WAG Magazine January 20

dylan lauren

the sweet life

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MAGAZINE

IN NEW YORK STATE 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018

WESTCHESTER & FAIRFIELD LIFE JANUARY 2020 | WAGMAG.COM

2020 visions CHLOE MENDEL Fashionable faux furs

TIMES TWO Twins, doubles and doppelgangers

THE 1920S Oh, how they roared!

JAMES GARFIELD Our 20th president’s tragic life

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CONTENTS JAN UARY 2020

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Great aspirations

18

A not-so-distant mirror

22

20 acts toward the ’20 women’s vote

24

In focus

28

The reluctant president

32

A kinship with twinship

36

Here comes the ‘Sun (shine Rock)’

40

Two’s enough

44

(Platform) tennis, anyone?

48

Fashionably drawn

56

An ear for music, an eye for art

60

Faux fur fun

64

History, in fashion

68

It’s ‘About Time’ at The Met

72

The colorful whirl of Alex Proba

52

COVER STORY Dylan Lauren: Sweet on sweets

THIS PAGE:

“Sugar and Skin” (2007), digital print on Moab proofing semi matte white paper. From the new exhibit “Fashion Illustration: The Visionaires, A Century of Illustration from the Frances Neady Collection.” See story on page 48.

E VERY OBJ ECT HAS A STORY

worth telling, worth find ing.

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FEATURES HIGHLIGHTS

HOME & DESIGN

76 1920s elegance meets 2020 luxury 80 A trendsetter, by design 84 Double delights in design 86 A toast to the ‘noble experiment’

TRAVEL

88 Tender (and grand) is the Hotel du Cap 92 20 travel tips, trips and trends for 2020 96 Enchanting Rhinebeck

FOOD & SPIRITS

92

98 Fabulous food from the land of the coconuts 100 No romance like a bromance 102 Cognac’s not-so-rustic cousin

FASHION

104 Eyes on the prize 106 Throwing the right kind of shade

HEALTH & FITNESS

48

108 The good fight 112 Making a spectacle of myself 114 Care on call 116 Are you asking the right nutrition questions?

PET CARE

120 Jesse girl 121 The pet portraitist

WHAT'S TRENDING

12 WAG spotlights the new and noteworthy

WHERE & WHEN 122 Upcoming events

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56

WATCH

126 We’re out and about

WIT

136 What are you eyeing for 2020?

dylan lauren

the sweet life

2020 visions

JUDGED A

TOP

MAGAZINE

IN NEW YORK STATE

CHLOE MENDEL Fashionable faux furs

2014, 2015, 2016, 2018

TIMES TWO Twins, doubles and doppelgangers

THE 1920S Oh, how they roared!

JAMES GARFIELD Our 20th president’s tragic life

WESTCHESTER & FAIRFIELD LIFE JANUARY 2020 | WAGMAG.COM

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COVER: Dylan Lauren.

Photograph by Danny Christensen.

See story on page 52.

JANUARY 2020

76

THE C A S E FOR THE NEW BRUCE •

•

•

COMMUNITY

ART

The entire ground floor of the New Bruce will be open to all visitors, bringing people together from across the region for cultural conversations in a shared public space.

The new art wing will give the Museum, for the first time, galleries to display masterworks from our permanent collection, as well as greatly expanded space for changing art exhibitions.

SCIENCE

EDUCATION

We’ll have quadruple the space for temporary science exhibitions and redesigned permanent galleries that emphasize interactive, hands-on experiences for visitors of all ages.

Renovated and expanded, our new education wing will allow us to double, to 50,000, the number of students the Museum hosts each year.

Become a part of the extraordinary transformation of the cultural and educational centerpiece of our community. Join Us Today! Find out more or give online at NewBruce.org

Bruce Museum Greenwich, Connecticut BruceMuseum.org | NewBruce.org

the

NEWBruce

Dee DelBello

Dan Viteri

PUBLISHER dee@westfairinc.com

GROUP ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/CREATIVE dviteri@westfairinc.com

EDITORIAL Bob Rozycki MANAGING EDITOR bobr@westfairinc.com

Georgette Gouveia EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ggouveia@westfairinc.com Mary Shustack SENIOR WRITER/EDITOR mshustack@westfairinc.com

ART Fatime Muriqi ART DIRECTOR fmuriqi@westfairinc.com

Kelsie Mania ART DIRECTOR kmania@westfairinc.com

Sebastián Flores ART DIRECTOR sflores@westfairinc.com

PHOTOGRAPHY Anthony Carboni, Sebastián Flores, Fatime Muriqi, John Rizzo, Bob Rozycki

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Jena A. Butterfield, Olivia D'Amelio, Gina Gouveia, Phil Hall, Debbi K. Kickham, William D. Kickham, Doug Paulding, Jennifer Pitman, Giovanni Roselli, Bob Rozycki, Gregg Shapiro, Barbara Barton Sloane, Jeremy Wayne, Cami Weinstein, Katie Banser-Whittle

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

MARKETING/EVENTS Olivia D'Amelio EVENTS COORDINATOR odamelio@westfairinc.com

Marcia Pflug PROMOTIONS/SPONSORS DIRECTOR mpflug@wfpromote.com

CIRCULATION Brianne Smith CIRCULATION SALES bsmith@westfairinc.com

Sylvia Sikoutris CIRCULATION MANAGER sylvia@westfairinc.com Robin Costello ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGER rcostello@westfairinc.com

FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM @WAGMAGAZINE FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM #WAGMAG @WAGMAGAZINE #WAGMAG

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WHAT IS WAG?

Billy Losapio ADVISER

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

WAGGERS

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

ROBIN COSTELLO

OLIVIA D'AMELIO

GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

PHIL HALL

DEBBI K. KICKHAM

WILLIAM D. KICKHAM

FATIME MURIQI

DOUG PAULDING

JENNIFER PITMAN

JOHN RIZZO

GIOVANNI ROSELLI

BOB ROZYCKI

GREGG SHAPIRO

MARY SHUSTACK

CAMI WEINSTEIN

KATIE BANSER-WHITTLE

COVER STORY: JEREMY WAYNE, PAGE 52

NEW WAGGER RAJNI MENON is an entrepreneur, a creator, a passionate chef and an unshakable optimist. The Scarsdale resident brings her South Indian culture to every dish she prepares at home and abroad while at the same time striving to build self-confidence in children globally. She is also an electrical engineer as well as a trained artist in drawing, oil, silk and Tanjore painting and textiles, with a degree in textile/ surface design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. Visit her at creativerajni.com.

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WESTCHESTER

EDITOR’S LETTER

BY GEORGET TE GOUVEIA

We begin the new year – our year of Visions – with “2020 Visions” and a backward glance at a not-so-distant mirror of our time, the Roaring ’20s.

As you’ll discover in our essay on what that period was like in WAG country, it was a decade of fascinating contradictions, in which women, blacks and immigrants both flourished and foundered, in which new technologies heralded an enticing, kick-up-your heels culture that is also remembered for Prohibition (Katie’s column); in which sky’s-the-limit building and spending would precipitate the stock market’s collapse.

The 1920s created some of our greatest literature at home and abroad, particularly the book that many consider the great American novel — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” inspired in part by his stay in Westport in 1920. Fitzgerald haunts Jeremy’s visit to the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera, the setting for the fictional Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers in the author’s “Tender Is the Night” — which Jeremy describes as the quintessential 1920s Riviera novel, albeit one not published until 1934.

Most of all, the ’20s was a milestone in the modern age, particularly for women, epitomized by the independent-minded flapper.

Mary talks with fashion historian and author Caroline Rennolds Milbank about the extent to which the flapper look — chemises, tennis whites, glittering fringe dresses and cloche hats — resonates today.

But it wasn’t just about aesthetics for women. The flapper signified a hard-won socioeconomic and political independence. Mary also profiles Eileen Gray, the pioneering Irish architect and furniture designer, who rose to fame in the ’20s and is the subject of a career retrospective at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in Manhattan.

And we consider the jagged, often brutal progress that led to women’s suffrage, which became the law of the land on Aug. 18, 1920. Let us take a moment to salute those women — and men — whose courage, perseverance and, yes, vision gave us all the victory.

Certainly, those suffragists stand shoulder to shoulder with women entrepreneurs, like our cover subject, Dylan Lauren — the “sweetly” ebullient dynamo behind Dylan’s Candy Bar, animal rights activist and mom of twins ( Jeremy’s story); and Chloe Mendel, whose Maison Atia has taken her family’s furrier pedigree and applied it to the creation of high-end faux furs.

Twentysomething Chloe is just one way in which the Waggers have taken the 2020 and ’20s theme and run with it. Twentieth president of the United States? That would be the reluctant James Garfield (Phil’s story), whose presidency dovetailed with the rise of women’s suffrage and illustrated the strengths and limitations of the end of the 19th century. Twentieth anniversary? We’ve got the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins, whose board of governors co-chair, Greenwich resident Shelby Saer, is helping raise awareness of its collaborative approach to this devastating disease.

2020 vision? Stephen Warren, M.D., discusses cosmetic procedures for the eyes while Jeremy has us in stitches with his self-deprecating take on a lifelong quest for 20/20 vision; and Fatime builds an eye makeup look that you can then protect with stylish Tom

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English porcelain suffragette plate with “Deeds, Not Words” and “Votes for Women” slogans, one-of-a-kind among known examples (circa 1905-18). Courtesy Jeff R. Bridgman American Antiques, one of the exhibitors at the recent Greenwich Winter Antiques Show. (See women’s suffrage story on Page 22.)

Ford shades. 2020 is also a double number that suggests symmetry and balance (Wares columnist Cami) and a certain delight ( Jeremy again, who writes about being a father of twins).

Speaking of doubles, we look at platform tennis, which is all about pairs of players. Created in Scarsdale in 1928, paddle tennis, as it is also known, will be celebrated in our area in March as the American Platform Tennis Association National Championships come to Westchester and Fairfield counties. Doubles of another kind — lookalikes known as doppelgángers — take center stage in our story about twin strangers in art and in life.

January is usually the month in which we say “out with the old and in with the new.” Well, we’re definitely down with the new.

Our newest Wagger, Rajni Menon, joins us to revel in the tastes, sights and sounds of India in her What’s Cooking? column. Welcome, Rajni.

Even Sotheby’s International Realty gets into the ’20s act with a house in Khakum Wood, a 1925 residential park in Greenwich. Sotheby’s didn’t plan it this way. But we at WAG don’t believe in coincidences, only wonderful synchronicity.

May 2020 and your 2020 visions hold the same.

A 2018 Folio Women in Media Award Winner, Georgette Gouveia is the author of the new “Burying the Dead” and “Daimon: A Novel of Alexander the Great” (both 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. This month, JMS Books publishes her novel “Seamless Sky.” For more, visit thegamesmenplay.com.

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

Courtesy Valmont.

that new year’s glow

Courtesy Hästens.

now, we rest If your holiday season was as busy as ours, then you know January is going to be all about finally slowing down and catching your breath. So why not do it in style, courtesy of Hästens, the Swedish company that’s been crafting a luxurious night of sleep since 1852? Supremely cozy accessories — in the company’s trademark blue-and-white check design — include down boots ($130), pictured here, pajamas, slippers, bathrobes, eye pillows and more. (And if you want to take the indulgence even further, check out Hästens’ partnership with Lotte New York Palace. The Manhattan hotel boasts the Hästens Ultimate Sleep Suite, the only one in the world to house an exclusive iteration of the brand’s flagship Vividus bed, which retails for $200,000 and takes 350 working hours to complete). For more, visit hastens.com/us.

Just in time for a New Year’s reboot, Valmont has released its Deto2x Cream, formulated with a dedicated complex that injects oxygen into the cells, boosting vitality, eliminating CO2 and helping cells breathe. Created to reveal a healthy glow, the Deto2x Cream is enhanced with an apple stem-cell extract to promote cell renewal, re-energize the skin and combat aging. With every use, the cream produces an airy foam that is best applied with a brush to preserve its oxygenating properties. True to the brand’s white-and-gold identity, the distinguished jar plays on symbols of purity and oxygen. Retail price: $440. Available at Saks Fifth Avenue, valmontcosmetics.com and Spa Valmont at Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Manhattan.

design star

John Rapetti photograph courtesy Carol Kurth.

We continue to follow the successes of Bedford-based architect and interior designer Carol Kurth, who launched her eponymous furniture line at the prestigious contemporary furniture fair, ICFF, in Manhattan last spring. Now, she is exhibiting a selection of her distinctive chairs — alongside work by Italian-based artist Marco Grassi — in Manhattan, at Galleria Ca’ d’Oro in Chelsea through Jan. 11. For more, visit carolkurtharchitects.com.

Courtesy Well Told Design.

‰aising a (topographic) glass Ring in the new or any occasion with Well Told Design’s Maps Champagne Flutes. They’re available for every U.S. city/town and more than 1,000 topographic map locations around the world. For more, visit welltolddesign.com.

–Georgette Gouveia and Mary Shustack

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Dancers perform “The Great Gatsby Ballet” at the National Palace of Arts in Kiev, Ukraine.

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Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And then one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

— The closing lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

We are borne back ceaselessly into “The Great Gatsby.”

Think of it: There are five film versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal novel, the most recent being Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role; a 1999 John Harbison opera; three radio productions; as many plays and ballets; two computer games; and two novels that either take off on some of the characters (Chris Bohjalian’s “The Double Bind”) or reimagine them (Sara Benincasa’s “Great”). (No doubt there will be even more iterations as “Gatsby” and all other works published in 1925 enter the public domain a year from now.)

Fitzgerald could hardly have imagined such a sphere of influence. When the book was first published, it was greeted with mixed reviews and poor sales. Fitzgerald went to his grave — dead of a heart attack in 1940 at age 44 — thinking the book and himself a failure. Often, however, time and distance are required for greatness to achieve its true appreciation. As he was dying, Fitzgerald could not know that Gatsby was about to reach that orgastic green light, for the novel would take off in the 1940s — a favorite of World War II soldiers, who perhaps identified with Gatsby, a soldier in World War I. Since then the book has been Scribner’s bestseller — 25 million copies to date, 500,000 annually, 185,000 e-books in 2013 alone — and a regular candidate for the great American novel. For some, it is the great American novel.

“By far it’s the single greatest American novel of the 20th century,” says historian Richard Deej Webb Jr., author of “Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda,” which explores Westport as an inspiration for the novel. “Only Mark Twain’s ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ in the 19th century rivals it.”

But what makes it so great? As the closing lines quoted above demonstrate, Fitzgerald’s book achieves a kind of poetry in prose in the most economical way. Yet with the exception of English teachers, literature professors and writers, who thinks of Fitzgerald’s prose when they think of “Gatsby”? What has inspired a host of visual storytellers — indeed what resonates with us today — is

great aspira ti ns

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

the story Fitzgerald tells about America’s relationship to aspiration, money and love.

“It’s the perfect embodiment of what is the American Dream,” Webb says, “and Gatsby doesn’t get it, that green light at the end of (Daisy’s) dock.”

It was another terrific writer, the 19th-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who was said to have said: “Show me a great fortune, and I’ll show you a great crime.” (What Balzac actually said was that a great fortune with no obvious cause was the result of a subtly, expertly executed crime.)

Fitzgerald gives readers a great fortune whose criminal link soon becomes apparent. The Jay Gatsby of the title is a wealthy, seemingly reclusive and mysterious Long Islander who has good reason for his elusiveness.

His fortune is derived from bootlegging and his associations with a character based on mobster Arnold Rothstein, the man behind the Black Sox Scandal, the World Series fix of 1919.

Like some Americans, Gatsby wants money and he wants it fast. And though he may be vague about how he’s acquired it, he has no qualms about displaying its trappings. Fitzgerald’s descriptions of the lavish parties at Gatsby’s house and their Champagne-swilling, fountain-splashing, Charleston-dancing, roadster-careening, flappered and tuxedoed attendees — the quintessence

JANUARY 2020

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Released as the authorized version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” to coincide with A&E’s 2000 telefilm adaptation, this edition features Francis Cugat’s original cover art.

The disembodied face, with nude women for irises, is said to refer to both Daisy Buchanan, the selfinvolved socialite Gatsby idolizes, and the billboard for the fictional optometrist Dr. T.J. Eckleburg that presides over the ash heap where the novel’s tragic climax takes place.

of ’20s kick-up-your-heels hedonism — are among the most captivating for readers and “Gatsby” interpreters.

Yet Gatsby is not interested in materialism for its own sake. No, what makes him such a romantic, haunted figure is that it’s all in service of Daisy Fay — the Louisville belle he’s loved and lost to the richer, more brutal Tom Buchanan.

Gatsby thinks that if he can acquire enough, including a bit of “old sport” polish at Oxford, that he can reinvent himself and win Daisy back. Sound familiar? We Americans are always told that if we just work hard enough, we can accomplish anything and be anyone — never mind the shortcuts and psychic airbrushing that some have used to achieve and portray success. But it’s not the speciousness of Gatsby’s affluence, the abandonment of his past or even the phoniness of his present that dooms him as much as the illusion of his dream. For the Daisy he longs for is no longer that girl who looked kindly on him as a poor soldier off to fight the Great War, if she ever was.

The Daisy he loves is a self-involved socialite who will never forsake her husband or their social class.

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Gatsby can buy his way into their neighborhood, but he cannot buy his way into their circle. In a sense, he has more in common with George Wilson, the mechanic who operates a garage on a neighboring Queens ash heap (now the site of the USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center, talk about your transformations), and George’s wife, Myrtle, who is Tom’s mistress. Gatsby’s possessions, George’s sweat equity, Myrtle’s sexual capital: None of them buy acceptance. There remains a gulf between the haves and have nots that reinvention cannot bridge, a tension that still plays out today when the 1 percent overwhelmingly control most of the nation’s wealth.

But such is the power of Gatsby’s dream that he cannot see this. He cannot understand that what he loves is not Daisy but his idea of her, his idea of himself. He goes to his death struggling to preserve that ideal.

And what of us? What of our dreams? Fitzgerald’s book suggests that while you can’t build a love and a life on a lie, that will never stop people from trying.

And so we keep straining against the tide — and turning the page.

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BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

a n t-s -distant mirr r The 1920s were the Dickensian “best of times and the worst of times,” Westport historian Richard “Deej” Webb Jr. says.

It was the age of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural flowering of New York’s black community, centered in Harlem. And, he adds, it was the age that saw the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and its hate crimes against blacks, Roman Catholics and Jews.

It was an epoch in which immigrants continued to flock to the country and make significant contributions. It was the epoch in which the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were unfairly convicted in a fatal armed robbery and executed because of their Italian ancestry.

It was a season of women’s liberation, with the passage of the 19th Amendment that gave them the vote, the increase of women in the workforce and the rise of the independent flapper. It was a season in which women were still judged by traditional standards of femininity and decorum and were reminded that socioeconomic equality was a long way off.

It was the spring of youth, beauty and energy as seen in flapper fashions, jazz, talkies, sporting events

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and the booze of the speakeasies, made illegal by Prohibition. (See Page 86). It was the winter of hedonism and debt as hotels, oil companies and other businesses issued credit cards to be used at their establishments for the first time, giving birth, Webb says, to a debtor nation, which would foreshadow the stock market’s collapse at the decade’s end.

Perhaps most of all, it was an age of invention, or at least the mass production and marketing of prior inventions. Radio programming; phonographs; talking motion pictures; acrobatic and long-distance flying known as “barnstorming,” automobiles on highways and byways; soaring skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building; and experiments with something called “television.” Each of these had a voice in the Roaring Twenties.

“The 1920s is the decade we would recognize as we recognize today,” says Webb, author of “Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda” (Prospecta Press), about the influence that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s five-month stay in Westport in 1920 had on his writing “The Great Gatsby.” (A documentary on the subject will be out next year.)

White Plains in the 1920s, seen from Mamaroneck Avenue looking onto Main Street: You can see the bones of White Plains in 2020. Courtesy whiteplains.gov.

“Future historians will see it akin to the Renaissance.

It’s all just been engineering since then.”

In WAG country, the technological, industrial and cultural sophistication of the ’20s saw the increasing suburbanization of Westchester and Fairfield counties. The 1920s was a “boom time” for suburbanization in Westchester, with industrial growth as well in the southern part of the county and Peekskill, fueled by a strong working-class of Irish, Italians and Central European immigrants, says Field Horne, author of “Westchester County: A History” (Westchester County Historical Society, 2018).

Meanwhile, Fairfield — whose industry included the production of mattresses, Ford carburetors, coffin tacks and cotton cord and twine — was seeing an influx of artists who had been priced out of New York City. “At the time, it was cheaper to buy in Connecticut than rent in New York City,” Webb says.

Race played a factor in the suburban flight. Some of those heading to Connecticut wanted to escape the Eastern European Jews who immigrated to New York City, Webb says. (Westport would become the first place in Fairfield to sell property to Jews.) In the meantime, African-Americans who were part of the Great Migration northward and westward that had begun in 1916 settled in urban “colored” communities in Westchester, Horne says. The one suburban exception was Runyon Heights in Yonkers, created by developer Hudson P. Rose.

In the ’20s, politics played out differently in the two counties. Webb describes it as a “laconic” affair in Fairfield, which does not have a county government.

Connecticut was one of only two states that did not ratify Prohibition, which began on Jan. 17, 1920. (The other was Rhode Island.) Both had the largest ItalianAmerican communities in the United States, Webb says, which were big wine producers.

Westchester, which has a county government, was run not by a county executive back then but by a boss — Boss William L. Ward, a Republican from what is now Rye Brook who had total control of the county from 1910 to 1933, Horne says. Ward ran on an anti-graft platform. On his watch, social programs were expanded for orphans and the aged, and major public works like the Bronx River, Hutchinson River and Saw Mill River parkways were underway.

The ’20s in Westchester was also a period in which schools were centralized within municipalities and interest in historical preservation was piqued — particularly in the Revolutionary War-era Hammond House in Valhalla and the post-Revolutionary neighborhood of Sparta in Ossining — in part due to the 150th anniversary of the American Revolution in 1926.

With their still bucolic beauty, Westchester and Fairfield were playgrounds for the rich and the modest of means alike in the ’20s.

“Nineteen-twenty was the first year people traveled more by road than by water,” Webb says. In their Fords, Chryslers and Packards, they took to the road to watch the Babe Ruth- and Lou Gehrig-led New York Yankees, who were developing into such a powerhouse team

KEY 1920S FIGURES, ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION

EGGS 47¢ a dozen, $ 6 today

MILK 33¢ a 1/2gallon $ 4 today

BREAD 10¢ a loaf, $ 1.20 today

STEAK 43¢ a pound, $ 5/lb. today

CAR 550, $ 8,000 today

HOME 6,000, $ 87,150 today

$

$

AVERAGE INCOME $3,269, $41,544 today Courtesy Richard “Deej” Webb Jr.

that in the late ’20s, they would earn the nickname “Murderers’ Row,” with the ’27 Yanks considered by some to be the best team to date. A year later, Art Deco-flavored Playland Amusement Park would open in Rye on the site of some ramshackle resorts.

