WAG magazine - May 2021 by Westfair Business Journal

DAVID HARTT: Reclaiming history at The Glass House FROM GLENMERE TO GREENWICH: Gilded Age gardens galore DAVID HOCKNEY’S eternal ’Spring’ Plant perils for pets JAN JOHNSEN’S blooming career VANESSA REISER: Running to end domestic violence Sex and the garden

the landscape reinvented TOP

JUDGED A

MAGAZINE

IN NEW YORK STATE WESTCHESTER & FAIRFIELD LIFE MAY 2021 | WAGMAG.COM

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CONTENTS M AY 2 0 2 1

6 Editor’s letter 8 Sex and the garden 12 Not so still lives 18 Running to end narcissistic abuse 22 From here to Hockney: art of the pandemic 26 Greenwich through its gardens 30 A career in bloom 34 Glorious Glenmere 38 Untermyer, reborn 42 Toscanini at Wave Hill 46 When plants become endangered HOME DESIGN 50 Luxe living by land and sea 54 Designing with flowers 56 Floral painting springs eternal

FASHION & BEAUTY 58 A fashion photographer in love with the land 62 What’s trending 64 Judith Ripka’s brick-and-mortar return FOOD & SPIRITS 66 Perf surf and turf 68 Forza Forni pizza ovens are white hot 72 Not your parents’ wine store anymore 74 Introducing cabbage thoran TRAVEL 76 That old Maine magic 82 Anguilla’s laidback charm 86 Travel treats for mom

WELLNESS 86 Strong but loving, a maternal tradition 88 A new approach to shoulder replacement WAGGING THE TAIL 90 Garden peril for pets 92 Understanding puppyhood 94 Wildlife worries solved WHEN & WHERE 98 Upcoming events of note WIT 100 We wonder: How are you reconnecting with nature? THIS PAGE: Photograph of the grape arbor and concord grape vines at the Holley House, circa 1900-10. Courtesy the Greenwich Historical Society, Holley-MacRae Papers.

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ART Dan Viteri CREATIVE DIRECTOR dviteri@westfairinc.com

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

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

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EDITOR’S LETTER BY GEORGET TE GOUVEIA

One of the great joys of being the WAG editor has been witnessing the delicious synchronicity that happens each month among our stories — often by design, of course, but just as often through sheer kismet. Rarely has this been truer than with this May’s “Reinventing the Landscape” issue, which considers the reciprocal relationship between the arts and the garden. For centuries, as far back as the Garden of Eden and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, artists have been depicting gardens. Those depictions in turn have provided inspiration for modern gardens. The owners of the great Gilded Age estates that graced the Hudson Valley and Fairfield County took their cues not only from the aristocratic mansions of Europe but from contemporary painters of the Impressionist and Postimpressionist schools. They wanted homes with “wow” factor. And that meant knockout gardens as well, as you’ll see in Jeremy’s story on Glenmere in Chester, New York, now considered the finest small hotel in North America; and our profiles of the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy in Yonkers, whose strange, twisting fate has had a happy ending; and “Beautiful Work: The Art of Greenwich Gardens and Landscapes,” a new exhibit at the Greenwich Historical Society through Sept. 5. As “Beautiful Work” demonstrates, the relationship between the arts and the garden hasn’t been abstract. In the case of the American Impressionist painters of the Cos Cob Art Colony who made the historical society’s Bush-Holley House their summer home, they painted, pressed and arranged the flowers and herbs members of their circle planted. Cover subject David Hartt brings this connection between the artist’s hand and eye and the gardener’s into the 21st century with “David Hartt: A Colored Garden,” at The Glass House, the historic New Canaan home of architect Philip Johnson. Hartt, an artist and University of Pennsylvania professor who is also a Black Canadian, creates environments that he then comments on through film, photography or video. At The Glass House, he’s planted a garden based on the blooms in the luscious 19th-century still lifes of Charles Ethan Porter, one of the first if not the first African-American artists to exhibit at the National Academy of Design, where he studied. By creating such a garden, Hartt isn’t only commenting on Black identity in his and in Porter’s time. (The use of the word “colored” in the title is deliberate.) He’s also offering a counterpoint to Johnson, whose legacy has been clouded by his early white nationalist views. Hartt’s garden will make you think differently not only about peonies but about race relations and cancel culture as well. But that’s the thing about gardens and the land: They’re not just about themselves. The fruit blossom trees David Hockney depicted at his home in Normandy that bound from the pages of his ravishing new book “Spring Cannot Be Cancelled” aren’t just about fruit blossoms. They’re about defying the coronavirus — as are the works in “Together apArt: Creating During COVID,” at ArtsWestchester in White Plains May 7 through Aug. 1. (See our story on pandemic art.) The Hudson Valley landscape that Congers psychotherapist Vanessa Reiser is running through this month is not just exquisite terrain but a roadmap to raising money to fight narcissistic abuse. Lush, hot and tangled, gardens are also about, well, sex, intrigue and danger (our opening essay). Botanicals can be poisonous (Gina’s story on the perils they pose to Fido and Fluffy). But they’re also fragile (Phil’s story on extinct plants; Gina again on humanely keeping wild animals from encroaching on your property). There’s a reason that 6

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As long as there are cherry blossoms, here at the New York Botanical Garden, it’s always spring in the heart. Photograph by Georgette Gouveia.

graves are strewn with flowers and adorned with vegetation. They are the ultimate mementos mori. But just as Sigmund Freud reportedly said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” fortunately for us, a garden is often just that and nothing more — a place for us to create (our story on Croton-on-Hudson landscape designer Jan Johnsen) or rest from our creative endeavors (our piece on legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini’s life at Wave Hill in the Riverdale section of the Bronx); a place from which we can draw aesthetic inspiration (Jeremy’s story on Italian photographer Federico Cannata; our piece on the upcoming revival of Judith Ripka jewelry as a brick-and-mortar store at The Westchester; Debbi’s and Gio’s tributes to Mother’s Day, Cami’s take on designing with flowers; Katie’s look at some of the still life artists who succeeded the Charles Ethan Porters). The land is the place from which we draw the bounty that Rajni uses in her Indian cooking column, Jeremy savors in his food stories and Doug sips for his wine articles. Sometimes you have to say, To heck with the metaphors and just stop and smell the roses. A 2020 YWCA White Plains & Central Westchester Visionary Award winner and a 2018 Folio Women in Media Award Winner, Georgette Gouveia is the author of “Burying the Dead,” “Daimon: A Novel of Alexander the Great” and "Seamless Sky" (JMS Books), as well as “The Penalty for Holding,” a 2018 Lambda Literary Award finalist (JMS Books), and “Water Music” (Greenleaf Book Group). They’re part of her series of novels, “The Games Men Play,” also the name of the sports/culture blog she writes. Her short story “The Glass Door,” about love in the time of the coronavirus, was recently published by JMS and is part of “Together apART: Creating During COVID” at ArtsWestchester in White Plains May 7 through Aug. 1. For more, visit thegamesmenplay.com.

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sex and the garden BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

In the third season finale of “The Crown,” Netflix’s addictive-as-chocolate-covered-potato-chips series about the British royal family, Princess Margaret has a fateful encounter with Roddy Llewellyn during a summer weekend at the Scottish estate of mutual friends. The charismatic but volatile princess — her stormy marriage to photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowden, on the rocks — is at loose, unhappy ends. And the hunky Llewellyn, 18 years her junior, is just the sort of good-natured chap to cheer her up. When she asks what he does, he suggests he’s a kind of jack of all trades. But what he really loves is gardening. To which she replies that she has a garden that needs tending — on her 10-acre estate, Les Jolies-Eaux, on the Caribbean island of Mustique. In no time, the two are off to Mustique, where Llewellyn tends her garden — while also tending her garden, if you know what we mean. Though the TV episode truncates the eight-year affair (1973-81) — which played a role in ending Princess Margaret’s marriage, the first English royal divorce since Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon — it basically gets the details right, experts say, especially the part about gardening. “Roddy was a gardener,” Princess Margaret biographer Christopher Warwick has noted vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/11/

WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021

princess-margaret-roddy-llewellyn-affairtrue-story-the-crown. “And Margaret was hugely interested in gardening too, so they had that in common” — along with amateur theatricals. Though the paparazzi-photographed liaison caused a scandal, Llewellyn, a baronet, would go on to a distinguished career as a gardening writer and TV show host. And yet, gardens and gardening remain lush, moist, sticky, tangled metaphors for hot, sometimes illicit sex, don’t they? In his letters to his wife, Josephine, French Emperor Napoleon spoke about longing to dally in her garden. In the musical “1776,” composer-lyricist Sherman Edwards gives Continental Congress delegate John Adams a similar ardor as he implies that despite his all-work-and-no-play reputation, his passion for wife Abigail is such that he still

Byam Shaw’s “The Woman, the Man and the Serpent” (1911), oil on canvas captures the lushness of gardens and lust.

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A glimpse of Yayoi’s Kusama “My Soul Blooms Forever,” inside the Palms of the World Gallery at the New York Botanical Garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory – part of “Kusama: Cosmic Nature” (through Oct. 31). The luxuriance of gardens makes them perfect for romance and intrigue. And indeed part of Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence” (1993), based on Edith Wharton’s novel of a doomed love affair, and the 2004 remake of the thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” were filmed at NYBG. Photograph by Georgette Gouveia.

“can romp through Cupid’s grove with great agility.” It all goes back to those first, naked-butfor-fig-leaves gardeners, Adam and Eve, and their serpentine temptation, forbidden fruit and carnal knowledge. They’ve been done almost to death in art and literature, a way for the pious to savor vicarious pleasure. Yet they still resonate. In “Eve’s Diary” (1905), one of a series of stories he wrote on Adam and Eve, Mark Twain makes them comical figures in their naïve curiosity, not the least of which is about each other. Lester Ralph’s au naturel illustrations for the book version caused some libraries to burn it, which amused Twain no end. “Clothes make the man,” he wrote in one inscription, “but they do not improve the woman.” You have to wonder what turn-of-the20th-century librarians would’ve thought of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Garden of Eden,” a book so controversial that it wasn’t published until 1986 — 25 years after his death. His modern-day Adam and Eve, David and Catherine, engage in androgyny and gender role-playing on the Edenic French Rivera — much as Hemingway did with his fourth and last wife, Mary Welsh — as well as in a battle to control the storytelling that shapes David’s writing career. That he nicknames the manipulative Catherine “Devil” leaves little doubt as to who’s the serpent in this garden. “The Garden of Eden” received mixed reviews, with some critics claiming it was butchered in the editing while the late Yale professor Harold Bloom included it in his list of works belonging in the Western canon. Another of those works is perhaps the greatest retelling of the fall of man and woman, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (1667). In a radical departure, Milton paints a portrait of a surprisingly egalitarian marriage, with Adam the more besotted, clingy, dependent partner — a role usually reserved for the wife — and Eve the smarter, more independent of the two. She loves Adam but less than he loves her, which makes her the more powerful emotionally. So when the magnetic Lucifer — who, let’s face it, has all the best lines in the epic poem — shows up,

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it’s really no contest. Eve takes the baiter, fateful, fatal fruit. And Adam follows suit, knowing what will be lost — paradise, immortality — because he cannot imagine life without her. They now have sex with full, lustful knowledge of the act and sated, fall asleep — only to waken after terrible dreams with another kind of knowledge: They have betrayed God. Sex can be lethal, and love may not be enough. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s horror story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), Giovanni, a student at the University of Padua — home to the world’s first botanical garden — falls for the daughter of a secretive botanist who experiments with poisonous plants. The young woman, Beatrice, however, is immune to such toxins — because she is poisonous herself. Beatrice yearns for Giovanni to look at the innocent heart that lies within. But in time he, too, grows poisonous. Developing an antidote to set her free, he succeeds only in killing her. As in Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark,” he suggests that you cannot destroy the essence of someone without destroying the person herself. Based on an Indian story revolving around Alexander the Great, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” has inspired Stevie Nicks’ song “Running in the Garden,” DC Comics’ Poison Ivy and Marvel Comics’ Monica Rappaccini and her poison-immune, poison-infecting daughter Camilla Black, among many creations. The story’s theme is the limits of love. And yet, love is all we have. Though Roddy Llewellyn said he wanted his relationship with Princess Margaret to go on forever, he eventually married someone else. The princess, though, took a stiff-upper-lip approach to the end of the affair and remained friends. When she died in 2002, her sister, Queen Elizabeth II, thanked mutual friend Anne Glenconner for introducing the couple, “because he made her happy.” We’d like to think that Llewellyn might’ve thought what Twain’s Adam observes at the end of “Eve’s Diary,” when, standing over her grave, he laments, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”

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MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

Charles Ethan Porter’s “Chrysanthemums” (circa 1881), oil on canvas. Collection the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. 12 WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021

not so still lives BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

The relationship between the garden and art has always been an intimate, reciprocal one. Samuel Untermyer based what is now the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy in Yonkers on Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings of gardens (Page 38). But that relationship has taken on new layers of intensity at The Glass House in New Canaan where “David Hartt: A Colored Garden” is on view through Nov. 15.

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Hartt, the Carrafiell assistant professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design in Philadelphia, creates environments that he also comments on in photography, film and video. That commentary may embrace everything from art history to architecture, landscape design, social justice and his own Black identity. Born in Montreal, Hartt developed an interest in the arts early, assisting his mother, a talented amateur photographer, in the makeshift dark room she set up in the basement of their home. “I was a history major,” he says, “but a poor student as a history major. So I dropped out of school then reapplied.” (He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.) Hartt is being modest. He may not have become an historian but his works brim with the insight that history is not the past but the story of the past, ever alive in the present to guide, inspire, enlighten, entertain and caution us into the future. “David’s poetic approach to the built environment reframes familiar ideas about site, history and identity,” says Cole Aker, curator and special projects manager at The Glass House, who first worked with Hartt on the 2019 installation “The Histo-

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ries (Le Mancenillier),” which transformed the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, into a tropical Martin Johnson Heade painting, complete with references to classical historian Herodotus, Creole-Jewish composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. “(David’s) deep sensitivity to the specificity of place is evident throughout his work and foregrounds the personal, idiosyncratic and often unexpected ways in which communities engage the spaces they inhabit. His project at The Glass House explores histories lying dormant in the landscape — a playful, exuberant and vibrant counterpoint to the surrounding grounds.” Hartt’s circular garden in the 49-acre Glass House’s southern meadow, 40 feet in diameter, echoes circular elements of controversial architect Philip Johnson’s historic Modernist estate and of the gardens, many of which are no longer extant, created by David Whitney, a curator who was Johnson’s partner for more than 40 years. But it also conjures the pregnant blossoms in the richly textured still lifes of Charles Ethan Porter (1847-1923), the Rockville, Connecticut, painter who was one of the first African American artists to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan, where

Popstead Garden and Shed (undated) and David Hartt (left). Photographs by Michael Biondo, Courtesy The Glass House.

he studied. The title “A Colored Garden” — a double entrendre that for Americans of a certain vintage will summon up the Jim Crow era of segregation for whites and “coloreds” — is “a bit of a provocation,” Hartt says with characteristic understatement. “But Porter said, ‘I am a colored artist. These are my people.’” And yet, in his day Porter created transcendent works that were admired by everyone from Hudson River School painter Frederic E. Church to writer Mark Twain, one of his patrons. Little wonder. You can almost scent the blooms in a Porter painting. Indeed, you will be forgiven for wishing you could disappear into the canvases and snatch them for your very own. “Porter was recognized in his time but lost to history,” Hartt says. Race undoubtedly played a role in that. But so did Porter’s genre, the still life, which throughout art history has been viewed as less important than history painting (religious and mythological action works), portraiture and landscape painting. In any event, Porter’s painting was ripe for the plucking by a history-savvy artist. At The Glass House, Hartt’s “Colored Garden” will include peonies, phlox, chrysanthemums and zinnias that will overlap in their sequential blossoming, giving the garden breadth and depth. A bronze mask designed by Hartt will hold cuttings from the garden atop The Glass House’s dining room table. But this is just the beginning. As part of a year-long residency, Hartt is making a film that follows a group of Black female musicians on the grounds performing new chamber music by Tomeka Reid. Noting that visitors to The Glass House in Johnson’s day constituted a particular “Who’s Who” of the arts, Hartt says he wondered: “What if a different group visited now?” The musicians constitute that group as well as the attendants in the painting “The Burial of Phocian” (1648, oil on canvas), attributed to the French landscape painter Nicolas Poussin, which graces The Glass House and mirrors its pastoral marriage of architecture and landscape. But scholars and critics have argued that the painting

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Charles Ethan Porter’s ‘Peonies in a Vase” (circa 1885), oil on canvas. Courtesy the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

— about the rise, fall and reevaluation of an Athenian statesman who was perceived to have sold out his city-state to appease its overlord, Macedon — is also a metaphor for Johnson, whose work has become divisive in light of his earlier Nazi views. In 1956, he donated the design for Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, which some accepted as a desire for atonement. "I have no excuse (for) such unbelievable stupidity,” he said in once again repudiating his white nationalist, anti-Semitic views during a 1993 Vanity Fair interview. “I don't know how you expiate guilt." Some say that you can’t, particularly in the aftermath of George Floyd and the renaissance of the social justice movement. In December of last year, the Johnson Study Group — consisting of 40 architects, designers and educators — penned an open letter to The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, where Johnson was the first chairman

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of the department of architecture and design, demanding his name be stricken “from every leadership title, public space and honorific of any form.” The former Philip Johnson Thesis House at Harvard University is now known only by its address. Perhaps some views are a bridge too far. But the celebration of Black artists and musicians at The Glass House offers a fitting, ironic counterpoint to Johnson’s past as well as to cancel culture. As Hartt noted in a recent interview with Pin-Up, the biannual architectural entertainment magazine, “While I appreciate and applaud (the Johnson Study Group’s) efforts in terms of trying to address the histories of racism and Fascism that are entangled within Philip Johnson’s legacy, that doesn’t prevent me from also thinking about The Glass House as a site that can be productive. I’m not, however, interested in creating a piece that is about Philip John-

son, just as I wasn’t interested in creating a piece about Frank Lloyd Wright….To me they’re all proxies that allow me to discuss the authoritarian aspects of Modernism or issues of colonialism and so on.” Hartt is calling his film “Et in Arcadia Ego,” the name of two other paintings by Poussin. Translated from the Latin, the ambiguous phrase means “I, too, am in Arcadia,” referring to death — the “I” in the phrase and in the paintings — being part of Arcadia, a rural Eden in central Greece. But there’s another way to view it: We imperfect, fragile creatures have an opportunity to create a bit of paradise on earth. The Glass House website offers this note to visitors: “The best time to view the garden will be approximately mid-May to mid-October. However, these dates may change if the bloom is either early or late due to weather conditions.” For more, visit theglasshouse.org.

