Ward, MD
SHOP
status report
BACK TO SCHOOL FINDS
BY MEGAN GAGNON
Cool for School Start the new year in style
Sporty-chic tri-stripe taping on bags and footwear is evolving in a big way throughout the season.” JILL ORALEVICH, DIVISIONAL MERCHANDISE MANAGER, LESTER’S
Elise hat; $95
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Steve Madden sneaker; $100 Tractr jacket; $88
1 Beige Luncher; $149
2 Stack of lucite bangles; $64
elicia Salazar F opened Fifi & Bella, a new
clothing boutique on Greenwich Avenue, to fill the void for a teen and tween destination downtown. She relied on the experience of shopping with her three daughters, aged thirteen to twenty, who both provide their insight into buying decisions and help out in the store. With a mix of everyday pieces— think denim, joggers, layering basics— and dance-ready dresses and accessories, Salazer has options for every occasion. Here, she weighs in on transitioning 28
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3 Camo sweatshirt; $56
from summer to fall with options for fashion-forward students. TAKE NOTE
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Use a good foundation piece like a tank top or cami and throw a denim or bomber jacket over it. You can also do the same with a sundress or jumpsuit.
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Add lucite jewelry to floral and suede dresses for the fall season.
Camo is still really big for teens and tweens. Look for faded prints and pair with distressed denim. Fifi & Bella
50 Greenwich Avenue 203-489-3450; fifiandbella.com
OUTSIDE THE BOX DITCH THE BROWN PAPER BAG FOR THIS GROWN UP ALTERNATIVE
I
f buying a new wardrobe and a set of school supplies was your favorite way to celebrate the end of summer, you’ll love this stylish update on the lunchbox. Make-ahead meals— often the healthier and more economical option—continue to rise in popularity but come with the annoyance of carting extra containers, often in a plastic or paper bag. Enter Modern Picnic, a chic solution from Greenwich native Ali Kaminetsky. A vegan leather exterior takes the shape of a classic handbag while a functional insulated interior hides your leftovers. It’s a fashionable way to keep your look and your lunch fresh. modernpicnic.com
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status report EXCLUSIVE VIP EXPERIENCES REPRESENT A HUGE PIECE OF THE LUXURY PIE. IN 2016, THE GLOBAL LUXURY MARKET WAS WORTH OVER A TRILLION DOLLARS, AROUND 65 PERCENT OF THAT NUMBER WAS SPENT ON EXPERIENTIAL LUXURY
by k i m - m a r i e e va n s
(VACATIONS, ADVENTURES, RESTAURANTS AND THE LIKE). THE FOUR DOOR MASERATI WON’T LAST FOREVER, BUT THE MEMORIES FROM FAB EXPERIENCES SURE WILL
Pay Eat,
Stay,
During prohibition speakeasies were well hidden and guests needed to proffer an obscure password to gain entry. Consider this your password to luxe experiences you’ll never find on Google. Turn the page to unlock some best-kept secrets
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While money may not be able to buy happiness, it can buy exclusive access to places where the air is thin and entrance is limited to those in the know
An exceptional team delivering exceptional results.
Pictured l to r: Anate Aelion Brauer, MD; Barry R. Witt, MD; Nora Miller, MD; Laura Meyer, MD
At Greenwich Fertility, we help make your dream of having a baby a reality. We have one of the highest pregnancy and successful birth rates in the country and have been designated as a Center of Excellence by top insurers. Our NYU Fertility Center physicians are world-renowned in the field of reproductive medicine and together with Greenwich Hospital’s compassionate staff, our team provides high quality fertility care in a uniquely personalized, supportive and nurturing environment. Greenwich Fertility is where hope comes alive. Consultations I Infertility Testing/Treatment I In Vitro Fertilization I PGD Donor Egg I Egg Freezing I Gestational Carrier I Surgical Services
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BOOK THE RIGHT HOTEL
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only a privileged few can take a selfie in front of the mosaic swimming pool, designed with 24-karat gold mosaic tiles imported from Italy. Rates at the Villa range from $550 to $1,400 per night and start at $575 per night, at The Setai; the private tour is included with a dinner at Gianni’s. vmmiamibeach.com, thesetaihotel.com
If American Crime Story wasn’t enough of a peek into the over-the-top lifestyle of Gianni Versace, book a stay at his Villa. Breakfast with Donatella not included.
02.
USE THE RIGHT TRAVEL ADVISOR
Go behind the scenes of the pomp and circumstance at the Vatican.
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nyone can book an afterhours tour of the Vatican. As Greenwich-based travel advisor Sandy Grodsky points
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CONTRIBUTED; SWISS GUARD BY ISTOKPHOTO.COM/©PALINCHAKJR
or the guest who wants bragging rights and the ultimate Instagram, look for hotels with exclusive partnerships. Versace’s former villa in Miami Beach (yes, that one) has been transformed into a tony boutique hotel with only ten rooms—THE VILLA CASA CASUARINA. Touring the gold-gilded mansion is strictly off limits to the public, except for Villa guests and guests of The Setai (the hotel that owns the Villa) who dine at Gianni’s at the Villa. The Villa was originally built in 1930 by an heir of the Standard Oil fortune but found infamy when the designer was gunned down on the steps in 1997. Now those stone steps provide the backdrop for dozens of fan photos, which, thanks to the recent American Crime Story miniseries, has increased immensely. But
GO out: “Vatican tours are a dime a dozen, but a tour with the SWISS GUARD, that’s something special.” Swiss soldiers have been protecting the Pontiff at all costs for over 500 years, and Sandy can set you up with an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at not only the Vatican, but also the Swiss Guard’s living and training quarters (starts at 2500 euros). Sandy has also created magic for clients by arranging dinners in China with top Chinese economists. (Can you say “trade war debate?”) Another
client favorite is premier access at the GRAND PRIX IN MONACO. She can arrange a viewing from a private terrace or yacht and even get you in the pit (ranges from €8,000 to €15,000 depending on the package chosen). youmaybewandering .com; brownelltravel.com
The fast and the furious: Get the best seat in the house at Monaco’s Grand Prix.
03.
BELONG TO THE RIGHT CLUB
CONTRIBUTED
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A private dinner under David? Why not?
here are plenty of luxury concierge businesses that promise once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Membership can run six figures and results are not guaranteed. Steve Sims of The Bluefish Company does things a little differently. Membership is only $5,000 per year, but you can only become a member after being personally vetted (basically, they need to like you). Once you gain access to the inner circle, the magic happens. Recently, Steve relayed a few of his favorite client stories. One member wanted a very exclusive dinner in Florence, but Florence is not known for swanky exclusivity. So Sims created an over-the-top meal by setting a table for six
at the feet of Michelangelo’s David; and for the evening’s entertainment, Andrea Bocelli serenaded the dinner guests. Oh, he also got a couple married—by the Pope. (Dinner with David will cost you in the ballpark of $275,000 and the Pope, well, he’s upwards of $350,000, if you can get him.) But perhaps the best story is about a guy who loved the band Journey. He used to play in a cover band when he was young but always dreamed of playing onstage with the actual band. Sims got him onstage with his Fender guitar for four songs with the original members of the band. (When pushed for price, he says that replicating a similar experience would cost around $350,000, but for members only.) thebluefish.com
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status report
FAIRFIELD COUNTY HOSPICE HOUSE
by va l e r i e fost e r
Heart & Home A new concept in end-of-life care comes to Fairfield County
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need would be met. We found home.” Those words bring a smile to the faces of Greenwich’s Loretta Lacci, executive director, and New Canaan’s Colleen Harkey, development director. Creating a home was always the intent. “Our goal has always been to provide home hospice care in a residential setting … to create a home where our residents are comfortable and well cared for,” Loretta says, adding that it is equally important for family and friends to feel at home, where kids can kick off their shoes and run around, and where families can gather around a fireplace and talk. “We strive to help families
HOW IT CAME TO BE A core group working tirelessly for eight years made this concept a reality. Loretta Lacci, herself a longtime member of FCHH’s board of directors, credits the original idea to Lynda Tucker, a nurse with the Visiting Nurse & Hospice Care of Fairfield County. Lynda enlisted the help of Cici Coutant, Rick Redniss, Lisa Rich and Lawrence Weisman, and together they set the plans in motion. Volunteers raised $1.4 million; secured
©ANDREW RUGGE, COURTESY PERKINS EASTMAN
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n January, Mary Ellen Hagedus of Fairfield was desperate to find a warm and loving place for her Aunt Peg to spend the last days of her life. Her aunt could no longer stay in the hospital and her assisted-living home could not provide the round-the-clock care she needed. One phone call led to another and someone told Mary Ellen about the new Fairfield County Hospice House (FCHH) in Stamford. As soon as she stepped through the doors, she realized this was the place for her aunt. “I was blown away,” she says. “Every detail just oozed compassion. The staff displayed such thoughtfulness and I knew that Aunt Peg’s every
find joy in the time they have together,” says Colleen. “You can go anywhere to receive services. This home is filled with joy and positivity. Our goal is to make the last months or days meaningful.” Mary Ellen would say that goal was accomplished. Her Aunt Peg only lived eight days at FCHH, but the days were filled with love and respect. “People hear the word hospice and they run the other way. We are all going to die. And this is a wonderful place to meet the end of your life. Dignity, respect, beautiful facility filled with sun, calming colors, calming staff and amazing care are all woven into the fabric of the place. I feel nothing but gratitude."
DO $1 million of in-kind donations, including the property worth $450,000 from the Roxbury Association; and obtained a $1.25 million state construction grant. They also worked with neighbors in the Den and Roxbury roads area, pledging to retain a residential feel. There is no signage, and the parking lot and entrance are at the rear of the property, out of sight from the road.
ONCE INSIDE The colonial home looks like its neighbors—painted a soothing gray-blue, with crisp white trim, a large front porch and a welcome mat to greet visitors. You have to look very carefully to realize this is a hospice home. There are 10,000 square feet of living, relaxing and office spaces that include:
©ANDREW RUGGE, COURTESY PERKINS EASTMAN
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SIX RESIDENT ROOMS, ALL WITH PRIVATE PORCHES AND MODERN BATHROOMS INCLUDING SHOWERS AND WALK-IN BATHTUBS
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A COZY DEN TO SIT AND READ OR JUST TALK
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AN EXPANSIVE FAMILY ROOM WITH A FIREPLACE AND TV
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A SLEEK, WELL-APPOINTED KITCHEN
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A LARGE DINING ROOM
A SANCTUARY FOR MEDITATION, REIKI AND MASSAGE
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A RESPITE ROOM, WHERE FAMILIES CAN GATHER OR CHILDREN CAN DO THEIR HOMEWORK. FAMILY MEMBERS
CAN ALSO CATCH A FEW HOURS OF SLEEP ON ONE OF THE PULL-OUT SOFAS
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A MULTIPURPOSE ROOM FOR FAMILY PARTIES
WHAT’S THE COST? The cost is $550 per day, which includes room and board, nursing care, activities, laundry and housekeeping. FCHH is considered an out-of-network facility and will provide an invoice that can be sent to the insurance company.
AUGUST 2018 GREENWICH
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EAT
status report
MYX CREATIVE KITCHEN • SKINNY PIZZA
b y m a r y k at e h o g a n
Mix & Match Healthy fast food just got a whole lot more interesting photographs by julie bidwell
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EAT
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Rustico sandwich: balsamic chicken, house myx, red peppers, farm caponata, mozzarella and balsamic dressing
QUICK BITES MOST POPULAR DISHES
Korean BBQ, Sesame Chicken and Moroccan bowls; Kale Caesar, smoky Southwest, and Mykonos salads and Insalata and Napoli flatbread pizzas.
SEASONAL SWEET
Try the Banana Whip for summer. It’s a 100-percent banana frozen dessert that tastes just like ice cream.
EDUCATED EATING
Myx hosts a series of speakers and tastings with authors, nutritionists and other wellness experts, including Robyn Youkilis, author of the blog Your Healthiest You; check social media or the site for a schedule.
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recent newcomer to the healthy-quick category, Myx Creative Kitchen serves convenient meals from a simple menu that emphasizes clean eating. Think veggie-based grain bowls, salads, gluten-free flatbread pizzas and sandwiches, all with the option to add in different types of proteins, meat and fish, including charred chicken, Asian pork, turkey meatballs and spice-rubbed shrimp. You can pick seasonal rice and noodle bowls right off the menu or build your own. We like the Casablanca with kale, quinoa and cauliflower in a Moroccan sauce and the Korean Barbecue with spinach, zucchini and mushroom. The same is true with the salads (try the Mykonos or the tasty Kale Caesar), which can all be customized. With the range of global flavors among the dishes created by Chef Fausto Mieres, who’s also worked for Oak + Almond and bartaco, you could eat here for lunch or dinner five days in a row and not get bored with the menu. In addition to your garden-variety add-ons, there are also special toppings such as farm caponata, zesty tomatoes and lime jalapeños for an extra flavor boost. While plenty of cafés and salad spots let you create your own, what sets Myx apart from other eateries (besides its variety) is the unique online ordering system. When you order online, you can customize not only the ingredients but the nutritional info, too. As you click on photos of different ingredients to add them to your salad or bowl, it tallies the calories, fat, protein and carbs. You see the total before you check out, so you can tweak things as needed and subtract items to get to your desired numbers. It’s ideal for people who are tracking what they eat as well as those with special diets. Myx is open for breakfast, too, so you can order healthy options any time of day. Check out the egg sandwiches, avo toast, egg ‘bowls’, acai bowls, smoothies and house-made juices. There are also grab-and-go healthy snacks (good for a guilt-free pick-me-up when you’re shopping the Avenue), such as pumpkin seeds, peanut butter energy bites, trail mix, fruit salad and more. And a big perk for those in hurry: There’s dedicated parking in back.