There were swanky hotels for the rich to relax in, too, Horne says — the Hotel Gramatan in Bronxville, where a business arcade is all that remains of a time when financier Joseph P. Kennedy dallied with screen siren Gloria Swanson and movie goddess Greta Garbo was let alone; the Gedney Farm Hotel in White Plains, destroyed by fire on Sept. 21, 1924; and the Westchester Biltmore, now the Westchester Country Club.

Those with smaller pocketbooks could enjoy cottages in small lake colonies in Cortlandt, Lewisboro, Somers and Yorktown, he adds.

In 1920 Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald would bypass all this for a house on Compo Beach Road in Westport that was adjacent to Longshore, the 175-acre estate of Tarrytown-born tycoon Frederick E. Lewis II. It was Lewis whom historian Webb and others believe was Fitzgerald’s model for Jay Gatsby, particularly as Zelda enjoyed getting kicked out of his lavish, star-studded parties and skinny dipping on his private beach.

“Jane Austen said ‘everything happens at parties,’” Webb notes. And the ’20s was one long party, the summer before the dark. “People,” he adds, “can’t get enough of it.”

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BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” Shakespeare writes in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

And neither does that of history. Consider the fight for women’s suffrage in the United States, which became the 19th Amendment to the Constitution on Aug. 18, 1920. We tend to think because it was ultimately successful that the battle for women’s right to vote must’ve been one big group effort. And, in some ways, it was. But it was also the story of jagged progress, rivalry among women’s groups and conflict between women and black men, who were also struggling to establish their enfranchisement. Below are 20 enlightening moments in U.S. women’s suffrage:

Public relations portrait of Susan B. Anthony used in the “History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 1” (1881), which she wrote with another leader of the movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Engraved by G.E. Perine & Co., New York.

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1. Lydia Taft, an 18th-century widow of means, votes in local elections in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. She is considered the only woman to have done so in Colonial America.

2. New Jersey’s 1776 constitution extends the vote to all adults with a certain amount of property. It’s confined to men in 1807.

3. Kentucky leads the way on women’s suffrage, though women’s right to vote is limited to widows or

female heads of households who are over 21 and paying property taxes for the new school system.

4. In the first decades of the 19th century, women break the “sound barrier,” speaking in public about civic affairs for the first time, a crucial step in the advocacy for suffrage. Among them is Lucy Stone, who will become a professional lecturer and a leader of the suffrage movement.

5. The Seneca Falls Convention, held July 19 and 20, 1848 in the Finger Lakes section of New York, brings together some of those who will be major players in the women’s rights movement, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Some members stop short, however, at the call to suffrage, a resolution that passes only with the eloquent support of Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist.

6. Sojourner Truth, a former slave turned activist, electrifies a regional women’s rights convention in Ohio in 1851 with her powerful “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech.

7. Two supernovas in the annals of women’s history, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, come together in 1863 to form the Women’s Loyal National League, the first national women’s political organization in the U.S. 8. Stanton, Anthony, Mott, Douglass and Lucy Stone are among the leaders at the 11th annual National Women’s Rights Convention in 1866, which becomes the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). The new organization is soon cleft by those who espouse putting the rights of black men first (Stone) and those who want women and black men to be enfranchised at the same time (Stanton and Anthony). Three years later, Stone helps found the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), while Stanton and Anthony are among those behind the new National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA).

9. Women are enfranchised in Wyoming Territory and Utah in 1869 and 1870 respectively.

10. In 1871, stockbroker Victoria Woodhull becomes the first woman to address Congress, arguing in a new approach that the Constitution implicitly gives women the right to vote. The idea is struck down four years later by the U.S. Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett.

11. Anthony is arrested for and convicted of voting in the presidential election of 1872 and ordered to pay a fine of $100. “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty,” she responds, and never does.

12. U.S. Sen. Aaron A. Sargent, a friend of Anthony, introduces a woman’s suffrage amendment in Congress in 1878. Ultimately, it will become the 19th Amendment in 1920.

13. Belva Ann Lockwood, the first female lawyer to argue a case before the Supreme Court, becomes the first woman to run for president on California’s Equal Rights Party ticket in 1884, even though her fellow suffragists back Republican James G. Blaine in a losing effort to Democrat Grover Cleveland.

14. The more conservative AWSA merges with the more radical NWSA in 1890 to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Stanton as the first president and Anthony, as vice president, succeeding Stanton two years later.

15. The late 19th century proves a daunting challenge for suffrage, which is opposed by several groups — those who do not want to see black enfranchisement expanded to black women; society women who do not want to see the status they claim through their husbands diluted; and German-Americans, who fear that Prohibition-minded suffragists will take away their beer production.

16. In the 1910s, the American West and Midwest continue to lead the way in enfranchising women, with Washington (1910), California (1911), Oregon, Kansas and Arizona (1912) as well as Illinois (1913) giving women the vote. But three years later, the movement was still 24 states short of 36, or the three-fourths majority of the then total 48 states, needed for amendment passage.

17. Alice Paul, who had participated in the militant wing of England’s suffrage movement, forms the National Woman’s Party (NWP) in 1916 to serve as NAWSA’s confrontational arm.

18. In January 1917, NWP stages the first-ever picket of the White House, demanding suffrage in an explosive event that sees the arrest of more than 200 protesters and the imprisonment of about half. In prison, Paul is among the hunger strikers, who are force-fed, putting pressure on Woodrow Wilson’s administration, which releases them.

19. With women being acknowledged for their efforts at home and abroad during World War I and a general election looming in 1920, Congress finally passes the 19th Amendment to the Constitution on May 21, 1919, but states’ ratification begins to stall. Tennessee gives the amendment the 36th state it needs to become the law of the land on Aug. 18, 1920.

20. It would still be a while before the rest followed suit — Connecticut, Delaware and Vermont in 1923, Maryland in 1941, Virginia in 1952, Alabama in 1953, Florida and South Carolina in 1969, Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina in 1971 and, last but not least, Mississippi as late as 1984.

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Marcy 24 B. Freedman in “2020 vision” mode. 2020 WAGMAG.COM JANUARY Photographs by Ryon Odneal. Courtesy Marcy B. Freedman.

in f cus

BY MARY SHUSTACK

Oh, how time flies…

Though WAG has long followed the work of Croton-on-Hudson performance artist and art historian Marcy B. Freedman, our last proper “sit-down” was in advance of her interactive Valentine’s Day performance nearly five years ago.

So when we caught up with her on a recent rainy afternoon, once again at The Black Cow Coffee Co. in the Chicago native’s adopted hometown, she not only greeted us warmly but also presented us with a stack of promotional postcards.

“What have I done since 2015? Here are the postcards of what I’ve done since 2015,” she said with a laugh, handing over some 75 cards advancing her varied projects that have ranged from “What are you afraid of?” to “The Global Displacement of Art: Pros & Cons” to “True or False? Ice cream is just for kids.”

In Freedman’s world, whether it be performance art, art history lectures or video work, most everything that captures her interest is fair game for exploration, drawing from her varied experience.

As an artist, Freedman has worked with painting, drawing, collage, photography, small sculpture, video and performance art. She has long maintained a Peekskill studio. Freedman the art historian has worked as an adjunct professor, curator and freelance lecturer. For the past 10 years, she tells us, her “primary expressive mode” has been performance art.

And that brings us to this afternoon, when Freedman is recapping what was her most recent work, “Do you have 2020 vision?,” which was presented at The Black Cow. It was a bit of a glimpse into 2020 itself, as she told us about her work in the new year: “I divided 2020 into two categories — one for projects dealing with political/election year matters and the other for women.”

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Marcy B. Freedman.

The “Do you have 2020 vision?” project was designed, Freedman has shared, to engage with “2020” from two perspectives, it being the year of a presidential election and the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote.

While Freedman’s own politics, she tells us, lean to the left, she was anxious to engage with people from all parts of the political spectrum, including those whose views might differ from her own.

As she said in advance of the event, “As a rule, I present interactive performances in order to remind everyone of the beauty and power of old-fashioned conversation — without the intervention of devices. In this particular case, I also want to learn from my neighbors. What do people think will happen in 2020? What do people want to happen in 2020?”

Freedman set up camp in the café, inviting people to share their thoughts and says the event gave her the chance to “in-

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teract with a wider range of people” than she encounters in her daily life.

“The people who showed up were passionate,” she said. “They wanted to discuss these issues.”

The project, she says, was not to impose beliefs on anyone, evidenced by her “Make America Talk Again” cap.

“It’s all about this,” she said, pointing to its slogan. “It’s all about the talking.”

She was most impressed by the way the younger people (in their 20s and 30s) had a real “engagement with topical issues.”

Of the project, Freedman said it was eye-opening for her.

“In my daily life, I live in a bubble, interacting primarily with people who share my social and political points of view — and sources of information.”

Overall, she says, “The people who chose to participate in my political interactives are truly passionate and engaged with the political process — regardless of their political affiliation. I think this is a good sign. Apathy is not OK when there are such crucial matters — the environment, social justice, racial and gender equality — at stake.”

As with all her work, she found this project rewarding.

“I think every performance I’ve done has been gratifying in one way or the other,” she said.

And, she concluded, “As always, I am enriched by the experience of talking to people. I always learn something — maybe factual, but more likely, something about human nature.”

A sampling of Freedman’s 2020 work includes: “Art History with a Twist,” a series of lectures at Hudson Valley MOCA in Peekskill that continues with Jan. 12’s “Art and Identity: The Shape-Shifters;” “I want to love my country,” which will explore the concept of patriotism on Feb. 14 at the BeanRunner Café in Peekskill; a Women’s History Month collaboration with dancer Andrea Elam March 29 at the Budarz Theater of the Ossining Public Library when Freedman will present a new performance piece, “Heroes and Role Models,” which she calls “an illustrated guide to the women who have shaped me;” and an installation on Women’s Right to Vote, as a member of the artist group called “In_Question” from June through September at the Hammond Museum & Japanese Stroll Garden in North Salem. For more, contact Freedman at mbf@bestweb.net or 914-271-5891; or visit marcybfreedman.com.

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the reluctant president

BY PHIL HALL

James Abram Garfield never intended to become the 20th President of the United States and, after his inauguration, he had little opportunity to show his brand of leadership.

Today, Garfield mostly registers as a blip within the wider sweep of American history. But his life and death offer the story of a man who both shaped his era while falling victim to its limitations.

Garfield was born on Nov. 19, 1831, in a log cabin in Orange Township, Ohio. His childhood was heavy with challenges. His father died when he was 2, and he was raised in poverty by his mother. Garfield worked as a carpenter’s assistant and a janitor to finance his education and pursued careers as a teacher, lawyer and Republican state senator in Ohio before joining the Union Army in August 1861 with a colonel’s commission. His leadership at the Battle of Middle Creek in January 1862 resulted in a promotion to brigadier general.

Garfield was convinced by friends to seek the vacant seat for Ohio’s 19th Congressional District in 1862. He left the military for Congress and quickly became an influential political figure, backing civil

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rights for the freed slaves in the Southern states and the Gold Standard as the foundation of the U.S. currency. He showed no interest in higher office, although he was part of the Republican-majority commission that tilted the disputed Electoral College votes in the 1876 election to Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes.

But Hayes — today judged an average president, despite his commitment to civil rights — had pledged not to seek a second term, and by 1880 the Republicans were in the hunt for a successor. Garfield arrived at the Republican presidential convention to nominate Treasury Secretary John Sherman but other factions were pushing for Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine and the return of former President Ulysses S. Grant.

No candidate could secure a majority of support, and Garfield’s name was put forth to break the stalemate.

To Garfield’s utter horror, the convention delegates quickly warmed to having him as their standard bearer. By the 34th ballot, Garfield was within reach of gaining the nomination. He rose to address the convention, arguing, “I rise to a question of order. I challenge the correctness of the announcement. The announcement contains votes for me. No man has a right, without the consent of the person voted for, to announce that person’s name and vote for him in this convention. Such consent I have not given.”

James A. Garfield, 20th president of the United States. Courtesy the Library of Congress.

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James A. Garfield

The convention delegates ignored his protests and Garfield was selected as their nominee on the 36th ballot. “This honor comes to me unsought,” he lamented. “I have never had the Presidential fever, not even for a day.”

Garfield defeated his Democratic challenger, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, by approximately 1,900 popular votes, the tightest margin in history. The electoral vote count was more lopsided, with Garfield polling 214 and Hancock 155.

Garfield was inaugurated on March 4, 1881 and almost immediately came to loathe the job. “My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?” he wrote in his diary. He would later confide to an aide, “My day is frittered away by the personal seeking of people, when it ought to be given to the great problems which concern the whole country.”

One of those people Garfield encountered was Charles Guiteau, a failed lawyer and writer dealing with mental illness. Guiteau was convinced that he was responsible for Garfield’s election and sought out a foreign service position from the new president. Garfield opted not to hire Guiteau, who began stalking the president’s forays into public.

Despite the Lincoln assassination of 1865, no one at the White House thought it was necessary to assign a security detail to the president. Garfield and his Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, walked by themselves from the White House to the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington on July 2, 1881, where the president was planning to take a train to the New Jersey seashore to visit his wife Lucretia, who was recovering from a bout

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of malaria. Guiteau trailed the men and fired two shots at close range from behind — one bullet grazed Garfield’s arm and the other passed the first lumbar vertebra of his spine and lodged in his abdomen.

“My God, what is this?” Garfield yelled as he fell to the floor. Guiteau, in his panic to escape, wound up running smack into a police officer at the station and was apprehended. The fallen Garfield was immediately attended by several physicians who were at the railroad station, including Charles Burleigh Purvis, an African-American and a co-founder of the medical school at Howard University.

However, another physician was summoned to handle the president’s care. Doctor Willard Bliss (his first name was Doctor), a childhood friend of Garfield, began examining the fallen leader on the train station floor by probing the wound with his unwashed fingers. Purvis openly questioned Bliss’ actions but was rebuffed — not because of racism, as Bliss was expelled from the Medical Society of the District of Columbia for denouncing its refusal to admit black doctors — but because Bliss did not embrace the then-controversial theory of antiseptic medicine that was being popularized by British surgeon Joseph Lister.

Garfield was returned to the White House and, over the next two months, Bliss would conduct multiple efforts to locate the lodged bullet using his unwashed hands and unsterilized equipment. Alexander Graham Bell was brought in with a metal detection device, but it failed to pinpoint the bullet’s location. Bliss widened the three-inch deep bullet wound to 20 inches, carving open Garfield from his ribs and to his groin. And while Bliss was

aware of the increased levels of pus within the wound, he assumed it was evidence that the body was healing itself.

Throughout the ordeal, Garfield was bedridden and unable to consume solid food. His robust 210-pound frame withered to 130 pounds and the affairs of the Executive Branch were put on indefinite hold as the president suffered through fevers, chills and excruciating pain. The blistering heat of the Washington summer did not help, and on Sept. 5 Garfield was moved to the New Jersey location where his wife recuperated. But Garfield’s condition worsened into a bout of pneumonia and he complained of chest pains. On Sept.

19, Garfield passed, two months shy of his 50th birthday.

In the aftermath of Garfield’s death, Bliss submitted a claim to the federal government for $25,000 for his services.

He was offered only $6,500, which he rejected. Guiteau was brought to trial and blamed Garfield’s death on medical malpractice rather than his gunshots. He was found guilty and hanged on June 30, 1882.

Parts of his brain are on display in a jar at The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Garfield’s vice president, Chester A. Arthur, was sworn in as president after Garfield’s death. Their working relation was often testy before Garfield was assassinated, but Arthur made no effort to assume the presidential authority. There was no precedent on how the nation would be governed when the head of state became incapacitated. That issue would remain unresolved until the passage of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution in 1967.

Despite the assassinations of two presidents within 16 years, the concept of a security detail to guard the president would only become reality after the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley.

The Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station was demolished in 1908. The West Building of the National Gallery of Art is located at the station’s former site. Two temporary panels identifying the history of the site were installed in November 2018 just south of the West Building, but they are scheduled to be removed on July 2, 2021. Garfield remains the only slain president whose assassination site is without an official memorial.

Nevertheless, his life — and particularly his death — helped define the presidency he was so reluctant to assume.

For more, visit the James A. Garfield National Historic Site at nps.gov/jaga/ index.htm.

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Property Brothers Drew and Jonathan Scott.

Photograph by Kathy Hutchins /WAGMAG.COM 32 Shutterstock.

JANUARY 2020

Å kinship with twinship

BY JEREMY WAYNE

In the specular world of ambigrams, palindromes and mirror images, 2020 is a peach.

2020, of course, is not palindromic — we’ll have to wait another 92 years, until 2112 for the next year, which reads the same back to front — and, nor for that matter, is it even strictly symmetrical. But it is at the very least congruent, with elements of twinship thrown in.

It is also satisfying. 2020 are digits you’d likely want for a house number or, if long streets are not your thing, then at least a phone number. 2020 rolls off the tongue, is instantly memorable and aesthetically pleasing, suggests control but not aggression, will be pleasant to write and pleasurable to type. Indeed, I’m doing that right now, my fingers merrily clacking in yin-yang formation at opposite ends of the keyboard). I could type out ‘2020202020’ all day and feel I had achieved something, or at least enjoyed a good therapy session. Try it yourself: Feels good, doesn’t it?

2020 sounds good, too, a harbinger of good news and well-being. It’s gentle on the ear. Wedding and party planners reported a dearth of celebrations in the latter half of 2019, as prospective brides and event hosts preferred to hold off to the new year, so that the essentially pleasing “2020” might be embossed on their invitations for eternity, in preference to the well-meaning, but prosaic, 2019. Trust me, you will

receive a surge of wedding invitations this summer.

But it’s the twin aspect of the year ahead that especially appeals to me. I feel it’s going to be a good year for twins generally, and especially if they happen to be turning 20 this year. (Mind you, I’m inclined to say it will be a good year for anybody if they are only turning 20 this year.)

As the father of twins, I can tell you twins are fascinating. As the father of identical, or monozygotic, twins, I can tell you they are not only fascinating, but they run the psychological gamut. Now, you hardly need to be the parent of twins, or indeed a twin yourself, to realize this, but it does afford you ample opportunity for study. As one friend declaimed some 15 years ago when I told him my wife was expecting twins, “ Well, you’re such a symmetry freak yourself, two of everything, I guess it had to be twins.” Another friend, gentler and perhaps wiser, observed, “It’s not about symmetry, but balance.”

How right she was. Because for twins to be notable, notable that is beyond the mere accident of their twinship, the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts, a complementary relationship where one plus one must produce something more valuable than two. For twins to be truly interesting, there must be more than a mere doubling up — something rooted in the inherent closeness, something more exceptional than an “ordinary” pair of attuned siblings might achieve.

It is not therefore the individual behavior of twins that is so interesting, but the joint behavior or achievement of a set of twins that holds our attention. Think of Artemis and Apollo, those unerring

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archers and children of Zeus — she the goddess of the hunt and childbirth; he the god of the sun, music and truth. In the founding of Rome, Romulus and Remus achieved, as divine twins, something they might not have achieved as mere siblings.

Conversely, when twins are bad, they can be very, very bad, like the New York-based Marcus brothers, gynecologists Stewart and Cyril, on whose bizarre life story David Cronenberg’s 1975 film “Dead Ringers” was loosely based.

Twins can be positively evil: I’m thinking of Britain’s notorious Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, the underworld bosses of London’s East End in the 1950s and ’60s, as sharply dressed as they were ruthless, for whom the torture of their perceived enemies was as routine as an afternoon cup of tea.

Twins can be competitive for the good. Remember Tim and Tom Gullikson, those lanky, doubles-playing tennis stars of the ’70s and ’80s, who were succeeded recently by Mike and Bob Bryan, the most successful men’s doubles team to date? (Like Tim and Tom and my guys, Mike and Bob are mirror image twins, where one is a righty and the other a southpaw respectively.

Sadly, Tim died in 1996, but Tom has carried on their twinship with the Tim and Tom Gullikson Foundation to help brain cancer patients and their families.)

Twins can be competitive to the point of changing the course of history — the story of Jacob and Esau springs to mind. In the market place, twins can be unstoppable. Britain’s Barclay Brothers, David and Frederick, were born into relative poverty and are now worth $3 billion a piece, with an empire that includes shipping, media, retail, the Ritz Hotel in London and an island in the English Channel. Meanwhile, the identical Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, raised right here in Greenwich Connecticut, may have let Facebook slip away, but a $65 million settlement in their favor and a cool billion dollars (give or take) made from Bitcoin means the brothers are not exactly down on their uppers.

Another identical duo, Drew and Jonathan Scott, aka HGTV’s Property Brothers, are as entertaining to watch for their brotherly interaction as for the home makeover projects which the pair undertake each episode. Ditto for those appraising auctioneers, the Keno Brothers, Leigh and Leslie, on PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow.”

It’s not just siblings. Cities, too, come in twins.

Minneapolis has St. Paul and Phoenix has Scottsdale, but twin cities tend to be fraternal, their traits and characteristics unevenly distributed.

One tends to get the looks and one the brains, while in the worst-case scenarios, one twin gets everything and the other gets it nothing, or at least very little. Twinship, like real life, is seldom fair. So while it comes as no surprise that Athens,

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Georgia, is twinned with (or, more correctly, is a sister city of) Athens, Greece, or that Beverly Hills, California, is a sister city of Cannes, France, some curious anomalies creep in — Leavenworth, Kansas, with Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Australia, for instance. It may take me all of 2020 to figure that one out.

Double trouble, people say of twins, whereas what they should say is double blessings. “Two for the price of one,” I used to say, naively, in the sleepless early months after our twins were born, although I quickly learned to say “two for the price of two,” as there are no special deals regarding twins, no reductions at the supermarket, no subsidized travel. You pay for everything — twice. Of course, you do. Then again, I would argue that the best things in life are seldom free, but they do very often come in pairs.

Happy 2020 and a doubly good year ahead.

The Greenwich-raised Winklevoss twins, Tyler, left, and Cameron, venture capitalists. Photograph by J Stone / Shutterstock.

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Bob Mould. Photograph by Alicia J. Rose.

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For fans of indie rock legend Bob Mould, whose solo albums have borne titles such as “Black Sheets of Rain” and “Beauty & Ruin”, the name of his latest, “Sunshine Rock” (Merge), might come as something of a surprise.

But it’s a completely fitting moniker, especially since the sun rises in the names of four of the record’s songs. Sonically, the album is also more radiant, a deliberate shift on the part of the man also known for his previous bands Hüsker Dü and Sugar. But fear not, there is still plenty of loud, crackling guitar on “Sunshine Rock.” Mould was kind enough to take a few minutes out of this busy schedule to answer a few questions before the release of the album and his Feb. 1 appearance at the Tarrytown Music Hall: The sun plays a starring role on your new album “Sunshine Rock,” appearing in the title track, “Sunny Love Song,” “Camp Sunshine” and “Western Sunset.” Have you become a sun worshipper?

(Laughs) “I think that after a couple of albums in a row that were informed by a lot of darker, heavier incidents, it was a conscious effort to write to the brightness, to write to the light in whatever form it takes. The sun is the easy one, because it keeps everything going forward for all of us.”

