WAG Magazine - Artistic Visions - October 2020

ARTISTIC VISIONS

COU SIN r e tu r B R U C I E ns to AM ARLO t a ck l e s ‘ H G U TH R I a rd T E im e s ’ PH O TO F I N L J o h n a rr y Le d e I S H E S B rm and igelow T an; Dia n ne D aylor u b le r H e ll o th e H fr amp om tons

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IN NEW YORK STATE 2014, 2015, 2016 2018, 2019 WESTCHESTER & FAIRFIELD LIFE OCTOBER 2020 | WAGMAG.COM

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CONTENTS O C TO B ER 2020

12 Why art still matters 16 Imagining the ‘Unthinkable’ 20 Portrait of an artist in control 24 Arlo Guthrie takes on ‘Hard Times’ 28 Nature’s editor 32 At home in a world of photos 36 Tree variations 40 The fleeting beauty of life 42 Uniting in love to help humanity 44 Portraitist of America rising 48 The ‘Aggie’ and the ecstasy 52 Cousin Brucie’s back 54 Healing through art 58 Mister Butterfly

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FEATURES HIGHLIGHTS

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HOME & DESIGN 60 A thoroughly modern manor 62 The art of living 64 Auction houses endure FASHION & BEAUTY 70 A shop fit for the gods TRAVEL 74 The Hamptons, artfully 78 Visiting the Veneto 80 A charmed life FOOD & SPIRITS 82 Topping Rose is still the top 84 Keeping wine lovers ‘Connected’ 86 An ‘eggs’cellent recipe

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HEALTH & WELLNESS 88 Patience is key in Covid-era breast reconstruction 90 Dentistry in the age of Covid 92 The other 23 hours PET CARE 94 Pet of the Month WHEN & WHERE 96 Artistic October WITS We wonder: How have you gotten creative during the pandemic?

ARTISTIC VISIONS

COU SIN returnsBRUCIE to AM ARL tackles O GUT ‘Hard HRIE Times’ PHO TO FIN Lar ISHES John ry Lederm Bigelow an; and Dianne Taylor Dubler Hel the Hamlo from ptons

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IN NEW YORK STATE 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018

WESTCHESTER & FAIRFIELD LIFE OCTOBER 2020 | WAGMAG.COM

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COVER: Artistic visions Illustration by Sebastian Flores.

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WAGGERS T H E TA L E N T B E H I N D O U R PA G E S

Dee DelBello

Dan Viteri

PUBLISHER dee@westfairinc.com

EXECUTIVE ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/CREATIVE dviteri@westfairinc.com

EDITORIAL PHIL HALL

DEBBI K. KICKHAM

Bob Rozycki MANAGING EDITOR bobr@westfairinc.com

Georgette Gouveia EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ggouveia@westfairinc.com

WILLIAM D. KICKHAM

ART Sebastián Flores ART DIRECTOR sflores@westfairinc.com RAJNI MENON

FATIME MURIQI

DOUG PAULDING

PHOTOGRAPHY Sebastián Flores, John Rizzo, Bob Rozycki

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Gina Gouveia, Phil Hall, Debbi K. Kickham, Doug Paulding, Giovanni Roselli, Bob Rozycki, Gregg Shapiro, Barbara Barton Sloane, Jeremy Wayne, Cami Weinstein, Katie Banser-Whittle

JOHN RIZZO

GIOVANNI ROSELLI

BOB ROZYCKI

PRINT/DIGITAL SALES Anne Jordan Duffy ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/SALES anne@westfairinc.com Barbara Hanlon, Marcia Pflug, Heather Sari Monachelli ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES

GREGG SHAPIRO

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MARKETING/EVENTS Fatime Muriqi EVENTS & MARKETING DIRECTOR fmuriqi@westfairinc.com

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CIRCULATION CAMI WEINSTEIN

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WHAT IS WAG?

Irene Corsaro ADVISER

Some readers think WAG stands for “Westchester and Greenwich.” We certainly cover both. But mostly, a WAG is a wit and that’s how we think of ourselves, serving up piquant stories and photos to set your own tongues wagging.

HEADQUARTERS A division of Westfair Communications Inc., 701 Westchester Ave., White Plains, NY 10604 Telephone: 914-694-3600 | Facsimile: 914-694-3699 Website: wagmag.com | Email: ggouveia@westfairinc.com All news, comments, opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations in WAG are those of the authors and do not constitute opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations of the publication, its publisher and its editorial staff.

No portion of WAG may be reproduced without permission.WAG is distributed at select locations, mailed directly and is available at $24 a year for home or office delivery. To subscribe, call 914-694-3600, ext. 3020. All advertising inquiries should be directed to Anne Jordan at 914-694-3600, ext. 3032 or email anne@westfairinc.com. Advertisements are subject to review by the publisher and acceptance for WAG does not constitute an endorsement of the product or service. WAG (Issn: 1931-6364) is published monthly and is owned and published by Westfair Communications Inc. Dee DelBello, CEO, dee@westfairinc.com

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EDITOR’S LETTER

BY GEORGET TE GOUVEIA

AT WAG, WE’RE ALWAYS STRIVING FOR CREATIVITY AND SO IT IS IN THAT SPIRIT THAT WE PRESENT ANOTHER FIRST FOR THE MAGAZINE — OUR FIRST COVER WITHOUT A SINGLE SUBJECT. Instead, we’re presenting several subjects from this, our annual arts issue. And that’s fitting, as the arts are usually a collegial affair that even when solitary — as in the case of a painter like Port Chester’s Jon deMartin (Jeremy’s story) — are a conversation among the artist, the subject and the idealized audience.

As it is, the arts issue is always among our easiest to fill and our most beautiful.

That’s because we live among so many imaginative people, who have met this challenging moment with the grace of their gifts. That’s apparent from our opening essay, inspired by the extraordinary riff on Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro” that Juilliard created at the height of the pandemic in New York this past spring. It offers an example of one of the things the arts do best — give meaning to suffering. In times of sorrow or in joy, artists go deep within to reach out.

Among those you’ll meet again or for the first time in these pages are the photographic couple John Bigelow Taylor and Dianne Dubler, to whom we introduced you last month in our story on the otherworldly jeweler Frederic Zaavy. The Highland Falls residents take the stage in this issue as we explore not only the celebrated books they’ve photographed, packaged and produced but the bespoke ones they’ve published under their Kubaba Books imprint. Photography is also close to the heart of Chappaqua’s Larry Lederman as he returns with a new book of “Garden Portraits: Experiences of Natural Beauty,” which focuses on 16 public and private spaces, mostly in WAG country.

Elsewhere, we dip into art history. The Bruce Museum presents “Floating Beauty: Women in the Art of Ukiyo-e,” featuring 40 woodblock prints of fleeting leisure pursuits in Japan’s seminal Edo period that capture the importance of women and the impermanence of life — key themes in this year of the pandemic and the centennial of women’s suffrage. Phil offers a poignant portrait of Hampton, Connecticut’s John Brewster Jr., who despite being deaf and

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Peserico’s logo, which appears on its shopping bags and a luxurious T-shirt, offers a stylized head of the Apollo Belvedere. (See story on Page 70.)

mute went on to immortalize the American middle class on canvas in the early days of our republic. Gregg checks in with folk legend Arlo Guthrie, who’s spent his pandemic downtime creating a video of Stephen Foster’s apt ballad “Hard Times Come Again No More” (1854).

We also turn an eye on William Cullen Bryant, poet, journalist and editor, who championed the Hudson River School of 19th century landscape painters while leading efforts to found New York Medical College. Bryant is a reminder that arts lovers are as important in the artistic equation as are the artists themselves, because they help get the word out. People like Bryant and DJ Bruce “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, now back on AM radio in New York (Phil’s story), serve as conduits between artists and the public.

As is our wont, we interpret the word “art” liberally. We have the art of philanthropy in the extraordinary example of Shirley Cheng, a minister who, despite being blind and wheelchair-bound, founded Unite in Love earlier this year as a response to Covid-19 to feed and protect the hungry among her students in the developing world (a story by Jeremy, who also weighs in on the arts scene in the ever-popular Hamptons).

Art meets science as breast surgeon Constance M. Chen returns with a piece on post-mastectomy reconstruction in the age of the coronavirus. Similarly, cosmetic dentist Kenneth Magid weighs in on

practicing his discipline in the Dickensian “best of times, worst of times.” And Jeremy, again, visits with John Diamond, a psychiatrist/artist whose Mount Kisco Life Energy Arts gallery is a place of healing and contemplation.

But isn’t that what all the arts offer? In writing about Paul Villinski’s butterfly sculptures — metaphors for his successful battle with alcoholism and drug addiction — I was reminded of the role that the butterfly has played in my own life.

When my beloved Aunt Mary, who had raised me, died on Groundhog Day in 2011, I slipped the butterfly necklace I had given her off her neck and placed it around mine. “Thank you,” I said. “I love you.”

One day in January, as I was washing my face, the butterfly pendant slipped off the chain and down the drain — never to be recovered. I knew then that 2020 — the year of yes and us in our magical thinking — would instead be the year of letting go.

At the height of the pandemic here in my favorite season — spring, Easter — I bought myself a new butterfly necklace as a gesture of defiance but also one of hope.

Butterflies, a hairdresser told me when I lost my job with The Journal News 11 years ago in the Great Recession, are symbols not only of fragility but of transformation and transcendence. In purchasing a new butterfly necklace in a season of death, I was hoping for that resurrection.

And I found that this year of letting go has also turned out to be one of beginning.

A 2020 YWCA White Plains & Central Westchester Visionary Award winner and a 2018 Folio Women in Media Award Winner, Georgette Gouveia is the author of “Burying the Dead,” “Daimon: A Novel of Alexander the Great” and "Seamless Sky" (JMS Books), as well as “The Penalty for Holding,” a 2018 Lambda Literary Award finalist (JMS Books), and “Water Music” (Greenleaf Book Group). They’re part of her series of novels, “The Games Men Play,” also the name of the sports/ culture blog she writes.

Her short story “The Glass Door,” about love in the time of the coronavirus, was recently published by JMS. Read WAG’s serialization of “Seamless Sky” westfaironline.com/thegamesmenplay.

For more, visit thegamesmenplay.com.

Floating Beauty:

Women in the Art of Ukiyo-e September 1–November 1, 2020 This exhibition is organized

by Reading Public Museum, Reading Pennsylvania

BRUCE MUSEUM Greenwich, CT | www.brucemuseum.org

WHAT'S TRENDING

WA G S P O T L I G H T S T H E N E W A N D N O T E W O R T H Y

TRAVEL THE WORLD WITH SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Do you love to travel?

Then you may want to send your photo to Sports Illustrated. The magazine is selecting a rookie for its 2021 Swimsuit issue, and it’s seeking women of all ages and of all different body types to enter the competition.

This open casting call will select one lucky winner, over the course of the next few months, who will travel to an exotic location, for the purposes of being photographed It could be you in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue. for the next Swimsuit Issue. You’re asked to send a photo and 60-second video, showing yourself “feeling good,” whether it’s volunteering, exercising, spending time with family and friends or relaxing on the beach. For this initiative, Sports Illustrated has partnered with Vita Coco, the world’s leading coconut water brand. Contestants can also create their own profile pages to share with the SI editorial team.

So what are you waiting for?

For more, visit swimsuit.si.com, and follow Sports Illustrated Swimsuit on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Good luck to everyone.

— Debbi K. Kickham

THE CIDER MILL RULES It’s apple season and that means not only pies and other baked goods but cider. Thompson’s Cider Mill — owned by Geoff Thompson of the public relations firm Thompson & Bender — had its most successful opening day ever with customers flocking to two locations this year.

Due to the need for additional space to meet social distancing The Cider Mill’s Hard Ciders requirements, the Cider Mill, at 335 are available there weekends Blinn Road in Croton-on-Hudson, through Dec. 20 and always has shifted part of its operations online. Courtesy The Cider Mill. to Fable Farm on Kitchawan Road (Route 134) in Ossining. “The shift of our fresh cider, apples and baked goods sales to our second location a mile away at Fable Farm on Route 134 proved very successful and enabled us to maintain social distancing protocols at the Cider Mill, where we are offering our hard ciders only,’’ Thompson said. “(Sept. 19 and 20) was our biggest opening weekend in 44 seasons, helped by ideal, clear, crisp early fall weather.” The Cider Mill will continue operations 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends at Fable Farm for sales of apples, fresh-pressed apple cider, cider doughnuts and other baked goods, while the mill’s award-winning hard ciders — Heirloom Blend Dry; Antique Apple Blend Semi-Dry; Apple-Raspberry Semi-Dry; and Apple-Blueberry Semi-Dry — are being sold from noon to 5:30 p.m. weekends through Dec. 20 at the mill itself. (The hard ciders can also be ordered yearround, along with the Blossom White dry apple wine.)

For more, visit thompsonscidermill.com.

— Georgette Gouveia

IN THE PINK FOR BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH If October means anything, it means Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which includes the Give Pink campaign at Bloomingdale’s and the Greenwich-based Breast Cancer Alliance’s annual Luncheon & Fashion Show.

Bloomie’s goes virtual this year for “Knock Out Breast Cancer With Rumble Boxing,” featuring Joe Ferraro (11:30 a.m. Oct. 3, 17 and 24). The fee is $15 per class or $30 for all three, with proceeds benefitting the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, The Tutu Project and the Marisa Acocella Foundation. To sign up, visit pinkboxing.eventbrite.com.

This year, the Breast Cancer Alliance Luncheon & Fashion Show will also be virtual, but it will still feature the moving survivors’ fashion show. Other highlights include fashion by Carolina Herrera presented by Richards. special guest actress Kate Walsh in conversation with Reshma Gopaldas, vice president of video 10

WAGMAG.COM OCTOBER 2020

Always the most moving moment in any Breast Cancer Alliance fashion show: The Models of Inspiration (breast cancer survivors all) strut their stuff. Here, the class of 2019 flanked by Scott Mitchell (left) and Andrew Mitchell (right), of sponsoring Richards department store. Photograph by Elaine Ubiña.

for SHE Media and a breast cancer survivor; and a tribute to BCA co-founder Lucy Day. The event begins at 11:30 a.m. Oct. 19 with music from DJ April Larken, but the silent auction Opens Oct. 9. For tickets, donations and more, visit bidpal.net/BCALuncheon2020.

— Georgette Gouveia

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Julien Favreau in Béjart Ballet Lausanne’s production of Maurice Béjart’s “Boléro.”

The dance’s male-on-male iteration is the most erotically charged version of Béjart’s 1960 work, as enduring as Maurice Ravel’s music itself. Copyright BBL_Gregory Batardon.

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It begins unexpectedly: A jazz pianist riffs on one of the most famous flute openings in musical history. But soon the percussion establishes the equally familiar beat — as inexorable as sexual desire — and we’re off in familiar territory.

And yet not so. Quarantined student dancers slink down stairs like cats, partner brooms and crumple on rumpled beds, motioning you to come hither as they burst forth into a cherry blossomed New York spring that will not be denied.

Famous alumni defiantly don red lipstick. Look, there’s Patti Lupone wagmag.com/patti-lupone-perennial-star/ and Christine Baranski.

And Laura Linney brushing her teeth. Bebe Neuwirth shimmies in a hallway. Itzhak Perlman fiddles and communes with children and a dog. Yo-Yo Ma saws and soars away.

Meanwhile, faculty members hold phone meetings as their young children climb over them, and a conductor holds it all together as string, woodwind, brass and percussion players multiply on the screen.

The music drives everyone on, with dancers propelled outside to leap amid greenery and concrete. The climax comes as the brass instruments take us to new heights, a new place, and a garage door opens on a burst of light — freedom. As the music and images collapse on themselves, the screen goes dark except for two words — “Bolero Juilliard.”

The nine-and-a-half-minute piece — one of the most extraordinary we’ve seen in a long time — is Juilliard’s video interpretation youtube.com/watch?v=rqzkn-jX-JU of Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro” (1928), which the Manhattan performing arts conservatory created this past spring at the height of the pandemic in New York.

“What can we do together that we can’t do alone?”

Damian Woetzel, president of Juilliard, wagmag. com/moving-still/ asked himself in imagining the work. “This is a question we take to heart as artists and as an institution. Right now, in this particular A I moment, we’re asking what can we do together E V OU TE G T even while we are alone. To answer this, I asked E G EO R

BY G my friend the choreographer Larry Keigwin to create a new spin on his ‘Bolero’ project, which he has tailor-made into different productions for different communities over the past few years.”

The result is a triumphant response to the coronavirus — a victory of life in the face of death, freedom in the face of confinement, humor in the face of grief and creative courage in the face of paralyzing fear.

It’s also a stunning reminder that art still matters, perhaps more so in times of crisis. With theaters, concert halls and opera houses shuttered for the foreseeable future and museums

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Imagined by Juilliard President Damian Woetzel as a response to the pandemic, the electrifying short “Bolero Juilliard” was directed and choreographed by Larry Keigwin with associate Nicole Wolcott and features student dancers, musicians and actors with Juilliard alumni and faculty. Courtesy Juilliard.

only recently returned with strict protocols in place, art institutions have unleashed their ingenuity on the internet while even those with only a tangential relationship to any art form have started coloring, crafting, painting, sculpting, journaling and dusting off musical instruments.

The arts have become a lifeline, an escape and a way to explain the inexplicable to ourselves. (Writers, including Yours Truly, thegamesmenplay.com/the-glass-door have begun publishing pandemic stories.

Look for a spate of pandemic novels in the near future.)

But the arts have always sought to find meaning in tragedy. Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” a 1937 oil on canvas in Spain’s Museo Reina Sofia, used the dismemberment and disorientation of Cubism — the segmentation and deconstruction of the body — to capture the actual physical destruction of life and limb that resulted from the Nazi bombing that spring of the titular Basque town in support of Spain’s Fascist leader, Gen. Francisco Franco. (Later in Nazi-occupied Paris, a German officer would visit Picasso’s studio and see a postcard of the work. “Did you do this?” the officer asked.

“No,” Picasso replied, “you did.”)

Life dictates, man adjusts and art responds. In the case of “Boléro,” Ravel was responding to a commission by the dancer Ida Rubinstein to orchestrate a few pieces from Isaac Albéniz’s piano work “Iberia”

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for a new ballet. Running into a copyright issue, Ravel ultimately decided to compose a new piece with only two themes and one underlying rhythm whose variety would come from his use of the orchestra. (While some experts have suggested that the repetition in “Boléro” reflected the dementia that would end Ravel’s career and his life, his brilliance as an orchestrator was such that it’s not surprising he set himself this challenge. (For an example of his orchestrating abilities, listen to his work on Modest Mussorgsky’s 1874 piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition.”)

“Boléro” was an immediate hit, though the choreography by Bronislava Nijinska (Vaslav Nijinsky’s sister), which involved an enticing female dancer on a tabletop, is lost to us.

