celebrating
LOVE
AND SAKS’ RED-HOT EXPANSION
DAWN UPSHAW A heartfelt voice
SAYBROOK INN
A lovers’ getaway
ANG LEE
Reel romance
SIMON PEARCE
Where tradition lives
STEPHEN J. FRIEDMAN
Pace’s powerhouse president JUDGED
BEST MAGAZINE WESTCHESTER & FAIRFIELD LIFE FEBRUARY 2016 | WAGMAG.COM
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T H E K W I AT C O B B L E S T O N E C O L L E C T I O N
CONTENTS
WHAT’S INSIDE: 12 16 18 22 24 28 32 36 38 40 42 44 46 50
Endless – and we do mean endless – love For love of money Sex and the single Chinese woman Our lady of the palette Gilded Age glories Ang Lee’s sense and sensibility Class act Saying it with flowers Dallet gets his due The modest music maestro Turning points Keeping with tradition Luxury on an intimate scale Mary Jane Denzer, remembering a woman of style, substance
56 FEATURED STORY: Dawn Upshaw – With a song in her heart
72 Life and loss
Robert Dallet’s “Indochinese Leopard,” watercolor and gouache. See story on page 38. Photograph by Photo Studio des Fleurs © Hermès, 2015.
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100 WATCH We’re out and about 110 WIT Do you wear your heart on your sleeve?
celebrating
LOVE
AND SAKS’ RED-HOT EXPANSION
DAWN UPSHAW A heartfelt voice
SAYBROOK INN
A lovers’ getaway
ANG LEE
Reel romance
SIMON PEARCE
Where tradition lives
STEPHEN J. FRIEDMAN
Pace’s powerhouse president JUDGED
BEST MAGAZINE WESTCHESTER & FAIRFIELD LIFE
IN NEW YORK STATE
FEBRUARY 2016 | WAGMAG.COM
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ON THE COVER:
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FEBRUARY 2016
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EDITOR'S LETTER GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
“What’s love got to do with it?” Tina Turner wondered in the song. Plenty, Tina, as we “Celebrate the Love” in this the month of the heart and hearts. We have classic ones in gold and diamonds, courtesy of Tiffany, and actual ones, courtesy of Giovanni Roselli’s cardio column — hey, his WWE moniker wasn’t Romeo for nothing — and an interview with Dr. Anthony Pucillo, whose expertise with coronary artery disease is such that he once found himself catheterizing a certain former president, Bill Clinton. I have known Anthony since Aunt Rita (his) married Uncle Johnny (mine) more than 50 years ago. (We share a goddaughter — their daughter and our cousin Michele.) And I have watched with wonder as the shy boy I remember has grown into a thoughtful physician who has guided my family — and many others — through a number of crises. The heart and hearts are, of course, irresistible metaphors for an emotion so profound that we sometimes have a hard time expressing what love is — even as we find it to be “a many-splendored thing.” There’s the love that soprano Dawn Upshaw has for music and working with young professional singers; director Ang Lee’s love for the offbeat in film (Laura’s story); Pace University President Stephen J. Friedman’s love for the law and education (Mary’s story); and artist Robert Dallet’s love for big cats, exemplified in Hermès’ stunning Bruce Museum show. When we think of amour in this month, though, we generally think of romantic love, and WAG has everything to get you in the mood, from cinematic vistas savored by our resident Wanderer, Jeremy, to our own Dionysus, Doug, sampling Port wines to Danielle R.’s forays into jewelry, lingerie and flowers. And we’re seeing red, thanks to the red-hot Saks Fifth Avenue Greenwich, which shares big renovation, expansion news and our cover photo.
But as we all know, the path to Valentine’s Day and true love is never smooth. Love has its dark side — see our opening essay — which gets even more complicated when it tangos with money. (See Audrey’s piece on Chinese matchmaking parties, which could give “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” a run for their money.) The love that is unadulterated by kooky obsession and the cash register, however, is hard to beat. When I think of love, I think of my Aunt Mary, who died right before we went to press on our first issue of WAG five years ago this month. She raised me, loved and delivered me to my own road — which is what a great parent does. At her funeral, I quoted the last lines of one of her favorite books, Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” about a priest coming to grips with the seeming random deaths of five people on a collapsed footbridge in 18th century Peru. They bear repeating here: “Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” Georgette Gouveia is the author of “Water Music” and the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding,” part of her series of novels, “The Games Men Play,” which is also the name of the sports/culture blog she writes at thegamesmenplay.com.
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ENDLESS LOVE
– and we do mean endless –
BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
What causes someone to become obsessed with another person or to think that person is secretly in love with him — or her — and so respond with unwanted attention? Whether the cause be biological (a delusion resulting from a brain aneurysm) or psychological (a lack of proper gratification during early psychosexual development, according to Freud), this much is clear: The nut-job, would-be lover is catnip to Hollywood. This does not require Freud. Anyone who has ever seen TV series like “Starsky & Hutch” or “Hart to Hart” will recognize the familiar plot in which the star is stalked by some pathetic loser — or a prominent guest star is stalked by some pathetic loser and has to be rescued by the star of the show. Film has also had a field day with this subject, using it to create some of its most memorable, provocative works. Say “obsessive love” and chances are one particular movie comes to mind — “Fatal Attraction” (1987). Set partially in Bedford — the movie’s grisly
climactic scenes were shot at Skipper Rope Farm, a five-acre 18th-century estate — and starring Bedford residents Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, the movie tells the story of a woman’s obsession with a man who has a casual fling with her, and then just as casually tries to break it off. That she doesn’t take the hint and instead invites him to a performance of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” should tell you everything you need to know about Close’s Alex Forrest. She really does identify, mistakenly, with that poor geisha, who’s seduced, impregnated and abandoned
WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
13
by a faithless American naval lieutenant. But the bunny-boiling Alex is no Butterfly. “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan,” Alex tells her increasingly desperate former lover, attorney Dan Gallagher (Douglas), who should’ve kept his lips and pants zipped instead of endangering his wife and daughter. It remains for that wife (Anne Archer) ultimately to rid the family of Alex’s murderous fixation — a denouement in which some film critics and critical feminists like Susan Faludi (“Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women”) saw the triumph of family values over the “predatory” single career woman. Alex was viewed as an erotomaniac suffering from De Clérambault Syndrome, named for the French psychiatrist who first identified erotomania. But erotomania involves the delusion that someone is secretly in love with the sufferer. Alex may be crazy. But that doesn’t make Dan — who gets to go back to his nice Bedford family — an innocent. Obsessive love gets a Pygmalion twist in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958), which has eclipsed “Citizen Kane” as the British Film Institute’s best movie ever. James Stewart stars as Scottie Ferguson, a San Francisco detective suffering from a fear
of heights who retires from the police force after a fatal accident. A wealthy former school chum asks him to trail his seemingly suicidal wife, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), herself haunted by a tragic ancestor. They fall in love, but it’s not enough to prevent Madeleine from apparently leaping to her death. Not long after, Scottie meets Judy, a coarse shop-girl who nonetheless reminds him of the refined beauty he cannot forget. Hitchcock reveals the truth about two-thirds of the way through the movie so that the viewer, who has heretofore identified with Scottie, instead begins watching him watch others, especially Judy. Gradually, we begin to understand that the story isn’t so much about a man obsessed with a woman as it is about a man obsessed with his idea of that woman. (Note Madeleine Elster’s initials — M.E.) He has fallen in love with himself. It’s a psychological tour de force — lovingly restored by Bedford’s Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz — that combined with a superb cast; Bernard Herrmann’s haunting, circular Wagnerian score; Robert Burks’ dazzlingly dizzying cinematography of San Francisco; and Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor’s memorable adaptation of the Boileau-Narcejac novel “D’entre les morts” (“From Among the
Dead”) builds to a truly terrifying climax. Hitch and Hollywood had nothing, though, on those ultimate spinners, the ancient Greeks. In Euripides’ “Hippolytus,” Aphrodite, goddess of love, seeks revenge on the spurning Hippolytus — a devotee of her sister Artemis, chaste goddess of the hunt — by causing his stepmother, Phaedra, to fall hopelessly in love with him. Fearing that a disgusted Hippolytus will go to his father Theseus with the truth, Phaedra kills herself, falsely accusing Hippolytus of rape in a suicide note. Theseus exiles his son, placing a curse on him that leads to his death in a chariot — but not before Artemis reveals the truth, and a father receives a son’s forgiveness. The many incarnations of “Phaedra” include a 1962 Martha Graham ballet that was so sexual — think beefcake revealed in peekaboo Isamu Noguchi sets and goddesses spreading their legs to Robert Starer’s crashing score — that it shocked the pair of Congressmen who caught it in West Germany as part of a State Department tour and led to the inevitable should-government-fund-such-art argument. Graham would continue to make works with women at the emotional core and men as lust objects. She was, after all, not one to be ignored.
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WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
15
FOR
love
OF MONEY BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
Poor money. It’s having a rough time of late. Baby New Year was barely born when the national and international markets landed with a thud. (Thanks, China.) This helped set up the periodic hue and cry “Break up Wall Street,” as did the critically acclaimed film “The Big Short,” based on Michael Lewis’ book about the hedge funders and brokers who profited from the housing and credit crisis of 2007-08. Folks, it’s also 2016, a presidential election year. Wall Street — as in “We’ve got to rein in Wall Street” — is always on the campaign platform in a big election year. But who’s kidding whom here? Where do Democrats and Republicans get their contributions from? Oh, that’s right, from donors, sometimes very large donors — the Koch brothers, anyone? — who make their money in part from being financiers and/or investors. The Ben Franklins certainly don’t grow on a billion-dollar tree. America has always had a love-hate relationship with money. We love to spend it and we hate to part with it. That’s why money is always a good thing in the first person — my money, our money — but a bad
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thing in the second and third person — your money, his money, her money, their money. Add to this a Protestant work ethic that is still the backbone of this country which says making money is godly while the love of money is the root of all evil, and, well, you see the problem? That ambivalence is compounded by another issue — the relationship of love and money — which is older than Jane Austen and as contemporary as the Chinese “Matchmaking
Parties” that Audrey Ronning Topping writes about on page 18, in which latter-day Aphrodites exhibit their, um, assets in the hopes of snagging millionaires. Before we go blaming women for continuing the tradition of marrying “up” in our postfeminist age, we must note that men increasingly do the same. As Richard V. Reeves and Isabel V. Sawhill, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., wrote in the Nov. 15 edition of The New York Times: “… the idea that men will be the ‘senior partner’ in marriage is no longer realistic; soon, there will be as many successful women as men. This means men need to get used to the idea of ‘marrying up’ — and women to the idea of ‘marrying down.’ This seems to be happening to some extent already: In 2012, 27 percent of newlywed men married ‘up’ educationally.” But haven’t men always married up — into the business of the wife’s family, for instance, and thus perhaps into a better socioeconomic class? What is a dowry — an ancient, possibly prehistoric tradition that still exists primarily in
the Balkans, North Africa and Asia — but a form of marrying up for the groom, who receives money, property and/or goods from the bride’s family? Even the traditional wedding — with the bride’s father paying for the shindig — is a kind of dowry. In reality, love and money have always been married, because money does indeed make the world go round, as per the Kander and Ebb song in “Cabaret.” Sure, you could barter for goods and services, as our prehistoric ancestors did — and as some people still do today. But that presupposes, Aristotle noted, that what one party wants is similar or equal to what the other has to offer. In his “Politics,” he observes, “When the inhabitants of one country became more dependent on those of another, and they imported what they needed, and exported what they had too much of, money necessarily came into use.” Money, then, made commerce far less cumbersome and inequality practical and even advantageous.
The man who understood all this was, of course, Alexander Hamilton, the guy who put the “founding” in Founding Father. “The bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” (Really, John Adams, are such insults necessary?) from the West Indies island of Nevis who reinvented himself in New York as George Washington’s aide-de-camp and speechwriter, Hamilton would go on to become many things, including an early abolitionist, champion of the Constitution and founder of the Federalist Party. But his greatest contribution to the fledgling nation was to put it on a viable financial footing as the first secretary of the treasury — organizing its debt and centralizing its banking. Hamilton understood that “power without revenue is a mere bauble” and that Wall Street would intersect with Main Street, becoming over time the rippling tide that would lift all boats. (And if you think that isn’t the case, just watch the Dow drop precipitously and watch everyone sit up and take notice.)
Thanks to the Hamiltonian understanding of money, we not only have homes, Ph.Ds, careers and vacations, we have probes that go to Pluto. And, perhaps more important, we have the means to help others. No wonder he’s the subject of a Broadway phenomenon (the musical “Hamilton”), a new book (“Washington & Hamilton: The Alliance That Forged Forged America” by Stephen F. Knott and Tony Williams) and the kind of admiring Time magazine special issue that’s usually reserved for Marilyn and Elvis. (It features such articles as Belinda Luscombe’s “The Hunk In the Frilly Shirt,” accompanied by an illustration of Hamilton surrounded by bikinied babes.) Fiery and eternally inner-directed, Hamilton was in truth his own worst enemy, always defending an honor that would cost him his life. Alex the Great knew that money doesn’t buy happiness. But he also recognized that it can make misery a hell of a lot more comfortable.
WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
17
SEX
and the single
CHINESE WOMAN BY AUDREY RONNING TOPPING
After Confucianism made the inequality between the sexes fundamental to political philosophy in China for 2,000 years, it’s not surprising that women — a desirable minority with a real professional track record — are still being marginalized. Among the shocking examples of this are the “Matchmaking Parties,” which have become increasingly popular for China’s super-rich. A bevy of attractive, accomplished, educated women who, like Marilyn Monroe in the classic musical, want to marry a millionaire, are selected to parade their sexy body measurements, IQs and cooking skills before eligible bachelors. One such party in Wuhan even demanded that candidates prove their virginity. Restorative hymen surgery, to “re-flower” women, has boomed in recent years along with breast enlargements. This arrangement, in which marriage is more
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like a business deal with riches and resources exchanged for beauty and sex, is almost as old as Adam and Eve. In China, it dates from the emperors choosing their virgin concubines. Attaching huge importance to female virginity is not uniquely a Chinese phenomenon. However, few cultures were as rigid about it as the ancient Chinese. In the Song Dynasty (9601279), prevailing Confucian opinion held that if any part of a girl, including her hands and arms had been touched by a male who wasn’t a blood relative prior to her marriage, she could not be considered a virgin.
The bride wears traditional red as she poses with her groom on the steps of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Photograph2016 by Daniel19Case WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY
Wang Xingjuan, a women’s rights pioneer who founded The Maple Women’s Psychological Counseling Center in Beijing, argues that a great many women now see sex before marriage as almost routine, ignoring the social pressure to remain “pure.” However, according to Wang, “Women still attach themselves to men as they did in ancient times. Why would so many women receive breast implants, use weight loss medication and undergo cosmetic surgery, if not just to cater to men?” “Love, meanwhile, is abandoned,” says professor Shang Zhongsheng from Wuhan University. “These parties degrade women by turning them into commodities for rich men.” Chinese society seems to be opening up to at least to the idea of discussing sex and sexuality as well as gender equality. However, when it comes to specific issues, both sexes find it a struggle to change ingrained social attitudes — particularly among men. Young men may talk about premarital sex and the importance of having sexual experience before marriage, but the tune changes when it comes to women doing the same. Misogynistic remarks such
as “Would you drink from a used glass?” are common on the discussion boards attached to such surveys. Chinese men all hope to be their wives’ first and last sexual partners. On the surface, relations between men and women appear to be and are widely described as fair and equal. After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, a new wave of reforms saw women enter the workplace, obtain the right to divorce and gain access to birth control. A 2011 Newsweek survey placed China 23rd on a global list of the “best places to be woman.” But historically, the average woman did not work outside the home and was expected to submit to an arranged marriage in her teens. Some 2,000 years of traditional practice continues to affect the subconscious of both modern Chinese women and men. Discrimination in China is often unconsciously driven by deeply-rooted prejudices and thus goes as unnoticed by its victims as by its perpetrators. While China’s constitution enshrined gender equality into law as early as in 1951, its ideals have never been properly enforced, which is why it is
difficult for female victims of domestic violence to obtain justice, as both police and the judiciary tend to turn a blind eye to so-called “family matters.” Huang Weiwei, a prominent female lawyer, told NewsChina Magazine that in 2012 she sent 57 formal letters of complaint on behalf of clients, all of which were related to gender discrimination by a job-hunting website. According to her, only one third of relevant departments responded and only one employer was fined for violating China’s gender discrimination law. “This is because China still has not yet explicitly defined what gender discrimination is in law,” says Ding Juan, a female researcher at the All-China Women’s Federation. “Gender discrimination in China remains merely a moral, rather than a legal concept.” Some Chinese claim that China’s increasing prosperity is leading some women to surrender their hard-won position in Chinese society to be relegated to their traditional role as property. To paraphrase the old Virginia Slims cigarette ad, Chinese women have come a long way — but they still have a long way to go.
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“Madame Vigée Le Brun and Her Daughter” (1789, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre). (Please note that this self-portrait is not part of The Met exhibit.)
Our lady of the palette BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
When Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin created their landmark exhibit “Women Artists: 1550-1950” in 1976, they included the 18th-century French portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. How could they not? She remains one of the great 18th-century artists, the great woman artists, the great artists. Her sympathy for her sitters, who constituted the glitterati of late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe; her skill in capturing the turn of a graceful figure, the glint of a satin bow make her a fitting subject for a retrospective. But oddly enough, there has not been a retrospective of her work — until now. “Vigée Le Brun:
Woman Artist in Revolutionary France” — featuring 80 paintings and pastels from museums and private collections at home and abroad — graces The Metropolitan Museum of Art Feb. 15 through May 15, allowing viewers to enjoy a belated Valentine’s Day and an early Mother’s Day there. That is perhaps no coincidence. Vigée Le Brun captured queens and counts alike. The doomed Marie Antoinette was an early patron who used her influence to get the prodigious Vigée Le Brun into the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1783. (This in an age in which women were not ordinarily admitted to art schools.) But among her finest works was a group of sensitive self-portraits that featured her only child, Jeanne Julie Louise, known as Julie. In one of her best-known paintings, “Madame Vigée Le Brun and Her Daughter” (1789, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre), Julie clings charmingly to her mother as she smiles at the viewer, enveloped in her mother’s arms. It’s an image beloved by those who cherish the tender intimacy of the mother-daughter bond. Although this painting does not appear in The Met show, there are allegorical paintings of Julie — as a vulnerable bather (1792) and the goddess Flora (circa 1799) — that capture a mother’s pride and affection. These allegorical images — which include “The Prince Henryk Lubomirski as Love of Glory” (1788, oil on wood) — contrast sharply with the plumed, ribboned, bonneted and gowned portraits of the rich and famous who were Vigée Le Brun’s clientele almost immediately. Like most women artists of a certain era
— Artemisia Gentileschi comes to mind — Vigée Le Brun owed her talent and its early nurturing to her father, the portraitist and fan painter Louis Vigée. As a convent school girl, she doodled in her notebooks. Though her mother would marry a wealthy jeweler after her father died when she was 12, Vigée Le Brun would often augment his miserliness with her earnings from portraiture. Soon she was attracting what we would call a celebrity clientele and the encouragement of artists like Jean-Baptiste Greuze. In 1776, she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, the great-grandnephew of the artist Charles Le Brun, who had been the Apelles to Louis XIV’s Alexander the Great. Still, it was not Vigée Le Brun’s husband but Marie Antoinette who made possible her entrée into the Académie Royale. It would prove to be a dangerous association in Revolutionary France, and, after the arrest of Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI, Vigée Le Brun fled Paris with daughter Julie. Though she was repatriated under Napoleon, Vigée Le Brun traveled to Germany, Italy, Russia and England, where she would paint everyone from the granddaughters of Catherine the Great — the Grand Duchesses Alexandra and Elena Pavlovna — to Lord Byron. At home or abroad, painting remained a constant. Indeed, after she died in Paris at the age of 87, her body was interred in the Cimetière de Louveciennes, not far from her former home. As per her will, the headstone contained a relief of a palette and brushes. In life and in death, she remained an artist. For more, visit metmuseum.org.