The songs “Lost Faith” and “The Final Years” have what I would describe as a dance energy, despite the seriousness of the lyrics. What was the thinking behind that?

“Oddly enough, those were two of the final songs written for the album. They were both written in Berlin in February and March. That would be the global outlook on those, specifically. With ‘Lost Faith,’ that was where the tempo landed. The same with ‘The Final Years.’ Maybe those would lend themselves to the dance floor, because they have a little more room to breathe and tell the story. It’s interesting that you paired them up, because they were born right next to each other in the same place.”

here c mes the ‘sun (shine r ck)’

BY GREGG SHAPIRO

Speaking of Berlin, you are dividing your time between there and San Francisco. Did you speak German before you moved to Berlin, if not, how is your German now?

BM: “Ich spreche ein bisschen deutsch. It’s very

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going to do?’ We started looking through some covers of songs that we thought would be cool. That was one of the songs that showed up and we took a stab at it.

“We learned it in 10 minutes and recorded it pretty much right then. That was the first song that I sang any vocals on for the record. That’s the first take, first vocal for the record. It was really funny. I said, ‘Somebody get the words off the internet.’

My favorite part of it, and it’s really key to the whole album, is that they handed me these words and I’m singing. You can hear the warm-up that I’m doing at the beginning to try to get my voice open. About half a second before the first verse starts, I hear the vocal line in my head and I’m like, ‘I can’t f**king sing this.’ It’s not in my range.

Three hundred milliseconds before the vocal starts, I have to conjure up a new vocal line on the spot and that’s what that is.”

poor actually. My German is not good at all.

I can read a little bit and I can understand a little bit. I can speak a tiny bit, enough to get by. Fortunately for me, so many people in Berlin speak English. It’s not really a problem. The frustrating part for me, and I’ve got to work on this, when I try to speak German, after a couple of sentences I get waved off (and they say), ‘No, let’s just speak English.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ll never get to practice. You’re going to make me go to immersion, aren’t you?’”

“Sunshine Rock” contains a cover of Shocking Blue’s “Send Me A Postcard”.

After all these years, why did you choose to include a cover tune and why that song in particular?

“When the three of us (including Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster) got together in Oakland for the week of basic tracks, we ended up finishing two days early. We knew that the second of those two days was going to involve a film documentary and photos and all of that. The first of the two free days, we were like, ‘What are we

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I’m glad you mentioned Jason and Jon. You have a long history of being one third of a trio — beginning with Hüsker Dü, continuing with Sugar and with your current band lineup featuring Jason and Jon on your solo albums from “Silver Age” through “Sunshine Rock.” Can you please say something about that?

“I’m aware of it, but I guess I never tried to ascribe a meaning to it. That’s where I started in music, with a three-piece. I’ve always enjoyed the simplicity of it, particularly in the live setting. When you only have one guitar, one bass and one drummer, as an audience member, you can clearly see what everyone is bringing to it. You can see the interaction. There’s just that little space in the middle of the stage where nothing physically exists, but sonically and emotionally, everything goes to that spot. That’s where so much stuff happens. Nobody’s there, but we are putting it to that place and putting it to the crowd. I think it’s a specific form of rock and popular music that not many people are doing anymore. It appeals to me because you get to see how people interact. For people who like that kind of music, this is what we do.

If you like that, this is your kind of record, especially your kind of show.”

Bob Mould performs on Jan. 29 at the Iridium in Manhattan and on Feb. 1 at Tarrytown Music Hall. For more, visit theiridium.com and tarrytownmusichall.org.

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tw ’s en ugh

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

With our January focus on the year 2020, we thought it would be fun to look not only at eyes and vision — 20/20, get it? — but at doubles of all kinds, including the tennis game, twins and doppelgängers, our subject here.

The “doppelgänger” — the word comes from the German for “double” and “walker” — is different from the evil twins so beloved by soap operas, historical fiction (“The Man in the Iron Mask”), horror novels and films (“The Other,” “Dead Ringers”) and Bette Davis tearjerkers (“A Stolen Life”). Nor is the doppelgänger the same as an alter ego, perhaps best realized in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” It’s an 1886 novella that has often been reimagined for the stage and screen, perhaps never more poignantly than in the novel and film “Mary Reilly,” which tells the story of the experimenting doctor who transforms himself into a man of unbridled passions from

the viewpoint of his compassionate Irish maid.

As with twin tales, doppelgänger stories turn on resemblances and mistaken identities. And the doppelgänger can appear so close to the subject that he may seem like an alter ego, or other self. But the doppelgänger is a separate individual, a nonbiological lookalike who may be different in personality but not necessarily sinister in character — though in truth sinister is how we like it.

Indeed, the idea of a doppelgänger has been a favorite subject of a variety of cultures going back at least to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, who saw ghostly doubles as harbingers of bad luck and even death. Dante Gabriel Rossetti captures this in his 1864 painting “How They Met Themselves,” an exemplar of the sensuousness and medievalism of his Pre-Raphaelite Movement. In this lush watercolor, a man and a woman encounter their unearthly doppelgängers, ringed in yellow, during a twilight walk in a forest.

Swooning in recognition of impending doom, the woman is braced by her male companion, who confronts the ghostly couple with a look of real vehemence.

The doppelgänger as malevolent figure

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Saul Bass’ poster for the 1996 theatrical re-release of “Vertigo.” Movie restored by Robert A. Harris, a longtime Westchester resident, and James C. Katz. Poster restored

by Adam Cuerden.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “How They Met Themselves” (1864), watercolor. Fitzwilliam Museum.

has propelled literary works ranging from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Double” to Stephen King’s “The Outsider.” It’s at the heart of a movie that a 2012 poll of critics by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine called the greatest ever, Alfred Hitchcock’s haunting “Vertigo” (1958).

The film tells the story of a San Francisco detective, John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart), who falls for the suicidal Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), whom he’s been hired to protect. We’re giving nothing away — since Hitchcock deliberately gives away the plot twist mid-movie — to reveal that the woman is imposter Judy Barton (also played by Novak), hired by Madeleine’s murderous husband, Gavin, to make her death look like a suicide. And then things get really interesting. Suffice it to say that Scottie is much like the great Gatsby — see our opening essay — a man in

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thrall to his love of an illusion.

Such delusion is not limited to art. Capgras syndrome — named for the French psychiatrist who identified it, Joseph Capgras — is a rare neurological disorder in which the sufferer thinks someone close to him or her is an imposter. It’s particularly tragic as the subject — usually a schizophrenic but oftentimes someone with a degenerative condition like dementia — can be fine one moment then turn violently on the “double” who has supposedly taken the beloved’s place. There is little in the way of research, and treatment and results vary with the underlying condition.

But sometimes in art and in life, the stranger wears a friendly face. In Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper,” Henry VIII’s son, Edward, changes places with an abused lookalike pauper and learns how to rule with compassion, re-

warding his new friend with a position of importance at court.

The doppelgänger has also become a darling of the digital age, with the site twinstrangers.net using facial recognition technology to match visitors with their doubles. There have been more than 5.6 million matchups and the results for those who download their passport-style photographs for a fee can be uncanny and moving, as the meeting of Sara from Sweden and Shannon from Ireland attests. In one of the site’s meet-ups, the two bond over a fairy tale Christmas in Dublin.

“Are you twins?” a food vendor asks.

“No, we’re not related,” Shannon says to the vendor’s astonishment.

Perhaps not biologically but emotionally?

“Shannon is the best present I could ever ask for,” Sara says of their fast friendship.

Success Runs in the Family

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(platform)

tennis, any ne?

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

“When the winter finds you, you fly to where it’s summer,” Judy Collins sings in her song “Houses.”

Paddle tennis is mainly a game of doubles — perfect for winter socializing.

That’s always been true of tennis players, hasn’t it?

Melbourne this month, Australia’s summer, for the Australian Open; Miami and Indian Wells, California, for the winter hard court season in the United States.

But there is one racket sport you can enjoy outdoors here in winter, and that is paddle, or platform, tennis. It’s a sport that’s increasingly played at any number of clubs and public facilities in Westchester and Fairfield counties virtually year-round. All eyes, however, will be on it March 5 through 8 as the American Platform Tennis Association (APTA) National Championships return to Westchester and Fairfield for the first time since 2016.

Matches, which are free to the public, will be played at more than 34 clubs and public facilities in both counties, with the semifinals and finals at the Country Club of Darien. On March 5, the APTA will also hold the Men’s and Women’s Viking President’s Cup, an annual interregional competition.

Platform tennis — which was born at Fox Meadow Tennis Club in Scarsdale in 1928 — differs from tennis in a number of ways, says Tiernan Cavanna, APTA president, Nationals co-chair and a Darien resident. It is played on a raised court one-third the size of a tennis court that’s made up of heated aluminum planks surrounded by

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Juan Arraya of Greenwich Country Club, foreground, with doubles partner Max LePivert of the Stanwich Club. Photograph by Scott Gerber.

mesh screens. The racket is smaller than a tennis racket and has no strings. And you only get a first serve. While platform tennis includes singles competition — there is an Eastern Men’s and Women’s National Ranking Tournament in Greenwich in September and October that wasn’t played last year — the sport is “99.9%” doubles competitions, Cavanna adds.

Among the doubles teams that will be in action is that of Amy Shay and Cynthia Dardis, who’ve been ranked

in the top four for the last 16, 17 years.

“I have the luxury of having the same partner for many years,” Shay says. “I know what she’s going to hit.

We play off one another’s shots. We play as one.”

Because platform tennis is played by doubles teams on a smaller court where you can hit a ball that bounces off the screens, similar in that regard to racquetball and squash, the strategy is different from that in tennis.

“In tennis, the player who hits the hardest is probably going to win,” says Cavanna, who was a competitive junior player growing up in Texas.

Whereas since the ball might ricochet off the screen back to you in platform tennis, hitting for power may not be the best game plan.

“It’s not your intention to hit winners,” says Shay, who went to Boston College on a tennis scholarship and took up platform after she had children. “You’re lobbing and serving and volleying.”

Adds Cavanna: “You and your partner try to figure out what your opponents’ weaknesses are and hit the ball over and over to that spot.”

With 18,000 members nationwide, platform tennis is growing, Cavanna says, bringing new meaning to the phrase “winter sport.”

“It helps to pass the season,” Shay says. “You don’t mind the winter when you’re doing something fun.”

For more, visit platformtennis.org and 2020nationals.com.

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I FEEL SO POWERLESS. I FEEL SOTO POWERLESS. WE HAVE WATCH HER EVERY MINUTE. WE HAVE TO FRIENDS WATCH HER EVERY COMING MINUTE.AROUND. FAMILY AND STOPPED FAMILY AND FRIENDS STOPPED COMING AROUND. HE KEEPS SAYING: “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH ME.” HE KEEPS SAYING:OUR “THERE’S IT’S DESTROYING FAMILY.NOTHING WRONG WITH ME.” DESTROYING OURHAVE FAMILY. IIT’S FEEL SO GUILTY WE TO MOVE HER INTO A HOME. I FEEL GUILTY WE HAVE MOVE HER INTOMEAN A HOME. IT’S SOSO HARD TO CARE FOR TO SOMEONE WHO’S TO YOU. IT’SHIDES SO HARD TO CARE FORTIME. SOMEONE WHO’S MEAN TO YOU. HE THINGS ALL THE HE GRIEVING HIDES THINGS ALL THE I’M THE LOSS OF TIME. SOMEONE WHO’S STILL ALIVE. I’M GRIEVING THE LOSSWHERE OF SOMEONE WHO’S STILL ALIVE. WE DON’T EVEN KNOW TO START. WE DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO START.

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Antonio Lope’s “Female Figure With Hat and Borzoi Dog” (1975), marker pastel.

48 Society WAGMAG.COM Courtesy of Illustrators. JANUARY 2020

fashi nably drawn “Fashion Illustration: The Visionaries, A Century of Illustrations From the Frances Neady Collection” — at the Society of Illustrators Jan. 7 through March 7 — had us at the catalog’s cover.

It features Tobie Giddio’s 2003 work in medium ink and colored Pantone paper, created for Chanel for Amica, which has a Zen-like, calligraphic quality. A fascinator, a pair of lowered, heavily fringed eyes with wings of shadow and a small, rouged mouth bordered by an abstracted mermaid gown that looks like an inkstand evoke the whole of a woman. Here, the eyes have it, a fitting metaphor for the eye of the illustrator and the eye of the designer that the illustrator captures.

“Informed by intuition and chance,” the accompanying text notes, “(Giddio’s) work is at once unexpected and beautiful to behold.”

The same might be said for the other visionaries in the show, including Bil Donovan, chairman of the Frances Neady Collection of Original Fashion Illustration, which the exhibit celebrates. Neady, who taught fashion illustration for 50 years at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and Parsons School of Design, both in Manhattan, didn’t create the collection, Donovan says, but rather inspired it. Held by FIT’s Special Collections, the Neady Collection now contains more than 400 pieces, 65 of which are in the show and 28 of which were acquired for the exhibit. They not only display the artistry of fashion illustration’s biggest names, Donovan says, but chronicle its history and the changing tides of America.

In the early 20th century, he says, fashion plates in books and magazines — which, by the way, are the origins for the term “fashion plate” to describe a fashionable person — had the studied quality of the Art Nouveau movement. With the advent of jazz, Art Deco and

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

René Bouché’s “Tatiana et Alex” (1944), ink on paper.

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Maud DeForest Bogart’s “Three Figures in Evening Gowns” (1929), wash and inks on paper.

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Coco Chanel in the 1920s, fashion started to loosen up and so did illustration.

“It was the genesis of fashion illustration to come,” Donovan says. In the show, the Jazz Age is represented in part by Carl Erickson’s (known as Eric) “Jazz Club Scene” (1927, medium wash watercolor), in which a flapper with a top-hatted gentleman drops her fur stole from her shoulders to reveal the low back of her short, form-fitting dress. It was an age in which anything went, as long as you were soigné about it, as “Three Figures in Evening Gowns” (1929, wash inks) attests. The women, in handkerchief gowns, pose against the backdrop of a party and New York City at night in this drawing by Maud Humphrey DeForest Bogart, the illustrator and suffragist, who served as art director of the fashion magazine The Delineator from the 1890s to 1920 and who is better-known to film buffs as the mother of movie star

Humphrey Bogart.

Donovan describes the 1940s and ’50s as the golden age of fashion illustration even though “still photography had a huge presence in advertising.” The era is represented by René Bouché’s come-hither nude (“Tatiana et Alex,” 1944, ink) and “Woman in Bouffant Skirt,” a charcoal, pastel, ink and gouache work by Esta Nesbitt, known as Esta, that catches the sweep of ’50s fashion.

With the Cultural Revolution of the ’60s, fashion, which had been the province of an exclusive crowd, began to become more democratic.

“Antonio Lopez was instrumental in this,” Donovan says. “He brought sex and street cred to fashion,” as in his “Amelia Earhart Series” (1978, graphite ink) for Bloomingdale’s, with an idealized version of the boyish subject flying on a swing — a long scarf whipping about her starry aviator’s cap, crowned in sparkling goggles, her pleated midi-length dress blowing back to reveal tapered legs in spiked-heel sandals.

In the 1980s, the field of fashion illustration became monopolized by photography, but drawing returned in the 1990s, Donovan says, with the advent of the cultural magazine Wallpaper.

“Graphics is a major part of the magazine, and it made people look at fashion illustration in a different way.”

Today, it has benefited, he adds, from both digital technology and social media.

The work is no longer primarily in publications but has migrated to promotions for everything from retail to credit card companies. Indeed, when we first met Donovan at the end of 2017, he was doing sketching at Louis Vuitton in The Westchester as part of a day of curated shopping sponsored by the mall and Harper’s Bazaar.

“For all the complaints that fashion illustrating might’ve gone away,” Donovan says, “it’s always there.”

For more, visit societyillustrators.org.

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JANUARY 2020 Dylan52 Lauren.WAGMAG.COM Photograph by Danny Christensen.

sweet n sweets

BY JEREMY WAYNE

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Dylan Lauren loves candy everything about it, the taste, the color, the packaging, especially the packaging.

“The colors remind me of the swatches I would see in my dad’s office growing up,” she told me when we recently spoke on the phone, ahead of her upcoming presentation and book-signing at the Bedford Playhouse.

The youngest of Ralph Lauren and his wife Ricky Ann Low-Beer’s three children, Dylan grew up in New York City where she attended the progressive Dalton School.

She lives in Manhattan but spends weekends with her husband, the hedge-fund manager Paul Arrouet, and 4-year-old twins, Cooper Blue and Kingsley Rainbow, at the Lauren family home in Bedford.

“I was a history of art major (at Duke),” Dylan says, “so I’m really into shapes, too. I love to see a cathedral, say, made of chocolate or a beautiful flower made out of candy sugar. I love to see candy transformed.”

In love with candy, or in her words, “inspired” by it since seeing the movie of “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” at the age of 6, she founded Dylan’s Candy Bar in 2001. In addition to four New York stores including the original Manhattan flagship on Third Avenue, you can now find Dylan’s Candy Bars in East Hampton, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles. She will open a store in Hawaii this year and has her eyes on openings in Japan as well as London, a city she loves. “I would love to live in London one day,” she says, full of genuine enthusiasm. But then everything Dylan says is full of enthusiasm. Her energy is palpable and infectious.

She sources candy and chocolate from around the globe, usually finding brands she likes herself as a regular shopper in supermarkets or on her extensive travels, and then finding out who the manufacturer or vendor is and seeing if he will work with Candy Bar. She also attends speciality food shows looking for unique goods, which is an exhausting business.

“I’m old-fashioned and I don’t want to be sent stuff by email, and they don’t let you bring a rolly cart in to the shows,” she says — you can hear the exhaustion in her voice at this point — “so I end up picking up every single brochure and walking out carrying about six pounds on each shoulder.” Top shows for Dylan would be All Candy Expo and Global Shop, held annually in Chicago, the latter being all about great shop design, which Dylan embraces and incorporates in all of the stores, making them as delicious to look at as the products they sell are to eat.

In addition to the Hawaii opening, 2020 will also see a renovation of the Chicago store and a relaunch of the e-commerce website. (There is a foundation too, Dylan’s Candy Barn, whose mission is to help every abandoned animal find a home-sweet-home by hosting adoption events, highlighting the importance of spaying and neutering in preventing overpopulation and euthanasia, sponsoring and granting funds to animal rescue programs and aiding animal-welfare organizations in ending animal cruelty. With good reason she is inordinately proud of the foundation and its achievements.)

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The stores, typically, sell up to 7,000 edible treats, but there are also candy-inspired lifestyle products, including stationery, toys and tech as well T-shirts, handbags and jewelry, much of it candy-themed. Several locations also sport an Ice Cream & Dessert Parlor, with party rooms that offer a wide variety of themed events for all ages. And if that conjures up images of hordes of kids strung out on sugar, it shouldn’t. Dylan’s Candy Bar, say Dylan’s people, is “not just a sugar high but a sweet lasting euphoria.”

Those “all ages,” incidentally include her twins — whom she naturally calls her “twinkies” — who not only like the candy but enjoy games, samplings and classes, like painting gingerbread decorating events that take place at the stores. They think it’s pretty cool that their mom has candy stores and, also, in true family tradition, they seem to have taken to retail like ducks to water.

“They actually report back to me. They’ll say things like, ‘The store was very busy today.’” Talk about the apple not falling far from the tree.

As for Dylan’s own fancies, if pressed she is more a candy than chocolate. “I could eat Marshmallow Fluff all day,” she says, not so much a confession as a badge of honor.

That’s the wonderful thing about Dylan — she eschews any sense of sin or guilty pleasure. For her, candy is joy, it is sheer, unadulterated pleasure. “I’m a red gumballs, red

licorice, Swedish fish person,” she throws in.

She does have one chocolate favorite, however — Cadbury’s — which, as a Brit, I fully understand (and applaud).

Its chocolate crème eggs, a confection that has almost cult status in the UK, are “awesome” and she loves “dissecting them.” I tell her she is not alone, since all Brits dissect their crème eggs. It’s just a thing to do. And when I lament the difficulty of buying them here in New York, she reminds me of DeCicco’s & Sons, which sells a wide variety of Cadbury’s chocolate in its Westchester stores.

Our phone conversation at an end, we make a date to meet in the candy aisle of DeCicco’s in Scarsdale and I add my name to the long list of people — including Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Madonna Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise — who proclaim themselves fans, not only of Dylan’s Candy Bar but of the ebullient and thoroughly sweet Dylan Lauren.

Dylan Lauren will sign copies of her book “"Dylan’s Candy Bar: Unwrap Your Sweet Life"during her event at the Bedford Playhouse, 1 to 3 p.m. Jan. 12. For more, call 914-234-6704 or visit bedfordplayhouse.org.

On Feb. 27, Lauren will host a Dylan’s Candy Barn event at her Manhattan flagship, where pets will be matched to humans and humans will be matched to pets.

JANUARY 2020

The bold and colorful interiors of Dylan’s Candy Bar. Courtesy Dylan’s Candy Bar.

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Anthony Benedetto’s “Venice II,” watercolor. All works Collection of Tony Bennett and Benedetto Arts LLC.

an ear f r music, an eye f r art

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

At The Art Students League of New York in Manhattan, teachers and students of all ages wear their passion for art emblazoned on their paintsplattered smocks as they bustle to class past an exhibit of paintings and drawings by one Anthony Benedetto.

The 29 works include portraits as well as landscapes of places around the world — Venice, Puerto Rico and Estoril, Portugal, to name a few — that evoke such artists as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Claude Monet, particularly in their creation of light-dappled colors.

It’s not, however, until you get to the insightful portraits of the celebrated — a pensive Duke Ellington here, a commanding Lady Gaga there — that you realize that Benedetto is an artist with an unusual day job: He’s the legendary singer Tony Bennett, whose alter ego is on display at the league’s American Fine Arts Society Gallery through Jan. 11 in the show “The Art of Tony Bennett/Anthony Benedetto.”

We first interviewed Bennett in the 1990s about his musical career and discovered he has not only an ear and a voice for music but an eye and a hand for art, too. He told us then that Frank Sinatra, a devoted Sunday afternoon plein air painter, suggested he take up watercolors as a way to pass the time on the road.

Bennett soon developed into a serious painter.

For many years, the ever-gracious performer would send us Christmas cards of his paintings. (We still have them.) Eventually, the cards stopped, but we would see him occasionally at the press previews for exhibits at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where his painting of Abraham Lincoln against the backdrop of an American flag hung in the office of Harold Holzer, then The Met’s senior vice president of external affairs, who is also a Lincoln scholar with many books to his credit and a Rye resident.

Tony Bennett work with his teacher Frank L. Porcu, an instructor at The Art Students League of New York in Manhattan. Courtesy The Art Students League of New York.

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It was through Holzer that Bennett met Frank L. Porcu, an instructor in anatomy, drawing, sculpture and painting at the 145-year-old league where he’s brought back the study of the antique with the second-floor Antique Cast Wall that includes a full-blown reproduction of Donatello’s sensuous sculpture “David.” (He also lectures on stereoscopic anatomy at Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons.)