The music, however, would transcend its classical roots. Say “Boléro” and many think of Bo Derek, Venus in cornrows, rising from the sea in Blake Edward’s “10” (1979). (It was not Hollywood’s first pas de deux with “Boléro.” A 1934 film of the same title, about the onstage, offstage relationship of two dance partners showed George Raft to be more than an actor who specialized in gangsters. There’s also “The Bolero,” an exciting 1973 Oscar-winning short of conductor Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic preparing to perform the piece.)

“Boléro” returned to its dance roots

with Maurice Béjart’s 1960 ballet of the same name, which reflected the original work — a woman on a tabletop, this time surrounded only by men, who leap on the table as she, they and the music collapse.

When feminists complained about the objectification of the woman in the piece, the story goes, Béjart turned the gender tables to feature a man in red surrounded by women.

But by far, his most successful — and controversial — iteration of the work showcased his muse, Jorge Donn, dancing on a red table clad only in black pants and encircled by a similarly clad group of male dancers. We saw it at Manhattan’s City Center Theater in 1983 and were more than amused by the audience’s reaction — the women on their feet, whooping and hollering; the men, seated, speechless.

Seeing the ballet again on YouTube — it has been recreated many times with star ballerinas and danseurs, though Donn remains its greatest interpreter youtube. com/watch?v=m5CFJlzlGKM — you are reminded not only of its hypnotic, robotic, homomoerotic power but that dance began as religious ritual performed only by men.

Béjart’s “Bolero” may not replace Bo Derek in many minds but in others it comes more than pretty damn close.

“Bolero Juilliard” is available digitally on the Juilliard website, YouTube and IGTV.

SPECIALIZING IN ENHANCED AND SPECIAL NEEDS CARE

GeorgeWAGMAG.COM Loomis in “Unthinkable.”

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As a toddler, George Loomis was something of a Method actor. Appearing on the ABC soap opera “Loving,” Loomis was once in a scene in which a bank was robbed.

“I was completely traumatized,” he says. So much so that he couldn’t stop crying — a little too much of the Method.

Nevertheless, “Loving” enabled him to work with “really talented performers” and ultimately paid for him to attend New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in storytelling. So you could say Loomis cried all the way to his debut feature — the medical thriller “Unthinkable,” which Unified Pictures will release on all major video-on-demand platforms Oct. 9.

“Unthinkable” stars Christopher Cousins of “Breaking Bad’ as an American ambassador to Syria, who survives a terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Damascus that injures his wife and kills their daughter, only to find his life in new jeopardy. Back in the States, he’s hospitalized in need of a heart transplant and without the support of his wife, still grieving the loss of their daughter. Enter Jones, an idealistic medical student assigned to the ambassador’s case. He’s determined to see him through the transplant, but medical, political and psychological challenges soon make it clear that he is in way over his head. Also starring Viveca A. Fox and Missi Pyle, “Unthinkable” gave Loomis an opportunity to explore an early ambition. Growing up in Larchmont, the son of George Loomis Jr. a frequent music writer for The New York Times, and his wife, Christine, an investment banker, Loomis thought about being a doctor, like his cousin. But then there were those early years screaming his lungs out on “Loving.” Soon OCTOBER 2020 WAGMAG.COM

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George Loomis and Angell Conwell in “Unthinkable.”

Courtesy United Pictures.

he was writing screenplays. As a 15-year-old at Mamaroneck High School, he boldly presented one to director David O. Russell when he came to speak to his class.

“Unthinkable” enabled Loomis to research transplants, a complex subject, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. It also gave him the opportunity to direct himself, something he was familiar with from his NYU film school days.

Many great actors — from Orson Welles to Kenneth Branagh — have directed themselves. So what’s that like?

“I don’t know if I can answer that fully as it’s so challenging,” he says. “I’m always grateful when I get emails…that say you really pulled that off in front of and behind the camera. I think of actors who direct, like Clint Eastwood and Elizabeth Banks.” For Loomis, it’s a question of balance and respect. From the extras to the stars, he says he affords them the same opportunities for discussion to ensure their comfort with their roles.

That solicitousness has made “Unthinkable” a winner at several national film festivals, including the 2019 Santa Fe Film Festival. But Loomis is hardly resting on his laurels.

“I get a lot of visions, inspirations walking my dog

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(Golden Retriever Bosley) at night or reading the newspaper,” Loomis says of his life in Los Feliz, the LA neighborhood where Mickey Mouse was born from the mind of Walt Disney and where Leonardo DiCaprio grew up.

With Dawn Aneada, Loomis has written “True Wellness,” a TV series about the dark side of the wellness industry that he describes as “ ‘Dexter’ meets ‘Killing Eve’.” He’s writing a political thriller “Lonely Hunter,” about an American agent who’s a former Russian spy.

Loomis would also like to revisit his efforts to make a film of Mark Mathabane’s 1986 autobiography “Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa.” When Loomis first became interested in the project, which would’ve featured an all-black cast, there was, he says, no “Black Panther” yet to demonstrate the bankability of an allblack ensemble. Now the time may be right.

But there are other challenges. Can a white man tell a black man’s story? All Loomis knows is that he’s not here to entertain, for the chills, thrills, laughs — and, of course, tears — alone.

“I want to do things that push the world forward.”

For more, visit georgeloomis.com and personapics. com.

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I had been hearing about artist Jon deMartin for years, but although he is a near neighbor of mine in White Plains, we had never met. Sure, I had read about him. I knew he was regarded as one of the finest representative artists currently working, as well as a popular commercial artist and a gifted teacher. What I didn’t have him down for particularly though, was a thoroughly nice guy, the kind of guy you immediately want to call your friend.

A plan to meet hatched at last and DeMartin is there to greet me at the door of his studio. It’s a charmingly disordered fourth-floor atelier on North Pearl Street in Port Chester, where Hopperesque canvases, palettes, brushes and paints, easels, skeletons (the fake kind), mannequins, torso models and books galore seemed to be clamoring for space, and where I am immediately aware of the essential, natural light flooding in from towering, tall windows. Trim, well-proportioned and with what I instinctively feel is a sunny countenance behind his mask, in jeans and crew-neck over a white T-shirt, deMartin has as a 1950s, Beat Generation cool about him. Think Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassady. What he doesn’t have, I quickly discover, is any of the Beats’ self-absorption or preening arrogance. On the contrary, he is the very epitome of modesty, from the gracious emails he has written me ahead of our meeting, to his persistent insistence on how he is still learning (and how much more there is to learn) and the way he downplays his talent at every turn. eMartin grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, but moved to Larchmont when he was about 10. His father was a designer. Just out of Pratt Institute, he had been hired by DuPont — recruited, deMartin tells me, by the great graphic designer, Sol Bass, bestknown for his film-title sequences and his now iconic corporate logos. “I played baseball back then. I was a real jock,” deMartin says, only half-jokingly. Lean and fit in his mid-60s, I can quite see it.

He played baseball at Mamaroneck High School but always loved to draw. “I remember my dad having a very large art book, one of those coffee table books on Leonardo da Vinci and looking at it as a kid. It made an impact.”

After graduating high school, deMartin really wanted to pursue baseball and relocated to Miami to do so. But with nothing working out in that department after a couple of years, he enrolled, like his father, at Pratt Institute, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in filmmaking.

It was a hard road, however, to get to be a director of photography, and art was always beckoning. He also believed — and still does — that the ultimate creative freedom is art. “Right now, I’m doing more and more picture-making, which means I’m in control. Sometimes I’m the director and sometimes the actor,” he says with a laugh. Indeed, he is, appearing in any number of his own works, and no Hitchcock-like, cameo-appearance either, but center stage, bare-chested as the artist’s model or as the artist himself, brush in hand, a self-portrait of the artist at work.

Back to life after Pratt, though, and after 10 years working for his father as a graphic artist, he was asked to teach a drawing class at the New York Academy of Art, which was a kind of turning point. Further teaching jobs followed, at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut, at Studio Incamminati School for

PORTRA IT OF A N ARTIST I N CONTRO L

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Jon deMartin’s “Bridgeport, American Dream” (2008), oil on canvas; “Faith in the Wilderness” (2006-07), oil on canvas; and “Ice Cream Girl” (2020), oil on wood. Courtesy the artist.

Contemporary Realist Art in Philadelphia and at the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan. He credits his own teacher, Michael Aviano — “my 92-year-old mentor,” as he calls him — with giving him the skills to be an effective teacher. “He had an ability to make things simple to understand. He kind of demystified classical art, which can be very complicated.”

DeMartin currently teaches at The Art Students League of New York in Manhattan and also privately. Prior to the pandemic, students would come to class in his studio in groups of six or seven, but for the time being he is teaching via Zoom. He also conducts trips abroad.

Although Covid-19 put a Florence, Italy, workshop, under the auspices of BACAA (Bay Area Classical Artist Atelier,) this past summer on hold, he is hoping another trip next year, to paint in the atmospheric surroundings of the hugger-mugger Physic Garden in London’s Chelsea district, will go ahead.

Students, he tells me, run gamut although retirees make up a large number. At the risk of it sounding pejorative, he says, he describes his students as “serious hobbyists.” “Most have also always had a passion for fine art,” he says, “but first they had to make a living.”

I ask deMartin a “How long is a piece of string?” question, namely this: Coming to art relatively late in the day, how “good” can you hope to get? How long does it take to achieve some degree of competence?

“I think it depends how hard you work, what you put into it.” He quotes Hippocrates’ famous aphorism, best known in its Latin form: “Ars longa, vita brevis,” usually translated as “Art is long. Life is short,” which, of course, has many implications and interpretations. He also gives the example of a mutual friend of ours who, although only having picked up a paintbrush after a long and successful career in the law, has reached an exceptional level, winning prizes at art shows.

“All because of the time and concentration she puts into it,” he says.

In a reworking of the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall, the same would appear to be true of art: Practice, practice, practice.

A habitual, inveterate learner, deMartin is profoundly aware that there is always more to learn. For nine days every year for the last 10 years or so, he has taken himself to Venice, to spend time just looking at great works, understanding “construction” as demonstrated by Titian, Tintoretto and Ve-ronese, skipping over Venice’s ‘”lean” period of the 17th century and then picking up again with Canaletto and the Tiepolos.

He says he doesn’t take commissions, because he likes the independence to choose his subjects, but concedes he has to stay in touch with the market and the sort of paintings people want to buy.

(This means American subjects, he says.) Currently with the Cavalier Galleries in Greenwich, he shows me two nearly completed canvases that he will shortly send for sale. One is of a muscled worker pulling spikes on a graceful curve of railroad track, an industrial skyline in the background. (If this painting were set to music, it would be Giuseppe Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” from “Il Trova-tore.”) The other is a steel bridge in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the afternoon sun burnishing the hard steel with a golden hue, the man-made bridge contrasting with nature in an almost bucolic setting.

It is done entirely from memory or the imagination and, like all of deMartin’s paintings now, without the use of photographs. “A photograph doesn’t interpret nature,” he says, a twinkle in his eye, as I admire the work on the easel. “It just records nature. But a drawing, a drawing represents it.”

For more, visit jondemartin.com

OCTOBER 2020 WAGMAG.COM

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Folk music icon Arlo Guthrie has been absent from the recording studio since his 2009 album “Tales of ’69,” but he has hardly been missing from the music scene. For the past decade, Guthrie has been a peripatetic presence in the concert touring world, reconnecting with audiences that remembered when “Alice’s Restaurant” and “City of New Orleans” were getting their first airplay and making the acquaintance of younger fans of the folk music sound.

The coronavirus pandemic disrupted Guthrie’s life on the road, and the 73-year-old singer/songwriter abruptly and unhappily found himself moored at home.

“The last gig we did was way back in early March in Tennessee,” he recalls. “And I flew home to my place in Florida and realized we weren't going back out again. That was it. All of the venues started canceling or postponing until they finally all gave up and said, ‘OK, forget about it for this year. We’ll go back to work next year if things are OK.’” The shutdown of the concert venues created a financial hardship for Guthrie, who relies on his road shows for a major portion of his income. It also created an emotional burden that he found difficult to accept.

“I’m struggling like everybody else with no money coming in, because we can't do the gigs,” he continues. “I've been working on the road for over 50 years. It's quite an adjustment to sit home. I mean, I’ve got a nice home — I'm not complaining about it — but I wish I could be out there doing what we do. That's what I got born for. And now I'm just sitting here like everybody else. It takes a toll on you.”

Rather than remain inactive, Guthrie opted to return to recording with a fitting, poignant selection, “Hard Times Come Again No More,” youtube. com/watch?v=P17dz6B0x7Y written in 1854 by Stephen Collins Foster. And while the song has been a staple of the record industry since its 1905 appearance on an Edison Manufacturing Co. wax cylinder, Guthrie believes Foster’s pre-Civil War work reflects the miasma facing today’s America.

“Suffering is suffering,” he says. “It doesn't HALL L really matter whether it's 160 years ago or I H

BY P 5,000 years ago or 20 years from now.

When people are having a difficult time, they suffer the same way as we always have and we always will.”

Guthrie is joined on his recording by pianist Jim Wilson, vocalist Vanessa Bryan, multi-Grammy Award-winning bassist Stanley Clarke, guitarist

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Arlo Guthrie channels the spirit of his father, legendary singer-songwriter Woody, in a moving video rendition of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” that links the pandemic/recession to the Great Depression, a time when polio was a scourge in the United States. Photographs

by Eric Brown.

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Andy McKee and a gospel choir. An accompanying music video features Guthrie amid a montage of stark photographs from the Great Depression and images of today’s pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests.

Unlike many performers during the pandemic, Guthrie has opted not to pursue Zoom or Facebook Live performances to stay in front of fans.

“We don't have the facility here to do that,” he says, referring to his rural Massachusetts residence.

“In other words, we don't have the bandwidth to get out and do live stuff. We're not in a big city. We're out in the middle of nowhere and it's very limiting as to what we can do live. Having said that, what we were able to do was to film some stuff, put it together and release that on the internet.”

Working with his collaborators on “Hard Times Come Again No More” was something of an eye-opener for Guthrie, whose previous recording studio session went along the traditional concept of musical talent piled into a single space.

“We started working on the project from home, which I had never done in my life,” he says. “So, it was totally new for me to be sending files back and forth and adding instrumentals and adding vocalists and adding arrangements and building it through the internet rather than being in the studio altogether. And, frankly, even though it was fun, it's not something I really felt as comfortable with as being in the studio with other people live and all looking at each other and feeling it out and working it. I don't know if anybody even does it anymore, but that's the way I like to do stuff.”

Outside of his new recording, Guthrie is focusing his attention on The Guthrie Center, an interfaith venue based in an 1829 church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, that serves as both a spiritual gathering space and an archive for Guthrie’s prominent musical family. He is also in conversations with theaters across the country to create a post-pandemic tour.

“We don't know when the pandemic will end,” he acknowledges. “If it ends within the next year or two, that would be awesome. I don't know how it ends — I haven't seen a lot of talk about it — but as for the talk about going to work next year, I'm all excited for that. I'm gearing up. The instruments are tuned and packed and they're ready to go.”

Until he gets the proverbial green light to hit the stage, Guthrie is remaining optimistic and vowing to keep hard times from his door.

“I think that the main thing is to stay active,” he says. “At my age, you don't want to get too comfortable doing nothing, because it becomes habit-forming.”

For more, visit the guthriecenter.org.

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Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” (1849, oil on canvas) immortalizes the friendship of his two friends – writer William Cullen Bryant (left) and painter Thomas Cole (right). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. 28 WAGMAG.COM OCTOBER 2020

He was the dean of American letters at the young nation’s dawn, a writer admired by Edgar Allan Poe who mentored Walt Whitman and inspired the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to quote him in his speech “Give Us the Ballot”: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.”

He was a mover and shaker about New York City, the co-owner and editor-in-chief of the influential New-York Evening Post (now simply the New York Post), who helped drive the creation of Central Park and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and whose political shift — from conservative to progressive — followed a trajectory that many American lives have taken.

He was a legend whose name is now attached to everything from the park behind the New York Public Library to schools in Long Island City, Milwaukee and Cleveland; a house at Williams College, which he attended briefly; one of the original villages of Columbia, Maryland; and a neighborhood in Seattle.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) possessed a name that will also be on the lips of those attending New York Medical College’s virtual fundraising “Founder’s Dinner” on Oct. 21. (As leader of the civic group that created the college, now located in Valhalla, Bryant was interested not only in the quality of New York City’s hospitals but in an enlightened medical education that would transcend purges, bloodlettings and high doses of drugs.)

But he is perhaps best-known today as an editor and writer of poetry and prose who befriended the Hudson River School of 19th century landscape painting that portrayed the Americas, and the United States in particular, as the new Eden in the decades that bracketed the Civil War. Writers have always championed artists, as in the case of critics like Clement Greenberg, who helped put the Abstract Expressionists on the map — and, by extension, make New York City the capital of the art world — in the postwar era. (Writers have on occasion also wielded a poison pen in

BY G EO R GET T response to art: The terms “Hudson River School” and “Impressionism” were E GO UVEI meant to be derogatory references to works that were considered respectiveA ly old hat and lacking clarity.)

“Sometimes it’s not so much a direct one-on-one correlation, but in each era, there is the establishment of a style in writing or art,” says Bartholomew F. Bland, executive director of the Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx. “For Bryant and (Hudson River School founder Thomas) Cole, it was the soaring of the landscape, Romanticism with a capital ‘R’.”

And an abiding friendship in that landscape. Laura L. Vookles, chair, curatorial department, of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers — whose ongoing “Landscape, Art & Virtual Travel” exhibit includes the two-volume, Bryant-edited “Picturesque America — points to Bryant’s 1829 “Sonnet to Cole — the Painter Departing for Europe,” which begins: Thine eyes shall see the light of distant skies: Yet, Cole! Thy heart shall bear to Europe’s strand A living image of our own bright land, Such as upon thy glorious canvas lies….

Translation: Cole, you may have been born in England, but don’t forget the land you have immortalized and the friends here who love you.

“Cole and Bryant shared a deep love of nature, which each in his own way extolled in poetry,” Barbara Ball Buff writes in “American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School,” the catalog for a 1987 exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art that remains a landmark in Hudson River School scholarship. “Their friendship included (Cole disciple Asher B.) Durand and extended to a lively correspondence, meetings at their clubs and at the (National) Academy (of Design) and…frequent treks together in the wilds of the Catskill, Adirondack and White mountains. (Bryant, who wrote frequently on art and reviewed the National Academy exhibits as editor of the New-York Evening Post, described in its pages those wilderness trips.)”

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William Cullen Bryant photographed by Mathew Brady taken during the American Civil War. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.

William Cullen Bryant Memorial in Bryant Park, Manhattan.

Photograph by Billy Hathorn.

The three worked together on “The Talisman,” an 1827 Christmas gift book, and “American Landscape” (1830), which featured Bryant’s writings illustrated by Durand’s engravings of paintings

by Cole, himself and others.