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running to end narcissistic abuse BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

In our age of celebrity and partisan politics, “narcissism” is a word that is much bandied about. But Vanessa Reiser — a clinical therapist and social worker from Congers — says that this psychological disorder is not about taking selfies or even about being self-centered or selfish. “The way people use this word it’s a total misnomer,” she says. “Narcissism is a personality disorder. Most of the time, these people have a fractured sense of self. In order to feel whole, they have to manipulate others.”

This month, Vanessa Reiser will run from Oswego to Manhattan to draw awareness to narcissistic abuse and to raise money for domestic violence centers. Photographs by George Pejoves. 19 MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

Reiser has firsthand experience with the subject. As a psychotherapist licensed to practice in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, she has some 300 clients who are victims of narcissistic abuse, about 60% of whom are partners of narcissists, most of those partners being women; and 40% of whom are children of narcissistic parents, with a few siblings of narcissists as well. (An underreported facet of this phenomenon, she says, is that of abused workers, as corporate leadership is one of the arenas to which narcissists gravitate. “But then,” she adds, “we’re expected to take sh—from our bosses, right?”) Reiser connects victims of narcissistic abuse with clinical specialists nationwide through her nonprofit tellatherapist.org. (Tellatherapist.net is her practice.) But she’s also experienced a narcissistic relationship that resulted in verbal abuse, professional threats and property damage. Now the two-time Ironman is donning her running shoes — and a wedding dress — for a 285-mile run that will begin May 17 and end May 29 in J. Hood Wright Park in Manhattan. The goal is to raise awareness and $200,000 for domestic violence shelters in Oswego, Onondaga, Madison, Otsego, Delaware, Sullivan, Orange and New York counties, which she will pass through on her way. Domestic violence shelters have reported an increase between 6 and 21% in calls since the pandemic began, with the largest increase in the first five weeks after the quarantine began. (In New York, the calls rose as much as 70%.) All domestic abuse, Reiser says, is narcissistic abuse. She started training for her run in October and has been averaging about 20 miles a day. She’s also looking for sponsors for the event, which she sees as a means to help clarify a seemingly familiar but much-misunderstood disorder, whose characteristics include arrogance, lack of empathy, a sense of entitlement and an obsession with the spotlight. “Narcissists don’t want to change,” she says of a condition that may be spurred by both biological and social factors and remains a challenge to treat. “They think they’re better than they are and anyone else.” Instead of self-improvement, what they’re looking for is “a constant supply of attention.” “Think of a toddler: ‘Daddy, look at me,’” Reiser says. “To get that supply, they will manipulate, triangulate (pit one person against another) and cheat.” Ignoring personal boundaries, the narcissist will build you up, only to tear you down to build you up again, which Reiser calls “wound and soothe.” Special occasions are a particularly vulnerable time.

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Vanessa Reiser.

“They always ruin holidays and birthdays,” she says. “They take a sh—on everything.” All of this is in an effort to attain and retain power and exert control. (Interestingly, narcissists are often animal lovers, she adds, because they think it’s easy to control a pet like a dog, which provides unswerving devotion.) Because the narcissist has no self-awareness and is never wrong, truth is always a casualty. “Narcissists are constantly lying,” she says of an approach in which one day vanilla is chocolate but the next day it’s strawberry. How, then, to deal with someone who makes you feel as if you’re always walking on shifting sand? While it might be best to avoid narcissists altogether, we can’t choose our family and co-workers and are sometimes sucked into a romantic relationship with a narcissist before we’re aware of the web that’s been woven. We ran several coping strategies by Reiser, each of which has its own pitfalls: 1. Engage the narcissist head-on. This is almost always an exit strategy. Be prepared to walk away — and face the consequences of rejecting one who refuses delivery of rejection. Reiser says she is still coping with the fallout of her relationship with a narcissist.

Kiss up, kick down. This is often applied in the workplace by sycophants and enablers — the so-called “flying monkeys,” after the Wicked Witch of the West’s companions in “The Wizard of Oz” — who suck up to the narcissist, usually a boss, by throwing colleagues and underlings under the bus. Just remember, though, that the people you abuse on the way up are those with long memories whom you will encounter on the way down. 3. Tap your inner double agent. This is probably the most effective strategy and yet, it is the most dangerous of all. You try to go along to get along, all the while working behind-the-scenes in counterpoint to create the best environment for yourself and others. What makes this risky is that you are going to have to identify allies early on to succeed. Creating a support team that will remain loyal isn’t easy. As for those who suffer at the hands of narcissists, Reiser has a simple message: “I believe you. I see you. We see you. And we can get you the help you need to be safe.” For more, visit tellatherapist.net and tellatherapist.org.

GARDENS P. 22 From here to hockney: Art of the pandemic P. 34 Glorious Glenmere P. 46 When plants become endangered

P. 26 Greenwich through its gardens

P. 30 A career in full bloom

P. 38 Untermyer, reborn

P. 42 Toscanini at Wave Hill

David Hockney’s “No. 180,” 11th April 2020, iPad painting. Copyright David Hockney. Images from David Hockney and Martin Gayford’s “Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021 in22 Normandy” (Thames & Hudson).

from here to hockney: art of the pandemic BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

When the going gets tough, the tough get creative. Amid the challenges of the pandemic, artists and arts lovers of every ilk have gone deep within themselves to express their experiences in a variety of media. “I wrote because I was compelled to, not just to document what was happening, but to help me process it,” says Lorena Butler, a Pleasantville resident. “Chronicling the events as they occurred allowed me to see them as they were. By doing so, it made them believable and grounded me in this moment in history. As the facts and science evolved and changed on a weekly basis, there were always new things to absorb and deal with.” Butler is one of 224 Hudson Valley artists who will be represented in ArtsWestchester’s “Together apART: Creating During COVID” (May 7 through Aug. 1),

featuring more than 250 paintings, photographs, sculptures, songs, stories, crafts works and other creative activities. “Covid-19 has profoundly changed the contours of our daily lives,” says ArtsWestchester CEO Janet T. Langsam. “At this time of great loss and physical distancing, many of us have turned to creative outlets to help us cope, to express our anguish and to gain agency when we feel helpless.” Deputy Director and Curator Kathleen Reckling adds: “Creativity helps us to reclaim a connection to our friends, families and self. Throughout the last year, we have found new ways to celebrate and

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David Hockney and his dog Ruby in the artist’s Normandy studio, May 25,2020. Copyright David Hockney. Photograph by Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima.

mourn, to recognize and memorialize major life events from weddings to passings. We have documented our experiences in quarantine diaries and creative cookbooks. We have endeavored to protect our loved ones and those on the frontlines with handcrafted masks. We have painted the scenes and changing seasons from our windows and captured the faces of our ‘quarantine teams’ in photo and gouache.” Few artists have responded to the pandemic more vibrantly than David Hockney, whose “Spring Cannot be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy” ($34.95, 280 pages), written with Martin Gayford, will be published May 11, just in time for “David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020” at the Royal Academy of Arts in London May 23 through Sept. 26. (“David Hockney: Drawing From Life” — focusing on the five people he has portrayed most often over the years, including mother Laura Hockney, fashion designer Celia Birtwell, printmaker Maurice Payne, curator Gregory Evans and himself — is at The Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan

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through May 30.) Can’t get to these shows or still maintaining your quarantine? Then by all means order your copy of “Spring Cannot Be Cancelled,” one of the most exciting artbooks to come down the pike in years. Hockney has always been a thrilling artist, one who has let the landscapes of the places in which he has lived (Yorkshire, Los Angeles, Paris, London and now Normandy) and new technology inspire his work. (Who can forget his panoramic Polaroid photocollages of L.A. in “David Hockney: A Retrospective” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1988?) From Polaroids to iPads: The works in “Spring Cannot Be Cancelled” were drawn and “painted” on an iPad and then blown up on paper at the studio at his 17th-century farmhouse in Normandy, to which he moved in 2019 to capture the blossoming of apple, cherry and pear trees and hedgerows. The arrival of the pandemic a year later would reinforce the importance of art in his life and the centrality of nature, which he compared in spring to frothing

Champagne, to that life and that art. “I’m always looking at (trees). Always. This afternoon I might draw the apple trees and pear trees because now they have fruit on them hanging there. Trees are fascinating things. They are the largest plant. Every one is different, like we are; every leaf is different….” These words, right down to the punctuation, are taken from Hockney’s email correspondence with art critic, friend and “Spring” co-author Gayford, further underscoring that text and email have been the new letter-writing for quite some time. The correspondence — which threads the book, along with images of the drawings and paintings and works by other artists that inspired them — is a kind of modern, digital version of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. The comparison is deliberate. Hockney has shared Van Gogh’s longing for the natural world, as seen in the former’s 2019 show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, “The Joy of Nature,” now at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through June 21. “Lots of people just scan the ground in front of them so they can walk, but they don’t really look at things. Van Gogh really looked,” Hockney observed in 2018, acknowledging that he stole from Van Gogh. (Great artists, Hockney says, don’t borrow. They steal.) Call it an hommage to the Impressionists, Postimpressionists and artists of other eras. Hockney’s “No. 180,” 11th April, 2020, an iPad painting, evokes the burst of Van Gogh’s “Almond Blossom” (1890, oil on canvas). His red-lined “In the Studio” (2019) conjures Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom” (1888, oil on canvas). Still the straight lines and squiggles of saturated colors are Hockney’s own and a marked contrast to the color blocks of much earlier works. This has led some to respond that he doesn’t have a signature style, Gayford writes, that his latest work doesn’t look like a Hockney. To which Hockney always responds, “it will.” For more, visit artswestchester.org and thamesandhudsonusa.com.

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greenwich through its gardens BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

The changing landscape of a place offers not only a tapestry of it but a narrative as well. So it is with “Beautiful Work: The Art of Greenwich Gardens and Landscapes,” on view through Sept. 5 at the Greenwich Historical Society. The exhibit surveys gardens ranging from majestic and manicured (Chelmsford, the home of industrialist Elon Huntington Hooker and wife Blanche Ferry Hooker) to the casually creative (the Bush-Holley House, home of the American Impressionist Cos Cob Art Colony and now

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part of the historical society) in some 60 photographs, landscape design and architectural drawings, books, magazines and paintings. (The show even contains an intriguing loan from the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection, an example of the blue chambray overalls for gardening that American women could order in 1918 from the Sears Roebuck catalog.) But while focusing on the town’s gardens, the show also charts the development of Greenwich itself.

Postcard view of E.C. Converse’s residence, (“Conyers Farm,” operated 1904-21). Courtesy Greenwich Historical Society.

“We happen to have a lot of objects that can tell a broader story,” says Maggie Dimock, the historical society’s curator of exhibitions and collections and the person responsible for an exhibit whose arches and pale-green palette are designed to place viewers in a garden setting. The exhibit’s broader story, as the historical society’s new “Historic Garden & Landscape Guide” notes, begins with the Wiechquaeskeck, a Munsee-speaking group of the Lenape people, who cultivated and hunted on the land for centuries. Seeing themselves as one with a nature that belonged to everyone, the native peoples had a different relationship to the land, Dimock says, than the European settlers who arrived in the 17th century and began carving

it up and farming it with the use of enslaved labor and hired hands. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the rocky terrain nonetheless yielded corn, onions, potatoes and apples, particularly russet apples used in cider, and other crops that were intended for homegrown consumption as well as for the commercial markets of New York City. But in the late 19th century, a shift occurred as those who made their wealth in the city began yearning for the country life in places like Greenwich and the English-, French- and Italian-style gardens that went with it. The period of 1890 to 1930, Dimock says, also coincided with the rise of landscape architecture as a field of study and a profession, one that would offer opportunities and challenges for women like the

pioneering Beatrix Farrand — niece of the Gilded Age novelist Edith Wharton, herself the author of “Italian Villas and Their Gardens” and owner of the exquisitely landscaped estate The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts. Farrand’s example would inspire Briarcliff Manor native Marian Cruger Coffin, who created the Seaside Garden for industrialist J. Kennedy Tod’s Innis Arden estate that was featured in the March 1920 issue of House and Garden (.35 cents) and that is now Greenwich Point Park, or Tod’s Point, in Old Greenwich. Among Coffin’s other notable commissions were the gardens at Winterthur, Henry Francis and Ruth du Pont’s Delaware estate, and some layouts for the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. The early women landscape

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Trifolium agarium (hop clover), collected and dried by Constant Holley MacRae, circa 1891-93. Courtesy the Greenwich Historical Society.

architects triumvirate was completed by Ellen Biddle Shipman, who designed the Greenwich estate of lawyer Herbert L. Satterlee, The Orchards, along with that of Clark Williams, Live Oak, which was in the town’s Belle Haven section. Landscape architecture was, Dimock says, a “mutable” profession dominated early on by men like Andrew Jackson Downing; Downing’s protégé Frederick Law Olmsted of Central Park fame; and architect Bryant Fleming, who refined

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the gardens for Chelmsford created by his mentor Warren H. Manning, an advocate for a more informal approach to gardens. Those created at the Bush-Holley House were no less charming for their informality. Once the home of grist-mill owner David Bush, the house became a boardinghouse for artists and writers in the mid-19th century when it was acquired by Josephine and Edward Holley — a tradition continued by their daughter, the appropriately named Constant, and her husband,

Elmer MacRae, one of the many American Impressionist painters associated with the site and what became known as the Cos Cob Art Colony. “The Holley family had extensive vegetable gardens,” Dimock says. These included an Heirloom Vegetable Garden of tomatoes, cucumbers and sugar beets as well as fruit trees tended first by Edward and then by Elmer. There was also a Concord grape arbor and a flower garden of annuals and perennials beloved by pollinators and nurtured by Constant that included hollyhocks, foxglove, roses, peonies, poppies and catmint. Perhaps the unsung heroine of the house was Constant, who besides running the place co-founded the Greenwich Garden Club in 1914 and became a respected floral designer, one who was invited to display her arrangements at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Dimock says. She also collected, dried and preserved 100 botanical specimens — including ferns, cattails, irises and dandelions — which the historical society rediscovered in the 1980s and has mounted on special herbarium paper. Some of these are part of the exhibit. The historical society is the 2020 recipient of The Garden Club of America’s Zone Historic Preservation Commendation, which recognizes not only its sustained preservation of the national historic landmark Bush-Holley House site but also the restoration of its American Impressionist art colony gardens. “Beautiful Work” will be accompanied by outdoor adult and family programs set amid those historical gardens, including a series of Tavern Markets and summer Concerts on the Lawn. “Beautiful Work: The Art of Greenwich Gardens and Landscapes” will be on view in the exhibit gallery at the Greenwich Historical Society’s Museum & Library through Nov. 15. Visitors are encouraged to reserve tickets in advance at greenwichhistory.org/visit/.

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a career in full bloom BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

Jan Johnsen has always loved plants, particularly flowering ones – not easy when you grew up in the concrete jungle of New York City, a world of “no plants and no lawnmowers,” says the landscape designer, a principal for 35 years in Johnsen Landscapes & Pools in Croton-on-Hudson. The child of Abstract Expressionist artists — her father studied with Robert Motherwell — Johnsen carved out her own realistic, representational world early on by growing tomato and coleus plants on the family’s fire escape. (Her mother watched in amusement as she once tried to grow corn on a windowsill in vain.) Still, Johnsen persisted, winning first prize as a student at the High School of Music and Art in the 1960s for her study on the beneficial effects of sound on plant growth. (It turns out the high-pitched sounds of birdsong open the pores of leaves, enabling the plants to grow. “It’s absolutely fascinating,” Johnsen says.)