“We kind of migrated toward each other and talked about painting,” Porcu recalls as we sit in another gallery. He was impressed by how much Bennett knew about art, but the singer, who has a studio and an apartment in Manhattan, was hungry for more. So Porcu invited him to his Friday night classes. Though he prepared the other students for a special visitor, they greeted Bennett with the same open-heartedness with which the singer meets his fans and the press.

“Celebrities come in and out,” Porcu adds. “That’s what’s great about this place.

We’re more interested in what you are in real life. We judge you as an equal.”

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Porcu conducts his classes — in which students work from live models — like a doctor on rounds. He picks five students to critique. The class follows him from easel to easel. Soon Bennett’s strengths became apparent to all, including “ a versatility and an ability to divorce himself from his ego and look with new eyes.”

One day Bennett told Porcu that he not only wanted to sculpt but that he wanted to sculpt his friend, Harry Belafonte. He even brought Belafonte to class.

The result is a bust that brings out Bennett’s affection for his fellow performer, as do his painted portraits of Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. They, along with one of his paintings of Central Park, are now part of the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., courtesy of Bennett, says exhibit curator Genevieve Martin, the league’s director of external affairs.

“To be relentlessly pursuing his artistic skills is motivation for all people,” she says.

“He never stops learning.”

For more, visit theartstudentsleague. org.

Anthony Benedetto’s “Central Park Jam Session,” watercolor.

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60MaisonWAGMAG.COM Courtesy Atia.

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Chloe Mendel — daughter of Gilles Mendel of J. Mendel fame — is putting her own spin on following in her family’s furrier-fashion footsteps.

Her new Maison Atia, founded with Gustave Maisonrouge, has opened a boutique on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue for its faux fur offerings. They include coats that you can personalize with patches for a contemporary edge, as well as accessories and home furnishings.

Recently, Maison Atia teamed with KOIO, a shoe company, to create the first 100% vegan leather sneaker accented with faux fur — a limited-edition platform sneak made in Italy.

Maison Atia is a supporter of PAWS Chicago, a leading no-kill shelter. For each coat purchased, Maison Atia provides life-saving transportation for a homeless pet from a high-kill shelter to a no-kill one.

Charmingly modest for one so young (27) and accomplished — “I don’t have much of a background,” she says — Chloe grew up in New York City of French-Taiwanese descent. Internships in her father’s atelier — she helped him launch J. Mendel’s first haute couture collection in July 2016 — led her to “crystallize” her ideas about faux fur.

She has also managed her life partner Billy Corgan’s tea shop, Madame Zuzu, in Highland Park, Illinois.

“We are currently reopening (in) spring…which is very exciting,” she says.

Their other venture is of the parental kind, with children Clementine and Augustus.

Dividing her time between the Big Apple and the Windy City, Chloe says, “I guess my background is an eclectic collection of many unique experiences beyond design and motherhood.”

Recently, Chloe took time to answer a few questions via email: Chloe, J. Mendel began as a furrier in 1870 St. Petersburg, Russia, with Joseph Mendel serving as furrier to Czar Alexander II. Do you have the sense with this venture that you and your family have come full circle?

“Yes, absolutely, I am the sixth generation of a long lineage of furriers and I feel that I am taking the family’s heritage and savoir-faire into a modern alternative — faux fur. My goal is to offer women who want to look and feel glamorous but don’t want to compromise on quality and craftsmanship another option, which is more accessible. What better way to show

faux fur fun

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

Gustave Maisonrouge and Chloe Mendel, founders of Maison Atia.

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both respect to my family but also creativity than taking these old-furrier techniques into a new material?”

Fashionistas recently learned that Queen Elizabeth is going faux in her personal clothing choices. (State robes are part of the crown and exempt.) Do you feel you are part of a trend that’s still cresting?

“Maison Atia launched (in 2019) a week before Gucci announced it was going furfree, a month after the cover of Vogue was all about faux fur. The saying is that timing is everything. Well, I guess ours could not have been better. Since then, a number of luxury brands like Chanel and Prada announced they, too, were going fur-free. So it does feel like we are part of a movement, and it’s quite gratifying when media speak of this phenomenon to see Maison Atia mentioned alongside such venerable brands as Stella McCartney or Chanel.”

What makes your approach to faux fur different than other designers?

“While we are not the only ones creating high-end faux fur coats and accessories, we are the only brand that exclusively focuses on luxury faux fur. Indeed, for the other luxury brands, faux fur is only a very small portion of their creations. Other faux fur

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companies are not focused on true craftsmanship, and we are the only ones consistently using the finest materials available. As we continue to grow, we remain authentic to our values and won’t compromise on our quality and heritage.”

You worked with your father, Gilles, CEO and creative director of J. Mendel, at the beginning of your career. Do you two talk shop and trade fashion advice?

“My father has been a constant source of inspiration for me and I continue to learn from him at every turn. I always ask myself when looking at a new style: Would he approve of the way the coat is made? Would he feel I am correctly merging my inspiration, creativity and craftsmanship? I know he is proud of me, but I also know he will not hesitate to be what I would call ‘constructively critical’ when needed. It is an amazing gift to have such a perfectionist to give you honest feedback. I promise it keeps me in check.”

What should fans be eyeing in your winter collection?

“Our faux fur hats. They are so warm and fluffy and an amazing gift.”

What should they be looking for in your spring collection?

“We are working on many cute faux fur

items that are less seasonal, such as our pochettes (envelope handbags), sweaters and little gifts in unique colors. (We’re) focusing on fun little surprises with a faux fur touch to stay on brand and very cute.”

What are you looking forward to in 2020?

“My co-founder, Gustave Maisonrouge, who takes care of the business aspect of the company, is working hard at identifying the best distribution partners for us. We have expanded our retail partnerships nationally. In addition to Le Board and Oui! Boutique in Manhattan, Neapolitan and Ikram in Chicago, Performance Ski in Aspen, and Halsbrook, where we were already last year, we are now part of the Orchard Mile online community, along with such iconic brands as Valentino and Balenciaga.

“We are also honored to be both online and at five key locations with Neiman Marcus this fall — Hudson Yards in New York City, Short Hills in New Jersey, San Francisco, Dallas and Boston. We are even now available in Deauville, France.

“So we look forward to capitalizing on this year’s momentum to continue to expand, looking first to Europe and then eventually to Asia.”

For more, visit maisonatia.com.

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1929. Lousie Brooks in “Pandora’s Box.” Copyright reserved: Aquarius Library. Images as featured in “Fashion: A Timeline in Photographs: 1850 to Today” (Rizzoli, 2015) by Caroline Rennolds Milbank. Courtesy Caroline Rennolds Milbank.

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hist ry, in fashi n

BY MARY SHUSTACK

In this, our “2020” issue that looks ahead to the new year while also taking a journey back into the 1920s, we thought it only fitting that fashion — something many of us obsess over — be included.

And for the walk through that “Roaring” decade in dress, we turned to Caroline Rennolds Milbank as our guide.

Milbank is a fashion historian, author, writer, curator and appraiser. In her curatorial role, she has worked with institutions including The Museum at FIT at the Fashion Institute of Technology and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in Manhattan, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Bruce Museum in Greenwich.

Milbank is also the author of a handful of fashion-themed books, including “Fashion: A Timeline in Photographs: 1850 to Today” (Rizzoli, 2015).

WAG has had the pleasure of hearing Milbank speak at a past edition of the “Mansions of the Gilded Age” symposium at Lyndhurst in Tarrytown — and she was an early December guest of the Greenwich Decorative Arts Society, when she offered an illustrated lecture,

“The Best of American Fashion,” at the Bruce Museum.

We caught up with her in the days after that lecture, when Milbank took time to share her expertise — and perspective — on 1920s fashion with us.

How would you summarize the 1920s in fashion, for both women and men?

“The 1920s followed the War to End all Wars and it was felt especially by the young that antiquated values and attitudes were responsible for such a cataclysmic event. ‘Bright Young Things’ (as both men and women were called) reveled in breaking the rules of the former social order.

Smoking cigarettes, drinking (Prohibition was on), driving fast, dancing crazily, using slang were all satisfactory ways to shock one’s elders.

Women, who now had the right to vote, dressed in a totally new way with short, bobbed hair, visible makeup and short skirts. The dominant look was an unstructured, tubular chemise dress. No corset was worn and the bust and waistline were not emphasized. It is no coincidence that the three great periods of relatively unstructured dress for women were times of enormous social change: the first decades following the French and American revolutions; the 1920s and the 1960s.”

What are some of most iconic fashions — silhouettes, garments and/or accessories — associated with the 1920s?

“The word iconic is always troublesome — it has come to be synonymous with common or clichéd. The clichés of the 1920s are long cigarette

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holders, feather boas and beaded dresses.

“The actual significant items were: • Little black dress, unadorned and beige as a chic color, both popularized by Chanel; • Little white sports dress as popularized by great (tennis players) and women of style Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills Moody. These were introduced by Jean Patou; • Fringed clothing. Radio and gramophones meant that music was more widely available during the 1920s than ever before, and with music came dancing. Dresses that featured fringe and separate floating panels could be best appreciated on the dance floor; • Sequins — a relatively new invention, used for entire garments; • The emergence of the beach pajama — First worn at the Lido in Venice in the mid 1920s, beach pajamas paved the way for wearing pants in public; • Wearing frankly fake jewelry à la Chanel. Previously, fake jewelry — along with makeup — (was) associated with actresses and ladies of the night; • With shorter skirts and an emphasis on the leg came sheerer, lighter stockings (previously most had been black) and ornate T-strap shoes; • All accessories associated with smoking and drinking — cigarette cases, flasks; • Makeup (Cupid bow lips painted red, nail lacquer) and accessories associated with makeup — powder compacts, lipsticks in ornamental cases; • Short hair for women.

“For men: A few items would include fads such as Oxford bags — tremendously wide-legged trousers — and raccoon coats, popularized by college boys. The man every man wanted to look like was the youthful Prince of Wales, who launched such styles as the midnight blue dinner jacket and plus fours (baggy knickers reaching below the knee).”

What effect do you think depictions of the 1920s in entertainment — we’re thinking of movies such as “The Great Gatsby” and such TV series as “Downton Abbey” and “Boardwalk Empire” — have on the general public’s perception of the 1920s?

“The relatively few movies or television shows to depict the 1920s have had a great impact on shaping our image of the period. Probably the first popular film to look back at the 1920s was ‘Some Like it Hot’ in 1959. In the 1960s there was ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’ and the early 1970s ‘The Great Gatsby’ with clothing by Ralph Lauren, then an emerging designer. What ‘Downton Abbey’ has done best in terms of fashion is show the progression of styles from the 1910s into the 1920s. The Dowager aunt continues to dress in styles of the past, befitting her old-fashioned attitudes, whereas the young set embraces the latest thing.”

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Do the styles of the 1920s continue to have an effect on contemporary dress — and if so, in what way?

“Fashion loves to look back but currently fashion tends to favor the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s but especially the 1970s.”

And finally, are you a collector of fashion?

If so, can you share details of any items you might have that reflect the 1920s — or also, any modern-day purchases that you feel echo the ’20s?

“Sorry, but no…

“Modern-day purchases that might give off a 1920s air would include: a sequined, beaded or fringed chemise dress; a close-fitting cloche hat (a bucket hat might work for this); beaded purse, either one with a chain handle or in envelope style; silk flower to wear at the shoulder; Art Deco jewelry such as dangling narrow long earrings; long strings of glass, crystal or pearl beads; brooches in geometric shapes, particularly worn at the hip.

A feather boa, often thought of as quintessentially 1920s was actually a fad from two decades before the 1920s.”

For more, visit Milbank’s website at fashionhistory.com.

1926 Maison Lewis cloche trimmed with tri-color grosgrain. Photograph by Henri Manuel.

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Leave it to The Met to offer a unique way to explore the concept of time.

As recently announced, the spring exhibition of The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan is to be “About Time: Fashion and Duration.”

And the latest entry in the series of blockbuster shows will present, as advance materials share, “a disruptive timeline of fashion history.”

It will all get underway May 4 with the annual Costume Institute Benefit, informally known as The Met Gala. This year’s event will be co-chaired by fashion designer Nicolas Ghesquière; “Hamilton” creator and noted composer, lyricist, actor and activist Lin-Manuel Miranda; Academy Awardwinning actors Emma Stone and Meryl Streep — and, of course, the iconic Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

Those attending the gala traditionally wear designs inspired by the theme, building the excitement for “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” which will open May 7 and continue through Sept.

7 in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall of The Met’s Fifth Avenue flagship.

As part of the museum’s 150th anniversary celebration, the exhibition will trace fashion from 1870 to the present.

THE EXHIBITION FOCUS

Here’s how it’s being advanced: “Employing philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée — time that flows, accumulates, and is indivisible — the exhibition will explore how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate the past, present and future. The concept will also be examined through the writings of Virginia Woolf, who will serve as the ‘ghost narrator’ of the exhibition. Michael Cunningham, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel ‘The Hours,’ which was inspired by Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ will write a new short story for the exhibition catalogue that reflects on the concept of duration.”

Max Hollein, director of The Met, shared in the announcement of “About Time,” that “This exhibition will consider the ephemeral nature of fashion, employing flashbacks and fast-forwards to reveal how it can be both linear and cyclical. As such, the show

it’s ‘ab ut time’ at the met

BY MARY SHUSTACK

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“FASHION IS INDELIBLY CONNECTED TO TIME. IT NOT ONLY REFLECTS AND REPRESENTS THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES, BUT IT ALSO CHANGES AND DEVELOPS WITH THE TIMES, SERVING AS AN ESPECIALLY SENSITIVE AND ACCURATE TIMEPIECE.” — Andrew Bolton

will present a nuanced continuum of fashion over the museum’s 150-year history.”

Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, added, “Fashion is indelibly connected to time. It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times, serving as an especially sensitive and accurate timepiece.

Through a series of chronologies, the exhibition will use the concept of duration to analyze the temporal twists and turns of fashion history.”

A WALK THROUGH TIME

The exhibition will feature 160 examples of women’s fashions, with the major-

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ity of objects drawn from The Costume Institute’s collection (including gifts made as part of The Met’s 2020 Collections Initiative in celebration of the milestone anniversary).

Here’s how the exhibition is envisioned, as shared by The Met: “A linear chronology of fashion comprised predominantly of ensembles in black will run through the exhibition reflecting the progressive timescale of modernity, and bringing into focus the fast, fleeting rhythm of fashion. Unlike traditional chronologies, which reduce the history of fashion to a limited number of decade-defining silhouettes, this timeline will be presented as a ceaseless continuum that is more complete and comprehensive in scope. “Interrupting this timeline will be a series of counter-chronologies composed of predominantly white ensembles that pre-date or post-date those in black, but relate to one another through shape, motif, material, pattern, technique, or decoration. For example, a black silk faille princess-line dress from the late 1870s will be paired with an Alexander McQueen ‘Bumster’ skirt from 1995, and a black silk velvet bustle ensemble from the mid-1880s will be juxtaposed with a Comme des Garçons ‘Body Meets Dress — Dress Meets Body’ dress from 1997.

“The exhibition will conclude with a section on the future of fashion, linking the concept of duration to debates about longevity and sustainability.”

The exhibition is organized by Bolton with support from Amanda Garfinkel, assistant curator, and Jan Reeder, curatorial consultant. Visual artist and stage designer Es Devlin will create the exhibition design with The Met’s Design Department.

For more, AboutTime.

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metmuseum.org/

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Alex Proba. Photograph by Jennifer Palomaa.

the c l rful whirl f alex pr ba

BY BOB ROZYCKI

Alex Proba is not just an artist, she’s an artist slash muralist slash graphic designer slash rug designer slash sculptor slash furniture designer.

(Get the picture?) Before starting Studio Proba in Brooklyn six years ago, she had been an art director with Nike and Kickstarter and a design director at ad agency Mother in New York City.

Alex DelBello is a senior at Parsons School of Design majoring in fine arts who loves large-scale painting. She followed Proba on Instagram and admired her work. So it was a fortuitous opportunity when Proba was commissioned to create a mural for environmentally conscious salad chain SweetGreen’s new store in Manhattan.

As she does when she does large-scale artwork, Proba put out a call for assistants.

DelBello jumped at the chance to work with her.

“The opportunity to work with such an established artist and designer was really valuable. From the start, she immediately came off with such a humble personality. And because of her sweet demeanor, you feel like you’re just friends painting together. That made the experience really fun.”

The way this latest mural came together was Proba first mapped out her design with pencil.

Day one was filling in the shapes, layer after layer after layer. Since it was stucco, “we had to apply about five to 10 layers on each shape,” DelBello says.

“So we all just painted layer after layer, Alex too, painting right beside us. She planned it all out and had final say on everything, of course.… We all painted together and just painted more layers for days. It was cool that she wasn’t just

a boss and had her assistants painting for her. She got just as dirty as we all did.”

DelBello says she was grateful for the chance to work with Proba.

“She taught me a lot about painting on stucco and the best ways to achieve the flat, perfect look she does. I can’t express more how much I loved the humility in the way she taught, though. She makes you feel like equals when working together. And even though I was the youngest assistant there, she respected the different kind of work that I did outside of this job, which enhanced this feeling of ‘friends painting together.’ I was just lucky to get to learn so much.”

As the world spins, so does Proba’s life. Sometime between working on murals in Seattle or Los Angles or New York City, she found time to answer some questions.

It’s hard to put you in a box. Murals, rugs, furniture, branding; wow. Oh, I left out sculptures. Are you a designer first or a painter or…?

“Hah, that’s very true. I think I am a multidisciplinary designer and artist. My background is in interior architecture and graphic design, and I studied furniture and product design in grad school in the Netherlands.

“But I think about that question a lot. What am I? I am a graphic/brand studio but also do environmental/spatial design as well as furniture and home products as well as art and murals. It’s a lot to make sense of for the viewer.

For me it all makes sense. I’ve started my career in architecture and then fell into graphic design and branding and that evolved to art as well as furniture and product. I started my studio in 2013 and until 2018 I’ve had full-time jobs next to running it (for many reasons). But two years ago, I finally put my love, passion and creativity into my studio work and could not be happier.

“I take it day by day and am not trying to create a distinc-

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ultimately not bad at all. So we just did it and it worked out great.

And ever since I’ve been painting a lot of murals in different sizes and heights and I’ve gained so much more knowledge of how to do it and what not to do. But I feel like you only learn those things if you do it and you will grow every time. What I love most is how murals (on whichever surface wall, table, ceiling) completely transform an environment. They add life and personality. They make you smile when you see them. They are an emotion for me.

I love that.”

An assistant works on Alex Proba’s mural in Manhattan.

Photograph by Alex DelBello.

tion between my art and design work. I take client work and commissions as they come in and I try to make every day different.

Sometimes I am only painting, the next day I am working on a branding project and then another day I am designing new products for my home collection.

“I am not a creature of habit or routine. I need exactly the opposite to be happy and to activate my creativity.”

In regard to murals, what comes first, the image or the colors or the shapes?

“The colors. The colors come always first.”

Do you have a favorite mural?

“That is a tricky question as I have different emotional ties to one mural over another and it’s very hard to pick my favorite. I would have to say that I love them all for different reasons. At the end of the day they are all a collection of my personal expression and mean a lot to me.”

What was the most difficult to do, whether time constraint or site choice? What was the easiest?

“Murals are paintings and the worst that can happen is to paint over. :) Therefore I don’t try to see anything as too difficult or too easy.”

How do you think so large? Does the image start small?

Could you please describe the process?

“I think my training in architecture and furniture/product design is very helpful in this case as I have a great ability for visualizing dimensions in any scale. All my work, even if it’s a small collage or a canvas painting, starts digitally — which is the graphic designer in me. I plan the design out digitally and mock it into a render or photo of the space to feel and see the scale ,and once I feel good about it I make it reality and paint it.

“I somehow fell into murals painting when a friend and former boss, Aaron Robbs, asked me to create a 60-foot-long mural for Dropbox’s New York City headquarters. That was about four years ago now and we both had absolutely no idea where to start and how to do it. Haha.

“I feel like once you have a challenge like that in front of you, you just figure it out. And I kept thinking what the worst is that can happen and it was painting over and starting again — which is

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I read somewhere that you were first going to be a dentist.

What happened?

“I am from a family of doctors. When I was 16, I studied as an exchange student in Ohio. I learned to appreciate art and craft more than any other time in my life. I started drawing, painting and experimenting with materials and objects. I felt something special when creating. After I came back home to Germany, I didn’t stop creating.

“My parents thought of my newfound creativity as a hobby, but I didn’t. But when it was time to decide on a career, I initially chose the expected route to become a doctor/dentist. After spending some time in the sciences, I started to explore the world of spatial and graphic design as well as product and furniture. And I feel so incredibly fortunate to have chosen the path that’s right for me and I feel very lucky to be able to do work I love.”

Have a you ever had a design come to you in a dream?

“Haha, I wish but that hasn’t happened yet. I dream about solutions a lot though. Often if I can’t figure something out during the day, the solution to it will come during the night and I wake myself up from it and have to write it down immediately so I won’t forget in the a.m.”

Has there been one artist (or more) who has influenced your works, be they murals, posters, rugs, etc.?

“I am working in so many different mediums from graphic design, spatial design to furniture. It’s very hard to find one specific source of inspiration. Back in school I used to look into literature and design history for inspiration, but that has drastically changed. I’ve learned how to be inspired by not visual and ‘designy’ things or other artists, but more by simple conversations with people, their stories and their emotions as well as smell. That also leads to materials. I love researching materials and their properties — to feel and see them at the same time inspires me. In general, I have to say that it isn’t necessarily visual inspiration that brings out an idea in me. It can be way more abstract than that for me. “ Did you have a mentor?

“My dear friend and past employer Mimi O Chun.”

What do your parents think of your vast works?

“I would like to know that myself. :)” Is there any other artist that comes close to you in creating on so many levels?

“There must be. Hmm, maybe I would say (textile, graphic and interior designer) Camille Walala.”

When you introduce lines to your shapes, it reminds me of an Alexander Calder sculpture. What do you think?

“I love that compliment as I am a big admirer of Calder. Thank you.”

For more on Alex Proba, visit studioproba.com.

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HOME & DESIGN

A TRENDSETTER, BY DESIGN

BY MARY SHUSTACK

Have you heard of Eileen Gray?

If you’re not a design fanatic, then the answer is likely “no.”

An exhibition coming soon to the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in Manhattan — a (perhaps) under-the-radar destination for routinely impressive exhibitions on design history, the decorative arts and culture — will certainly raise the profile of the late Modernist architect and designer, who rose to fame in the 1920s.

“Eileen Gray: Crossing Borders” will feature numerous works not exhibited publicly before, along with new research, when it opens Feb. 29.

The first in-depth exhibition in America on the iconic Gray (1878-1976) has been organized in collaboration with Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou.

In addition to Gray’s noted designs as an architect and designer, the exhibition will also further explore her creativity by examining her work as a painter and photographer.