CREATIVE MYX
19 West Elm Street, 203-861-1150 myxkitchen.com
HOURS
Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. – 8 p.m. Saturday, 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. Sunday, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
EAT
Modern Pizza
There’s a new, slimmed-down pie in town
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hin is in: for pizza, that is. Skinny Pizza, a new eatery near the top of the Avenue, serves individual micro-thin pizzas that are a healthier take on the average pie. The pies have a minimal yet lightly crispy crust (choose from whole wheat, original and gluten-free) with toppings such as organic tomatoes and all kinds of veggies as well as classic meats. Thanks to the wood-fired oven, these skinny pies cook in no time, so even if you forget to order on the app or call ahead, your lunch or dinner will be ready fast. But those who are in the mood for more of a sit-down meal can stay awhile at comfortable banquettes and enjoy beer, wine, or a Stubborn fountain soda or Hubert’s lemonade with their pizza, salad or pasta. Skinny Pizza may sound like an oxymoron but, in
SKINNY PIZZA
30 Greenwich Avenue, 203-769-1234; skinnypizza.com
fact, the menu lists the calorie counts so you know what you’re getting into (though not all are lowcal). For those with dietary constraints, the menu also IDs which are vegan, dairy-free, vegetarian, gluten-free and low-fat; six of the signature pizzas are vegetarian (and can be made vegan). You can also build your own pizza and select different types of cheeses (say, part-skim mozzarella or feta or vegan cheese) and sauces (vodka, marinara, alfredo) and, of course, toppings. We tried a few of the signature pies and liked the mix of shiitake, peppers and olives on the veggie and the barbecue chicken on the Skinny Hickory, but our favorite pie was the classic Skinny Margherita. You can also create your own pasta bowl or go skinnier with a salad or soup. G AUGUST 2018 GREENWICH
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G -Mom READY OR NOT, HERE COMES SCHOOL
End-ofSummer-
FUN It ain’t over ’til it’s over. Enjoy the dwindling days of the season while subtly sneaking in a little school prep
Shop Till You Drop 1
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Breakfast of (shopping) champions: Power up with a cup of coffee and avocado toast from the Granola Bar.
Avenue; Bistro V, 339 Greenwich Avenue; Le Pain Quotidien, 382 Greenwich Avenue, are all great options. Then make your way around town. And don’t forget to check out boutiques just off the Avenue like Perfect
Provenance (47 Arch Street), which carries a fresh mix of unique clothing and a great selection of Tretorn sneakers. Lunch is so delicious at its Café 47 that you might want to end your trip with a meal here.
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hether it’s searching for the ultimate backpack or the perfect pair of jeans, shopping for school is a great way to build enthusiasm for the fall. Yes, you can buy just about anything online and have it delivered to your door, but that defeats the whole purpose. An annual tradition of back-to-school shopping can help inspire and focus antsy preschoolers or distracted teens. Hit the Avenue early but remember shopping on an empty stomach can lead to a cranky shopper, so make your first stop breakfast. The Granola Bar, 41 Greenwich
BY EILEEN BARTELS Strolling the High Line
TV Isn’t a FourLetter Word 4
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Tai Chi and scheduled events. It is free and open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. in the summer. The High Line ends just steps from the Whitney Museum (99 Gansevoort Street), where you can trip into New York City can interest check out one of the ever-changing exhibitions or even the most been-there-done-that just soak up the atmosphere and architecture at teen. Head into Grand Central, then Danny Meyer’s restaurant, take the new 7 subway line to Untitled, at the base of the its end at Hudson Yards. With museum. Adult admission Hudson Yards its dramatic long escalator and to the Whitney is $25 but three mosaic art installations, children under eighteen are this subway stop is sure to free, and Fridays 7 to 10 p.m. impress. are pay-what-you-wish night. Two blocks from the subway Chic shopping abounds on you’ll find the High Line, which nearby cobblestone streets. runs from West 34 between Cap the day off with a 10th and 12th avenues down sweet treat at the Sugar to the Meatpacking district. Factory, home of the sixtyThe elevated former rail path ounce drink in a goblet that features gorgeous gardens, arrives stuffed with goodies art installations and excellent like gummy bears surrounded people watching. Go to the by a fog of dry ice (835 Friends of the High Line website Washington Street in the (thehighline.org) to learn more Meatpacking district). about walking tours, meditation,
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HIGH LINE BY ISTOCKPHOTO.COM /©FERRANTRAITE; HUDSON YARDS BY ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/© sx70
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Getting Familiar
After a foray into back-to-school shopping instills an inkling of interest in your student, plan another kind of field trip. If your child is starting a new school, especially at the preschool and elementary levels, plan casual activities at or by the school in the dwindling days of summer. If the school is local, take a walk or bike ride to the grounds or playground area. Pack a picnic lunch and allow your child to explore the school grounds. It will give them the opportunity to feel at ease in their new surroundings while it’s still summer.
ugust brings the stifling heat that makes us all want to retreat indoors, which can lead to our children disappearing behind a variety of screens. Who doesn’t feel that mom guilt and conflict over screen time? But Angela Santomero, award-winning children’s television producer and former Greenwich mom (she graced the cover of greenwich magazine in 2009), assuages our guilt. Angela, who has been described by Fred Rogers’ widow, Joanne, as a modern-day Fred Rogers, has created some of the most interactive and impactful shows for children on TV—Blue’s Clues, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and Super Why!. Most recently she released the book Preschool Clues: Raising Smart, Inspired, and Engaged Kids in a Screen-Filled World and is currently in preproduction for an updated version of Blue’s Clues (Blue will be back in 3-D, with a new host that children will help select). Angela offers these clues to making sure screen time is beneficial: • Not all content is created equal. But just as a parent may choose to not ban all junk food, a little “junk food” television is okay, too. She encourages parents to teach thoughtful media consumption, adding that a quality show should combine education, interaction and entertainment (if it’s no fun to watch, it won’t engage your child). • Use media to help children see their favorite characters in situations they may also feel anxious about, like the start of a new school year. One of Angela’s popular programs, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, is aimed at preschoolers and features four-year-old Daniel Tiger, a cardiganwearing tiger in the mold of Mr. Rogers, who talks directly to young viewers about their feelings. Go to pbskids.org to watch specific episodes that deal with topics you want to address. The PBS Kids website is a treasure trove of crafts, games and parenting tips. Don’t miss the section on the Daniel Tiger page that features Fred Rogers’ Timeless Wisdom. Visit angelasclues.com for videos and articles on parenting topics. G
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SAVE THE DATE
Thursday, November 29 6:30 – 9:30 p.m.
2018
Photos by Melani Lust
Please join us as we honor the nonprofit and philanthropic work of our community heroes. Introducing Community Impact Awards, honoring two extraordinary nonprofits Presented by Fairfield County’s Community Foundation
Community Leader Sponsor
Event Host Sponsor
Become a Sponsor
Join us for
For more information & participant opportunities please contact Laurinda Finelli at 203.571.1614 • laurindaf@mofflymedia.com
Moffly Media’s 11th Annual Light a Fire awards reception and cocktail party at King School
PEOPLE
by alison nichols gray
& Places
YWCA GREENWICH• PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOFFLY MEDIA’S BIG PICTURE/BOB CAPAZZO
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A Floral Soirée
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ive, Laugh, Love (formerly the Persimmon Ball) is the YWCA’s annual dinner dance. The event, held at the Hyatt, kicked off the spring gala season with great food, entertainment, and live and silent auctions. The evening’s cochairs were Nisha Hurst, Mairead Finn, Lauren Hagerty and Brooke Bohnsack. ywcagreenwich.org »
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1 David and Chris Zadik 2 Sarah Bamford, Brooke Bohnsack, Olga Litvinenko, Beth O’Malley 3 Patrick and Lisa Kerney 4 Ward Duvol, Dan Haugh 5 Alessandra Long, Sue Bodson, Ginger Stickel 6 Nicole Fischer, Troy Starrett 7 Natalie Stein, Courtney Belheumer, Melissa Levin
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12 Nisha Hurst, Brooke Bohnsack, Lauren Hagerty, Mairead Finn 13 Diane Duvol, Loretta Haugh 14 DJ April Larken in the house 15 Jasbeena and Ralph Layman 16 Debbie Buonanno, Erin Chang, Jennifer Frascella 17 Rep. Michael Bocchino, Shannon Bocchino, Rep. Fred Camillo 18 Terry and Nick Cataldo 19 Lauren Walsh, Lori Fagen 20 Salvatore Albanese, Nicole Velaj, Elizabeth Sacco, Dr. Anthony Sacco
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Flower Power
C 7 1 Jeanne Host, Deb Robinson 2 Karen DeWahl, Martha Robinson Heard, Sara Morena 3 Katarina Ladd, Veronica Richter 4 Dianna Smith, Brett Smith, Michelle Smith 5 Eileen Grasso, Peter and Sheri Donovan, Patrick Grasso 6 Blooms suspended in water 7 Alison Troy, Nonie Mackin, Diana Sampinara
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hrist Church was bursting with blooms at the Color of Light show hosted by the Green Fingers Garden Club. The club, founded in 1935, is made up of women who share a love of gardens, creative design, the environment and community engagement. Proceeds from the event support a teaching garden and landscaping at the new pool at the Byram Shore Park. Other recent projects include the Gateway Gardens at Greenwich Point, the Kitty Starr Memorial Gardens at the Greenwich Land Trust and landscaping at the Town of Greenwich Ferry Boat Landing. greenfingersgardenclub.org »
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOFFLY MEDIA’S BIG PICTURE/MELANI LUST
| | GREEN FINGERS GARDEN CLUB | |
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| | BRUCE MUSEUM | |
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Innovators & Creators
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1 Peter Sutton, Meredith Melling, Molly Howard, Jamie Creel, Pilar Viladas, Valerie McCauley, Markham Roberts 2 Jordan Rhodes, Virginia Tupker, Erin Glasebrook, Brooke Fagan 3 Marianne Allyn, Gretchen Bylow 4 Monique deBoer, Megan Gagnon 5 Sarah Kohart, Yeenee Leri 6 Angela Dotson, Esther Tadjiev, Colleen DeVeer 7 Judith Hamilton, Nicole Reynolds 8 Besty Ruprecht, Karen Morstad, Judith Wertheimer, Eva Marie Janerus 9 Paula Tennyson, Kathy Georgas, Sandra Caruso 10 Jan Kniffen, Peter Sutton
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he Bruce Museum’s fifth annual Art of Design Panel Discussion and Luncheon at Greenwich Country Club was once again a smashing success! Guests enjoyed listening to the panelists Jamie Creel (founder and owner of Creel and Gow), Meredith Melling, Valerie Macaulay and Molly Howard (the team behind the fashion line La Ligne) and interior decorator Markham Roberts. Pilar Viladas, design and architecture writer for Town & Country magazine, moderated the discussion. Not to mention that the fashion-forward crowd made for great people watching. brucemuseum.org »
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOFFLY MEDIA’S BIG PICTURE/BOB CAPAZZO
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Fall Registration Now Open! Classes for Ages 3-18 www.greenwichballetacademy.org (914) 305-4377
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he Greenwich United Way women’s initiative, Sole Sisters, held its thirteenth annual luncheon at Greenwich Country Club. The lovely afternoon of shopping and lunching brought together 350 ladies and a few good men. The inspirational keynote speaker was Melissa Bernstein, cofounder of Melissa & Doug, a toy brand that grew from wooden animal puzzles to a $400 million company. greewnichunitedway.org
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOFFLY MEDIA’S BIG PICTURE/KYLE NORTON
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1 Maxinne Armstrong, Amanda Wilson 2 Virginia Lockhart, Grace Djuranovic, Melissa Bernstein (Melissa & Doug), Jaime Eisenberg, David Rabin (CEO, United Way of Greenwich) 3 Some beauties from SAKS 4 Heather Woodbridge, Ann Franscioni 5 Kristin Connell, Kristen Davis, Courtney McMontgomery 6 Melissa Levin, Demetra Soterakis, Melanie Tsangaroulis, Natalie Stein 7 Karen Hopp, Charlene Vego 8 Jennifer Sisca, Dara Johnson, Rhiannon Forlini 9 Rebecca Tipermas, Lala Addeo, Anna Vuzik, Martha Kaiser, Charlotte Kaiser-Weinberg
PEOPLE &Places Interesting Facts About Westy…
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There are 15 Westy Storage Centers and not one is located in New York City, yet 1,608 Manhattanites store at Westy. The main reasons they give are the quality of the personal service and the peace of mind that they receive from storing at Westy.