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That led to a full scholarship to Friends World College, a Quaker school with “no classes and no grades” but plenty of centers and internships worldwide that took her to Mombasa, Kenya, for the study of city planning; Osaka, Japan, to work with a landscape architectural firm; and the University of Hawaii, where she earned a degree in landscape architecture. Johnsen would go on to work with Alain Grumberg, a master gardener from Versailles, at Mohonk Mountain House https://w w w.wagmag.com/round-themountain-to-mohonk/ in New Paltz, where they planted 20,000 flowers from seeds — a real test of a gardener. A stint

Blue salvia. Images

31 MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM courtesy Jan Johnsen.

at a firm in New Orleans, where Johnsen earned a master’s degree in city planning at the University of New Orleans, would follow. So if anyone — anyone — should write a book called “Floratopia,” it should be Johnsen. “Floratopia: 110 Flower Garden Ideas for Your Yard, Patio, or Balcony” (The Countryman Press, $30, 256 pages) is Johnsen’s fourth book in 10 years, the others being “Heaven Is a Garden,” “The Spirit of Stone” and “Gardentopia.” “Floratopia,” inspired by her 45-year professional love affair with flowers, comes at a time when business is blooming. “Oh my goodness, the interest in plants and gardens has exploded, thanks to Covid,” she says. Homeowners, she adds, are looking at their properties as the new vacation spots or entertainment complexes or as extensions of their indoors or views to escape into. “I attribute this to people being home more,” she says. “They used to get up and get on a train. Now they get up and look out their window.” One thing they should see outside that window — a pot or two of flowers. That’s how Johnsen starts every project. No one visits your house, she says, and remarks on your paving stones. But they will remark, she adds, on some lovely blossoms. Whether they’re potted or embedded, Johnsen says, the first step is to know what flowers can be planted in this region (as well as which thrive in shade, sun and drought). Despite Johnsen’s childhood experience as a fire-escape gardener, New York City is actually a rich spot for landscaping because, she says, it is the southernmost city for northern plants and the northernmost city for southern plants, having been reclassified as a humid subtropical place, thanks to warming trends. Lower Westchester County has temperatures similar to New York City, as does Fairfield County, with the Long Island Sound serving as a mitigating factor, Johnsen says. Northern Westchester is cooler.

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Next, think about your color scheme. Do you want to do beds and gardens each in a different color? Or do you want contrast, as in silver foliage plants like lacy dusty miller offsetting purple summer snapdragon and “Titan Icy Pink” annual vinca (Tip No. 41 in the book)? You’ll probably want a mix of annuals, like marigolds and New Guinea impatiens, which will give you color into the summer and fall but will have to be planted every year, and perennials, like irises and peonies, which bloom for a shorter period but will come up on their own. And you’ll want to consider deer-resistant plants like spiky, jewel-colored gomphrena globosa, also called globe amaranth, an annual. If you’re using a pot, make sure it has feet or a stone underneath it for elevation and drainage. If you’re planting flowers

in the ground, it’s all about soil, she says. Turn it over and feed it with compost before planting. Whatever you decide to plant, don’t forget milkweed, herbs and other plants on which pollinators like bees and butterflies thrive. Milkweed is, however, one of many pretty flowers that are poisonous to pets. (See story on Page 90). But back to pollinators. “The public doesn’t realize how badly in danger we are of losing insects,” Johnsen says, which are necessary for our beautiful floral gardens. She even makes a case for the humble dandelion. Yes, it may be a weed, but it is a beloved food source for bees and butterflies. So please, don’t pick the dandelions. For more, visit johnsenlandscapes. com.

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glorious glenmere STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEREMY WAYNE

The formal Italian garden looking Glenmere. MAY 2021 34 toward WAGMAG.COM

“Mrs. Meir, it is good to be here at last. I have been waiting for this moment.” Those were Egyptian President Anwar’s Sadat’s first words when he stepped off the plane at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport in 1977 — the first time an Arab head of state had visited the Jewish state — as the former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir stepped forward to greet him. The redoubtable grandmother smiled at Sadat, with whose country, only four years earlier, Israel had been at war and palms turned heavenward, looking him straight in the eye, she replied, “In that case, Mr. President, I must ask you. What on earth took you so long?” I have my own Sadat moment recently, visiting Glenmere, a Relais & Châteaux hotel in Chester, New York, for the first time. Despite a former professional attachment to the luxury Relais & Châteaux collection of hotels, I had never been to Glenmere — a 110-year-old, Gilded Age mansion relaunched as a luxury hotel in 2010 after decades in decline — even though a friend, a well-known travel writer on Robb Report, had assured me it was “probably the most luxurious small hotel in North America.” Really? I found it so unlikely. Maybe that’s why I never rushed to visit. Curiosity was never going to kill this cat. We arrive on a sultry weekday afternoon, the first really warm day of the year, already drop-jawed at the first glimpse through the trees on the long driveway of this beautiful, honey-colored house. We circle the courtyard and Chris greets us at the front door, announcing he will be our butler. He says he will take care of our car and our bags and indeed any other things that may need to be taken care. The Italianate mansion was built in 1911 for Robert Goelet, heir to an immense real estate fortune, who spared no expense on his extravaganza, where he would entertain royalty, heads of state, celebrities of the age, you name ’em. But after 30 years

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he tired of it, as not only the very rich but as all of us occasionally do of the things we once loved. The house, along with what remained of the original 3,000-acre estate, was sold to developers. The mansion became a hotel, as mansions do, and over time changed hands many times, gradually falling into disrepair. Fast forward 40 years and the current owners, the writer and ex-realtor Alan Stenberg, and his partner, the orthopedic surgeon Daniel DeSimone, M.D., were driving to Hastings-on-Hudson one day when they caught sight of the house and decided they had to have it, an incredibly reckless thing to do. They spent four years and $40 million dollars restoring it. But, of course, you don’t just throw money at such “vanity” hotel projects if they are to succeed. You work all the hours God sends and then somehow find a few more and you offer up blood, sweat and tears, as well as applying shedloads of good taste and your own experience of staying in great hotels around the world, from which you have learned a thing or two. Glenmere was designed by architects Carrère and Hastings, who also did New York’s original Frick Collection and the New York Public Library, which opened the same year as Glenmere. The gardens — notably the sunken garden between the house and the lake — were the work of America’s first woman landscape gardener, Beatrix Farrand, who spent time in England and regarded the celebrated British landscape gardener, Gertrude Jekyll, as a mentor and you feel this, an English sensibility, along with the Italian. Like the house, the gardens are a wonder, bringing to mind a Gainsborough, or an early Corot as we behold them from our corner room, looking out across manicured lawns that sweep softly down to Glenmere Lake. All the colors become muted in the distance and the haze and the entire view are seemingly suspended in time. In the guest rooms, style reigns, but never at the expense of comfort. Indeed, they go hand in hand. The plushest Italian bed linens adorn what has to be the world’s most comfortable bed, in front of which a pair of dashing, lime green-covered silver chrome ottomans stand guard. And as if he were a family friend or relative, a photograph of Robert Goelet nestles among the bibelots and larger “pieces,” in a room which is full but exudes no sense of clutter. Still, having promised by way of a standard waiver at check-in, almost on penalty of death, not to smoke on the premises, I’m intrigued by a large china ashtray (remember those?) bearing the face of the late Emperor

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The library at Glenmere.

Hirohito, which I found on the black, faux crocodile-covered desktop. It bore a tiny sticker on the underside, which read, “for decoration purposes only.” The marble bathroom is equally remarkable, with its free-standing bathtub, deep as a pit; an old Delft waste bin, heavy as a boulder and decorated with blue and white fishes; and an exquisite inverted-dome Maiolica wash basin, with its intense but luminous pattern, fit for a Spanish king. Back down the grand, stone staircase, you come to the playfully conceived Frogs End bar and tavern and the sun-dappled cortile, which is the symmetrical center point, the heart of the house. Carry on and you reach the library, with its books (of course), its fireplace, outsized Scrabble table, antique backgammon boards, contemporary art and zingy fabrics. And in the stone gray and taupe drawing room that adjoins it, with its Art Deco mirrors, obelisks, Greek vases, ormolu clocks and ostrich sofas, even the logs by the fireplace are gray birch — color coordination taken to extremes. In short, where everything could all go so horribly wrong, it doesn’t. Instead, it is so utterly, deliciously right. In the restaurant, cozily called The Supper Room, the mostly-male wait staff move with the grace and precision of a corps de ballet, plates placed and removed silently; a

staff member always discreetly positioned to watch the room, so that service — should your wishes fail to have been anticipated — is never more than the merest glance away. For all this professionalism, there are no noses in the air here and no one is above making a joke or camping it up a touch, our French waiter proposing a “magnificent, marvelous, massive slice” of coconut cake for dessert, a confection he assures us that Executive Pastry Chef Taiesha Martin makes only on the rarest of occasions. Outside, meanwhile, formal gardens and courtyards spread out from the house in geometric form, one of them leading to the spa and swimming pool. Like all the best pools, Glenmere’s is based on a simple rectangular design and, like the best Tuscan swimming pools, it boasts a loggia at the side, where it is going to be bliss to sit in summer. And on and on you could go, praising this New York Italian jewel to the skies. But suffice it to say, bravo, Glenmere: You probably are the most luxurious small hotel in America, as my friend observed. For my part, better late than never and I’m glad I finally got here, although with a nod to the late Sadat, I’m still kicking myself that it took me so long to do so. For reservations, visit glenmeremansion.com

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MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

untermyer, reborn BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA Vista steps view at Untermyer Gardens Conservancy in Yonkers. Photograph by Jessica Norman.

John Lennon posed for photographs there. Isadora Duncan danced there. And composer Richard Strauss was one of the many luminaries who visited there. “There” was paradise, or at least an earthly version of it, complete with Greco-Persian influences, which is only fitting as “paradise” is a Persian word for “an enclosed park.” In the case of the restored Untermyer Gardens Conservancy in Yonkers, the “enclosed park” of 43 acres is a garden walled on three sides that leads to neoclassical elements — arcades, temples and a small, open-air amphitheater guarded by two sets of twin Ionic columns topped with sphinxes; and watery ones — pools, canals and fountains — all overlooking the formidable Hudson River and chalky Palisades. Oh, yes and, of course, thousands of trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals as well as tropical and aquatic plants.

A busy Untermyer season gets underway Untermyer Gardens Conservancy is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays without reservations and noon to 6 p.m. Fridays through Sundays with free, timed online reservations. In May, tours take place 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Sundays, with the May 9, 23 and 30 tours focused on the history of the place and the May 16 tour focused on the gardens. Admission is $10. On May 8, conservancy President Stephen F. Byrns leads the first in a series of three tours on the “Trees of Untermyer” from 10 to 11 a.m. ($20). (The other two Tree Tours will be in June.) Programs include a drawing class from 10 a.m. to noon on May 15 and 22 ($40); and “Sunset Yoga” (for all abilities) from 7 to 8 p.m. on May 23 and 27 ($25). There are also Family Adventure Tours May 16 (Walled Garden), May 23 (Vista and Ruin Garden) and May 30 (Temple of Love and Dell) from 10 to 11 a.m. These are for ages 7 to12. The cost is $10 per child; those under age 2 and accompanying adult(s) are admitted free. Capacity is limited. Social distancing and masks are required. All tours and classes must be reserved in advance at untermyergardens.org.

“The garden is always changing, letting in the view,” says Caroline Seebohm. “It is a combination of factors — the architectural elements, the gardens and that view — that have turned it into something unique.” And something that Seebohm — a veteran garden and lifestyle author, born and raised in England, and now living in Titusville in the “garden state” of New Jersey — couldn’t resist. She was first introduced to Untermyer by photographer Curtice Taylor, with whom she did “Rescuing Eden: Preserving America’s Historic Gardens” (The Monacelli Press, 2015). Untermyer’s strange, sad, ultimately uplifting odyssey from Gilded Age glory to 1970s urban squalor and

horror to resplendent 21st-century resurrection captivated her, and she knew it had to be part of “Rescuing Eden.” She also knew there was standalone book in this, the result being the recent “Paradise on the Hudson: The Creation, Loss, and Revival of a Great American Garden” (Timber Press, $27.95, 222 pages).

UNTERMYER THE MAN

Central to its story is someone Seebohm found as fascinating as the place itself — Samuel Untermyer, the dapper, odontioda orchid-wearing, crusading New York attorney, friend and sometime foe of the rich and powerful alike, who even challenged

automobile entrepreneur Henry Ford and his anti-Semitic publications. (Among his clients was Albert Einstein, who appreciated Untermyer’s discreet handling of his finances.) “He was an extraordinary man…bright, ambitious, who took on cases no one would take, speaking for the underprivileged,” Seebohm says of his social justice activism. In the courtroom, she adds, “he had a quiet wit and a terrific, theatrical style” that drew the general public. “I’m told that my profession is the law,” the Virginia-born Untermyer said in 1918. “But my real affection is for my greenhouse.” As the 20th century dawned, Untermyer bought Greystone, the turreted 99-room mansion on the Hudson that had belonged to former New York Gov. Samuel J. Tilden. The 113-acre property would not sit idle. “In those days,” Seebohm says, “they didn’t have landscape architects.” Extending his property to 150 acres, Untermyer

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hired William Welles Bosworth — responsible for the Italianate look of Kykuit, the sedately elegant estate of rival John D. Rockefeller in Pocantico Hills — with a mandate to create “the finest garden in the world.” Bosworth responded by creating a world that revealed even as it concealed, with outcroppings and Egyptian, English, Greek, Italian and Persian architectural elements, along with Paul Manship’s neoclassical sculptures, serving as a counterpoint to water displays, including fountains by Charles Wellford Leavitt, and vegetable and floral gardens as far as the eye could see. The Color Gardens, Seebohm says, were particularly noteworthy, each for a single color — the pink garden including snapdragons and hollyhocks; the blue garden, delphiniums and thistles; the red, geraniums and begonias; the white, Japanese and German irises and sweet Williams; and the yellow, chrysanthemums and cannas — among many other botanicals. These gardens, inspired by the Impressionists and Postimpressionists, were meant to be enjoyed not just by the Untermyer family and their illustrious guests but by the public, which was admitted on Tuesdays. On one September day in 1939, 30,000 visited. RESURRECTION In a sense, that day in September 1939 — the month and year that World War II broke out in Europe — would serve as a kind of apotheosis for Untermyer’s gardens. As his health declined, he spent more time at The Willows, his Palm Springs estate, where he died on March 17, 1940 at age 82. “1940,” Seebohm says, “was a terrible time for giving away Gilded Age mansions.” No one really wanted Greystone and its gardens — not the Untermyer family or the state (New York), the county (Westchester) and the city (Yonkers) he left it to in that order. Ultimately, Yonkers decided to accept 70 acres of the site, 16 for “Samuel Untermyer Park and Gardens.” By then furnishings inside and out of Greystone had been auctioned off — the mansion would be demolished in 1948 — and parcels sold off to developers. The remaining elements began to decline. When John Lennon posed for some photographs there in 1975 beneath the filigree wrought iron dome of the Corinthian-columned Temple of Love, he remarked that he should’ve worn jeans as the undergrowth had dirtied his new suit. Worse was to come in the next two years as Untermyer Park became associated with “Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz

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Samuel Untermyer, an orchid always in his lapel, in New York City. Courtesy the Library of Congress.

and tales of a dog-sacrificing cult. Meanwhile, time and nature reclaimed what vandals didn’t. Untermyer Park was becoming like something out of Thomas Cole’s painting series “The Course of Empire” (1833-36), a cautionary tale of civilization. But Untermyer would have a different ending, thanks to Stephen F. Byrns, who as a child in Michigan liked to build and grow things. When the Princeton-educated architect tired of Manhattan, he moved to Yonkers and then Riverdale, where he became involved with Wave Hill — another grand Hudson estate that has been repurposed as an eco-cultural center (Page ?) — and befriended its director of horticulture, Marco Polo Stufano. But Byrns had already begun championing the revival of Untermyer, which had been expanded to 43 acres. At a Yonkers party in 2010, Byrns heard Untermyer’s fountains had been turned on. Something bubbled up inside him as well. “I felt like something had hit me,” Seebohm quotes him as saying in the book. “The place combined history, gardens, architecture, horticulture and an important piece of America’s cultural and social heritage.”

Byrns enlisted the by-now-retired Stufano and the task of recalling Untermyer to life — as well as its crusading namesake — began with fundraising, news stories and tours as work proceeded on the Walled Garden, with its amphitheater, sphinx-topped columns, pool and canals; the Temple of Love, perched on a rocky outcropping with a waterfall; and the Vista, a step walkway leading down to the Hudson. “This (year) marks the 10th anniversary of the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy,” says Byrns, now its president. “We have made enormous progress since 2011 and now have seven gardeners working, with more restorations slated to take place this year.” The cost to date — $2.2 million. Untermyer, which has come full circle, is proof that destiny cannot be denied. It is still a place visited by the celebrated and the unsung alike. (British-Iranian journalist Christiane Amanpour, host of PBS’ “Amanpour and Company,” was honored there at a recent celebration of the Persian harvest festival, Mehregan.) It’s still overseen by an architect with an interest in gardens. It’s still a paradise on earth. Up there in a different paradise, we imagine Samuel Untermyer is content.

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toscanini at wave hill BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

As with all the great historic houses that preside over the banks of the Hudson River, Wave Hill — now a public garden and cultural center in the Riverdale section of the Bronx — has been no stranger to illustrious visitors (Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother) and residents (the young Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain). But of all the celebrated and powerful who strode the rooms of its Greek Revival manse, Wave Hill House, and savored its conservatory, gardens and scenic pergola, few were more fascinating than fiery maestro Arturo Toscanini, whose authoritative passion, acute ear, attention to detail and photographic memory have made his name a benchmark of classical music conducting.