Durand would capture the trio’s bond poignantly in “Kindred Spirits,” an oil on canvas he painted in 1849 — the year after Cole’s untimely death — that depicts Bryant and Cole standing on a ledge overlooking the Catskills. It is a painting that considers not only nature but death itself as Bryant, hat in hand, listens respectfully to Cole, who takes his leave by gesturing with his paintbrush to the misty mountain clefts that recede to eternity.

For the Romantics, nature and death were intimates. In Bryant’s most famous poem, “Thanatopsis” (1811,’17,’ 21) — from the Greek, meaning “a view of death” — he writes that all in the end must: Go forth, under the open sky, and list To Nature’s teachings…. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix for ever with the elements….

“Thanatopsis” — the inspiration for C.K. Wilde’s 2015 currency collage of the same name that was part of the Lehman College Art Gallery’s 2019 “Mediums of Exchange” exhibit — was written in Bryant’s New England youth. He was born and raised in Cummington, Massachusetts, the son of Peter Bryant, a doctor turned state legislator, and his wife, the former Sarah Snell, who traced her ancestry to Mayflower passengers John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, immortalized as part of a love triangle in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” (Bryant

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was also the nephew of Charity Bryant, a seamstress who lived in Vermont in a well-documented professional and personal relationship with Sylvie Drake of which family and community approved. As their affectionate nephew wrote of them: “If I were permitted to draw the veil of private life, I would briefly give you the singular, and to me interesting, story of two maiden ladies who dwell in this valley. I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for more than 40 years.”)

Despite his distinguished pedigree and early promise as a poet, Bryant did not come from a wealthy family, and he was forced to take up the law as a viable career, particularly once he married Frances Fairchild and moved to Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

The law, however, proved not to his liking and he gave it up in 1825 for the life of a journalist in New York, where he quickly advanced at the Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton. Bryant was an early proponent of conservative, Hamiltonian Federalism. But that too went by the wayside for a more progressive politics in editorials that supported immigrants, religious minorities and workers. (As an elector in the 1860 presidential election, Bryant voted for Abraham Lincoln.)

It is on his writings that Bryant’s reputation ultimately rests.

Indeed, children’s author Mary Mapes Dodge (“Hans Brinker”) would say: "You will admire more and more, as you grow older, the noble poems of this great and good man."

The New York Medical College Founder’s Dinner will begin at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 21. For more, visit nymcalumni.org/foundersdinner.

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www.bermanbuyscollectables.com • 914-244-9500 OCTOBER 2020 WAGMAG.COM

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E M O H T A D L R O W IN A TOS O H P OF

John Bigelow Taylor and Dianne Dubler. Courtesy Kubaba Books. Photographs by John Bigelow Taylor.

Every once and a while, we meet a couple whose creativity and passions are perfectly in sync with each other and with the artistic interests of WAG magazine. John Bigelow Taylor and Dianne Dubler are such a couple.

We first introduced you to the Highland Falls, New York, pair in our September story on the late Frederic Zaavy — the otherworldly jeweler whose nature-inspired creations are true works of art and whose unusual presence echoed the title character of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Le Petit Prince.” Zaavy had asked the couple to do a book on his career, a request that became more urgent in the last years of his life, which ended in 2011. The resulting “Stardust: The Work and Life of Jeweler Extraordinaire Frederic Zaavy” ($75, 245 pages)wagmag. com/stardust-memories/ — photographed, produced and packaged by Taylor and Dubler A UVEI O and published by Milan’s Officina Libraria — is G E TT ORGE slated to be released in November.

E G BY But “Stardust” is just one kind of book that the pair do, Dubler says.

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Liberty pin, Gijs Bakker, from Madeleine Albright’s “Stories From a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.”

Emerald and diamond necklace by Bulgari, from “Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry.”

“We do bespoke books that are not for general consumption,” Taylor says, “where we’re commissioned to photograph important houses, beautiful grounds and important collections.” They may create less than 10 copies or 1,000 for estates on the Hudson River, in Greenwich or out on Long Island, among other locales. These are published through their imprint, Kubaba Books, which began in the 1980s. “ ‘Kubaba’ is the oldest Indo-European word for the Anatolian Mother Goddess,” Dubler says. It is key to their work and life stories, she adds, “because the other side of all this is our world travels.”

When the couple met on the winter solstice (Dec. 22), 1970 — he was in commercial film; she was a journalist for The Times, Trenton and The Trentonian — it was the spark for a relationship that would take them to such places as Afghanistan, India, Mexico, Nepal and especially Turkey over the course of several decades as they explored their interests in prehistoric and ancient art.

“The photography came out of traveling,” Taylor says. “It became an important part of our transition.”

Looking for more stable careers in the late 1970s than the little

Diamond, emerald and gold serpent bangle watch by Bulgari, Jaeger-LeCoultre, from “Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry.”

jewelry and old furniture import and T-shirt businesses they had been pursuing, the couple heeded the words of their mentor, the collector Gillett Griffin — a curator and scholar of Pre-columbian and Native American art at Princeton University Art Museum.

“Since you love art, why not photograph it?” Taylor recalls him saying.

They left their New Jersey base and moved to Manhattan, where they would have a series of four studio/lofts around the island. Over 40 years, they photographed more than 250 books on everything from jewelry to architecture for such clients as Harry N. Abrams Inc., (now Abrams and still one of the premier publishers of luxury art books), and the Adelson Galleries, located in Manhattan and Palm Beach, whose owners, Jan and Warren Adelson, were longtime Westchester residents.

Among these books were two involving two of the most high powered women in modern times — former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s “Read My Pins: Stories From a Diplomat’s Jewel Box” (Harper, 2009) and “Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry” (Simon & Schuster, 2002).

John Taylor remembers Albright as “very, very sharp, smart, friendly and dynamic. Her issue was that men have their ties,

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Left: Waddeson Manor, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom.

Above, top to bottom: Private residence, Hudson Valley.

what did we women have? Well, she had her brooches.”

And they played a key role in brooch diplomacy, as Albright used them to signal everything from a mood to a policy. When Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein called her a snake, she turned up for a meeting with Iraqi officials sporting a serpent pin.

For Albright’s book, Taylor and Dubler photographed some 200 to 300 out of 1,000 brooches in their Manhattan studio.

Their encounter with two-time Oscar-winning actress and AIDS fundraiser Elizabeth Taylor was equally memorable, with the couple photographing her jewels in the trophy room of her Bel Air home. Though the actress was fairly reclusive with a number of health issues, she would pop in during the evening, when she got up, to say “hello.”

“We thought she was great,” John Taylor says, adding that her famed violet eyes seemed to say she just wanted to have fun.

Around the same time they were meeting Liz Taylor, the couple received a commission from Jacob Rothschild and Paul Gottlieb — the legendary publisher and editor in chief of Harry N. Abrams and another mentor — that would lead them deeper into the world of bespoke publishing. Producing the images for

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“Waddesdon Manor: A Biography of a Rothschild House” — in the village of Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire, England — Taylor and Dubler saw “The Red Book,” a bespoke volume on the house that Frederick de Rothschild, the original owner of the manor, created in 1897. The less than 10 copies were given to family members and, in one special case, Queen Victoria upon her visit. From “The Red Book,” Kubaba Books took off.

A year ago, Taylor and Dubler moved exclusively to their place in Highland Falls.

“One of the reasons we left New York City is that most of our work is done on location,” Taylor says. This will include for upcoming bespoke books on a big estate on Long Island and one on the Hudson River, for which the couple will play their usual complementary roles. On the shoots, Taylor is the technical one; Dubler, the stylist.

“Our lives have been a privilege of extraordinary places and extraordinary people,” Taylor says. The books are, he adds, “a continuation of our own life adventure.”

For more, visit kubaba.com.

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WAGMAG.COM OCTOBER 2020

For his new “Garden Portraits: Experiences of Natural Beauty,” Larry Lederman photographed 16 public and private gardens, most of which are in Fairfield and Westchester counties. Top: Iroki, Mount Kisco. Bottom left: The Beckoning Path, Armonk. Bottom right: Brubeck Garden, Wilton.

Photographs by Larry Lederman.

It was the trees that drew them, says photographer Larry Lederman. In 1992, Lederman, then a practicing lawyer, and his wife, the interior designer Kitty Hawks, purchased four acres in Chappaqua that would become Hawks Nest in large part because of the mature trees that studded the landscape — maple, oak, tulip and pine.

“I bought a camera and started photographing the trees,” he recalls. “My wife said, ‘That’s not a tree.’” Clearly, he had much to learn.

And he did. He took a class in black-and-white photography but says, “That was really not for me. The trees are all in color.” On the advisory board of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, Lederman began photographing the trees there, which range from lofty tulips to fanning fruit blossoms.

“No one was following trees at that time,” Lederman says.

But he did and that led in 2012 to “Magnificent Trees of the New York Botanical Garden” and, in 2017, to “Rockefeller Family Gardens: An American Legacy.” (He was also the principal photographer of “Interior Landmarks: Treasures of New York,” the 125th anniversary edition of “The New York Botanical Garden” and “Frederic Church’s Olana on the Hudson,” about the Hudson River School painter and his Persian-style estate.)

Lederman’s latest — “Garden Portraits: Experiences of Natural Beauty” (The Monacelli Press, Oct. 13, $50, 223 pages) — is another splendid variation on his theme. With a text by Thomas Christopher and a foreword by Gregory Long, who served as president of the New York Botanical Garden for 25 years, Lederman offers lovers of landscape photography in-depth reflections on 16 public and private gardens, all but one of which — Long Island’s Glimcher Garden — are in Fairfield and

BY G EO R GET T Westchester counties.

E GO UVEI The words “in-depth reflections” are chosen deliberately here. What A strikes you from the moment you open the book — which begins with double-page spreads on Rock Cobble Farm in South Kent, Merrin Garden in Cortlandt Manor, Hawks Nest and Sleepy Cat Farm in Greenwich, all in different seasons — are the richly textured panoramas and reflective qualities Lederman achieves throughout. You feel as though you are walking over the leaf-strewn paths and stone footbridge of Hawks Nest in autumn amid bushes, shrubs and trees of varying heights in all their russet, gold and crimson glory.

Along the way, Lederman achieves the kind of sleight of hand that is the hallmark of any artist worthy of the name. What appears to be autumnal snow, glimpsed through a Japanese maple at The Beckoning Path in Armonk, are actually reflections of clouds on a lake. Later in the chapter on this garden — which was created by the late Ted Nierenberg, founder with wife Martha of Danks International Designs, the housewares company — a specimen maple seemingly suspended over the water evokes the lush mysteries of summer and the Far East. Meanwhile, in the chapter on Woodland Garden, native pink and white dogwoods watch over the Hudson Valley below and conjure all the fresh promise and yearning of spring.

How does Lederman attain his alchemy? It begins with a digital camera — a Nikon at first and now a Pentax 645Z — and always a tripod. “I shoot to achieve great depth of field, so I vary the time of exposure by keeping the aperture open. It allows in any light for good depth of field. It allows for complexity.”

Early on, he discovered that photographs made with his hand-held camera were often out of focus, because his hands were moving. Now he can blow up his photos to 60 by 90 inches and find exquisite detail.

Lederman also sets perimeters that he can then transcend in his art. For “Garden Portraits,”

T R E E VARIATIO NS

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he chose gardens no more than an hour’s drive from his home and arrived early.

“I also tried to start in the winter when you can see the bones of a garden,” he says. Then he cycles through the seasons. Or many seasons: He photographed The Beckoning Path over three years — taking many images, as he always does, moving his tripod around, following the light.

You need a good pair of feet to be a photographer, Lederman adds, and to take your ego out of the equation. Perhaps that’s easier to do when photography begins as an avocation and you’ve already made a great success as something else.

Specializing in mergers and acquisitions, Lederman rose to become chairman of global corporate practice for the firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, now Milbank LLP, whose corporate headquarters are in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. He still keeps his hand in the law, teaching mergers and acquisitions at New York Law School.

“If you’re very successful at something, people assume you’re not going to be as successful at something else.”

But with the intrepid spirit of the autodidact and a passion for nature, Lederman has disproved that assumption and is looking forward to his next variation on a theme — “Water in the Garden: A Photographic Essay.”

“If you’re excited, you start to see things in a new way.”

For more, visit larrylederman@smugmug.com.

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Top: Larry Lederman’s own Hawks Nest in Chappaqua. Bottom left: Glimcher Garden, Long Island.

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THE FLEETING BEAUTY OF LIFE

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

pressionists when they were exhibited in Paris at L’École des “Floating Beauty: Women in the Art of UkiBeaux Arts in 1890. yo-e,” at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich It’s easy to understand why everyone from Mary Cassatt through Nov. 1, is a timely exhibit times two. to Vincent van Gogh was bowled over. The prints — made In a year in which we’re celebrating the through a painstaking, multilayered process for the masscentennial of American women’s suffrage, es — presented a vibrantly colored, detailed view of nature “Floating Beauty” offers a window onto the as well as Japanese society. The exhibit includes Hokupeculiar yet not unfamiliar treatment of womsai’s seminal “The Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagaen during four centuries of Japanese history. wa” (1830-31, ink on paper), a masterwork of blues, grays But in its portrayal of a world that was centered and whites in which a mammoth wave dwarfs Mount on arts and entertainment, it also holds up a Fuji in the backdrop and two long boats, whose huddistant mirror to our own culture, in which the dling crews struggle to stay afloat in the foreground. coronavirus has remade our notions of leisure But amid works on nature like the dramatic “Great and life’s impermanence.

Wave” and Hiroshige’s serene scene of fishermen The exhibit features 40 color woodblock prints (“Village by the Tamagawa River,” 1858, ink on pafrom the permanent collection of Pennsylvania’s per), there are those that paint a darker portrait of Reading Public Museum that were made during Japanese society and the roles of women in it.

Japan’s critical Edo period (1615-1868), which beThe exhibit text notes that women enjoyed a gan with the military rule of the shogun Tokugawa certain status, autonomy and influence before the Ieyasu and ended after the reopening of Japan to the arrival of a harsh form of Chinese Buddhism and West. (It was called the Edo period after Ieyasu’s capConfucianism that depicted women as inherentital, now Tokyo.) ly evil and stupid, confining them to being utterIeyasu reorganized Japanese society into a strict ly obedient housewives and mothers or courcaste system of (in descending order) samurai, tesans and laborers. (Interestingly, high-born farmers, artisans and merchants that was based on ladies and courtesans alike tied the sashes of neo-Confucian morality. To quell the inevitable retheir kimonos in the front to indicate they did sentment of the lower classes toward the aristocrats, not have to do manual labor, while laboring who managed to slip through many of the rules, the women tied theirs in the back so they would shogun established the Yoshiwara pleasure district that not interfere with their work.) A woman embraced everything from courtesans to kabuki theater. might run a teashop or a brothel or become Soon artists like Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai a hairdresser or even an artist, but these and Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige I were creating “pictures of were exceptions that proved the rules. the floating world” (ukiyo-e) of leisure, in particular those Standards of beauty were just as rigidof beautiful women (bijinga). These prints would have a ly defined — lead-based makeup to whitprofound effect on the French Impressionists and Postim-

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Kitagawa Utamaro’s “Courtesan Hanaogi in Ogiya With Attendant,” 18th century, ink on paper Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania.

en the skin, plucked eyebrows painted higher on the face, teeth blackened by an iron-based drink and a wooden headrest to maintain the required elaborate coiffure. There is, noted an artist friend of ours who accompanied us to the exhibit, a certain sameness to the elongated, expressionless faces with their aquiline noses, small mouths and slit eyes and brows — with the exception of one print depicting women with soft, round features that may or may not have been created by a female artist.

“What we’re seeing is a male gaze, presented from a male viewpoint,” says Corinne Flax, manager of school and community partnerships at the Bruce, who does a lot of educational outreach on its shows.

Indeed, in a section on kabuki theater’s female impersonators the text notes the prevailing wisdom of the day about that gaze — that only a man could portray a woman since only a man could observe one from the outside. Apparently, the best woman, then, was a man.

Such observations are not limited to the Japanese society of yesteryear. The male gaze has been the default throughout the history of the arts. wagmag.com/ the-eyes-have-it-2/ And, Flax adds, instead of blackening their teeth and shaving and painting their eyebrows, women today are whitening their teeth and microblading their brows.

Similarly, the fleeting aspect of entertainment that was the subject of the ukiyo-e prints is all around us nowadays, particularly in this age of the coronavirus.

“How much of my modern life is the pursuit of pleasure or taking in pleasures you’re not aware of?” Flax asks, noting the giant information screens around New York City that you can plug your phone into and that have replaced the old phone booths. “All of our world is a bit of a floating world.”

And yet the irony is that while the world that inspired these prints is long gone, the works themselves are still with us, conjuring the past.

Life is short. Art remains.

For more, visit brucemuseum.org.

An installation shot of “Floating Beauty: Women in the Art of Ukiyo-e,” at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich through Nov. 1.

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“How are you feeling today?” I ask Shirley Cheng, kicking off the conversation when we spoke by phone a few weeks ago. “I’m fine. Thank you,” she replies, without a moment’s hesitation. “Every day is a gift from God.” Shirley Cheng has every reason not to feel fine. Diagnosed with severe juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when she was 11 months old, she lost the ability to walk before she had even learned to take a step and is confined to a wheelchair. In her first years, the Albany-born Cheng was hospitalized so many times between America and China that there was no opportunity for a school education until she turned 11. And though she hardly spoke a word of English when she started elementary school in Poughkeepsie, she spoke fluent English six months later with the help of special education and had mastered other subjects up to grade level.

Sadly, though, there were further trials to come. At the age of 17, Cheng lost her sight. Not that this further disability has crushed this remarkable woman’s spirit — far from it. She is a three-time summa cum laude graduate and doctor of divinity from Ames Christian University, a poet, an advocate of parental rights in children’s medical care, an award-winning author and the founder of Ultra-Ability.com, where she proclaims “Jehovah God’s Good News of Salvation through Jesus Christ.”

Now based in White Plains, Cheng founded Unite in Love earlier this year as a response to Covid-19 to feed and protect the hungry among her students in the developing world: A little background first, if you will. From earliest childhood, through those traumatic teenage years, and now in adulthood, how have you coped with your disability?

“I would say I’ve always had a very positive attitude. I’ve always been happy, never depressed, no matter how many difficult situations I’ve had to face. When I was a baby, I laughed through my tears. When I was 4, my mother told me about God, and I immediately accepted the fact, as I saw physical creation all around me. I knew that my creator knew exactly what I was going through, what I needed, and so I put my whole life in his hands.”

How have you turned your religion and deep conviction into your life’s work?

“I lost my eyesight when I was 17. People would say, ‘Wow, that’s too bad.’ But now I think this was a divine turn of events and I’ll tell you why.