Gilded Age glories Met exhibition celebrates a love of fine furnishings, preservation BY MARY SHUSTACK PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Model B grand piano, case by George A. Schastey & Co. (1873–97), piano by Steinway & Sons (founded 1853). New York City, 1882. Approx. H 72 x W 60 x D 84 in., open. Satinwood, purpleheart, brass, and silver mounts. Collection of Paul Manganaro. 24
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For those fascinated by the opulence of the Gilded Age in New York, a visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art is most certainly in order. The destination is an exhibition that is holding breathtaking court in The American Wing of the Manhattan institution. “Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age” — in actuality a three-part exhibition — vividly celebrates the love that Gilded Age luminaries had for fine furnishings and decorative objects. And the centerpiece is the unveiling of the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room, a fanciful retreat preserved from a New York City home thanks to the enduring generosity – and love of preservation — of the Hudson Valley philanthropic stalwarts, the Rockefeller family. Throughout three galleries in The American Wing, intricately crafted cabinets and side chairs, secretaries and paintings, fire screens, stained-glass panels and ephemera, tables, tiles and even a rare 1882 Steinway art case piano serve to transport one back in time. Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang curator of American Decorative Arts, and Nicholas C. Vincent, manager of Collections Planning, have organized the exhibition, with Moira Gallagher, research assistant.
WHAT A JEWEL One of the most exciting moments of a visit will, no doubt, be the first glimpse into the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room, which Frelinghuysen calls “always a favorite of mine, truly a jewel box of a room.” The Met has crafted a clever introduction — visitors first encounter the dressing room by peeking through a lace-curtained window. It’s a delight to see how the room — commissioned by art collector and philanthropist Arabella Worsham in 1881 for her West 54th Street home — was executed as a unified work, a signature concept of the Aesthetic Movement. From the satinwood furnishings to mother-of-pearl accents to intricate marquetry, most of the room is original, with stenciled walls and textiles reproduced from its original designs. What was a second-floor room with a window overlooking the property’s garden and carriage house was designed as a private retreat, in which a lady’s maid would help Worsham (and later, Laura Spelman Rockefeller) with her hair, clothing, jewelry, makeup and perfume. Then mistress of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, Worsham had tapped George A. Schastey &
Co., the New York-based cabinetmaker and decorator, to complete the home’s interiors. Soon after, though, she would go on to marry the then-widowed Huntington and sold the property, fully furnished, to John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller, co-founder of the Standard Oil Company, would himself retire in 1897 and spend most of his time at the family estate, Kykuit, in Tarrytown. In more than 50 years of ownership of the West 54th Street home — likely used only occasionally — few changes were made. When Rockefeller died in 1937, the home would be demolished but the family saved three rooms, which John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated to The Museum of the City of New York and the Brooklyn Museum. “It just shows you how strong preservation is in that Rockefeller family,” says Frelinghuysen. The dressing room was donated to The Met when the MCNY was undergoing renovations in 2007 and has been both conserved and firmly identified as the work of Schastey. “We started to really think about this room, who did it and how we could interpret it,” says Frelinghuysen. The solution was The Met turning a decommissioned stairwell into the cozy space that the dressing room occupies today. Set to become a permanent part of the suite of historic interiors in The American Wing, the dressing room is a showstopper and remains a rare surviving commission by Schastey (1839-1894). WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
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INTRODUCING SCHASTEY The second part of the exhibition flows naturally, putting a true spotlight on the designer through “Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age: George A. Schastey,” which continues through May 1 in The Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery. Though the Schastey name is only starting to receive contemporary acclaim, the firm thrived during the Gilded Age, rivaling noted competitor Herter Brothers in both reputation for quality and scope of work. Schastey, Frelinghuysen, says, “was a complete, relative unknown” to the modern audience. “We needed to bring George Schastey to light.” And the process has been particularly rewarding for all those involved, she adds. “It’s pretty exciting for us… to have a new name and be able to put together an important body of work by that new name.” Here the museum highlights Schastey’s work through the firm’s trademark aesthetic and sought-after execution. Models and historic documents round out the exploration. Vincent, exhibition co-organizer, says, “We really are making a case that this is museum-quality, even though it was done for a private residence.”
Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room, designed and executed by George A. Schastey & Co. (1873–97). New York City, 1881–82. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of The Museum of the City of New York, 2008 (2009.226.1–19a-f) Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Console from the drawing room of the William H. Vanderbilt House. Herter Brothers (1864–1906). New York City, 1879–82. Gilded wood, mother-of-pearl, abalone, Egyptian alabaster and composition ornament. H 35–1/4 x W 34–1/4 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Jan and Warren Adelson, 2013 (2013.956a, b) Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
REVISITING THE HERTER BROTHERS The concluding portion of the exhibition, “Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age: Herter Brothers and the William H. Vanderbilt House,” which will continue through Jan. 31, 2017, offers a refreshed installation in the adjacent Deedee Wigmore Galleries. Here, the focus is on the museum’s recent acquisi-
tions of Herter Brothers furniture, in particular for its most important commission, designing and creating interiors for William H. Vanderbilt during 1879 and 1882. These elaborate pieces — which were crafted at the same time as the Worsham commission — offer a fitting conclusion to the overview of New York’s Gilded Age in all its sumptuous glory. For more, visit metmuseum.org.
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Ang Lee after winning the Academy Award for “Brokeback Mountain” in 2006. Dreamstime.com
ANGLee’s sense and sensibility BY LAURA CACACE
The auditorium at Mamaroneck High School is filling up, the room buzzing in anticipation as one man walks unnoticed down the aisle toward the stage. He sports a puffy blue coat, snow boots and a backpack. Only when he reaches the stage and turns around do I realize who he is — Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee. His appearance at the high school was hosted by The Center for Continuing Education of Larchmont and Mamaroneck. (Lee and his family have been living in Mamaroneck for a number of years.) “I’m a very spaced-out person,” he says once he’s onstage later in the evening. “My attention span doesn’t last more than one minute, but I’m good at hiding it. I had to pretend I wasn’t dreaming (when I was younger). My mind was always drifting away.” Lee’s father, the principal of his high school back in
Taiwan, had trouble understanding his son, who was shy and could never quite focus on his schoolwork. But Lee knew he was different. His whole family was. His parents moved to Taiwan from China before he was born, rendering themselves and their children “outsiders.” And many of the characters and stories he feels drawn to are the ones where the “outsider” triumphs in some way, big or small. “In some ways, I feel at home being an outsider,” Lee says. “I have more of a sense of belonging in an
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imaginary world.” His father didn’t understand his choice to pursue acting when they lived in Taiwan. “Film people” in Taiwanese society were perceived as those who did not behave well, who didn’t conform to social norms. As a high school principal, Lee’s father was all about good behavior. But Lee didn’t let his father’s opinions stop him. After studying acting in Taiwan, he moved to the U.S. in 1978, where he attended the University of Illinois as a theater student. “I felt that only through pretending I could touch the truth,” Lee says. It was why he wanted to study acting and, ultimately, why he chose film. “I couldn’t be an actor. I couldn’t speak English. So I turned to directing.” That’s how he found himself at New York University, where he received his master’s degree in film production. Fortunately for us, he never looked back. Lee has since directed a wide range of movies that nonetheless contain a common thread — the clash between the head and the heart. It’s the subject of “Sense and Sensibility” (1995), which won an Oscar for star Emma Thompson’s adaptation
of Jane Austen’s novel; “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), an Oscar winner in the Best Foreign Language Film category; and the groundbreaking “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), which earned Lee his first Oscar as Best Director. He also won for “Life of Pi” (2012). Other notable films include “Eat Drink Man Woman” (1994), filmed in Taiwan in Mandarin, and “Hulk” (2003), about Marvel’s troubled green superhero. Diversity isn’t necessarily something he strives for, though — it just kind of happens. When asked how he selects screenplays to bring to life onscreen, Lee says, “Sometimes, I feel it [the screenplay] selects me. Like I’m a slave. I never really plan on it. I’m looking for things I’m curious about. It’s not necessarily about characters. It’s about elements that speak to me. Like gay cowboys.” He’s quick to correct himself, “They’re sheepherders actually, not cowboys.” Lee always looks for the interesting, the conflict, the strange, the things people might shy away from at first glance. The elements — a poignant love story that just happens to be between
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two men, a young boy who’s lost everything, but finds comfort in the presence of a tiger that may not be a tiger at all, a man who transforms into a big, green monster when he gets angry — though perhaps unexpected, are what bring out emotions somewhere deep inside, and that’s what compels Lee the most. “I think of myself as a vessel. I have a lot of curiosities with the world, with myself and with my actors and I put them all together. When I see people react to that, I don’t feel so lonely.” For Lee, filmmaking isn’t just about putting out a product or receiving accolades. It’s how he makes sense of the world around him. “I don’t feel like I’ve worked one day,” he says with a smile. “I’m very fortunate.” Someone in the audience asks, “Are there any movies you wish you had made?” “No,” he says quickly, and everyone claps. He’s laughing now. “Do I regret my own life?” he asks, and it isn’t clear whether he’s asking this of the audience or himself, but his answer is still the same, “No.”
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Organized by Cincinnati Museum Center, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Women of Color Quilters Network
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Lucy Terry Prince The Griot’s Voice (2012) Peggie Hartwell Summerville, South Carolina 47.5 × 48 in. Materials: Cotton fabric, cotton batting, cotton thread, nylon thread Techniques: Hand appliqué, machine appliqué, machine embroidery, machine quilting
BRUCE MUSEUM
Pace University President Stephen J. Friedman in a conference room on the school’s lower Manhattan campus. 32
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Stephen J. Friedman keeps pace on top BY MARY SHUSTACK PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ROZYCKI
When others his age were exploring retirement, Stephen J. Friedman took on a new — unexpected — challenge. “I spent most of my career as a lawyer and in government,” he says. “I was a partner in a large firm.” He pauses then adds with a most charming laugh, “Then I became a born-again academic.” Indeed, Friedman — at age 66 — became the dean of Pace University School of Law in White Plains in what would mark the start of a whole new path. “It was interesting because I didn’t really think of myself as ‘an education person,’” he says, though he had worked with legal-education entities and taught as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School for about 10 years. But, he adds, “I thought this is an area where I thought I could make a contribution.” And others clearly agreed, though Friedman wasn’t looking for a new career. “I loved that job,” he says of his time as dean, smiling as he adds, “I thought it was my last job.”
Not quite, as he would find out three years later. “I basically became president overnight in the summer of 2007 and then I found myself on an even steeper learning curve.” It was a time of declining enrollment and other challenges. “I learned a lot — and fast — and I made a lot of changes. I changed almost the whole senior management group.” And, as they say, he hasn’t looked back. As the seventh president of the private institution founded in 1906, Friedman works out of an 18th-floor office at One Pace Plaza, in the heart of the school’s lower Manhattan complex adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall. “Pace is engaged in a program of really massive renewal and change and rebirth, but we’re still rooted in our tradition,” he says. With campuses in New York City and Westchester County, Pace enrolls nearly 13,000 students in bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs in its College of Health Professions, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences (which includes Pace School of Performing Arts, launched in 2014), Lubin School
of Business, School of Education, School of Law and Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems. As president, Friedman oversees it all — working with the school’s board of directors — and that includes master plans for both the New York City and Pleasantville campuses. Throughout, he says, his role is to help students “improve their prospects in life, give them a running start in their careers.” It’s a noble — and impressive — goal for an unplanned second act.
A LOVE FOR EDUCATION Friedman will easily reel off facts and figures, discussing student population and faculty experience. He points to successes of specific programs, from advances in the physician’s assistant division to a new performing-arts school that works with The Actors Studio. Pace, for example, was ranked in the top 15 percent for Return on Investment out of 1,500 colleges from PayScale.com. In 2014, the Pace team won first place at the National College Fed Challenge, an economics competition, ahead of schools,
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including Princeton University and the University of Chicago. In addition, Pace’s master’s program in computer information technology was ranked No. 9 for “Best Online Graduate Computer Information Technology Programs” by U.S. News & World Report. An easygoing conversation with Friedman also touches on topics ranging from technology and its applications in the classroom to landscaping on the Pleasantville campus to impressive student successes. “A high percentage of our students get very good jobs,” Friedman says. “It’s incredible, exciting and gratifying to make that kind of contribution.” But Friedman hardly takes all the credit. “I have a lot of meetings,” he says. “I’m really an old-fashioned manager. I like to meet a lot with my senior managers.” And he also finds rewards in fundraising for the school, which he has been doing more often. “A lot of my private-sector friends would say ‘Ew. You’re going to spend a lot of time fundraising.’” Friedman loves it — “I meet so many interesting people.”
FROM THE START Friedman, it seems, had a drive to succeed from his earliest days.
A Brooklyn boy who would go on to receive an AB (artium baccalaureus) magna cum laude in 1959 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Friedman earned his JD magna cum laude in 1962 from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and winner of the Sears Prize. His career was devoted to the fields of law and government. Friedman came to Pace as a former senior partner and co-chairman of the corporate department of Debevoise & Plimpton. He had served as commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, deputy assistant secretary for Capital Markets Policy at the United States Treasury Department, as executive vice president and general counsel of the Equitable Companies Inc. and the E.F. Hutton Group Inc. and as law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. Friedman wrote and lectured often on regulation of the securities markets and of financial institutions and is also chairman emeritus of the American Ballet Theatre. Today, he serves as a board member of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities and the National Museum of the American Indian-New York. He also serves on the board of directors for the Alliance for Downtown New York, Inc. and the Westchester County Association.
These posts, he says, keep him “connected” with Pace’s communities.
FAMILY TIES Friedman, who lives in Manhattan and also has a home in Pound Ridge, remains as devoted to his own family — where, it must be said, success seems to thrive. He proudly shares that his wife, Fredi, a veteran of the publishing industry (Little, Brown & Co.), is a literary agent and president of literary-management firm Fredrica S. Friedman & Co. Daughter Vanessa Friedman is fashion director and chief fashion critic of The New York Times, while son Alexander is in asset management, the CEO of GAM Holding in London. Three grandchildren round out the picture and keep Friedman on his toes. Friedman concludes that his foray into education has been nothing short of rewarding. “It’s a very challenging job, but it’s the best thing,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of things, and it’s really the most exciting, challenging and fun thing I’ve done.” And with that delightful laugh, he ends on a note of typical candor. With a grin he sums it up: “Not every moment — but it’s great.” For more on Pace University, visit pace.edu.
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Kevin Kegan, owner, with sister-in-law Kathie Murphy, general manager.
Saying it with flowers BY DANIELLE RENDA PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ROZYCKI
NO REQUEST IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR BLOSSOM FLOWER SHOPS, a family-owned business with roots going back nearly a century, threading four generations. “We have a motto that we’re your ‘Yes-we-can florist,’ says Kathie Murphy, who has been the general manager for 35 years. “We say, ‘No,’ rarely, and if it’s a, ‘No,’ there’s always another option.” The Kegan family opened the first Blossom Flower Shop in 1925 in the Fordham area of the Bronx, following it with additional Bronx locations. At just 21 years old and newly married, Kevin Kegan, the shops’ fourth-generation florist, took over the business. Kegan has since closed its Bronx stores and planted its central distribution facility in Yonkers with an additional storefront in White Plains, serving individual and corporate clients nationwide. From the upcoming Valentine’s Day to birthdays, get-well and sympathy occasions to anniversaries 36
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and “just because” moments, Blossom Flower Shops serve them all with stunning arrangements, bouquets, baskets and vases. “The busiest day is Valentine’s Day. Christmas is the busiest month. Mother’s Day is the busiest week,” says Murphy. “Valentine’s Day we do mostly roses, as well as other mixed arrangements that include hydrangeas, lilies, roses and tulips. Mother’s Day is just about the beautiful, mixed arrangements — anything colorful and large is popular; for Christmas, the centerpieces. Some people like the classic red and green, some like burgundy and the maroons.” There are also custom designs and specialty requests available for all occasions. In addition to bountiful bouquets, Blossom Flower Shops offer clients the opportunity to save money and give back with each purchase. Petal Points is a system providing customers with
one point per dollar spent, which can be redeemed toward the purchase or a gift card, available on the website. At checkout, customers can use the Growing Together program to donate to a participating church, school or nonprofit in Westchester County, including: Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, Family Services of Westchester, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, March of Dimes and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. But customer service has always remained the heart of Blossom’s business. “Customer service is our number one priority,” Murphy says. “(Our team) really cares about the business and the flowers and put their hearts and souls into it. We’re really customer-oriented and everyone takes that seriously.” Blossom Flower Shops are at 980 McLean Ave. in Yonkers and 275 Mamaroneck Ave. in White Plains. For more, visit blossomflower.com.