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Toscanini (1867-1957) was already an international sensation with conducting stints at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic on his résumé when talent, temperament — and a very different kind of musical titan — conspired to set him on the serpentine path that would lead from Manhattan to the promontory that is Wave Hill. The year was 1936 and Toscanini, having wrapped up a decade on the podium of the New York Phil, was ready to retire in his native Italy, where the political situation remained explosive. Already Toscanini, who had flirted with Fascism in the 1920s, had tangled with dictator Benito Mussolini — refusing to play “Giovinezza,” the Fascist anthem, at Teatro alla Scala in Milan and enduring physical attacks, wiretaps, surveillance and passport confiscation. “The conduct of my life has been, is and will always be the echo and reflection of my conscience,” Toscanini observed — although his passionate nature might’ve gotten the better of him when he thundered to a

Wave Hill, a public garden and cultural center in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, in spring. Photograph by Joshua Bright. 43 MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

Ross Bleckner and Zachari Logan’s “Collaborative Series No. 5 (Meditations 1)” (2018), mixed media on mylar. Courtesy of the artists and Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.

friend: “If I were capable of killing a man, I would kill Mussolini.” So when emissaries and mutual friends of David Sarnoff came calling with an overture for a new musical venture in New York, Toscanini was reluctant but ripe. Scarsdale resident Sarnoff — president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the dealmaker behind the creation of its fledgling TV network, NBC — wanted a symphony orchestra that would bring classical music to the masses, and he wanted Toscanini to conduct it. The NBC Symphony Orchestra made its debut on Christmas 1937 from Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, now the

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home of “Saturday Night Live.” The concerts, while overall successful, making Toscanini a household name, were not without their challenges. The acoustics were famously dry and the maestro was criticized for adhering too rigidly to the scores — something that composers, of course, loved — and for not playing enough modern and American music. The last criticism was unfair as Toscanini played works by Cortlandt Manor resident Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, John Philip Sousa and Dimitri Shostakovich while showcasing such soloists as clarinetist/band leader Benny Goodman, the witty pianist Oscar Levant and the virtuoso pianist Vladimir

Horowitz, who happened to be married to the maestro’s younger daughter, Wanda. On Nov. 5, 1938, Toscanini conducted the premiere of what would become one of the most famous of American works, an orchestral arrangement of the second movement of Mount Kisco resident Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, Op.11, the “Adagio for Strings,” better known today as the soundtrack for “Platoon.” Toscanini pronounced the work semplice e bella — “simple and beautiful.” A personnel dispute with Sarnoff led to Toscanini’s brief resignation from the orchestra in 1941. He would share conducting duties with friendly rival Leopold Stokow-

ski before resuming complete control in 1944. It was during these crucial World War II years that Toscanini lived at Wave Hill. Online footage at Critical Past https://www. criticalpast.com/video/65675025691_Arturo-Toscanini_plays-piano_works-on-a-musical-composition_makes-a-correction offers a glimpse into the maestro’s life there. As his grandson Walfredo — son of Toscanini’s only son, Walter, and a future deputy mayor of New Rochelle — lounges in a study filled with books, plants and memorabilia, Toscanini paces, listening to a phonograph, then annotates a score at a piano. Outside nature would create a different kind of thunderous sound, the wind howling across the river. “I believe we have the noblest roaring blasts here I have ever known on land,” said Mark Twain, who lived at Wave Hill some 40 years before Toscanini (1901-03). “They sing their hoarse song through the big treetops with a splendid energy that thrills me and stirs me and uplifts me and makes me want to live always.” None of us do, of course. Toscanini would leave Wave Hill at the war’s end in 1945 but would stay on in Riverdale, continuing to conduct the orchestra at Studio 8H until 1950, then briefly at Manhattan Center and finally at Carnegie Hall. His last performance, an all-Wagner program on April 4, 1954, caused a sensation when the maestro had a minor lapse in concentration that led panicky technicians to stop broadcasting the concert for a full minute, even though Toscanini quickly regained his form. While he would spend the next few years evaluating the broadcasts with Walter for release on record, that lapse was a harbinger of things to come. Toscanini had a stroke on New Year’s Day 1957 and died on Jan. 16 at home in Riverdale. He is buried in Milan in the family tomb, with an epitaph that reads Qui finisce l'opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto." ("Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died.") Thirty-one years earlier, he had uttered those words before Liù’s death scene in Act III of Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot” during the opera’s premiere at La Scala, because that was was all the music Puccini had composed before he died. (The next night, La Scala would present a full performance of the work, the opera having been completed based on Puccini’s remaining notes and sketches.) But at that first performance

Arturo Toscanini, the legendary classical conductor, lived at Wave Hill during World War II. Courtesy Wave Hill.

when Toscanini spoke, he had laid down his baton. Now he laid it down for good. Wave Hill, however, would go on singing. Since becoming a public garden in 1965, the site has also become the home of programs in which the arts intersect with nature. Gyan Hur’s “So we can be near” installation (May 22-June 27) deals with landscape, beauty and loss. Simultaneously, Shoshanna Weinberger’s “Fragments of Perception” plumbs Wave Hill’s Aquatic Garden Pool and tropical plants collection as well as her own Caribbean-American heritage. Then

“The Shadow of the Sun: Ross Bleckner and Zachari Logan” (May 22 through Aug. 15) finds two complementary, longtime collaborators teaming again to consider the themes of invisibility, queerness, the landscape and the fragility of life. There are free, popular weekend programs that allow families to create art around nature-inspired themes and lots of live music. In other words, Wave Hill is the kind of place where the spirits of people like Twain and Toscanini can “live always.” For more, visit wavehill.org.

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

when plants become endangered BY PHIL HALL

Most people are aware of the concept of endangered and extinct species within the animal kingdom, but less common is knowledge about plants and trees that have either been brought to the brink of oblivion or pushed into the extinguishing abyss. The botanicals that shared the prehistoric planet with the mighty dinosaurs disappeared with them. Today, we only know of their existence through fossilized remains. And while excessive hunting, the introduction of invasive species and reckless development doomed hundreds of animal species to eradication and continue to threaten the existence of countless others, the same careless and deliberately cruel behavior wreaked even greater havoc on the soil homes of an endless number of plants and trees. In June 2019, a study published by Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens and Sweden’s Stockholm University determined that 571 plants were completely eradicated from the wild over the preceding 250 years — more than twice the total of mammals, birds and amphibians combined that became extinct over the same period. “Most people can name a mammal or bird that has become extinct in recent centuries, but few can name an extinct plant,” Aelys M. Humphreys, author of the report and assistant professor in the department of ecology, environment and plant sciences at Stockholm University, said in an interview to coincide with the study’s publication. “We hear a lot about the number of species facing extinction, but these figures are for plants that we’ve already lost, so they provide an unprecedented window into plant extinction in modern times." Somewhat closer to home, an August 2020 study authored by 16 researchers and published in the scientific journal

Conservation Biology confirmed 65 plant extinctions — 37 perennial herbs, 15 annual herbs, eight shrubs and five small trees — in North America since the arrival of European settlers in the 16th century. Nineteen of these affected plants and trees were native to California, while five were unique to New England. But this study acknowledged that there were constraints to understanding why plant species become extinct. “Given the paucity of plant surveys in many areas, particularly prior to European settlement, the actual extinction rate of vascular plants is undoubtedly much higher than indicated here,” the study said, adding that “data limitations abound. Twelve species new to science are discovered each year, on average, in California alone, suggesting an untold number of plants went extinct before scientific discovery.” According to Minette Marr, conservation botanist at the Lady Bird Johnson

The Franklin tree is no longer extant in the wild. But specimens found in gardens, parks and private collections across North America can be traced to the seeds from the rare discovery in the 18th century. Courtesy the Plant Image Library/ Flickr Creative Commons.

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Tiny thismia Americana, native to Australia and New Zealand, was discovered growing along Chicago’s Lake Calumet in 1912 by graduate student Norma Etta Pfeiffer but has since disappeared.

Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas, 40% of plants worldwide are considered to be at risk for extinction. “A species is considered extinct in the wild when all of the known populations have been extirpated,” Marr explains. “In the past, professional biologists monitored populations of Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) as often as possible. Unfortunately, many populations of SGCN could not be relocated from records that were decades old.” Marr credits the iNaturalist social network of professional and citizen scientists for working to relocate previously documented plant populations facing extinction and discovering hitherto unknown plants that may have vanished without ever being documented. “For some species, the number of plants in a population can be counted,” she says. “For others, it can only be estimated due

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to time constraints or inability to secure access.” Pamela Diggle, professor in the University of Connecticut’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, points out that some locales have become obvious spots for species endangerment. “Things are going extinct everywhere, but they're much, much higher in the tropics and on islands,” she says. “Now, they're doing regular surveys to track things that we know are endangered.” Yet Jennifer Mattei, professor in the department of biology at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, acknowledges that tracking wild plants is more challenging than keeping an inventory on wild species. “Yeah, you would think it'd be easier because they're sedentary. They grow and stay put,” she says. “But it is actually the smaller ones that are difficult and they can escape detection by dispersing seeds. The

seeds can remain dormant for many years, so it's hard to tell if something is truly extinct.” One of the most bizarre examples of dispersed seeds might have involved the thismia Americana, a centimeter-tall plant discovered in 1912 by a 24-year-old graduate student named Norma Etta Pfeiffer along a small wet-mesic sand prairie on Chicago’s Lake Calumet. Its discovery created bafflement, as the species belonged to a genus that was only known to exist in Australia and New Zealand. Alas, the lakefront section was torn up for industrial development four years after the plant was identified and no additional specimens have ever been located elsewhere. Mattei warns that habitat destruction, whether deliberate or through natural disasters, poses the greatest threat to plant species. “In California, they’re suffering from drought and fire and climate change,” she says. “People are keeping an eye on various species that are well-known, like the saguaro cacti and the Joshua tree in the desert. They’re not extinct yet, but they were burnt in the massive fires in the West, so their populations were reduced quite a bit.” Still, there is hope for some endangered plants. Not unlike species that are extinct in the wild but are saved through wildlife conservation centers, some plants have been able to thrive in arboretums and botanical gardens after vanishing from their natural habitats. UConn’s Diggle recalls one of the earliest and most famous examples involved the Franklinia alatamaha, more commonly known as the Franklin tree. “It was discovered in Georgia sometime in the 1700s in a drainage area,” Diggle says. “And it was named after Ben Franklin. The seed was collected seed and then transported. But no one has been able to find that species in the wild.” Today’s specimens of the Franklin tree found in gardens, parks and private collections across North America can be traced to the seeds from the rare discovery in the 18th century. Still, there are some happy surprise endings to be found in this pursuit. The March 8 edition of Nature Plants included a report that 17 plants previously believed to have been vanished forever have been confirmed as existing, including four that reemerged unexpectedly in the wild. “Sometimes,” Diggle says, “things are thought to be extinct and then somebody finds it again, especially when things are rare.”

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Introduced by a long, radiant-heated, cobbled drive leading to a landscaped forecourt, this property offers beautiful, chemical-free landscaping by Cummin Associates. Extensive fruit and vegetable gardens and fruit tree orchards highlight the grounds, along with two beehives and a chicken coop. Lined with sycamore trees, the outdoor pool is spanned by a stone terrace with a barbecue and a pergola with a wood-burning fireplace. At the edge of the sweeping lawns is an electric-powered dock with a freshwater bib protected by a 180-degree stone jetty. There is also additional mooring off the main dock, a storage shed for kayaks and private beach-front seating. From this enchanting viewpoint, the eye gazes out over the open water to observe vessels sailing to and from Greenwich Harbor and the Indian Harbor Yacht Club. Inside, this 15,580-square-foot home is light-filled, graced by soaring ceilings, walls of windows and an expansive covered porch affording you those idyllic waterfront views. Grand-scale entertaining and everyday comfort are equally a

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part of the elegant interiors by Thomas O’Brien of Aero Studios, which include eight bedrooms, nine full bathrooms and two half-baths. Among the amenities is an indoor pool, hurricane-impact resistant Tischler windows, a water filtration system and a backup generator for the entire house. There is also an attached garage with an electric vehicle charging station that is flanked by a sports court with a

basketball hoop. Yes, it comes with a hefty price tag -$55 million. But elevated, protected and privately positioned, Field Point offers the ultimate in luxury lifestyle. For more, contact Joseph Barbieri at 203-940-2025 or 203-618-3112; or Leslie McElwreath at 917-539-3654 or 203618-3165.

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Flowers from the garden can transform a room – brightening or calming it, as needs may be. Courtesy Cami Weinstein Designs LLC.

designing with flowers BY CAMI WEINSTEIN

he first days of spring usher in warm air, sunshine and flowers. I start to go through my seed and bulb catalogs and gardening books. I love gardening. I can’t say I am the most successful gardener, but every spring I am at it again, pouring over catalogs and visiting local nurseries; hoping that this year more of the flowers that I plant will bloom and that the deer will forage in another yard and leave mine alone. Alas, this never happens. Spending time in the garden is relaxing and watching those buds grow and open into beautiful, colorful flowers never fails to enchant. This year there is an easy way to bring outdoor flowers into your home. Floral patterns are back in a big way in interior décor.

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They have not been this prolific since the late 1980s. Some of the floral patterns are just as traditional and beautiful as they were years ago. Many have been reimagined in colors that are compatible with current design trends. Some of the newer versions offer large- scale patterns that make a bold, modern statement, one that is being used in contemporary interiors as well. Whether your design is modern or traditional, there are a few things to consider when adding these floral patterns to your home to keep them from feeling dated. Since these large floral patterns have such an effect, it is best to limit them to certain areas of your home or one room. Consider using a bold, floral graphic wallpaper on a focal wall. It will energize your room and add style

to it, especially if you don’t have much in the way of personal artwork. Or consider doing your powder room in a bold floral. I would do all four walls and maybe the ceiling to really elevate your design and create a jewel box powder room with that wow factor. Some of the patterns are in the style of photorealism. These are also a fun choice. With the ease of digital wallpaper, murals are making a comeback, too. These scenic wallpapers often depict floral and fauna scenes, and the ability to scale and print them easily can make for a dramatic and affordable solution for homeowners to get a custom look. One of the easiest ways to transform a room is to bring your garden inside. When I garden, I try to concentrate on flowers that can be cut and brought inside to fill my many vases. I collect vases in various sizes, styles, materials and colors to complement the flowers I fill them with. Sometimes I put several vases out on my dining room table and fill them with flowers. This creates a focal point in the room. My favorite cut flowers make for loose seasonal bouquets that can change a room, infusing it with color and life. Sometimes filling the room with one color of flowers in a pale shade can calm a busy space while a riot of colorful flowers can energize a completely neutral one. The best thing about changing your rooms with flowers is the energy they create. They keep your room/s from becoming static. Flowers are such an important part of my décor that rarely does a week go by without fresh flowers infusing my rooms. Not only do I use flowers but budded branches and large leaves. The branches can be very dramatic and usually require a larger, heavy vase. Going all green is fun as well. Think grasses, leaves, pine branches, ferns and seedpods, which can all make dramatic arrangements. Whether you use flowers from your garden, a florist, a farmstand or a supermarket, bring them inside and enjoy them in your home. And if you are walking around New York City, you may glimpse the handiwork of Lewis Miller, the designer who creates floral flashes — giant bouquets of flowers in unexpected containers, filling trash cans and old phone booths and ringing around lampposts. These surprising floral flashes are doing what flowers have always had the power to do — surprise and enchant us, coaxing a smile and reminding us that poet John Keats was right when he wrote in “Endymion,” “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” For more on Cami, call 203-661-4700 or visit camidesigns.com.

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Franz Sedlacek’s “Blumenstück.” Sold for $183,000 at Skinner Inc.

floral painting springs eternal

BY KATIE BANSER-WHITTLE

s Sir William Gilbert wrote in “The Mikado:” “The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, bring promise of merry sunshine.” The sunshine may be fleeting, but those welcome blossoms are the enduring theme of songs, poems and, of course, paintings. For hundreds of years, floral still lifes have flourished everywhere, from palaces to cottages. There are treasured examples ranging from kindergartener’s refrigerator art to multimillion dollar masterworks. For the next few months flowers will abound everywhere outdoors. All year-round, though, a floral still life brings fresh air into a room of any period, or no period at all. In the Middle Ages, flowers began to peek out of religious paintings such as altarpieces and the luxurious private

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prayer books called books of hours. The flowers depicted were highly symbolic — roses for love, lilies for purity. Blossoms weren’t the focus of medieval paintings and tapestries, however. They were included as minor elements, supporting players in a story of faith. During the Renaissance, flowers came into their own as the main subjects of paintings. Northern European artists excelled in highly detailed, realistic depictions of floral arrangements. These pictures often included unrealistically perfect blooms from different seasons and even different continents, all combined in one gloriously colorful bouquet. As in medieval floral art, allegories and symbolism were ever-present. Carnations were symbols of love and marriage. Irises represented trust and a divine message. Every flower could convey a hidden

meaning, often with a connection to the newly popular classical mythology as well as the Christian faith. For all flowers, the fleeting nature of youth and beauty were definitely part of the picture. The Baroque, Rococo, Regency and Victorian periods saw the popularity of still life paintings endure even as fashions and painting styles changed. Always a favorite with avocational painters, the still life was also a genre that attracted the skills of professional artists. Until recent times, European society was governed by strict class boundaries, and the rules were extended to art. The École des Beaux-Arts, perhaps the arbiter of French tastes, imposed a hierarchy on paintings. Its decrees had lingering effects on how artists were trained and how their work was valued. The highest branch of painting, according to such authority, included historic, religious and mythological subjects. Next came portraits, preferably of the rich, famous and/or beautiful; genre painting or scenes of everyday activities; landscapes; and, at the bottom, still lifes. To make the point perfectly clear, at the annual salon exhibitions paintings were hung on the exhibit rooms’ walls according to this ranking. Still lifes were usually down at the bottom, emphasizing their inferior status. None of this did a thing to wither people’s liking for, and acquisition of, floral still-life paintings. Some of the same flowers beloved in the Middle Ages bloomed under the brushes of the Impressionists and Postimpressionists. Pierre Auguste Renoir was especially fond of roses, Claude Monet, water lilies; Vincent van Gogh, sunflowers, irises and almond blossoms. Successors such as Odilon Redon and Raoul Dufy ushered in a new golden age of floral painting. Twentieth-century examples from American painters like Georgia O’Keefe, Florine Stettheimer and Jane Peterson bloom alongside the color-drenched works of Continental masters such as Emil Nolde, Gustav Klimt and Franz Sedlacek. The floral still life remains one of the best-loved art genres. Young or old, sophisticated or simple, traditional or avant-garde, everyone is drawn to these paintings. They allow us to enjoy the beauty of spring and summer always, mingled with a promise of growth and renewal that keeps us going through the dark times. For more, contact Katie at kwhittle@ skinnerinc.com or 212-787-1114.