I was always interested in the Bible but never really had time to read it, because of my schoolwork and typical teenage things. But after I lost my eyesight, I had a lot more time on my hands. The Commission for the Blind signed me up for talking books from the library, so I asked for a copy (of the Bible.) I learned so much about (God’s) personality, his warmth, his desire and what he wants for us. In 2008, I began my online ministry, because I wanted to share with others the joy and fulfillment I experienced when knowing God on a deep level.”

Who are your typical followers? Who comes to you wanting instruction?

“Over the years, I have been so privileged to meet people from around the world. My students come from the United States, Africa, Asia, Australia — all over.

UNITING IN LOVE TO HELP HUM A N IT Y

BY J EREM

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Y WA YNE

WAGMAG.COM OCTOBER 2020

Shirley Cheng.

Photograph by Juliet Cheng.

Students of all ages.”

How do they hear about you?

“From my website. And I post Christian articles on sites like ezinearticles.com. People find me there. Plus, I’m the author of nine books and people find me on Amazon. And I have a Facebook presence. I use screen-reading software — that’s how I communicate with people.”

Yes, we have so much to thank technology — well, I suppose you might say God — for. Now, let me ask you this — favorite books of the Bible?

“Oh, I like all the books.”

I knew you were going to say that. But if pressed, what is your favorite book. one you are drawn to time and again?

“I love the Book of Ruth, because it shows the power of love that we have for one another, as well as the love that God has for us. And it shows how love redeems us.”

Tell me about Unite in Love and what the project is.

“Absolutely. After I began hearing about the negative effects of lockdown, when I started asking my students how they were doing, I would get answers like, ‘I’m hungry,’ or ‘I just got some food from my neighbor’ or ‘I managed to find something in the street.’ It was so painful to hear. I gave it some thought and said to myself, I can’t just sit here and do nothing. I have to at least try to help, to put my best foot forward. So, I decided to start a fundraiser to help as many people as I could — to help my students, to help my friends.

There is strength in numbers and there is power in love, so when we put them together and say, ‘Unite in Love,’ we can accomplish common good for our society. That is simply living up to our humanity.”

How did you get started?

“I prayed and hoped for the best and, to my pleasant surprise, my network of friends and associates starting donating. I started out helping 10 families, and then it became 20, distributing funds to cover emergency food supply and also to prevent the eviction of families with young children. Some had gone for days without food before we sent them money. They were literally on a liquid fast. These people are in a very difficult position (in comparison) to us, with no government benefit, no stimulus check, just left alone to fend for themselves.”

Where are you mainly supporting people — any particular region?

“Most of the students we are helping are from Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya. I also have families from India, Pakistan and Nepal.”

You have a truly global reach.

“All thanks to God. I’m really humbled to be his servant.

He gave me my life, he sustains it and he called me to his ministry. Serving him is the least I could do in gratitude.”

To learn more about Unite in Love or to donate, visit facebook.com/donate/310402090175008.

For more on Shirley Cheng’s ministry, visit ultra-ability.com

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John Brewster Jr.’s “Boy Holding a Book” (1810). Courtesy the Florence Griswold Museum.

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During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, John Brewster Jr. was one of the most prominent portrait artists in the Northeast.

And while he may not be a household name today, the quality and quantity of his work coupled with his extraordinary life experience make him one of the most intriguing figures in the development of American art.

Brewster was born in Hampton, Connecticut, in May 1766 — the exact date of his birth being uncertain. What is certain is that he came into the Colonial era with an extraordinary social advantage as the third son of John Brewster, M.D., a prominent member of the Connecticut General Assembly and a direct descendant of William Brewster, a Pilgrim leader who arrived on these shores via the Mayflower.

But Brewster’s birth also included what could have been a devastating difficulty for him in that time: He was born deaf and mute. His early years were mostly spent isolated from wider society, and he learned to communicate through pantomime with his immediate family and very few friends. His father’s wealth enabled him to receive private tutoring, including lessons by a local pastor named Rev. Joseph Steward on how to paint in the style of Ralph Earl, a prominent Colonial era portraitist. Being able to receive private art lessons was a luxury that few in Brewster’s time enjoyed.

“Most artists that did get training usually went to England to get it — like John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart and Benjamin West,” says Elizabeth V. Warren, president of the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan. “But the American-born artists, for the most part, were primarily either self-trained or got a little bit of training from other people who didn't know much more than they did.”

Warren notes that despite the lack of formal training, these artists

BY P HIL H found themselves in a market where their services were highly in deA LL mand.

“There were lots of them,” she continues. “This was a time of a growing middle class. People had the money and the desire to have themselves represented to show how well they had done, or to have themselves remembered by their families. Remember, it wasn’t until the late 1840s when the daguerreotype comes to America that there was an alternative to having a portrait painted. So, there were quite a number of painters and they ranged in their skills from barely acceptable to quite proficient, as Brewster was.”

After initially painting portraits of relatives, Brewster’s family recognized his skills could make him financially independent. Ironically, the deafness that separated Brewster from his surroundings may have been the driving force in liberating his artistic talents.

“Brewster focuses on the sitter’s face — the eyes, the expression — and he de-emphasizes the setting in the background,” says Paul D’Ambrosio, president and CEO of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. “When you look at the works of his peers, you don't see what Brewster is able to see in his beautiful portraits. You see some nice likenesses, you see some beautiful designs and fluid brushwork, but you just don't feel like you're really gazing into somebody's being. Brewster is making a profound connection with each sitter, and I think it can only be attributed to the heightened sense of visual awareness that comes with not having access to one other crucial sense.”

By his mid-20s, Brewster began advertising his portraiture services in newspapers

PORTRAI T I S T OF A M E R ICA RISING

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while his family made inquiries within their social and professional connections to help him gain commissions. He moved in 1795 with his younger brother, Royal Brewster, M.D., to Buxton, Maine, though his career would take him throughout New England and eastern New York State, resulting in more than 250 portraits.

“Ralph Earl is known for taking the English style of portraiture and bringing it into America,” D’Ambrosio adds. “But Brewster was successful in simplifying it and making it popular in the countryside for ordinary people at an affordable price. So, he really spread portraiture throughout New England and he established a basic style that became prevalent by among self-taught artists in the Northeast.”

Brewster’s portraits of children were particularly beloved, with D’Ambrosio noting how “nobody quite painted children with such innocent beauty and purity as Brewster did. I don't think he has a peer.”

One of these paintings, “Boy Holding a Book,” is part of the exhibition “Expanding Horizons: Celebrating 20 Years of the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection” that opens Nov. 7 at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Jennifer Stettler Parsons, the museum’s associate curator, says it is crucial to have Brewster as part of a presentation tracing the evolution of the American sociocultural experience.

“I think it's really important when our society is thinking about ways to expand the narrative of history and move toward a more engaged social consciousness about our world,” she says. “And so many of those stories live in our historical work. John Brewster Jr. is a perfect example of that. This extraordinary artist was able to function as a deaf artist in a world where he was a minority and he didn't have… methods of communication, so had to create his own.”

In 1817, at the peak of his career, the 51-year-old Brewster put his work on hold and traveled to Hartford to enroll in the newly opened Connecticut Asylum for the Education of Deaf and Dumb Persons, known today as the American School for the Deaf. And while the average age of his classmates was 19, Brewster studied for three years and learned

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John Brewster Jr.’s “Starr Mygett and His Daughter Lucy,” oil on canvas. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

to communicate in the then-evolving American Sign Language. Parson notes this was “the first time he found a community where he was able to identify with others.”

Brewster died in 1854 at the age of 88. Sadly, he did not leave a diary or memoir, so we are not certain how he viewed his place in the world. Nor is there any known image of him, which further separates his legacy from today’s consideration. But while the man’s inner soul and appearance remain mysterious, Warren praises him for creating an invaluable record of the people who were the backbone of the young America and who would have otherwise been lost to history.

“His patrons were not the elite people nor the wealthiest, but they were the professional middle-class farmers, doctors and lawyers,” she says, adding that Brewster’s celebration of these Americans deserves greater appreciation.

“For a long, long time, and in many places today, self-taught artists are still not considered worthy of our appreciation,” Warren says. “In my world, Brewster’s extremely well-known. But in the greater world, folk artists are rarely if ever taught in art history classes . They're really dismissed as second-class citizens. And I think that's wrong.”

For more, visit florencegriswoldmuseum.org.

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THE ‘AGGIE’ AND THE ECSTASY

BY GREGG SHAPIRO

Agnes and Catherine Gund.

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Documentary filmmaker Catherine Gund has an exceptional eye for subject matter when it comes to her movie projects. Of course, it helps that she was already familiar with the people, including performance artist Ron Athey, the late Mexican singer Chavela Vargas and choreographer Elizabeth Streb. However, she probably wasn’t as well acquainted with them as she is with the subject of her new documentary “Aggie” (Strand Releasing/Aubin Pictures), which is about her mother, art collector and philanthropist Agnes Gund.

Agnes’ name may be familiar to some readers from her tenure as president of The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Others may recall her incredible 2017 act of generosity when, after selling a piece of art from her private collection — Roy Lichtenstein’s “Masterpiece” — for an estimated $165 million dollars, she donated $100 million dollars from the sale to establish Art for Justice, a grant-making organization “focused on safely reducing the prison population, promoting justice reinvestment and creating art that changes the narrative around mass incarceration.” Can you even imagine a subject more worthy of a documentary?

Of course, that was director Catherine’s greatest challenge, because her mother preferred to stay out of the limelight. Nevertheless, Catherine prevailed, and you’ll be glad she did, because “Aggie” is a truly delightful and eye-opening work of art. We talked with Catherine Gund before the film’s release, Oct. 7.

Catherine, you have a history of making docs about undeniably fascinating people, including Chavela Vargas, Ron Athey and Elizabeth Streb.

What is involved in your decision-making process when it comes to the subjects for your films?

“I love this question about how to identify fascinating people, because I never have set out to profile someone or make a movie about someone. It's always been somebody who's already in my life and then it sort of develops into this story that I feel like is always much bigger than that person. You're absolutely right. Ron Athey was the first feature length film documentary that I made.

That was another scenario where we were friends. I was friends with most of the people in the film already before I made the film. This art and this living: For me, it's experience. It’s, Let's make food, let’s make a movie, let's make love, let's make happiness, let’s make something together. A lot of these relationships have already been established in that vein and then we move on and making a movie just becomes an obvious outlet. Each case was something like that.”

“Aggie” is different from your others in that it is an especially personal project. Why was now the time to make a movie about her?

“As a documentary filmmaker, many people in her world have said to me, ‘Your mom’s great. When are you going to make a movie about her?’ I've always said, ‘Never, never, never.’ (laughs) I was very clear about that. But then she did this incredible thing. She didn't talk about

it, she didn’t say she should do it, she just did it. In the French Revolution, they called it “the propaganda of the deed.” I just needed to add to that, to amplify that as something to encourage, inspire and for all of us to aspire to. Nobody can do exactly what she did. Nobody can do what you do. In this way, I was saying everyone can do something and we don't have to be constrained by the mainstream media or advertising or tradition.

We can actually use our imagination, which is where she honed this skill. Use our imagination to do something different, that responds to our gut instincts, that responds to our intuition.

‘We can follow our intuition to places that the mainstream media, advertising, the education system, other things won't lead us. Art, to me, is what can lead us there. I want to share. I want everyone to feel like I do about art. I feel like art is our salvation as individuals, as a community, as a society that needs to find a path forward, both to heal past wrongs and current wrongs as we experience right now in our government — the legacy of slavery, the history of anti-black racism and the violence with which this society was founded. It is such a violent society. We need to be able to heal and then to move to something that's more just and beautiful.”

Fairly early in the movie, you ask your mother if she wants to see a rough cut of the documentary and she says that she doesn’t want anyone to see it.

“It’s absolutely what she said. I think she understands this part. I think there are moments when I speak about or other people speak about it, where they can talk about the bigger picture. She obviously is an exceedingly humble and shy person who shuns the spotlight.

That's just a fact. It made making a film about her extremely difficult. Because here I was saying, ‘You're a good a person. You should have a film made about you, but the reason you're good is that you don't want the film made about you.’ So that was a challenge. I feel like I tried to foreground in the film and make it clear that she doesn't want the film made. But she deeply believes in the end of mass incarceration, that this time requires a reckoning and that she can speak to that. To anyone who is listening, even if it's a small group, even if it's just me, even if it's a few friends and we all know it's bigger than that. She does have a voice and she can use that voice to create a world that would benefit everyone.”

Throughout the film, you have other people interviewing Aggie, including her grandchildren, as well as artists and others. How did you come up with that idea and was that a way of making it easier for her to talk about herself?

“Aggie agreed to do a few interviews with me, not even for the movie. I just said, ‘Look, we haven't sat down and had interviews. When you talk to your friends and you talk to me and you talk to your kids, it's always so beautiful. Let's just do a couple interviews. I’ll ask some questions.’ Frankly, Gregg, I think that everybody should be interviewing everyone. I think we should ask each other

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about X,Y and Z. She spent so much time in the conversations with people asking them questions.”

questions that we don't ask. We ask, ‘How are you?’, but we don’t really care about the answer. Instead we could ask, ‘Where is your family from? How do you think you became similar or different from people you were raised with? What's been the most fascinating experience you had in your life and explain something that you do and believe in now? She said yes and we started the interview and we were awful. It was so boring. We had agreed to do five to 10 of these and I said, ‘Forget it, we're never doing that again.’ Two of my kids were heading off to college and I said, ‘I'll tell them they can ask you anything they want for an hour and I’ll film it.’

“It was so great. I said we must do my other two (kids) and so we did those. We realized that the prism of her life is full through her social connections. Maybe that is true for many people. I've seen some talking head interviews that work well with some people.

That's never going to work with Aggie. She can't even look you in the eye when there's no camera between you. She doesn't look at the camera. She's much more comfortable talking to her friends and her colleagues and people who inspire her and who educate her. It was an opportunity to have all these different facets sort of reflected and refracted out into this. It was after about 10 of them that I realized I should actually make a movie. (laughs) “People don't realize that we didn't start making the movie based on conversations. We started the conversations and then I was like, ‘OK, now I have a way to tell her story that's really about how someone came to a place from where she was. It was in the Midwest 80 years ago. She was in this very sheltered, super-wealthy family that lived out in the country. They just had each other. They didn't spend time with a lot of other people. She came from this incredibly segregated place to where she’s this woman who lives in New York City, has a multiracial family, has these deep beliefs that are honed from being surrounded by and prizing art and artists, realizing and believing her life is worth living because artists exist.”

The movie is full of examples of your mother’s delightful sense of humor. The interview scene with (director) John Waters, for example.

“That was the best, the very best.”

Do you share her wit, or would you consider yourself to be more serious?

“I think we have very different senses of humor. I definitely think hers is much drier and wittier. I laugh freely and I crack jokes constantly. You wouldn't believe how many of those little clips in the back seat of the car there are. In a way, her priorities are right, but that means that they're not always the same priorities as yours.

Here I am trying to get her to speak and be interviewed, tell me

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Were you aware, when you were growing up, of what exactly your mother had hanging on her walls?

“I was and I wasn’t. When she moved to New York City, I was out of the house. I will say that is when it became clearer, certainly to me. Maybe because I was older. I think her being in New York, she was freer to do it. There are certain pieces that I know were in the house when I was little. They’re just burned into my psyche.

There’s sort of an indelible mark. The Mark Rothko piece has been in our house my whole life. I knew it was there and I loved it. I felt a connection to it. Also the Hans Hofmann, which is in The Museum of Modern Art show. It's a very colorful block color piece. That was always there while I was growing up. There was art around, for sure. We moved several times, but I can remember where the Rothko piece was in every single house. This was when things didn't change as much as they do in her house now where art is being loaned out constantly and new art is being hung. It's just a beautiful, living gallery. Growing up, there were fewer pieces and the thing that changed would be the Christmas tree. A Christmas tree would come and some furniture had to be moved. We would decorate the Christmas tree and I would always think of that in relation to the art that was still on the walls.”

Because this is such a personal film, what are you hoping that audience members take away from it?

“It is a really personal film and for that reason I feel like I partly had to make myself vulnerable. But I also feel like there's not really an argument with inspiring people to think about their community and their relationships within their family and in their country and in the world. I think that's what I want people to take away. To talk to people, like these conversations show, to people who you don't know everything about or who you don't agree with about everything. Also, the way she sees the world through art. People have said to me, ‘I thought artists were just old, dead, white guys.

That was the definition I was given.’ It’s horrifying to realize that that's still what people are taught. If you go to museums, you're still going to see Picasso and Matisse and Renoir and Rembrandt. All these old, dead, white guys. These are the names that will come up if you say ‘artist.’

“People aren't thinking of Faith Ringgold, Hank Willis Thomas, Glenn Ligon or Teresita Fernández — so many older, younger and established artists. Some are performance artists and some are sculptors and some are painters and some are abstract. Julie Mehretu’s artwork is very abstract, although she will say each piece is about an experience that is very concrete to her. Mark Bradford’s work hangs on gallery walls. It’s incredibly powerful, but it's also because there's an energy that goes into it and reflects and that spirit comes right back out at you. It's not about what the pieces are. I'm looking around the room I'm sitting in now and I see all these different pieces that mean so much to me. One is made by my daughter, one is made by a friend, one is an image that everybody really loves and connects to in our family. The piece doesn't matter. It’s the idea of having that energy in the room and having that as a part of our language. Our ability to communicate is based on a language of seeing. What do we see and that dictates then what do we know. It’s a cycle. I would love people to think of art more that way.” “”Aggie” is available Oct. 7 at the Film Forum site. For tickets, visit watch.eventive.org/aggie/play/5f5952627d760d005954e9a7.

For more, visit aubinpictures.com. And for Gregg Shapiro’s full interview with Catherine Gund, visit wagmag.com.

Last month saw the return of Bruce Morrow — better known to his fans as Cousin Brucie — to the New York radio orbit after a 15-year absence.

“Cousin Brucie’s Saturday Night Rock & Roll Party” now airs from 6 to 9 p.m. every Saturday night over 77 WABC-AM and, thanks to the station’s website and app, he is reaching far beyond the five boroughs.

“When we were on last week, they got emails from Belgium, Paris and London,” he recalls. “And, of course, all over the country. So, it's a whole new responsibility, and a whole new mindset for me of who I'm talking to and who I'm visiting with.”

While Cousin Brucie can cite an international following, the foundation of his fanbase — or, as he prefers to call them, his “cousins” — has been the generations of New York radio listeners who followed the Brooklyn-born broadcaster across the dial from WINS in 1959 to WABC in 1961 to WNBC in 1974 to WCBS in 1982. In 2005, he departed the terrestrial radio dial for SiriusXM satellite radio, hosting programs on Wednesday and Saturday nights.

But Sirius is a paid subscription service, and those who did not subscribe missed Cousin Brucie’s booming voice and unapologetic devotion to the classic sounds of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. And, it seems, Cousin Brucie missed the New York listeners, too.