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DALLET GETS HIS DUE BRUCE MUSEUM FEATURES HERMÈS SHOW ON BIG CATS BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
It is no accident that turtles hatched at Robert Dallet’s home in southern France on the day of his funeral service any more than it’s an accident that Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, was born the year he died. Dallet (1923-2006) loved nature, particularly big cats. And he loved drawing and painting nature. His illustrations would serve as a muse for Hermès’ scarfs and other accessories and objets d’art for almost 20 years. Now Hermès and Panthera have joined forces to celebrate the man who devoted himself to nature’s beauty and preservation. The Parisian luxury house and the conservation group have announced the establishment of The Robert Dallet Initiative for Wild Cat Conservation, which will not only expand, but transcend the wildlife organization’s efforts. The announcement was made at the tony press preview for Hermès’ gorgeous “Fierce and Fragile: Big Cats in the Art of Robert Dallet,” through March 13 at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich. The initiative will be funded in part by proceeds from the sale of a charitable scarf featuring a Dallet leopard, along with one-of-a-kind items — a vase, a handbag, a tapestry, among them — inspired by Dallet’s drawings and paintings. These funds and an outreach campaign will continue to help Panthera rebuild lion populations in Africa; create the largest wildlife corridor for jaguars from Mexico to Brazil; increase the number of argalis and ibexes that serve as food sources for snow leopards in Central Asia; protect tigers from poachers in Southeast Asia and India; and end the persecution of leopards — the most beloved of the big cats by fashionistas — in part through the “Furs for Life” program that exchanges leopard skins used in religious ceremonies by South African tribes for high quality faux furs. Why the big cats? In saving them and their ecosystems, Panthera founding chairman Thomas Kaplan said
at the press preview, we are preserving one-third of the earth’s land mass as well as keeping the natural balance in check. But we are also paying tribute to these animals’ charismatic power and grace, he added — and the contemplation of beauty that Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas spoke of in his remarks. Certainly, the Bruce Museum exhibit will go a long way to further that contemplation and the increasing partnership between the arts and the sciences that is a Bruce hallmark. Curated by Dominique Surh of the Leiden Collection, Kaplan’s private art collection, with contributions from Ménéhould de Bazelaire, who is the director of Hermès cultural heritage, the exhibit contains some 60 paintings and drawings from the Emile Hermès collection and the Robert Dallet family private collection. The show is accompanied by a book co-published by Hermès and the French publishing house Actes Sud, whose blue cover was chosen, Dumas said, to represent both the nocturnal aspect of the big cats and the darkness of being endangered. In that book and the exhibit, the reader and viewer will encounter an artist who captured the soulfulness of the big cats’ emerald or amber eyes, their slinky musculature and the irresistible way in which they crouch to pounce or sip water. A master of composition, Dallet would complement the curve of a cat’s spine with the sinuousness of a tree branch. Such fearful symmetry, as it were, is presented in a beautifully lit, deep blue and green design by Hermès — which is also providing free admission for the run of the show. Equally impressive is the Dallet attitude to these animals. A lion may amorously groom a lioness in one drawing and attack an antelope in another. There’s nothing sentimental about these works. But then, there’s nothing sentimental about nature. For more, visit brucemuseum.org.
Robert Dallet’s “Amur Leopard,” watercolor and gouache. Photograph by Studio des Fleurs. © Hermès, 2015 WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
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The modest
MUSIC MAESTRO BY LAURA CACACE PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ROZYCKI
Phil Ciganer at Towne Crier Cafe.
Phil Ciganer didn’t always dream of opening a music venue as unique as the Towne Crier Cafe in Beacon — one that provides a fine dining experience for listeners and an atmosphere of comfort and excitement for musicians. But in 1972, he founded the Cafe in Beekman, turning his back on other, perhaps more profitable ventures to, fulfill a new dream. “I grew up in the ’60s, when the club scene was really thriving, and I was a trader on Wall Street — close proximity to the village,” Phil says. “So I’d finish work and walk to the Village and spend my evenings in clubs.” Clubs that included Cafe au Go Go, The Other End (otherwise known as The Bitter End), The Gaslight Cafe, Cafe Wha?, Gerde’s Folk City and Steve Paul’s Scene — places where, as Phil puts it, “something of high quality” was going on every night. “When a major opportunity was offered to me — a seat on the Stock Exchange — I thought about it, and I really didn’t want to do that. What I really wanted to do was hang out in clubs.” There he saw the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia and others who didn’t necessarily have the recognition that they deserved. During that time, Phil discovered a talent of his own. He laughs when he says, “My talent is recognizing talent and bringing it together with an audience.” After turning down the Wall Street job, he made up his mind about what he truly wanted
to do — create a unique venue for musicians who otherwise may not have had a platform to come and share their music. “I spent the next two and half years searching for a community that was in need of what I had in mind. I decided it was Austin, Texas. It was just an accident that I ended up on Beekman Road and I decided to try there for three months. When I looked back, 16 years had gone by.” After Beekman Road, he moved his venue down the road and spent 25 years in Pawling, before the Towne Crier landed on Main Street in Beacon in 2013. The list of artists — many of whom are musical giants that the Hudson Valley might never have seen without the existence of the Cafe — is extensive and diverse, spanning genres. Since 1972, Phil has welcomed members of The Band; Tom, Steve and Jen Chapin (members of Harry’s family); Pete Best, the original drummer for The Beatles; Rick Derringer; Laura Nyro; Randy Newman; Richie Havens; Poco; Leslie Gore; Suzanne Vega; Judy Collins; and Pete Seeger, to name a few. Sawyer Fredericks, the 2015 winner of “The Voice,” actually got his start at the Towne Crier. “He became a national celebrity almost overnight,” Phil says matter-of-factly. Even though he wouldn’t normally watch the show, Phil made sure to tune in to see Sawyer, who, in a way, is one of his own. “Because he started here, he’s coming [back to
perform] in early February.” Hailey Knox recently signed a major deal with a record label and will open the show for Sawyer. Phil’s known Hailey since she was a little girl but doesn’t suggest that any of her success, or Sawyer’s, is due, even in part, to their start at The Cafe. When pressed, he agrees that it makes him feel good to know where they began, but shrugs as he goes on to say, “Over the years, there have been many musicians that just come in here, and something happens along the way where they catch on nationally and become household names.” Phil’s the kind of guy who’s happy to facilitate the art, and if something good happens for those artists along their respective journeys, he’s just as content to stand back and watch. Because for him, the fulfillment doesn’t come in knowing that he’s been crucial in broadening the Hudson Valley music scene since 1972 or with the national success his artistic discoveries have gained. “It’s the joy in people’s eyes, the connection between the audience and the performers in an intimate setting. A nice environment, good food — it’s a total experience.” It takes a second, but he tacks on a final reason. “And the appreciation I get at the end of the evening.” For more, visit townecrier.com.
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Turnin g points From ballet to business and back
STORY AND PHOTOGRAPH BY COLLEEN WILSON
Few people have many memories at the age of 4, let alone know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. But Brittany Bochow Brandwein — director of events for the White Plains Business Improvement District — remembers being 4 and the moment she knew what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.
Brittany Bochow Brandwein with her pre-ballet class at Excel in Larchmont. 42
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She was sitting at the Tarrytown Music Hall watching the then-Mid-Atlantic Ballet perform “The Nutcracker” when she decided to become a ballerina. “I just wanted to be up there and dance,” she says. From age 4 through most of high school, Brandwein trained and performed constantly, about 30 hours a week, commuting after school and on the weekend from her Westchester County home to Manhattan. Her ability to perform a fouetté — a whipping turn on one leg made famous in the “Black Swan” pas de deux from “Swan Lake,” in which the ballerina does 32 consecutively — landed her on a national commercial before age 12. Before graduating from New Rochelle High School, Brandwein had danced in some of the most prestigious national venues and with some of the country’s most accomplished young performers — including the
likes of American Ballet Theatre principal Misty Copeland. Brandwein trained with American Ballet Theatre, the Pennsylvania Ballet and Studio Maestro, dancing in productions that included “The Sleeping Beauty” at the Metropolitan Opera House and “Il Cordellino,” in which a 1999 New York Times review described her as one who “caught the eye for her quietly assured ballerina manners.” But her favorite memory from those years was dancing in “Le Corsaire” with American Ballet Theatre. “I was in the first casting of this role where I danced en pointe with the corps members and I was relied upon for the next three years that they did it. … You’re on stage with corps members, principal dancers — it was a truly fulfilling experience on the stage at the Met Opera,” she says. To dance en pointe means “you’re performing to the fullest extent of a dancer’s expectations” — a feeling you could venture to describe as euphoric.” By the time Brandwein was in her late teens she was on track to become a professional dancer, was graduating early from high school and had just been cast in the principal role for a performance with Studio Maestro when she suffered an anterior cruciate ligament tear, an injury that
would alter the trajectory of her life. “This was kind of my big break. There would be people there looking to offer contracts,” she says. “Unfortunately, I missed that opportunity and ended up in surgery instead.” In May 2002, Brandwein had a complete ACL reconstruction, but her body didn’t respond well and she ended up back in surgery to take care of a malignant cell tumor that ultimately led to a chronic nerve pain condition. “I decided I needed to change my career path,” she says. But it didn’t change completely. Brandwein made her own major at the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York, earning a dual degree in performing arts administration and economics. Today Brandwein lives in the Valhalla area and works in White Plains at the BID. In her spare time she is teaching a pre-ballet class for 2- to 5-year-olds, a Mommy, or Daddy, and Me ballet class for similar ages and a class she developed called “Ballet: Bouncing Back Gracefully.” Though Brandwein keeps ballet close to her, both personally and professionally, it wasn’t easy to get back into it after her injury. “It’s a chord that has always strummed in me
and after my injury it was devastating and you go through this healing process and acceptance process where I didn’t want to be, I can’t be around it, I can’t be with it, I can’t see it,” she says. “That didn’t last very long.” Since graduating college, Brandwein has worked in various roles teaching, assisting and administering dance programs, but developing the “Bouncing Back” ballet class was something that has given her a completely different perspective on teaching and being a part of the dance world. “I specifically designed it for postpartum women, postmenopausal, those recovering from injury,” she says. “It is basically something to restore your sense of self, your sense of grace, finding yourself in a new body.” Brandwein created the six-week class last year and is looking to teach a second round of students again this year. The experience, she says, has been a cathartic and restorative process for her. “It’s not about getting back to who you were,” she says. “It’s about getting acquainted with your new body and the changes that are happening or have happened.” For more, email Brandwein at brittanyy. brandwein@gmail.com
Cafe an d Store
Stepping Stones Museum for Children presents
Hands-On Exhibits
rams p-In Prog Daily Dro
Birthday Parties
Special Exhibit Now Open Rainforest Adventure introduces children to tropical rainforest communities, the challenges they face and ways that people of all ages can impact their survival. Younger children discover the beauty, wonders and rich diversity of rainforests. Older children may become rainforest scientists and investigate issues, analyze information and determine their role in supporting rainforest conservation. This is one awesome adventure your family can’t miss.
For the most up-to-date activities and events, visit www.steppingstonesmuseum.org/calendar
Rainforest Adventure was created by Stepping Stones Museum for Children. This exhibit is partially sponsored by Horizon Foundation, Inc.
Norwalk, CT • Exit 14N or 15S off I-95
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A glassblower at work at the Simon Pearce Mill in Quechee, Vt. 44 WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY
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n g i p with tradition e e K BY DANIELLE RENDA
Simon Pearce wished to preserve the craft of glassblowing. And his business, with locations in Connecticut, has done so for more than 30 years.
Pearce’s eponymous company creates and sells handblown, lead-free, crystal glassware, with collections, including tabletop and décor items, as well as pottery and specialty lighting. Founded in 1981, Simon Pearce relocated from
Bennettsbridge, Ireland to Quechee, Vt., where the surroundings mirror the Emerald Isle’s grasslands. The Vermont headquarters is not only a manufacturing site, it’s also an experience. Attracting about 300,000 visitors annually, the location features glassblowing demonstrations, held daily from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., in addition to The Mill at Simon Pearce, a farmto-table restaurant where guests can enjoy a meal served on Simon Pearce glassware and pottery. Modern glass may be created in factories using specialized equipment, but the art of handblowing
Simon Pearce Revere Votive, $70.
glass is centuries old. In molding molten materials into glass products, Simon Pearce craftsmen continue the tradition. It’s no easy task, but for Bill Browne, master glassblower, it’s all in a day’s work. Browne is the process-improvement specialist for Simon Pearce, focusing on glass production, distribution and facilities. He’s been blowing glass for more than 20 years. “It requires focus, trust and teamwork at all times, every day,” Browne says. “The 2,100-degree (Fahrenheit) molten glass is close to the body at all times, and how we transfer glass from one iron to another requires us to hold the molten material over a teammate’s head.” As Browne explains, a glassblower gathers liquid glass onto a blowpipe and shapes the material using traditional tools, wooden blocks and paddles and wet newspaper. The glassblower then gently breathes down the blowpipe, rotating the material while filling it with air. He shapes the air bubble into a design, using a form or doing it by hand. The material is then attached to an iron, removing it from the blowpipe, to be heated, softened and shaped into its final dimensions. The last step requires the glass to cool and solidify. “It can take anywhere from eight hours for a light piece under a pound to 70 hours or more for an item that is extremely heavy, 20 pounds or more,” Browne says. He explains that Simon Pearce specifically uses a “pontil” iron — a fishing iron — during the crafting process, which distinguishes the glass from other glassware. “The pontil is the mark of the marker and a functional transition to create hand-finished glass,” says Browne. When the iron attaches to the material, it leaves a mark on the glass, which is often removed. Simon Pearce, however, leaves a cross-shaped mark on its glass. When the iron is removed, the cross takes on a clover effect, identifying that it’s exclusive to Simon Pearce. Simon Pearce has locations at 170 Main St. in Westport and 125 E. Putnam Ave. in Greenwich. For more, visit simonpearce.com.
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LUXURY on an intimate scale BY REECE ALVAREZ
Nestled in the picturesque coastal community of Old Saybrook is a romantic retreat, the Saybrook Point Inn & Spa. 46
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A blend of modern and historic, casual and luxurious, the sprawling shoreline property features an array of more than 100 distinct, intimate villas, guesthouses, suites and rooms. The property, which is situated at the mouth of the Connecticut River in the hamlet of Saybrook Point, dates back centuries, first as home to Algonquin and Pequot American Indians and later to the Dutch, who settled Saybrook Point in 1623.
A major center for international trade, the colony would grow and become a notable location. Yale University was first established there and the area would later gain fame as the home of Katharine Hepburn and notoriety as a gambling den. Under three generations of the Tagliatela family since the 1950s, the Saybrook has evolved into one of Connecticut’s premier luxury vacation destinations, noted for its Italian cuisine, historic architecture and,
The Lighthouse Suite, considered the Saybrook Point Inn & Spa’s most romantic accommodation, boasts panoramic waterfront views and unparalleled privacy. Photograph courtesy Saybrook Point Inn & Spa
most of all, its one-of-a kind accommodations. Among the inn’s most romantic spots, particularly for lovers of the sea, is the Lighthouse, says general manager John Lombardo, who has been with the inn for more than 21 years and helped it to achieve its current AAA Four Diamond status. While not in actual maritime use, the Lighthouse Suite features a beaming navigation light perched above a dock house in the inn’s working marina.
The private accommodation boasts unobstructed views of the Long Island Sound and Connecticut River in all directions. With a living room, dining area and kitchenette, the Lighthouse offers guests a spacious 900 square feet to call their home away from home. “My father designed it, built it and lived in it,” says Stephen Tagliatela, the innkeeper and managing partner for the Saybrook.
Tagliatela notes that the suite not only provides a unique accommodation, but also rare views of several other lighthouses along Connecticut’s coastline. “There aren’t many places where you can stay and see four or maybe five lighthouses,” he says. While the suite may be considered the crown jewel of the Saybrook, the inn’s historical centerpiece is Three Stories. With wraparound porches, private garden and common rooms graced by
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The luxury and romance of the Saybrook extends beyond its rooms to a host of services and offerings, from an engagement ring slipped into a glass of Champagne for a surprise proposal to paths of rose petals leading into your room.
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billiards and books, Three Stories invites guests to unwind and enjoy the tranquility of a completely renovated Italianate home. The property contains eight individually designed rooms, each with a private balcony, fireplace, fine linens and artwork by local artists. Originally built in 1892 as a single-family home for engineer William Vars, the landmark guesthouse reflects the New England reverence for the past. Each guestroom tells the story of a local resident, from Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn, the actress’ mother, a suffragist who co-founded what would become Planned Parenthood; to Anna Louise James, who was one of the first African-American woman pharmacists and ran The James Pharmacy, on the National Register of Historic Places. The luxury and romance of the Saybrook extends beyond its rooms to a host of services and offerings, from an engagement ring slipped into a glass of Champagne for a surprise proposal to paths of rose petals leading into your room. “We have whole chocolate strawberries, cheese platters, Champagne, wine, assortments of chocolates,” Lombardo says. “A young man called one night and he wanted strawberries with whipped cream and chocolate waiting when they arrived. When
they checked in we ran that up and it was sitting in their room, waiting for them as a surprise for the young lady.” The inn holds upwards of 100 weddings a year, he adds, and proposals are frequent occurrences. Indeed, Innkeeper Tagliatela married his wife there more than 15 years ago. “We really wanted to get married somewhere else and we just couldn’t find anything that was going to fit what we want to do, so we ended up having it here in January,” he says. “It’s a nice time of year to get married. There is something about the winter here that is very cozy and intimate.” When not enjoying the comfort of generously sized rooms or touring privately owned shops in the nearby downtown, lovebirds can enjoy a couple’s massage at the inn’s Sanno Spa, which promises a new kind of pampering and indulgence. Recently renovated, Sanno now includes 11 total-service rooms and Swiss showers. In addition, an expanded spa menu as well as spa products are featured, which allow guests to create tailored visits. Services include massage therapy, facials, body wraps and scrubs, manicures and pedicures. Rounding out the Saybrook experience is Fresh Salt, the inn’s restaurant, where guests can enjoy drinks by outdoor fireplaces or feast on a fine-dining menu featuring family recipes like Mrs. Tag’s Swordfish, one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes, Tagliatela says. Tagliatela, whose grandparents emigrated from Italy, says there is a love of food in the family that is shared with guests. “My grandfather started with a pushcart with fruits and vegetables and built a substantial food chain — Pegnataro’s grocery stores,” he says. The pride of a family name attached to the inn can be felt in the service and attention to detail, which translates into an unusual experience for guests, Lombardo says: “You get the opportunity to have the amenities of a luxury resort with the privacy, ambiance and personalized service of a small luxury inn.” For more, visit saybrook.com.
THE FIRST DOCTOR SAID DEPRESSION. THE SECOND SAID STROKE. THE THIRD SAID ALZHEIMER’S. NO ONE SAID FTD. Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD) is the most common cause of dementia for people under 60, affecting more than 50,000 in the U.S. alone. Onset strikes earlier in life—when few anticipate dementia—and accurate diagnosis can take years. Families lose active parents and breadwinners without knowing what’s stealing away the person they love. And when a diagnosis is made, there are no effective treatments. Help to change that reality today. www.theAFTD.org/learnmore
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Mary Jane Denzer A granddaughter remembers a woman of style and substance “Today I am wearing the necklace my grandmother gave me for my 22nd birthday, a replica of the one she always wore and like the ones my beautiful aunts wear, too. She never took it off, nor do they, nor will I — ever. This is the outfit I wore to my grandmother’s Christmas dinner last year. I mostly do not wear outfits like this. I mostly wear my dad’s sweaters and leggings. My grandmother, who said quite a few things to quite a few people, never said anything to me about my clothes. I don’t know why she let me off the hook, but she did. My dad told me that the day after Christmas my grandmother called him to remark how ecstatic she was about this outfit. She loved it. I loved that it had made her so happy. On the days I opt out of the sweaters and leggings, I dress myself like this because it is how my grandmother taught me to dress. She was the essence of style, and the way she looked on the outside was how she taught me to be on the inside. To live with poise, eloquence, ferocity, and passion. It was important to me that she knew I felt this way. In October, I wrote this email: “Dear Grammy, What I want you to know is that you have given me the strength of a thousand women. That you have built a family of warriors, joy-seekers, love-givers, and kindness. You have shown me fierce passion, what it means to have it and hold onto it, and you have shown me the endless, bottomless, overflowing love a grandmother has for her granddaughter. I will always carry your love in the depths of my soul. There is no way to explain what you mean me to me, what your friendship has allowed me, where
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your guidance has led me and how your love has nourished me. I am forever lucky to be yours, to be of you and I cherish the life we have shared with each other. Every moment with you has been joy, excitement, laughter, and true connection. I have been so angry with every God, with the universe, with my own ignorance and misunderstanding since I was told you were sick. Nothing prepared me for this and I have struggled deeply with any attempt at acceptance. And I know, that sometimes the truth is the hardest thing to accept. I’m so sorry that I haven’t visited more, called more. I’m sorry for these excuses. But I am heartbroken, and scared, at the prospect of living without my grandmother. I just want you to know that ours is true love. That a childhood filled with sleepovers and visits to the city, family dinners and lunches by the pool will be with me for the rest of my life. That your passion for your life is emblazoned in me and I will share everything about you, every last detail, with my children. They will live in the legacy of their most fabulous great grandmother and they will know how at the deepest root of our family and at the deepest part of me, is you. I would not be here if not for you and what a miracle that is. Thank you for meeting my Poppy and having my father, making him strong and wonderful and caring and allowing me to have life on this planet. I am because of you, and isn’t that tremendous? There are no words, so few tangible ways to express the infinite love that is in me for you. But I know you share in that love and we two are the only ones who have to know what that means. I find it so beautiful that you can find a best friend in your grandparent, that I only had to wait until life was given to me to find you. And it’s so lovely that a few decades after you were born, you found me. There is such certainty in knowing that and so a goodbye is not necessary. We were always meant to be and things meant to be do not have endings. I thank you for always accepting me as I am, for listening to me for 22 years and for injecting your spirit into every morsel of my life. I want you to know that every part of your being is loved and cherished. That you will always be safe because you are loved by so many. And that I am always here for you, indebted to you, and in love with everything you are. Thank you for being my grandmother. I love you desperately. Haley
Mary Jane Denzer, who brought the world of fashion to Westchester for 35 years through her eponymous luxury boutique in White Plains, died at 83 in December. Here, she is pictured with her beloved dog Bodhi, as photographed by Bob Rozycki.