FASHION & BEAUTY

P. 58 A fashion photographer in love with the land

P. 62 What's trending?

P. 64 Judith Ripka’s brick-andmortar return'

a fashion photographer in love with the land BY JEREMY WAYNE

It’s not only Americans who are frustrated at not being able to travel overseas. All over the world, citizens of other countries are champing at the bit, waiting to be able to travel far and freely again. For one young Italian fashion photographer, who is already enjoying success in his home country, a first visit to New York is right at the top of his post-Covid agenda. But it’s not big cities that up until now have inspired Federico Cannata, so much as the place of his birth — Modica, in Sicily, where he still has a house and atelier and to where he returns frequently to work, as well as to recharge his batteries and reconnect with his family and his roots. Growing up in Modica — a perfect Baroque town, with the ravishing southwest Sicilian towns of Noto, Ragusa and Syracusa for neighbors — Cannata has always been fascinated by art and pictures. He was bitten by the photography bug at a very young age. “One of my teachers asked me to take pictures of some sculptures we were making in class and simply presented me with a camera and told me to get on with it. After that, I borrowed a camera, which belonged to my brother, and I went out and started taking pictures of the neighborhood.”

Although at the start he didn’t have a clue as to how his interest might develop, in his liceo artistico (a category of Italian high school, slanted towards the humanities,) he started to discover a way of incorporating all that he saw, all his visual perception, into his photographs. And into the mix he even added his own poetry, although his creative vision did not always find favor. (“No, Federico, the sky is not pink,” he would be pulled up by his bemused high school teachers.) The result, at any rate, are multilayered, almost three-dimensional photographs, extremely complex in construction, although ironically, Cannata claims, one of the many things that drew him to photography over other kinds of art in the first place was the (mistaken) idea that a shot would take far less time to set up than

From "Le Preghiere Fotografiche" by Federico Cannata.

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

making a painting. He defines his work as “handwriting,” because “I assemble photography and graphic design in a single shot, in which titles, experimental poems (of which he is the author) and small short films become essential to tell a story.” Cinema, architecture, publishing, typography, the industrial world, art and design are all sources of inspiration, he says. After school and still supported by his family, Cannata studied graphic design at the University of Catania and was already working commercially when his first really big break came in 2013. An ongoing search by Vogue magazine for new talent resulted in the publication of one of his pictures. He was still living in Sicily at that poin, and had indeed been submitting his photographs to Vogue for years, but they were always rejected. But when he came up with this particular black-and-white image of an alleyway in his Modica, “they went crazy for it.” For a fashion photographer to be published in Vogue was “huge,” he says, and as a result, apart from publication of that one photo, he was asked to submit an entire portfolio. This brought further recognition and opportunities. Not least, in 2017, for the very first time, he was invited to Fashion Week in Milan as an official photographer. But if success has taken him to Milan and the upper echelons of the fashion world and fashion photography — he has photographed the likes of Gigi Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Edie Campbell, as well as worked with Alberta Ferretti, Emilio Pucci and Dolce & Gabbana among other bigname brands — Cannata’s heart remains in Sicily. “It is a land,” he says, “of a thousand contradictions and creative ideas.” With its atmosphere, colors and settings, it’s also a continuous source of inspiration.” Among the projects of which he’s most proud is “Le Preghiere Fotografiche” (“Photographic Prayers.”) It was born during the first lockdown in Italy last year and has continued to evolve. The heart of the project are depictions of the Virgin Mary in the local Baroque churches, which he juxtaposes with pictures of models he takes in Milan during Fashion Week, a sort of Sicily-Milan cross-pollination. When I ask him if there is any resistance to these images in a society that may still be traditional in outlook, Cannata responds with a shrug. “No, not at all. The work has been really well received and appreciated.” Pressed to describe his style in a nut-

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Federico Cannata, self-portrait.

shell, he says it is “pop, with elements of the surreal.” To date, his work has been published in a clutch of Italian and European magazines, including Elle and Madame, as well as Elegant and Guild magazines in the United States and international editions of Vogue and Vanity Fair. And always promoting his beloved hometown, he was honored to receive a Lions Club International award last July for banging the drum for Modica in particular and promoting Sicily in general to the wider world. Back in early April, when we spoke, Covid was still raging in Italy, with Milan more or less at a standstill — something Cannata found to be a paradox in what has long been Italy’s most forward-looking, most happening city. “People are actually fleeing the big cities now, going back to their small villages in the countryside.” But Milan, he stresses, is the city that drives the nation’s economy. Without its Fashion Week, without its Design Week,” he laments, “Milan is not Milan. “The situation

just has to improve.” As for what’s next, when the situation improves, like so many of us, regardless of where we are based or what we might do for a living, he’s eager to see the moment where we can all travel more easily, like we used to. But his greatest dream is to visit New York. Although he has worked with New York-based designers — the (Sicilian-born) jewelry designer, Marina Monitto, for instance, whose Seekelia website he designed and whose visual communication and advertising campaigns he developed and photographed — he has never visited the Big Apple himself. When he finally makes it over, he says, he plans to stay for a month, experiencing the adrenalin rush, soaking up the atmosphere and photographing in what he has always heard is New York’s unique light. In short, Cannata is preparing to enjoy life to the full again and in that he is certainly not alone. For more, visit federicocannata.com.

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what's trending BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

A COFFEE BREAK WITH CATHERINE ZETA-JONES

SUITING US TO A ‘TEA’ (AGAIN)

One of Catherine Zeta-Jones’ daily delights is her cup of coffee, emphasis on the word “her.” Recently, the Oscar winner (“Chicago”) — and Irvington resident — launched her Casa Zeta-Jones Coffee, featuring six blends ($20 each), responsibly and sustainably sourced from a variety of beans selected around the world. It’s the latest line in the Casa ZetaJones portfolio of home goods. “With Casa Zeta-Jones coffee, I saw an opportunity to use something as simple as a great cup of coffee to make a difference in the world,” Zeta-Jones says. Working with Icon Global Coffee Co. — a 90-year-old fourthgeneration importer, roaster and packager — Zeta-Jones is looking to give back not only to local farmers but to some favorite charities that receive a portion of the profits. “Partnering with Catherine has been a thrilling creative process,” says Icon President Greg Ousley.” She has exquisite taste and an attention to detail that has been a joy to work with and has elevated the entire process of creating these coffee blends." For more, visit casazetajonescoffee.com.

There are few things we enjoy more than Tea Forté’s collections of imaginative (and imaginatively named) teas and accessories, some recently inspired by New York Botanical Garden prints. So we were more than tickled to hear about its third NYBG collaboration, the Tea Forte’s new Tea Over Ice set is, well, Soleil Collection of Darjeeling nice. Courtesy Tea Forté. Quince, Cherry Blossom, Wildflower Honey Citrus, Vanilla Rose and Wildberry Hibiscus teas, featuring a matching KATI Steeping Cup and Infuser ($22), a Single Steeps Sampler ($20) and various presentation boxes ($34 and $22). But we were just as intrigued by the Tea Over Ice Pitcher Set ($55). Steep Blood Orange, Ceylon Gold, Mango Peach, Ginger Pear or Raspberry Nectar in the small pitcher and set it atop the large pitcher (filled with ice) or pour it over the ice for a chilling effect. Try the new Iced Blueberry Merlot Five-Pack Box ($12) as well. Separately, the Hibiscus Blossom tea, a fragrant herbal orange and hibiscus blend, is also great cold. For more, visit teaforte.com.

THE BOOK(S) ON GARDENS Need a little inspiration for your garden? Try these two recent tomes — “Oudolf Humelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life” (The Monacelli Press, 431 pages) updates the life and philosophy of Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf. Meanwhile, “Contemporary Gardens of the Hamptons, LaGuardia Design Group 1990-2020” (also Monacelli) offers the spare yin of contemporary American landscape architecture, in contrast to the teeming yang of “Oudolf Humelo’s” European gardens.

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SAYING IT WITH (PAPER) FLOWERS Mother’s Day is a time for bouquets and cards, but what about a bouquet that functions like a card? FreshCut Paper’s pop-up bouquets offer an earth-friendly alternative to flowers flown in from around the world and refrigerated for freshness. FreshCut Paper’s cheery pop-up The company was created by the bouquets outlast real flowers climate change-minded Peter Hewitt, with less carbon footprint. Courtesy FreshCut Paper. whose name may not be familiar to you but whose products for Disney, Revlon, Crate & Barrel and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) surely are. He’s also the founder of one of our favorite things, Tea Forté. (See item above.) All FreshCut Paper bouquets, envelopes and enclosed note cards are 100% recyclable, with a portion of every purchase going to the earth-saving organization 1% For the Planet. And as a special thank you, FreshCut Paper plants one tree in your loved one’s honor for every bouquet purchased. They retail for $10 to $12 each and mail with 3 “Forever” stamps. For more, visit freshcutpaper.com.

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MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

Double Flower Ring with Mother of Pearl and Diamonds, from Judith Ripka’s Jardin Collection, $1.250. Courtesy Judith Ripka.

judith ripka’s brick-andmortar return

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

s Bob D’Loren talks to WAG from his home in Oyster Bay Cove on Long Island, formerly owned by fashion designer Geoffrey Beene, he is looking out on his gardens — including cascading forsythia, magnolia trees and a greenhouse beyond. D’Loren’s is a life that is surrounded by beauty. An architectural student turned Wall Streeter — “I cracked the code on intellectual property-backed bonds,” he says — he was introduced to fashion by one of its greatest practitioners, Bill Blass. “He had extraordinary style,” says D’Loren, who inherited Blass’ entire collection of suspenders. As chairman and CEO of Xcel Brands, D’Loren oversees the fashion labels C.Wonder, Halston and Isaac Mizrahi as well as the 125-year-old, artisan-driven home goods label Longaberger. The fifth brand in the Xcel portfolio is the jewelry label Judith Ripka, ac-

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quired in 2011 after the company, founded in 1977, was hit hard in the 2008 financial crisis and saw its 16 stores close. Now Judith Ripka is ready for a brick-and-mortar relaunch with a new store targeted to open at The Westchester in White Plains on June 7. Former QVC host Albany Irvin will be on hand for opening night, which will be livestreamed. “We’ve done $3 billion in sales livestreaming,” D’Loren says of Xcel Brands. “It will be exciting and fun.” It goes without saying that these have been challenging times for brick and mortar, retail and brick-and-mortar retail. “First and foremost, we were scheduled to open last May,” he says. “When Covid hit, the mall closed, and we couldn’t get our contractors in there, so here we are a year later. No one has that crystal ball to see the future of brick-and-mortar retail. I don’t think it will go away. But I do think it will be streamlined.”

D’Loren remains enthusiastic, however, about the timelessness of jewelry and the strategic importance of The Westchester in the regional luxury market. Since at least the ancient Egyptians, he says, jewelry has been used to mark milestones. As for The Westchester, it is “uniquely positioned,” he adds, to engage shoppers from New Canaan to Bedford — just as the Judith Ripka store will be similarly positioned, adjacent to Gucci on the mall’s second level. The 2,000-square-foot store, which includes 1,200-square-feet of selling space, is inspired by art, D’Loren says. “For me, I wanted to create a store that would position jewelry as art. We took our direction from The Museum of Modern Art — white walls, black slate floors, glass cases and vitrines.” The look and feel is one of an art gallery. And what kind of works does this gallery contain? “Judy had a brilliant use of color in more abstract, princess jewelry,” D’Loren says of pieces that sold from $595 to $120,000. Three years of market research told him that customers are looking for more modern pieces in the $295-to-$30,000 price range with the sweet spot being $500 to $2,000. “We have much more use of polished rather than textured stones, more metal and the designs are more symmetrical,” says D’Loren, who works with designer Yookie Lee on the Judith Ripka collections. He’s not a fan of asymmetry either in jewelry or fashion. “The eye is not comfortable with it.” In The Jardin Collection, mother-of-pearl flowers decorate necklaces, bracelets and rings in even numbers, with even numbers of petals. D’Loren says he uses mother of pearl — offset by diamonds, sterling silver and rhodium — to suggest the deep textures of flowers. The photographs that accompany this collection — a signature of the website — will immediately transport viewers to Paris and Lake Como in Italy. No surprise. At D’Loren’s Palladian-style home, trees are squared off in the manner of those that line the Champs Élysées in Paris. He is a lover of the formality, the geometry — the symmetry, if you will — of French and Italian gardens, as opposed to the wild romance of the English garden. The former, are, he says, “magnificent.” Judith Ripka is scheduled to open at The Westchester, 125 Westchester Ave. in White Plains, June 7. Hours will be 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. The brand’s white glove service will be available to all shoppers who are looking for jewelry stylists and concierge amenities. For more, call 347-727-2474 or visit JudithRipka.com.

FOOD & SPIRITS P. 66 Perf surf and turf P. 72 Not your parents’ wine stores anymore

P. 68 Forza Forni pizza ovens are white hot P. 74 Introducing cabbage thoran

perf surf and turf BY JEREMY WAYNE

Spring has long-since sprung, but in the precious weeks before Memorial Day, when the sun is already high in the sky and the summer crowds have yet to appear, a pal and I take a ride out to Southampton for some ocean air and a blowout dinner. Until late last year, Union Sushi & Steak — located on lovely Bowden Square, across the street from Tates’s Bake Shop Inc. — was the Tex-Mex restaurant, Union Cantina. It is still under the same ownership, but the joint has morphed from Latino to surf and turf. Well, I love a good morph and I also love a good steak and sushi, so I’m intrigued to see what the new incarnation has brought to the safe if rather stagnant Southampton dining scene.

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Walk through Union’s enchanted garden (the place to sit on warmer nights) and up the few stairs and you come to the host stand. Here, your path diverges. On the left is the well-established Burger Bar, a brick and heavy wood interior doing little to conceal the building’s former pub status, where Hamptonites will tell you the 8-ounce Black Angus hamburger, served on your choice of bun, is the nattiest patty for miles around. To the right though and our destination this evening, is the new steakhouse, with its baby grand piano, its slightly saucy chandeliers that wouldn’t look amiss in a boudoir and swathes of shear curtains that can be moved back and forth as well as sideways to create private spaces — for Covid concerns or simply for, ahem, privacy. (Think “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” by the ocean.) Little gilt

chairs, the sort you see at a fancy outdoor wedding, give the room a dainty if slightly impermanent feel. Seated by Fernando, whose frugal conversation is oddly in inverse proportion to the amount of charm he exudes, first and foremost we address the business of drinks. For me, it’s going to be a classic martini, the steakhouse standard. A great martini is, or should be, the harbinger of a great steak to come. And, this one is — Hendricks gin, the faintest murmur of vermouth, a paper-thin twist of lemon, ice cold on the lips. The pal takes a Social cooler, which is to say Casamigos tequila, with watermelon purée and fresh lime. Any “cooler,” it strikes me, is an appropriate cocktail for the era of social distancing. Talk about the power of advertising, though, because I can’t think of Casamigos

Interior of Union Sushi & Steak. Courtesy Union Sushi & Steak.

Lobster and avocado sushi roll. Courtesy Union Sushi & Steak.

without seeing George Clooney, co-founder of the billion-dollar brand, sliding into view, to the point where I half expect him and the missus to wander over to the Union’s host stand and ask for a table. The menu stays true to the steakhouse model but with a wider ambit. A lobster bisque, pale as straw, with a silky consistency and fleshy pieces of lobster, is in fact not quite a bisque. It’s more than a regular cream soup, for sure, and stops short of a chowder, but what you call it is, in any case, irrelevant, because it is quite lovely and we could have eaten it by the bucketful. Other appetizers, like ramen with pork belly, a duck egg roll with sweet Thai chili sauce or Prince Edwards Island mussels, reference Asian and shellfish themes, and all of them attest to the dexterity of Union’s chef Scott Kampf. He’s as confident at sea as he is on

dry land. The appetizers make a good introduction, too, to the sushi. The sushi we tried, including hamachi, toro, shrimp and unagi, was spankingly fresh, and if you choose to supplement it with, say, shrimp tempura or spicy tuna rolls, you would already have had a feast and leave happy. From the large selection of “signature” sushi rolls, if you opted for, say, the Union roll (lobster and avocado topped with marinated skirt steak, eel sauce and yuzu mayonnaise,) it would turn what was already a feast into a banquet and ring down the curtain on a thoroughly balanced and utterly swish and filling supper. If, on the other hand, you go the steak route, then the Union’s porterhouse for two, a beast of a chop — half filet mignon, half strip steak — means business, which is

fine, since you are here to trade. You offer up a hearty appetite in exchange for what seems like half a cow, cooked rare in our case and arriving at the table pre-sliced. A vast platter of golden pommes frites is honestly the only accompaniment the beef needs, but you won’t regret the extra indulgence of creamed spinach, which has such an affinity with beef. And the indulgence continues, with generous, artery-clogging desserts, such as chocolate lava cake or fresh berries with heavy vanilla cream. When Union’s co-owner, Ian Duke, he of Southampton Social Club renown, stops by the table to shoot the stiff Southampton breeze, he says he has envisaged the new place as a kind of supper club and, right on cue, Ella Fitzgerald — recently honored by her hometown of Yonkers on her 100th birth anniversary — comes over the stereo, gently warbling her plaintive invitation to the dance. Indeed, I would actually be delighted to begin the Beguine or indeed any other dance, right now, in the cause of working off the excesses of dinner. Instead, we take a slow walk back to the comfortable and well-established Southampton Inn, where we are staying, and contemplate lunch the following day at the Union Burger Bar. At the end of the day or even in the middle of it, I think it’s fair to say I am a Union man. For Union Sushi & Steak reservations, visit dineatunion.com. For more on the Southampton Inn, visit southamptoninn.com

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

forza forni pizza ovens are white hot BY JEREMY WAYNE

If you want to stay on trend this summer, keep the Weber kettle in the garage and don’t bother stocking up on charcoal briquettes, because the hottest outdoor cooking experience this upcoming season is going to be wood-fired pizza — made in your own backyard.