“We were garnering our huge audiences all over the world,” he said about his satellite radio gig. “But I knew that there was something missing to what I wanted to do. I'm a broadcaster. I'm a performer. I like to be with people, but I felt that I was doing something more of a corporate nature than I was a broadcasting.”

While Cousin Brucie was debating whether to renew his Sirius contract this past summer, he was getting calls for song requests on his show “from a guy named John and his wife, Margo.” At first, he assumed he was dealing with devoted fans with a penchant for the vintage hits.

L L A HIL H “They were driving around in their cars on

BY P a Saturday and he'd request songs. He loved Elvis, the Everly Brothers, the Stones and the Beatles,” he says. “One day, I got a call from a friend who said, ‘Do know who you're talking?’”

The John who kept ringing Cousin Brucie with Saturday night phone requests turned out to be John Catsimatidis, who bought 77 WABC last year in a $12.5 million cash deal. Castimatidis had gotten word that Cousin Brucie’s Sirius contract was coming to an end and was eager to have him return to his old stomping grounds.

“The day after I stopped my contract with Sirius, I signed the deal with WABC,” he continues.

“So here I am, back on radio and very thrilled.”

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Bruce Morrow, aka Cousin Brucie, has come full circle, returning to AM radio. Photograph by Vicky Sedgwick / Creative Commons.

The tunes that Cousin Brucie plays on his Saturday night shows reflects what he perceives to be the pinnacle of popular music.

“The music of the late ’50s and the ’60s was so easy to listen to and remember,” he says. “You could hum a tune after the first time you heard it on the radio or some friend played a record, and you knew it something very special. It really showed what life was about.”

As for today’s music mix, Cousin Brucie freely admits that he has no emotional connection with the hit songs.

“Everything is so overproduced,” he laments. “When you see these videos, it's like watching Barnum & Bailey Circus, and I think the music is very secondary….Everything's fireworks and production with 800 people on the stage moving, jumping and screaming, and nobody has clothes on. So, no-

body's really paying attention to the music. In the ’60s, we paid attention to the music. We didn't know about having a circus video.”

While Cousin Brucie could easily spend hours name-dropping — he was close friends with Elvis Presley and still stays in touch with Paul McCartney — he is more focused on his listeners. His new show includes call-in requests and dedications, a rarity on most of today’s music radio stations and, to his delight, he is attracting yet another generation who are just discovering the classic tunes for the very first time.

“We have young people in the audience and I love it,” he exclaims.

“I talk to kids that are in elementary school — 9, 10, 11, 12 years old — and they love their Cousin Brucie. We talk about their school and I always ask them: ‘What's your favorite subject?’ And I tell them my favorite subject when I was in school was lunch, and they laugh.

They giggle. They’re terrific kids and we have a good time.”

Cousin Brucie is banking on these “terrific kids” as both his future in radio and to keep yesterday’s hits relevant in the digital age.

“It grows because one kid tells another kid,” he says. “My audience is loyal. They've been with me a long time, and it keeps growing.”

For more, visit wabcradio.com.

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“I’m only interested in healing,” says John Diamond, M.D., octogenarian psychiatrist, holistic healer, nutritionist, osteopath, photographer, musicologist, spiritual guide and exponent of “life energy.” “Whatever I do — all of my creativity in many areas — is always with healing as my only intention.”

The Australian-born Diamond has many credits to his name. He was the first medical doctor trained in applied kinesiology (the study of the mechanics of body movements) and is also the author of 21 books, including two bestsellers — “Your Body Doesn’t Lie” and “Life Energy: Unlocking the Hidden Power of Your Emotions to Achieve Well-Being.” Now, he can add gallerist to his powerhouse résumé.

In his Life Energy Arts gallery in Mount Kisco, open by appointment, the focus is on Diamond’s art and the promotion of his healing philosophies. On a recent visit for a show-round by his colleague and gallery director, Karla Booth, I was immediately taken by the extraordinary calm of the second-floor space.

Life energy, Diamond’s abiding interest, Booth says, is about finding the thing that gives someone a real passion for life, a real enjoyment of life. And it’s usually through the creative arts —painting, music, photography, dancing — “all the things we actually do as little kids.”

All too often, though, she adds, we don’t take these passions through to adult life and, even if we do, we have a lot of judgment about them. “We say, ‘I can’t paint,’ or ‘I can’t sing,’ and Diamond’s response is to say, ‘Yes you can.’ You don’t need to be a professional, but it’s in you and it’s there for you to use, to make your life fuller and better.”

Diamond’s actual art started out with calligraphy, drawings he would make on small pieces of paper, which he would look at for a brief moment as meditation and then throw away. When an art critic friend told him that the drawings were really gorgeous, that he should do something with them, he started exhibiting. Booth, meanwhile, was studying massage, nearly 40 years ago, when she first met Diamond through a group of therapists and loved his work. She had taught yoga for 14 years on what are now the gallery premises and when she closed her yoga studio a year and a NE Y A half ago, together they decided to repurpose the YW REM E J space as Life Energy Arts.

Y B In the foyer leading through to the gallery, we stop to admire some of Diamond’s “Stillpoint” drawings (so-called because when you look at them, or when he is making them, there’s this sense of stillness, of being settled, being at peace), before coming on to the abstracts.

These are photographs produced using Fujifilm slides (“no Photoshop,” Booth says) and the images are strikingly rich, with great intensity of color. There is also a series of 8-by-10-inch prints that you can look at and meditate on while viewing,

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John Diamond, M.D. does not title his paintings, believing titles restrict interpretation.

Courtesy Life Energy Arts.

each one self-contained within its gold border. Find one that works for you, and the gallery will then print it up to your preferred size.

As I read in his pamphlet “A Few Words on Art (Just a Few),” Diamond places enormous emphasis on the importance of the frame, envisioning how it will look even before he starts the painting. The reason for this, he says, is that we are unconsciously reassured by the frame, so that we do not lose reality.

As he sees it, with an appropriate border in place, the viewer is now safe to enter the other reality of the art.

(The mat — the border between the actual painted area of the canvas and the frame — is also key. Based on the Chinese philosophy of life, of empty and full, the white surround, Diamond says, adds to the sense of emptiness to balance the full.)

Moving through to the gallery proper, I admire the brilliant white walls, pristine cream-colored rugs and ceiling lampshades hanging like intricate white fuchsias or orchids. (“Secret,” Booth mock-whispers: “They’re from IKEA.”) We look at more calligraphy — “Diamond paints on any sur-

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face he can find,” Booth says, “especially if it’s luminous,”— and indeed there are painted lamp shades, glass dishes and tiles in addition to paper and canvas. We also look at a larger series of paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock on re-display, Pollock being an artist Diamond appreciates for his free forms and palpable sense of liberty.

Interestingly, none of the paintings have titles, as Diamond feels that titles are restrictive, somehow inhibiting the way in which the viewer relates to the painting.

Just off the gallery, a former therapy room, now containing just a chair and a soft light, acts as a meditation room, where you can contemplate a picture hung on the opposite wall undisturbed, for as long as you like. It’s called the Cholden Room, named for Louis Cholden, M.D., the eminent Canadian psychiatrist who died at only 38 in an automobile accident, whom Diamond regards as one of his guiding lights.

“It’s such a peaceful space, the ladies at the Mount Kisco Chamber of Commerce (next door) are always asking, ‘Can we come in for a bit?’” Booth quips.

As Diamond himself has expressed it, “Viewing Life Energy Art helps to reduce stress, free up one’s breathing and enhance Life Energy.” And healing, he says, is not the curing of a disease, per se, but the alleviation of the “disease” in the soul, “the deep anguish from which we all suffer throughout our lives, whether we are conscious of it or not.”

It’s certainly a dazzling concept, radical on the one hand, inherently true and irrefutable on the other.

For more, visit johndiamondart.com and LifeEnergyArts.com.

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Butterflies have been talismen of transformation and transcendence since prehistoric times. In “The Spirit of Butterflies: Myth, Magic, and Art” (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2000), Maraleen Manos-Jones writes of one of their oldest depictions — in a wall painting of a religious shrine, dating from 6500 B.C., excavated at Çatal Hüyuk on the Anatolian plateau (present-day Turkey). For the later ancient Greeks and Romans, the butterfly was associated with the soul. The Greeks believed that the soul flew out of the mouth at death, much as a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis — something they depicted on sarcophagi.

The ancient Greek word for butterfly and soul is our word “psyche” — a connection the 18th century sculptor Antonio Canova made in his sweet depiction of the goddess Psyche and her love-god hubby Eros (Cupid) holding a butterfly — holding Psyche’s soul — in their hands.

In modern times, some of the most memorable works of art have had butterfly motifs — from Giacomo Puccini’s tragic opera “Madama Butterfly” (1904) to Steve McQueen’s 1973 prison drama “Papillon” (the French word for “butterfly”).

To the papillon oeuvre we can add the works of Paul Villinski, whose butterfly sculptures are the subject of the recent book “Villinski” (Vivant Books/Paul Villinski, 269 pages, $95.)

“Butterflies are impossibly beautiful,” Villinski is quoted as saying in David Revere McFadden’s essay for the book. “These

BY G ridiculously delicate creatures…fly many thousands of miles EOR GE T TE G each year.”

OUV EIA Many of Villinski’s fragile frequent flyers are truly transformed, created out of recycled beer cans at his Long Island City studio in a building near MoMA PS1 where the Talking Heads recorded their “Fear of Music” album. Villinski’s creatures spiral and swarm over wire figures and wooden horses. They flit along guns, topping their barrels. They escape from overalls and are dramatically backlit on walls. Mostly, they tell the story of their creator, a man who is also fragile but enduring.

“They provide a touch of the magical in a world obsessed by science,” Bartholomew F. Bland, executive director of Lehman College Art Gallery, writes in his essay, “Kaleidoscope of Butterflies: Imagery and Iconography in the Art of Paul Villinski.” “Tellingly, the artist refers to their physical creation from the base metal of beer cans as ‘alchemy,’ the medieval idea of the transformation of matter….The idea of the beer can as a vehicle for intoxication has a powerful meaning for the person recovering from addiction, and it is also a strangely personal symbol.”

The seeds for Villinski’s addiction to drugs and alcohol were sown in a violent, peripatetic childhood. He was born 60 years ago in Maine to a mother, the former Jacqueline Whalen, who painted, and a father, Paul B. Villinski, who was a United States Air Force navigator and an abusive, mentally ill addict.

All his life, his namesake has been in love with art and flight.

A self-described Air Force brat, Villinski moved regularly with his family. The one constant was his father threatening to take off his belt. When he did, Villinski would feel it. In one horrific incident, his 3-year-old body was covered in bruises.

When his father retired, Villinski received a full scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious prep schools. This should’ve been Villinski’s chrysalis, his cocoon for meta-

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Paul Villinski with a friend. Photographs courtesy the artist.

morphosis. Instead, he dropped out, beginning an odyssey of travel, reading, drugs and alcohol that would bring him to study at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and graduate from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Making the decision to get sober in 1992, the environmentally minded Villinski also decided along the way to trade his LeFranc and Bourgeois oil paints for New York City detritus — old gloves and LPs, broken police barriers, discarded shipping pallets and empty liquor bottles that echoed his family’s history of addiction — to create things with wings.

“Lately,” he writes in the “Artist’s Statement” at the end of the book, “the things I need to make in the studio seem to choose me rather than the other way around, probably because I’ve stopped trying to keep the influence of my own biography in check. After three decades of practice, I’m finally willing to let whatever it is I actually know and care about find form in my work.”

For more, visit paulvillinski.com.

Made of aluminum (found55.9a_pegasus_constrast_crop.tif cans), wire, Flashe acrylics and powdered pigment, Paul Villinski’s “Relay” (2008) was used as an illustration for the table of contents in The New York Times Magazine’s first “Green” issue, April 20, 2008. Collection Fidelity Investments, Manhattan. Courtesy 46 of 200 12% Morgan Lehman Gallery, Manhattan. Copyright Paul Villinski 2008.

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Paul Villinski’s “Pegasus” (2016), steel, wood, soot, found aluminum cans, Flashe acrylics. The winged horse of Greek mythology underscores Villinski’s love of flight.

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WARES

HOME & DESIGN

THE ART OF LIVING

BY CAMI WEINSTEIN

ART COMES IN SO MANY FORMS AND ENRICHES OUR LIVES IN SO MANY WAYS.

During the current pandemic, many of the cultural art forms we would normally partake in are not available to us.

Performing arts have not reopened yet, although museums and gardens are now open on a limited basis. As we grapple with all of the cultural loss, we can turn to other forms of art that are less visible but equally important to our daily lives.

The pandemic has made us revaluate what we bring into our homes to appreciate. As we feather our nests or freshen our surroundings with new furniture, rugs and paint, many of us are also turning to art. We now have the time to learn about different artists and to think about which art forms interest us. Paintings, prints, photography, sculpture and other handmade objects are being enjoyed in a more personal way.

Handmade objects are growing increasing popular as we move away from industrial and commercially made products. I am finding many of my new clients are looking for art forms and one-of-a-kind pieces. Brooklyn and Long Island City have become working and living destinations for artists and artisans who create objects that are both beautiful and often functional for the home. I often find myself in these areas working with artists to create magical pieces for my clients. If the time it takes to make these pieces and cost are not within your budget, there are

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Even if you’re dining home alone, there’s no reason not to have an attractive place setting for yourself.

so many other products that are now available to the general public that make our lives more beautiful and functional.

Many of them have a handmade quality to them.

Live life artfully. Take the time to really look at how you can incorporate beautiful objects into your life. For example, if you need a new set of dishes and glasses for your home, choose ones that reflect your lifestyle. Even if pieces are commercially made, think about how the weight of the plates feels. Do the pieces feel artisan-made? Do the glasses you select to go with them reflect the mood of the room? Do they “work” with the plates? Do they work with your furniture? Tying all of these elements together sets the stage for living artfully.

Enjoy your surroundings and indulge yourself at home. Use plates and glasses instead of paper plates and cups. Set your table nicely, putting your main meal and food on decorative plates everyday. Treat yourself as if you were a guest. Paint your walls colors that bring you pleasure and make you feel great every time you walk into the room.

Some colors energize you and others calm you down, Select colors according to the way you enjoy feeling.

Look around you at all the objects in your home and their design. Product designers think about both the function of these objects and many times about

the beauty of the objects they create.

Everything from vacuum cleaners, bottle openers, coffee pots and toasters has been artfully designed for better living with style. Utilitarian objects that are used in the home must be both functional and attractive. Why have an unattractive toaster or coffee maker when you can have a great looking one?

Giving thought to these objects that you have to purchase anyway makes the difference in a home’s cohesive style. Take the time to enjoy your surroundings and treat yourself well.

Incorporating different art forms into your home brings a lifetime of pleasure. Living artfully should not just be a luxury. With a little thought and care about your surroundings, you can definitely make the pandemic easier to get through. Once our lives return to normal, don’t forget to keep taking care of your surroundings and appreciate all the different art forms that are in our everyday lives. Continue to bring things into your home that put function and style together. You will feel better. Your home should be your personal refuge.

As I am writing this I am contemplating both a new vacuum and acquiring a new photograph for our collection. Both will happily co-exist in our home. Live well by living with style.

For more, call 203-661-4700 or visit camidesigns.com.

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OCTOBER 2020 WAGMAG.COM

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WHAT'S NEW

HOME & DESIGN

AUCTION HOUSES ENDURE

BY KATIE BANSER-WHITTLE

COVID SOMETIMES SEEMS TO HAVE US ALL BOXED IN ON MANY LEVELS. MASKS, SOCIAL DISTANCING, ATTENDANCE LIMITS ON INDOOR GATHERINGS, TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS — ALL OF THESE CONSTRAINTS MIGHT MAKE IT SEEM AS THOUGH THE ENTIRE WORLD OF COLLECTING, BOTH FOR BUYERS AND SELLERS, HAS A GREAT BIG “CLOSED FOR BUSINESS” SIGN ON ALL THE ENTRANCES.

But happily, that’s not the case. In the past several months, Skinner has been working successfully outside the box.

New methods combined with the tried and true mean we can continue to offer myriad opportunities for collectors, de-acquisitioners (that’s a useful new term) and people who want to learn more about the world of antiques and collectibles.

Once upon a time, the idea of bidding by phone was a daring innovation. It caught on, and how. It was no longer necessary to be “in the room.” Bidders realized that remote bidding was a convenient, efficient way to acquire the objects of desire they’d seen in printed catalogs. Sellers realized that new technology increased the pool of competitors for their treasures.

More recently we’ve all become accustomed to e-commerce. Online catalogs with high-resolution photographs can show every aspect and detail of an item, in close-up and high magnification. Online bidding has proven to be a flexible, useful tool. And the high prices achieved at recent Skinner onlineonly sales emphasize the appeal of new technologies.

For example, the Skinner May 31 auction of American and European artworks met with great success,

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Alfons Walde’s “Aufstieg der Schifahrer” (oil on board) was a big hit at Skinner’s May 31 online auction.

doubling pre-auction estimates. Recordhigh interest came through participation in the United States, Canada and throughout Europe. A high point was Alfons Walde’s dynamic winter scene, “Aufstieg der Schifahrer.” It reached $612,500, including the buyer’s premium, against an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000. Bidders, many of them firsttimers, competed via the Skinner website, Bidsquare, telephone and absentee bids.

Virtual reality creates a virtuous circle in other ways as well. Anyone with internet access can email photographs and information for up to three items for expert consideration by one of Skinner’s regional appraisers. An estimate of value, delivery instructions and consignment terms will be offered for any item that would fit well in an upcoming auction.

“Virtual Tuesday” occurs in Massachusetts on the first Tuesday of the month. There is also “Maine Monday.”

And conveniently close by for WAG readers is “Westchester Wednesday.”

Complete information is on Skinner’s website.

But wait — there’s more. Specialist virtual talks accessible at skinnerinc.com provide insider insights from Skinner experts. Recent topics have included chicanery, skullduggery and shenanigans in the art market, and an intimate portrait of George Way, a self-taught scholar and collector of 16th- and 17th-century English and Dutch art and furniture.

Another virtual outreach at Skinner’s website can be found in the blog, with subjects ranging from rarity in

numismatics, to the history of the catalogue raisonné, the complete catalog of an artist’s work, to the allure of Chinese export silver. There are also videos such as a recent expert tutorial on English saltglazed stoneware.

Skinner has found creative and safe ways of continuing the personal interactions that can be so important to prospective sellers and would-be buyers.

In-person house calls following government guidelines can be arranged.

Limited to a single collecting interest, such as silver or fine art, under-the-tent consignment events with timed and controlled access are being held outdoors in Skinner’s Marlboro, Massachusetts, headquarters. Where appropriate and feasible, private exhibition previews by appointment only are offered.