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24 Shore Road, Old Greenwich 06870 5 1 Mary Radcliffe, president of Greenwich Symphony 2 Don Hamilton, Claudia Silver, president of the Young Artists Philharmonic 3 Greg Robbins, executive director of Young Artists Philharmonic; Sara Fears of Steinway & Sons; Frank Gaudio, president and CEO of First Bank of Greenwich 4 First Selectman Peter Tesei 5 Melinda Chen, Marcia Hamilton, Lenny de Csepel, Maria Stich
| | YOUNG ARTISTS PHILHARMONIC | |
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or fifty-eight years, the Young Artists Philharmonic has provided young musicians (grades 3–12) in Fairfield and Westchester counties with world-class musical training. The orchestra is dedicated to transforming lives through music. This year at a lovely event at the Water Club in Greenwich, the organization honored Mary Radcliffe, president of the Greenwich Symphony, for her dedication to music, youth and her incredible support of the Young Artists Philharmonic. youngartistsphil.org »
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| | ALLIANCE FOR CANCER GENE THERAPY | |
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1 Joan Whipple, Kate Niehaus 2 Jim Read, Margaret Cianci 3 Peter Glicklich, Barbara Gallagher 4 Sharon Phillips, Barbara Netter 5 Dr. Andre Choulika, Dr. Carl June, Rachel Elliot, Dr. Usman Azam, Meg Tirrell, Dr. George Yancopoulos, Margaret Cianci 6 Susan Alisberg, Tracy Korrbusch, Andy Alisberg 7 Lori Lorenz, Christy Fraser 8 Bill Smith, John Rosenberg
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ancer gene therapy had an exciting year in 2017 thanks to the FDA’s first-time approval of two gene-therapy treatments. So it came as no surprise that there was a full house at the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy’s (ACGT) recent panel discussion, “Cancer Gene Therapy: The Next Chapter, Perspectives from the Frontline,” held in New York City. In 200, Greenwich resident Barbara Netter founded ACGT, the nation’s only nonprofit dedicated exclusively to cell- and gene-therapy treatments for all types of cancer. acgtfoundation.org »
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOFFLY MEDIA’S BIG PICTURE/BOB CAPAZZO
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1 Tyler Swift, Sam Saleeby, Kyle Foote, Luke Finneran 2 Laura Moore, Craig Warwick, Jodie Rucci 3 Jeff Glor, Hannah Storm 4 Susan Tedeschi 5 The Gilmer Family 6 Stewart, Zach and Meg Russell, Rick and Caroline Reilly 7 Alan and Daniel Gilbert 8 Rob Burnett 9 Boaters enjoying the tunes
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rammy Award-winner and three-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Eric Clapton rocked the stage at the eighth annual Greenwich Town Party. The all-day family-friendly music festival at Roger Sherman Baldwin Park also included performances by the soulful Tedeschi Trucks Band, legendary New Orleans-based Preservation Hall Jazz Band and six local bands. This special day has grown to become one of the most popular and eagerly anticipated community events in Greenwich, where multiple generations come together to celebrate town pride through live music, local food favorites and family-fun activities. greenwichtownparty.org
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it's tailgate time!
Boys and Girls Club of Greenwich annual Benefit
Friday, September, 14 6:30pm
Tickets and information:
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sponsors: cheerleaders Juliet Tammenoms Bakker, Beth Barr, Nancy Better, Courtney Bieger, Kerri Breed, Rebecca Breed, Brooke Bremer, Skye Brewer, Marisa Brown, Lauren Caffray, Pat Caffray, Holly Cassin, Leason Cercy, Alexandra Codraro, Judy Collins, Meg Critchell, Dominique Crosby, Amy Dana, Colleen deVeer, Aimee Early, Lisa Errico, Ayla Farnos, Haley Fisher, Courtney Gardiner, Erin Glasebrook, Shauna Graziano, Elizabeth Harned, Jennifer Hausmann, Diana Higgins, Ellen Hoeffel, Sophie Bosch de Hood, Nisha Hurst, Ilona Kaali‑Nagy, M.E. Kjaernested, April Larken, Sally Lawrence, Yashmin Lloyds, Sally Mann, Jonna Mesimaki, Jennifer Miller, Mimi Moulton, Anne Ogilvy, Tammy O’Sullivan, Jennifer Patchen, Emilie Powers, Courtney Presutti, Lisa Quackenbush, Ashley Reid, Abigail Ritman, Rachel Robison, Kristen Rosenbaum, Leigh Ann Ryan, Catie Salyer, Jennifer Seidel, Glenn Shaw, Carter Simonds, Lauren Stephens, Erin Stern, Lisa Stuart, Laura Sullivan, Magali Swanson, Eileen Tang, Catherine Tompkins, Meg Nolan Van Reesema, Kelly Vintiadis, Sarah Von Der Ahe, Chrissy von Oiste, Amanda Wilson
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VOWS I do!
by a l i so n n i c h o ls g r ay
MARIA ROSE SMERIGLIO & MARTIN FRANCIS MASTERSON IV
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arty and Maria met their freshman year at Providence College, where both were on the sailing team. The couple dated through most of college, until they went their separate ways to different graduate schools. Maria pursued a career in veterinary medicine, and Marty pursued a career aboard merchant ships. Toward the end of their schooling, life brought them back together. The couple dated long-distance for two years before Marty popped the question at the Bay Head Yacht Club (even Maria’s dog, Alfred, was there). Father Bose Raja officiated at the ceremony at Sacred Heart Church in Greenwich, and the reception followed at American Yacht Club in Rye. The bride, daughter of Michael and Geri Smeriglio of Old Greenwich, graduated from Greenwich High School, Providence College and Ross University. Maria is a veterinarian in Norwalk. The groom, son of Martin and Pamela Masterson of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, graduated from Christian Brothers Academy and SUNY Maritime College. Marty is a Ship’s officer for TE SubCom. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Tulem, Mexico. They live in Cos Cob. G
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Twenty-six-year-old
Eliza M cNitt
uses top Hollywood talent to create
virtual realities that take us to a point of no return —literally
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IT TAKES EIGHT AND A HALF MINUTES TO TRAVEL INTO SPACE; THREE DAYS TO REACH THE MOON; AND SEVEN MONTHS TO DROP ANCHOR ON MARS. No human has ever touched the red planet, but if Elon Musk has his way, we could do so next year via his BFR spaceship, with inflatable housing and pizza joints to follow next decade. Beyond Mars we cannot hope to go any time soon. Therefore we must content ourselves to imagine, with Hollywood and David Bowie as our guides, what it’s like to cavort among astral bodies many light years away. We do have help from the Hubble Space Telescope. Though it’s only about 340 miles overhead, the Hubble can “see” roughly 14 billion light years into deep space, which also means fourteen billion years into the past. Closer to home, Hubble has captured arresting images of the Orion Nebula, a stellar birthing ground that Earthlings can observe as a very faint smudge in the sword hanging from Orion’s belt. Through Hubble’s eye, though, we see the nebula as a sort of giant space blossom made of gas and dust—yellows, roses, greens, blues—with mists of stars and planets hovering in it. Alas, the Orion Nebula is 1,400 light years away (the light we see took 1,400 years to reach us), meaning that none of us will ever go there. But on August 6, 2016, about 6,000 people did visit that lovely cosmic neighborhood, in a manner of speaking. They gathered at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn for the premiere of composer Paola Prestini’s Hubble Cantata, an hourlong piece that is accompanied—for the finale—by a first-of-its-kind virtual reality film called Fistful of Stars, written and directed by Greenwich native Eliza McNitt. Using Hubble’s images as a starting point, Eliza and her team launch us into space, first floating alongside the Hubble— from which we can turn at will to see the great bright curve of the Earth behind us—then merging with the Hubble’s lens and propelling us into the nebula itself. “And inside the Orion Nebula, you ride on the backs of stars,” Eliza says. There, viewers witness the birth, life and death of a star, an eons-long process that ends when the star explodes into a supernova. “So it’s a very simple story, and yet it was very hard to make.” The challenge lay in extrapolating, from still Spheres: Songs of Spacetime promo poster images, a you-are-there total immersion in deep space with an appropriate sense of awe. By all accounts Eliza succeeded wildly. Sarah Larson, who attended the
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Brooklyn premiere for The New Yorker, wrote, “It astounded me, this feeling of floating above Earth, and tears began to emerge from my cardboard goggles.” It’s a warm spring day in the East Village, and Eliza is sitting on a bench outside Ninth Street Espresso; suitably, Bowie’s Low is playing on continuous loop, and the music floats out of the coffee shop and mingles with sirens, horns and other sounds of the city. Eliza lives in Manhattan now; she’s twenty-six years old with shoulderlength blonde hair (which she absently twirls on an index finger as she talks) and broad, sculpted cheekbones. She might have been a Hollywood actress, having excelled in short films; but ever since she learned to grow radishes on a wet paper towel at Whitby School, the science geek within her has been irrepressible. Eliza’s great subject is space. Early this year she followed Fistful of Stars with Spheres: Songs of Spacetime, the first release in an ambitious three-part Virtual Reality (VR) series inspired by the discovery that space is, in a sense, awash in sound. We’ll get back to that. As for plot: “In Songs of Spacetime, you embody a star,” Eliza says, “and you’re sucked inside a black hole where you then become the black hole.” It’s hard to overstate how daring the film is. Black holes are the strangest, most mysterious entities in the universe, and talking about them—never mind visually representing them—can make you feel like you’ve blown a circuit in the brain. “If you’re a star and you fall inside a black hole, you’ll be spaghettified,” Eliza observes with a sardonic chuckle. “That’s the scientific term for the process where you’re ripped into millions of pieces as you go toward ‘the singularity,’ which is a point where space and time no longer apply, where physics as we know it does not exist.” A black hole forms when a massive star—far more massive than our sun—dies and In January its core collapses in on itself, Spheres: Songs creating a gravitational vortex of Spacetime so ferocious that not even light created a stir can escape it. In Spheres: Songs at the Sundance of Spacetime, you, as both a Film Festival. literal star and the metaphoriOne reason: cal star of the experience (VR After Fistful folk call their films “experiences”), approach the whirlpoolof Stars, Eliza like surface of the black hole, had become known as the “event horizon.” something of a From this vantage point you celebrity in the see the star’s light weave gorVR world, giving geously round the black hole, her access to defining its spherical immenthe top strata sity, and then you fall through of film talent. the event horizon—the point of no return—toward the
Eliza at home in New York City
From The Bee-ginning Eliza grew up on Steamboat Road, the daughter of Audrey Appleby, a dance educator, and Jim McNitt, an aerial marine photographer. “I spent my childhood sailing in Greenwich—sailing was in our blood,” she says. “I was also a very curious kid. One Christmas I got a microscope, and I’d go fishing and cut fish in half, and take out their organs and their scales and look at them under my microscope. I was fascinated by how things worked.” But her true scientific awakening began (like another signal event) with the eating of an apple. This was back when she attended
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Greenwich High School. Her grandfather watched Eliza prepare to sink her teeth into the apple and said, “Did you wash that?” Now 101 years old, he had been a chemical engineer at MIT who taught Army officers how to defend against nerve gas attacks. His brief instruction to Eliza about the dangers of pesticides aroused her curiosity; soon she learned that honeybees, the chief pollinators of the apple crop, had recently begun vanishing at an alarming rate. “And I started thinking about how pesticides made their way through the pollination pathway of honeybees, from the apple crop all the way back to
Pale Blue Dot, second in the Spheres series
the hive,” Eliza says. “That’s what ignited the research that I then embarked on for the next two years of high school.” In 2009, her senior year, she won a first-place award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair; her subject was honeybee colony collapse disorder (CCD), first identified in 2006 and since tied to the pesticide Imidacloprid, a widely used replacement for DDT. Her research was sobering: A third of the human diet derives from pollinated foods, and most of the pollinating is done by honeybees. A world without honeybees would threaten our existence, but not before escalating food prices led to riots in the streets. “The fragility of what we have here—that is one of the biggest themes in all my work,” Eliza says now. But after she won the Intel science fair, she realized that even the most vital science news of the day did not travel far. “Outside of this community that I’d been engaging with at science fairs, not many people even knew what CCD stood for, or that honeybees were vanishing.” Providentially, her GHS friend Charles Greene announced that he wanted to make a documentary film and was casting about for a subject. Eliza all but pounced: “We have to do it on colony collapse disorder!” Together they parlayed her research into the short film Requiem for the Honeybee, which won first place in C-SPAN’s
COURTESY OF INTEL
singularity. Here’s something to try to wrap your head around: The singularity, deep within the black hole, is far, far smaller than a grain of sand, but possesses the density of many suns; it’s theoretically of infinite density, making absolute chaos of our physics. It may be that time and space end here. The imaginative among us posit things like wormholes, or doors that open to another dimension. Eliza made the film in consultation with top astrophysicists, the better to translate what is known into a coherent artistic vision. Indeed, it’s her mission to unlock the art inherent in sci“If you’re a star ence and the science inherent and you fall in art. The two should swim in inside a black tandem, she believes. “That’s hole, you’ll be one of the big problems with spaghettified. the way we think about science and art—they’re taught That’s the separately and not together,” scientific term Eliza says. “I think science is for the process an art, and vice versa.” where you’re Nobody has seen or will ever ripped into see inside a black hole; so what millions of did the scientists tell her? “My pieces as you favorite moment of collaboratgo toward ‘the ing with them was, after they gave us all sorts of scientific singularity,’ which information about what that is a point where journey would be like, they space and time finally turned to me and said, no longer apply, ‘Just make it strange.’ So that’s where physics as what we did. We made it very we know it does strange.” not exist.” How so? Well, physics tells us that if you could survive a tumble into a black hole, you would behold something mindblowing. “You’d see the entirety of the universe compressed into a bubble,” Eliza says, arching her brow with amusement. “But you would also be stretched into a million pieces.”
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Get Your Photo Published! We are looking for fantastic photos of Greenwich and Greenwich people to feature every month on our new back page. If you would like a chance to be published in GREENWICH magazine and win $100 here’s what you should know:
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We can’t wait to see your view of Greenwich!