The exhibition is being curated by Cloé Pitiot, curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and expands on the Centre Pompidou’s 2013 retrospective of Gray’s work, also curated by Pitiot.

IN THE GALLERIES “Eileen Gray: Crossing Borders” is set to include nearly 200 works that, advance materials share, “give new insights into Gray’s contributions as one of the leading avant-garde designers and artists of the 20th century.”

It will be organized into five sections, each devoted to different stages in Gray’s career that yielded famed designs, including the “Dragons” armchair, Bibendum Chair and E-1027 Table, a version of the last sold today through the MoMA Design Store.

“The Early Years” will open the Bard exhibition, exploring the Irish-born woman’s student years as a painter at the Slade School in London to her relocation to Paris, where she found greater freedom as a female artist and would go on to move in the city’s most avant-garde circles.

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Clockwise from above: Eileen Gray. “Bibendum chair,” ca. 1930. Chrome-plated metal, canvas. Galerie Jacques De Vos. Photograph: Christian Baraja, Studio SLB; Eileen Gray, “Transat chair,” 1926-29. Varnished sycamore, nickel-plated steel, synthetic leather. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris.

Purchase, 1992, AM 1992-1-1. © Centre Pompidou, Mnam-CCI, Dist. RMN-GP: Jean-Claude Planchet; and Eileen Gray. “Pedestal table,” 1922-25. Carved and lacquered oak. Private collection. Image courtesy Galerie Vallois, Paris. Photographed by Arnaud Capentier. Images courtesy Bard Graduate Center Gallery.

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The exhibition will then examine “Galerie Jean Désert, Paris,” which Gray both owned and directed in Paris from 1922 to 1930. It was a period when she would create some of her most important interiors. (Despite the relative freedom of Paris, it’s notable that Gray would name the gallery under a male pseudonym).

There, she would sell her artwork as well as showcase her furnishings, which were the start of her professional design career. In this section, advance materials share, there will be a “recently discovered drawing by Gray of her vision for the well-known Boudoir de Monte Carlo (1923) with Gray’s handwritten notes on the (design fair) project, furniture made for the collectors Jacques Doucet and Madame Mathieu Lévy, and a recreation of the façade of Galerie Jean Désert, as well as Gray’s abstract paintings, drawings, and photographs of the projects she worked on during this period.”

The exhibition will continue with “Collaboration with Jean Badovici,” which will explore Gray’s work with the French-Romanian architect. They teamed together on innovative projects, including the Renaudin family home (1925) and Badovici’s own home and studio (1927-31). Also explored will be their work on Architecture Vivant, which we’re told was “one of the first magazines exclusively devoted to modern architecture and the influence of De Stijl, the avantgarde Dutch design movement.”

“Villa E-1027” is the topic of the following section, devoted to perhaps Gray’s most notable project. The now-iconic work of Modern architecture is a villa above the Mediterranean Sea in France’s RoquebruneCap-Martin, its story told through photographs, film, a model and original rugs and lighting.

Finally, “Architectural and Interior Projects” will trace the trajectory of Gray’s career through key works, including Tempe à Pailla (1931-34), the house she designed for herself in Menton, France. It will also look at the Camping Tent (1931), a socially driven project that proposed an economical home, along with other high-profile works that cemented Gray’s reputation.

A catalog, published by Bard Graduate Center and Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition.

As part of the exhibition, Bard Graduate Center will also produce a film based on an unreleased interview with Gray, with excerpts to be included in the exhibition. The film, directed by French filmmaker Michael Pitiot and prepared for the screen by Philippe Garner and Cloé Pitiot, is expected to debut soon after “Eileen Gray: Crossing Borders” opens.

“Eileen Gray: Crossing Borders” will open Feb. 29 and continue through July 10 at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 18 W. 86 St., Manhattan. For more, visit bgc.bard.edu.

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WARES

HOME & DESIGN

DOUBLE DELIGHTS IN DESIGN

BY CAMI WEINSTEIN

Twice as nice: Pairs of chairs add symmetry, balance and comfort in a living room. Courtesy Cami Weinstein Designs LLC.

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As far as celebrations go, 2020 is a significant number for a new year. A double number is a milestone and worthy of further notice. Double numbers are symmetrical and, as a designer, I love that. Using doubles or pairs in decorating solidifies the symmetry of a room.

I recently toured a home by a significant architect that was distinctly asymmetrical and, although it was on a beautiful piece of property with incredible views, I felt uncomfortable in the house. There were too many angles and spaces that felt awkward to me. I love homes that flow, generous spaces and high ceilings but not cavernously high. Many of these spaces have a balanced flow. Think center hall Colonials, Mediterranean homes and even many modern homes. These abodes and their rooms have a comfortable feel that allows their occupants to move around freely. Understandably, some architects want to showcase views and “walk” you through their spaces in a specific way. Although I understand their artistic talents I prefer more symmetrical, livable spaces.

A current trend in kitchen design in larger homes is incorporating a pair of islands. One

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island is a working island and becomes part of the prep area. The other becomes an island for casual dining or serving.

I often include pairs of chairs or sofas in large spaces as they ground a seating area. Another pairing favorite is incorporating artwork in doubles. Two similar paintings from the same artist can create a distinct design statement in a room. (And once you add a third painting by the same artist, then you are well on your way to starting a collection. But that is for a different article.)

There are some ways to bring symmetry into a room that could use a more balanced feel. In a dining room for instance, use a pair of vases on a long dining table filled with similar flowers. Another statement-making idea, if the table is long enough, is to fill the length of the table with a few smaller vases centered between the two larger vases. The odd number of smaller vases between the two larger vases is a nice mix. This is a fantastic way to give the room a little magic and allows flowers to flow down the length of the table. Adding a few votive candles will create an even extra dash of sparkle.

Speaking of sparkle, I often use pairs of mirrors in a large entry with a pair of consoles. This sets the tone for a gracious entrance. Under the consoles I often place (surprise, surprise) a pair of benches.

I recently placed two full-size beds in a guest room instead of a pair of twin beds. The two larger beds can hold more guests comfortably, especially if your guests include a couple and a small child. Small children are often unhappy when they are in a strange place and their parents aren’t close by. The lack of privacy more than makes up for keeping a small child feeling happy and comfortable, knowing his/her parents are close by. When designing the room, I used the same bedding so the beds look exactly alike.

Pairs can bring warmth to a home whether your home is traditional or a modern home, because ultimately most people like to also be paired! We are comfortable with pairs. Families usually start with a pair of people wanting to spend their lives together filled with family and friends.

In this double year of 2020 maybe we can all feel a little more connected to family and friends and realize how similar we are rather than how dissimilar we are.

Let’s complete the circle of home and community and be more considerate of others, because, at the end of the day, we just want to care for our families and friends and keep them healthy and happy. Best wishes for a Happy 2020 and may we remember to reach out and bring others into our circles — whether they’re paired or not.

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WHAT’S NEW AGAIN

HOME & DESIGN

A TOAST TO THE ‘NOBLE EXPERIMENT’

BY KATIE BANSER-WHITTLE

The year 2020 is here, full of hope and controversy, longheld values and new ideas.

It’s the beginning of a new decade that undoubtedly will see changes in every aspect of our lives — political, social and economic.

We’ve been here before. One hundred years ago, that remarkable decade now called the Roaring ’20s got under way.

The 1920s ushered in the modern age — see page 18 — and with it Prohibition, one of the most controversial and misunderstood episodes in 20th-century history. Brought into existence by the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, Prohibition was called “the noble experiment” by its supporters. Just how noble it was, or wasn’t, would help define the ’20s.

The experiment was a nationwide ban on producing, importing, transporting and selling alcoholic beverages. The amendment was ratified in 1919 by the required 36 out of 48 states (Connecticut and Rhode Island, home to ItalianAmerican winemakers, never ratified it), to go into effect one year later. Congress passed enabling legislation called the Volstead Act, which set the rules for enforcement and defined the prohibited types of beverages, despite thenPresident Woodrow Wilson’s veto.

It’s important to know that it was not illegal to possess or drink alcohol during Prohibition. People had one year from the passage of the amendment to stash wine, beer and spirits for their personal use.

Those who could afford to did, sometimes in considerable quantity.

Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury in the 1920s and the Federal official largely responsible for enforcing many aspects of the Volstead Act, was a major shareholder in the famous Old Overholt distillery. The well-connected company obtained a medicinal permit allowing it to sell its products to druggists.

Some of the 50 cases of leftovers that family members were permitted to retain have recently surfaced and have been sold at auction.

Sacramental wine for religious use and whiskey intended for medicinal purposes

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Old Ram’s Head, 14 years old (1916), Kentucky. Auction estimate — $7,200 to $9,600. Sold at Skinner Inc. for $18,450.

could be produced and sold. A doctor’s prescription allowed patients to buy a pint of booze every 10 days. New divinity schools and drugstores flourished.

Individuals were allowed to make up to 200 gallons a year of beer or wine for personal use. Alcohol for industrial purposes, fairly easily converted into drinkable if sometimes dangerous beverages, continued to be available.

The noble experiment had started with high hopes in January 1920. Unintended consequences soon became obvious. By the end of the decade, it was clear that Prohibition had failed. The amendment was finally repealed in 1933.

What went wrong? How did the solution — prohibiting the production, transportation and sale of intoxicating beverages — turn out to be worse than the problems caused by alcohol abuse, including drunkenness, alcoholism, spousal and child abuse and neglect, workplace absenteeism and alcohol-related illnesses?

Some states largely refused to enforce Prohibition, partly because enforcement was expensive. Making things worse, state tax revenues from alcohol sales and related businesses declined sharply.

With legally produced liquor heavily restricted, organized crime moved in.

Smuggling from Mexico, the Caribbean and, especially Canada, was rampant.

Verses like this were widespread:

Four and twenty Yankees, feeling very dry, Went across the border to get a drink of rye.

When the rye was opened, the Yanks began to sing, “God bless America, but God save the King!”

Anti-immigrant sentiment initially played a role in support for Prohibition.

Some people felt that immigrants from wine and beer-drinking European countries had imported undesirable “saloon culture.” Working-class people gathering to drink in inexpensive, sometimes rowdy establishments. The Ku Klux Klan’s vocal enthusiasm for Prohibition drove some other Prohibition supporters away.

Prohibition’s failure proved the futility of well-intended attempts to prohibit behavior that, while harmful to some, is viewed as harmless by most and pleasurable to many.

Ingenious devices for concealing illegal liquor remain as mementoes of the “noble experiment.” Hollowed-out lamp bases, canes and umbrellas with flasks hidden inside, dolls whose torsos were replaced with tin liquor containers are the mute evidence that legislating morality is bound to fail, despite the best intentions.

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

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TENDER (AND GRAND) IS THE HOTEL DU CAP

BY JEREMY WAYNE

WANDERS

TRAVEL

If any hotel perfectly symbolizes the Jazz Age in Europe, then surely it has to be the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Nowhere did the ’20s roar more than at the hotel, magnificently situated in Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera.

Mind you, it had all begun years earlier. When Cole Porter introduced those well-heeled, funloving sophisticates, Gerald and Sara Murphy, to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Paris in 1920, and the foursome headed south to pursue their art and particular brand of self-destruction on the Côte d’Azur, Hotel du Cap was already 50 years old. The original house, the Villa Soleil, had been built as an artists’ retreat by the founder of (the French newspaper) Le Figaro in 1870, becoming a fully fledged hotel some 20 years later. But it wasn’t until the 1920s that Hotel du Cap — which Scott Fitzgerald would later immortalize as Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers in “Tender is the Night” (1934) and which celebrates its 150th birthday this year — really took off.

Hotel du Cap has always been something of a closed club, even to the very wealthy, if they were considered arriviste. A certain American captain of industry, attempting to pay his not inconsiderable bill by credit card in the late 1980s, was politely informed that Hotel du Cap did not accept credit cards. The captain was incredulous.

“Hotel du Cap? Hotel du C*ap more like it,” he was heard to disclaim loudly, within earshot of several guests. When, a decade later, the hotel bowed to modernity and began to take credit cards, the captain found himself unable to secure a reservation. No matter which dates he inquired about — and he was prepared to be extremely flexible — Hotel du Cap was always complet.

The stories are legendary. One particular guest in those pre-plastic years would arrive with a monogrammed Louis Vuitton Apache attaché

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case filled with wads of banknotes, which he would hand over in its entirety at check-in, always enough to cover the entire bill and then some. He would find the same case, containing any change in an envelope, added to his suite of luggage at check-out. Cash is all very well, but why should anyone actually want to have to touch the beastly stuff?

Guests not wishing to be weighed down with oodles of banknotes (because Hotel du Cap was never an inexpensive proposition) simply wired sufficient funds ahead of their arrival to cover their stay, or provided letters of credit, an arcane practice but one which continued well into the 1990s.

Then again, it is vulgar to dwell too long on the subject of money. So, instead, let’s talk about the hotel itself. While Hotel du Cap is very, but very grand, it is important to say that it has seamlessly managed the brilliant trick of moving with the times and never, but never appears stuffy. This is due entirely to the vision of the hotel’s owners, the Oetker family (who conveniently also have Le Bristol in Paris and the Lanesborough in London.)

Hotel du Cap was run for nearly 50 years with an iron fist by the appropriately-named, formidable general manager, Jean-Claude Irondelle, who was eventually dismissed by the Oetkers under a cloud of fiscal mismanagement.

(By contrast, the hotel’s current GM, the softspoken Philippe Perd, is thoroughly good-natured and approachable.) A graduate of the Harvard Business School and London’s Inchbald School of Interior Design, with various hospitality industry credentials, Perd has held the job since 2006 and is keen to point out that the hotel, despite its reputation and self-evident grandeur, is accessible and open to all.

If these days a managerial eyebrow is raised at the sight of a baseball cap worn indoors, (or, forfend, back to front), or a brow becomes ever so slightly furrowed at the glimpse of a scuffed

Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc faรงade. Courtesy Oetker Collection.

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Birkenstock, somehow it is never obvious. All hotel staff, many of them frankly far grander than the guests, have a highly developed sense of noblesse oblige, which means the average Joe gets treated as well as Joe Biden, and Joe Biden gets treated pretty much like the average Joe, because, at Hotel du Cap, VIPs are all “civilians” (in Elizabeth Hurley’s delightfully derogatory turn of phrase) and all “civilians” are VIPs. Of course, the hotel’s guest book is not short of top-ranking celebrity guests.

Ernest Hemingway drank here, Winston Churchill relaxed here, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso sketched and painted here and Marlene — well, Marlene Dietrich did whatever she was wont to do here. A honeymooning Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton strung out here and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor seemed only too happy to hang out here. Modern-day celebrities, Matt Damon, George Clooney and Johnny Depp among them, add 21st-century luster. Hotel du Cap, though 7 miles from Cannes, is still the top stars’ and producers’ address of choice when its film festival rolls around each May. So what, you ask, is Hotel du Cap like? Well, first and foremost it is jaw-droppingly lovely, de Villemessant’s original main house sitting like a wedding cake in a park of palm trees and scented pines, looking as fresh as if the very last brick or lick of paint had been applied just a few hours before. And then there is the service, so polished, so refined, so kind and — amazingly — so natural, that throughout your stay you feel somehow as if you are floating on a celestial plane, without having gone to the trouble of dying.

Then, of course, there are the more banal details — 118 sumptuous suites, with heart-stopping

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Hotel du Cap swimming pool, 1920.

Courtesy Oetker Collection.

views across the sparkling Mediterranean towards the western Côte d’Azur, with a backdrop of the Alpes-Maritimes; a swimming pool that is the be-all-and-end-all of swimming pools, hewn into the rock and seemingly afloat on the sea; the bars, four of them to be precise, and superb dining in the restaurant and grill, where executive chef Arnaud Poëtte commands a kitchen brigade of 75 and pâtissier Lilian Bonnefoi alone directs a team of 14 pastry-makers, one dedicated chocolatier and three bakers.

There is also a wonderful La Prairie spa, where just walking through the door seems to fill you with a sense of wellness, dreamily sited tennis courts and a kids’ club to end all kids’ clubs. Add to this the sleekest limos to drive you into town or to the airport and speedboats to whisk you up and down the coast, to ski, or for a lunch date, or simply for the hell of it, and you have a glimpse of what this hotel is like.

But at the end of the day, Hotel du Cap is a mood, a state of mind, something that in a perfect world each one of us should experience at least once in a lifetime.

“It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark,” wrote Scott Fitzgerald, describing the pseudonym-ed Hotel du Cap. Three words into that sentence, the word “pleasant” may just be the biggest understatement in literature. What he really meant, of course, was “it was paradise.”

For more, visit oetkercollection.com.

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20 TRAVEL TIPS, TRIPS AND TRENDS FOR 2020 WANDERS

TRAVEL

BY DEBBI K. KICKHAM 1. Scent of a woman — Jackie O. Founded in 1948 on Capri, Carthusia creates products by hand using ingredients exclusively from the island.

Mediterraneo is Carthusia’s best-selling fragrance, which Jackie O wore on her wedding day to Onassis. It blends the freshness of lemon leaves with green tea. $80. bigelowchemists.com.

2. Do it up in denim. Italian denim is the way to go. Started by former Under Armour executives, Revtown knows performance inside and out.

The denim is sustainably dyed, using shrimp and nut shells and orange peels. This process uses 30% less energy, 50% less water and 70% fewer chemicals than traditional dying techniques. $79 per pair. Revtownusa.com.

3. Where to go in 2020. “Italy is a top destination that I recommend,” says Becky Powell, president of Protravel International. “It is a captivating country with scenic views at every turn. The people, the culture, the food, the experiences are endless and very enriching to all who travel there. There are numerous off-the-beaten path locations I recommend such as Lake Garda, Lucca, Levanto, Sardinia and Orvieto.” protravelinc.com.

4. Get the “Hint.” Hint sunscreen sprays and sticks are deliciously scented with luscious fruit essences — grapefruit, pear and pineapple. Free of oxybenzone, with skin-loving ingredients, including aloe vera and vitamin E, SPF 30 and water-resistant coverage for 80 minutes. Sunscreen spray SPF 30, 6 fl. oz. , $18. drinkhint.com.

5. Pack like a Parisienne. Sign up for Oui Please and you’ll receive a subscription box filled with all-things French, such as beauty items, apparel and accessories. $150 for the bimonthly box.

Ouipleasebox.com.

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6. Swim safely. Sharkbanz use patented magnetic technology developed by marine biologists to deter predatory shark species. Verified by independent research, Sharkbanz are for beach-goers, swimmers, paddle boarders, spear fisherman, surfers and any ocean lover, for wrist or ankle. $84. Sharkbanz.com and Amazon.com.

7. Love at first night. Pack this premium pillow when you take that weekend car trip to the Hamptons. The Sleep & Glow pillow features cutouts where, when you lie down, your face is cradled in a silken cocoon of comfort — obviating wrinkles and nurturing you to the Land of Nod. $159. sleepandglow.com 8. Go all-inclusive. Why pay killer resort fees? A luxury all-inclusive property such as Sandals Resorts offers a wealth of amenities and oceans of options, all at one price. Travel Advisor Ashley Les at Protravel International says, “All-inclusive resorts are a gamechanger in the travel realm. As far as ease of travel goes, this is it. You never have to leave the resort, there are activities for every age, and they take the guesswork out of it all. No need to budget for dinners, plan excursions, bring toys to entertain the kids. It’s all there already. Beaches Turks and Caicos personally is one of my favorite hotels.” sandals.com.

9. Take it off. Packed with essentials for a smooth men’s shave, the Proraso shave kit fits effortlessly in your carry-on. Developed for any beard type,and free of parabens, silicones, mineral oils and artificial colors. $15. bigelowchemists.com.

10. Say cheese. Keep your smile on-the-go ready with Marvis’ Travel with Flavor imported-from-Italy set containing three Marvis classics in 1.3 oz. travel sizes — Classic Strong Mint, Whitening Mint and Cinnamon Mint. $15. bigelowchemists.com.

11. Best foot forward. Leaders Cosmetics in South Korea makes “Baby Soft Foot,” featuring booties filled with skin-softening ingredients. Wear for just one hour and dead skin cells peel off in days. $31.50.

Leaderscosmetics.com.

12. Fly with me. BIOselect from the Greek island of Crete offers beautiful organic skincare products. The Travel On The Go kit contains foam cleanser made with olive oil; micellar cleansing water with olive leaf; and face scrub and mask. Or just opt for the nurturing night cream made with honey. Melina Mercouri would love it. Travel kits, $17-$47. bioselect-us.com.

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13. Breast-dressed. Paris’ prestigious Guinot Institute features a special cream for a muchoverlooked area of a woman’s body — the décolleté. This stunning skin saver smells fabulous and is ideal for when you wear that strapless LBD at The Ritz. $68. GuinotUSA.com.

18. Protect your Pumas. Only from Louis Vuitton comes the custom-made hard-sided sneaker trunk, special order only. The piece is designed to fit at least six pairs of low-tops and eight pairs of high-top sneakers. This is luxury luggage for your favorite footwear. louisvuitton.com.

14. FactorFive into your face. Stanford-trained scientists formulated FactorFive skincare, using human stem cells to restore skin’s ability to heal itself and look younger. The FactorFive skincare line currently includes Regenerative Serum ($199), anti-aging cream ($189) and eye/lash cream ($149). factorfiveskin.com.

19. Forget jet-lagged skin. Founded by Doris Dalton, M.D., the Doll 10 beauty line has been developed using a handcrafted recipe of 10 skin-repairing ingredients that act as nutrition for the complexion. Anti-Stress Skin Perfector, $38. doll10.com.

15. Go and glow. A-lister Victoria Beckham’s new 20-piece beauty collection features an amazing skin-renewing primer. $145. violetgray.com.

16. The cold truth. Now you can store your mini-travel beauty samples in a gorgeous mini refrigerator. The Fria Skincare Fridge comes in white and rose gold and is ideal for your dream creams and facial rollers. $89.99. vanityplanet.com.

17. The ultimate ensemble. Nancy Tran creates gorgeous made-to-measure couture garments, such as the “Jacqueline” travel-friendly navy dress, which is the epitome of class. $850.

Nancytranstudio.com.

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20. Go Coco. From the 2020 Spring Chanel collection comes a gorgeous pink quintessential quilted bag made from goatskin. The perfect pop of color for any destination. $4,600.

Chanel.com.

21. Honorable Mention: Try Charlotte’s Web 17mg CBD oil in Mint Chocolate, formulated with Charlotte’s Web proprietary hemp genetics that feature 80-plus naturally occurring phytocannabinoids, terpenes and flavonoids to support a sense of calm for focus, and maintain healthy sleep cycles. The “Put Yourself First Aid Kit” also contains Calm Gummies 10mg CBD. What better stressreducing travel treat? $99. charlottesweb.com.

For more on Debbi, visit DebbiKickham.com.

Now you can repel sharks by wearing Sharkbanz on your ankle or wrist.

Recharged. Redefined. New American Cuisine.