No question, recent events have brought about huge changes in the way almost everything is bought and sold. The marketplace for antiques and collectibles has been profoundly affected. Skinner’s has shown itself to be highly adaptable to these challenging circumstances with a creative mix of new and old technologies to satisfy clients’ needs.

The auction world really is a story of constant renewal. Old things become new again, moving from old homes to new ones, bringing their beauty and their stories to delight new surroundings and new stewards.

There’s a metaphor for all of us in that.

For more, contact Katie at kwhittle@ skinnerinc.com or 212-787-1114.

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Heather Sari Monachelli | Houlihan Lawrence | Licensed Real Estate Agent OCTOBER 2020 WAGMAG.COM 914-439-2927 - Direct Line

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FASHION & BEAUTY

WEAR

A SHOP FIT FOR THE GODS

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

LET’S JUST SAY PESERICO HAD US AT ITS LOGO — A STYLIZED VERSION OF THE HEAD OF THE APOLLO BELVEDERE, A GRECOROMAN MARBLE THAT GRACES THE VATICAN MUSEUMS AND IS ONE OF THE GREAT WORKS OF ART. Like the Apollo Belvedere, Peserico’s creations are beautiful and deeply rooted in Italy. Founded in 1962 by Maria Peserico as a company making trousers for women in Cornedo Vicentino, about an hour outside Venice, the brand debuted its first collection of pants under its own name in 1975 — five

Monochromatic colors – with an occasional pop of jewel tones – luxurious fabrics, clean lines and scrupulous craftsmanship define the Peserico label. Courtesy Peserico SPA.

years after Peserico’s husband, Giuseppe Peruffo, joined in the management.

(Their son, Riccardo, is CEO of this family affair, with Riccardo’s wife, Paola Gonella, serving as creative director.) In 1980, Peserico launched its first ready-to-wear collection.

Ten years later, the brand entered the U.S. market. Today, it’s in 1,110 stores worldwide as well has more than 20 shops that bear its name, including one in Greenwich that opened in May 2018.

Recently, we visited Peserico’s

Greenwich Avenue store and drank in its chic monochromatic offerings — the brand produces 250,000 items per season — with occasional pops of color that make the neutrals all the more sedately sleek.

“I like to define Peserico as ‘everyday couture,’ with its soft colors, essential and elegant shapes for women of any age who like to feel chic and ready in any moment of their day,” Gonella told WWD in 2018. “The quality of our yarns and (more than 200) fabrics, often exclusive

to us, are tied to a sartorial craftsmanship that we support from the ’60s as a family tradition.”

And then there’s Peserico’s signature T-shirt in luxurious white cotton, with its cuffed cap sleeves and the stylized head of the Apollo Belvedere emblazoned in silver chain punta luce (“point of light”) embroidery on the front — a company signature.

It’s a classic piece fit for a classical god.

Peserico is at 279 Greenwich Ave. For more, call 203-869-7999.

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KING SIMBA “WHY IS IT YOU CAN NEVER HOPE TO DESCRIBE THE EMOTION AFRICA CREATES? YOU ARE LIFTED. OUT OF WHATEVER PIT, UNBOUND FROM WHATEVER TIE, RELEASED FROM WHATEVER FEAR. YOU ARE LIFTED AND YOU SEE IT ALL FROM ABOVE.” – Francesca Marciano

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CAN YOU REMEMBER PLAYING AS A CHILD AND ROARING LIKE A LION? Having a contest

to see who could roar the loudest? MGM and one of its predecessors, Goldwyn Pictures, have used a roaring lion mascot to begin its movies since 1916.

One of those movies was “The Wizard of Oz,” featuring the lovable Cowardly Lion, played by Bert Lahr in the 1939 film classic. In all cases, the African lion commands respect. Our love for this magnificent creature has only grown with the release of more books and films, including Joy Adamson’s “Born Free” and Disney’s production of “The Lion King.” Did you know that Simba is the word for “lion” in Swahili?

A male lion can be 4 1/2- to 6 1/2-feet long and weigh up to 420 pounds. In Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, with an altitude of 3000 to 6000 feet, males living in the highlands develop heavier manes than those in the more humid and warmer lowlands of Eastern and northern Kenya. There it is a common to find much smaller manes or even be completely maneless.

Joy Adamson’s true story of raising an orphan lion cub in the 1950s and her successful release into the African bush is one of the great conservation stories of all time. Elsa the lioness lives on and you can feel her presence when you visit their home Elsamere, open to tourists, in Kenya.

Joy and her husband George each left their entire estates to the Elsa Conservation Trust.

During the last 40 years, the trust has donated millions of dollars to wildlife education and conservation projects, large and small, helping to create many famous Kenyan parks and reserves.

For the Maasai people, peaceful pastoralists who make their homes in Kenya and Tanzania and can cross the border without passports, killing a lion used to be the ultimate symbol of bravery. Due to conservation efforts, the Maasai no longer kill lions, although a coveted, beaded mane collar that had been prepared in earlier times by Maasai women is bestowed upon those who display outstanding acts of courage in the protection of their village.

There are so many fascinating things to discover about lions and all the other creatures that can be found on safari with John Rizzo’s Africa Photo Tours. It’s an unforgettable trip filled with lions, elephants, leopards, zebras and rhinoceroses – all waiting to be discovered by you.

Rizzo, an award-winning photographer, leads a team of experienced guides, specializing in safari and tribal tours within East Africa – Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia. His experienced team brings an intimate group of guests of all ages to see the “Big Five” (buffalos, elephants, lions leopards and rhinos) as well as visit with the Maasai, Samburu and Turkana people. It’s a once in a lifetime experience, far more beautiful than any of your childhood memories.

For more, visit africaphototours.com africaphototours.com

WANDERS

TRAVEL

THE HAMPTONS, ARTFULLY STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS

BY JEREMY WAYNE

IF THE 35 MILES OF SOUND SHORE PROVIDE WESTCHESTER WITH ITS LOCAL BEACHES, THEN THE HAMPTONS MAY BE ITS CLOSEST RIVIERA. THE HAMPTONS’ SEASON, THOUGH, WITH BEACH LIFE DEPENDENT ON THE WEATHER, HAS TRADITIONALLY BEEN SHORT, BUT COVID-19 IS CHANGING ALL THAT.

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People with second homes and others wishing to escape the city by any means they can — something made easier by new-found opportunities to work from home — flocked to the Hamptons before Memorial Day in droves this year and showed no signs of leaving after the Labor Day cut-off.

As a result, the Hamptons’ art scene, which was already well-established, has recently rocketed. Hamptons people need art. An article by Ted Loos, which appeared in The New York Times in July and led the way for many others, called attention to the number of new galleries

opening in Long Island’s East End, many of them having relocated from New York City. Easthampton is the hub, with Pace, formerly the Vered Gallery, on Park Place Passage, and heavy-hitters Skarstedt, Van de Weghe and Sotheby’s lined up neatly in a row along Newtown Lane, ready to do art battle. Over in Southampton, the international dealers Hauser & Wirth have set up shop on Main Street, while out at Montauk — last art stop before Europe — the new South Etna gallery is said to be doing brisk business. And this is just the start.

If an art weekend on the island floats

Hauser & Wirth gallery, Southampton.

Above and top right: Baron’s Cove.

your boat, then October, before the weather turns too cold, would be a great time to take the trip. And when it comes to looking for a hotel, Sag Harbor, equidistant from South and Easthampton, might be a good place to stay. Although Sag is not exactly Hernando’s Hideaway in terms of obscurity, it is at least relatively quiet and traffic-free. It is also one of the few places where visitors without beachfront houses of their own can stay directly on the water. The town itself has a rich cultural history and hosts several festivals throughout the year

(at least in a normal year), and postcard pretty though it is, it has sufficient grit to make it real. Sag also has enough galleries of its own to sink a ship, if you’ll forgive the maritime pun.

At Baron’s Cove on Water Street, an old-established, 67-room resort that underwent a major renovation in 2015, you have the best of all worlds.

The cove is tranquil as can be but five minutes’ walk has you bang in the center of town. Check out Sag’s shops and galleries in the morning, return to Baron’s for lunch on its terrace overlooking the marina and spend a

lazy afternoon, at least in the warmer months, by the pool. There is also weekend morning yoga on the lawn for the contemplative, tennis every day for the sporty and bikes on a first-come, first-serve basis, for everybody.

Guest rooms vary considerably. You can park your car directly outside the almost motel-like, first-floor rooms, which fan out directly from the hotel lobby. These rooms are basic, clean and bright and with their ample patios with table and chairs, you can be entirely self-sufficient here if Covid worries prevent you, say, from venturing into

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Art House B&B in Easthampton.

the public parts of the hotel. For myself, I might splash out and plump for one of the pricier second-floor harborside suites, attractive duplexes with a downstairs living room and balcony overlooking the marina and a cosy upstairs bedroom.

But wherever you choose you’ll be in good company. The hotel has hosted a clutch of famous guests, including John Steinbeck, Truman Capote and Paul Newman, over the years and artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning also spent time here.

Heading northwest over the bridge, which links Sag Harbor to North Haven, you come after three miles to the South Ferry, which whisks you over to Shelter Island in just 10 minutes. Although not quite as convenient for the galleries of the Hamptons, Shelter Island boasts the Shelter Island House (known locally as

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SIH,) a charming boutique hotel that has been looking after guests since 1945 but in all respects is bang up to the minute. With its spacious guest rooms and gorgeous pool, plus a terrific restaurant and bar, this is one of the area’s most appealing hotels.

Heading south again, the Topping Rose House in Bridgehampton offers an 1842 Greek Revival Mansion that opened in 2013 and bills itself as the Hamptons’ first “full-service” hotel, with luxury and original art of its own, albeit at an appreciable price. Its restaurant, which has Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s name above the door, is the subject of this month’s Wonderful Dining. (See Page 76.)

And in the local artists’ neighborhood of Clearwater Beach — a 12-minute drive to downtown Easthampton, with private access to the beach preserve and the marina on Gardiner’s Bay that

few tourists get to see — the four-room Art House B&B (actually an expansive villa) offers yet another perspective on Hamptons life. There are private and communal seating areas in the landscaped gardens, an indoor and outdoor pool and a complimentary gourmet breakfast each morning.

Expect “intuitive service and newfashioned luxury,” say owners Rosalind Brenner and Michael Cardacino, artists themselves, and indeed guests are welcome to tour their studios, which are located in the villa.

With world-class art, great food and a good night’s sleep, the Hamptons have it all.

For more, visit caperesorts.com/ barons-cov, shelterislandhouse.com, toppingrosehouse.com and easthampton-arthousebedandbreakfast.com.

WWW.MURIQICOSMETICS.COM

WANDERS

TRAVEL

Basilica Palladiana. Photographs courtesy Sloane Travel Photography.

SMILING THROUGH THE VENETO

BY BARBARA BARTON SLOANE

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STEPPING INTO AN ANKLE-DEEP PUDDLE, I ALMOST LOST MY FOOTING AND QUICKLY HAD TO GRAB THE HAND OF AN ELDERLY GENTLEMAN, WHO THEN CEREMONIOUSLY LED ME ONTO A LARGE WOODEN PLANK SITTING ATOP SEVERAL INCHES OF WATER, COURTESY OF THE GRAND CANAL.

Walking the plank before I reached the hotel door, a fierce gust of wind blew off my hat and turned my umbrella into a bowl-shaped, useless thing. Despite this inauspicious start, my eyes were sparkling and my mouth was turned upward in a silly grin. So why was I smiling? It’s simple: I was in Venice, and I dare anyone, in any weather and under any circumstance, not to greet the site of this Wonder on the Water without smiling. Impossible. Can’t be done.

My pre-Covid venture into the Veneto — Italy’s eighth largest region, containing some of its most legendary cities, including Venice, the regional capital — did indeed start off soggy. But soon the fabled sun that graces this region was out and my umbrella was in — back

in my luggage, not to make another appearance for the rest of the trip.

Once ensconced in my room at the Luna Hotel Baglioni, I was quickly transported into a Venetian dream with a window that looked out on a canal, water softly splashing against the hotel’s walls. That evening, my travel companions and I had a special treat awaiting us. We walked a short distance to Piazza San Marco and stood transfixed by a luminous silver sky, mauve clouds scudding quickly across the Campanile and, of course, ubiquitous gray pigeons swooping overhead in gay greeting. We dined at the Caffe Ristorante Quadri, which dates from 1725. Over the years everyone from Stendhal to Proust, Wagner and Byron has dined here and in this pinch-myself moment, now me.

CRUISING

The best ride you will ever have and one of life’s great pleasures — plying the waters of the Grand Canal. I had

the feeling I was in a living Canaletto painting, the sky an impossible blue and surrounded by ancient palazzos, their colors soft terra-cotta, cream, gray and beige. This great road of water was filled with vaporetti, motorboats and gondolas, the boat moorings like peppermint sticks jutting up from the water — a scene that would thrill even the most jaded world traveler.

While on the Canal, stopped to visit the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at Sestiere Dorsoduro 701. This is among the most important museums in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the 20th century. It’s located in Peggy Guggenheim’s former home, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. The museum was inaugurated in 1980 and presents Peggy Guggenheim’s personal collection, masterpieces from the Gianni Mattioli Collection and the Nasher Sculpture Garden, as well as temporary exhibitions.

The Grand Canal.

WHEREFORE ART THOU?

The city of Verona is 71 miles west of Venice, and is, of course, the setting for Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

A long-forgotten editor of one of the Bard’s plays wrote: “Verona, so rich in real history, has an even greater charm for those who would live in the poetry of the past.” Hmmm, live in the poetry of the past: That’s my kind of neighborhood, and so is Verona, one of the great cities of Italy, where the past is ever present.

Our sightseeing took us to Casa di Giulietta, a house the city acquired in 1905. Many locals believe that in the 19th century the house was a bordello, but I prefer to close my eyes and picture Juliet leaning over her balcony, swooning over that Montague boy.

PASSAGE TO PADUA

This is a major art center of the Veneto. Standing below the imposing façade of Padua University, Italy’s second oldest, we learned that Dante and Galileo were once professors here. In the square, we heard a loud commotion, singing, shouting and laughing. Turns out it was a large group of the university’s students serenading a recent graduate in a traditional and bawdy fashion. The embarrassed girl was being marched through the square wearing a crazy costume, including a

Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Courtesy Italian Tourist Board.

shower cap and flippers, and carrying a sign that proclaimed her graduate status. The crowd sang something our guide loosely translated as “You’re a doctor now, big deal, go…….yourself.”

All in good fun, but I suspected the graduate would be happy when her “fun” was over.

The modest Chapel of the Scrovegni is one of the best reasons to visit Padua.

Sometime around 1305, the artist Giotto did several frescos on the chapel’s walls, and we stood enthralled before one of his most awe-inspiring, “The Last Judgment.”

AN ARCHITECTURAL DELIGHT

In the 16th century, Vicenza was transformed into a virtual laboratory for the architectural experiments of Andrea di Pietro known as Palladio, one of the great architects of the High Renaissance.

Here we came upon the alabaster-white Basilica Palladiana shimmering in the sunlight. On our city tour, we were rendered speechless by one of Palladio’s

greatest masterpieces, the Olympic Theater, which was completed five years after the architect’s death in 1585. The trompe l’oeil renderings onstage are, themselves, worth a visit.

MEDIEVAL MARVEL

In Treviso we strolled through this well-preserved ancient city gaping at the fantastically frescoed houses. We sat on a bench by a slow-flowing canal and enjoyed a spectacular lunch at the Park Hotel Bolognese, a villa of the late 1800s.

Viewing Dante’s Bridge, we were told it was so named because Dante actually referred to this town in his “Paradiso.”

ARRIVEDERCI

The time to depart Italy arrived but no final farewell for me. I prefer to say “Arrivederci” — so long for now, see you again. And by the way, that silly grin that adorned my face when I arrived — well, I’m still smiling and when you visit the Veneto, you’ll smile, too.

For more, visit italiantourism.com.

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WANDERS

TRAVEL

One of Charmco’s travel bracelets in 14-karat gold.

A 'CHARMED' LIFE

BY DEBBI K. KICKHAM

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT EVERY YEAR IT GETS HARDER AND HARDER FOR MY HUSBAND BILL TO BUY ME PRESENTS. I ALREADY HAVE JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING AND IN MY WORK AS A GORGEOUS GLOBETROTTER, I ALWAYS FIND AMAZING DISCOVERIES FOR MYSELF WHEN I’M SHOPPING. YET I JUST CAME UPON A COMPANY IN NEW YORK THAT MAY BE THE ANSWER TO EVERYONE’S GIFTING. It’s Charmco — a fabulous online 14-karat gold charm company whose best sellers are travel charms and bracelets. They’re the go-to brand for allthings-“charm’ing.

So I’m telling my husband, Bill, — for all future reference — to go online to see all the Lilliputian lovelies such as the mini

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Eiffel Tower, New York taxicab or the moveable charm of a cruise ship. These would be a welcome addition to my wrist.

Charmco has a full-scale, full-service showroom on 47th Street in Manhattan’s Diamond District and sees clients by appointment only. Everything is done on-site, as the jewelers and engravers “are all in one place,” says co-owner Lisa Feldkamp. She and her mom, Leslie Slutsky, started the company after Leslie gave a charm bracelet to her daughter, and “Everyone commented on it…and we got impassioned about it.”

Indeed, Leslie says, “We have a lot of customers in Westchester and in the tristate area, as well as all over the world.

We focus on the U.S.A. and Canada.”

One special characteristic that sets Charmco apart is that the company offers a wealth of vintage charms from different eras, which they sourced at antique shops and trade shows. No matter what you’re looking for, there’s sure to be a charm for you.

“Travel charms are our best sellers,” says Lisa, citing the Eiffel Tower, Roman Coliseum, Stonehenge and Big Ben, as well as the Empire State Building

and diminutive suitcases that can be engraved with your monogram. Some of my favorites include the $375 tiny tropical drink, the $245 conch shell with pink enamel and the $195 U.S. Passport.

But besides Travel, Charmco offers charms in the areas of beauty, hobbies, professions, love, pets, beach and nautical themes and even colleges.

What’s the big trend for this year?

Aside from charm bracelets, “Necklaces with 20 or more charms on them “are a big driver this year,” Lisa says. “Just throw it on with a button-down shirt and you can look chic.”

Or echo Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, who sports a charm necklace with the first initials of her three children — George, Charlotte and Louis.

Along with that, the best-selling gold bracelet on which to attach your charms is the Sophia in solid gold that sells for $525.

No matter what you choose, you’ll have a bespoke bracelet that lets you wear your wanderlust.

For more, visit charmco.com/. And for more on Debbi, visit debbikickham.com.

See Africa as only an insider can Bring your camera and learn how to capture some amazing moments.

10-DAY KENYA SAFARI, NOVEMBER 2019 africaphototours.com

WONDERFUL DINING

FOOD & SPIRITS

Stephanie Hirsch’s “Don’t Settle” (2016), mixed media.