My grandmother responded, not 10 minutes later: “I can hardly find the strength to answer such a beautiful message. I love you too — so deeply — and I am not leaving you yet. We will have more time together to talk about everything — and I will be with you forever — I promise — in spirit and love. See you tomorrow.” Grammy So, to my everything, I promise to always dress on the inside the way you dressed on the outside. And you better believe, when it comes time for a party, I will be my grandmother’s granddaughter, and be the best dressed guest. In the heaven I imagine you in, you are always at a cocktail party reapplying your lipstick. Every dish is the most fabulous you have ever eaten, everyone is laughing and you are always the most divine. Please save me a seat at your table. In the mean time, I will be loving you from afar.” Haley was wearing a short black cocktail dress with a fitted top and full, black lace skirt by Australian designer Alex Perry when she delivered this eulogy. — Haley Jakobson
WAY
Brevoort Lane
Waterside havens The love of water — and luxe waterfront property — dominates Greenhaven, a coastal community of some 200 homes in Rye Neck whose residents have the highest net-worth in Westchester County. (It is, according to Business Insider, the 10th richest community in America.) “This hidden jewel of southern Westchester is the best-kept secret for international and Manhattan residents alike looking for an upscale and private waterfront weekend retreat or convenient yearround waterfront residence,” says broker Louis Katsoris of Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s International Realty. He represents three distinctly styled proper52
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ties as well as a neighboring contemporary on Shadow Island, just across the Long Island Sound. The close proximity, diverse styles and simultaneous availability of these properties has raised the possibility of several related parties making a move together — four waterfront homes serving as a private yet connected compound for close
friends or family to enjoy. “This unique opportunity has certainly made a few buyers sincerely consider a joint move as it isn’t an opportunity often available on the waterfront,” Katsoris says. “Many of our clients come to this area based upon the recommendations of friends that recently bought properties. The prospect of being able to now buy distinct, private waterfront homes together on the same street is raising significant attention from related buyers wanting to own properties close together and maintain their social ties.” While each boasts its own unique style and character, all of these homes have the common appeal of panoramic water views and waterfront amenities: On Shore Road, you’ll find a landmark waterfront estate that was constructed in 1925 and previously
owned by Greenhaven founder and developer Vivian Green. It lies on 2.3 elevated acres with views of the sound from every vantage point. A gated entry at the end of a private lane leads to the 10,000-squarefoot residence, whose luxurious amenities include a heated, shore-line pool, a tennis court, a beach with a cascading waterfall, a greenhouse, large level lawns and impressive space both inside and out to capture the home’s nautical backdrop. The property is offered at $9,600,000. Just down the street is a beach-house retreat. Boasting a Tudor style, this 5,800-square-foot residence, which is offered at $5,999,000, sits on a 1.23acre protected lot with waterside lawns, elevated dining patios and a private dock along the Long Island Sound. An expansive private beach envelops the spacious, completely renovated home with an inviting front courtyard, unusual architectural details, sleek finishes and an open floor plan to capture Long Island Sound views from every room. Across the street on Brevoort Lane you’ll find an English country home flanked by the Long Island Sound and Van Amringe Pond. The property offers panoramic and diverse water views plus a beautiful pool and spa just steps from the beach and a community dock. A well-appointed, open floor plan interior displays Old World details paired with a distinct contemporary flair. The residence is offered at $4,395,000. Across the water on Taylors Lane lies an estate accessed by a private causeway leading to 4.02 acres known as “Shadow Island,” with approximately 1,000 linear feet of direct waterfront, a private beach, a waterside, heated pool and pier. This contemporary residence, which was constructed by mid-century architect Ulrich Franzen, has since been completely renovated with the highest level of finishes and style. Walls of glass, numerous balconies and expansive decks capture surrounding water views that stretch to Manhattan. The property is offered at $6,975,000. “It’s extremely rare to find so many significant new listings in such a small section of Westchester County at the same time that are all so unique,” Katsoris says. “From magnificent estate-style to contemporary and traditional, each listing is very different, but all offer the same unparalleled waterfront amenities, privacy and (Rye Neck) school system, as well as a convenient location barely 35 minutes from New York City.” For more information on each of these properties, please visit their individual websites at 1ShoreRoad.com, 3ShoreRoad.com, 508BrevoortLane.com and 707TaylorsLane.com.
3 Shore Road
Taylors Lane
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By the sea The lure of the Connecticut coastline is such that many homeowners long for it, even in winter. Fortunately, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty counts many waterfront properties in its Nutmeg State portfolio. Like the one on Westport’s Canfield Island, an oasis on the Long Island Sound with only 13 residences. A gated bridge leads to this private enclave and custom-built contemporary Colonial, which was built in 2001 on just over an acre of land. The home, listed at $2,750,000, offers year-round views of the sound and Canfield Creek, with direct access to a beach shared by just five homes on the island. With panoramic water views from every room, the three-bedroom, three-bath residence boasts a fully equipped cook’s kitchen, soaring cathedral ceilings,
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two-story windows and a separate office or artist studio. The property also features multiple decks and patios surrounded by professionally landscaped perennial gardens. “This one-of-a-kind property is… worlds away yet just over an hour from New York City by train,” says Molly O’Brien Watkins, a Darien agent for Sotheby’s. “Kayak on Canfield Creek to Bermuda Lagoon, swim and sun at the beach, or relax on the deck and take in the abundant wildlife and breathtaking scenery. From sunrise to sunset, there is something for everyone at this extraordinary residence.” Additional amenities include a nearby golf course, yacht club, public beach, playground, park and access
Grove Point Road
to shopping, public transportation and other Westport town offerings. For more information on this Shorehaven Road property, visit williampitt.com/search/ real-estate-sales/52-shorehaven-road-westportct-06880-99112823-1217793/ . Beachside Common offers a home that boasts seven bedrooms, seven full baths and 7,757 square feet of space, perfect for entertaining. The Colonial, built in 2002, rests on more than two acres of waterfront land in the Greens Farms area of Westport and enjoys vast views of Sherwood Island, Connecticut’s first state park. Greens Farms is the oldest neighborhood in Westport, dating from 1648 when the town officially gave five farmers, one of them being John Green, permission to settle on the fertile land of the Pequot people. The settlers eventually bought the land from them, expanding the Fairfield County community. Highlights of the home include six fireplaces, a gourmet eat-in kitchen, a spacious family room, a liv-
ing room with coffered ceilings, a media room and a game room. Perhaps the most impressive room of the house is the master suite, which boasts his and her walk-in closets, a private balcony, a fireplace and a sitting area. A fully equipped gym with a bath and sauna, as well as an in-ground pool, completes the residence. For more, visit williampitt.com/search/realestate-sales/15-beachside-common-westportct-06880-99124330-1298261/. The contemporary-style home on Grove Point Road lies on direct waterfront land in Westport’s Compo Beach neighborhood, overlooking Compo Mill Cove. A cottage-style, historic area of Westport, Compo Beach is popular among families. F. Scott Fitzgerald once owned a summer home here, gaining much inspiration for his work from its beautiful location and community. The 1,980-square-foot-home enjoys sunrise views across the water, which are visible from the master suite. Originally built in 1950, the residence has been thoughtfully expanded and updated, now boasting a great room as well as a newer kitchen and bathrooms. Other features include wide plank oak floors, an expansive deck overlooking the water, French doors and walls of glass. For more, visit williampitt.com/search/real-estate-sales/94-grove-point-road-westportct-06880-99118278-1250874/. The 1920s Tudor on Shagbark Road has been called Fairfield County’s “Best Kept Secret” for a reason. It’s located in the private waterfront community of Norwalk’s Wilson Point, a peninsula of about 150 coastal acres, bordered on the east by the Long Island Sound and on the west by Wilson Cove. There are more than 80 houses in the area, ranging in age and size from an original farmhouse built in 1749 to recently constructed, larger properties. The neighborhood is also home to the Norwalk Yacht Club. While the house has since been updated, the owners have made sure it stays true to its historic character. Especially interesting is the great room, which was once an artist studio. The room maintains various original features, including 22-foot, vaulted ceilings, wide-planked wood floors, a large fieldstone fireplace and French doors that lead out to a back stone patio. A large loft additionally overlooks this spacious room, which is rumored to have once housed an organ used to entertain the artist’s guests as they viewed his work. Other highlights include an up-to-date chef’s kitchen, large sun-filled windows and an elevated deck. In total, the home includes five bedrooms and four baths. For more, visit williampitt.com/search/ real-estate-sales/17-shagbark-road-norwalkct-06854-99095650-659255/.
Canufield Island, Shorehaven Road
Shagbark Road
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song IN HER heart BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY DAWN UPSHAW
Einstein said that “the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.” So it is no surprise that Dawn Upshaw was the first vocal artist to be awarded a “genius grant” when she was named a fellow of the MacArthur Foundation in 2007. Upshaw, the lyric soprano whose career has embraced everything from Baroque to contemporary music, is the essence of that simplicity. Her manner is direct and sincere; her appearance, elegantly uncluttered, even in a glittering ball gown. “Some like flash,” she says. “But that’s not my style.” Then there’s the crystalline voice that has en-
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chanted opera lovers and concertgoers alike for some 30 years and set new YouTube fans to marveling and begging for more. “There are certain things I wish I could try out differently with my voice,” she says modestly. “But we’re born with a certain voice.” And into a certain culture. Upshaw, a longtime Westchester resident, is the product of the Mid-
Dawn Upshaw in “Cosi Fan Tutte.”
Her manner is direct and sincere; her appearance, elegantly uncluttered, even in a glittering ball gown. “Some like flash,” she says. “But that’s not my style.”
west and parents who were part of the civil rights movement. Her soundtrack was the folk music of the 1960s — Beacon’s Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary and Joni Mitchell, among others. “It was about getting the words out, the text,” she says. “The simplicity of the delivery is important in any piece of music. For me, I have to start with the text.” That approach, and that rarefied voice, brought her acclaim as a host of Mozart maids and maidens — the so-called “anna, ina” roles of Susanna in “The Marriage of Figaro,” Pamina in “The Magic Flute,” Despina in “Cosi Fan Tutte” and Zerlina in “Don Giovanni.” But those qualities have also suited her to the challenges of contemporary music like Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s “Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra,” which Upshaw will perform Feb. 7 at the Westchester Philharmonic’s second annual “Friends & Family” concert. “Especially with new music it’s like listening to a new language,” Upshaw says. “You want to be as clear as you can be.” Golijov’s “Three Songs,” which he orchestrated from other arrangements and brought together in this work, are particularly formidable as they are in Yiddish, a Spanish dialect and English respectively. (The texts are by Sally Potter, Rosalia de Cas-
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Dawn Upshaw as Despina in “Cosi Fan Tutte.”
tro and Emily Dickinson.) The music, while haunting, has its own difficulties. High notes hang in the air, seemingly plucked out of nowhere. Melodies sigh like the wind weaving through the reeds. Threading the three is a sense of loss or longing, Upshaw says. The first, the Yiddish “Lullaby and Doina” — after an ornamented, improvisational Romanian musical form that has found its way into klezmer music — is less about loss than longing, she adds. (It appears in the 2000 film “The Man Who Cried.”) “It’s about encouraging this child to sleep and not being completely at ease in that.”
The second — “Pale Moon,” in the Galician (northern Spanish) dialect of Galego — is “about hiding from the world and wanting to disappear.” Adds Upshaw wryly, “It’s the saddest song I know in C major.” The third, “How Slow the Wind,” was inspired by a sudden death in the composer’s circle of friends. It’s about time and grief and how grief stops time — or makes you wish it could. Singing songs on a concert stage, like singing a Mozart heroine, “is a form of acting. To convey them, especially, the text, I like to have time to prepare.”
So don’t expect Upshaw to come barreling into Purchase College’s Performing Arts Center — where the Westchester Phil performs — at the last minute, throw off her coat, dab on some makeup and rush out onto the stage. “It’s a habit formed over decades: I’m happiest if I have some quiet time before a concert.” Space is important to Upshaw in singing — space before a performance and space between performances. “I still love singing,” says the woman who has jetted from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to Paris to Glyndebourne to Salzburg for decades. “But I actually love traveling less, settling down a bit.” These days, her longest commute may be from Westchester to Annandale-on-Hudson to Lenox, Mass. Upshaw — who has a B.A. from Illinois Wesleyan University, an M.M. from Manhattan School of Music and honorary doctorates from those institutions along with Yale, Juilliard and Allegheny College — is artistic director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music and head of the Vocal Arts Program at the Tanglewood Music Center. At Bard, where she’s been for 10 years, and Tanglewood, where she’s been for a little more than a year, she coaches young professional singers — graduate and postgrad. “Coaching” is not a word she favors. But she acknowledges its use in the music world to distinguish what she does from “teaching,” or training the voice — although she will work with singers on their technique. But her primary role is to help them with their message in song — “what they want to say and how they want to say it. “I love the artistic planning in both programs,” Upshaw says of Bard and Tanglewood. “I love trying to create the home, the playing field, the place in which (the students) can create and take risks safely and thrive.” Other profiles — notably a 2008 article in The Guardian — have discussed the part that being a breast cancer survivor has played in separating the wheat from the chaff in her life. But, she adds, “Some of it is getting older, and some of it is maturity. I want my life to be simple. It’s all good.”
Dawn Upshaw at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan.
Red-y to roll
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BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA PHOTOGRAPHS BY BOB ROZYCKI
Saks Fifth Avenue Greenwich is red-hot.
The Greenwich Avenue anchor looks to expand this fall and early next year with three new retail spaces accenting specific departments plus a makeover. 60
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Opening around the corner on East Elm Street in autumn is the 14,000-square-foot 10022-SHOE, named for the Manhattan flagship’s shoe salon, which, the saying goes, is so big it has its own ZIP code. Across from the main store on Greenwich Avenue will be The Vault, 6,000 square feet of fine jewelry, and another space that will contain more than 14,000 square feet devoted to contemporary ready-to-wear and accessories. The main store will remain open while being renovated to feature designer readyto-wear and beauty. These renovations and expansions will be complete in 2017. “We’ve been looking to grow in Greenwich and this is a fantastic opportunity,” says Jeff O’Geary, vice president and general manager. He and members of his team are giving us a sneak peek of the contemporary ready-to-wear space for a WAG photo shoot featuring some of the store’s red offerings for Valentine’s Day. Even though the contemporary clothing space has not yet been renovated, it’s a fabulous setting with a seemingly endless series of white Doric columns.
Those columns make the ensembles pop, suggesting a new answer to the question: What’s black and white and red all over? LOOK ONE (COVER) – Model Deborah Fenker’s ready to rock Valentine’s Day in this flirty Oscar de la Renta crocheted number, ($2,990), accented with a Saint Laurent Paris moto jacket, ($4,990); a Valentino Rock Stud clutch, ($1,695); and Christian Louboutin Oeillet suede peep-toe pumps, ($895). The cocktail ring is also by Oscar ($190); the lip, Dolce & Gabbana’s Lover ($37). LOOK TWO (LEFT)– Fenker anticipates spring in this ruched floral Dolce & Gabbana dress ($2,390), which still satisfies the red requirement for V Day. Pair it with a YSL clutch ($1,150); Christian Louboutin Oeillet suede peep-toe pumps, ($895); an Oscar de la Renta floral cocktail ring ($190); and Dolce & Gabbana’s lipstick in Lover ($37). LOOK THREE – Like your reds muted? Make Valentine’s a day of wine (colors) and roses with this Nancy Gonzalez croc bag ($3,250) and these Gucci Marine pumps in Romantic Cherise ($650).
Penny Pincher Boutique The Very Best in Women’s Luxury Consignment Established 1985
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*Cannot be combined with already reduced items or during storewide sales. Does not include Chanel or Hermes. Expires 2/29/2016
Designer Handbags, Shoes, Furs, Clothing, Accessories and More l Fine Gold, Platinum, Silver and Costume Jewelry l Designer Watches l Eclectic Home Furnishings l
Penny Pincher is a women’s luxury designer boutique offering hi-end brands of shoes, handbags, clothing, jewelry (fine and costume) and home furnishing. Call (914) 241-2134 or e-mail us to discuss consigning your designer items at info@pennypincherboutique.com. We also provide “White Glove” private service in your home within NY, NJ, and CT areas. Please inquire. 184 Harris Road, (Rte. 117 By-Pass) Bedford Hills, NY | 914-241-2134 | Open 7 Days | Daily 10-5:45 Sunday 12-4:45 www.pennypincherboutique.com | info@pennypincherboutique.com
Socialize with us!
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New shops come to Neiman’s BY DANIELLE RENDA PHOTOGRAPHS BY BOB ROZYCKI
The third floor of Neiman Marcus Westchester recently underwent a facelift.
Brunello Cucinelli Monili Double-Strap Sandal in graphite, $1,395.