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national student documentary film contest. This in turn got her featured in these pages as a Teen to Watch (September 2009), and in O, The Oprah Magazine (May 2011) as one of four “teen geniuses” (the designation makes her laugh, chiefly because she’s lousy at math) whose science projects “blew us away.” Requiem for the Honeybee also ignited her passion for telling stories on film. At NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, the short films Eliza made showed unusual narrative skill and compositional beauty. Violet (2012) concerns a young woman about to undergo chemotherapy; she dyes her lovely blonde hair purple, a color she hates, so she won’t mind losing it so much. The Ninth Train (2012) tells of two sisters aboard a Kindertransport—a train full of children escaping to England—intercepted by the Nazis. Without Fire (2013) is about an asthmatic Navajo woman and her young daughter, who, using a pickup truck radiator and a bunch of soda cans, construct a solar heater for their desolate home. This last film derives from a fellow Oprah teen genius and science fair savant named Garrett Yazzie; he’s a Navajo from Arizona who really did build a solar heater out of so-called junk. His story so entranced Eliza that she arranged to see Garrett and his family on the reservation. And her script so entranced the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that it awarded her $25,000 to make the film. Without Fire features Misty Upham, a Native American actress who starred in the acclaimed Frozen River (2008, produced by Greenwich resident Charles Cohen) and had just finished filming August: Osage County with Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts and Sam Shepard. “I got an amazing casting director who knew all the local Navajo actresses, but I kept saying I want someone like Misty Upham,” Eliza recalls. “And she said, ‘Well, why don’t we just reach out to her?’” The actress loved the script. “So here I was, twenty years old, working with Misty Upham.” (Upham died the following year, aged thirty-two, after an apparent fall into a ravine.) At this stage, Eliza might have left science behind in favor of filmmaking. There seemed no practical way to combine the two as an ongoing project. But what kind of filmmaker would she be?
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as a filmmaker? “It’s funny how everything goes back to the Intel science fair when I was seventeen,” Eliza says. “My award was to go visit the Large Hadron Collider at CERN”—the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland—where particles are smashed together at mad velocities, simulating reactions that occurred just after the Big Bang. “At CERN they’re searching for clues to understand the deep mysteries of the universe. It was at this moment, when I was walking inside the particle accelerator, that I began to wonder what else lay out there in the universe, beyond this world that we live on.” In 2015 Eliza made her first space film, a short called Artemis Falls, in which an astronaut played by Adepero Oduye (12 Years a Slave, The Big Short) flies, or attempts to fly, the first solo mission to the moon. In 2017 she made the documentary Dot of Light about three female astronauts—a lovely consideration of what a stunning thing it is for humans to pierce the dome of the sky and enter space and then look back. Astronaut Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan tells us she saw clouds of dust billowing over the Sahara Desert in Africa and fine tendrils of that dust stretching all the way to Brazil. Anousheh Ansari tells us how, while grinning ear to ear, she watched a teardrop roll out of her eye and float right in front of her.
Back To The Future As a theme, space is far from exhausted for Eliza. So, what’s next? Filmmakers are famously coy about projects in the works, and in this respect Eliza holds true to form. “I’m going to make a sci-fi
COURTESY OF INTEL
Eliza stepping into her VR world
As a theme, space is far from exhausted for Eliza. So, what’s next? Filmmakers are famously coy about projects in the works, and in this respect Eliza holds true to form. “I’m going to make a sci-fi feature film,” she says tantilizingly, and leaves it there.
She gravitated toward films like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life—films classifiable as magnetic but confounding. “The first movie that I had to watch more than once was Mulholland Drive. I was enthralled by the mystery of the film—I couldn’t decipher what it meant, and I spent years trying to piece it together.” Space movies? She loved Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and also the “brooding, glacially paced” (New York Times) film Solaris— “not the remake [by Steven Soderbergh], but the original by [Andrei] Tarkovksy. Just a beautiful and complex story about space.” But how did she get to space
IMAGE COURTESY OF GOOGLE, BEHIND-THE-SCENE PHOTOS CAPTURED WITH A PIXEL
feature film,” she says tantalizingly, and leaves it there. In January Spheres: Songs of Spacetime created a stir at the Sundance Film Festival. One reason: After Fistful of Stars, Eliza had become something of a celebrity in the VR world, giving her access to the top strata of film talent. An executive producer of Spheres is Darren Aronofsky, founder of Protozoa Pictures and maker of such stylishly unnerving films as Pi, Black Swan and The Wrestler; and the narrator—the voice of the cosmos—is the brilliant actor Jessica Chastain from Zero Dark Thirty and Interstellar. Then there’s the film itself, which achieves the nearly impossible feat of bringing a black hole up-close and personal. “When you fall into the heart of a black hole, it’s very disorienting,” Eliza says, describing a pivotal moment in the film. So discovered Robert Redford, Sundance’s founder. As he drifted toward the event horizon and began to fall through, well, the film legend kind of crumpled to the floor, right there in Utah. Headlines ensued. “But he was like, ‘Get me a chair, I want to finish it.’ So we sat him down and he watched the whole thing, and then he ripped off the headset and said, ‘I want to talk to you about black holes,’” Eliza says. “And so we had a wonderful discussion about science and art.” Spheres: Songs of Spacetime proved to be a game changer for VR commerce. As the buzz crescendoed at Sundance, CityLights, a virtual reality financing and distributing venture, bought the three-part series for “seven figures,” a festival first for virtual reality. “This is a historic moment for the VR industry,” Jess Engel, a Spheres producer and friend of Eliza’s, said at the time of the sale. “It signifies that a viable storytelling medium has emerged.” The second release, Spheres: Pale Blue Dot, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, takes a wider cosmological view. The voice of Patti Smith, perfectly cast as mother of the universe, “takes us on a journey from the Big Bang all the way forward in time to Earth,” Eliza says. “And so the experience begins in silence, because first there was the Big Bang, and then came sound 400,000 years later. And Patti traces the history of sound in the universe down to the strangest sound of all—which is the human voice.” Spatially, the film begins somewhere out in the darkness on the Eliza interviewing NASA astronaut Kathy Sullivan Ansari for Dot of Light
edge of the universe and travels to our own pale blue dot—and how strange to think that every epic, every dynasty, every love story, every birth and death, every joy and sorrow, has played out on that fleck of cosmic dust. Are there other, equally busy grains of space? Consider that in our galaxy, there are billions of other solar systems; beyond the Milky Way are billions of other galaxies; and beyond our universe, some theorize, are billions of other universes. The final episode of Spheres, titled Course of the Cosmos, is in production now. Where Songs of Spacetime focuses on black holes and Pale Blue Dot on the history of sound in the universe, Course stays rather local—our own solar system. “It tells the story of the songs of the solar system,” Eliza says. Songs? Does the universe sing? (Though Course of the Cosmos is last to be made, Eliza considers it first in the sequence, given the relative youth of the solar system; to that end, it will be narrated by a girl.) This brings us back to the music theme—the theme that binds the series together. We’ve all heard of “the music of the spheres,” but until recently we did not take that ancient notion literally; the “music” concerned the orderly dance of stars, planets and moons. And space is silent, right? “As I was finishing Fistful of Stars, I discovered that space is actually full of music,” Eliza says. One startling “space music” revelation came in 2015, when scientists used special lasers to detect gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—caused by the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. (Gravitational waves had been postulated but never proved up to that point.) “Space is full of frequencies that we can detect and translate into sounds that our ears can hear,” Eliza says. “And all the frequencies of the universe would compose an orchestra that is larger than we can imagine.” So, after taking the measure of our smallness, has Eliza come to see us as insignificant? Hardly. In a profound sense, when we look at the night sky, we are gazing into an infinite mirror. “The atoms in our bodies were forged in nuclear furnaces “My favorite at the heart of previous stellar moment of generations,” the astrophysicist collaborating Mario Livio explains in Fistful of with them Stars. “We literally are stardust.” [astrophysicists] Eliza adds, “So when we look was, after they up at the sky, we are looking gave us all sorts at our brothers and sisters from thousands of years ago. Billions of scientific of years ago. We are so small in information the grand scheme of things, yet about what that the power of humanity is that we journey would be are the ones who are discoverlike, they finally ing everything that’s out there.” turned to me and Eliza’s short films and Spheres said, ‘Just make previews are available on Vimeo, it strange.’” YouTube and elizamcnitt.com. G
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by jamie marshall
photography by julie bidwell
HAND LETTERING BY MEGAN GAGNON
T OF HEART. IS NOT FOR THE FAIN IL TA RE OF D RL WO W NAVIGATING THE NE LE LOT OF PASSION, ATION AND A WHO IN RM TE DE Y, IT NU BUT WITH INGE MPHED RENEURS HAVE TRIU THESE FIVE ENTREP
IT
TAKES GUTS AND VISION TO BUILD A BRICK-AND-MORTAR BUSINESS in an Amazon-centric world. But these five extraordinary Greenwich women have done just that. As a result, their first-generation, female-run stores have changed the face of retail at a local level. Despite differences in their backgrounds and ages, each of these women share distinct similarities in their approach to business and life: They all developed a passion for sales at an early age; they all nurtured that passion into a viable business plan; and most important, they care deeply for their customers and their community. Flying in the face of conventional wisdom, these small business owners offer something Amazon can’t—a human connection—reminding us that, at its core, shopping is still very much a social experience to savor. »
The ladies gather for a chat at CFCF on Greenwich Avenue
Splurge 39 Lewis Street
2007
IN GREENWICH SINCE
BUSINESS
Gift Boutique
Sonia Malloy Changing Course to Stay the Course
S
onia Malloy, the founder and owner of SPLURGE, developed a knack for sales at an early age. At nine years old, she began holding tag sales in her backyard. “After five years and five tag sales, my parents said, ‘No more. We don’t have anything left to sell,’” she recalls. The experience taught her valuable lessons about pricing, negotiating and customer service—skills that came in handy years later when she opened her popular gift shop in December 2007. “The timing was terrible,” she says. “But I really believed in the business. Even in 2008 I saw a glimmer of hope.” The first SPLURGE, located on East Putnam Avenue, was dedicated to hand-crafted items made in the USA. Fairly quickly, Sonia realized she had to change course. “I needed more variety. Customers would tell me they needed hostess gifts in the $20 range. I listened to them and got on it.” Today, the bright and cheerful shop on Lewis Street offers everything from Swell water bottles and silk scarves to monogrammed 68
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serving trays and fine jewelry. “I change the inventory often,” she says. “I never want people to come in and find the same things.” Last year, she took over an adjacent storefront and expanded her children’s offerings with a focus on tween girls. This fall she will launch a “minternship” program for girls ages eleven to thirteen. “They can learn what it takes to run a business,” says Sonia. “These are the formative years, the years when I developed my passion.”
GETTING PERSONAL WHAT MADE YOU GO INTO BUSINESS FOR YOURSELF?
“From an early age, I loved organizing and putting pricing on items and haggling with people and coming up with a deal that worked for everyone. My dream was to be a merchant; it’s my calling.”
WHAT IS THE MOST REWARDING ASPECT OF OWNING YOUR OWN BUSINESS?
“The jobs I’ve created, the interns I’ve mentored and the relationships with my customers. For us it’s not just about offering great customer service in the store but going above and beyond to fulfill their needs. Whether someone buys a $20 gift or a $200 gift—it will be wrapped the same way, and those two customers will feel great about what they are walking out with.”
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE? “Remaining relevant. With everything happening in today’s world, particularly with the Internet and ecommerce, the key is constant evolution. You have to be flexible and open to change. I like to keep things fresh. The store never looks the same two weeks in a row. We have so many customers who come in consistently, and that’s one of the biggest challenges. Another big challenge is how you allocate your time and resources to be the most productive.” WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR ENTREPRENEURS JUST STARTING OUT?
“There are certain things that every entrepreneur needs: passion and belief; to be financially careful; to take small calculated risks that allow patience. It can be very discouraging to build a business, to hold on and stay the course. I was invested with everything I could be involved in—networking, holiday boutiques.These are not only great marketing opportunities, but also great ways to give back to the community and your peers. Finally, always under promise and over deliver!” »
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Green of Greenwich
311 Hamilton Avenue
2012
IN GREENWICH SINCE
BUSINESS
Floral Designer
GETTING PERSONAL WHAT MADE YOU GO INTO BUSINESS FOR YOURSELF?
“It comes from my passion for flowers; I love floral design and architecture. I’ve had the entrepreneurial spirit since I was thirteen. I was always looking for something to sell. If I’d had fidget spinners as a child, I’d have been selling them at school for sure. Even when I was in the financial world, we’d travel, and I’d buy stuff and sell it to my coworkers.” WHAT IS THE MOST REWARDING ASPECT OF OWNING YOUR OWN BUSINESS?
“The contact I have with my clients and the things I learn every day. And the fact that I can be part of a community. I love being able to give back, even if in a small way, by donating flowers for a raffle. I really believe small businesses are the backbone of our society.”
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE?
L
ike many entrepreneurs, Flavia Barker’s journey as a small- business owner can be traced back to her childhood, in this case Sao Paulo, Brazil. Growing up with three sisters, all of whom were very competitive, she embarked on a career in finance, working as a commodities trader. Eventually the punishing hours took a toll. “When I was starting a family, I thought it would be best if I had more control of my life,” she recalls. Flavia had always loved working with flowers, so she quit her job and partnered with her mother who had a thriving floral design business. When Flavia’s husband was transferred to the U.S. in 2006, word of her talent got out and soon she was freelancing for a local florist. In 2012, she opened Green of Greenwich, a floral design studio on Hamilton Avenue, housed in an antique brick building with tin ceilings and old hardwood floors. Today the highly sought-after designer does everything from intimate dinner parties to lavish fundraisers, as well as flower-arranging classes for small groups. “One of the things I love most is the contact I have with my clients,” she says. “It’s so fulfilling. I have people that will call me and say, ‘I’m doing a dinner party for twenty. I’m using this linen, this silver and this china.’ Before they’ve finished the sentence, I already know what the flowers are going to be.”
“Time management. First, you need time to build your business, your name and your reputation. And then you need time to work. You are your business. I am the designer, buyer, cleaner, bookkeeper and delivery person. For example, today I spoke with a grower in Amsterdam, then I called vendors, then I talked to my insurance agent, then clients came in, and then I had a delivery. Once a week I go to the flower market in New York City, which means getting up at 3:30 a.m. But I love it. That’s where my creative juices get flowing.” WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR ENTREPRENEURS JUST STARTING OUT?