TOPPING ROSE IS STILL THE TOP STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS

BY JEREMY WAYNE

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THERE IS A PLACE AT THE INN — I KNOW THERE IS, BECAUSE I HAVE BOOKED DINNER FOR TWO ON RESY — BUT THERE IS NO PLACE IN THE PARKING LOT AT THE INN TO PARK THE WAGON. IT’S A MONDAY NIGHT, THE SEASON IS OFFICIALLY OVER AND THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF GOOD RESTAURANTS IN THE HAMPTONS, BUT TOPPING ROSE IS BURSTING AT THE SEAMS. WAY TO GO. In the restaurant dining room, meanwhile, where Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s name now adorns the shingle, half the tables have been removed in line with the current Covid requirements, but banquette seating, bentwood chairs and soft lighting from striking wall sconces, which resemble the fingers of an upturned hand, give the space a stylish look.

Additionally, a wide and handsome deck runs

around three sides of the house, filled with well-spaced tables — or half-filled, you should say — and punctuated with those tall, obelisk-shaped flame heaters, throwing out their warmth and romantic light. One step down and there are more tables still in the gardens surrounding the property, lush and grown-up now, far different from the spare, sparse backyard I encountered when Topping Rose, a Greek Revivalist mansion built in 1842, first opened as a hotel under its present ownership in 2013.

Parked and seated at last at a cosy corner table for two — just a candle, a daisy and sprig of blue alpine holly for decoration — we take in the room. Labor Day has long gone but the men wear deck shoes year-round here. And they’re sockless, of course. (No man has worn socks in the Hamptons since the mid80s.) Women wear Loro Piana pants and everything cropped.

Nico, our genial and well-informed server, has glasses of Taittinger on the table in a flash. Small-bubbled and properly cold, it was a treat to drink the real thing after months spent at home indiscriminately guzzling supermarket Prosecco. (“There are many alternatives but no substitutes,” a well-known Champagne maker once put it to me.)

If there was little sign of the advertised Champagne dressing in a generous starter of warm shrimp and avocado salad, that hardly mattered, because it was the fresh-caught shrimp that sang. In another appetizer of crispy salmon sushi, an overlay of mild, delicate salmon sat atop crisp sushi rice, sprinked with a chipotle mayonnaise and made umami-rich with its soy glaze.

An entr’acte black truffle and fontina pizza — something of a Jean-Georges signature dish — put by any selfcongratulation on our healthy dinner up to this point.

On a first reading, the entrées on the Topping Rose menu seemed almost banal by comparison — salmon, hamburger, beef and pasta — all of them “usual suspects” you might find on any fairly upscale menu anywhere.

No overblown farm-to-table talk here, no arcane brassicas with chef’s secret dressing.

Scratch a bit, though, trust the kitchen and the prizes start to pile up. Three fleshy, succulent Colorado lamb chops (meat and poultry come from topline supplier D’Artagnan), served pink, arrive at the table with the sort of griddle lines that give an incredibly deep aroma and

The restaurant at Topping Rose House.

Lauren Welch’s “Sweater Goose Wearing a Goose Sweater” (2019), acrylic on canvas.

flavor to the meat and speak of clubby, old-fashioned grill rooms. These chops could have come out of Taillevent in Paris, or one of those smart asadors in the posh Chamberí district of Madrid.

Washed down with Jean-George’s ownlabel Pinot Noir, it is a dish to remember.

Another is roasted Maine lobster, simply cooked and served with nothing more than herb butter, a twist of lime and golden French fries. The mashed potato, by the way, a great accompaniment for any lamb or beef dishes, is the best in North America. Period.

Not so rosy at Topping Rose are the

desserts. A chocolate chip or brownie cookie, even jumbo sized, is not much of a dessert to me. And the “decadent” chocolate cake — so much promise in that juxtaposition of words — isn’t really. It is in fact a mid-sized chocolate fondant, nicely done, but not a cake as we know it. Long Island is brimming over with fruit at this time of year — fall raspberries, peaches, pears and, of course, apples. Even figs, if you know where to look. (That would be Oysterponds Farm in Orient.) Bar the peach pie, with its dollop of marzipan ice cream, a few more fruit-based desserts might have been a salient addition.

Mood music is provided by the likes of Jake Troth (“Look for the Good”) and Jason Mraz (“Give Them Your Sunday Smile,”) up-tempo and relentlessly cheerful. And this being our arts issue, there is of course original art aplenty at Topping Rose — Zaria Forman’s “Charcot Fjord, Greenland,” for instance, a huge black canvas seemingly pierced through with glacial ice, or Tony Scherman’s sensual “Mary Magdalene.” Curated by Winston Wächter Fine Art in New York City, all of it is for sale. But be warned: You’re going to need some pretty resilient plastic if you add a Stephanie Hirsch or a Lauryn Welch to your dinner check.

For menu and reservations, visit toppingrosehouse.com. For more on the art at Topping Rose House, email cwachter@winstonwachter.com.

OCTOBER 2020 WAGMAG.COM

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KEEPING WINE LOVERS ‘CONNECTED’

BY DOUG PAULDING

YEARS AGO, BECOMING A WINE WRITER REQUIRED A JOURNALISM DEGREE AND SOME BACKGROUND IN THE WINE OR RESTAURANT INDUSTRY. Today, with

WINE & DINE

FOOD & SPIRITS

blogging and web-based information and discoveries, it is far easier to broach the subject. I know wine professionals who taste and review wines and have developed a substantial online following.

And now, with the Covid pandemic still raging and remote interviews of virtually anyone in the world possible, many wine writers are morphing into online interviewers. Wanda Mann, David Eckert and Monique Soltani are a few who have all developed a remote interview style and following in the food and beverage industry and will bring worthy subjects and personalities into your home or car whenever you have time to tune in.

Melanie Young and David Ransom have been in the wine industry forever.

Melanie’s dad, Mel Young, was a CPA with a wine passion and developed a respectable wine cellar and a following in the early 1970s. He created a wine course he taught for decades and was affectionately known as the “wine professor.” Melanie learned wine from her dad and eventually took a job in the hospitality public relations field, which then morphed into wine PR and wine, food, health and travel writing. David’s father worked for IBM. In 1987. The family bought the Rivendell Winery in New Paltz, which would become New York’s top, award-winning winery.

As Melanie’s wine PR business took off, the two of them met and Melanie

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David Ransom and Melanie Young. Courtesy Michael Gold Photography.

coaxed David into wine writing and helping her organize wine tasting and educational wine events. Romantic things began to happen, too, with David proposing to Melanie live in front of 2,000 wine and food professionals at the James Beard Awards. (Fortunately, she said, “Yes.”) Today, David is president of the Wine Media Guild, a consortium of wine promoting professionals based in New York.

They both write for different wine magazines, are active in social media and have developed a radio show interviewing wine and food principals.

Their show can be found on W4CY, an internet-based radio station at 2 p.m.

Wednesdays. They are also available on Spotify and IHeart and all major podcasting platforms. Now in their sixth year, the two have interviewed more than 500 dynamic personalities, including thought-provoking leaders in the food, wine, spirits, travel and hospitality industries around the world.

They conduct in-depth interviews faceto-face and sometimes remotely via Skype, Zoom or some other e-manner.

“We try to expose the personalities and welcome the listener, if only for a short while, into the interviewee’s life,” Melanie told me. “It’s more than a sliceof-life interview. We want to deliver, in living color, who they are, what makes them unique, how they got there and maybe where they are going.”

Winemaker Nicholas Joly from the Loire Valley, a biodynamic winemaking pioneer, commanded their show with his passion for healthy, living vineyards. David and Melanie were invited to Sting’s winery in Il Palagio in Tuscany just south of Florence and got a vineyard tour and tasting in Sting and Trudy Styler’s living room, surrounded by framed family pictures.

Chef Jacques Pepin told of his first bed being an open drawer in a bureau in his parent’s bedroom. Winemaker and wine consultant Michel Rolland grew up on a winery in Bordeaux but today his happy place is horseback riding in Argentina near the vineyard, Clos de la Siete, where he has a financial stake and significant ownership status.

“Robert Parker was a fantastic interview,” David adds. “He was so pleasant and nice with a world of knowledge. He was very solid and down-to-earth and very gracious and considerate. After years of hearing of Parker in reverential or denigrating term, we didn’t know what to expect from him”.

All of David and Melanie’s interviews are discoverable on theconnectedtable. com. There is a ton of content and information. If you want to learn about food and wine in an entertaining setting while driving, exercising or cooking dinner, this is the place.

Write me at doug@dougpaulding.com.

TRATTORIA 632

Restaurants in Westchester County change plans but not dreams amidst the pandemic....

The very popular family eatery, Trattoria 632 is excited to welcome back their loyal diners and greet new ones as they open for indoor and outdoor dining on their new patio. Delivery and take-out of their full, extensive menu is also available. Patrons can rest assured that Trattoria 632 has taken every measure and precaution to ensure a delectable and safe dining experience.

Nonna Marieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s homemade cakes and pies are no exception! She is serving her famous carrot cake and original cheesecake recipes and Trattoria 632 is delighted to see their customers smiling again!

632 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, NY 10577 914-481-5811 trattoria632 .com

INGREDIENTS: 2 tablespoons coconut oil 1 teaspoon turmeric powder 2 teaspoons kosher salt 1 teaspoon black pepper powder 1 teaspoon garlic powder 1/4 cup minced shallots 5 eggs

WHAT’S COOKING?

FOOD & SPIRITS

MY POSH TOAST

FOR GARNISH: 3-4 petals of edible flowers 1 tablespoon ketchup 3-4 fresh cilantro leaves 2-3 Jalapeno sliced thin

AN ‘EGGS’CELLENT RECIPE

BY RAJNI MENON Eggs are a versatile protein that can be had any time of the day or night. Eggs cooked in coconut oil are to die for. The soft scrambled eggs combined with the aroma of coconut oil along with shallots are heavenly. It was one of the dishes my mom would turn to when she’d had a long day and wanted to make a simple dinner.

Eggs taste great with toast, but my mom would make this with a flatbread called chapati. These scrambled eggs are a staple on the menu on most of the street food carts in Kerala as well, as the taste is amazing.

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INGREDIENTS FOR TOAST 1 tablespoon butter 1 garlic clove 1/2 Roma tomato 1 pinch of salt DIRECTIONS: For eggs: 1. In a bowl mix all the spices, salt, shallots and eggs and beat well until pale yellow.

2. In a pan heat coconut oil and add in the eggs and cook until soft and almost done. Set aside.

For toast: 1. Heat a pan and toast 2 slices of sourdough bread with butter until well toasted.

2. Once toasted let them rest for a few seconds and rub a garlic clove onto each of the toasts.

3. Next rub the tomato on the toasts as well and let the tomato juice seep into the toasty bread. Add in a pinch of salt.

4. Add in a good amount of eggs onto each toast and garnish with edible petals, jalapeño slices, ketchup and fresh cilantro leaves.

5. Enjoy your eggs with a cup of hot tea.

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PATIENCE IS KEY IN COVID-ERA BREAST RECONSTRUCTION

BY CONSTANCE M. CHEN, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.C.S.

A DIAGNOSIS OF BREAST CANCER IS OVERWHELMING AT ANY TIME. BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR WOMEN WHO WERE DIAGNOSED DURING THE COVID PANDEMIC AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT DECISIONS ABOUT POST-MASTECTOMY BREAST RECONSTRUCTION?

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HEALTH & FITNESS

For starters, the fundamentals of cancer treatment remain the same.

Patients need to work with their oncologists to decide upon the best course of therapy. Women should fortify themselves with good nutrition and exercise and pay attention to their mental health. Masks and social distancing are essential to avoid complicating treatment. Once the basics are addressed, breast cancer patients should know that post-mastectomy breast reconstruction can be delayed without compromising the final aesthetic outcome.

The paramount goal of breast cancer treatment is to prolong and maintain quality of life, and women need to remember this during the Covid pandemic. And while treatment options may vary depending on the aggressiveness of a tumor, some basic facts remain the same. Oncologic treatments such as ablative surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy should take precedence over reconstructive treatment. Furthermore, a delayed breast reconstruction can be just as good as an immediate breast reconstruction as long as there is teamwork and thoughtful planning between the oncologic surgeon and the reconstructive surgeon.

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During the Covid pandemic, many women may decide to delay breast reconstruction, because hospital resources may be more limited. Furthermore, delaying breast reconstruction minimizes anesthesia time and recovery after the oncologic procedure, which curtails challenges to the immune system. By diminishing trauma to the body from surgery, the potential for postoperative complications such as infections and wound healing problems is also decreased, which reduces the subsequent need for frequent in-person postoperative visits — important during a pandemic.

For patients who want immediate breast reconstruction, they should recognize the risks and benefits of the different types of breast reconstruction.

In the short term, tissue expander and implant-based surgery is a quicker and easier operation for a healthy patient, but some patients may suffer long-term negative reactions to the foreign body.

In the long term, natural tissue breast reconstruction integrates best with the body, but the bigger operation may be a harder recovery in the short term. For high-risk patients — such as those with nicotine exposure, diabetes, a BMI (Body Mass Index) greater than 30, history of radiation therapy or other medical comorbidities — the safest course may be simply to delay reconstruction to reduce the risk of infection and wound-healing problems.

Whether breast reconstruction is delayed or immediate, most patients want their new breasts to look and feel as much as possible like normal, living breasts. The gold standard in breast reconstruction is nipple-sparing mastectomy and natural tissue breast reconstruction, which gives a patient soft, warm breasts that grow and shrink as she gains and loses weight. With careful planning, this can be accomplished even with a delayed breast reconstruction. A woman does not need to compromise on her ultimate breast reconstruction if she and her plastic surgeon can persuade her oncologic breast surgeon to perform a nipple-sparing mastectomy, no matter how large her breasts.

A nipple-sparing mastectomy sets up a patient to achieve the ultimate breast reconstruction. In a nipplesparing mastectomy, the breast surgeon needs to make sure that she does not

remove any breast skin and all the skin is left intact as if there is going to be an immediate breast reconstruction. If she cannot salvage the nipple for oncologic reasons, she can resect the nipple-areola complex alone and close it with a pursestring closure. This preserves the entire breast skin and creates the framework for a normal breast shape. This may be challenging for some breast surgeons to accept, because they will be focused understandably on the immediate postoperative appearance of a flat chest with empty excess skin and may worry that the breast skin will look deformed until the delayed breast reconstruction. It is vital to accept the temporary wrinkled appearance of the breasts, however, to ensure enough skin during the ultimate delayed breast reconstruction. Even in large-breasted women, the breast skin will retract during the time between mastectomy and reconstruction, and it is always possible to resect excess breast skin later if necessary. However, skin that has been resected at the time of mastectomy can never be replaced.

There is no limit to how long to delay the ultimate breast reconstruction, but patients should heal completely from the initial mastectomy because tissues can be friable and delicate in the immediate postoperative period. For a delayed breast reconstruction, it is best to wait at least three months to allow the body to fully recover from the first oncologic surgery, but longer periods are perfectly acceptable and even preferable as the extra time only gives the body a chance to heal more fully. In addition, by undergoing oncologic and reconstructive surgery in stages, patients can confirm clear margins prior to breast reconstruction. For patients who need radiation therapy, breast reconstruction should be delayed at least 6 months after radiation is completed. By delaying reconstruction, patients give their body a break. Risk of recurrence of the primary tumor is highest in the first 18 months after treatment, so some patients may wait one to two years or even later to go back to the operating room for breast reconstruction. No matter how long the wait, it is crucial to complete oncologic treatment first and then allow the body to recover fully from the essential oncologic treatment.

For more, visit constancechenmd. com.

Been avoiding seeing your orthopedic specialist?

Maybe it’s time to stop putting it off.

At Yale New Haven Health, we’ve instituted a comprehensive 10-step safety program in all of our facilities to ensure that everything is clean, safe, and ready to treat you at a moment’s notice. There’s never been a better time to take advantage of our world-class medical expertise in the presence of new, world-class safety measures. greenwichhospital.org

DENTISTRY IN THE AGE OF COVID

led to a smile makeover transformation.

While there are many apps that promise to put a filter on your smile or to brighten your teeth with an Instagram filter, live video cannot hide the imperfections in your teeth that you may not like.

BY KENNETH MAGID, D.D.S., F.I.C.D.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

— Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”

FOR A WESTCHESTER COUNTY DENTIST, THE OPENING OF DICKENS’ NOVEL IS AN APT ONE. THE PANDEMIC CAUSED THE SHUTDOWN OF OUR HARRISON, NEW YORK DENTAL PRACTICE, ADVANCED DENTISTRY OF WESTCHESTER, FOR THREE MONTHS AND MADE IT MORE DIFFICULT TO TAKE CARE OF OUR PATIENTS 24/7/365 IN CASE OF DENTAL EMERGENCIES, WHICH WE HAVE HANDLED FOR THE PAST 50 YEARS.

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The pandemic made it necessary for us to research and purchase the extensive equipment we use to create “surgically clean air” in each room, including external vacuum devices to remove and disinfect the aerosols created by dental treatment, fogging devices to treat each room (and ourselves between patients), and extensive PPE for our team.

We have had to work in uncomfortable N95 masks, face shields and gowns.

We have even gone to the effort of being certified as a Covid testing center for our staff and patients when the equipment is available. All of this pales in comparison to the devastation felt by those who have lost a loved one or had to close their business permanently, but it certainly represents the most challenging time during my 50 years in dental practice.

But just as in “A Tale of Two Cities,” there is another side to this story.

We have had a significant increase in the number of new patients who will not travel to New York City for

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Kenneth Magid.

dental appointments and who are more comfortable with the extensive measures we have taken to create a safe environment for their dental care.

Is it safe to go to the dentist during the pandemic? Under the present circumstances, it is important to complete dental treatment in as few visits as possible, and thus our use of CADCAM to create crowns and inlays in one visit instead of two or three has become more important now than ever before.

To reduce the number of dental visits, we also use our CAD-CAM system to place dental implants without extensive surgery or healing. Our use of lasers instead of a “drill” for many procedures eliminates the contaminated aerosol, which is also critical during the pandemic.

How Zoom meetings disrupted the dental industry The pandemic has also changed people’s spending habits and priorities.

Many people are tragically out of work and are struggling to pay for life’s necessities. For others who are still employed, they may have chosen to improve their health and appearance by taking care of dental treatment that has been postponed, instead of dining out frequently or going on vacation. In this age of wearing masks, you might think that improving your smile’s appearance would not be a priority. However, Zoom or Skype meetings focus closely on the face, and a worn, discolored or unattractive smile soon becomes obvious. It has led to a surge in patients wanting to address their smiles through cosmetic makeover enhancements, because their smiles are now center stage among colleagues and business associates in an increasingly virtual world.