402 Main St #5, Armonk, NY 10504 • (914) 730-1144 www.taukkitchen.com

In the heart of Armonk Square- Tauk Kitchen and Bar Features our most innovative culinary masterpiece, the launch of the ‘Centurion menu’ while bringing to you a whole new level of customer service, exquisite food and superb drinks. Our new Centurion menu brings a new culinary experience featuring tapas/ small plates while hosting a new and improved main entrée and salad selection. We kept true to our Tauk roots while further improving our all-star dishes -you will not find elsewhere. Join us as we strive for culinary excellence and experience the new, recharged Tauk Kitchen.

Delve into our new menu for an exquisite seafood dining experience, featuring some of our best sellers such as the Montauk Lobster Roll and house cut truffle steak fries, Lobster bucatini, gluten free block island sound CodFish N’ Chips, and the Tuna Poke Bowl.

If you prefer a heartier meal, we have amazing selection of locally sourced meats from Fossil Farms on our menu

including the short rib and fresh rigatoni, short rib entrée with purple heirloom mashed potatoes, rib eye steak and special blend steakhouse burger. Look no further for the best salads in Westchester than the quinoa bowl and autumn salad with razor thin kale and Brussel sprouts. Our culinary vision and devotion to detail comes from both the owner Francis Leone and executive chef Michael Torres “we challenge the status quo and dare to compare.”

Step into the bar of the TAUK and you will find nothing less than excellence, choose from a variety of quality liquors. Anthony Ducharme crafts ingenious as well as nostalgic cocktails from the arsenal of liquors showcased.

Are you a wino? Look no further- we are known for our select but outstanding wines paired perfectly to our culinary menus. What are you waiting for? Let’s Tauk - Dinner reservation are highly suggested.

Follow us on Instagram: @taukkitchen

ENCHANTING RHINEBECK

WANDERS

TRAVEL

BY BARBARA BARTON SLOANE

Just a mere two hours from New York City, there is a place that perfectly embodies the charms of small-town America — steeped in history, with majestic views of the Catskill Mountains and nestled in the lush rolling hills of Dutchess County in scenic Hudson Valley — Rhinebeck. It’s an all-American town that was founded in 1686 as a result of a land transaction of 2,200 acres between four Dutchmen and six Indians. Today, trees line the town’s sidewalks fronted with gaily colored plants and interesting specialty shops that beckon you to come browse. Both fine and casual dining spots celebrate the valley’s thriving locavore movement of boutique farms and orchards. Gracing this entire timeless scene is the grandeur of the stately Beekman Arms Inn. Directly behind the property lies a twostory barn — the Antique Market — a multidealer emporium with more than 30 merchants offering high-quality collectibles.

Touring the town, I enjoyed visiting Hudson Valley Pottery in the center of this historic village. I was able to monitor a class where students were making large vessels and sculptures. My long-harbored hope to one day learn this skill and just maybe create something wonderful (at least to my eyes) was rekindled.

I have a keen interest in aviation, planes and flight that I chalk up to my deep-seated fear of flying. I feel if I dive deeply into this subject, perhaps I can,

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one day, actually look forward to flying. Of course, I had to check out the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, a true “living” museum of antique aviation. Here I found one of the largest collections of early aeroplanes anywhere, many of which, my guide said, still take to the air for demonstrations during weekend air shows.

I had been told to check out Rhinebeck’s Farmers Market, which is considered one of the best around.

The market began back in 1994 when a group of residents and business people organized it with the goal of creating a venue to promote Hudson Valley agricultural products and to enhance the social and economic life of Rhinebeck. I found a place where neighbors meet and mingle and visitors can sample the best of the Hudson Valley. Sample is precisely what I did, especially with lovely goat, cow and sheep’s milk cheeses, honeys and jams. I picked up two bright yellow and orange Celosia plants to brighten my doorway for the next several weeks.

This cultural mecca boasts galleries, museums, performing arts, independent film, historic homes and architecture as well as the new Mirbeau Inn & Spa, whose Willow restaurant WAG featured in November. Back in the mid-’90s, Linda and Gary Dower noticed that many American hotels had little to do with “hospitality” and were simply convenient and predictable places for travelers to sleep as they passed through. Recognizing that today, instead of long vacations, many people opt for the quick, easy

Mirbeau Inn & Spa. Courtesy of Enjoy Rhinebeck.

getaway, the Dowers envisioned gracious inns where guests could enjoy classic comforts, a facility where they would totally relax and, more important, a place that was close to home. They opened the first Mirbeau Inn & Spa in 2000 in the village of Skaneateles in the New York Finger Lakes region. Later, another property opened in Plymouth, Massachusetts, which WAG wrote about in 2017, then a day spa in Albany. And now, lucky Rhinebeck.

Upon first sighting Mirbeau, I was charmed by its graceful circular cobblestone drive leading to the mansard roofed, French-inspired resort. The property is residential in character and each of the 50 guest rooms has its own fireplace and mini-spa bathroom with clawfoot bathtubs and high-end showers. “Zen machines” on each bedside table work as oil diffusers and white noise players. The color palette is inspired

by French Impressionist Claude Monet and prints of his paintings are featured throughout. In the lobby, pristine white floors are bordered in black, and plush carpets lead to the dining room where windows open onto a wild forest bordered by willow trees.

As we’ve noted, Willow, restaurateur Charlie Palmer’s dining room, is an important feature of Mirbeau. Palmer has said that the restaurants, including the lighter fare Aqua Terrace and Willow bar, are “attractive to the people who live and work and visit in the surrounding area.” Palmer’s name is on

the shingle of a dozen restaurants across the nation, so he doesn’t run this kitchen on a daily basis. That task is handled laudably by executive chef Thomas Burke, whose résumé includes French Laundry, Per Se and Le Bernardin.

Mirbeau’s 12,000-square-foot spa is the epitome of luxury. Locker rooms, showers, saunas and a salt cave are all tastefully appointed. The Motion Studio with yoga mats, pillows and blankets lined up in neat rows on a shiny laminated floor made me want to downward dog right then and there. Reading through the menu of treatments, I learned that “whether you seek rejuvenation or relaxation, we are here to create an experience that both satisfies and inspires.” How could I resist? So many appealing treatments and only an hour to spare. I finally chose the Mirbeau Signature Ritual — body exfoliation enhanced with a sugar scrub. By the time the treatment was over, my sweet tooth was sufficiently satisfied and I left relaxed, rejuvenated and, yes, inspired.

Right about now as I gaze out my office window at snow with a forecast of possible sleet, I can think of nothing more tempting, nay more inviting, than a visit to picturesque Rhinebeck and the Mirbeau Inn & Spa. Good food, cozy surroundings — and a blazing fire.

Mirbeau and Rhinebeck: Take me, I’m yours.

For more, visit enjoyrhinebeck.com and rhinebeck. mirbeau.com.

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WHAT’S COOKING?

FOOD & SPIRITS

FABULOUS FOOD FROM THE LAND OF THE COCONUTS

BY RAJNI MENON

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I’m a native of Kerala, India, an artist and a passionate cook. In this new column, I’ll be introducing you to three kinds of cuisine from Kerala, the southernmost state in India, whose name means “Land of the Coconuts” (from kera, for “coconut” and alam for “land.” They are Hindu cuisine, mappila ( or Muslim) cuisine and Syrian Christian cuisine. Hindu cuisine consists of a variety of vegetarian and nonvegetarian options typically served with rice, while Mappila cuisine is a blend of traditional Hindu cuisine and Arab cuisine. Syrian Christian cuisine features a unique kind of meat preparation.

One of the most popular dishes of Hindu cuisine is called Nadan Chicken Curry. “Nadan” refers to “being traditional.” This is a traditional chicken recipe where the coriander seeds are toasted and then ground into a fine powder. The chicken is then cooked in this powder along with an aromatic blend of other spices, beet juice and coconut milk to produce a delectable curry. This chicken curry is a staple in most Kerala households. It can be cooked quickly and it is usually served with rice and a vegetable dish. The bone in the chicken adds a fantastic flavor to the curry.

BEETROOT CHICKEN CURRY (SERVES 4) INGREDIENTS: 8 bone-in chicken thighs 4 tablespoons coriander seeds 1 cup diced red onions 2 diced Roma tomatoes 10 curry leaves, julienned 2 cups coconut milk 4 tablespoons ginger and garlic paste 2 teaspoons mustard seeds 3 tablespoons coconut oil 1/2 cup diced shallots 1 teaspoon turmeric powder 1 teaspoon Kashmiri chili powder 2 cups beetroot juice 1 inch cinnamon stick 2 star anise 1/4 teaspoon garam masala 2 cups chopped cilantro leaves 2 dried red chillies 1/2 a beetroot peeled and grated 2 tablespoons salt DIRECTIONS: 1. Heat a small nonstick pan and dry roast the coriander seeds until they give out an aroma and turn a little brown. Cool them, then grind into a fine powder. Set this aside.

Beetroot Chicken Curry.

Courtesy Creative Rajni.

This recipe is my twist on the traditional curry with the addition of beets. When my son Adi was younger, I created this chicken curry for him. He was a picky eater when it came to vegetables and did not like them stir-fried. Hence I thought of puréeing vegetables and integrating them into the chicken curry, which was and still is his favorite. So I started adding spinach, sweet potatoes, beets, kale, broccoli and so on to the curry. He loved the addition of beets the most.

This curry had the most beautiful color from the beets and is flavorful due to the addition of coconut milk and toasted spices.

So whenever Adi wanted this curry, he would ask me, “Would you please make beetroot chicken curry for me?” And I would say, “Yes, of course.”

At one point, Adi even started inviting his friends to try my beetroot chicken curry. They all loved it and they would keep coming back for more. I was happy to cook this curry for my son and his friends. Hence this curry became a staple in my home and Adi named it as Mummy’s beetroot chicken curry. I hope to inspire you in making this velvety, smooth curry in your own home.

2. Heat coconut oil in another deep pan and add cinnamon stick, star anise and red onions to it. Sauté this well until reddish brown. Add ginger and garlic paste and stir well for a minute on low flame.

3. Add roasted coriander powder, Kashmiri chili powder, turmeric, salt and stir for 30 seconds.

4. Add in the diced tomatoes and sauté well until the tomatoes are thoroughly combined.

5.Add in the chicken thighs, beet juice and coconut milk.

Cover it and cook until chicken is fully cooked. Set it aside.

6. In a separate small saucepan, add in coconut oil and, when hot, add the mustards seeds and let them crackle. Now add in chopped shallots, dried red chilies and curry leaves and sauté well until reddish brown.

7. Add this shallot, red chilli, curry leaf mixture to the chicken curry and stir well to combine.

8. Add chopped cilantro leaves and garam masala and mix well. Before serving, add 1/2 cup of grated beets on top of the chicken curry for garnish.

9. Serve hot with steamed basmati rice.

NO ROMANCE LIKE A BROMANCE

BY JEREMY WAYNE

WONDERFUL DINING

FOOD & SPIRITS

I already know a little about Neil Bieff, the Ossiningbased designer whose flattering, diaphanous dresses have a universal appeal, and who earlier this year was featured in an utterly charming WAG story written by the magazine’s editor in chief, Georgette Gouveia. But nothing prepares me for the man himself, when we meet for dinner on a late fall evening at David DiBari’s Cookery in Dobbs Ferry, a “neo-nostalgic” Italian restaurant winning plaudits for its rejection of the red sauce, red-check tablecloth Italian default and its plucky presentation of gutsy Italian showstoppers.

Neil, it must be said, comes with a set of preconditions — perhaps likes and dislikes is a better way of putting it — but happily his dislikes are peeves I also happen to share. He doesn’t like too much noise (check) and he doesn’t do lunch, which I wish I could check but I can’t, as lunch is my favorite meal of the day, so let’s gloss over that one. But Neil also doesn’t like to eat dinner too early (double check. I used to live in Spain so the idea of a 5 p.m. dinner is anathema.

We agree on an 8 p.m. start.) And he’s happy to be seated at the bar, side by side, so he can hear his companion talk, which I’m fine with over a Negroni or an Old Fashioned, although when reviewing I tend to prefer a table where I can observe the activity in the room.

Did I mention it’s a blind date? Blind dates are much the best fun for Table Talk, although no date these days, with the internet as a prop, is entirely blind. I know what Neil looks like before I actually find him at the bar, looking very much like his picture in June WAG (an image which he hates, by the way), nursing a glass of Sauvignon Blanc but minus the red rose he had teasingly told me he was going to be holding in his mouth.

What pictures don’t reveal, of course (although the very best portraits should) is character, and it’s a pleasure to find — almost immediately — that we share certain traits. We bond instantly over the Cookery’s house-made bread and smoked seaweed butter, a huge umami hit atop a wodge of comforting, yeasty dough, so good that frankly I could devour a whole loaf of it, call it supper and go home contented.

We quickly discover a shared love of travel, Asia, India (where Neil has been a hundred times) and Italy, of course, the authentic and exotic always trumping the tried and tired tourist trail.

But prompted for the third time to order by our

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server, we break off to consider the menu further. Neil is an octopus man. “I love octopus,” he announces, for all and sundry to hear. At the Cookery, it is fried, prepared and served with a smoked marinara, along with a pistachio and serrano salsa, a real corker of a dish. I come down on the side of a rich chicken liver parfait, which comes with a nicely charred slab of cornbread, the almost bitter char nicely cutting the richness of the liver, and served with a sweet, concord grape preserve. We share a terrific salad, kale as you’ve never had it, with lentils, currants, capers and almonds, as pingingly fresh as it is healthy and generous.

Our table talk moves from travel to Trumpworld — as Neil calls the current dystopia — but we keep the politics brief. Why spoil a terrific dinner? Children are a much more enjoyable topic. We have two sons apiece and all eight of their ears must be burning this evening as we exchange stories of their particular virtues and idiosyncrasies. Neil is clearly smitten with his boys, as am I with mine, but we halt the praise as pasta heaves into view. For Neil, a glorious spaghetti dish with pork and clam sausage, spiked with garlic and lemon, not for the faint-hearted and for me, ridged, radiatore pasta, with a lovely, slow-cooked lamb Bolognese, prinked with fresh mint. Portions by the way, are huge, so that when Rose, our clued-in, ever-patient server, stops by to ask about mains, we decline. Which is not to say I won’t be back for the Cookery’s osso buco, or branzino en croute with beguiling-sounding “old-school caviar butter.” Because I will.

Over lashings of Sauvignon and a straightforward but nicely buttery Kumeu New Zealand Chardonnay, we muse on love, life, marriage and saving the planet. We are not so much ladies who lunch as older dads who dine, and it feels good. We share a dessert of vanilla ice cream, which I’ve heard is a specialty of the house, and I wonder silently why houses where everything is special (the Cookery — here’s looking at you!) bother to have specialties in the first place.

Too soon, dinner draws to a close, before we have fully had time to put the world to rights, although we have certainly made a good start. I pay a bill that is not inconsiderable, considering the casual nature of the joint, but the wine has been good, the food has been great and the company best of all. And who can put a price on that? As we stumble out into the chilly, black Dobbs Ferry night, with a new friendship formed, neither one of us, I bet, feels the cold.

For reservations, call 914-305-2336 or visit thecookeryrestaurant.com.

Chef Sajin Renae and David DiBari in doorway of The Cookery. Photograph Salvatore DiBenedetto @thegrubfather.

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COGNAC’S NOT-SO-RUSTIC COUSIN STORY AND PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG PAULDING

WINE & DINE

FOOD & SPIRITS

I traveled to the Southwest of France about 12 years ago on a media trip to taste the wines of the region. There are many subregions of wine production spanning this massive, 300-mile-wide area, with geographical islands of wine production ranging from the Pyrenees on the Spanish border to the Languedoc-Roussillon wine region. During one dinner with several winemakers, one producer pulled out a bottle of Armagnac from his cellar and introduced it as a grape-based distilled spirit that he called “Cognac’s rustic cousin.” I just returned from a second trip to the region and tasted many Armagnacs from many decades, the oldest vintage being from 1893.

We visited one Armagnac production house, Domaine d’Espérance, owned by Jean-Louis and Claire de Montesquiou, who bought an estate and began Armagnac production in 1990. After a lovely tour and luncheon in their kitchen with many Armagnacs to taste, Claire said, “I don’t want to be the ‘rustic cousin of Armagnac.’

Our Armagnacs are very elegant, far from rustic.”

Well, the region is decidedly rustic, with narrow two-lane roads in quaint villages where you could open the car window and touch the homes on a pass-through.

It’s common to see locals foraging for mushrooms, berries or dandelions right beside the road. The farms are comprised of charming, historic buildings with old trucks and tractors and a dearth of visible, modern commercial farming equipment.

The restaurants we dined in were small mom-and-pop operations with a bucolic menu and service. But the Armagnacs we tasted throughout our visit were lovely, expressive of the region and its terroir and decidedly not rustic.

Armagnac production predates Cognac by a century and a half and, for many small

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producers then and now, it was made as an insurance policy, a hedge against a monetary slump, an asset in the cellar that could be monetized when necessary for a new car, tuition, a wedding or retirement.

Indeed, many were taught to put away some barrels for the future and old barrels are still frequently found tucked away.

Cognac production is largely controlled by four houses — Rémy Martin, Courvoisier, Hennessey and Martel. Cognac grapes, almost all Ugni Blanc, are grown on 185,000 acres compared with a little more than 10,000 acres of planted grapes in Armagnac. In Armagnac, 10 grape varietals are allowed, with the most production being Ugni Blanc, Folle Blanche, Baco Blanc and Colombard. Both Cognac and Armagnac are grape-based brandies. The grapes are harvested, fermented into a low alcohol wine and then distilled into a clear eau-de-vie (“water of life”) spirit. This spirit is then oak-aged, blended and bottled for popular consumption. Most Armagnac is distilled once. Cognac is distilled twice.

Each distillation removes congeners and flavor. I have heard wine producers say many times, “Good wine starts with the fruit.” Brandy producers historically used bad wines to make brandy. I heard several Armagnac producers say, “Better grape production makes better wine and better wine makes far better Armagnac.”

The Armagnac region is subdivided into three regions — Bas Armagnac to the west, Armagnac-Tenareze in the middle and Haut Armagnac to the east. Each subregion has different soils and micro climates and each imparts different flavors to its product. Each producer chooses barrel types and a degree of toast or char on the barrel, which has a profound effect on the taste. And some regions or producers create a fresher, more floral bouquet. Some exhibit a smooth spiciness, while some cradle the palate with savory oak flavors.

One Armagnac producer, Baron de Lustrac, owns no vineyards. It has no

grape presses or fermentation tanks. It has no distillation machinery. It simply buys Armagnac barrels from 20 different producers that meet its criteria of flavor profile. It continues the aging process until just the optimal moment and then blends and bottles on request. Château de Tariquet, on the other hand, is a multigenerational operation with vast vineyards and every piece of modern fermentation and distillation equipment. It crafts its Armagnac from buds on the vine through to oak aging the distillate, which infuses the eau-de-vie with flavors of pepper, spice, orange peel, licorice, toffee, caramel and cinnamon.

Armagnac might not be readily available in small retail shops in the U.S., but larger outlets should have some respectable options and if not, could certainly order some. Look for Janneau, Delord, Château de Pellehaut, Darroze, Esperance, Castarede, Marquis de Montesquiou, Château de Laubade and Dartigalongue. All of these producers have a long and unique history of production and are crafting high-quality, ethereal and mesmerizing Armagnacs.

If you get a chance to visit the region, virtually all the production houses will gladly welcome visitors and offer extensive tastes and romantic stories.

Show your appreciation with a purchase or two. And the best news for people wishing to discover Armagnac. Highquality bottles can be had for a small percentage of an aged Cognac. I bought a beautiful bottle of 1974 Janneau Grand Armagnac in a magnificent oak presentation box for about $110.

I have fallen in love with all things Armagnac and brought home several bottles. The sips are heady and lovely, and its elegance belies the region. The Armagnac elixir shared with a friend or two will create memories of flavor and celestial conversation. Armagnac is so not rustic.

Write me at doug@dougpaulding.com.

Remy Grassa of Domaine Tariquet in front one of his Armagnac distillers.

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FASHION

Elizabeth Taylor, she of the violet eyes.

EYES ON THE PRIZE

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BY FATIME MURIQI Even if you don’t have perfect vision, you can keep your eyes looking 20/20.

1. Begin with Skin&Co Roma Truffle Therapy Eye Concentrate to give you a smooth canvas with which to work. skinandcoroma. com. Photograph courtesy Skin&Co. 2. Makeup artists will tell you: It’s all about the brows. Indeed, well-defined eyebrows can enhance a youthful face and make a mature one appear more vibrant. Recently, we sampled cruelty- and chemical-free Wingme Cosmetics’ “Brow Jam” in Just Met Brownette, using the brand’s thin angled brush with spoolie bristles on the other end for grooming. (The nicely textured jam also comes in Honey I’m Home and Ebony.)

Wingmecosmetics.com. Photograph courtesy Wingme Cosmetics.

3. Eye shadow casts a glow, a warmth, an allure. Try Chantacaille Luminescent Eye Shade in Rhino. Neimanmarcus.com.

We’re also loving Sisley’s Phyto-Ombre Eyeshadow Sparkly Topaz. sisley-paris.com. Photograph courtesy Neiman Marcus Westchester.

4. Whether you want to go full Cleopatra or just add a hint of liner under and/over the eye — feel free to smudge — Lancome Le Crayon Khôl in Noir is your friend. lancome-usa. com. Photograph courtesy Lancome.

5. Just as you need a good moisturizer for your face, your lashes need one, too. Prep them with Chanel La Base Mascara Volume and Care Lash Primer. chanel.com. Photograph courtesy Chanel.

6. Finish with a flourish with Ripar Cosmetics’ Lasting Effects Mascara. ripar.us. Photograph courtesy Ripar Cosmetics.

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3.

4.

5.

6.

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.

• Monitoring progress and adjusting behaviors as needed.

• Building consistency and repeatable systems for making good choices.

• 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.

THROWING THE RIGHT KIND OF SHADE FASHION

No sooner had Tom Ford launched his own brand in 2004 that he began thinking of eyewear. His frames and shades debuted a year later and have since become among the hottest accessories for your eyes.

Being both stylish and practical, these sunnies will have you taking on your next adventure in a stylishly protected way.

1. Tripp Metal and Acetate Aviator Sunglasses in black.

2. Ingrid Gradient Butterfly Sunglasses in blue.

3. Open-Temple Oval Sunglasses in black/blue.

4. Men’s Magnus Golden Metal Sunglasses in gold.

5. Men’s Fender Geometric Acetate Sunglasses in black.

Courtesy Neiman Marcus Westchester.

– Fatime Muriqi

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3.

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HEALTH CARE & WELLNESS

BE WELL IN 2020 Start the year off on a healthy note, as you always promise yourself you will.

The following section features ways to do just that.

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THE GOOD FIGHT

WELL

HEALTH & FITNESS

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ROZYCKI

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For many who are on the boards of medical organizations, the cause is personal. Such is the case with Shelby Saer, co-chairman of the board of governors of the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

Saer’s maternal grandfather, Edgar Gwin Shelby, developed ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — in his 60s and died at age 72.