Steak ready for the wood-fired oven. Photographs courtesy Forza Forni.

Mark Hopper, culinary director of Forza Forni, in the test kitchen. Photograph by Laura Giarratano.

As beautiful to look at as it is satisfying to use, a wood-fired pizza oven makes the best pizza. And fortunately for all of us, Forza Forni, the world’s No. 1 international supplier of commercial, residential and mobile pizza ovens, is located right here in our backyard, in Brewster. The company was founded 15 years ago by Dutchman Peter de Jong. A trained pastry chef, de Jong was taken with woodfired pizza ovens some years earlier and traveled to Italy to learn more about them. “I discovered the ovens they had out there,

the people behind them and their passion,” he reminisces. Moving to the United States to join his brother, John, who was already living in Westchester, de Jong started building outdoor kitchens and ovens in his garage. “And that’s how this whole thing was born,” says Laura Giarratano, Forza Forni’s director of marketing and communications. As the business started to develop, de Jong rented a double garage and then a shared facility as the business continued to grow. Six years ago came the move to

the current site in Brewster, from where Forza Forni now sends its ovens all over the world as it continues to serve a growing local market. Restaurants like Rivermarket in Tarrytown, Village Social and Locale in Mount Kisco and Parlor in Dobbs Ferry all use ovens supplied by Forza Forni. “If you’ve dined out and had a pizza in the area, chances are it’s from one of our ovens,” says Giarratano. All the components come in from Italy and ovens are built individually and to order, with colors tilework and finishes to suit customers’ own preferences. John de Jong, who is vice president of operations, sends his trucks out all over the country to deliver ovens or build them on-site. (On the day of my visit, Forza Forni’s teams were building restaurant ovens on-site in Denver and Cleveland.) “Most of our clients have our personal cell-phone number and we’re always there for them,” says Forza Forni’s general manager, Rick Figueiredo, reiterating the personalized and customer-focused nature of the business. But while the the main thrust of the business is commercial ovens, the residential market is growing exponentially. “Covid has undoubtedly helped,” says Giarratano. “People are spending more time at home and are investing more in their homes.” The day before my site tour, she had taken a call from a pitcher from the San Francisco Giants, whose home is in

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New Jersey. He wants an oven for his backyard and the price isn’t likely to put him off. “They’re a showpiece,” says Figueiredo. “You can cook a gourmet meal yourself, or light the fire and sit back and have a few cocktails, and then have everyone make their own (pizza.)” But you don’t need celebrity status or a stratospheric income to indulge. With major, top of the line kitchen appliances like ranges and refrigerators running into the tens of thousands, the entry price for a residential wood oven of around $6,000 — while more than your average barbecue — is hardly beyond a lot of people’s means. Plus, the company offers financing. Each customer, commercial or residential, has different requirements, but as Peter de Jong says, “If you can dream it, we can build it.” The third type of oven Forza Forni supplies is the mobile wood oven. Mounted inside a custom-built trailer, complete with plumbing, refrigeration and counterspace, these ovens can be driven more or less anywhere — to ball games, for example, or country fairs, corporate events and, of course, weddings and celebrations. They provide a great opportunity, or angle, for restaurateurs who want to take their operation out of a fixed restaurant, or even add another oven to their brick-andmortar premises. This is, in many instances, a circumstance created by Covid, what with restaurants being closed or having limited capacity indoors. Apart from the novelty and the excellent pizzas, the advantage from the operator or event organizer’s point of view is that these ovens not only look beautiful but they can serve up customized pizzas at an impressive rate, which other food trucks or make-to-order food stations cannot match. As a Forza Forni customer, Bruno Zacchini, of Pizza Bruno in Orlando, Florida, puts it, “Food for 100 people in 20 minutes. It’s like bringing a Ferrari out to a wedding.” The most significant recent development in the de Jong brothers’ business, however, has been the appointment of a dedicated culinary director. Enter Mark Hopper, formerly executive chef of casual dining with the Thomas Keller restaurant group (TKRG), chef de cuisine of Bouchon Bistro in Beverly Hills and sous chef of the

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Mark Hopper. Courtesy Forza Forni.

famed French Laundry. The genial chef, who actually grew up in Westchester, also founded and owned Pizzeria Vignette, one of most popular Neapolitan pizzerias in California’s Bay Area. An expert in all varieties and styles of pizza, Chef Hopper will establish a full-service consulting program for Forza Forni’s clients worldwide, as well as setting up an adult education program, offering classes and demonstrations at the company’s test kitchen. Additionally, although these ovens are first and foremost associated with pizza, Hopper is committed to demonstrating their versatility. With a cooking temperature of around 790 degrees Fahrenheit, they lend themselves to cooking all manner of dishes besides pizza, the wood and the ferocious heat producing deeply flavouful, almost ethereal results. On the day of my visit, I found him in his chef’s whites in the Brewster headquarters’ backyard, one of his four ovens stoked and ready to cook. After an appetizer of fiery, blistered Padrón peppers, prinked with lime and sea salt, he whipped up a classic Margherita pizza — flour and water for the dough, tomato and mozzarella for the topping — pizza cheese “al fresco,” as he calls it. It took around two minutes to bake.

This simplicity of the process belies the resulting texture and superb flavor, but it is also the starting point for professional or home pizzaiole (pizza cooks) to get creative. “As the industry leader,” says Peter de Jong, it’s our responsibility to inspire chefs to think about pizza in a whole new way. (Hopper’s) expertise and vision will bring our clients much more than just pizza recipes. He’ll bring them opportunity.” And to prove it, next out of the oven is a cast-aluminum pan of roasted day boat scallops, prepared with spring asparagus, oysters mushrooms, pickled ramps and garden lemon thyme. It’s a multilayered, deeply sublime dish, the fat scallops firm to the touch yet yielding, the asparagus and ramps fresh and still crisp despite the high heat. As we savor the bivalves, Giarratano confirms that Hopper cooks steaks, chicken, fish, bread — even makes breakfast — in the pizza ovens. The possibilities are limited only by imagination and flair. Hopper, meanwhile, puts it more succinctly. “Thomas Keller didn’t teach me how to cook,” he says. “He taught me how to think.” For more, visit forzaforni.com.

Presents

Floral Design Workshops Nature is Your Canvas Friday, June 18, 2021 7 PM - 9 PM

Late Summer Flourish Wednesday, September 15, 2021 7 PM - 9 PM

Winter Wreaths Friday, December 10, 2021 7 PM - 9 PM Speaker: Steve Ricker Westmoreland Sanctuary’s Director of Conservation Workshop Coordinator: Nadia Ghannam Over 20 years of working in the arts and museum field.

Call (914) 666-8448 or visit westmorelandsanctuary.org to register 260 Chestnut Ridge Road, Mount Kisco NY 10549 Virtual or in-person based on NY state COVID-19 Guidelines MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

Vintology Wine & Spirits in Scarsdale is a good example of the versatile sophistication of oenophiles, particularly in our Covid times. Courtesy Vintology Wine & Spirits.

not your parents’ wine stores anymore

BY DOUG PAULDING

y parents were not big wine people and in the 1960s and ’70s there were not a lot of options for buying wine. In Massachusetts at the time, the only place to buy wine was at a state licensed liquor store, known as a package store, or locally and colloquially, as a packy. My parents would go in, check out a limited selection in their modest price range and buy. There was little discussion with sales clerks about structure, length or fruitiness. It was more like, “This should do the trick.” Today, most every wine store is staffed by knowledgeable and probably wine- and spirit-certified owners and salespeople who can guide the buyer to a satisfying purchase. Many stores offer small sample tastings to fine-tune preferences, or at least they did pre-Covid. They also have written wine descriptions and perhaps a rating for

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most wines in the store. As Dean Morretta, career wine & spirits guy and proprietor of Vintology Wine & Spirits in Scarsdale, told me, “We taste and select every wine in the store. We offer great wines at a very attractive price. We work hard at it. We are tough tasters and must agree on each bottle. We truly care about what we sell. We have relationships with our customers and they trust us. I like to steer someone to something they might not choose but that I know is right for their palate and flavor profile preference.” (Vintology, at 2 Palmer Ave., also offers curbside service and same-day delivery.) Buying wine online directly from the winery is a relatively new concept and it cuts out a middle supplier or two. Most stores and winery-direct purchases will offer a case discount, but shipping costs could undo the discount. And now there myriad wine clubs to discover to meet your

interests. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both offer wine-buying clubs at NYTwineclub.com and WSJwine.com respectively. In each of these clubs, you can choose your wine preferences, your pricing and your monthly bottle amount desired. Their experts will assemble a package to meet your desires, complete with tasting notes and food pairing recipes. Most of these clubs have a teaser welcome pricing to familiarize yourself with their concepts. And most clubs have a money back guarantee if you’re not satisfied. Many universities and colleges have their own wine clubs, too, developed as fundraisers for some type of program. And then there are online wine buying websites that tend to morph from humble beginnings to a more dynamic site in time. Wines Till Sold Out (WTSO.com), wine.com and winemag.com are a few sites that will offer great deals, often discounted well below what a store can do, but then again, delivery costs approaching $50 per case might offset online savings. The site I am particularly attracted to is undergroundcellars.com. It offers catchy names for wine groupings like Red Blend Maestros, Influential Italy, Unbeatable Cabernets or Globe Spanning Grenache, and you can purchase a bottle or two or a six pack or a case. Early on you create a profile with your color preferences, grapes desired and regional interests. When you buy, the site will upgrade some or all of your picks to better (sometimes much better) and higher priced wines. It will store up to 500 bottles in its climate-controlled warehouse for you and provide free shipping for 12 bottles. When I am ready for another batch of wine, I go to my account on the site and choose the Quick Pick option where it will randomly assemble a case of wine I have purchased. Or I can personally select the wines I want from my e-cellar. I find it to be educational and fun as I often taste wines I wouldn’t be able to find or likely would not have chosen. So however you manage to purchase your wine, maintain an open mind on other options. In these Covid times all purveyors of wine have had to reinvent themselves to some degree and introduce new buying concepts. Your computer is a quick and easy way to buy. But if you find yourself passing through Scarsdale, stop in and meet Morretta at Vintology Wine and Spirits. He will ask a few questions and match you up with something well-priced and special. Tell him Doug sent you. Write me at doug@dougpaulding.com.

See Africa as only an insider can Bring your camera and learn how to capture some amazing moments. 10-DAY KENYA SAFARI, NOVEMBER 2021 africaphototours.com MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

PAN-SEARED SALMON WITH PURPLE CABBAGE THORAN RICE

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Add salmon steaks and coat well with the marinade, letting this sit overnight in the refrigerator or at least two hours. In a pan add coconut oil and once hot add the salmon steaks and fry 3 to 5 minutes on one side, flip them, cover and cook on low heat for another 2 to 3 minutes. Once cooked, set aside on a paper towel to drain the excess oil.

WHAT’S COOKING?

FOOD & SPIRITS

FOR THE SALMON Ingredients 2 salmon steaks ¼ cup tamarind juice or lime juice 3 teaspoons onion powder 2 teaspoons garlic powder ½ teaspoon ginger powder ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon pepper powder 1 teaspoon Kashmiri chili powder ½ teaspoonturmeric powder 2 tablespoons coconut oil

introducing cabbage thoran BY RAJNI MENON In South India, cabbage is popular and widely used in thoran, a finely cut vegetable stir-fry dish, lightly seasoned with mustard seeds, curry leaves, green chilies and coconut. Vegetables like cabbage, beans and beets are cut into small pieces, then sautéd with other spices along with grated coconut. Thoran is usually served on feasts like weddings or other celebrations in Kerala. Here’s my version of cabbage thoran with purple cabbage and pan-seared salmon.

PURPLE CABBAGE THORAN RICE Ingredients 1 cup basmati rice, cooked 2 cups purple cabbage ½ cup white onions, chopped fine ¼ teaspoon cumin seeds 2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon black pepper 2 cloves of garlic, minced ½ cup fresh cilantro leaves, chopped fine Instructions In a pan heat coconut oil and add cumin seeds and then onions. Sauté for 2 minutes.Now add in minced garlic and sauté for 30 seconds. Add in the purple cabbage, salt and pepper. On low heat, cover and cook for about 5 to 6 minutes. Add in the cooked rice, cilantro leaves and mix well. The rice is ready to be served with pan- seared salmon. For more, visit creativerajni.com.

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TRAVEL

P. 76 That old maine magic

P. 80 Travel treats for mom

P. 82 Anguilla’s laidback charm

that old maine magic BY JEREMY WAYNE

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Bar at Hidden Pond Kennebunkport’s Serenity Pool. Courtesy Hidden Pond Kennebunkport.

“How many lions can you put in an empty cage?” went the old schoolkids teaser. “Just one, of course, because, after that, the cage isn’t empty.” I think of this wonderful piece of logic whenever I hear the expression “best-kept secret,” which in the travel trade is a term used so much it has lost all meaning. After all, once a secret is divulged, especially in print or online, it is by definition a secret no more – always supposing it was one worth discovering in the first place.

Treehouse lodge, daybed, at Hidden Pond Kennebunkport. Photograph by Jeff Roberts Imaging.

Five miles away from the hordes of downtown Kennebunkport, Maine, sitting on 60 acres of pristine birch forest, Hidden Pond cannot claim to be a secret, but it is certainly a gem — and the pond remains stubbornly out of view. (Read on.) Opened in 2008 and expanded a few years later, the accommodations comprise two-bedroom cottages and one-bedroom bungalows, as well as 10 new treetop lodges — one of them created by the Boston-based designer, Todd Snyder — which were launched last summer. With each lodge containing a studio and a one-bedroom suite, guests have the option of booking one or both rooms, making them ideal for both couples and families, or even a luxurious retreat for one. Budding novelists requiring peace and quiet, take note.

Hidden Pond is not so much a riff on a traditional Maine camp as a modern reworking of it. One thing Maine is not short of is pine and birch forest, and Hidden Pond has certainly gone to town in the timber department. While essentially an outdoorsy enterprise, the design of the lodges — where branches and twigs play a tremendous part in the overall look — brings the outdoors right in, and the resort celebrates nature while at the same time being cozy and supremely comfortable inside. Comfort takes many forms. In the sumptuous treetop lodges, there are screened porches with daybeds; superbly comfortable beds; Frette linens; rich woolen throws and indoor and outdoor showers. And after comfort, come other amenities and bonuses, like floor to ceiling stone fireplaces; brand new, state-of-of-the-art drawer fridges; coffee-makers and tea kettles; and Malin + Goetz bath products. And let’s not forget the homemade whoopie pies the size of flying saucers, which are offered as welcome treats. Even the mild, smoky scent of the accommodations, the natural scent of wood, adds authenticity and reinforces the unmistakable sense of place. The resort boasts two pools. The fam-

ily pool at the Main Lodge isn’t huge, but it is well-situated in the center of the resort right next to the main lodge, and it is fun. Little kids can splash around here all day, while their doting parents look on and strike up new friendships. Like everywhere at Hidden Pond, the mood is laidback and family-orientated. Behind the family pool, in the large garden, there’s Ping-Pong along with other games, which keep older kids amused. Everyone seems to be permanently in a good mood. One of the great pleasures of Hidden Pond, though, is the adults-only Serenity Pool, situated between the resort restaurant, Earth, and the Treetop Spa. Tranquil both by name and nature, this is an absolutely dreamy spot, more redolent of some exclusive and eye-wateringly expensive boutique hotel in Provence than cool, coastal Maine. It is a quiet and private area. Vast amphoras of sweet-smelling petunias between the socially-distanced chaises longues fill the air with a glorious scent, while luxurious beach towels (each one individually-wrapped) are in plentiful supply. With the water a perfect 79 degrees, it is hard to imagine a more relaxed or cosseting setting. A great add-on is the small outdoor bar, which was shuttered last year

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

Firepit at Earth, Hidden Pond Kennebunkport’s romantic restaurant. Courtesy Hidden Pond Kennebunkport.

during Covid but is set to reopen at the start of the upcoming season. Make mine a strawberry daiquiri, will you? A third swimming option — indeed, the very reason lots of folks head to Maine in the first place — is the beach. Just two miles from Hidden Pond, 3-mile-long Goose Rocks Beach, with is gracious curve and gentle surf, is arguably the loveliest beach in Kennebunkport. The hotel will shuttle you there pretty much on demand, or provide you with a coveted parking permit if you make your own way with your own car. No permit needed if you walk or run, though, or head over on one of the resort’s beach cruiser bikes, which are loaned to guests individually on request for the duration of their stay. Then again, you may care for neither the beach nor the pool, nor happen to be

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remotely outdoorsy, in which case Hidden Pond works just fine, too. Each unit houses a veritable treasure trove of books, so you could happily while away a week or two in your clubby leather armchair in front of the fire, absorbing the classics perhaps or getting stuck into some of the more idiosyncratic tomes (“A Review of Coal Mining in South Wales During World War II” proved a surprisingly riveting read.) If you’re an artist, budding or established, you will find an artists’ hut at your disposal, complete with materials, adjoining the organic farm and kitchen garden, while keen or novice gardeners can “Meet the Gardener” and take an eye-opening hypertufa (potted limestone rock) workshop in Hidden Pond’s utterly charming potting shed. Covid protocols were already well-established when I was a guest at Hidden Pond last summer, but they have been updated for the new season. While at this point masks still need to be worn around the property and full housekeeping service remains suspended (clean linens and other requisites can be left outside each unit on request,) this year it will be busi-

ness as usual, barring any unforeseen developments. Regular check-in will resume, the Main Lodge will be open and bar life — in my view so essential a part of any vacay — will return. Last but not least, the deeply romantic restaurant Earth is open for dinner every evening. I absolutely love this restaurant, with its tables dotted around the pool, near the firepit, in open-sided cabanas and on the terraces overlooking the eponymous — whisper this — hidden pond, the entire area lit by candles at night. Earth is a much more sophisticated proposition than the crab shacks and casual fish houses by the water in downtown Kennebunkport, but be warned: Like Hidden Pond itself, it fills up very quickly. Make reservations well in advance to feast on dishes like Chef Joseph Schafer’s wood-fired carrots or his smoky, deep-flavored leg of lamb. I promise you this: Whether you stay for a night or a month, or whether you simply come to Hidden Pond for dinner at Earth, That old Maine magic will have you under its spell. For more, go to hiddenpondmaine. com.