The rapid digital transformation has also

Computer guided dentistry As assistant director of honors esthetics at New York University College of Dentistry, I’ve had many referrals for cosmetic dentistry enhancement procedures. One of the techniques I pioneered was the use of a photograph and computer enhancements to show patients their proposed new smiles. We have modified this in response to the pandemic, allowing people to send us a good photo of their smile for computer enhancements without an in-person visit.

The art of cosmetic dentistry There is a mathematic formula for the width, length, shape and position of teeth based upon the patient’s face and dental arch. With this altered photo, the patient can see his, or her, new smile and make any changes he would like. Once he is happy with the new look, the ceramist artistically creates the final result in a wax model. This “wax up” smile is used to guide the dentist in preparing the teeth if necessary and to create the basic shape of the temporary veneers or crowns. It is the artistic talent of the dentist that modifies these temporaries while the patient is wearing them for maximum esthetics. The patient gets to leave with this “try in” smile and live with it for days to make sure he loves the new look so there are no unhappy surprises. All that is necessary is for the dental ceramist to copy the try-in smile using artistically added shades and stains for a beautiful but natural look that is ready for a Zoom close-up.

Kenneth Magid, D.D.S., F.I.C.D OF Advanced Dentistry of Westchester in Harrison is also director of pre-doctoral laser dentistry and associate clinical professor at New York University College of Dentistry as well as the assistant director of honors esthetics there. He has appeared on national TV and radio shows to discuss high-tech and cosmetic dentistry, including on ABC and in The New York Times.

Magid lectures throughout the United States and Canada and is a contributor to many medical journals on topics, that include minimally invasive dentistry, laser dentistry, digital radiography, air-abrasion dentistry, 21st century dentistry. and cosmetic dentistry.

For more, visit adofw.com.

AVAILABLE NOW: WAG'S OWN FITNESS GURU GIOVANNI ROSELLI'S COMPLETE ONLINE NUTRITION AND EXERCISE PROGRAM

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Unlike many other "diet plans", this is NOT a set of "rules" or a "one-size-fits-all" prescription. In fact, it's not a prescription at all. It's a set of principles about how and why nutritional choices work. Principles such as: • Progressively building habits over a long period of time to promote confidence and long-term sustainability.

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• Helping bodies function and perform their best, approaching change holistically; looking at all sides of a problem.

Nationally certified and recognized fitness trainer and Precision Nutrition coach.

• Mention this WAG Magazine ad and receive 20% OFF the program. As a thank you, veterans receive 50% OFF. • Daily nutritional habits and reminders guide you through your transformation.

• Workouts come complete with videos and modifications specific to the individual.

• At the end of the program, if not completely satisfied, you will receive a full refund.

Visit www.GiovanniRoselli.com for more info or contact him directly at Gio@GiovanniRoselli.com.

OCTOBER 2020 WAGMAG.COM

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THE OTHER 23 HOURS

BY GIOVANNI ROSELLI

“Balance is the key to everything. What we do, think, say, eat, feel, they all require awareness, and through this awareness we can grow.”

— vlogger and spiritual teacher Koi Fresco

WE HAVE ALL HEARD IN SOME WAY, SHAPE OR FORM HOW IMPORTANT “THE OTHER 23 HOURS” ARE — WHAT WE ARE DOING OUTSIDE OF OUR WORKOUT WINDOW THAT IS CONTRIBUTING TO OUR OVERALL HEALTH PUZZLE. With the

• Does working out on an empty stomach help burn more fat?

• You read that those who eat plantbased diets have a better quality of life and now you want to try one.

Come on, you know we can list about 1,000 more like this. As a fitness professional and health coach we know all too well the rhetoric that is constantly being thrown around. Then more questions, comments and concerns arise as we try to navigate the best we can.

This is why it is absolutely necessary to have some type of nutritional education and guidance, given all the information, misinformation and trends circulating.

RECOVERY

When it comes to exercise, we have a structure to get to outcome-based solutions. For example, if someone wanted to build muscle, there is a certain rep range, rest period, number of sets and weight that are required to create this response. The recovery world is much different and much less

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STRESS MANAGEMENT

Exercise is a stressor to the body, unless of course you are doing enough passive and/or non-taxing exercise, which is why the recovery portion needs adequate attention.

So if you are already overly stressed, especially given our unique times today, and you throw intense exercise on top of this, which adds stress to the body, is it any wonder why we hear the word “inflammation” so much?

• How do you handle social media distractions?

• Do you have a good nighttime routine that helps aid in sleep quality?

• Do you find the time to decompress after a long day of work?

• Are any breathing techniques implemented into your daily ritual?

We will inevitably come across individuals who like to crush it in the gym, but do very little self-care outside of it. These individuals wonder why they do not feel they are making much progress. Well, we know the answer.

experience that I’ve accumulated as a fitness coach, coupled with the battle we all face against Father Time, I have become much more focused on what I am doing outside of the gym walls over the last several years. With this, I've been able to coach clients with this same mindset.

To those fitness enthusiasts reading this, helping to guide and coach you is a lot more complicated than figuring out a workout plan. To my fitness colleagues, you know that attempting to help a client requires a lot more effort than giving them a good sweat session.

I have written entire articles on nutrition alone, which validates my point even more so that the non exercise portion of our lives is just as critical and important as getting in a good day of training and burning some calories.

With the abundance of nutritional information floating out in the world today, many would argue that it’s actually more confusing than helpful.

• Should you try intermittent fasting?

• Your family member just went on keto and now he’s telling you that you should do it too.

• Are carbs the enemy?

Should someone spend more time with a particular method than someone else based on certain markers?

Generally speaking, the older we get the more recovery and self-care we need. That same workout you did at 24 years old will feel a lot different if you try to do it at 44.

Knowing and learning about all the different ways to recover and repair takes time. These methods, like nutrition, are once again necessary when looking at maximizing health.

Giovanni Roselli. Courtesy Roselli Health & Fitness.

structured and organized.

Sleep. Cryotherapy. Compression Boots. Stretching. Foam Rolling.

Percussion Guns. Passive Vibration.

Epson Salt Baths. Ice Baths. Electric Stim. Red Light Therapy. Sauna. Steam Room. Massage. Trigger Point Therapy.

Rolfing. Chiropractic Care. Acupuncture.

Floating. Swimming & Pool Activities.

Restorative Yoga. Meditation. Tai Chi. These are just a few examples of some popular recovery strategies. And if all of these are good for us, how often should we be doing them? Are any contraindicated based on the individual?

Finding time to exercise — whether it be 15 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour — still poses an obstacle to some. However, in the grand scheme of things, carving out the time to move can be considered fairly simple compared to the decisions we need to make for our nutrition, recovery and stress. There is never any one definitive answer to any fitness or health-related topic, which inevitably makes things even more complicated.

With the prevalence of “The Other 23 Hours” continuing to become popular, a seasoned and professional health coach knows that it will take a lot more than sets and reps to optimize someone’s health.

Reach Giovanni on Twitter @ GiovanniRoselli and at his website, GiovanniRoselli.com.

A WRITER TRYING TO OUTPACE HER PAST A DELIVERY MAN ON THE FRONTLINES AND THE GLASS DOOR THAT DIVIDES YET CONNECTS THEM

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FROM WAGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S EDITOR COMES A BRIEF TALE OF LOVE AND LOSS IN THE TIME OF CORONA THEGAMESMENPLAY.COM OCTOBER 2020 WAGMAG.COM

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Playful pup Loki lives up to his name.

Courtesy SPCA.

PET OF THE MONTH

PET CARE

LOVABLE, LOOPY LOKI

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Whether in Norse mythology or the Marvel universe, Loki is a bit of a trickster and thus the perfect name for this ridiculously cute, playful pup that the SPCA in Briarcliff Manor rescued from a high-kill shelter.

The 4 month old may be rambunctious, but it’s all in good fun as he just loves everyone. His Pitbull/Boxer blood may explain his irresistible blend of goofiness and smarts.

WAGMAG.COM OCTOBER 2020

Loki will make a great addition to a family with an active home – and a big yard – to keep up with his silly antics and outgoing personality.

One thing’s certain: Whoever offers him a forever family can look forward to many years of adventures.

To learn more about Loki and/or set up a meet and greet, email an application to shelter@spca914. org. Applications can be found at spca914.org.

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WHEN & WHERE THROUGH OCT. 31

Bethany Arts Community presents “Art in the Time of Covid,” an exhibition featuring teaching artists from the New York State Artists Teacher Association that explores current issues through confrontation, escape, negotiation and affirmation.

Reservations are encouraged but not required.

10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 40 Somerstown Road, Ossining; 914-9444278, bethanyarts.org

THROUGH NOV. 1

Lyndhurst Mansion’s “Watershed Moment,” at its unrestored swimming pool building, is a multidisciplinary art installation that involves the interplay of monumental cast-latex curtains, changing lights and the sound of six different New York state bodies of water. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays through Sundays; 635 S. Broadway, Tarrytown; lyndhurst.org

Through May 9 – “Frank Stella’s Stars” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

THROUGH NOV. 7

THROUGH MAY 9, 2021

OSilas Gallery at Concordia College presents “A Photo Album of Ireland Art,” a touring exhibition featuring more than 120 photographs that tell of the triumphs and turmoils in the life of a nation.

From the earliest photographs taken in the 1850s to the advent of the digital era in the early 1990s, these images reveal details about how people lived, worked and gathered that official historical records may have overlooked. Noon to 5 p.m.

Thursdays, 2 to 5 p.m. Saturdays, 171 White Plains Road, Bronxville; osilasgallery.org

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents “Frank Stella’s Stars, A Survey.” Curated by Richard Klein and Amy Smith-Stewart, the exhibition (on view in the museum and the sculpture garden), follows the historical arc of Stella’s use of the star, from the minimal to the maximal, with recent works showing a corruption of the form — as well as a wild diversity of materials and fabrication techniques. Timed ticket reservations required. Noon to 5 p.m. Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays through Fridays; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays; 258 Main St., Ridgefield; 203-438-4519, aldrichart.org

THROUGH NOV. 21

OCT. 1 Exploration photographer George Steinmetz and science writer Andrew Revkin discuss their collaboration on the new book, “The Human Planet: Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene” a sweeping visual chronicle of Earth, revealing both its unhindered natural features and the human project that relentlessly redesigns its surface in its quest to build shelter, grow food, generate energy and create beauty through art and architecture. 7 p.m. Zoom; 203-869-0376, brucemuseum.org Historic Hudson Valley presents its annual “Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze” at Van Cortlandt Manor through Nov. 21. Guests will walk through an 18th-century landscape and discover a display of more than 7,000 illuminated jack o’ lanterns—all designed and hand-carved on-site by a team of artists. Times vary. 525 S Riverside Ave, Croton-onHudson; hudsonvalley.org​

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OCT. 1 THROUGH JAN. 10

“Biophilia: A Dialogue with Art, Nature and Science” is an extensive art and multimedia sensory experience that unravels man’s intimate relationship with the natural world. Artist, naturalist and New York Times best-selling author Christopher Marley reveals the sometimes obscure beauty in nature through his three-dimensional work with animal, mineral and plant specimens.

11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Mondays through Saturdays; Stamford Museum and Nature Center, 39 Scofieldtown Road; 203977-6521, stamfordmuseum.org

OCT. 2 The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Septet with Wynton Marsalis will be performing live outdoors at MoCA Westport with “The Sound of Democracy,” a program of brand new music that has not been played in Connecticut before.

Attendees can bring their own food/drinks or enjoy the delicious offerings of an on-site food truck.19 Newtown Turnpike; 203-222-7070, mocawestport.org

OCT. 3 Brookfield Properties’ The SoNo Collection Mall has commissioned 10 artists to each paint a 24- by 36-inch canvas, one artist a week in the mall. The artists in #SoNoArtCares are Yedi Fresh, Sarah Stinson-Hurwitz, Jahmane, Leslie Cober-Gentry, Robert Abriola, Justin Cox, Vernice Holmes, Naomi Clark, Kristin Schnitzler and Duvian Montoya. All works, commissioned by The SoNo Collection, are being donated to The Cultural Alliance for a silent auction through Oct. 3, when the top four canvases will be presented in a live auction. 5:30 p.m. 203256-2329, culturalalliancefc.org

OCT. 3 The Ridgefield Playhouse celebrates its 20th Anniversary Gala with a full live performance

by Bruce Hornsby as well as virtual guest appearances from artists who have performed at The Ridgefield Playhouse over the past 20 years, including Stephen Schwartz, Alan Menken, Todd Rundgren, Paul Shaffer and some surprises. 7 p.m. The gala ticket (6:30 p.m.) includes dinner under the tent and a live feed of the playhouse

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WHEN & WHERE OCT. 22 The Cultural Alliance of Fairfield County celebrates its fifth annual Arts & Cultural Empowerment (ACE) Awards online this year. Two-time Tony Award winning actor James Naughton is master of ceremonies, making awards presentations and interviewing on tape the five honorees, Miggs Burroughs (artist award): Bernicestine and Harold Bailey (citizen); The SoNo Collection (corporate); Elizabeth Gaynor of the Connecticut Dance School (educator); and KEYS/founding executive director Rob Silvan (nonprofit). Tony Award-winning actress and singer Joanna Gleason delivers the keynote. 5:30 p.m. 203-256-2329, culturalalliancefc.org Through Nov. 1 — “Watershed Moment” at Lyndhurst. Photograph by Emma Gencarelli.

stage. The virtual ticket gives you access at home.

203-438-5795, ridgefieldplayhouse.org

OCT. 3 AND 4

The annual Armonk Outdoor Art Show, sponsored by Friends of North Castle Public Library, will be hosted online this year. Guests will explore the work of 160 juried artists who work in fine crafts, mixed media, painting, wearable art and more​. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., armonkoutdoorartshow.org

OCT. 6 In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, local flamenco artist Rebeca Tomás and members of her A Palo Seco Flamenco Company will present “Viva Flamenco!,” an online flamenco workshop for the whole family. The program will introduce traditional elements of the flamenco dance, including intricate footwork (zapateo) and rhythmic hand-clapping (palmas). This program is supported by the Warner Library and ArtsWestchester. 4:30 p.m. via Zoom, warnerlibrary.org/calendar/5306

OCT. 7 Emelin Theater will present a livestream performance with Suzanne Vega from the Blue Note Jazz Club in Manhattan. The Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter will celebrate the release of her new live album, “An Evening of New York Songs and Stories,” during the event. 9 p.m., emelin.org

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OCT. 9 AND 10

Irvington Theater presents its annual All Shorts Irvington Film Festival (As iFF 2020), a twonight virtual festival featuring 13 short films from around the world. Celebrating its fifth year, As iFF will present live-action, animated and documentary short films, which were chosen from hundreds of international submissions.​8 p.m., asiffestival.com

OCT. 13 The Westport Library presents the virtual talk, “The Haunted Theaters of Broadway,” about the real-life (and death) stories of the ghosts who haunt theaters around the world. Meet womanizing ghost David Belasco, the laughing ghost of the St. James Theater, the phantom audience that died in a fire at Chicago’s Iroquois Theater and many more in this entertaining virtual talk by Robert Viagas, longtime editor at Playbill, who has been collecting these stories firsthand from actors and backstage workers for more than a decade. 7 p.m. 203-291-4800, westportlibrary.org

OCT. 17 The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum hosts its “Virtual Starlit Gala” featuring an award presentation and a talk by Glenn McGee, PhD, renowned expert on bioethics. The mansion will honor David Westmoreland, a longstanding and key supporter of the mansion and its preservation. The event will include a catered dinner and silent auction. 8 p.m. 203-838-9799, lockwoodmathewsmansion.com

OCT. 22 Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan presents a virtual talk on the “Pioneering Women of American Architecture” by project directors Mary McLeod and Victoria Rosne and contributor Michael Kubo. The project was launched in 2017 with the goal of documenting and publicizing women’s contributions to building in the United States. 7 p.m. Zoom; 203-275-7565, theglasshouse.org

OCT. 28 As part of its continuing “Diversity in Film” series, the Ridgefield Playhouse presents Ava DuVernay’s award-winning historical drama “Selma,” chronicling the tumultuous three months in 1965, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition. The epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, culminated in President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

A conversation with reporter Cheryl Washington follows the screening. 7 p.m. Reservations required. 203-438-5795, ridgefieldplayhouse.org

OCT. 28 THROUGH NOV. 15

ACT of Connecticut presents “The Last Five Years,” one of Time magazine’s 10 best shows of 2001, a musical chronicling the five-year relationship between two New Yorkers. With book, music and lyrics by Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown, this modern 90-minute musical has enraptured audiences around the world. Both inperson and livestream tickets are available. 2 p.m.

Sundays, 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays and 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 36 Old Quarry Road, Ridgefield; 475-215-5497, actofct.org

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WE WONDER:

HOW HAVE YOU GOT TEN CRE ATIVE DURING THE PANDEMIC ?

“I started picking up roller blading and being more consistent with working out.

With many leisure activities closed down during the pandemic and the nice weather I’ve made sure to be outside, listen to music and roller blade.

I loved doing this when I was younger and wanted to pick it up again given my extra time and trying to be creative in finding things to do. Social media also inspired me to buy a pair (of skates) after watching so many people skating in my timeline.”

KAYLA CRONIN

senior account executive Stamford resident

“During the pandemic, I ‘bit the bullet’ and adopted a puppy. We had talked about adding a dog to our life for several years and now that we, my significant other and I, are both working from home, we decided to take action to enhance our family wellness. Prior to our new puppy life, I had purchased "Feets Up," a yoga apparatus that allows me to take classes online, in my house and to do core exercises at any given moment.

My goal was to get in shape, physically rehab myself ‘upside down’ from sitting all winter in an ergonomically incorrect bedroom chair and then to become certified in teaching "Feets Up," too.

However, the puppy took over my life. So now, thanks to the puppy, I am getting my cardio in every single day.”

MIA SCHIPANI

principal, Schipani PR Stamford resident

“This pandemic has definitely brought out more of my crafty side. As a longtime maker of things, I started to hone in on my sculpting skills with polymer clay. That combined with a love of statement jewelry (led me) to start my own handmade earring business. It's been extremely rewarding to be able to create fun designs and patterns with clay and ship them out to ears around the country. It's stress relieving and entertaining, which we all need a little more of in these times.”

TESSA DONOLLI

video producer/earring maker Brooklyn resident

“I turned my hobbies and passions into my own business, Weatherby Home Services, during the pandemic to help everyone turn chaos within their homes into clarity. For maximum lifestyle enjoyment, I'm offering my passion of home organizing, revamping through interior styling, peace of mind with house and/or pet sitting and ultimately all-around wellbeing by providing in-home holistic services and everything else you may need in between.

For your viewing pleasure, I also began posting my favorite life tips and decluttering tricks.

Follow us at @weatherbys.”

ISABELLE WEATHERBY

owner of Weatherby Home Services Newport, Rhode Island, resident

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Live life to the fullest

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