Monili Double-Strap High Heel Sandal in graphite, $1,495
It was an exciting transformation earmarked for designers Brunello Cucinelli and Prada. In December 2015, two separate shops were created in the luxury department store in White Plains, acting as the brands’ “home away from home.” And giving birth to a new shopping experience for Neiman Marcus customers. Rather than simply browse clothing racks and shelves of accessories, clients can thoroughly engage in the distinctiveness of each brand. Some of the focal points of Brunello Cucinelli’s shop are framed photographs of the designer’s native Italy. For Prada, the shop uses the black-and-white logo’ throughout, while mannequins sport some of the latest fashions
in eye-catching prints. Each shop features its Spring 2016 collection. Patrons can fully immerse themselves in the brands’ individual collections as well. For Brunello Cucinelli, this includes a pastel palette grouped with basic neutrals and the exquisite juxtaposing of untamed fibers and refined details. For Prada, spring welcomes just the opposite — an idiosyncratic mélange of graphic patterns and unexpected layers, sheer fabrics and three-dimensional embellishments, all united with color motifs of bright yellow, neon green, orange and brown. And stripes. Lots and lots of vertical stripes. For Brunello Cucinelli, think sophisticated. For Prada, think edgy. But be sure to pay each shop a visit — and leave with a little something for yourself. For more, visit neimanmarcus.com.
Background photo features charcoal, wool blazer with lace cuff, $2,995; vanilla, silk “v” neck blouse, $795; and necklace, multistrand, clear, silver-grey choker, $1,425. All pieces are part of Brunello Cucinelli’s spring 2016 collection.
MIKKEL PAIGE
RANA FAURE
Our place or yours distinctive on or off-site catering available for every occasion
2015 WEDDING WIRE COUPLES CHOICE AWARDS WINE SPECTATOR, Grand Award since 1994 NATURE CONSERVANCY, The Hudson Valley's Top Green Restaurant
Eleven Kittle Road Chappaqua, New York kittlehouse.com 914 666 8044 WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
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SCULPTURES GONE
MICRO BY DANIELLE RENDA PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF AUDRIUS KRULIS
For Audrius Krulis, art is his muse. As the founder of an eponymous jewelry company, Audrius describes his creations as “sculptures on a microscopic scale.” He designs and handcrafts each piece, which are offered exclusively through his collection. “Audrius finds inspiration in many forms,” says Karolis Krulis, Audrius’ son, who manages the photography and web design for his father’s company. “Part of it is the intrinsic nature of building something and seeing it come to life in front of you. The shape takes on its own soul and character, which fuels the creative process.” Audrius, who is from Lithuania, founded his company in 2012. Graduating with a master’s in sculpture from Lithuania’s Vilnius Academy of Arts, Audrius immigrated to New York in 1993. He worked as a shop foreman for Alex Sepkus’ New York-based 64
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jewelry company for almost 20 years before pursuing his own creative vision. Among the influences on Audrius’ vocation were his parents, graduates of the Vilnius Academy of Arts who taught art in Lithuania. “Jewelry was simply an extension of a long history of art in the Krulis family,” Karolis says. Now Audrius brings his designs to various international trade shows around the United States, including JCK Tucson — a gathering that features finished jewelry and loose gemstone collections — and JCK Las Vegas — a premier jewelry event open to domestic and international professionals. This year will be Audrius’ first experience at the American Made Show, a wholesale trade show in Washington, D.C. for products by studio artists from the U.S. and Canada. “Wearing something of his is an intimate connection to the soul and imagination of an artist,” Karolis says. “It is as much a reflection of an individual’s taste as it is the craftsmanship of the artist, and so it
is not just the jewelry that is unique, but the nature of the bond between art and collector.” All Audrius’ pieces are made from 18-karat gold using precious and semiprecious stones. His collection features bracelets, rings, earrings, necklaces and pendants. His best-selling pieces in the New York metropolitan area are long, beaded necklaces and bracelets, with rough diamonds and sapphires. Audrius’ whimsical, new take on classic center-stone rings has also been popular, especially with its use of brighter stones. Says Karolis: “People are really loving a strong palette and have become more inclined to pick something that stands out.” Audrius Krulis’ je welry is available in 12 stores around the U.S. and Canada, including two Westchester County retailers — Royal Jewels of Rye, 56 Purchase St.; and Zalta’s Gallery, 90 E. Boston Post Road in Mamaroneck. For more, visit audriuskrulis.com.
“Peekskill is my home, and keeping us safe is my job.” Kaitlyn Corbett Nuclear Engineer Kaitlyn Corbett has always called New York home. Born and raised in Buffalo, she earned her degree in nuclear power engineering at SUNY College of Technology and moved to Peekskill to start her career at Indian Point. Safety is the single most important mission for Kaitlyn and her 1,000 colleagues at the plant, and it’s been the focus of her years of study and training in the nuclear power industry. Every day, engineers are graded on their performance by inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC recently gave Kaitlyn and the team at Indian Point its highest safety rating — for the fifth year in a row. Discover more about Indian Point at SafeSecureVital.com
POWERING NEW YORK
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a perfect fit BY DANIELLE RENDA | PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ROZYCKI
From left, Marilynn Lipton Blotner and Stacey Lipton owners of Soleil Toile. 66Schumer, WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
Modern lingerie may be associated with sheer, lacy fabrics and figureenhancing frames. But at Soleil Toile, fit comes before style. “If you have something that fits well, that you feel good in, you ultimately become sexier – not only to yourself, but to whoever is seeing you in it,” Stacey Lipton Schumer says. “Once you establish your size, that makes all the difference.” Schumer co-owns Soleil Toile, a fine lingerie and swimwear shop with locations in Westport and New Canaan. Along with her mother, co-owner Marilynn Lipton Blotner, she works closely with their clientele, helping women to look and feel their best. “We encourage one-on-one,” Schumer says. “You really need someone who’s going to take you through all of the different styles and really assess
your size correctly. Because you can get a size to work, but that doesn’t mean the style will work.” Soleil Toile was founded in 1990, after the mother-daughter duo came across a particular lingerie boutique at an event held at Manhattan’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. “We walked though like 10 football fields filled with different ideas, and there was this one brand that stuck in our heads,” Schumer says. “It definitely showed a new direction in lingerie. It wasn’t just utilitarian anymore. It was something to be seen. And we said, ‘There’s something here.’” Schumer worked at the shop during breaks from school and then on weekends, while she worked weekdays in fashion editorial and later for a designer, both in New York City. But by 1994, just four years after its opening, Schumer was working full-time for Soleil Toile. And her passion is still palpable. With bright eyes and a smile, Schumer describes her everyday tasks, which revolve around boosting the confidence of others. “People transform in our fitting rooms,” she says. “It’s feeling good from the inside-out, but it’s also that little push in getting the right foundation that com-
pletes not just the outfit, but the mindset as well.” Having the clients feel comfortable during the sizing experience is a priority. “That’s something that we wanted to make a pleasant process,” Schumer says. “Because so many people have this apprehension when they come in to get fitted… And it doesn’t need to be scary. It doesn’t need to be intimidating.” And the shops’ small-town locations allow the staffers to connect personally with their customers. “We go from first bras to wedding to maternity and afterwards,” Schumer says. “They say, ‘You can’t be all things to all people,’ but we really try.” The current lingerie trends offered include a transition into peek-a-boo, delicate bras with straps that are made to be seen. For swimwear, the one-piece is making a comeback, along with high-waist bottoms, all embellished with chic details like fringe. “Always work with your strengths,” Schumer advises. “And every woman has strengths.” And never forego fit, of course. Soleil Toile is located at 14 Post Road East in Westport and 44 Elm St. in New Canaan. For more, visit soleiltoile.com.
Dream Kitchens and Baths The Friends & Family Concert February 7 at 3 pm
CRAFT-MAID ■ BIRCHCRAFT ■ HOLIDAY ■ CABICO ■ STONE ■ QUARTZ ■ CORIAN ■ DECORATIVE HARDWARE
Ted Sperling, conducting Dawn Upshaw, soprano Mozart: Overture to The Marriage of Figaro Golijov: Three Songs Mendelssohn: Octet for Orchestra FA M I LY
Kids FREE with adult admission. Pre-concert instrument “petting zoo”
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KITCHEN & BATH, LTD. 164 Harris Road, Bedford Hills, NY 10507 914.241.3046 | www.euphoriakitchens.com H O U R S : T U E S - F R I 10 : 3 0 A M - 5 P M S AT 11 A M - 4 P M
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G C L I C . # W C - 16 2 2 4 - H 0 5
Westcheste er Philharmon nic 914.682.3707 | westchesterphil.org
Dawn Upshaw
Concerts at the Performing Arts Center, Purchase College.
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Heart to heart Photographs courtesy of Tiffany & Co.
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Tiffany is one company that doesn’t mind wearing its heart on its sleeve. And with good reason. The luxe jeweler’s open heart pendant has to be one of the most oft-imitated pieces in the world. Now Tiffany offers a rosy variation on a silvery theme with its lovely open heart mesh necklace in 18-karat rose gold ($4,500). If diamonds are your best friend, you might want to check out the classic hearts pendant in 18-karat rose gold that features the icy stuff ($9,300) or the more unusual heart key pendant with diamonds in platinum ($8,500). Traditionalists might like the signature “Return to Tiffany” medium heart tag in 18-karat gold on a bracelet ($3,550). Still, neither Tiffany nor we can get away from our rosy view. For the man in your life, there’s the CT60 three-hand 40 MM watch in 18-karat rose gold ($12,000). And when you come to think of it, what better present is there for someone you love than the gift of time? For more, visit tiffany.com — Georgette Gouveia
Feel the love VALENTINE’S EDITION
More than 35 million boxes of chocolate are sold for Valentine’s Day. We selected businesses as the best way to ‘seal this Valentine’s Day with a kiss’ and make it unforgettable! Our readers have asked us to highlight the best of the best in the region.
Love at first sight AGABHUMI 22 Magee Ave. Stamford, Conn. 06902 888-AGA-BALI agabhumi.com
Betteridge 239 Greenwich Ave. Greenwich, Conn. 06830 203-869-0124 betteridge.com
D’Eerico 509 Central Park Ave. Scarsdale, N.Y. 10583 800-325-3935 westchesterjewelers.com
Lenox Jewelers 2379 Black Rock Turnpike Fairfield, Conn. 06825 203-374-6157 lenox-jewelers.com
Lux Bond & Green 169 Greenwich Ave. Greenwich, Conn. 06830 203-629-0900 lbgreen.com
Shreve, Crump and Low 125 Greenwich Ave. Greenwich, Conn. 06830 203-622-6205 shrevecrumpandlow.com
Wilson & Son Jewelers 18 Chase Road Scarsdale, N.Y. 10583 914-723-0327 wilsonandsonjewelers.com
R & M WOODROW JEWELERS 21 Purchase St. Rye, N.Y. 10580 914-967-0464 woodrowjewelers.com
Indulge in romantic nights Patricia Gourlay 45 E. Putnam Ave. Greenwich, Conn. 06830 203-869-0977 pgourlay.com
Siren Boutique 224 Mamaroneck Ave. Mamaroneck, N.Y. 10543 914-777-2122 sirenboutique.com
Saks 5th Avenue Greenwich 205 Greenwich Ave. Greenwich, Conn. 06830 203-862-5300 saksfifthavenue.com
Soleil Toile 14 Post Road East Westport, Conn. 06880 203-454-8688 soleiltoile.com
Victoria’s Secret at The Westchester 125 Westchester Ave. White Plains, N.Y. 10601 914-644-8643 victoriassecret.com
Dreamy getaways Castle Hotel & Spa 400 Benedict Ave. Tarrytown, N.Y. 10591 914-631-1980 castlehotelandspa.com
Delamar Greenwich Harbor 500 Steamboat Road Greenwich, Conn. 06830 203-661-9800 delamargreenwich.com
Saybrook Point Inn & Spa 2 Bridge St. Old Saybrook, Conn. 06475 800-243-0212 saybrook.com
Royal Regency 165 Tuckahoe Road Yonkers, N.Y. 10710 914-476-6200 royalregencyhotelny.com
Sheraton Stamford 700 E. Main St. Stamford, Conn. 06901 203-358-8400 sheratonstamford.com
Personalize it Artuso Pastry 270 Westchester Ave. Mamaroneck, N.Y. 10543 914-630-7880 artusopastry.com
Blossom Flower 275 Mamaroneck Ave. White Plains, N.Y. 10605 914-997-8527 blossomflower.com
Godiva Chocolatier The Westchester Mall 125 Westchester Ave. White Plains, N.Y. 10601 914-328-2838 godiva.com
Edible Arrangements 288 Mamaroneck Ave. White Plains, N.Y. 10605 914-949-7400 ediblearrangements.com
Sweet Lisa’s Exquisite Cakes 3 Field Road Cos Cob, Conn. 06807 203-869-9545 sweetlisas.com
Val’s Putnam Wines 125 W. Putnam Ave. Greenwich, Conn. 06830 203-869-2299 valsputnamwines.com
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from Rosamaria Brown
EXCLUSIVE MAKEUP AND HAIR TIPS Eyes Prep your peepers for the day by preventing eyeliner smudge. Select a powder eye shadow — in a shade darker than your pencil eyeliner — and apply on top of the liner. Or, try using a gel eyeliner, particularly one that’s water-and-smudge resistant. To make any eye color pop, apply pink eye shadow to the creases of your eyelids. You may also use a pink blush to create this look. But note, if you’re creating a dramatic eye, then don’t overdo the lips: select one and make that your focal point. Drawing attention to both the eye and lip can be overpowering.
Brows & Lashes Natural and less manicured eyebrows are not only “in,” but they can enhance your facial structure. Use an eyebrow pencil or powder to gently fill in spots with less hair. Be careful not to overdo, as this can create a harsh look. Before going to bed, apply Vaseline to your eyelashes, which can help your lashes grow longer and stronger. Vaseline acts as a conditioner, in addition to moisturizing the skin around your lids. For a more dramatic look, apply false lashes.
lip liner to outline the lips and gently blend the liner. Add a neutral, loose or pressed powder to the lips to help set the lipstick in place.
Skin A creamy, matte, pressed powder can help control shine and minimize the appearance of pores. Using highlighting powder or a shimmer blush to your cheekbones can also rejuvenate your look.
Hair Your luscious locks don’t have to be flawless. In fact, loose curls and more of a messy beach look is in, which can easily be recreated using a curling iron or hair products intended to enhance curls.
Lips Red lips are a makeup staple, but not always the easiest to perfect. To create a red lip, apply lip line perfector around the edges to prevent color feathering. Next, use a waterproof
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Rosamaria Brown is a celebrity television hair and makeup artist in New York City and Washington, D.C. Brown is available to do weddings, proms and private parties. For more, call 517-432-7718.
Feel the Love
Life and loss BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
In the introduction to “Lee” — Lee Radziwill’s charming new memoir (Assouline, 186 pages, 250 illustrations, $50) — longtime friend and Departures magazine Editor-in-Chief Richard David Story writes, “Lee lives very much ‘with’ the past, but never ‘in’ the past.” It would be understandable had she chosen to avoid it altogether, given the tragedies she’s endured. But that is not the Radziwill style. Recalling their first lunch in the Grill Room of The Four Seasons, Story writes, “She made me immediately comfortable, simultaneously transporting me to another time and another place, sometimes to a world that no longer exists but still flickers vividly from magazine covers and chandeliered evenings, summers in Montauk, and black and white balls and yes, November 22. I would later come to see and understand her dignity, in the face of great opportunity and privilege, but also in times of great sorrow.” In this glamorous “scrapbook,” she has chosen to “accentuate the positive,” as the song says, offering sharp observations on many of the movers and shakers who shaped the second half of the 20th century along with an affectionate portrait of a woman with an abiding love of friends, family and the arts. Indeed, here is 16-year-old Caroline Lee Bouvier writing on Miss Porter’s School stationery to the eminent art historian Bernard Berenson, who had introduced her to the Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center 72
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Giorgio Armani and Lee Radziwill on the island of Pantelleria. Courtesy Lee Radziwill, all rights reserved.
for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. “I have often wondered how I could make myself completely happy and it was not until this year that I found out,” Radziwill writes in neat, fat print. “I am so terribly thrilled when I find anything concerned with art and (am) at the height of enjoyment in an art gallery or museum.” Radziwill’s love of culture would manifest itself in her friendships with Rudolf Nureyev, Truman Capote and Andy Warhol and forays into interior design, fashion editing and theater and TV acting (“The Philadelphia Story” and “Laura,” respectively). But perhaps her greatest role was as frank, keeneyed witness to world events as wife, mother and sister. Writing of her 1962 trip to India with older sister Jacqueline Kennedy — great photo of the pair atop an elephant — Radziwill notes, “We were always surrounded by too many people — the banquet at the presidential mansion was absolute hell.” She describes costume designer and photographer Cecil Beaton as “mean and funny as hell … When he came back from doing the film ‘My Fair Lady,’ I asked, ‘Isn’t Audrey Hepburn a dream?’ To which he replied, ‘With those crannies and lakes in her neck?’” You suspect, however, that the reader will be less interested in the Who’s Who and more taken with the intimate photos that illustrate Radziwill’s devotion to family. There’s a terrific shot of Prince Stanislaw “Stas” Radziwill — her second husband and father of her
children, Anthony and Anna Christina — and President John F. Kennedy locked in an intense backgammon game in Jamaica in 1959. The prince studies the board. The president takes a break to light a cigarillo. Their casualness underscores their closeness. Just as the photograph of the sisters at Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan defines theirs. The widowed Jacqueline Kennedy’s face was by then a practiced study in meditative remove. (She wears the preoccupied air of the “Mona Lisa.”) But Lee Radziwill cannot mask the sorrow etched in hers. “With Jackie at Bobby’s funeral,” she captions the photo. “We were devastated.” The many photos of the Kennedy-Radziwill cousins, too, are tinged with sorrow. There’s John F. Kennedy Jr. helping best friend Anthony Radziwill, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning TV producer, with his tie before the latter’s wedding. They would die within a month of each other in 1999 — Kennedy in a plane crash and Radziwill after a long battle with testicular cancer. Leafing through these pages, you can’t help but think of all Lee Radziwill has lost, but that still remains, for she has leavened the bitter with the sweet. “Berenson said so many wonderful and memorable things,” she writes, “chief among them that there are two categories of people: life diminishing and life enhancing. To this day, I think that is so true, and I still apply it in my life.”