“You need a business plan. You need to know your market, your clientele, your targets. Don’t be shy about asking for help. I used the Women’s Business Development Council in Stamford. They are amazing. Talk to people who’ve been in business for a long time. Learn from them. Know that you will be involved 100 percent. Recently my husband and I were in London for a friend’s wedding, but I was tethered to my phone 24/7. As an entrepreneur, you don’t get free time. You get other things, but you don’t get free time.”»
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ASHA
409 Greenwich Avenue
2016
IN GREENWICH SINCE
BUSINESS
Jewelry Designer
Ashley McCormick Shopping Beyond the Site
A
shley McCormick, the founder of ASHA, remembers the day her life changed course. She was a freshman at Georgetown University planning to major in economics, when she took her first art history class. “I fell in love with it,” she recalls. “I called my parents and asked if it was okay to switch majors. They said yes. That was a pivotal moment for me.” Ashley spent her junior year in Paris, where she met the head jewelry designer for Chanel. He offered to introduce her to a local jewelry artisan with whom she spent hours sketching each week. When she got back to the States, she found someone who could produce her designs. A serendipitous meeting with Christiane Celle, the founder of Calypso St. Barth, resulted in an order for $10,000 worth of merchandise. “I remember thinking, This is amazing, but how am I going to do this?” Clearly, she found a way. Today, ASHA designs are in stores throughout the country, including Saks, trunk shows at Bergdorf Goodman and locally at Darien Sport Shop, among others. And her brand has grown into a collection of fine jewelry, bespoke pieces, accessories like handbags and even a children’s line, Little Asha. Although a large number of sales come through her website (ashabyadm.com), two years ago Ashley opened the ASHA Penthouse—a sleek, modern showroom and creative lab—on Greenwich Avenue, in part because she wanted to offer her clients a chance to see the designs in process. For Ashley, the Penthouse is 72
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the next logical step toward fulling her long-term goals. “It’s a place for our clients to watch us work, to browse, to have a cup of tea, to shop in a relaxing setting. It brings my aesthetic to life,” she says. “I feel like I’m just starting out. There are so many things I want to do.”
GETTING PERSONAL WHAT MADE YOU GO INTO BUSINESS FOR YOURSELF?
“I’ve always been entrepreneurial. As a kid I would make paintings and try to sell them. In high school I made and sold ribbon belts. I was always interested in commerce and creativity and figuring out how to get things done.
WHAT IS THE MOST REWARDING ASPECT OF OWNING YOUR OWN BUSINESS? “I thrive on the ability to create things. When I see people wearing my jewelry, that’s a great feeling. Especially the fine jewelry, where we are creating heirlooms that are being handed down to the next generation.” WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE?
“Juggling all the areas of the business, which has become easier as I’ve grown the company. As an entrepreneur, you have to be able to switch on and switch off different parts of your brain—design, packaging, marketing, accounting, shipping—I could go on. You have to be able to learn on the fly, adjust your plan and keep going.” WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR ENTREPRENEURS JUST STARTING OUT?
“It’s very simple. Find something you are passionate about and just do it. If you wake up every morning with passion and conviction for your idea, that’s the place to start. The other thing I tell people, seize an opportunity when you have the chance and follow through. I’m sure when he gave me his card, that jewelry designer from Chanel never thought he’d hear from me. That’s just one of the many serendipitous moments I’ve had along the way.” »
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Marietta C
436 East Putnam Avenue
2017
IN GREENWICH SINCE
BUSINESS
Dress Designer
GETTING PERSONAL WHAT MADE YOU GO INTO BUSINESS FOR YOURSELF?
“Since I was nine years old, I always dreamed of having my own store in town and making beautiful dresses for people. I learned to sew from my mother. In high school; I made quilted vests for my classmates.”
WHAT IS THE MOST REWARDING ASPECT OF OWNING YOUR OWN BUSINESS?
B
ehind a modest storefront on East Putnam Avenue, across the street from Citibank, Marietta Contadino and her team of seamstresses create swoon-worthy gowns and dresses for debutantes, bridal parties, socialites and more. A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, who earned several prestigious awards along the way, Marietta says she dreamed of opening her own shop in Greenwich. But first she spent years learning the ropes and fine-tuning her individual style at fashion houses in Manhattan. “My passion lay with evening wear and special trims,” she says. In 1997, Marietta opened a studio in the city, where she did a brisk business designing cocktail dresses for an upscale clientele. “They’d fly into New York and coordinate going to the opera and coming for their fittings,” she recalls. Eventually, she followed her heart and with the help of her brother, Louis, who designed the space, opened her Cos Cob boutique eleven years ago. With a range of styles and fabrics to choose from (she has more than 100 styles to pick from), she is involved in every step of the process—from the initial sketch to the final fitting. As a designer, her biggest goal is to make her clients look their best. “I always give my opinion. A client might not be happy to hear it, but that’s what they come to me for. We have a joke here, ‘They come in wanting an all-over beaded dress, and they leave with a gown without a stich of beading on it.’”
“My clients. You become part of the family, their special occasions. A young lady got married, and I did her wedding dress. Then she got pregnant and I did a maternity dress, then I did the dress she wore for the baptism, the baby’s dress and the dresses for her mother and her mother-in-law. You become part of their life. Recently, a husband called me to say, ‘When I saw my bride in your gown, she took my breath away.’ That’s rewarding.” WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE?
“Getting the word out. People are surprised when they walk in the door. They think, what are you going to see in Cos Cob? The first time they come here, people compare me to big-name designers. They leave the boutique, run into New York City and go up and down Madison and Fifth avenues, and then they circle back here because of the quality of my designs. Or they might see one of my dresses in a Christmas card photo and ask their friends where they got the dress made.” WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR ENTREPRENEURS JUST STARTING OUT?
“It’s easy. They have to do what they love. Even when I worked for other people, my ex-bosses would say, you are the hardest worker I’ve ever had. When I opened my own shop, I didn’t expect anything else. I’m very hands-on, even today. I still do all the lace work and the trim on every design.” »
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Perfect Provenance 47 Arch Street
2016
IN GREENWICH SINCE
BUSINESS
Lifestyle Boutique & Restaurant
Lisa Lori
Creative Curation
L
ocated in a 1912 Victorian-style home in downtown Greenwich, Lisa Lori’s creative lifestyle store, the Perfect Provenance, features a beautifully curated collection of fashion, home and art products. Among the top sellers? The Circle of Life collection of jewelry. “It is based at a price point that could be given as a gift or a woman could buy for herself,” says Lisa. “It’s great when a woman comes in and says, ‘I’m going for it.’” As an added bonus, shoppers can view special exhibitions and works of art that rotate seasonally and get a bite at the cozy Café 47, now under the guidance of Chef Duane Shand. It serves lunch daily and dinner the first weekend of every month, and hosts private events year-round. The shop’s setting on Arch Street is part of the appeal: within easy walking distance of the Avenue, the meticulously renovated home features turn-of-the-century touches such as the original front door with beveled glass panels, penny-round tiles, and even a bathroom with a pull-chain toilet. “These details give the space a little fun, a little oomph,” she says. Shoppers will find home and gift items on the first floor, and men’s and women’s fashions on the second. “The idea was to take European and Australian designers that weren’t represented here and bring them into a boutique atmosphere. Throw food into the mix and you 76
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have a true gallery for the senses,” she says. “We are an old-fashioned boutique. We want you to feel like every time you come in there’s a new item, like when you go on vacation and you find something special and then every time you wear it, you’re happy and remember that special moment.”
GETTING PERSONAL WHAT MADE YOU GO INTO BUSINESS FOR YOURSELF?
“The idea was born of my experience as a public relations professional in the luxury goods business for twenty-five years. I had always wanted to open a store. At fifty years old, I figured, okay, why not?” WHAT IS THE MOST REWARDING ASPECT OF OWNING YOUR OWN BUSINESS?
“It’s really gratifying to have an idea and concept and see it come to life. To have people embrace it. You can think about it for years and at night you’ll be lying there thinking, Is this crazy? Is this going to work? And then you bring the idea to fruition and see people get joy out of it. That is awesome, awesome. Plus, the store is two miles from my home. I get to see my kids every day. Two of them work in the café. We are part of the community. My husband is really supportive. That’s icing on the cake.”
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE?
“When you’re creating a business, building systems, recruiting staff and what price points to cover, that’s challenging. When you introduce new designers and brands, there is a learning curve. Now, after two years, I have a better sense of what works. I know my customers. The ins and outs of buying are really tricky. Just because it’s cool and edgy in Paris or London, doesn’t mean it’s right for Greenwich.”
WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR ENTREPRENEURS JUST STARTING OUT? “You have to love it. That sounds self-evident. You have to have a passion for it. Also, sometimes an entrepreneur has an idea for something and then becomes so emotionally invested that it’s hard to step back. In PR I learned to take rejection. For people to expand, they need to learn to adapt and move forward.” G
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Anxıous Anxious Anxious Anxious Anxious The
Generation
The social-media generation shares more than ever—yet today’s teens are hiding a crushing amount of fear
ISTOCK.COM@PIOTR MARCINSKI
by t i m ot h y d u m as
The
Anxıous
Generation
H
ere at The Depot, a popular teen center in Darien, Justin Carver*, a high school senior with a mop of dark curls, is sitting in a diner-style booth, fidgeting, scratching, tapping his foot. He never sits still. Especially not now, as he recounts the first day of his junior year at Darien High School, the day anxiety overwhelmed him. “I was like, ‘I’m not anxious, I’m just sick. First day of school— just relax.’ But I was freaking out. So I went to school that morning, and then I went and yakked up in the bathroom. I was shaking, like, ‘I can’t do this.’ ”
Certain names have been changed to protect privacy.
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JUSTIN IS HARDLY ALONE. ABOUT 25.1 PERCENT OF YOUTHS 13 TO 18 SUFFER FROM ANXIETY disorders at the present moment, and 31.9 percent have suffered from them at some point in their lives, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. On college campuses, anxiety is the top complaint of students seeking mental health services, having overtaken depression. In 2016 the American College Health Association found that 62 percent of students reported feeling “overwhelming anxiety” in the past year, up from 50 percent in 2011. “Twenty percent of college freshmen are utilizing psychiatric services—that’s gone up exponentially,” says Meghan Skelton, a social worker at Weston’s high school and middle school. “By the time they graduate, 50 percent are accessing some sort of mental health services at college.” Over the past decade, high schools have witnessed a troubling rise in the number of students who, like Justin, get so anxious they can’t bring themselves to go. Psychiatrists call the phenomenon “school refusal” or
“school avoidance.” While anxiety disorders generally are quite treatable, says Dylan Kollman, author of Solving the Anxiety Dilemma (2016) and founder of the Anxiety Institute of Connecticut in Westport, “school refusal can be difficult—it’s a sticky problem.” Kristin Hunter*, whose daughter, Caroline*, left Staples High School last year when anxiety overpowered her, likens school refusal to “grooves in a record” that deepen as the missed days pile up. “The longer you wait, the harder it is,” she says. Kristin shows us a photo of a fit, attractive sixteen-year-old with a radiant smile. “As a parent, it’s confusing. My daughter will go on stage and be in a play. But when she’s walking down the hallway or goes into a store on Main Street, she thinks everyone’s looking at her and negatively judging her.” (Caroline has since enrolled at a small private school, where she is faring better. Kristin hastens to note that Staples was “amazing” in their sensitivity to the problem: “They deal with a lot of this, you can tell.”)
Panic attacks have also become routine in schools, sending kids to the nurse’s office or worse. “I would hyperventilate and pass out and have to go to the hospital,” says Lauren Quinn*, a classmate of Justin’s whom we also met at The Depot. “I’d have probably four or five panic attacks a week. It started when I was in seventh grade. Since I’ve gotten older and worked with my doctors, I can now feel them coming and I can handle them better. But every now and then they’ll still get really bad.” Justin thinks that anxiety is far more common among his peers than the adults of Fairfield County know: “I’d say like nine out of ten kids have it.” Lauren agrees. “It’s a huge problem,” she says. “If you talk to any student, I guarantee they’ll be like, ‘I have anxiety.’ There are so many people who don’t get it diagnosed and are suffering from it.” “Over the last forty years, we’ve seen a 700-percent increase in anxiety, most of it coming over the past ten to fifteen years,” says Dan Villiers, cofounder of the Anxiety Institute in Greenwich, an intensive day-treatment program for adolescents, and of Mountain Valley Treatment Center in New Hampshire, the first residential treatment center for adolescent anxiety in the United States. The experts are calling this strange turn in the culture an “anxiety epidemic.” But what does that mean? Anxiety has always been with man as an anticipatory response to danger: Confronted with a tiger in the grass, or merely the idea of one, he readied to fight or flee. The same neurochemical response (emanating largely from the amygdala, a center deep in the brain that regulates fear but also pleasure) helps modern man rise alertly to the task at hand, whether in the classroom or on the playing field. “Anxiety should, in theory, have an adaptive function,” notes Howard Weiner, a psychiatrist at Silver Hill Hospital for Mental Health and Addiction in New Canaan. “We all know that we need a certain amount of anxiety on a test—but too much is bad, and too little isn’t right, either.” The question of too much anxiety among too many people began to occupy students of the brain about 150 years ago. In 1881 George Miller Beard, a neurologist from Montville, Connecticut, published American Nervousness, a book that, though it got much wrong (hay fever a “nervous disorder”?), managed to touch on something important: “The chief and primary cause of this…very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization.” Genetics, capricious parenting and family
strife contribute to anxiety in children—but these factors have always been with us. Beard was talking about the massive technological and cultural change that was then spreading across the land. Train travel, electric light, the telegraph and mass media were still fairly new, and the automobile and powered flight were just around the corner. The French writer Charles Péguy wrote in 1913: “The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years.” Before now, however, no anxiety epidemic had ever been recorded among America’s young. Where did it come from? The answer is complex. Ours is a moment marked by political contentiousness and mass shootings which, teachers and social workers tell us, have penetrated school walls as noxious psychic forces. “For kids to feel unsafe about going to school, and teachers to feel unsafe going to work, is a big deal,” Meghan Skelton says. (Staples had dealt with a serious threat the week of our interview.) While granting these influences, the experts we consulted train their focus on two other twenty-firstcentury phenomena: a vastly ramped-up culture of achievement, centered on the golden ticket of admission to a prestigious college and the good life it promises; and kids’ near-umbilical attachment to the smartphone. As it turns out, the two are intimately related.