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

AVAILAB JMS BOO LE AUG. 12KS

Part of ArtsWestchester’s “Together apART: Creating During COVID” (May 7 through Aug. 1) FROM WAG’S EDITOR COMES A BRIEF TALE OF LOVE AND LOSS IN THE TIME OF CORONA THEGAMESMENPLAY.COM MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

BY DEBBI KICKHAM

travel treats for mom

With Mother’s Day set for May 9 and travel beginning to open up, mom will love these globetrotting goodies:

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Vested interest — This travelfriendly, double-breasted vest from M. M. LaFleur elevates your favorite T-shirt. Fabric-covered buttons create a sleek look, while pockets offer a place to stash your business cards and easy tailoring makes it summer-friendly. $195. mmlafleur.com

Gorgeous From Ghana — The NETT exfoliator cloth is Ghana's best-kept beauty secret and has been an essential part of bathing culture for decades. The fine-net texture is perfect for maintaining smooth, beautifully soft skin and the length and shape is great for getting to those hard-to-reach places. All NETTs are sourced from Ghana, directly from the market stalls (not wholesalers) which pays a fair price to support these stall holders. $35 each. mynettex.com

Animal Planet — Travel memories are the gift that keep on giving, so why not book a spectacular safari for Mom? Black Panther Safaris Inc. (with an office in Greenwich) caters to a niche clientele that seeks luxurious and meaningful travel. The company provides transformational safaris to Tanzania, the only home of the Serengeti, Mt. Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar. Black Panther will curate safaris for private clients in the metro area and create a simple way for you to book your bucket list. Trips range from seven to 16 days and cover journeys perfect for teens, couples, families, milestone celebrants and cultural enthusiasts. Eight days start at $7,689 per person. blackpanthersafaris.com

La Dolce Vita — What’s the next best thing to being in Rome? Eating like a Roman. Mom can enjoy authentic food experiences at home with the Eatales Italian Subscription Box, where cheese, grappa, truffles and the sky is the limit. Each box is packed with Italian delicacies and accompanied by a live virtual tour that features locally produced Italian food, wine and treats, delivered anywhere in the world. With the Liquirizia: Amarelli Museum Live Virtual Tour, for example, you will “visit,” through live streaming, the Giorgio Amarelli Museum and Factory Store and see one of the most important made-in-Italy products — Amarelli licorice. Its history dates back to 1731. Your box comes with five products based on licorice ingredients, including anisette and lemon sweets. $70. shengoxp.com

Beauty Sleep At 25,000 Feet — Coco & Eve makes beautiful satin pillowcases that assure that your hair wakes up frizz-free, while the company’s eyeshades will have mom dreaming of faraway destinations. (I’m yawning already.) Beauty Sleep Bundle - $35.80. us.cocoandeve.com

Jeepers Creepers, mom will be crazy about Peepers, a fourthgeneration, family-run company that makes chic, upbeat eyewear and is a favorite of Oprah Winfrey’s. Peeper’s products are available as prescription readers, blue light and sunglasses to stash in your suitcase, so you can look great everywhere from Cancun to Cairo. $25. peepers.com

Bold New Brows — If Mom wasn’t blessed with big bold brows, it’s Factor Five Eye and Lash Cream to the rescue. This do-it-all eye cream helps reduce wrinkles and other signs of aging with human derived stem-cell growth factors while Biotin and Redensyl help stimulate brow and eyelash growth. Stash it in your Samsonite for beauty-on-the-go. $149. factorfiveskin.com

Say Cheese – Mpix offers professional quality prints and personalized photo items that showcase travel memories in a unique way. The Mpix photo lab is what sets it apart, with its photo blankets, mugs, calendars and magnets being just a few fan favorites. The “statuettes” are completely adorable and a fabulous way to “freezeframe” a special moment of any trip. Statuettes start at $19.99. Use code WAG2521 to receive a 25% discount through May 15. mpix.com

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

anguilla’s laidback charm BY BARBARA BARTON SLOANE

Anguilla is a British overseas island territory that is tucked away in the northern Caribbean and nestled around unrivaled white beaches and deeply turquoise seas. It is casual and easy, a blend of high style and low-key elegance with a people who are one of its best features. Anguillans are genial and friendly. They take pride in their rich culture, their home and the pleasure of sharing it with visitors from around the world.

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AUNT BEA, UNCLE ERNIE — JUST ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY Throughout my visit, it was not unusual to hear Anguillans greet me with a friendly “hello” and, not long after that, we often got to know each other by name. Aunt Bea is a name I won’t soon forget. A well-known presence on Shoal Bay, this adorable lady was often found under the shade of the sea grapes across from Uncle Ernie's where she would sit and sew the colorful handmade dolls that she sold on the beach. I bought a pretty doll attired in yellow, green and pink, my favorite memento of both the place and the lady. And where and what is Uncle Ernie’s? A well-known Shoal Bay beach bar, one of the most famous eateries in Anguilla, the bar dates from 1984, opened by the late Ernest Benjamin (Uncle Ernie). Today it remains a family affair now operated by his daughters and a nephew. I ordered the barbecue chicken and the signature rum punch — a very good choice. Anguilla is a mere 30 minutes away by ferry from bustling St. Maarten and a few minutes by plane from high and mighty St. Barths. Comparisons are futile because Anguilla is, well, different — in a good way. Just three miles wide and 27 miles long, the country is flat and dotted with scrub and small salt ponds. Wild donkeys and

Anguilla. Courtesy Sloane

Travel Photography. 83 MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

The CuisinArt Golf Resort & Spa was once owned by Leandro Rizzuto, co-founder of Stamford-based Conair Corp.

goats wander freely, adding their particular earthy charm. The island traces its ancestry back to the time of the Arawak Indians and their spirit continues to offer a haven of laidback charm that is hard to come by on most other Caribbean islands. It still enjoys the reputation of being somewhat under the radar, serene among its touristy, trinket-hawking neighbors — this despite some changes made, actually plenty of them within the recent past. A GENTLE ISLAND This serenity has not come about haphazardly but thanks to a forward-planning government intent on protecting the country’s culture and beaches. Anguilla banned large cruise ships and towering hotels, and although it’s a haunt for many bold-faced names, you wouldn’t know it. Locals are remarkably unfazed and treat glitterati like everyone else. The original, small airport’s runway has been lengthened to handle private jets, and a large port has been built to accommodate yachts like the SeaDream and SeaBourn. Serenity was most definitely not the order of the day, however, a few years back when Hurricane Irma blew through Anguilla, severely damaging homes, hotels, restaurants, resorts and the glorious gardens and lush vegetation that this island is known for. Happily, things grow fast in the

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Caribbean. With that and extraordinary onthe-ground relief efforts, Anguilla is back in business once more. YOUR INVITATION TO EXHALE I guested for a few days on Rendezvous Beach at the spectacular CuisinArt Golf Resort & Spa, once owned by Leandro Rizzuto, co-founder of the Stamford-based Conair Corp. and thus the man behind Cuisinart. (Daughter Babe was WAG’s first cover when the magazine was reintroduced in 2011.) It makes sense as the Cuisinart name is synonymous with a gourmet lifestyle. Integral to this property is its soilless hydroponic garden farm where plants are grown using a mixture of nutrients and water — and nothing else. (The resort’s new owner, Best Buy founder Richard Schulze, is planning to upgrade it.) The foods grown here are harvested and served at their restaurants the same day under the watchful eye of Dino Jagtiani, CuisinArt’s new executive chef. Well-respected in the Caribbean, he said he is grateful to be in Anguilla, heading the kitchen at CuisinArt. And why not? This resort puts you in mind of Mykonos. A white-sugar beach surrounded by cubic-shaped, Mediterranean style villas blaze brilliant white in the sun. My room was done in vibrant Caribbean colors and offered a spectacular view of the grounds and the bright blue sea beyond. My

balcony was the ideal place for morning coffee or a pre-dinner cocktail. I put it to good use. I dined at Santorini, the crown jewel of CuisinArt’s culinary offerings, both Mediterranean and Caribbean. And although there were many activities to check out, I was most content lazing poolside. Whenever I thought I should rouse myself for a little tennis or snorkeling, I quickly thought better of it. I was perfect just where I was, thank you. FEELING IS BELIEVING As the island continues to develop, it is not on its way to becoming the Caribbean Southampton anytime soon. We can take comfort in the fact that some things never change. Its water is still azure and crystal-clear; its sands are white and powder-soft; the sky remains an irresistible, cerulean blue; and the Anguillan people are still kind, gracious and eager to welcome you to their special island paradise. Indeed, they have a saying here: Feeling is believing. I’ve felt Anguilla’s soothing sun as I lazed in a hammock. I’ve felt its sparkling ocean breeze as I walked the beach. And I’ve definitely felt the good vibes of its people. I’m a believer. For more, visit ivisitanguilla.com and cuisineartresort.com. And for Covid updates, visit Anguilla-beaches.com.

WELLNESS

P. 86 Strong but loving, a maternal tradition

P. 88 A new approach to shoulder replacement

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

or look for attention. She’s earned it just by being herself.

strong but loving, a maternal tradition BY GIOVANNI ROSELLI

“Mothers hold their children’s hands for a short while but their hearts forever.” — Unknown

here was a situation going on a few years back with our family and everyone was emotional about it to the point of tears. However, I remember my mom being the only one who wasn’t crying. Her response: “Someone has to be the strong one.” And that’s exactly who she is. And where did she get it from? Her mother, of course — my grandmother Rose Tota. I had a very close relationship with my grandmother, and she passed along all her amazing traits to her daughter, which in turn always made me very close to both of them. A lot of people would often see everyone in my family take such good care of my grandmother and have so much respect and love for her that they would ask her, “How do you get everyone to take such good care of you all time?” Her answer was easy, “Because I took really good care of them.” My mother and grandmother raised me and my sisters “old school” — tough when necessary, understanding when needed and loving always. This in addition to being supportive and loving spouses to my father and grandfather always.

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SHE CAN DO IT ALL My mother is the type of person who never complains — about anything. Whether she is feeling under the weather, frustrated with one of her children or just simply tired and exhausted, you would never know the difference. My mother wouldn’t be the one who reaches out for help. She would always be the one who was helping everyone else. A family member going in for some type of surgery or procedure? She is always the calmest one, even if it was her going in for the procedure. Posting a social media rant? My mother doesn’t even have an email address and just graduated from a flip phone. She doesn’t have time for that nonsense, nor does it demonstrate a beneficial example. For years she would be the bookkeeper for my father and uncle’s gas station and auto mechanic business, while raising three children, driving everyone around where he or she needed to go, having a home cooked meal on the table every night, keeping the house tidy and still, of course, taking care of her mother. She leads by example. She never needs to ask for respect

MOM KNOWS BEST Looking back on my life up to this point, the expression “mom knows best” really does ring true to me. She wasn’t just there to support me, raise me and love me. She taught me early on about important life skills, such as how to manage and save money. At the time, it really didn’t seem too important as to why I was opening up a retirement account when I was a teenager. Well, looking back now I’m glad she did. Coming as no surprise, I immediately opened up a college fund 529 plan for my daughter when she was born and many gifts she’s been given has been in for the form of stocks. While it’s fun getting some toys and games as a kid, it wasn’t much fun getting stocks and bonds as gifts when I was young. That’s until you become an adult and realize that the stock you received goes a lot further than the video game. Yes, I truly understand the expression, “You’ll appreciate and understand this when you get older.” THE ROCK OF THE FAMILY My Uncle Charlie, my mom’s brother, was giving one of his many speeches years ago and it has still really stuck with me. He was honored countless times over the years for his work with the Antonio Meucci Lodge in White Plains. I couldn’t have been more than 12 years old, so this was almost 30 years ago. He went through our family thanking everyone and saved his sister towards the end. He called her “the glue that holds our family together.” I’ve never forgotten that, and over the years I’ve come to realize and appreciate just how true that statement really is. How many of you can relate that your mom is the glue to your family? So here’s to my mom, and all the wonderful, caring, loving mothers out there. This article pales in comparison to the appreciation and gratitude that you deserve, but it is recognition that I can provide nonetheless, thanks to WAG. And yes, I’ll always be your little boy and will always send you your favorite yellow roses every birthday and Mother’s Day. Wishing all the readers continued safety and health as we continue to pull ourselves out of the pandemic. Happy Mother’s Day. Feel free to reach out to me at Gio@ giovanniroselli.com.

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Nationally certified and recognized fitness trainer and Precision Nutrition coach. • Mention this WAG Magazine ad and receive 20% OFF the program. As a thank you, veterans receive 50% OFF. • Daily nutritional habits and reminders guide you through your transformation. • Workouts come complete with videos and modifications specific to the individual. • At the end of the program, if not completely satisfied, you will receive a full refund. Visit www.GiovanniRoselli.com for more info or contact him directly at Gio@GiovanniRoselli.com.

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

The Barcelona Open, as seen in the spring of 2019. Tennis is a sport that puts tremendous pressure on the shoulders. But new advances in shoulder joint repair make recovery quicker and easier, particularly for the athletic.

a new approach to shoulder replacement BY ALEJANDRO BADIA, M.D.

dvances in repair of the shoulder’s ball-andsocket joint are making partial joint replacement rather than total joint replacement a more viable option for a growing number of patients. Moreover, this type of joint replacement is ideal for the growing movement toward outpatient surgery. Partial shoulder joint replacement, particularly with a stemless implant is less invasive than total joint replacement, preserves natural bone, allows for quicker recovery and, thanks to new technologies, is becoming an increasingly successful, long-term solution for disorders that cause shoulder pain and loss of function. One of those “new technologies” is the Catalyst CSR Total Shoulder System, featuring a stemless, nonspherical implant and patented instrumentation that can be used for partial or total joint replacements for patients of all ages. The implant’s accuracy has been found to recreate a shoulder’s natural center of rotation better, which could minimize risk of failed joint repairs caused by misaligned shoulder implants. Until now, total joint replacement has been the gold standard for treating shoulder-joint problems that have not responded

WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021

to conservative therapies. But during the past several years, we have seen the emergence of revolutionary technologies like the Catalyst CSR system. These advanced tools allow us as surgeons to restore the biomechanics of the shoulder with minimally invasive, bone-sparing approaches on an outpatient basis. Indeed, mounting research evidence suggests that partial shoulder replacement, where only the “ball” part of the ball-andsocket joint is replaced, may be a preferred alternative for maintaining shoulder-joint viability in more active and athletic patients. As these patients maintain their activity and their joint implants wear, they may require future joint surgery, which will be much more easily and successfully performed because their earlier procedure with an implant like the Catalyst CSR has left more of their natural bone intact. Injury, osteoarthritis, post-trauma arthritis and avascular necrosis (reduced blood flow to the shoulder causing deterioration of bone) are all disorders that can compromise shoulder-joint cartilage. It is this cartilage that creates the smooth surface on which the ball at the top of the forearm — the humerus — can glide readily within the shoulder blade socket, or glenoid. Loss of this cartilage leads to shoulder pain, swell-

ing, stiffness and decreased range of motion. Total joint replacement requires cutting away bone to accommodate an implant with a stem that anchors it at the top of the humerus and replacing scapula bone with a prosthesis. In a partial joint replacement procedure with a stemless implant, the surgeon simply clears the diseased area from the ball of the humerus and then caps it with a metallic (cobalt chromium) component that fits into the glenoid socket, restoring the normal anatomy of the joint. In some instances, the surgeon may have to reshape a damaged glenoid. In a 2019 issue of the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Arthroplasty, scientists report positive results in new shoulder replacement techniques that rely on specially designed, nonspherical elements — like that provided by the Catalyst system. These implants, authors say, cap the ball at the top of a diseased forearm bone — the humerus — with high precision, preserving the bone’s anatomical relationship with the glenoid, the socket of the shoulder blade and allowing little deviation of the joint during shoulder movement. Other advantages of partial shoulder replacement: The procedure is more conservative than total joint replacement, requires a smaller incision, results in less pain, offers quicker recovery and the implant may prolong the function of the joint and help the patient avoid future total shoulder joint replacement. Patients who undergo partial shoulder replacement with a stemless implant are driving a car within a matter of weeks and, within a few months, back to golfing, tennis or other athletic activities. Not every shoulder patient is a candidate for partial joint replacement, however. Total joint replacement or reverse shoulder arthroplasty may be necessary if the patient is of advanced age or the shoulder disorder involves a rotator cuff tear; structural damage — like a fracture -- to the ball-and-socket joint; or presence of extensive disease, including inflammatory arthritis, osteonecrosis and post-injury degeneration of the joint. Alejandro Badia, M.D., FACS, is a hand and upper-limb surgeon and founder of Badia Hand to Shoulder Center and OrthoNOW, a network of walk-in orthopedic centers. He is the author of “Healthcare From the Trenches.” For more, visit orthonowcare.com and for more on Catalyst OrthoScience, visit CatalystOrtho.com.