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CHIC CHOICES GIFTS AND NEW PRODUCTS IDEAL FOR ANY OCCASION COMPILED BY MARY SHUSTACK
WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
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Gifts for those with a love of…
CHIC CHOICES
ART If someone you know has always had that unfulfilled wish to explore his or her creativity, there’s a solution at the ready. Look into a gift certificate from the Silvermine School of Art in New Canaan, where classes are offered in subjects ranging from painting to sculpting to jewelry making – and more. Classes, offered year-round and at all levels, range from one-day workshops to 10-week sessions. Youngsters can even join in during the school year or at Silvermine’s summer camps and courses. Prices range from $50 to $400. For more, visit silvermineart.org. Photograph, on previous page, courtesy of Silvermine Arts Center
BIRD WATCHING
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( 1 ) Those who delight in heading to the great outdoors in search of a soaring eagle or nesting sparrow will certainly find The World’s Longest Zoom Binoculars ($399.95) more than useful. With 160X magnification, they have a telescope’s long-distance power, allowing you to observe planets or an insect perched on a leaf half a mile away. Complete with a lifetime guarantee, these binoculars include a large sliding lever, allowing for quick shifts from the 30X magnification to the maximum 160X zoom, and a sensitive focusing knob that sharpens the image with one finger. A diopter eyepiece adjuster accounts for a user’s eyesight. The eye cups accommodate viewing with glasses and a rubberized exterior provides a firm grip and shock protection. The set includes a neck strap, case, dust caps and tripod adapter. For more, visit hammacher.com. Photograph courtesy of Hammacher Schlemmer
GOLF
( 2 ) A handsome leather monogrammed locker bag makes the ideal companion for a day on the links. The Golfer’s Personalized Leather Clubhouse Bag, in black or cocoa, is fashioned out of Napa leather and offers both sleek design and ample function. The main compartment, complete with vent, is designed to fit a pair of golf shoes plus also features two additional interior compartments and two exterior pockets to fit additional balls, tees and gloves. The clubhouse bag ($269.95), a complement to your golf bag, can be monogrammed with up to three letters. For more, visit hammacher.com. Photograph courtesy of Hammacher Schlemmer
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COOKING
( 3 ) All-Clad’s new Gourmet Slow Cooker with All-in-One Browning ($249.95) will get any chef dreaming of meals to whip up for a chilly winter’s day. More than just a traditional slow cooker, this all-in-one machine also steams food, browns and sautés – and cooks rice to tender perfection. Prepare meals to suit your own schedule, thanks to a programmable 22-hour timer and keep-warm feature. The removable 7-quart nonstick aluminum insert goes right from slow cooker to table. So start imagining those stews, soups and one-pot rice dishes… For more, visit williams-sonoma.com. Photograph courtesy of All-Clad
TRAVEL
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( 4 ) The Bomber Jacket Briefcase is a courier-style bag that can serve as a rugged-looking briefcase or carry-on bag for the man on the go. This bag ($299.95) is made with leather that shares the same top-grain character as a bomber jacket from World War II and is made with meticulous care from select lambskin by Scully, the venerable company that provided leather flying helmets, jackets and gloves to aviators during both world wars. With this heirloom-quality craftsmanship and contemporary features such as a generously sized, double-gusseted main section that has a removable 15-1/2 inch padded laptop pouch, the bag is destined for long-term use. For more, visit hammacher.com. Photograph courtesy of Hammacher Schlemmer
Le Farm An inspirational property, a sought-after address! Le Farm , Bedford, NY This 25 acre gentleman’s farm offers privacy & tranquility in a stunning equestrian setting. The thoughtfully renovated 5 BR main house is perfectly sited on the property, overlooking a pond, paddocks, & rolling lawns. French doors beckon guests to the terrace & pool, while large windows frame idyllic views. The heart of the home is a luminous great room w/a vaulted ceiling & stone fireplace, while formal living & dining rooms offer venues for more traditional entertaining. The west wing master suite & adjacent oak-paneled study offer the perfect setting for quiet repose. Another 3 family BR’s and 2 BTH’s reside in the south wing of the home, & an additional guest suite occupies its upper level. In addition to the pool/pool house & terrace, the grounds offer a tennis court, 2-BR guest cottage, garage space, & a greenhouse. The equestrian facilities include a 5 stall barn, outdoor arena, 6 paddocks, & direct access to the Bedford riding lanes. MLS#4526323 Price Upon Request
Gingerbread House, North Salem, NY
Chestnut Hill, Ridgefield, CT
Historically significant Victorian farmhouse on North Salem’s idyllic Keeler Lane is an equally suitable country retreat or full-time home. The heart of the main house is its creatively renovated kitchen, which showcases the home’s 19th C. framing and provides a striking office loft. Living and dining rooms are well proportioned, with large Italianate windows and elaborate millwork. Private spaces include a master suite which spans the width of the structure, and 2 spacious en-suite family bedrooms. The secluded setting encompasses a wealth of amenities -pool, pool house w/ kitchen/Bedroom and full bath. Bocce court. Separate 1 Bedroom guest cottage. For those looking to achieve their own farm to fork experience, the property also includes mature fruit trees, a large vegetable garden, and accommodation for chickens. Hilltop clearing offers views of rolling hills.Featured in Numerous magazines such as Real Simple & Interiors. Walk to 1000 Ac Park and Conservation Land. Truly Memorable. MLS# 4544621 Price $1,500,00
This 5 BR, 4.5 bath Colonial home boasts ample living space & high ceilings, hardwood floors & rich millwork. Pride of ownership is evident throughout. The gourmet kitchen features warm cabinetry, marble & granite countertops. The breakfast area opens onto the patio. The home includes a formal DR, formal LR w/impressive views of the Hudson Valley, a den & a comfortable office w/screened porch. 2nd floor encompasses the master suite w /a sitting area, fireplace, & a screened porch. 3 additional BR’s on the 2nd floor, 1 en-suite & 2 connected by a shared bath. Completing the 2nd floor is an additional bonus room. The home’s finished, walk-out lower level includes a guest suite and a gym area. The equestrian amenities include the 4 stall barn, outdoor arena & 2 large paddocks. Short ride to the NS trails. The grounds feature a manicured lawn, mature plantings, a gazebo, & a Gunite pool. Stone patios offer flexibility for outdoor dining. MLS#4537579 Price: $1,450,000
Hidden Paradise, Pound Ridge, NY
Captain Merrits Hill, Mt. Kisco, NY
Privacy and tranquility await you in this tucked away contemporary built by Vuko Tashkovitch. This 4 bedroom 3.1 bath home provides 3,931 sq. ft. of sun filled rooms and beautiful views that give way to an easy flow and carefree style of living. Dramatic floor to ceiling windows and stone fireplace enhance the spacious living room with large glass doors that lead to a generous sized deck. A heated Gunite salt water pool provides the perfect place to relax and entertain. Surrounded by 100 state acres, this gem is ideal for full time or weekend living. It is a beautiful retreat that is just minutes from town. MLS#4436476 Price: $1,625,000
This charming 1886, 4 BR, 2 Bath, colonial is situated in the sought after Captain Merrit’s Hill section of Mt. Kisco. Hardwood floors, 10’ ceilings, solid wood beams and a built in corner cupboard detail this inviting home. Walk to train and shopping makes this the commuter’s dream! This family home is just waiting for a new family’s stamp to make it complete!!! MLS# 4544205 Price: $599,000
h s e Fr e fac
EI A I OUV TE G ROZ YCK T E G B R O O E B BY G APH BY R TOG H P O
When it comes to skin care and men, it’s no longer a brave new world. “Men are paying more attention to their skin,” says Linda Ortiz, the representative at the Sisley Paris Boutique in Greenwich Village, where WAG recently experienced a richly moisturizing facial that was the perfect antidote to the wintry mix outside. Ortiz says that some 25 to 30 percent of the spa’s clientele is male, which is about the national average. Meanwhile, spas such as the Clarins Skin Spa at Bloomingdale’s White Plains — where WAG was treated to a facial that felt like an instant face-lift — are actively seeking to increase the number of male clients. At first glance, men and skin care would seem to be a natural pairing. “Men’s skin is usually more resilient than women’s,” notes the Sisley men’s skin care brochure. Male skin has greater collagen density and more moisture — men sweat more — which may account for its more youthful appearance. Plus, says Karlene Aarons, the aesthetician at the Clarins Spa, men exfoliate their faces every time they shave. Still, shaving can cause irritation, as do the elements — for which makeup serves as a barrier, and few men wear makeup. Also unlike women, experts say, men can be impatient with the one hour to one and a half hours that a good facial can require — although spas offer an array of treatments that can be tailored to your needs. Men are more interested in grooming products than treatments — roughly 80 percent nationwide use them —provided they can keep the routine simple. At Clarins, Aarons recommends the Exfoliating Cleanser, which can help with the redness male skin 76
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Karlene Aarons of Clarins Skin Spa at Bloomingdale’s White Plains gives Thomas Donnelly a facial.
can be prone to and the irritation caused by shaving; the Revitalizing Gel, which smooths and hydrates the skin while offering anti-pollution protection; and the Anti-Fatigue Eye Serum, which uses a combination of plant extracts to lessen dark circles and puffiness. As in any makeup line, there are a number of signature unisex products. Clarins’ signature is its Double Serum, which relies on 20 plant extracts to deliver tauter, more radiant skin. Sisley’s is All Day All Year, with its UV filtration system. Sisley has some 15 products for men, but Ortiz says guys can pare their routine down to the Buff and Wash Facial Gel, which sloughs away the dead skin cells, and the Sisleÿum for Men moisturizer, designed to strengthen and reinvigorate the skin. WAG’s managing editor, Bob Rozycki, has tried both of these Sisley products, which he describes as “a welcome to fingers and face. The lotion disappeared with a few quick rubs. Yes, do the neck, the instructions implored. So I did. “The botanicals had an ever-slight fragrance that disappeared quickly. After a shave, the moisturiz-
er feels great, with no residue or feeling of the skin encased in some translucent plastic. (I have experienced that before with another lotion.) “The verdict is still out as to whether I’m looking any younger. Perhaps a selfie is in order in the offchance the anti-aging elements kick in and I take on the handsomeness of, say, a Liam Neeson or Denzel Washington.” Still, nothing beats a facial, Ortiz and Sisley Paris Boutique makeup artist Natalia Acosta say. From the meditative music to the soothing scents to the gentle pressure of the aesthetician’s hands on your face, a facial is among the most sensuous and refreshing of experiences. Afterward, Acosta says, “You feel and show more confidence.” “That’s what’s exciting,” Ortiz adds, “to see the difference.” For an appointment at the Clarins Skin Spa at Bloomingdale’s White Plains, call 914-684-6457. For one at Sisley Paris Boutique, call 212-645-1013 or email 343bleecker@sisley.fr.
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romantic TRA R E VEL BY JEREMY WAYNE
78 duWAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY Hotel Cap-Eden-Roc, France.
2016
t
he trouble with romance — commercialized, sanitized and wrapped in absorbent cotton for Feb. 14 — is that it’s desperately unromantic. The candlelit dinner, the Spumante on ice, the single red rose — well pass me the sick bag, if you wouldn’t mind. Just pity poor old St. Valentine, who, it turns out, had nothing whatsoever to do with his eponymous day. He must be spinning in his grave. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for love and romance. But I want it spirited and hot-blooded or gentle and time-tested. It’s the pap and schmaltz in the middle I’m not keen on. At the beautiful Summer Lodge Country House Hotel and Spa in Evershot in the English county of Dorset, the backdrop of Thomas Hardy’s novels, I’ve only to walk out the back door and into the village to feel I could bump into Gabriel Oak or Bathsheba Everdene — “Far From the Madding Crowd,” as it were — or spy a hapless Tess of the d’Urbervilles scuttling along the road. Meanwhile, John Fowles’ French Lieutenant and his woman play out their drama just a few miles south of Evershot, along the Cobb in Lyme Regis. Fictional love abounds in this romantic neck of the woods. What, I ask myself, could be more romantic than a night at the 16th century Black Swan Helmsley on the Yorkshire Moors? Look out of your bedroom window and you can practically feel the presence of Catherine and Heathcliff, the visceral lovers in Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” or see sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre fleeing from the love-mad Mr. Rochester. In France, they get romance. True romance, I mean, not the tinselly stuff. Consider the tragic Abelard and Héloïse, or Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Claude Lelouche’s film “Un Homme et Une Femme,” set to Francis Lai’s pulsating score. (Yes, I admit that Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant do sit in that car for what seems like an eternity with the windshield wipers going back and
forth ad nauseam, but it’s pure romance all right.) Down in the south of France, meanwhile, I was lucky enough to have dinner toward the end of last year at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d’Antibes, which was the model for the fictional Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night.” Goodness, you could just sense the ghosts — friendly ghosts — of Nicole and Dick Diver, the Hollywood starlet Rosemary Hoyt, swashbuckling Tommy Barban and all the dramatis personae stalking the property. I promptly reread the book. In Florence, I always fancied that the captivating but reassuringly simple Pensione Tornabuoni was the setting for E.M Forster’s “A Room With a View.” That particular pensione has in recent years become rather grand, upgrading itself to the Hotel Tornabuoni Beacci, but you can still easily imagine yourself a Lucy Honeychurch or George Emerson on the brink of young love as you stand at one of the Tornabuoni’s windows, overlooking the city and its rooftops. Remember Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “The Sandpiper,” she as the free-spirited Laura Reynolds, he as Dr. Edward Hewitt, the conventional headmaster? What unbridled passion beneath the poised exteriors. Get off the beaten track in Southern California, find a little guest house (The Venice Beach House will do) and maybe a deserted cove, and you’ll feel their presence palpably. It’s the same in Puerto Vallarta. Burton again, this time in WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
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The Taj Lake Palace Hotel, Udaipur. Courtesy Taj Hotels.
Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of The Iguana,” torn between the fiery Ava Gardner and demure Deborah Kerr (to say nothing of his love affair with the bottle). These days luxury hotels abound in Puerto Vallarta, and the adults-only Hotel Mousai would make a great Valentine’s getaway — but really you need only a moonlit night and the chirp of cicadas for romance to cast its spell down Mexico way.
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India, to my mind, also has romance wound into its DNA, with hotels like the peerless Lake Palace in Udaipur — floating, so it seems, in space — or the Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur, built for the present maharaja’s grandfather. Passionate, often proscribed, love bursts forth from the literature — think of Paul Scott’s “The Raj Quartet,” or Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s “Heat and Dust,” or Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s
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“The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay.” I can’t walk past a garden or pavilion in a provincial town in India after dark and not think of the fictional Daphne Manners and her doomed affair with Hari Kumar (“The Jewel in the Crown,” the first novel in “The Raj Quartet”), while not forgetting that India’s greatest tourist attraction, the 17th-century Taj Mahal, was built as an expression of sublime love. So it’s ironic, at least in the light of all I have said above, that a novel released on Valentine’s Day in 1970, a clever and calculated PR exercise if ever there was one, turned out to be one of the best love stories ever written. Has Erich Segal’s “Love Story” stood the test of time? It certainly has. This old sap can’t read it without a box of tissues at the ready. On a recent visit to Boston, I could not walk out of the Mandarin Oriental hotel where I was staying (itself a contender for the city’s most “romantic” hotel, with its glorious flower arrangements and original modern art collection) without seeing Oliver and Jenny in my mind’s eye, walking hand-in-hand on those snowy, blowy blocks. The novel also has what could possibly be the best closing sentence in all literature — and it’s only two words long. If you’ve never read “Love Story” or can’t remember it, then now’s the time for a read (or reread.) Happy Valentine’s to one and all, and never be cynical about love.
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WONDERFUL DINING
Chinese gets an update BY DANIELLE BRODY
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Chinese heritage spare ribs with honey and plum glaze.
Wuji offers shrimp and chive, pork and vegetable dumplings.Photographs by Thomas McGovern.
Nouvelle restaurant Wuji gives you a reason to leave home for Chinese. With beautifully presented food, modern décor and signature dishes, this growing restaurant group updates the classic go-to takeout option. Wuji is a new “farm-to-wok” concept with locations in Rye on Purchase Street and Scarsdale on Chase Road, another restaurant in Greenwich slated to open later this year on Putnam Avenue and others in the works in both counties. The restaurant offers health-conscious food made-to-order and served in a modern setting that incorporates Chinese elements — paper umbrellas, statues and lanterns — seamlessly and cleverly into the design. I got my first taste of Wuji at the Scarsdale location’s menu sampling in September. From the charming red delivery bikes outside (Rye has one, too) to the serene interior, I was impressed. Standouts were the doughy pork buns, tender spare ribs, mu-shu Peking duck and dumplings served in a bamboo basket. That night, owner and Wuji co-creator Jody Pennette told me he didn’t bother with basics like chicken and broccoli on the menu, because they have no “mojo.” Dishes are made to appeal to the modern palate of Chinese food fans. The opening of the Rye restaurant in December was a great excuse to experience more of the Wuji magic. The striking interior was more romantic and sleek in tone than Scarsdale’s earthy color scheme. Rye’s location resembles a buzzy art exhibit with its dark wood, soft lighting, large Buddha prints on the wall and oversized urns, plus a well-dressed staff. On a recent Friday night, everyone wanted a ticket. The wooden tables set with small, dimpled black pebbles and the bar, sectioned by a concave wall, were filled with couples, families and small groups of adults and a few teens. I even spotted Pennette walking around, greeting guests and delivering a few plates.
Bao bao buns with sweet and sour pork. Photograph by Thomas McGovern.
Wuji’s popularity meant we had to wait despite having a reservation, but the staff directed us to the bar, kept us updated on when we’d sit and readily apologized. This meant I got to try a blood orange Mojito and a few sips of a Mai Tai. At Wuji Scarsdale, I thought the cocktails were too sweet, but this time they were just right. Once seated, our affable waiter explained the restaurant’s concept and recommended we choose a few dishes to share. Although I was craving pork buns again, I chose different items this time around. We started with the fresh crab rangoon, which, to my delight, was shaped like tulips. The tangy bites met their claim of tasting fresh and were complemented by the sweet and spicy Mandarin sauce. Alongside this, we ate the chicken peanut spring rolls, which were wrapped in a fried shell like an egg roll rather than a thin wrapper. While I liked the concept, the rolls were dense and lacked a distinct flavor and would have tasted better and been truer to Wuji’s healthy theme if they had a lighter casing.
▶ Above left, The interior of Wuji in Rye features dark wood, soft lighting and a Chinese-flavored design. Photograph by Jody Pennette.
The tangerine beef — Wuji’s sophisticated take on General Tso’s chicken (which is absent from the menu) — had a tangy citrus kick. I would have preferred if it were not fried, but at least the coating gave the beef a nice crunch on the outside, and Wuji uses grass-fed beef. Another dressed-up classic was the Shanghai noodles, a heaping bowl of lo mein with ginger sesame sauce. I typically avoid lo mein because it’s one of those foods that gives you what Wuji calls an “MSG hangover,” yet this version of lo mein was not only “safe,” but complex and rich with thick noodles and a generous amount of vegetables and pork. A mild Chinese beer topped off the meal perfectly. Now my only problem is that a simple chicken and broccoli, whether eaten from a ceramic plate or a paper box, will no longer be as satisfying. Wuji has raised my standards. Lucky for me, the restaurant group is growing — and does takeout. For more, visit wujirestaurant.com.