UNDER PRESSURE Suniya Luthar is a psychology professor at Arizona State known for her study of youths who attend high-achieving schools in affluent communities across the country. In twenty years of researching such schools (including Staples and Wilton high schools), Luthar has found serious maladjustment in all of them, without exception. “They should be better than national norms given their resources, right? If anything, these kids should be happier. Not only are they not happier, but in every single case, there’s at least one if not more areas in which there’s significant concern—whether it’s depression, anxiety, eating problems, self-harm or substances. It’s stunning.” She contends that pressure is the core of the problem— “the intense amount of pressure these kids experience to excel in just about everything they do,” Luthar says. “The question is, where does this pressure come from? And »
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Treating Anxiety Disorders THERAPISTS SAY MOST TYPES OF ANXIETY ARE FAIRLY EASY TO TREAT—ASTONISHING NEWS TO THOSE WHO CAN’T STOP WORRYING OR WHO SUFFER REPEATED BOUTS OF SWEATY, WHITE-KNUCKLED TERROR.
“The whole secret of treating anxiety— which 95 percent of people don’t do—is learning how to increase it, not decrease it,” says Dan Villiers, founder of the Anxiety Institute in Greenwich. “Treating anxiety is immersing yourself in it.” What does he mean? Picture whatever situation lies at the heart of your anxiety—flying in a plane or attending a class that requires speaking. Although you’re in no physical danger, your brain sprays out its danger hormones, causing you deep dread or outright panic. No time soon will you expose yourself again to this danger, you tell yourself. Thus begins avoidance, a word you hear a lot from anxiety therapists. “People come here because of anxiety, but it’s really the way they avoid anxiety that causes the problems,” says Dylan Kollman, a therapist who heads the Anxiety Institute of Connecticut in Westport (no relation to the Greenwich institute).
CBT
One especially reliable anxiety-reducing process is cognitive behavioral therapy. Think of CBT as a two-part affair: talk therapy plus exposure therapy. The talk part isn’t designed to plunge you into Freudian murk, but to examine the irrational underpinnings of your anxiety—to fix the brain’s incorrect suppositions about danger stimuli. (Standing in front of a group of people won’t harm you, even though your brain’s on red alert.) The exposure part desensitizes you, step-by-step, to your over-active danger response. Some therapists, like Villiers, incorporate virtual reality devices as a way to prepare you to confront your realworld fear. Eventually, you leave the office for the “in vivo” part of your exposure therapy, in which you confront, with your therapist, the actual plane or classroom.
MEDICATION
The CBT process lasts a few weeks to a few months, and it can be costly. It works especially well with panic disorder and specific phobias. “The success rate for the treatment of panic disorder is 85 or 90 percent, and that’s without medication,” Kollman says. People with generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder also benefit from CBT, but the success rates are less clear-cut. Often these sufferers couple CBT with anxiety medications such as Xanax; the combination appears to work better than one or the other alone—if by “work better” we mean return people more frequently to their normal routines. Anxiety therapists tend to frown on medication or, at least, a medicationonly approach. It masks rather than fixes the problem. Meditation techniques, breathing exercises, and activities like art and equine therapy may also be part of the tool kit.
NEUROFEEDBACK
A recent arrival on the anxiety treatment scene is neurofeedback. Some years ago the medical establishment regarded it as quackish. Now it’s gaining respect as a treatment for ADHD, post-traumatic stress, anxiety and much else. The idea is that we can train the brain to produce its energy in a more harmonious way. Darien High student Justin Carver* (see main story) was initially skeptical, but after several treatments he believes that neurofeedback calms and focuses him. “This is literally me strengthening my brain,” he says, “so that I can healthily make thoughts in the day and I can healthily power down at night.”
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IMMERSION
The
Anxıous
Generation the answer is, where does it not come from?” “All of my friends, they feel like they’re under a microscope and have to perform at such a high level,” Lauren Quinn says. “It applies everywhere: sports, school, music, being in a club. Everyone’s worried about, like, ‘I have to be better than I was before, I have to be better than the next person.’ That’s when the anxiety kicks in, because you feel like you’re never doing quite enough. ‘I only got a B. I should have gotten an A.’ ” The kids admit they put some pressure on themselves. But Luthar says they’re also internalizing a cultural condition they can’t escape. Justin puts it starkly: “I think the culture of Darien is that the weak fall to the bottom and the strong rise to the top. New Canaan, too. Wilton. Fairfield County. It’s hard to meet the expectation around here. There’s so much that can upset you in an environment like this, where it’s like, ‘you’ve got to be the best to be happy.’ It’s almost impossible not to be anxious, you know?” Janice Marzano, who heads The Depot and is a beloved confidante of Darien’s young, remarks, “Kids are playing sports they don’t even like, just to get into college.” Students describe their days as being relentlessly mapped out. Lauren rises at 5 a.m. for physical therapy and does not stop until she turns out the light at night, after completing her homework. “There’s literally no time to be a kid,” she says. Her classmate Maria Price* says she’ll “step back” and put off her work when she’s overwhelmed, “which makes it even more stressful in the end.” Is gaining admittance to college really much harder these days? It’s a contested issue. But this much is true: The applicant pool has grown dramatically as colleges seek more diverse and more global student bodies, students are applying to more schools than they used to, and acceptance rates at the best schools have shrunk by as much as half over the past twenty years. “When I applied to Kenyon,” Dan Villiers says, “the acceptance rate was something like 55 percent. Now it’s 20 or 25 percent. I don’t think I could get in today.” (Many of the teens Villiers treats, not surprisingly, come to him with “fear about the future, fear of failure, doubts about themselves”—a complex of worries called generalized anxiety disorder.)
HIDDEN CRISIS At one point in the conversation with Lauren, she pauses and waves her hand before her eyes, checking a flow
of tears. A friend of hers committed suicide, she says. “In a letter, she kind of explained it all. She felt she was letting her family down and letting her friends down, because she just wasn’t good enough.” Lauren furrows her brow at the thought of it. “She was getting B-pluses in everything. She was a really smart girl. Everyone loved her. If you’d met her, you would have never thought there was this darkness inside of her. It’s so sad to think that if she was born like, twenty years ago, she never would’ve had the issues that she had.” This tragedy of this young woman is part of an alarming trend. Since 2007, teen suicides have been climbing steadily, the boys’ rate rising by a third, and the traditionally stable girls’ rate doubling. From 2008 to 2015, the number of children hospitalized for suicidal thoughts also doubled, with October, not surprisingly, being the peak admissions month. (But are they admitted for anxiety or depression? Often the two are “comorbid,” or occurring together, and not neatly separable.) The uphill suicide graph correlates eerily with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the saturation of smartphones generally by 2012—at which point the graph turns steeper still. Phones and suicide? Last year, California psychologist Jean Twenge published a groundbreaking book titled iGen, which documents a powerfully suggestive link between phones—the obsessive, time-devouring use of social media on them—and anxiety and depression. Twenge writes, “The sudden, sharp rise in depressive symptoms occurred at almost exactly the same time that smartphones became ubiquitous and in-person interaction plummeted.” “I was a little skeptical at first,” says Dylan Kollman. “It felt a little old-mannish to me: ‘Oh, it’s TV. Oh, it’s video games, or rap music.’ But her data is really strong. And you just kind of feel it with kids, that there’s something unhealthy about unadulterated access to these phones.” Why should this be so? With the advent of smartphones, multiple studies say, young people are spending more time alone than they used to; their “real” adventures out in the neighborhood, among flesh-and-blood people, have become rare; mediating their worlds so incessantly through the smartphone inhibits their maturity; and constant digital stimulation weakens their ability to concentrate on tasks that require sustained attention, not to mention their ability to cope with uncomfortable emotions like boredom. Tracey Masella, a social worker at Silver Hill who deals extensively with adolescents, observes, “We’re breeding kids who have no tolerance for discomfort, whether it be boredom or anxiety or sadness or rejection or failure.” »
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The
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Generation
5 FACES OF ANXIETY Anxiety is a catch-all term. Therapists look to identify one of these specific problems:
1. PANIC DISORDER
is “a misfiring of your fear response,” says Westport therapist Dylan Kollman. “It’s a false alarm—it would be a real alarm if a cheetah were there.” Still, the fear is so acute that people feel as if they are going to die.
2. GENERALIZED ANXIETY DISORDER
is marked by feeling worried or on-edge and by an inability to escape negative thinking.
3. SOCIAL ANXIETY DISORDER
or social phobia, the most common anxiety disorder, is characterized by a fear of social situations and, more specifically, by a fear of being unfavorably judged by others.
4. OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER has been given its own heading in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It involves intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors, like hand-washing.
5. POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER
has also been given its own heading in the manual. It stems from traumatic experiences, like being attacked or witnessing violence, and therapists see little of it among teens.
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of disinviting guest speakers for fear of causing students “emotional injury,” to borrow a remarkable phrase used by Williams College’s student editorialists. Twenge writes, “If some people might be upset, the thinking goes, we’ll ban the speaker.”
SAFE DISTANCE This brew of high expectation and emotional frailty is bad enough. What makes it worse, though in ways we don’t yet fully understand, is smartphones’ power to amplify. (Who could have predicted the clout of the Tweet?) Lauren Quinn describes the smartphone world as a world of mirrors in which one is always found wanting. “It’s horrible—you see these people who look like supermodels. Even someone who goes to your school. They post a picture and you think it’s so cool, and everyone else loves it, you’re just like, ‘I want to be like that. I need to be skinnier. I need to do cooler things. I need to own nicer clothes.’ It just causes so much more unnecessary stress and anxiety.” The research indicates that Lauren’s feelings are widespread. “One thing our data is showing is that these kids think other people’s lives are always better than their own,” Suniya Luthar says. “ ‘My friends are happier than I am, more popular than I am, more successful in their love life.’ That aspect of social media is particularly damaging in terms of young people’s well-being.” This is to say nothing of cyber-bullying and the like, that not-so-brave new world where one can practice nastiness at a safe digital remove. Anyone would agree: Smartphones have their virtues. But Lauren has decided the vices outweigh them. She’s tired of the phones’ Pavlovian pull. “Literally the other day, I asked my mom for a flip phone,” she says. “I was like, ‘I don’t want my iPhone anymore.’ ” The engineers of Silicon Valley would applaud her. Justin Rosenstein, who helped create the “like” button for Facebook, banned himself from Snapchat—teens’ social app of choice—which he likens to heroin. Rosenstein is among a growing number of tech engineers who deem their own products unhealthy, a fact that should give us all pause. But there’s a deeper point to be made. Between the push to achieve and the compulsion to live digitally, the young are conditioned to fixate on outcomes and rewards—not on the pleasure of doing a thing, much less on the care of the soul. “It’s a hard way to live, if your »
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Howard Weiner adds, “Something has changed in the expectation we have of getting through life without distress.” He notes a disconcerting paradox: smartphones are contributing to kids’ distress, yet the kids are turning to them to lessen the selfsame distress—like lab rats hitting the sugar lever. As Dan Villiers puts it: “They’re selfmedicating through instant access to the smartphone. That’s a fact.” A broader point is that young people’s powers of resilience—of handling setbacks or uncomfortable situations—have seriously eroded. (The phones are but one cause. Masella also notes a shift in today’s parenting, whereby many parents’ reluctant to say “no” to their kids muddle the family’s authority structure, with chaotic results.) Jean Twenge mentions the new college habit
2019 PHOTO CONTEST
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Enter Today!
Anabel Howe The Last Catch of the Day
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Julia Howe Conversation
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HERE’S THE PICTURE This is your chance to capture the spirit and vibe of Greenwich on film. The photogenic faces, facets and façades of our town are abundant. Whether you are a serious amateur photographer, a weekend shutterbug or a beginner with a good eye, show us your stuff. WHAT TO FOCUS ON The theme is the People, Places and Animals of Greenwich, with all shots taken in Greenwich. Set your sights on Greenwich people at work, at play, young, old and in-between. Snap that adorable pet doing something cute. Or take pictures of identifiable Greenwich places, from woods to water. Look for those uncommon sites; catch that different perspective. We want to see the town through your viewfinder—who or what you think best exemplifies the character and spirit of Greenwich. If animals are featured in the photo, please identify their owners or the location where they were photographed. IT’S A SNAP TO ENTER > Amateur photographers only > No frames or glass
> Each photograph must have a separate entry form attached to the back of the picture
> Minimum size 5" x 7" • Maximum size 8" x 10"
> Photos will not be returned
> To download more entry forms, go to Greenwichmag.com
> DEADLINE: MONDAY, OCTOBER 22
WE’LL BE THE JUDGE OF THAT A team of impartial judges will choose the winning photographs based on 1. Composition 2. Clarity 3. Creative Concept DON’T FORGET Mail or deliver to: GREENWICH magazine, 205 Main Street, Westport, CT 06880. Attn: Ali Gray A completed entry form must be attached to each picture. GREENWICH magazine assumes publication rights for winning photographs. GREENWICH magazine employees are not eligible to enter. Professional photographers are also not eligible.