Her mother, Jo Gwin Shelby, a New Orleans schoolteacher, was 57 when she was diagnosed with ALS and died at age 65 on Aug. 29, 2011.

“She retired from teaching … and lived with us (in Greenwich) the last three years of her life,” Saer says. “My mother learned to drive a wheelchair with her chin and tongue and use a computer with her eyes. She had a service dog, Lolly, a yellow Lab who is still with us at age 14.”

While 90% of ALS cases are sporadic and only 10% are familial, inherited through a mutated gene, Saer says she sometimes thinks about a future in which she could have the disease. She is counting on her family for support.

“My husband, John (former Packard Center board co-chair), was a rock and said, ‘You’re an only child. Your mom needs to be with us.’”

Saer says she jokes with her children — Kenneth, Tobin and Julia — that if the time comes, they’ll have to show the same care for her that they did for their grandmother.

She knows, however, that ALS is no laughing matter. Also called Lou Gehrig’s Disease — for the legendary New York Yankees first baseman who died of the illness on June 2, 1941 at age 37 — ALS is a rare neurological disorder affecting some 30,000 people in the United States.

It causes motor neurons to shrink and die off. Over time, the loss of these neurons in the brain and spinal cord results in loss of voluntary muscle control that leads to paralysis and difficulty in speaking, swallowing and, ultimately, breathing. The average life expectancy is two to five years from diagnosis, Saer says.

“For so long, a disease like ALS has been seen as an orphan disease,” she says, “because not enough people have it to fund a lot of research.”

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That’s why she wanted to become involved with the Packard Center, which represents a new trend in collaborative medical research.

“Twenty years ago, ALS scientists worked in silos,” she says.

“The Packard Center developed a model that brought them together to critique each other and share information. It’s a collaborative approach that is now used in other diseases,” Saer says, crediting Dr. Jeffrey Rothstein, the center’s founding director.

Progress has been slow. “ALS is a difficult disease to diagnose. There is no one test or procedure to ultimately establish the diagnosis of ALS. It is through a clinical examination and series of diagnostic tests, often ruling out other diseases that mimic ALS, that a diagnosis can be established.”

And yet, progress has been made. Saer notes that it took 25 years to discover the role that the SOD1 gene plays in familial ALS but just over eight years to uncover the C9orf72 gene’s role.

She is particularly excited by the center’s Answer ALS study, inspired by co-founder Steve Gleason — a former New Orleans Saints safety who disclosed his ALS in 2011 — and an advisory board that includes two other ALS patients and caregivers. To date, the group has raised $40 million for the study, which involves 1,000 patients from eight clinical sites across the country.

“It’s the single largest and most comprehensive ALS research project in history,” she says, “producing more ALS data than has ever been amassed, while openly sharing it with the global research community …The project will use that data to investigate the unique pathways of each variation of ALS and begin to develop the right treatments or cure.”

Saer doesn’t see that treatment or cure coming in her lifetime, but looks to one in her children’s. For her, “it’s an honor” to be part of that future.

“It took me a while to get involved,” she says.

“But I’m all in now.”

The Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore holds its 20th annual symposium March 2 through March 4.

For more, visit packardcenter.org.

Shelby Saer and Lolly, who was her motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s service dog. Jo Gwin Shelby died of ALS in 2011.

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FIVE HABITS FOR A HEALTHY 2020

BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE DOCTORS AT NEWYORK-PRESBYTERIAN MEDICAL GROUP WESTCHESTER December is filled with holiday parties, events, and stressing over finding the perfect gift. It’s easy to move less, eat more, and not sleep enough. The New Year offers a fresh start to engage in healthy behaviors. Ready to reset?

Let NewYork-Presbyterian show you how.

GET YOUR ANNUAL PHYSICAL

• Schedule your annual physical to identify any possible issues, check your blood pressure, cholesterol and more.

• If you do not have a doctor nearby, NewYork-Presbyterian medical group has over 60 locations in Westchester and Hudson Valley, which offers primary and specialty care.

EAT RIGHT

• Aim for a diet high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fish, while low in sugar.

• Start your day with protein — such as an egg white omelet, fat-free Greek yogurt, or a protein shake — to help control blood sugar and appetite.

GET QUALITY SLEEP

• Shoot for eight hours of sleep, going to bed and waking around the same time each day.

• Avoid caffeine later in the day and turn off electronics an hour before bedtime.

PROTECT YOURSELF FROM THE FLU • Get a flu shot.

• Wash hands frequently or use hand sanitizer.

• Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.

GET MOVING If 150 weekly minutes of exercise, as recommended by the American Heart Association, sounds like a lot, try to break it up into 30-minute time slots.

• Find a stairway at work and walk up and down the stairs a few times.

• Take a walk at lunchtime, on your commute home from work, or after dinner.

• Do strength training with light weights while watching TV.

STICK TO YOUR PLAN One out of three people who make a New Year’s resolution don’t achieve it. Stay on track by: • Writing out your goals and action plan week by week.

• Creating healthy incentives to reward yourself when you reach your goals.

• Telling someone else your plan to help you stick to it.

To find a doctor and schedule an annual physical, call NewYork-Presbyterian Medical Group Westchester at 914-787-2200, or visit nyp.org/medicalgroups.

Cold Spring

Putnam Valley

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Yorktown Heights Cortlandt Manor

Croton-on-Hudson

Ossining Pleasantville

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White Plains

Scarsdale

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Bronx

Expert doctors close to home.

NewYork-Presbyterian medical groups have you covered.

Our doctors, including Columbia physicians, provide a wide range of services from primary care to OB/GYN and more at over 60 convenient locations in the Westchester and Hudson Valley area. We also offer same-day, early, late, and weekend appointments for your convenience.

Find a doctor: 914-787-2200 or nyp.org/medicalgroups

MAKING A ‘SPEC’TACLE OF MYSELF

BY JEREMY WAYNE

WELL

HEALTH & FITNESS

All I wanted for Christmas — all I’ve ever really wanted for Christmas — is 20/20 vision. Or 20/20-ish vision. Which means finding a really good pair of specs. But nearly all my life, I’ve been making a spectacle of myself in the process.

When I was very young, I was diagnosed with something called a lazy eye. Even in those far-off days, I was struck by how unprofessional, how unmedical this diagnosis sounded. But I was stuck with it.

Ophthalmologists, eye doctors, opticians and a special kind of occupational therapy (which apparently trained the lazy eye to focus, but in fact just got you teased by your peers, because it looked like you were sewing) were my lot.

We all know, thank you Dorothy Parker, that men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses and that is fine, because men have been making an awful lot of passes of late and they are by no means always welcome. But what about boys who wear glasses? I’ll tell you what — they get ridiculed a lot, especially if they are British National Health glasses. National Health glasses — in other words, free eyewear, offered by the state — are what Harry Potter wears and, indeed, the boy wizard has given them a kind of respectability, even desirability. The expression “geek chic” springs to mind.

But in my day, National Health specs were not chic.

They were considered hideously ugly and derided by everybody — even those unlucky enough to have to wear them.

The day I lost them I celebrated by eating two packets of Starbursts and a Mars bar straight off, even though I could hardly see to get the wrappers off.

In England, nowadays, there is a shop

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called Vision Express. A better name would be Vision Extremely Slow, because it seems to me that whenever you go into Vision Express, the one pair of frames you pick, out of a choice of around 13 million, is the one pair that is not available. So instead of your glasses being ready the same afternoon, which is the fast turnaround that the Vision Express business is predicated upon, you will be lucky if they are ready by two weeks next Thursday, which is when Vision Express generally tells you — or at least me — to come back. Now, I appreciate of course that Vision Extremely Slow is not half as catchy a name, but at least it would have the benefit of truthfulness, and also not raising the poor, shortsighted customer’s expectations, only to dash them to the ground, which is not a good thing to do in retail.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with different colored glasses, or I should say frames. I have tried blue frames and green frames and purple frames and tortoise-shell frames. I have tried frames so weird and so wacky they make Elton John look as prim as a librarian.

And, of course, there were the contact lens years, born out of vanity primped with a nod to pragmatism, encouraged by the pleasing, clean aesthetic of the rectangular, blue and white Acuvue packaging, like a personal gift each time you open a fresh box.

I also loved the politically incorrect, singleuse, extravagant fresh-pair-daily approach, the very name “daily disposable” suggesting profligate luxury. But you know what? Even daily disposables became too much of a bind, what with the dry eye and the dust and forgetting to remove them last thing at night and the chore of popping them in first thing in the morning. And worst of all, the running out, because, somehow, I was forever on my last box of lenses.

I’m back to regular specs now. And, at last, in reasonably respectable, or should that be “respectacle,” middle age, I am finally happy with my eyewear. There are two reasons for this. First, I have discovered Walmart, where it is perfectly possible to buy a pair of respectable spectacles for less than the price of a private island. Well, the frames at least are reasonably priced — I recently paid only $15 for a pair of lovely frames, which honestly could hold their own with any number of so-called designer frames, and which could only be improved upon price-wise if you sat down to make your own with a wire coat hanger or some pipe-cleaners and even yours truly is not going to go that far to save a few bucks.

And second, I have found what I believe is the perfect style, a simple black frame,

Doggone it: Finding the right specs can be a laborious process, says WAG’s man about the globe, Jeremy Wayne.

which is neither too big nor too small, nothing statement-y about it, which just disappears into your face as much as much as it is possible for a spectacle frame to disappear, while saying nothing about the wearer, his political beliefs or proclivities.

And, what’s more, I actually see quite well in them. When I wear them, that is.

At a seminar in Mexico recently, seeking a bit of downtime, I unwisely walked into the hotel’s cobalt blue pool wearing only my swimming goggles (and my bathing suit, obviously) but not my glasses. Well, it’s difficult to wear goggles and glasses at the same time and I wanted to do laps. I promptly walked into the chrome hand rail at the deep-end, which caught me in quite an unfortunate place. I can tell you, dear reader, I winced, although I continued to smile, as I do think a sunny countenance is important. The pain wore off after a short time and I commenced my laps. Keep going in a straight line, I told myself, and turn around when you reach the wall. What can go wrong? And indeed, nothing did go wrong for a little while and I swam a few laps, happy as a halibut, or whichever fish it is that is supposed to be blissfully happy.

But when I came up for air, I accidentally upended another hotel guest whom I had not previously noticed, the way a rhinoceros might turf a smaller mammal out of the watering hole with his snout.

Naturally, I apologized profusely. “You haven’t a clue who I am, have you” said the guest, whose voice I thought I recognized, but could not quite place. “Er, no, not really,” I conceded, since in truth I couldn’t see a darn thing. “I’m your friend, Bruce,” said the voice. And so it was. My dear friend Bruce, with whom I had been enjoying a cocktail only hours earlier.

The truth of the matter is, I am always making a spectacle of myself, whether I am wearing glasses or not.

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CARE ON CALL

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

WELL

HEALTH & FITNESS

Being a practicing trauma surgeon is “something that chose me,” says Shea C. Gregg, a Trumbull resident. The number one thing he sees in the operating room?

People over 65 on blood thinners who’ve been injured in a fall.

According to Gregg, geriatric falls account for 29,000 deaths a year, while homicide-related firearm deaths are roughly half that number.

“I’m very engaged in trying to improve geriatric care,” he says. To this end, he has founded Fall Call Solutions LLC, dedicated to streamlining communications between elders and their caregivers — as they are called on his website.

“For years, 12 in practice, I have cared for elder patients,” says Gregg, whose wife and co-founder, Kristin L. Gregg, is an emergency room physician and niece of WAG Wanders columnist Debbi K. Kickham, who brought us this story.

“The thing I found frustrating was that medical alert buttons are not used.”

Gregg came up with what he says is a simpler solution. Fall Call Lite is a free app that seniors can download to their Apple Watches, iPhones or Androids. A press of a button or the sound of their voices and they’re connected with up to five caregivers, who get a read on their location, heart rate and that help is needed.

The caregivers also receive updates on whether or not the seniors’ Apple watches are being used or require charging.

There’s also a subscription service that’s $14.99 a month — $10 less than competitors — that hooks them into a dispatch center, which calls EMS. But why would seniors — not the tech savviest demographic — be inclined to download an app to a pricey smart watch or smartphone? It’s a clichéd question that Gregg says has been

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Kristin L. and Shea C. Gregg, both physicians, are the founders of Fall Call Solutions LLC, which creates free apps to simplify communications between senior citizens and caregivers, particularly in emergency situations.

Courtesy Media InFocus LLC.

posed to him since 2015, three years before Fall Call was launched.

“The number one people purchasing Apple technology are people over age 65,” he says, adding that seniors are sometimes embarrassed to wear traditional medical alert bracelets and pendants, as they suggest a certain feebleness.

Fall Call Solutions is also the creator of ElderCheck Now, a free app for the iPhone and Apple Watch that facilitates seniors getting in touch with loved ones.

Gregg has been interested in finding practical solutions to the needs of others since he was a 13-year-old, growing up in Nashua, New Hampshire.

He earned a B.S. in neuroscience at Brandeis University and his M.D. from the Dartmouth/Brown Medical School Program. Gregg did his general surgery residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital and his surgical critical care fellowship training at R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, Maryland.

In 2020, he’s keeping his eye on new innovations that will continue to help seniors enjoy life to the fullest in their homes and travels.

“I appreciate the uniqueness of every day on the job and using all my creativity to solve problems.”

For more, email solutions@fallcall.com, call 203-736-7647 or visit fallcall.com.

LIVING LONGER, LIVING BETTER: THESE SENIORS HAVE THE RIGHT RECIPE The taste and smell of food can have powerful meaning for seniors. Cooking and eating trigger memories, strengthen connections with others, and provide cognitive and physical stimulation.

And that’s a recipe for an enriching activity at United Hebrew of New Rochelle.

At United Hebrew’s skilled nursing home, residents chop, slice, and dice ingredients, assist in cooking, and enjoy a communal meal followed by dessert during a monthly cooking club.

Taco bar anyone? Vegetable soup? You bet! Led by Udo Schneider, Chef and Director of Food and Nutrition Services, and Carrie Deppong, Director of Therapeutic Recreation, the sessions are, well, sizzling.

“Once the smells and sounds of cooking fill the air, everyone comes alive,” says Deppong. “It’s just magical.“ PASTA SPARKS MEMORIES — AND OH, THE SCONES! At United Hebrew’s Willow Towers Assisted Living, Executive Chef David Shakin leads cooking activities. There, residents knead dough for scones, operate the pasta-making machine, and prepare healthy snacks. Cooking sparks conversations about family recipes from the past, best meals ever had, and favorite people to cook for.

“Food brings people together; it sparks memories

and starts conversations,” says Shakin, who trained at the Culinary Institute of America. “It helps our seniors reminisce about their past, and it stimulates their senses.”

Food is connected with intense emotions and feelings of love, enjoyment, family, and holidays, notes Deppong. “Cooking offers an opportunity for our residents to connect, to get creative, and feel independent.”

COOKING UP COMPANIONSHIP Several research studies have shown a strong correlation between social interaction and health and well-being among older adults. Whereas social isolation may have significant adverse effects for older adults, staying socially active has been linked to better cognitive function, good emotional health, better physical health and increased longevity.

United Hebrew of New Rochelle designs its activity programs to have an enriching effect on all who participate, according to Rita Mabli, United Hebrew’s President/CEO. “Cooking is just one of the many therapeutic activities offered to seniors in our nursing home, assisted living, and memory care communities,” she notes. “Our residents enjoy an array of recreational, cultural, and social activities, all designed to make life more enjoyable.”

In addition to cooking, residents may partake in music and dance therapy, exercise classes, current events discussions, entertainment, cards, board and “brain” games, live music, art classes, history lectures, book clubs, and much, much more.

“We know that the benefits of staying socially active and engaged will last far into the future for our residents,” says Mabli. “Through our activities, residents make friends. They bond. They stay connected to others. That helps them feel a sense of purpose and a true sense of belonging. And that’s our goal.”

Learn more about United Hebrew of New Rochelle’s campus! Call 914-632-2804, visit www. uhgc.org, or take a tour at 391 Pelham Road in New Rochelle.

Preserving feisty and independent personalities for over 100 years.

A Campus of Comprehensive Care.

Take a Tour Today.

Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Willow Towers Assisted Living Willow Gardens Memory Care Certified Home Health Agency Meadow Lane and Soundview Senior Apartments

www.uhgc.org 914-632-2804

ARE YOU ASKING THE RIGHT NUTRITION QUESTIONS?

“Should I do keto?”

“What do you think about a plantbased diet?”

“Do you think I should do intermittent fasting?”

“I saw ‘Game Changers’ and am never going to eat meat again!”

“Carbs are bad, right?”

“I thought the yolks in eggs have too much cholesterol?”

One of the problems with the limitless amount of information and opinions going around the world today is that we get easily swayed. In addition, with

Giovanni Roselli. Courtesy Roselli Health and Fitness.

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trends coming and going, we tend to lose patience and try to jump onto the next “thing.”

Here’s a little insight as to the most commonly asked fitness and nutrition questions. The answer is always, “It depends.” It depends on so many things.

• Is your schedule conducive to it?

• Is it something you are truly interested in?

• Do you have the resources for it?

• Do you have the finances for it?

• Do you have social support around it?

• Do you have the patience to try this?

As I’ve said in past columns, the “best diet” is simply a nutrition plan that you can stick to consistently.

Have an honest discussion with a seasoned health coach and come to an agreement on which habits would be the most beneficial to improving your health. Focus on building habits instead of jumping from one diet to the next.

Then, begin to implement these habits into a daily, weekly and monthly routine slowly. Some simple examples could be drinking more water or adding more vegetables to your daily intake. Pick the lowest-hanging fruit (pun intended) and decide on a realistic habit that you can be successful with.

A good health and wellness coach should be flexible enough to help guide you with your decisions as opposed to a “it’s my way or the highway” mentality.

Think about it: Who really wants to be forced to do something that he really doesn’t want to do? And how long does something like that really last? Probably about as long as most New Year’s resolutions.

Will this be the year – or just another year?

Find someone to hold you accountable and motivate you to a new year and new you. Don’t let this be another year of broken resolutions and disappointments.

To get some of you started who may need a kick start, I will offer my online nutrition and fitness program absolutely free for the first two months of this year for the first five readers who respond to this article. Simply email me at Gio@ GiovanniRoselli.com and I’ll be happy to get some momentum going for you!

Happy New Year.

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

WELL

HEALTH & FITNESS

BY GIOVANNI ROSELLI

What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven’t even happened yet – Anne Frank

WAGMAG.COM

JANUARY 2020

Introducing Vivace Plus.

The Titan Of Skin-Tightening And Retexturing.

Using new technology, Vivace (pronounced vee-vah-chay) takes skin rejuvenation to a new level by combining microneedling with radiofrequency (RF) and LED light therapy. Now we’ve taken that technology a step further, by adding PRP (Platelet-Rich Plasma) to the treatment. We call it Vivace Plus.

You might call it a miracle. Only at Greenwich Medical Spa.

Scarsdale • Greenwich • Westport • greenwichmedicalspa.com 914.722.6869 Medical Director: Mitchell Ross, MD, Board Certified Dermatologist Catherine Curtin, APRN • Amanda Pucci, APRN • Shilpa Desai, PA P

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PET OF THE MONTH

PET CARE

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JESSE GIRL PHOTOGRAPH BY SEBASTIÁN FLORES

Forget wishing we had Jesse’s girl – sorry, Rick Springfield. We just wish we had Jesse. She’s an adorable 5-month-old Retriever mix, who was found all by herself in a rural area down South. She is smart, playful and energetic. Jesse would love a home with an experienced pet owner, who will continue to work on her training and be active with her. An ample yard to romp in would be nice, too, please.

Jesse’s going to be an amazing companion as all she wants to do is please her peeps and be by their side.

To meet Jesse, visit the SPCA of Westchester at 590 N. State Road in Briarcliff Manor.

Founded in 1883, the SPCA is a no-kill shelter and is not affiliated with the ASPCA. The SPCA is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays and 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays. To learn more, call 914- 941-2896 or visit spca914.org.

WAGMAG.COM

JANUARY 2020

Courtesy Laura Massaro Oris.

THE PET PORTRAITIST

BY ROBIN COSTELLO

PET CARE

decide on the basics, then it’s up to me to capture the spirit and essence of the pet on my canvas.”

Her 11-by-14 inch acrylic portraits can run between $350 and $750. “It all depends on how much time I spend and how intricate the piece gets.” Her paintings are known to capture the expression and light behind a pet’s eyes — a window to the soul.

Laura’s paintings have also caught the attention of celebrities such as Ice-T, Coco Austin, Kathie Lee Gifford, Jeanine Pirro, Megyn Kelly and Elvis Duran, all of whom own one of her pieces.

As the writer and host of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show Roger Caras once said, “Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place with curators in museums. Others we take for walks.” With Laura’s paintings, we are reminded we can do both.

For more, visit lalasportrait. com or llmassaria@gmail.com.

PET PORTRAITS

A “Paint and Sip” evening out with friends at Pinot’s Palette in Stamford created a spark that ignited a new career for Mount Kisco’s Laura Massari Oris.

A financial adviser by trade, Laura decided to paint her sweet puppy Jackson at the wine-and-paint party.The painting was so well-received that she posted a photograph of it on Facebook.

“It all took off so fast,” Laura says.

“Before I knew it, people started texting and messaging me with requests to paint portraits of their pets as gifts for family and friends.”

Over the next few years, Laura’s second career flourished, even with the newly added roles of wife to husband Peter and mother to baby girl Madison. With a studio in Mount Kisco, her own website and an Etsy store, commissions began to pour in.

Her process? “It all starts with a photo. I ask my client to provide a photo of the pet.

From that I create a basic sketch and send it to the client for approval. They can have as little or as much collaboration as they want in the planning of the piece. Once we

WAG

WHERE & WHEN

Jan. 9 through 26 Curtain Call Theatre presents “Cactus Flower,” a classic 1965 Broadway comedy by Abe Burrows that went on to become a successful film, directed

by Gene Saks. 8 p.m. Thursdays to Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, 1349 Newfield Ave., Stamford; 203461-6358, curtaincallinc.com.

Jan. 10 and 11 Fairfield’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church invites you to “The Boar’s Head — A Festival of Light,” a medieval pageant of song and dance, spoken word and a living Nativity. A festive reception will follow both performances. 8 p.m. Friday, 5 p.m.

Sunday, 661 Old Post Road, Fairfield; 203-2593013, stpaulsfairfield.org.

Jan. 11 As part of the programming for Franklin Street Works contemporary art space's exhibition “Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text," Jennifer Tamayo will give a multimedia performance that is influenced by artist Ana Mendieta, using darkly tinted tears and sweat generated through live movement to produce an erasure work on paper. 4 p.m., 41 Franklin St., Stamford; 203-595-5211, franklinstreetworks.org.

Dylan by Christopher Brown.

See through Jan. 31.

Jan. 11 Kenny Barron is known the world over as a master of performance and composition. A highly awarded American Jazz Hall of Famer, he has been called “one of the top jazz pianists in the world” (The Los Angeles Times). 8 p.m., MoCA Westport, 19 Newtown Turnpike; 203-222-7070, mocawestport.org.