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WINE & DINE
Trans-Port-ed by an after-dinner wine STORY AND PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG PAULDING
In the last couple of years I have had the good fortune of being invited to two epic vertical wine experiences in New York and two in-depth Port house tours and tastings in Portugal. Most readers here know a vertical tasting to consist of one wine label with multiple vintages offered side-by-side-by-side. Vertical tastings are illustrative and informative. All wines have a life span that can be described with a bell curve. Verticals will show different stages in the maturation process. Inexpensive wines are usually best consumed quite young and will not improve much. They will be past their prime within months or a couple of years and likely undrinkable after that. Better crafted wines of nuance and elegance will drink very well when initially released for sale but patience will be rewarded. The bell curve of their tasting time will ascend slowly and maintain a number of years, if not decades, of steadily improving flavors. At some far-off future time the curve will eventually begin to decline, usually very slowly. George Sandeman invited a group of wine writers to Del Posto restaurant to taste through seven Sandeman vintage Ports spanning 56 years, the old84
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est being a 1955. And more recently Adrian Bridge of Fonseca Port Wine hosted a sit-down dinner and vertical tasting at Bouley restaurant, coincidentally on the day Bouley was voted “best restaurant in America” by TripAdvisor. At Bouley we tasted seven Fonseca vintage Ports spanning 76 years, the oldest of which was 1927. In my life I haven’t had the opportunity to taste many wines older than I am and each year that opportunity becomes a little rarer and a little more expensive. At these two dinners, I tasted three vintage Ports older than I am and one that was older than my dad. The wonderful thing about tasting Ports is each producer has a house style that shines through each Port style and price range of its inventory. Sure you can splurge and spend upwards of $400 a bottle for an older vintage Port. The opulence and complexity will emerge and many flavors of dried fruit, cinnamon, allspice, leather and unlit cigar might present. But the lesser priced Ports from the same house will still display the house style and emit similar flavors, albeit with perhaps less texture, less pronounced flavors and a shorter finish. I am a big fan of Ports. I recently returned from a trip to Portugal. Port wine grapes are grown in the very hot Douro Valley. The grapes are harvested and brought to the fermentation room. Here the grapes are de-stemmed, placed in large open cement tanks
and crushed by teams of barefoot grape stompers. A few houses have brought in mechanical crushers that try to emulate the human foot in size and pressure but foot treading is by far the most commonly employed approach. Then the juice is fermented for a while and shocked by adding a high alcohol brandy that kills the yeasts, preserving some of the natural grape sugars, which give Port its signature sweetness. This wine is then put in oak barrels and transported westerly, originally by barge, now by train or truck to the Port lodges, most found in the city of Gaia, directly across the Douro River from the beautiful city of Porto on the Atlantic Ocean. It is in these Port lodges that the oak-barrel aging and eventual bottling takes place. I toured and tasted through Churchill’s and Graham’s Ports at their visitors’ centers in Gaia and each house style was delicious and unique. Port is a wonderful after-dinner wine, especially served with a simple dessert of Stilton cheese, bread, nuts and fruit. All of these flavors will play off and enhance each other and make for a lingering and lovely finish. Port is also a sweet and sophisticated way to share with your honey in front of a roaring winter fire. The glow of the fire, the glow of the Port, the glow of contentment will bring you together in ways you may have forgotten. Savor and enjoy the glow. Write me at doug@dougpaulding.com.
WHETTING THE APPETITE
Hunter’s Stew BY JACQUELINE RUBY PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ROZYCKI
Ingredients:
Something to stew about What better way to work off the cold winter blues than with a great pot of Hunter’s Stew. This has the most wonderful flavor and is perfect for chilly nights. It’s one dish you will make again and again. Enjoy!
For more, contact the Saucy Realtor at jacquelineruby@hotmail.com. 86
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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
1 ½ pounds veal tips 1 pound boneless chicken thighs 4 sweet fennel sausages 2 pieces of rolled beef braciole 1 quart of beef stock 1 can plum tomatoes 1 tablespoon of veal demi-glaze 1 tablespoon of sherry 3/4 bottle dry red wine 1 tablespoon lemon juice Zest of 1 lemon 1 box frozen pearl onions 2 boxes of mixed mushrooms 1 bag small carrots 2 teaspoons of oregano 1 shallot Salt and pepper 1 ½ cups of flour 2 garlic cloves
Directions: Cut up chicken into small pieces. Season veal and chicken with salt and pepper. Add salt and pepper to flour and 1 teaspoon of oregano. Mix. Coat chicken and veal tips with flour. Shake off excess. Saute chicken and veal tips quickly in a pan and set aside when browned on each side. Sauté beef braciole and sausages and set aside (around two to three minutes). Sauté chopped shallot quickly and add wine. Reduce wine three minutes, then add sherry and 1 teaspoon oregano. Add tomatoes, beef broth, veal stock concentrate, lemon zest, lemon juice, carrots, onions and garlic. Mix in chicken, veal, sausages and beef braciole. Stir. Add salt and pepper to taste and simmer stew for at least an hour. Mix in mushrooms and cook an additional 15 minutes. Serve over rice or noodles.
Life lessons,
Krav Maga-style BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
914 Krav Maga martial arts demonstration. From left: Sensei Livia Meneghin, Miriam O’ Sullivan and Thomas Messina. Photographs courtesy of 914 Krav 88 WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016Maga.
Krav Maga — the very name suggests something that Gerard Butler should be doing in the movie “300.” Something strong, athletic, powerful. Something that says, “This is Sparta.” And indeed 914 Krav Maga is a specialized martial arts and fitness kickboxing school that recently opened on Central Avenue in Greenburgh. But don’t let those words and images intimidate you. At 914 Krav Maga — whose students range from children to senior citizens — ego and negativity are checked at the door. “At 914 Krav Maga, we are dedicated to helping our students get in shape,” says Marty Fareri, partner and senior instructor. “Our programs and instructors also teach essential life lessons. Students learn about the importance of integrity and the value of hard work and dedication.” “We take the time to get to know all of our students on an individual basis,” says Greg Melia, partner and head instructor. Melia brings his 20-plus years of martial arts experience to teaching Krav Maga— actually an Israeli self-defense discipline that combines boxing, judo and wrestling techniques with fight training. (The term is Hebrew for “contact combat.”) Melia also teaches grappling; Brazilian jiu-jitsu, about defending yourself against a larger adversary; Muay Thai, a combat sport from Thailand in which fists, elbows and shins come into play in various striking and clinching motions;
914 Krav Maga’s facility.
as well as the classes for children ages 5 to 17. Fareri is in charge of assessment and training programs for mature adults that help keep the golden generation active and independent. Says Melia, “We help students develop the confidence they need to succeed in both their professional and personal lives.” For more, visit 914kravmaga.com.
483 Cherry Street Bedford Hills, NY 10507 914-218-8357 www.customcandleco.com
WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
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Hearty outcomes BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ROZYCKI
It was the Thursday before Labor Day in 2004 when Dr. Anthony Pucillo — whose practice deals primarily with coronary artery disease and peripheral arterial disease — got a call about a patient who needed a catheterization. The patient, a middle-aged Chappaqua man, was suffering from chest pains and shortness of breath. “I said, ‘Fine, give me the patient’s name,’” Pucillo, who was then with Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, recalls. “I wrote the name down.” And did a double take. Bill Clinton. As in former President Bill Clinton. “I thought it would be straightforward, but it turned out to be more complicated,” Pucillo says. Because of the circumstances — the first time a former president was catheterized — “I had to do a lot of organizing, which caused some sleepless nights.” Through it all, the former president remained his trademark convivial self. “I was probably more nervous than he was,” Pucillo says, remembering the young Secret Service agents waiting outside the operating room. Clinton was then transferred to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center for successful bypass surgery. Four months later, the former president returned to Westchester Medical Center to dedicate a new cardiac catheterization unit to be run by Pucillo. “I was asked to say a few words,” he recalls. “The number of reporters and photographers was overwhelming.” Indeed, he could’ve become a celebrity doc after that. The New York Times and Charlie Gibson of “Good Morning America” came calling. “I’m not interested in that,” Pucillo says. What he is interested in is being exactly what he is — a serious, disciplined physician on the cutting edge of arterial disease. Today he is an assistant professor 90
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Anthony Pucillo
in the Division of Cardiology at Columbia University Medical Center, practices at Columbia Doctors Medical Group in Hawthorne and White Plains and serves at the director of cardiac operations at NYP/Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville. “I can’t remember a day when I thought of doing anything else,” he says during an interview at his White Plains office. “My father had a good friend who was a physician.” And the profession caught fire with him while he was a student at Mount Vernon High School. He went on to college at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with the idea that it was a good place for a young man with a medical career on his mind. After graduating from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan, he did his internship, residency and fellowship at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. Then he was recruited by Westchester Medical Center. “I thought I could bring some of the sophisticated things I had been taught to do to the center, and we did a lot of great work there.” Now he’s back with Columbia. One of the reasons Pucillo is so enthusiastic about the heart is the great strides being made in the field of cardiology. His arterial work takes him not only to the heart but to the kidneys, the intestines and the legs, enabling him to combine mind and hand, the intellectual challenge with the actual procedure. Due in part to new treatments, drugs and greater public understanding, “we see a lot less young men dying of acute heart attacks,” Pucillo says. Nevertheless, heart disease remains the primary cause of death, according to the World Health Orga-
nization, followed by stroke and various lung illnesses. (In this country, heart disease is also the number-one killer, followed by cancer, accidents and stroke.) With heart disease, “it’s a matter of seeking the right medical care for the evaluation of the symptoms,” Pucillo says. Clinton didn’t have crushing chest pain. Women may not have the classic chest and left-shoulder pain but may present with fatigue, nausea and/or shortness of breath. In evaluating his patients, Pucillo takes a nonjudgmental approach. Shaming smokers or the obese is not for him, he says. Rather he works with the patient to find a solution to his or her coronary issues. There is a lot that the general public can do as well, he says, and it involves well-known measures — exercise; a heart-healthy/Mediterranean diet that centers on fish, fruits, vegetables, grains and monounsaturated fats (olive oil, nuts); alcohol in moderation. Pucillo doesn’t just talk the talk. He walks the walk, keeping his compact physique trim with careful eating and cross- and interval-training. “Part of it is good for my own ego,” he says. “But it’s also about setting an example.” Pucillo seems to cope with stress through a touch of whimsy: His office is decorated with sheet music covers of songs containing the word “heart,” gifts of a patient. To which WAG adds the chorus of Mumford & Sons’ “Winter Winds”: “And my head told my heart, ‘Let love grow.’ But my heart told my head, ‘This time no, this time no.’” It should be the other way around, we say. “Yes,” Pucillo says with a grin.
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WELL
stay heart healthy BY GIOVANNI ROSELLI
As a former WWE professional wrestler with the moniker “Romeo,” you might expect me to give you some advice on love and romance for the month of February. But a love doctor, I am not. February is American Heart Month. What better way to show your significant other how much you care than to keep your heart — the most important muscle in your body — healthy. Let’s take a look at some facts about heart disease: Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States. About 610,000 people die of heart disease in the United States every year — one in every four deaths. Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the most common type of heart disease, killing more than 370,000 people annually. Every year about 735,000 Americans have a heart attack. Of these, 525,000 are a first heart attack and 210,000 happen to people who have already had a heart attack. I also want to bring up a thought-provoking study linking heart disease with excessive TV viewing. The study found that people who spent hours watching television greatly increased their chances of dying early from heart attacks and strokes. Compared with those watching less than two hours of
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TV daily, people who sat in front of a TV for more than four hours a day were 80 percent more likely to die for reasons linked to heart and artery disease. I’m not saying stop enjoying your favorite shows, but this goes back to a sedentary lifestyle leading to chronic symptoms. I won’t belabor the fact that you need to exercise — you already know the importance of physical activity that goes along with a good heart. If you want a refresher, you can check out my past WAG columns, which discuss the importance of strength training and the ill effects of sitting. Besides exercise, let’s look at some foods we can eat that take care of the heart and blood pressure. I recently sat down with Dr. Jeffrey Morrison, head of The Morrison Center in Manhattan. His focus is to help patients optimize their health and overcome disease through integrative medicine and nutrition. Here are some of his food recommendations for heart health: CELERY — It helps lower blood pressure and is a great choice for a quick snack. GARLIC — Ideally roasted or sautéed, it is also used as a blood-pressure lowering food. RAW BEETS — They provide nutrients to enhance nitric oxide production, which is helpful for improving circulation. Morrison suggests shredded beet salad as a great way to eat raw beets. DARK CHOCOLATE (70 percent cacao) — Cacao is
high in antioxidants and nutrients that improve circulation and lower blood pressure. A moderate portion of dark chocolate is a great way to enjoy cacao. PARSLEY — It’s a great natural diuretic and helps alleviate fluid retention. You can use parsley as a garnish with all meals and also add it to soup recipes. Before you run out to buy that box of candy for your significant other on the 14th, make a good choice. You can still enjoy chocolate this Valentine’s Day but now you can be more specific with your selection and help your and your partner’s heart at the same time. Everything in moderation, of course. Due to the enthusiastic response to last month’s contest, I’ve decided to hold another. I will select a couple to receive a full month Equinox membership to our Greenwich location. In addition to a month’s membership, you will receive a complimentary fitness assessment and a personal training session. All you have to do is either email me at GioRoselli@ gmail.com or tweet me at @GiovanniRoselli with a fun photo of how you and your partner are doing something this month for heart health. Feeding each other 70 percent cacao chocolate? Going for a walk together? Shopping for celery? I look forward to your photos. In good health, Giovanni
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PET OF THE MONTH
Leah the L VER WHEN IT COMES TO PEOPLE, LEAH, A 5-YEAROLD AMERICAN BULLDOG MIX, IS ALL HEART. And body. This sporty kinda gal would revel in finding an active person or family to call her own. She can’t get enough play time in the yard. And if you’ve got a tennis ball, she’s an especially happy girl. Leah has lived in a home before, so she’s got the whole house training and crate training thing down pat. She’s also lived with children before. While she isn’t a big fan of other fourlegged critters, Leah is the biggest mush the two-legged variety could ask for. And she’ll give you a big lick across your face to prove it. To meet Leah, 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.
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pooch portraits
PET PORTRAITS
HUDSON VALLEY ARTIST LESLIE BENDER SENT US HER OIL PAINTING OF TWO KING CHARLES SPANIELS, SOPHIE AND ANNABEL, WHICH REPRESENTS A NEW VENTURE FOR HER. We’ve asked Leslie to tell us more about her adventures in painting animals. “I have been creating art for more than 40 years. Besides continuously working on my own painting, printmaking and drawing in my studio, I’ve coordinated and painted many indoor and outdoor murals for private clients and public communities. Two of the murals are 200 feet long. I work with designers on private wall decorations and have also worked on many projects in local and regional theater as a set painter and designer. “Since childhood, I have loved and responded to wild indigenous animals of the Northeast, and horses (not surprising for a girl) have figured in many of my artworks. What may surprise is that horses still have a major role in my imagery, although mostly in circuses and carnivals, as expressions of powerful emotion and freedom (or lack thereof). “Recently, I was asked to do a portrait of two King Charles Spaniels for my interior designer friend as a gift for her client. The love I felt for these animals was so intoxicating that I decided to start this project of painting dog portraits. I research the breed of the dog and use photographs of the dogs plus photos of the interiors of homes and other details to create custom portraits.” For more, visit paintedhounds.work and lesliebender.com.
PRINCE WILLIAM HAS PRINCE HARRY, SNOOPY HAS SPIKE – YOU KNOW, THE BAD-BOY BABY BRO WHO’S A CHUNK OF CHARM AND A TON OF TROUBLE. That’s what WAG Weekly is to WAG. In our e-newsletter, we let down our hair (and occasionally, our grammar) to take you behind behind-the-scenes of the hottest parties and events, offer our thoughts on the most controversial issues of the day, share what couldn’t be contained in our glossy pages and tell you what to do and where to go this weekend – all while whetting your appetite for the next issue. If you can’t get enough of WAG — or you just want to get WAG unplugged — then you won’t want to miss WAG Weekly, coming to your tablet each Friday a.m. WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
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FEB. 3 Grammy Award winner Sergio Mendes serves up the
WHEN & WHERE
bossa nova at the Ridgefield Playhouse. 8 p.m., 80 E. Ridge Road, Ridgefield; 203-438-5795, ridgefieldplay-
NOW THROUGH MARCH 5 “2016, in With a POP!,” a group exhibit exploring the
house.org
evolution of the Pop Art movement from the founders
FEB. 4 THROUGH MARCH 31
through the contemporary scene. 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Rhinecliff artist Bruce Murphy exhibits his unique
Tuesdays through Saturdays, Madelyn Jordon Fine Art,
enamel-on-board paintings at Betsy Jacaruso Studio
37 Popham Road, Scarsdale; 914-723-8738 madelyn-
in the Rhinebeck Courtyard, 43 E. Market St., Suite 2,
jordonfineart.com
Rhinebeck; 845-516-4435, betsyjacarusoartist.com
NOW THROUGH MARCH 19
FEB. 5
The Clay Art Center presents “Tristate of Mind,” a
The New York Virtuoso Singers in Concert with The
regional juried exhibit that features a contemporary
Riverside Symphony present “Trial and Triumph,” a
cross-section of emerging artists working within a 75-
concert of music by Copland, Handel and Andrew Im-
mile radius of the center who use clay as their mode of
brie at 8 p.m., The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, 145
expression. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. week-
W. 46th St., Manhattan; nyvirtuoso.org
days and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays, 40 Beech St., Port Chester; 914-937-2047, clayartcenter.org
FEB. 2
FEB. 6 Teatown’s Hudson River Eaglefest — Teatown Lake Reservation presents a daylong program that cel-
It’s Groundhog Day! Come on, Punxsutawney Phil, we are
ebrates the Bald Eagles’ return to the Hudson River
hoping for a cloudy day with no shadows and an early
and other waterways of the Hudson Valley. The day
return of spring. (If all else fails, stream the movie of the
includes birds of prey shows, children’s activities,
same name with Bill Murray.)
environmental exhibits and music featuring a performance by Grammy Award-winning singer-songwrit-
BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE: (THE ABSURD OBJECT) FEB. 13 THROUGH APRIL 3, ROCKLAND CENTER FOR THE ARTS
er Tom Chapin. Activities take place at Croton Point Park, with a shuttle bus leaving from there and traveling to other eagle viewing sites along the river. For tickets and more information, visit teatown.org or call 914-762-2912, ext. 110.
who has the best chili. 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Bedford Middle
†§¢
School, 88 North Ave.,Westport; macchilifest.org
The Westchester Jewish Council celebrates its “Winning Ticket” 40th Anniversary Gala. The celebration will honor Westchester Jewish Council Past Vice
FEB. 8
Presidents Harriet P. Schleifer of Chappaqua and
Westport Country Playhouse presents a Script in Hand
William H. Schrag of New Rochelle for their dedi-
Play reading of “Scotland Road” by Jeffrey Hatcher.
cation and service to the Westchester Jewish com-
It’s a mystery/thriller involving a woman who may be a
munity. The evening will feature a cocktail dinner
survivor of the Titanic. 7 p.m., 25 Powers Court, West-
and dessert with entertainment by comedian Elon
port; 203-227-4177, westportplayhouse.org
Gold. Kosher dietary laws will be observed. 7:15 p.m., Westchester Jewish Center, 175 Rockland Ave., Mamaroneck; 914-328-7001, wjcouncil.org.
FEB. 11 Bestselling Romance Authors At The Ferguson Li-
FEB. 7 KEVIN PAULSEN: WINTER THEOREMS FEB. 13 THROUGH APRIL 3, ROCKLAND CENTER FOR THE ARTS 96
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FEBRUARY 2016
brary — Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Friends Author Series welcomes a panel of three of today’s
Looking for a pre-Super Bowl good time? Then come
hottest romance authors, Kristan Higgins, Eloisa
to MacChilifest, (the sister event to Chowdafest) in
James and Laura Moore. Each will talk about their
Westport. Enjoy unlimited sampling of decadent chili
new books and answer audience questions. Tickets
and macaroni and cheese from 17 of the area’s best
include a wine and appetizer reception. All proceeds
restaurants and two fire departments. Come dressed
benefit the Library. 6:30 p.m., DiMattia Building, cor-
in your favorite team jersey and enjoy the sounds of
ner of Bedford and Broad streets, Stamford; 203-351-
the Sacred Heart University band while you determine
8275, fergusonlibrary.org
For Tickets & Complete Schedule: 203-438-5795 • ridgefieldplayhouse.org
THE RIDGEFIELD PLAYHOUSE
80 East Ridge • Ridgefield, Connecticut
for movies and the performing arts
Non-profit 501 (c) (3)
Donny Osmond
The Soundtrack of My Life Tour March 11 @ 5:30PM & 8:30PM “It Takes Two,” "A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock n' Roll," “Puppy Love,” “Go Away Little Girl” & more. Celebrating 50 years in show business!