Entry Form GREENWICH MAGAZINE’S 2019 PHOTO CONTEST please PRINT clearly NAME ADDRESS
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Entries must be received by MONDAY, OCTOBER 22 Mail or deliver to: GREENWICH magazine, 205 Main Street, Westport, CT 06880. Attn: Ali Gray
The
Anxıous
Generation sense of self-worth is all tied in with the splendor of your accomplishments,” says Luthar. Howard Weiner adds, “If that’s all you have, there’s not a lot to fall back on when you don’t succeed.” It’s touching to hear Lauren Quinn recall the presaturation days of her childhood: “We were lucky, because we were the last kids who didn’t grow up with smartphones—we had flip phones. So we got to play outside still.” The generation now in elementary school has never known a world in which people were not slaves to their gadgets. How will these children grow up? Count Dan Villiers among the concerned. “What’s so valuable in a child and an adolescent is to develop a sense of self-worth, self-confidence. And you do that by growing independence.” Too often we’re doing the opposite, he says. “We’re actually regressing them. We’re developing a generation of anxious and avoidant kids.” Changing the culture is, obviously, a tall order, since it involves “the entire ecosystem of kids” and then some, Meghan Skelton of the Weston schools says. “Everyone’s got to jump on board.” The schools do appear to be finding their footing as they recognize the enormity of the problem. Justin Carver says Darien High lightened his workload at critical times. Kristin Hunter recalls how Staples sent a small delegation to her house to delicately coax her daughter back to school, one class at a time. In 2013 the school’s guidance department launched the Staples Resilience Project in response to rising anxiety and depression; it’s designed to foster “emotional agility”—to help students gain a healthier perspective on inevitabilities like failure and rejection. Last year, Darien inaugurated Fitch Academy as an alternative high-school program for kids dealing with severe anxiety and related issues. And as schools put mental health and well-being at the forefront of their agendas, they turn increasingly to cutting-edge outfits like the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in New Haven. The new emphasis on emotional skills (starting with the ability to understand one’s own emotions and to read others’ emotions) is hardly accidental: They are essential for healthy growth and learning, and yet numerous studies show they are under assault. Meanwhile, the hope is that students who need help will ask for it rather than suffer in silence. Consider Justin. “I’m feeling great,” he says, drumming the tabletop. “The anxiety still comes in little waves—but it used to be this big tsunami. Now, like Japan or New Orleans, we’re cleanG ing up, and sooner or later it’ll be a nice city again.”
5 TIPS FOR PARENTS
Having a child with an anxiety disorder can leave parents feeling overwhelmed, but therapists say these practical guidelines provide needed support.
1
Listen. In the hurly-burly of daily life, we may hear our kids without listening to them and, thus, miss their distress signals. Despite appearances, our kids want you to get beyond the monosyllables. So don’t just ask them how their day was; ask them what they think about things. “You know how friends can realize that something is wrong?” asks one Darien High School senior. “A parent could do that if they listen.” “Be curious, not furious,” advises Kristin Hunter,* a Westport mother whose daughter suffers from anxiety. “Ask them, in an empathetic tone, what they are worried about, what is keeping them from going. Try not to get mad or frustrated or ask what is wrong with them—that just shuts them down.” Finally, refrain from lecturing. “What they want,” says Weston schools social worker Meghan Skelton, “is to connect.”
2
Limit Screentime. This is a battle in every household, but the evidence is increasingly clear: social-media addiction leaves teens feeling less satisfied with their lives and more depressed and anxious. While social media can be great for connecting, it, ironically, leaves more kids feeling lonely and excluded (ask your teen about FOMO—fear of missing out). “When I take my daughter’s phone away, it’ll be twenty-four hours of hell—and then six days of bliss,” says Kristin Hunter. “Then she says, ‘I don’t feel as stressed. I don’t feel as much pressure to keep checking my phone.’” While they’re offline, have them read psychology professor Jean Twenge’s iGen, which warns of a
looming mental health crisis among our young. If they won’t read it, pin them to a chair and read choice passages aloud.
3
Encourage Good Habits. Do your kids exercise? Do they eat well? Do they go to sleep at a decent hour (social media often leads to nocturnal hours)? Do they get together—in person—with friends? These eternal good habits are among the things getting lost to digital addiction.
4
Lighten the Load. Between multiple AP courses, sports, clubs and volunteer work— the better to build an impressive college application—many kids feel they have too much on their plate and not enough time to discover, explore, imagine. The healthiest choice for your child might be to do less. Distressingly, mental health professionals tell us, it is often the parents who won’t let kids put on the brakes.
5
Understand. Sometimes a parent will view anxiety as a character weakness and encourage his child to “toughen up” or “snap out of it.” Greenwichbased anxiety therapist Dan Villiers’ own father took this view when Villiers suffered from social anxiety in his youth. But it’s misguided, he’ll tell you. Let’s remember that Thomas Jefferson suffered bitterly from anxiety; closer to home, so did Steve Young, the Greenwichraised Hall of Fame quarterback. Our anxious kids are battling a neurochemistry they cannot hope to defeat—not without guidance, tools, understanding and, in some cases, therapy.
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CALENDAR AUGUST 2018
Art & Antiques ALDRICH MUSEUM, 258 Main St., Ridgefield, 438-0198. Tues.-Sun. noon5 p.m.; Fri. until 8 p.m. AMY SIMON FINE ART, 1869 Post Rd. East, Westport, 259-1500. Tues.Sat. 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., or by appointment. BRUCE MUSEUM, 1 Museum Dr., 869-0376. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun. 1-5 p.m. CANFIN GALLERY, 39 Main St., Tarrytown, NY, 914-332-4554. Tues.-Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. or by appt. Fine paintings and sculptures by established and emerging contemporary artists from all over the world. CAVALIER GALLERIES, 405 Greenwich Ave., 8693664. Mon.-Sat. 10:30 a.m.6 p.m.; Sun. noon-5 p.m. and by appt. A showcase of a select group of established and emerging artists who represent the finest in modern painting, sculpture and photography.
September Sun, oil on enameled aluminum, 36 x 36
The Drawing Room Gallery The Drawing Room Gallery will host an exhibit, Rhythmic Transitions, with works by artist David Dunlop running through Saturday, September 8. Dunlop is an artist, teacher, lecturer and Emmy Award-winning television host. He is on the faculty at the Silvermine School of Art in New Canaan, where he teaches painting, gives workshops and leads groups of art students to Italy, France and Japan. David lives in Wilton with his wife, Rebecca Hoefer. The gallery is located at 5 Suburban Avenue in Cos Cob and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ( for more events visit greenwichmag.com )
CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY PRINTMAKING, 299 West Ave., Norwalk, 899-7999. Mon.-Sat. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun. noon-5 p.m. Wed. 1-26, 6th Biennial FOOTPRINT International Exhibition. CLAY ART CENTER, 40 Beech St., Port Chester, NY, 914-937-2047. Mon.-Sat. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. or by appt. DISCOVERY MUSEUM AND PLANETARIUM, 4450 Park Ave., Bridgeport, 372-3521. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.5 p.m.; Sun. noon-5 p.m. Permanent exhibits include Energy Exhibit, Sound and Light Galleries, Preschool
Power, Sports Science and Solar Legos. Exhibits at the Discovery Museum are designed for hands-on interaction and learning. FAIRFIELD MUSEUM AND HISTORY CENTER, 370 Beach Rd., Fairfield, 2591598. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.4 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., noon-4 p.m. FLINN GALLERY, 101 W. Putnam Ave., 622-7947. Mon.-Wed., Fri.-Sat., 10 a.m.5 p.m.; Thurs. 10 a.m.8 p.m.; Sun. 1-5 p.m. Visit flinngallery.com for exhibit information. GERTRUDE G. WHITE GALLERY, YWCA, 259 E. Putnam Ave., 869-6501. Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sat. 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. GREENWICH ARTS COUNCIL, 299 Greenwich Ave., 862-6750. Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. noon-4 p.m. The Bendheim Gallery hosts major exhibitions every six weeks; visit greenwicharts .org to learn about upcoming exhibits. GREENWICH HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 39 Strickland Rd., 869-6899. Wed.-Sun. noon4 p.m. J. RUSSELL JINISHIAN GALLERY, 1657 Post Rd., Fairfield, 259-8753. Tues.-Sat. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. A large selection of original marine and sporting art by Arguimbau, Blossom, Demers, Kramer, McGurl, Mecray, Mizerek, Prosek, Shilstone, Stobart and Thompson. KATONAH MUSEUM OF ART, Rte. 22 at Jay St., Katonah, NY, 914-232-9555. Tues.-Fri. and Sun., 1-5 p.m.; Sat., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. »
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Please join us on September 24th for the
at the Woodway Country Club in Darien, CT. Tickets and information available at www.kidsincrisis.org KIC1472_KidsChallenge-Ad-HalfPage-R3.indd 1
11th Annual
6/20/18 9:59 AM
The Greenwich Botanical Center Greenwich Dahlia Society
Saturday, September 29th 2pm – 4pm & Sunday, September 30th 10am – 3pm
Followed by Sale of Flowers, Sunday at 3pm Open to the Public Free Admission
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The Greenwich Botanical Center 130 Bible St., Cos Cob, CT www.gecgreenwich.org
CALENDAR
Best of Greenwich Join us for a fabulous evening of cocktails, food and music as we celebrate the best of what Greenwich has to offer. The Delamar Greenwich Harbor will be the place to be on Monday, August 6 from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Tickets are available at Greenwichmag.com. See you there!
KENISE BARNES FINE ART, 1947 Palmer Ave., Larchmont, NY, 914-834-8077. Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m., or by appt. Visit kbfa.com for show information. LOCKWOOD-MATHEWS MANSION MUSEUM, 295 West Ave., Norwalk, 838-9799. Wed.-Sun., noon-4 p.m. Visit lockwoodmathewsmansion. com for program information. LOFT ARTISTS ASSOCIATION, 575 Pacific Street or loftartists.com. Fri.-Sun. noon-5 p.m. visit website for current exhibits. MARITIME AQUARIUM, 10 N. Water St., S. Norwalk, 852-0700. Daily, 10 a.m.5 p.m. The Maritime Aquarium inspires people of all ages to appreciate and protect the Long Island Sound ecosystem and the global environment through living exhibits, marine science and environmental education.
MICHAEL FLORIO GALLERY, 135 Mason Street, 858-5743. Specializing in established and emerging contemporary artists, marine art and curiosities. Open most days by chance or by appointment, Michaelflorio .com.
Dawson, Demers, Gray, Hoyne, Jacobsen, Moran, Stobart, Waugh and Yorke.
NEUBERGER MUSEUM OF ART, Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Rd., Purchase, NY, 914-251-6100. Tues.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
SAMUEL OWEN GALLERY, 382 Greenwich Ave., 3251924. Mon.-Sat., 10:30 a.m.6 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.-3 p.m. The gallery is committed to exhibiting the work of emerging to mid-career artists, as well as a variety of strong secondary market works. The gallery has a Nantucket location as well.
PELHAM ART CENTER, 155 Fifth Ave., Pelham, NY, 914738-2525 ext. 113. Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat. noon-4 p.m. QUESTER GALLERY, 119 Rowayton Ave., Rowayton, 523-0250. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat.-Sun., by appt. 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century marine art and antiques, including works by Bard, Bareford, Beal, Bishop, Brown, Buttersworth,
ROWAYTON ARTS CENTER, 145 Rowayton Ave., Rowayton, 866-2744. Tues.-Sat. noon-5 p.m.; Sun. 1-4 p.m.
SILVERMINE GUILD ARTS CENTER, 1037 Silvermine Rd., New Canaan, 966-9700. Wed.-Sat., noon-5 p.m.; Sun. 1-5 p.m. SM HOME GALLERY, 70 Arch Street, Greenwich, 629-8121, Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.5 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
or by appointment. Featuring award-winning regional and national contemporary artists. Visit sandramorganinteriors.com for exhibit information. STAMFORD ART ASSOCIATION, 39 Franklin St., Stamford, 325-1139. Thurs.-Fri. 11 a.m.3 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. noon-3 p.m. STAMFORD DOWNTOWN, fun summer series of art and music throughout the city of Stamford, 348-5285 or visit stamford-downtown.com for event information. WESTPORT ARTS CENTER, 51 Riverside Ave., Westport, 226-7070. Mon.Fri. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. noon-4 p.m. YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, 1080 Chapel St., New Haven, 432-2800. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun. noon-5 p.m. Permanent collection on view.
YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY, 1111 Chapel St., New Haven, 432-0611. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thurs. until 8 p.m.; Sun. 1-6 p.m. The permanent collection includes African art, American decorative art, American paintings and sculpture, ancient art, Asian art, coins and medals, and modern and contemporary art.
Concerts, Film & Theater ARENA AT HARBOR YARD, 600 Main St., Bridgeport, 345-2300. Visit arenaharboryard.com for show listings. AVON THEATRE FILM CENTER, 272 Bedford St.,
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CALENDAR
WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE, 25 Powers Ct., Westport, 227-4177. Tues. 8 p.m.; Wed. 2 and 8 p.m.; Thurs, and Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 4 and 8 p.m.; Sun. 3 p.m. Tues. 14-Sept. 1, The Understudy. Audiences mob the theater when a Hollywood action star takes the Broadway stage. But what if he can’t go on? Enter Harry, the understudy, a journeyman actor who has the chops but not the résumé. This hilarious look at life backstage gets even crazier when Harry reunites with the stage manager (his ex-fiancé).
Maritime Aquarium Enjoy casual “TGIF” and “Saturday Sunset” cruises on Long Island Sound aboard The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk’s research vessel every weekend in August. For times, tickets and more, visit maritimeaquarium.org.