Through Jan. 31

Jan. 8

The Westchester Children’s Museum presents “Stay Awhile,” an exhibition that displays the recent work of photographer Sandra Wong Geroux, who uses her photography to document local families and communities. Her candid photographs explore what it means to experience the world as a child, while inviting viewers to reminisce about their youth. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays to Sundays, 100 Playland Parkway, Rye; 914-4215050, discoverwcm.org.

Downtown Music at Grace presents a Noonday Concert with guitarist John Lehmann-Haupt, known for his arrangements of popular, classical and traditional songs. The program will include the music of Jobim, Handel, Bach, Albeniz and Metheny, along with some traditional ballads.

Noon, Grace Episcopal Church, 33 Church St., White Plains; 914-949-0384, dtmusic.org.

Jan. 9

PJS Jazz Society presents a concert with saxophonist and composer Ray Blue, whose sound and style is a fusion of straight-ahead jazz and rhythmic groove. 5:15 p.m., First Presbyterian Church, 199 North Columbus Ave., Mount Vernon, 914667-0823, pjsjazz.org.

The Harrison Council for the Arts presents “Christopher Brown: Newspaper Artist 2004-2019,” an exhibition that features the works of The Journal News graphics artist, who for the past 15 years has illustrated covers for its arts, sports and life & style sections. Opening reception and live musical performance by Brown on Jan. 4 at 2 p.m. Times vary, Harrison Public Library, 2 Bruce Ave.; 914835-0324, harrisonpl.org.

Art historian Agnes Berecz, author of "100 Years, 100 Works of Art: A History of Modern and Contemporary Art," which focuses on one work of art for every year from 1918 to 2018, discusses the criteria that guided the choices found in the book with Katja Zigerlig, vice president of Fine Art, Wine & Collectibles at Berkley One. 6:30 p.m., Bruce Museum, One Museum Drive, Greenwich; 203-8690376, brucemuseum.org.

Pianist and composer Asiya Korepanova, the only pianist currently performing Liszt's 24 Etudes as a single program, and also recognized for her work as a transcriber, composer, visual artist, and poet, will perform Tchaikovsky, with artwork, poetry and original transcriptions. 3 p.m., First Presbyterian Church of Stamford, 1101 Bedford St.; 203-324-9522, www.fishchurch.org.

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Jan. 12

Experience Something Real JANUARY 25 CMS of Lincoln Center 30 Limón Dance Company

TICKETS ARE ON SALE NOW

MARCH 1 The Very Hungry Caterpillar 6 It Gets Better 14 CMS of Lincoln Center 14 Ballet Folclórico Nacional de México 15 A Cappella Live!

20 Mariachi Los Camperos 22 Treehouse Shakers: The Boy Who Grew Flowers 27 Black Violin 28 Doug Varone and Dancers APRIL 18 RUBBERBAND: Ever So Slightly 19 Westchester Philharmonic 25 CMS of Lincoln Center MAY 2 Gravity and Other Myths: A Simple Space 5 Tania Pérez-Salas Compañía de Danza

914.251.6200 www.artscenter.org LUCILLE WERLINICH, Chair of Purchase College Foundation

Pictured: BAir Play © Florence Montmare

FEBRUARY 8 Orpheus Chamber Orchestra 8 Villalobos Brothers 9 Westchester Philharmonic 14 Paul Taylor Dance Company 15 The Manhattan Transfer 23 MUMMENSCHANZ: you & me 28 Air Play

Jan. 20 “Connect-Us: Bridgeport Has A Dream” is a special Marting Luther King Jr. Day performance created by the young people of Bridgeport as part of C-U Onstage, a talent show in which those ages 5 to 25, take responsibility for producing the shows from beginning to end. 1:30 p.m., The Klein Auditorium, 910 Fairfield Ave., Bridgeport; 203864-9129, connectusct.org.

Jan. 24 The Bedford Playhouse presents a special evening with comedy legend Chevy Chase, who will bring his 1980 cult classic film “Caddyshack” to the theater for a screening and an audience Q & A (moderated by band leader Paul Shaffer). The evening will include a pre- and post-party in the new café along with a mini-golf challenge, specialty cocktails and “Bushwood Country Club” themed fun.

Pre-party starts at 5:30 p.m., film and Q & A starts at 7:30 p.m., 633 Old Post Road; 914-234-6704, bedfordplayhouse.org.

Gold Lacquer Writing Box with Cranes. See Jan. 16.

Jan. 13 through Jan. 18

Jan. 18

Jan. 31

Steffi Nossen School of Dance presents a free week of dance an open house, during which audiences can try unlimited age- and level-appropriate classes. The school offers a young children’s program, a program of core classes in modern, ballet, jazz, tap and hip-hop for children 3 years old through teens, and level-based technique classes in modern, ballet and jazz. Times vary, 216 Central Ave., White Plains, 914-328-1900, steffinossen.org.

Audiences will enjoy an evening of chamber music, featuring The New Choral Society Orchestra, conducted by John T. King. 8 p.m., Hitchcock Presbyterian Church, 6 Greenacres Ave., Scarsdale; 914-725-1678, newchoralsociety.org.

Enjoy an evening with Stephanie J. Block, who most recently starred in “The Cher Show,” for which she won a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award. 8 p.m., Ridgefield Playhouse, 80 East Ridge Road; 203-438-5795, ridgefieldplayhouse.org.

Jan. 14 Stephanie Klose, reviews editor for Library Journal and School Library Journal, presents her “Books To… Beat the Post-Holiday Blues,” a perfect list of books to help you relish those long, dark nights by the fire. The evening will include guest appearances and drinks. 7 p.m., The Westport Library, 20 Jesup Road; 203-291-4800; westportlibrary.org.

Jan. 16 Ive Covaci, adjunct professor of art history at Fairfield University, lectures on “Gifts of Gold: The Art of Japanese Lacquer Boxes,” before the opening reception for the exhibition she curated. 5 p.m. lecture, 6 p.m. reception. Bellarmine Hall, Fairfield University Art Museum, 200 Barlow Road; 203-254-4046, fairfield.edu.

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Jan. 18 through 26 The Play Group Theatre presents “Seussical,” a family friendly musical based on the children's stories of Dr. Seuss. This musical about friendship incorporates a variety of Seuss characters, including Horton the Elephant, the Cat in the Hat, Gertude McFuzz and others. 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. Monday, 1 N. Broadway, Suite 111, White Plains; 914-946-4433, playgroup.org.

Jan. 20 “Dragon Lady: The Life of Sigrid Schulz” opens. Chicago Tribune war correspondent and bureau chief for Central Europe, Schulz provided critical intelligence about Germany’s wartime plans. Nazi cabinet minister Hermann Göring called her “the dragon lady of Chicago” and tried to kill her many times. Wounded in an Allied air raid, Schulz moved to Westport, where she lived for 40 years until her death. 4:30 p.m., Westport Museum for History and Culture, 25 Avery Place; 203-222-1424; westporthistory.org.

Vuyani Dance Theatre, presents “CION: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero,” drawing inspiration from Zakes Mda’s novel “Cion” and music from Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro.” “Cion” is a universal story that explores our ability to band together to share the burden of grief. 8 p.m., Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University, 1073 N. Benson Road; 203254-4010, quickcenter.fairfield.edu.

Jan. 31 through Feb. 15 Arc Stages presents Rajiv Joseph’s “Animals Out of Paper,” a comedic, poignant play about the collision of mismatched people and the fragility of relationships. When an origami artist opens her studio to a teenage prodigy and his schoolteacher, she discovers that life and love can't be arranged neatly. Times vary, 147 Wheeler Ave., Pleasantville; 914-747-6206, arcstages.org.

Submitted by ArtsWestchester (artswestchester.org) and The Cultural Alliance of Fairfield County (cultural alliancefc.org/FCbuzz-events).

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES

PAST AND PRESENT

NEW FROM JMS BOOKS thegamesmenplay.com

JANUARY 2020

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WATCH

SALUTING THE MILLIES

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Thirty-two millennials were honored for their entrepreneurial spirit, passion and effect on Westchester and Fairfield counties at the 2019 Westfair Communications Millennial Awards, held at Serafina at the Italian Club in Stamford. Kris Ruby, CEO of White Plains-based Ruby Media Group, was the keynote speaker for the event, which was co-sponsored by the UConn School of Business. The benefiting sponsor was the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, “Save the Sound.”

Photographs by Sebastián Flores.

1. Nicole Thomas and Ken Price 2. Claudia Artandi, Ariel Allkanjari and Ina Gjoni Allkanjari 3. Nick Fernandes, Nicole Cuglietto and Catherine Fernandes 4. Krystina Murawski 5. Christina Dufour and Robin Koutsopolos 6. Seanna Lopes-Goodman, Loni Richards, Marilyn Forsythe and Alphonso Lymus 7. Keith Sherman, John Varamo and Roy Goldberg 8. Stephen Thompson and Michelle Colacion 9. Isil Michelle Ulutas and Tugba Pal 10. Patrick Kovac and Rachel Gould 11. Lauren Enea and Anthony J. Enea 12. Kris Ruby and Matt Scott 13. Courtney O’Donnell and Macki Mongillo 14. Chelsea Merola and Lisa Trombetta 15. Jillian McDonnell 16. Theresa Baker and Jason Baker 17. Jay Ragusa, Prem Itharat and Katie Divenuto 18. Amanda Ayala and Helen Ayala 19. Adam C. Weiss 20. Nicole Macias, Mikaela Dedona, Manette Macias and Jasmine Perez 21. Phoebe French

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ROARING TWENTIES AT LMMM On Oct. 5, more than 100 guests gathered at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum for its “Roaring Twenties Gala.”

The evening featured a special theatrical presentation by Play With Your Food and a sneak peek of the mansion’s new contemporary art exhibition, “The Trained Eye: The Art of Railroads & Stations” while also honoring trustee Port Draper for his preservation activities and unwavering support of the museum. The evening raised more than $95,000 for the museum’s cultural and educational programs. Photographs by Bob Capazzo, Big Picture Photography.

1. Amy Kule and Gail Candlin 2. Carole Schweid, Susan Gilgore and Gavin McLeod 3. Anne and Robert Svensk 4. Georgetta and Kim Morque 5. James and Lynne Byington 6. Jackson and Kristie Kuhl and Kristen and Douglas Adams 7. John Wasilewski, Mimi Findlay, Nic Aldana and David Parker 8. Kurt and Veronica Odell 9. Liz Tardif and Miggs Burroughs Patsy Brescia and Port Draper 10. Tom Claus and Gail Ingis 11. Sandy Whitton, Lucia and Harry Rilling 12. and Brett Whitton

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FALL BALL More than 300 guests enjoyed an evening of entertainment to celebrate and raise essential funds for ARI of Connecticut Inc. at its â&#x20AC;&#x153;Fall Ball-Jazz Hands for Independence,â&#x20AC;? gala held Oct. 25 at The Italian Center in Stamford. The celebration brought consumers, staff, board members and the community together to honor Pitney Bowes and George Comfort & Sons. Marcus Walden, an individual served by ARI, received the Always Reaching for Independence Award. Each honoree has assisted in enriching the lives of people with disabilities and their families by enabling them to achieve their fullest potential at home and work as well as in the community. The event raised more than $115,000 with proceeds directly funding programs and services that support nearly 150 people with developmental disabilities.

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1. Susanne D. Kuligowski, Jessie Estrada, Jodi Gutierrez and Gerard Gasparino 2. Matthew and Marianne Quinones 3. Marcus Walden 4. David Martin 5. Barbara Aronica Buck and Peter A. Buck 6. Dudley Williams and Juanita James 7. Sheila McCaffrey, Kevin Chang and Mary Jane McDonough 8. Lynn Villency Cohen and Stephen Cohen 9. Linda and Ziggy Zajkowski 10. Ira Joe Fisher and Dennis Macauley 11. Chris Stack, Pat Grant, Cedric Bufkin and Lou Bracey 12. Bobbi Nieves and Ruth Green

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ELEANOR’S LEGACY Paying tribute to the legacy of “The First Lady of the World,” The Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill honored five change-makers, including Chelsea Clinton and Zainab Salbi, with its prestigious Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal at a ceremonial luncheon held Oct. 13. Medals were bestowed by honoree-selected presenters, including 1995 medal recipient, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Chappaqua resident. The sold-out ceremony took place at the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park. Photographs by Kate Wark Photography.

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1. Chelsea Clinton, Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, Gloria Kidd Golden, John W. Golden and Zainab Salbi 2. Hillary and Chelsea Clinton

IN THE PINK AT THE CASTLE

The Castle Hotel & Spa in Tarrytown recently held its annual fundraiser, “A Positively Pink Evening at Sankara Spa,” in an effort to help raise awareness and donations for Support Connection of Yorktown Heights. The organization provides emotional, social and educational support services to women battling breast and ovarian cancer, as well as their family, friends and caregivers. Guests mingled while receiving VIP treatments and more, all while sipping on sparkling Rosé and enjoying food provided by Equus Restaurant, The Rare Bit and Chef Pearl Cooking Studio.

Photographs by Lisa Van Gundy.

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Christina Rae and Fiona Sanzo Evan Kalogiannis and Brian Jones Carolyn Gould and Carolyn Clyne Katherine Quinn and Diane Buschel Seth and Alison Yassky Cesar Calderon Angela Porcelli

WEDC HONORS

More than 60 people were on hand recently at the annual networking event hosted by the Women’s Enterprise Development Center, where Risa Hoag received the Lillian Vernon Award for Community Service. David Hochberg, son of Lillian Vernon and longtime WAG adviser, was on hand to bestow the honor and speak about the contributions Lillian Vernon made to Westchester County and beyond.

10. David Hochberg and Risa Hoag 11. Anne Janiak and Kecia Palmer Cousins

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HAPPY 102, IONA PREP Iona Preparatory School recently celebrated its 102nd anniversary at the President’s Dinner at Glen Island Harbour Club in New Rochelle. The school’s biggest fundraiser of the year, the President’s Dinner featured remarks by select seniors and was emceed by Michael A. Carvin ’74. This year the Founders’ Award was presented to honorees Stephen Columbia ’74 and wife, Sarah. Proceeds will go to enhance the educational experience of the more than 1,000 students between Iona Preparatory’s Lower and Upper schools. Photographs by Christopher Pope Photography.

1. Michael Browne, Sarah and Stephen Columbia and, Robert and Thomas Browne 2. Gregory and Erin Johnston and Christine and Jerry Reen 3. Brother J. Kevin Devlin, Ann Mara Cacase and Timothy Cacase 4. Avery Iorio, Brother Thomas R. Leto and Nicholas Cannistraci

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The Friends of White Plains Hospital hosted the “Best is Yet to Come” Bash to benefit the hospital on Nov. 16. The sold-out evening at Brae Burn Country Club in Purchase raised more than $1.4 million for the hospital’s new Center for Advanced Medicine & Surgery.

5. Ralph and Geralyn Della Cava and Kathleen and Christopher Winterroll 6. Allison Fehrenbaker, Patti Dweck, Wendy Kleinman, Amy Hirschhorn and Joan and Joel Picket 7. Linda Plattus, Howard Berk, Wendy Berk, Carrie Bank, Andy Bank, Michael Meyers and Eileen Meyers 8. Laurence Smith, Susan Fox, Erik Larsen, Lucy Schmolka and Allen Waxenberg 9. Michael and Jen Savner, Andrew and Jody Frieman and Lori and Steven Kron

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More than 800 supporters of Northern Westchester Hospital (NWH) attended the 2019 annual benefit gala to honor outgoing hospital president and CEO Joel Seligman and philanthropist Seema Boesky, NWH Foundation board member emerita. The gala, held in an elegant tent on the hospital campus, raised more than $2.2 million to support the creation of a Comprehensive Cardiac Center of Excellence at NWH. Photographs by Peter Reitzfeld.

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THE BUZZ ON BUZZ

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Buzz Creators Inc., the Valhalla-based boutique public relations and marketing firm, recently celebrated 10 years of helping businesses share their special stories.

Buzz founder and president Christina Rae held an anniversary party at Sunset Cove in Tarrytown where employees, clients, friends and family gathered. Photograph by Aaron Kershaw.

1. Alessia Bicknese, Christina Rae, Nicole Doherty, Leah Osborne and Jessica Apicella

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A SUPER SAIL WAG was thrilled to experience Labor Day Weekend's Vineyard Race at Stamford Yacht Club. This 238-mile race, which dates from 1932, stretched from Shippan Point through the swirling currents of Plum Gut past Block Island and on to the light tower at the entrance to Buzzard's Bay. Once reached, sailors returned by leaving Block Island to starboard en route to the finish in Stamford Harbor. The race was capped by a trophy presentation and cookout party while members and guests also took in the club's tennis championships.

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Claudia and Richard Recker Bitsy, John and Trip Greifzu Jeff and Laura Osborn Jennifer and Barret Johnson Lori and John Gianukakis John Hillhouse and Diane Cenci Linda Moran Keeshan and Christina Greifzu

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ELEMENT 46 GRADUATION The Westchester County Office of Economic Development recently celebrated the graduation of the first cohort of the Element 46 incubator, a program designed to help catalyze growth of entrepreneurs.

The program incubator provides programming, mentoring and free workspace to enable startups to develop their businesses within a network of peers. The graduation was held at a special reception on Oct. 29 at HudCo in Dobbs Ferry.

9. George Latimer, Terence Finn, Susanne Shoemaker, Michael Sellers, Lisa Albanese, Alexander Davidas, Marci Lobel-Esrig, Chris Oates, Jack Martin, Beth Turner, Katie McCorry and Courtney Stanley

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HOLLYWOOD HEARTTHROBS AT BURNS Recently, two of Hollywood’s leading men — Michael Douglas and Edward Norton — stopped by for events at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville. Academy Award-winning actor Douglas was the guest of honor at the Silver Screen Circle dinner, while Norton was on hand for a screening of his new film, “Motherless Brooklyn,” which he wrote, directed and starred in. Photograph by Lynda Shenkman and Russell Peborde.

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1. Edward Norton 2. Mark Rosenberg, Janet Benton, Michael Douglas, Janet Maslin and Rochelle Rosenberg

AND JUSTICE FOR ALL As the only provider of free, comprehensive civil legal services to low-income and vulnerable individuals and families in the Hudson Valley, Legal Services of the Hudson Valley relies on pro bono volunteers to help meet the high demand for services. The organization recently celebrated National Pro Bono Week to enhance and expand pro bono work and increase access to justice with an Oct. 22 ceremony at LSHV’s headquarters office in White Plains.

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SOLD!

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Recently, celebrity auctioneer Erin Ward (with the help of auctioneering legend Bobby D. Ehlert) led the fundraising efforts at the LOFT: LGBT Community Center’s 2019 “Legacy Gala,” held at the Mamaroneck Beach and Yacht Club in Mamaroneck. The gala celebrated the legacy of LGBTQ activism and recognized the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, raising money to support the nonprofit’s mission.

7. Rhoda Rollins Stone, Erin Ward, Tess Tickles and Bobby D. Ehlert 8. Michael Sabatino, Judith Windsor and Tara Rosenblum

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WAGVERTISERS JAN UARY 2020

The AFTD – 47 theaftd.org/learnmore

Gregory Sahagian and Son, Inc. - 59 gssawning.com

Serafina – 63 Serafinaic.com

Neil S. Berman - 27 bermanbuyscollectables.com

Hospital for Special Surgery- 9 hss.edu/westchester

Skinner Inc. - 3 skinnerinc.com

Blossom Flower Shops - 87 blossomflower.com

New York Presbyterian – 110, 111 nyp.org/medicalgroups

Sothebys International Realty – 20, 21 sothebyshomes.com/greenwich

Briggs House Antiques - 27 briggshouse.com

ONS - 113 onsmd.com

Sotheybs Realty - 79 sothebysrealty.com

Bruce Museum –5 brucemuseum.org

PKF O’Connor Davies LLP - 7 pkfod.com

The Surf Club on the Sound – 71 thesurfclubonthesound.com

Castle Hotel and Spa - 51 castlehotelandspa.com

Penny Pincher - 97 pennypincherboutique.com

Tauk Kitchen + Bar – 95 taukkitchen.com

The Chelsea at Greenburgh – Inside Back Cover chelseaseniorliving.com

Pepe Infiniti - 11 pepeinfiniti.com

United Hebrew- 115 uhgc.org

Performing Arts Center at Purchase College - 123 artscenter.org

Val’s Putnam Wines and Liquors - 135 valsputnamwines.com

The Club at Briarcliff Manor – Inside Front Cover theclubbcm.com Eager Beaver Tree Service - 85 eagerbeavertreeservice.com

R & M Woodrow Jewelers – 1 woodrowjewelers.com John Rizzo Photography – 39, 91 johnrizzophoto.com

Emelin Theater - 67 emelin.org Euphoria Kitchen & Bath - 83 euphoriakitchens.com Georgette Gouveia - 125 thegamesmenplay.com Greenwich Medical Spa & Laser – Back Cover, 117 greenwichmedicalspa.com

Giovanni Roselli - 105 giovanniroselli.com Royal Closet - 83 royalcloset.com Sacred Heart University - 31 sacredheart.edu

Westmoreland Sanctuary – 75 westmorelandsanctuary.org White Plains Hospital – 118, 119 wphospital.org Wittus - Fire by Design – 13 wittus.com World Class Parking - 82 wcparking.com Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital - 17 ynhch.org

Our WAG-savvy sales team will assist you in optimizing your message to captivate and capture your audience. Contact them at 914-358-0746.

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WE WONDER:

WHAT ARE YOU E YEING FOR 2020? *

Regina DeCicco

Ingrid Hershman

Carson Kressley

Megan Lacovara marketing manager Norwalk resident

CEO, The Flip Flop Bitch Katonah resident

“I’d love to do more traveling.”

“Peace in the world… and good health.”

“I’ve loved horses since I was a kid. I grew up around them (on a farm in Allentown, Pennsylvania). I’m having a horse baby (this month), so I’m going to be a horse daddy.”

“I’m looking forward to a new start, being healthier, following a better nutrition plan and getting more exercise.”

“I love good health and nutrition, so I can accomplish what I want to accomplish.”

DJ Theo

Robert Sanders

Risa Stern

Luisa Viladas

comedian Manhattan resident

Laura Massari Oris

Westchester resident

style guru New York City and Pennsylvania resident

financial adviser Axiom Capital, Mount Kisco resident

Theo Philip Entertainment Elmsford resident

managing partner Hospitality Resource Group White Plains resident

retired teacher White Plains resident

communications and marketing consultant Greenwich resident

“I have a little girl. She’s 14 months. I’m looking forward to watching her grow up and our adventures together.”

“I’ve got my eye on increasing my business and becoming a homeowner.”

“I am looking forward to the economy to continue to grow in a positive fashion and looking for the New York Giants to get an offense line.”

“I’m looking for peace, calm and good health for everyone.”

“Finishing up my second novel and getting it published will make 2020 a superb year.”

*Asked mainly at “The Makeup Date” Nov. 17 at Bloomingdale’s White Plains.

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