February 21 • 4PM & 7PM Professional ice show featuring singers, dancers and skaters live on stage!
More Music & Live Shows: The Fab Four
A Beatle’s Tribute Band
February 18 @ 8PM
An Evening with Joel Gray February 19 @ 8PM
“A Night with Janis Joplin” February 24 @ 7:30PM
March 12 @ 8PM
The McCartney Years March 13 @ 8PM
Johnny Clegg Band
February 26 @ 8PM
Sinbad
February 27 @ 8PM
The Cowboy Junkies
February 17 @ 8PM
The Celts: Celtic Roots
March 30 @ 8PM
The Smithereens
With Joe Louis Walker
March 6 @ 4PM
Mario Cantone
On The Way To Broadway
The Robert Cray Band
The New Shanghai Circus
February 28 @ 8PM
March 31 @ 8PM
The Machine Performs Pink Floyd April 1 @ 8PM
March 5 @ 8pm
An Evening with Stephen Schwartz
Special Guest Brothers McCann
April 2 @ 8PM
Martin Sexton
The Tartan Terrors April 6 @ 8PM
Jim Norton
April 7 @ 8PM
FEB. 13 THROUGH APRIL 3 Two exhibits of upstate artists at the Rockland Center for the Arts — “Beautiful Nonsense: (the absurd object)” features artworks that play tricks on our perception of ordinary objects while “Kevin Paulsen: Winter Theorems” offers pieces reminiscent of 19th century itinerant artists, using only the simplest of tools such as a toothbrush, ink, charcoal and tape. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays, 27 S. Greenbush Road, West Nyack; 845358-0877, rocklandartcenter.org
"WHEN HARRY MET SALLY" FEB. 14, JACOB BURNS FILM CENTER
FEB. 14 “I’ll have what she’s having...” It’s St. Valentine’s Day. Grab your sweetie and head over to Jacob Burns Film Center
FEB. 19
where gaming is plentiful — all to raise money for a
for a showing of the 1989 classic “When Harry Met Sally.”
The Purchase Symphony Orchestra, presents Ransom
worthy cause. Your admission includes a buffet dinner,
All roads lead to romance in this beloved comedy written
Wilson and Stephen Buck in a program of Mozart and
open bar, bowling, racing and a 20-credit arcade card.
by Nora Ephron (who received an Oscar nomination for
Beethoven. 7:30 p.m., The Recital Hall at The Perform-
6 p.m., Grand Prix New York, 333 N. Bedford Road,
the screenplay), directed by Rob Reiner and starring Meg
ing Arts Center, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase; tick-
Mount Kisco; Race4ACure.kintera.org
Ryan and Billy Crystal. 5 p.m., Jacob Burns Film Center,
ets.artscenter.org
364 Manville Road, Pleasantville; 914-747-5555, burnsfilmcenter.org
FEB. 26 AND FEB. 27
†§¢
FEB. 21
Yorktown Stage presents a youth performance of “Se-
Valentine’s Day Gala — The Ridgefield Playhouse pres-
“Winter Ice Solstice” features singing, specialty acts
ussical Jr.” Everyone’s favorite cool cat,The Cat in the
ents rock icon Joan Jett. The evening will begin at 6 p.m.
and professional ice skaters gliding across the stage
Hat, narrates the story of Horton, an elephant who dis-
with dinner-by-the-bite, free Champagne, a free rose for
of the Ridgefield Playhouse. 7 p.m., 80 E. Ridge Road,
covers a speck of dust containing tiny people called
your date, raffles and a live auction, with the concert at 8
Ridgefield; 203-438-5795, ridgefieldplayhouse.org
the Whos in this fable about the powers of friendship,
p.m., 80 E. Ridge Road, Ridgefield; 203-438-5795, ridge-
loyalty, family and community. 7:30 p.m. Friday, and
fieldplayhouse.org †§¢
FEB. 24
StepCrew — Ottawa Valley step-dancing and Modern
“Lift Ev’ry Voice: A Celebration of Black History
noon Saturday, Yorktown Community Cultural Center, 1974 Commerce St.; 914-962-0606, yorktownstage.org
Tap are featured in this fleet-footed performance. The
Month” features performances from across the Pur-
dancers are backed by a five-piece band, including
chase College campus, culminating in a new piece titled
FEB. 27
Celtic vocals and fiddle playing. 3 p.m., Academic Arts
“The Creation,” based on the James Weldon Johnson
“The B-52s,” one of rock music’s most beloved and
Theatre, Hankin Academic Arts Building, Westchester
poem of the same name. It was composed by Pete Ma-
enduring bands, play The Capitol Theatre. 8 p.m., 149
Community College, 75 Grasslands Road, Valhalla; 914-
linverni for the Soul Voices choir and choreographed by
Westchester Ave., Port Chester; 877-987-6487, the-
606-6262, sunywcc.edu/smartarts
Kevin Wynn for the Purchase Dance Company. 7 p.m.,
capitoltheatre.com
The PepsiCo Theatre at The Performing Arts Center,
FEB. 15
735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase; 914-251-6000, pur-
Washington, whose birthdays are Feb. 12 and 22
FEB. 28
chase.edu/music
Although most often associated with Lincoln and
Don’t forget to tune in to ABC at 7 p.m. to watch comedian Chris Rock host “The 88th Academy Awards” cer-
respectively, Presidents Day is set aside to honor
FEB. 25
all those who have ever served in the office. Hail to
African-American Trailblazers Award — Westches-
are presented by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts
the chiefs.
ter County will honor African-American members of
and Sciences to honor the best films of 2015. Tune in to
community for their professional and civic accomplish-
see if your favorite movie of 2015 will win.
FEB. 18 In conjunction with Hermès and Panthera’s collaboration
ments at the annual “Black History Month and Trailblazer Awards” ceremony. 5 p.m., Jay Heritage Center, 210
FEB. 29
Boston Post Road, Rye; 914-698-9275, jaycenter.org
on the “Fierce and Fragile: Big Cats in the Art of Robert Dallet” exhibit running at the Bruce Museum, Ménéhould
emony. “The Oscars,” as they are commonly known,
It’s leap year, which means an extra day for love and romance. A fifth century legend says that St. Bridget com-
De Bazelaire, director of Cultural Heritage and curator of
FEB. 26
the Emile Hermès Museum, will present a lecture titled
The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer
their suitors to propose. Supposedly, St. Patrick then gave
“Hermès: A Natural History.” 6:30 p.m., Bruce Museum,
Research presents its second annual “Race4ACure”
women a single day in a leap year to pop the question —
One Museum Drive, Greenwich; 203-869-0376, bruce-
fundraiser. Enjoy “Arrive and Drive,” go kart racing
the last day of the shortest month. It’s a small window, but
museum.org
(safety equipment provided), bowling and an arcade
go for it, ladies.
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plained to St. Patrick that women had to wait too long for
FEBRUARY 4 Purchase Film Series: Ivory Tower
Documentary examines the cost of college
Pictured: Ravi Coltrane, Monterey Jazz Festival Š Deborah Feingold
13 Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour
Jazz greats featuring Ravi Coltrane
14 National Theatre Live: Jane Eyre Recorded live in London
20 Martha Graham Dance Company 90th anniversary tour
21 Decoda
NYC-based chamber ensemble
26 Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana Turn up the heat!
27 The Intergalactic Nemesis Live-action graphic novel
28 Zuill Bailey, cello
Gifted young cellist in recital
For event details and tickets, call 914-251-6200 or visit
WWW.ARTSCENTER.ORG THANK YOU
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THINKING PINK
The THANN Sanctuary Spa at the Castle Hotel & Spa in Tarrytown recently went “Pink” for an event that benefited Support Connection, a breast and ovarian cancer organization. Attendees enjoyed Champagne, mini-facials and spa treatments, educational seminars and hors d’oeuvres. Photographs by Christina Rae. 1. Maria Giordano, LaKisha DeBiase, Jennifer Murray and Barbara Cervoni 2. Fiona Sanzo and Diana Piccolino
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A HEALTH CARE HORN OF PLENTY
HRHCare, one of the largest federally qualified health center systems in the country, hosted its 11th annual gala, “Cornucopia: A Celebratory Benefit of Harvest & Health,” recently at Crabtree’s Kittle House in Chappaqua. The event raised more than a quarter million dollars while recognizing HRHCare’s 40-year history of providing health care to those in need throughout the Hudson Valley, The Catskills and Long Island.
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3. Andrew Richter, Mimi Edelman, Anne Kauffman Nolon and Steven M. Safyer
SHINING A ‘LIGHT’
The Westchester Community Foundation recently partnered with the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville to present the documentary “The Armor of Light.” The film, which follows the journey of an Evangelical minister seeking the courage to preach about the growing toll of gun violence in America, is the directorial debut of Abigail Disney, a philanthropist and grandniece of Walt Disney. Photograph by Christina Rae. 4. Laura Rossi, Abigail Disney and Jennifer Barahona
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MUSIC TO THEIR EARS
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Local residents and musicians raised nearly $35,000 at the 13th annual Music for Parkinson’s Research concert held recently at Congregation Emanu-El in Harrison. Some 120 guests attended the afternoon of chamber music to benefit the research programs of the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation. Since 2003, Music for Parkinson’s has raised more than $500,000 for Parkinson’s research, annually drawing more than 100 guests and the support of internationally acclaimed musicians. 1.Denny Jacobson, Eileen Lehrer, Francie Camper, Robert Mencher, Regina Schwarz, David Eger, Jane Eger, Martin Mintz and Robin Elliott
GOOD SHABBOS
In a spirited show of community, more than 200 Westchester residents came together at the JCC of Mid-Westchester in Scarsdale for the “Great Big Challah Make,” kicking off The Shabbat Project. This is an international initiative through which Jews from all walks of life unite to experience Shabbat — a day when they rest and set aside worldly cares.
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2. Dottie Burger 3. Daniel and Rosa Schneider and Vivian Sklar 4. Participants dance after making challah.
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LIVE AT 5
The Professional Women of Westchester hosted its fifth anniversary celebration at the Castle Hotel & Spa in Tarrytown. More than 75 women attended the event. 5. Morgan Modugno, Jamie Imperati, Donna Massaro and Dana Wachter 6. Ellen Rose and Verena Arnabal 7. Mary Jo Franze, Maureen Callaghan Jacobson, Laura Winston and Rosa Calabrese 8. Barbara Cerf, Jenifer Ross and Hana Rubin
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CARING FOR OUR
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MORE THAN A FEW GOOD WOMEN
Some 175 women – and “a few sprinkled men” – defied an early morning rain for the United Way of Westchester and Putnam Women’s Leadership Council breakfast at Abigail Kirsch at Tappan Hill in Tarrytown. Over baby quiches and asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, attendees saw the Council present Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of The State University of New York, with its Woman of Distinction Award, and heard keynote speaker Dawn Hudson, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for the NFL, discuss the familial aspects of the often embattled league. News 12 anchor Lisa Salvadorini was the emcee. Photographs by José F. Donneys. 1. Katy Coppinger and Margaret Tramontine 2. Nancy Zimpher and Mary Murray 3. Alana Sweeny, Lisa Salvadorini and Dawn Hudson 4. David Yawman 5. Bernadette H. Schopfer
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DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE
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More than 40 people turned out recently at Neiman Marcus Westchester in White Plains to hear WAG’s own Dr. Erika Schwartz talk about her new book, “Don’t Let Your Doctor Kill You,” already in its fourth printing. It was a provocative evening in which Dr. Erika and attendees discussed the roles that traditional medicine, insurance companies, Big Pharma and intimidated patients play in turning health care into what she calls “health scare.” Photographs by José F. Donneys. 6. Rosellen Welch and Julie Gaynor 7. Dr. Erika Schwartz 8. Chris Carlucci and Laurel Forest 9. Wellness enthusiasts listen to Dr. Erika Schwartz
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ALL IN THE FAMILY
Abbott House, the Westchester-based nonprofit serving children, families and the developmentally disabled throughout the Hudson Valley and New York City, hosted the 2015 “Dignity of Family Life” Award Dinner recently at the Crowne Plaza White Plains. This year’s celebration honored Allan Houston (assistant general manager of the New York Knicks and general manager of the D League Westchester Knicks) and his family for their commitment to service and family life. 1. Teresa Weatherspoon, Allan Houston and Swin Cash 2. James Kaufman 3. Tamara Houston and Gregory Mooney
EYE IN THE SKY
The organizers of the Armonk Outdoor Art Show, a 54-year old exhibit of art and beauty in the Westchester community, have always wanted to capture on film the essence of the show in its entirety. This year, Tompkins Excavating stepped in and, with the help of modern technology, finally made it possible by using drone photography, which recorded wide, aerial shots of the event from above.
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4. Rose Colonna, Susan Geffen, Marian Hamilton, Justin Tompkins and Stephanie Wagner 5. The view from a drone
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CHANGING TIMES
Recently, the American Diabetes Association presented its inaugural “Change the Future” chef event at the Greenwich Country Club. More than 225 guests enjoyed a six-course dinner paired with wines, guided by emcee Victor Rallo, host of “Eat! Drink! Italy!” The evening raised more than $165,000 to support Camp Carefree, which serves more than 5,300 children with diabetes. Photograph by Elaine Ubina. 6. Stephen Maronian, Phil Iannuccilli, Edward Varipapa, Frederic Kieffer, Rui Correia, Bill Taibe and Victor Rallo
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Featuring pediatrics, primary care, imaging and many other medical & surgical specialties. As well as urgent care open nights and weekends.
To make an appointment please call 914.849.7900 WAGMAG.COM FEBRUARY 2016
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A ‘TASTE’FUL EVENING
The Arc of Westchester Foundation recently hosted its annual food and wine event, “A Matter of Taste,” at the Westchester Country Club in Harrison. More than 400 guests enjoyed food from local restaurants, along with wines and beers. The live and silent auctions helped raise nearly $300,000 to support the foundation’s programs and services for people of all ages with developmental disabilities, including autism. 1. Alyson Graci, Paul Sturr, Joseph Graci and Tibi Guzman 2. Bill Deutsch and Elaine Masket 3. Anupa Mueller 4. Joseph Saccomano and Nancy Patota 5. Tom and Roma Steffanci 6. Anthony Crawford 7. Ruedi Laager and William Healey 8. Analisa Rubino and Laura Landegger 9. Carolyn and Don Moriarty
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International Wines, Spirits and Beers Free Wine Tastings on Friday and Saturday Daily Sales and Specials Corporate and Client Gifting Programs Event Planning Services
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AND JUSTICE FOR ALL
The Pace Women’s Justice Center (PWJC) recently honored Westchester County District Attorney Janet DiFiore; Assistant Chief Anne FitzSimmons, White Plains Police; and Lawrence McElroen, Sterling National Bank, at the center’s annual “Making a Difference” Benefit Dinner. Held at Abigail Kirsch at Tappan Hill Mansion in Tarrytown, the dinner drew 350 supporters and raised more than $150,000. Proceeds will help PWJC continue its work in providing free legal services for victims and survivors of domestic violence and elder abuse. Photographs by Margaret Fox Photography. 1. Anne FitzSimmons and Cindy J. Kanusher 2. Joan Magoolaghan 3. Mike Kaplowitz 4. Richard L. O’Rourke and Steven Schurkman 5. Lawrence McElroen 6. MaryJane Shimsky 7. Janet DiFiore 8. Kevin J. Plunkett 9. Sandra Forster, Paul Goldhamer and Alayne Katz
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WESTCHESTER PARK MEDICAL CONSULTANTS
NEW LOCATION
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You pay attention to your outer body — now it’s time to pay attention to your internal body and get into balance. We partner with you to create the custom comprehensive plan to restore your health — proactive and preventative medicine. Your medically supervised program provides you with clear direction from your personal team, reasonable expectations, medical guidance and supervision, hormone replacement when clinically indicated, and vitamin supplementation based on your needs and goals.
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WATCH
A BOOKISH SANTA
The Westchester Community Foundation, which provides critical funding to the Greenburgh Health Center’s maternal-infant health care program, saw that the waiting room there was empty of books. The foundation connected with a special donor, Ann Spindel, a former children’s librarian and early childhood literacy advocate. Together with an additional donation from her husband, Paul, and friends Ira and Susan Deutsch, Spindel selected 500 titles (in Spanish and English) and used her donor-advised fund to purchase new books for hundreds of local children who attended the annual Christmas Fair at the Greenburgh Health Center. 1. Ann Spindel and Laura Rossi 2. Pat Brigham
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WWW – WESTCHESTER’S WHO’S WHO
Thompson & Bender, an advertising, marketing and PR firm in Westchester County, held a holiday networking event at 42 Restaurant & Events for Westchester’s movers and shakers. More than 100 attended the event. Photographs by John Vecchiolla. 9. Sarai Bartels, Naomi Campbell and Jennifer Bannan 10. Karen Coniglio and Valerie Hovasapian 11. Wiley Harrison and Janet Langsam 12. Geoff Thompson, Elizabeth Bracken-Thompson and Dean Bender
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bluehillmarket.com
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REMEMBERING KING
Westport’s 10th annual Martin Luther King Day Celebration, featuring lawyer Marilyn J. Ward Ford as keynote speaker, took place recently at Westport Country Playhouse. The free event was presented by the Interfaith Council of Westport and Weston, TEAM (Together Effectively Achieving Multiculturalism) Westport and the Playhouse. As part of the afternoon program, students from the Regional Center for the Arts in Trumbull read excerpts from King’s works while the Staples High School Orphenians and the Serendipity Chorale offered musical selections.
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1. Staples High School Orphenians, directed by Luke Rosenberg 2. Gigi Van Dyke directing Serendipity Chorale 3. Rev. Ed Horne of United Methodist Church of Westport and Weston 4. Regional Center for the Arts students
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Eager Beaver Tree Service INTELLIGENT TREE CARE ARTISTIC DESIGN DETAIL ORIENTED LONG TERM PLANNING-IMMEDIATE RESULTS SATISFACTION GUARANTEED!
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WIT WONDERS:
DO YOU WEAR YOUR HEART ON YOUR SLEEVE?*
Ronnie Bray
Anna-Lisa Corrales
Ellen Cramer
Herbert Donovan
Maria Harris
Gabriel Hernandez
Suzanne Lio
Cristina Martinez
Ruth Gastel
Frank Morehouse
*Asked at the press preview for the Bruce Museum’s “Fierce and Fragile: The Art of Robert Dallet,” the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society’s annual gathering and Saks Fifth Avenue Greenwich. 112
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