Stamford, 661-0321. Visit avontheatre.org for special events and guest speakers. CARAMOOR INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL, Girdle Ridge Rd., Katonah, NY, 914-232-1252. Caramoor is a renowned oasis for musical inspiration that offers audiences the Caroline Jones to hear an opportunity in-depth spectrum of music in one of the country’s legendary outdoor settings. Visit caramoor.org for details. CURTAIN CALL, The Sterling Farms Theatre Complex, 1349 Newfield Ave., Stamford, 329-8207. Visit curtaincallinc.com for upcoming shows and times. DOWNTOWN CABARET THEATRE, 263 Golden Hill St., Bridgeport, 576-1636.
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Legally Blonde coming in September. FAIRFIELD THEATRE COMPANY, On Stage One, 70 Sanford St., Fairfield, 2591036. Visit fairfieldtheatre.org for dates, shows and times. GOODSPEED OPERA HOUSE, 6 Main St., East Haddam, 860-873-8668. Wed. 1-Sept. 8, Oliver! GREENWICH LIBRARY, 101 W. Putnam Ave., 6227900. No Friday Film Nights in August. JACOB BURNS FILM CENTER, 364 Manville Rd., Pleasantville, NY, 914-7737663. Visit website for titles and times burnsfilmcenter.org. LEVITT PAVILION, Jesup Green, Westport, 226-7600. Summer Concerts and films, visit levittpavilion.com for concerts and show times.
LONG WHARF THEATRE, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven, 787-4282. The Roommate, coming in October. PERFORMING ARTS CENTER AT SUNY PURCHASE, 735 Anderson Hill Rd., Purchase, NY, 914251-6200. Visit artscenter .org for shows and times. RIDGEFIELD PLAYHOUSE, 80 East Ridge, Ridgefield, 4389269. For shows and times visit ridgefieldplayhouse.org. RIDGEFIELD THEATER BARN, 37 Halpin Ln., Ridgefield, 431-9850. Urinetown coming in September. SHUBERT THEATER, 247 College St., New Haven, 800-228-6622. Visit shubert .com for more shows, dates and times. STAMFORD CENTER FOR THE ARTS, Palace
Lectures, Tours & Workshops ALDRICH MUSEUM, 258 Main St., Ridgefield, 438-0198. Tues.-Sun. noon-5 p.m.; Fri. until 8 p.m. Fri. 3, First Fridays: A Contemporary Cocktail Hour, 7-9 p.m.; visit aldrichart.org for more information. AUDUBON GREENWICH, 613 Riversville Rd., 869-5272. Sun. 5, first Sunday bird walk at Greenwich point, 9 a.m.; visit Greenwich.audubon.org for more events. AUX DÉLICES, 231 Acosta St., Stamford, 326-4540, ext. 108. Visit auxdelicesfoods .com for menus and dates. BOWMAN OBSERVATORY PUBLIC NIGHT, NE of Milbank/East Elm St. rotary on the grounds of Julian Curtiss School, 869-6786, ext. 338. Wed. 1 and 15, Observatory open to the public free of charge, 8:30-10:30 p.m., weather permitting. Sponsored by the Astronomical Society of Greenwich.
BRUCE MUSEUM, 1 Museum Dr., 869-0376. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun. 1-5 p.m. Visit brucemuseum.org for updates on lectures, tours and workshops. CLAY ART CENTER, 40 Beech St., Port Chester, NY, 914-937-2047. Clay Art Center’s mission is to offer a stimulating space for studio practice, exhibition and educational opportunities to better serve the community. FAIRFIELD MUSEUM AND HISTORY CENTER, 370 Beach Rd., Fairfield, 259-1598. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.4 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., noon-4 p.m. Visit fairfieldhistory.org for tours. GARDEN EDUCATION CENTER, 130 Bible St., 8699242 or gecgreenwich.org; pruning class, plant doctor series, fruit tree grafting and more. Visit website for classes, dates and times. GREENWICH LIBRARY, 101 W. Putnam Ave., 6227900. The library offers a variety of programs: Blood Pressure Screenings, Drop-In Computer Lab, Chess Club, Volunteer Tax Assistance, Foreign Affairs Book Discussion Group; for dates and times visit greenwichlibrary.org NORWALK SEAPORT ASSOCIATION, Washington and Water streets, S. Norwalk, 838-9444. Daily Cruises to Sheffield Island and Lighthouse Tours. SOUNDWATERS, Brewer Yacht Haven Marina, Batemen Way, Stamford, 323-1978. Visit soundwaters .org for afternoon and sunset sail dates and times. STAMFORD MUSEUM & NATURE CENTER, 39 Scofieldtown Rd., Stamford, 977-6521. Mon.Sat. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday night Observatory Visitors’ Night, 8:30 p.m; Summer Sundays on the Farm, noon-4 p.m. »
MARITIME AQUARIUM
Theatre, 61 Atlantic St., Stamford, 325-4466. Visit stamfordcenterforthearts.org for event information.
2018 Panel of Judges
awards
2018
get your tickets now
James Aman
Eric Cohler
AMAN & MEEKS
ERIC COHLER DESIGN
Amy Lau
John Meeks
AMY LAU DESIGN
AMAN & MEEKS
JOIN US FOR THE A-LIST AWARDS GALA! Wednesday, September 12 at the Palace Theatre in Stamford
Mario Nievera
Jennifer Post
NIEVERA WILLIAMS
JENNIFER POST DESIGN
NEW
5:30PM S TART Mor Networkein g!
Brian Sawyer
SAWYER | BERSON
Edward Siegel EDWARD SIEGEL ARCHITECT
Our 2018 panel of judges will reveal the winners FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO PURCHASE TICKETS, PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE: ATHOMEFC.COM
Keith Williams
Vicente Wolf
NIEVERA WILLIAMS
VICENTE WOLF ASSOCIATES
PRESENTING SPONSORS EXCLUSIVE AWARDS SPONSOR
Dibico
B u i l d • Tr a n s f o r m • E n j o y
EXCLUSIVE WATER SPONSOR
CALENDAR KATONAH MUSEUM OF ART, Rte. 22 at Jay St., Katonah, NY, 914-232-9555. Tues.-Fri. and Sun. 1-5 p.m.; Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays for Tots, 1 p.m; Picture This! Saturday Story Time, select Saturdays, 10:30 a.m. MARITIME AQUARIUM, 10 N. Water St., S. Norwalk, 852-0700. The Maritime Aquarium inspires people of all ages to appreciate and protect the Long Island Sound ecosystem and the global environment through living exhibits, marine science, and environmental education. NEW CANAAN NATURE CENTER, 144 Oenoke Ridge, New Canaan, 966-9577. Sat. 25, Creatures of the Night Hike, 7:30-9 p.m.
Kid Stuff
AUGUST 2018
ALDRICH MUSEUM, 258 Main St., Ridgefield, 438-4519. Tues.-Sun. noon-5 p.m.; Fri. until 8 p.m. Sat. 18, Family Art Experiences, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. AUDUBON GREENWICH, 613 Riversville Rd., 869-5272. Sun. 5, First Sunday bird walk, at Tod’s Point, 9 a.m. AUX DÉLICES, 23 Acosta St., Stamford, 326-4540 ext. 108. Visit auxdelicesfoods .com for menus and dates. BEARDSLEY ZOO, 1875 Noble Ave., Bridgeport, 3946565. Open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. One of Connecticut’s top family attractions. See more than 300 animals
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representing North and South American species and learn about their endangered and threatened species, which include the Amur (Siberian) tiger, Andean condor, Ocelot, Red wolf, Maned wolf, Giant Anteater and Golden lion tamarin. Then grab a bite at the Peacock Café and take a ride on the carousel. BOYS & GIRLS CLUB OF GREENWICH, 4 Horseneck Lane, 869-3224. Visit bgcg .org for events and programs at the club. BRUCE MUSEUM, 1 Museum Dr., 869-0376. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun. 1-5 p.m. Sun. 5, First Sunday Science at the Seaside Center, 1-4 p.m. and visit brucemuseum.org for updated classes and exhibits and after school workshops. DISCOVERY MUSEUM AND PLANETARIUM, 4450 Park
Ave., Bridgeport, 372-3521. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun. noon-5 p.m. The Discovery Museum’s 20,000-square-foot facility includes changing and permanent interactive exhibit galleries, a planetarium, Challenger Learning Center, an auditorium and five multipurpose classrooms where hands-on science classes are conducted for schools, groups and the general public. discoverymuseum.org.
FAIRFIELD MUSEUM AND HISTORY CENTER, 370 Beach Rd., Fairfield, 2591598. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., noon-4 p.m. GREENWICH HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 39 Strickland St., 869-6899. Visit hstg.org for upcoming camp and programs.
DOWNTOWN CABARET THEATRE, 263 Golden Hill St., Bridgeport, 576-1636. Little Witches coming in October.
GREENWICH LIBRARY, 101 W. Putnam Ave., 6227900. The library offers many programs for children: Wee Ones, Tales for Tots, Baby Lapsit, Mother Goose Story Time, call or visit greenwichlibrary.org for dates and times.
EARTHPLACE, 10 Woodside Lane, Westport, 227-7253. The mission of Earthplace is to build a passion within the community for nature and the environment through education, experience and action. earthplace.org.
IMAX THEATER AT MARITIME AQUARIUM, 10 N. Water St., S. Norwalk, 852-0700. For special documentaries and Hollywood films on IMAX, check website for films and times, maritimeaquarium.org.
STAMFORD MUSEUM & NATURE CENTER, 39 Scofieldtown Rd., Stamford, 977-6521 or stamfordmuseum.org. Mon.-Sat. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Fri. 3, 10, 17, 24, Observatory Visitors Night: for ages 5-17, 7:30 p.m.; Sun. 6, 13, 20, 27, Sunday Farm Market. STEPPING STONES MUSEUM FOR CHILDREN, 303 West Ave., Mathews Park, Norwalk, 899-0606. Everyday 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Ongoing exhibits: Energy Lab, Tot Town, build it!, state-of-the-art Multimedia Gallery and Light Gallery; Ongoing events: science lab, community gardens; Rainforest Adventures and Color Coaster; visit steppingstonesmuseum.org for daily classes. WESTPORT ARTS CENTER, 51 Riverside Ave., Westport, 222-7070. Visit westportartscenter.org to sign up for workshops and summer camps. G
MARITIME AQUARIUM
On most Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, learn about sharks from divers swimming with the sharks in The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk. For times & tickets visit maritimeaquarium.org.
STAMFORD CENTER FOR THE ARTS, Palace Theatre, 61 Atlantic St., Stamford, 325-4466. Stay tuned for The Very Hungry Caterpillar Show coming in November.
INDEX OF ADVERTISERS ARTS & ANTIQUES
FOOD, CATERING & LODGING
Drew Klotz Kinetic Sculpture . . . . 63
New Country Porsche Greenwich . . . 9
JK Chef Collection . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Private Staff Group . . . . . . . . . . 12 The Mountain Valley Spring Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
BUILDING & HOME IMPROVEMENT
HEALTH & BEAUTY
Dibico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 Grand Entrance Gates . . . . . . . . . 47 JP McHale Pest Management, Inc. . . . . . . . Cover 3 Karp Associates . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Connecticut Dermatology Group . . 18 Greenwich Dental Group/ David A. Zadik, DDS & Steven Altman, DMD, FAGD . . . . . . . . 53 Greenwich Fertility . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Hassenfeld Children's Hospital at NYU Langone . . . . . . . 13, 15, 17 The Nathaniel Witherell . . . . . . . . 47 Park Avenue Vein Laser Center . . . 10 Rye Vein Laser Center . . . . . . . . . 10 Yale NewHaven Health/ Greenwich Hospital . . . . . . . . . 27 Yale NewHaven Health/ Northeast Medical Group . . . . . 21 Yale NewHaven Health/Yale New Haven Children's Hospital . . . . . . 7
AUTOMOTIVE
BUSINESS & FINANCE Cummings & Lockwood LLC . . . . . 10
DECORATING & HOME FURNISHINGS Joe Ginsberg Interior Design . . . . 12
EDUCATION & CHILDREN Greenwich Ballet Academy . . . . . . 49 King School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
ENTERTAINMENT 95.9, The Fox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Anything Goes with Kim Berns . . . 63 Stamford Tent & Event Services . . . 22
EVENTS 22nd Annual Kids Challenge Golf Tournament to Benefit Kids in Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 A-list Awards 2018 . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Best of Greenwich . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Boys and Girls Club of Greenwich Annual Benefit . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Closer to Free Ride . . . . . . . . . . . 53 The Greenwich Botanical Center/ Greenwich Dahlia Society 11th Annual Dazzling Dahlias Show . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Greenwich Photo Contest . . . . 85, 86 Light a Fire 2018 . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 NYCWFF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
JEWELRY Betteridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 4 Rolex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 4
MARINE & BOATING Castaways Yacht Sales . . . . . . . . . 8
REAL ESTATE Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties/ Patrick Eagan . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Coldwell Banker Global Luxury/ Tamar Lurie Group . . . . . . . . . 19 David Ogilvy & Associates . . Cover 2, 1 William Raveis . . . . . . . . . . . 2, 3, 5
REAL ESTATE/DESTINATION Business Development Board of Palm Beach County . . . . . . . 11
FASHION
MISCELLANEOUS
Lester's . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Westy Self Storage . . . . . . . . . . . 51 AUGUST 2018 GREENWICH
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POSTSCRIPT p h oto g r a p h by h o l l y p o n e y
Sand & Fog E
ven on a seemingly gloomy morning, beauty can be found at Tod’s Point. “I took this photo just outside the boat club. It was a foggy morning and the water looked just like glass, and with the reflection it gave the image an eerie quality—like a ghost ship,” says Holly Poney of Cos Cob. “I grew up at Tod’s, as my dad was the caretaker there many years ago. Going out there now reminds me of having it as my playground growing up. I was very lucky!” G
Have a photo that captures a moment in Greenwich? Send it to us at editor@greenwichmag.com for a chance to win $100. Please write photo submission in the subject line.
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