WAG THE TAIL P. 90 Garden perils for pets

P. 92 Understanding puppyhood

P. 94 Wildlife worries solved

P. 96 A second chance at love

garden perils for pets BY GINA GOUVEIA

No season beckons quite like spring in the Northeast. The air is sweeter, signs of nature’s beauty unfurl daily and we can’t get outside fast enough, often with furry friends in tow. Whether in the park or just your own backyard, a savvy pet parent should be aware of the hidden perils that can cause disruption to an animal’s health, from mild gastrointestinal flareups and allergy symptoms to life-threatening issues. 90

WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021

Educating yourself and preparation are keys to success, so first we turned to a knowledgeable, third-generation veterinary practitioner — Jessica Malman, D.V.M., of Bespoke Veterinary Services — to weigh in on toxins, pests and allergies. In our conversation with Malman, who offers custom, mobile veterinary services throughout Fairfield County, it becomes apparent that there is much more outdoors to be wary of than your pooch munching on a random flower. First, at home, there’s the environment at large. Her recommendation? “Do not avoid treating your property with pesti-

cides. You may be doing your pet more harm than good if you don’t,” she says. The benefits of mitigating ticks and other harmful insects far outweigh the need to treat an animal once it has contracted Lyme's disease or heartworm. She suggests taking the advice of an expert landscaper or lawn service professional for guidance, being sure to inform him that you have pets. He will recommend the right course of treatment and advise on how long to keep pets off treated areas. When it comes to getting into garden trouble, puppies lead the list, but adult dogs and cats are also attracted to a host

A Jack Russell Terrier helps weed the garden of dangerous plants. Most pets, however, would be sampling the botanicals rather than raking, so pet parents need to be vigilant when outdoors with their charges.

BE INFORMED ABOUT PET POISONS ASPCA The ASPCA compiles an annual list of the Top Ten toxins for pets and runs a campaign to educate the public about these dangers every March during National Poison Prevention Week. The organization provides a service to pet owners via a toll-free number to its Animal Poison Control Center (888-426-4435) that provides 24/7 access to trained veterinary staff to guide you through toxic reactions. Its website contains exhaustive lists of substances beyond the garden that can be poisonous to animals. aspca.org/news/ official-top-10-pet-toxins-2020 CORNELL UNIVERSITY VETERINARY SPECIALISTS This organization offers 24/7 in-person emergency care and specialty veterinary services at its facility in Stamford. CUVS also offers online education animal wellness webinars on topics ranging from pet first aid and CPR to more acute illnesses. cuvs.org/

of plants and garden materials, from sticks and mulch to flowers and grass. Sometimes, Malman says, you won’t see symptoms of an adverse reaction for a while. Often, your pets will likely ingest something while you’re not looking, so you won’t necessarily know the cause of the problem. Even with a watchful eye, their quick actions may go unnoticed. “I had a case last week where a dog ate something unknown and then the owner observed her pet repeatedly making a swallowing motion. I advised her to offer water to clear the mouth of any irritation, and even offering a small amount of bland

food can help, too.” But at any sign of distress, Malman advocates checking with your veterinarian for the proper course of action. Other symptoms may be present, including the obvious ones like vomiting and diarrhea, and the not so obvious ones like excessive drooling, smacking the lips together or trying to bring something up. There are far too many plants and flowers that can cause GI upset and other issues to list them all here, ranging from aloe vera and daffodils to hollies and hydrangea. In fact, a deep dive on the ASPCA website reveals a copious list of toxic plants and plant materials, with 416 varieties of plants are listed under the canine section alone. (See sidebar.) By far, Malman says, mushrooms are among the most threatening toxins in the garden and surrounding woodlands. And with so many varieties in nature, some

quite toxic, they can produce harmful effects on our pets, so best to steer your pets clear of potentially dangerous fungi. Other plants and garden materials like mulch are attractive to animals and do pose some health risks, but mostly, these will result in a mild to moderate GI upset. Other considerations for pets spending time outdoors are allergies and insect bites. Like humans, dogs, too, can have several allergies, but their symptoms may be quite different from ours. “We will have itchy, watery eyes and sneeze, but dogs and cats will manifest allergic reactions through their skin,” Malman says. Accordingly, we may see pets doing a lot of itching and licking. Brown staining, caused by pet saliva and seen around the paw area, is usually a sign of heavy licking. Also, look for excessive ear and body itching, patchy hair loss, or the animal rubbing his head on the ground. All point to signs of irritation from allergic reactions, like dermatitis and ear infections. Again, leave it to the professionals to diagnose and advise the right course of action for your pet, be it topical, oral or both, depending on the cause and severity. “If you know your pet has allergies, you can get ahead of it beforehand,” Malman says. She suggests addressing these issues ahead of the peak season with your vet, who can prescribe some preemptive remedies like allergy injections or medicated shampoos and other treatments to keep pets more comfortable before problems start. Lastly, animals, especially those who go outdoors, should be treated for fleas and ticks, but this will not guarantee immunity to the occasional insect bite. Look for a swollen muzzle or red spots, which are indicators of allergic reactions to bites. “Dogs, in particular, love rolling around on the ground,” Malman adds, “and they can get bitten by spiders and other garden insects.” Still, none of this should be a deterrent to enjoying walks, trails and your own backyard with your pets. Proper education, prevention and keen observation of their behavior should ensure a happy and safe time for all. For more, visit bespokevetservice.com.

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

A one-day-old Rhodesian Ridgeback lies on a paw of his mother. “Dogs are born with their noses open,” WAG Follow My Lead columnist Cristina Losapio writes. “Around 14 days later their eyes open and around 21 days after that, their ears open.”

understanding puppyhood

BY CRISTINA LOSAPIO

ou would think the first thing you would learn when you take a group puppy class is how dogs are born into this world. But I did not find this out until years after I adopted my first dog. It blew my mind. Dogs are born with their noses open. Around 14 days later their eyes open and around 21 days after that, their ears open. A female dog’s gestation period is around 63 days until the litter is born. From newborn to eight weeks, puppies should be with their mom and litter mates. Eight to nine weeks is this time that the puppies are ready to go to their forever home. Between eight and 16 weeks as well as 16 weeks to eight months, your puppy will go through some pretty important imprinting stages. He will study everything we do and don’t do, every reaction and overreaction and overall how we handle ourselves. This is the part where I remind everyone that a puppy is a canine, not a human child and if we are not honoring a puppy as a dog, we can get into some muddy water. Within this very important imprinting

WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021

time, your puppy will have moments he may perceive as scary but are actually not, and it’s up to us to show him the way. If we follow the laws of nature, this is how it would play out. We introduce the dog to everything first using the nose. Meaning we let him smell everyone and everything without layering so much talking and touching. We honor our dog and follow mother nature’s path. Yes, it’s a cute puppy that is so beautiful and little, but we have to honor the dog first by letting him use his nose. When we do pet our puppy, it’s not fast and over the head and for long periods of time. And when we talk to our dog, it’s not yelling and speaking in a squeaky, crazy voice making the kissy sound a thousand times. I see this all happening backwards so many times, and it’s just because we do not know. Families bring a puppy home and they are all passing the puppy around — talking fast, petting all over and not realizing that they are putting self before puppy's needs. Something to think about. I would make a list of all new firsts for your puppy to practice using the nose.

Think of breaking down every single step out of everything that you do throughout the day. Putting a new garbage bag into the can, opening the washing machine, opening the oven. If nose builds confidence and then eyes create curiosity and ears are not fazed, then you have enabled your dog to embrace that item. You can then add encouragement by saying “check it out” or “good job.” You can give a pet a pat on the side body or under the chin if your puppy finds that desirable. The timing of when to use food is when the dog is being curious. If maybe he’s on the cusp of being curious, you can place the food down to help shift him to being curious. If you are using food, it’s best to have it not come from something he can hear or see. So many times a dog is using his nose and then you open a loud bag of treats that interrupts the moment. This type of practice takes patience and discipline, putting a dog’s needs first. As your dog builds confidence, then you add more distractions and go to different places to do more exposure to our world of chaos. Write things down on what you are working on. You may find that opening the dishwasher was a nonevent and then one day your puppy became extra bold and wanted to go into the dishwasher. So now you are working on limits and boundaries but that’s another conversation. Most important is to be present, have fun and sprinkle encouragement along the way. SOME TIPS TO REMEMBER: When we show a puppy what we want, being clear and using one word while the behavior is happening works best. Always check in with yourself. Are you rushing through something, do you need more time, do you need help? If we don’t check in with ourselves, we are not being honest and that will not help the situation. Are we breathing, actually breathing? When my puppy does solicit affection, I like to say one breath in and out. On the breath in, we center ourselves and on the breath out, we can pet down the back of the puppy or under the chest. So the out-breath can be whatever you want but, let's say inbreath three seconds and out-breath three seconds. Short, relaxed and sweet. For more, contact Cristina at Trail Dog Inc., 914-755-1153.

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Most of us in these parts have a somewhat fleeting experience, usually, with the numerous species of undomesticated animals that exist in our yards or nearby outdoor environs. Not uncommon sightings are squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits and racoons. Occasionally, just after dark, bats dart through the night sky and at dawn or dusk, deer can be spotted grazing on our lawns or in a distant meadow. Some may even spy a fox, possum, coyote and even a black bear, the most common variety found in this geographic region.

wildlife worries solved BY GINA GOUVEIA

Courtesy Jim Dreisacker/ Westchester Wildlife LLC.

WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021

With certain animals in the wild, particularly those that invade or threaten human and small animal habitats, the need for expert intervention may be required, especially when they can cause damage to structures by inhabiting them or wreaking havoc in a garden. Surfing the internet and taking matters of intervention with nature into our own hands may not often be the best course of action. In other words, best to seek the advice and services of those who work with homeowners and can offer solutions. We spoke with Jim Dreisacker of Westchester Wildlife LLC, who’s been at it since 1982 and knows a thing or two about humane trapping, removal and exclusion solutions. So much so, indeed, that he has often been featured in the press, participated in numerous studies and invented proprietary methods. His approach? “It’s more than just trapping and removal. It takes considering a number of factors to determine the best solution. Each property is different, and each scenario presents different challenges.”

Dreisacker grew up in Thornwood and tells us of his lifelong interest in nature. As a kid, he had turtles and raised pigeons. But from his early years, he hoped that combining his interest in nature and working with wildlife was something he could eventually work into a business. Since formally starting his business, which serves New York and Connecticut, Jim has been a licensed member of the New York State Wildlife Management Association (NYSWMA) and, in Connecticut, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT-DEEP). He initially began working as a contractor and it was his encounters with animal inhabitation issues, particularly those involving bats, that led him to invent a device called the Bat Cone, of which he is most proud. “It took a while to perfect it, he says. “But after working on it for a few years, it was developed and eventually I sold to a another company.” While it was in development, he had great success using it in homes, making instructional videos and training other professionals across the country. The plastic Bat Cone is a humane removal product. The “invaders” can fly out but they can’t fly back in. It is not only for bats who nest under eaves and inside attics, but it can also be used for bird and squirrel removal, according to its website. What are some of the signs homeowners could observe for dwelling-based problems, we asked? “Knocking or tapping may indicate birds, especially woodpeckers. Light footsteps and scurrying? Squirrels. More heavy-footed steps? Raccoons,” he says. Again, mitigating problems is what Dreisacker either does or recommends, working with subcontractors. “I am not in the business of exterminating,” Dreisacker adds. “My son went into that business and has a company in Brewster.” Dreisacker works with both homeowners and tradespeople, offering a personal, investigative approach to each situation. As he sees it, “It’s a community service — helping (sometimes) sick animals and helping neighbors. Usually within 20 minutes, I can identify the problem and devise a solution.” He told us that it’s his goal to treat a problem with the expectation that he won’t need to repeatedly return — in other words, problem solved. He has built his reputation on 35-plus years and the goodwill

Jim Dreisacker. Photograph by Milton Agusto.

of the customers and contractors with whom he works. Dreisacker tells us that his approach is educational and science-based. He is not into using any fear tactics. Every problem is treatable, and exclusion is always the goal — following the established protocols for humane trapping and removal — whereby a healthy animal will relocate itself in the wild. Dreisacker told us that, in certain instances, he works with local animal care and control organizations for an animal’s rehabilitation and/or relocation, when necessary. Increasingly, he has entered the realm of property fencing to keep larger animals like deer and coyotes outside of properties inhabited by humans and pets. “It’s the proper way to animal-proof your yard,“ Dreisacker says, “and it’s 95% effective.” This is a whole new aspect of the services he offers — prevention He is not, however, a fence contractor: Owners obtain any necessary permits and work with licensed contractors. Lately, too, he has seen an uptick in his business in performing new home

inspections. Prospective buyers seek his expert advice in identifying areas that may need to be addressed and shored up before a problem sets in after taking occupancy. Passion and interest in the ever-changing ecosystems around our region are what keep Dreisacker engaged, especially when it comes to animals living outdoors, either on or around someone’s property, from the common fox and deer to the larger coyote. He speaks proudly of his participation some years back in a multiyear, collaborative study between the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and Cornell University, investigating a variety of issues surrounding suburb-dwelling coyote populations and human-coyote interactions. With his decades of experience in wildlife management and mitigation, there’s always something to learn and a new way to tackle an issue if Dreisacker has his way. For more, visit westchesterwildlife. com and batcone.com.

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

PET OF THE MONTH

WAG THE TAIL

A second chance at love

“Love is lovelier the second time around,” Sammy Cahn wrote in the lyrics to Jimmy Van Heusen’s melody for their song “The Second Time Around.” That’s exactly what Piper needs. This beautiful, 1-yearold purebred Border Collie was recently turned into a rescue down South because, her elderly owner could no longer care for her. She’s now at the SPCA to find her perfect match once again. Like most working breeds, Piper will do best in a home with a yard and would love an active family. She’s a sweet gal who also likes to relax and chill out sometimes, so she truly has just the right balance. To learn more about Piper, complete an application at spca914.org and email it to trainer@spca914.org.

Piper is a purebred Border Collie looking for a second chance at a forever home. Courtesy SPCA. 96

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CELEBRATING LIFE, LOVE, & THE POWER OF FLOWERS SINCE 1925 4th Generation, Locally Grown & Locally Owned

www.BlossomFlower.com 914.237.2511 MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

WAG

WHEN & WHERE

THROUGH MAY 30 The Bruce Museum reopens with “Let in, Let go,” created by Holly Danger, a video artist based in Stamford who has brought experiential events and immersive installations to audiences around the world. Holly transforms ordinary spaces into moving experiences, mixing natural and digital elements together, creating vibrantly colored, abstract, audiovisual art that is projected onto natural and architectural surroundings. Each work is a site-specific, one-of-a-kind experience that comes to life with the energy and presence of the viewer. 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays to Sundays. One Museum Drive, Greenwich; 203-869-0376, brucemuseum.org. MAY 6 The Westport Library hosts a virtual screening of Keith A. Beauchamp’s 2005 documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.” about the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was in Mississippi with relatives when he was kidnapped and brutally murdered after whistling at a white woman. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Beauchamp and the film’s producer, Steven Laitmon. 7 p.m. Registration required. 203-291-4800, westportlibrary.org. MAY 6 THROUGH 9 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents the 6th edition of its “Aldrich Undercover” fundraiser. All works are priced at $350 and sold anonymously. Artists’ identities are revealed after the purchases. More than 100 alumni artists have contributed 9-by 12-inch original works in any medium of their choosing for sale to benefit the museum. The presale show takes place 7 p.m. May 6 with performances by artists turned musicians Roz Chast, Michelle Segre, Steve DiBenedetto, B. Wurtz and Ann Bobco. The art sale follows. It’s online all day Friday and Saturday, ending at 5 p.m. Sunday. 203-438-4519; thealdrich.org MAY 8 RiverArts presents “Imprint of Light,” a dance, music and video collaboration that will be broadcasted on Zoom. Choreographer and dancer Maxine Sherman

WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021

Through May 30 – “Let In, Let go”

and composer and videographer Steven Brent collaborate in this new work that explores the human spirit and its relationship to the four elements of the earth. 8 p.m.; riverarts.org MAY 8 THROUGH 29 Bethany Arts Community will present “(s)mother 2.0,” an exhibit that considers mothering in a time of crisis. The show will feature painting, photography, video and text. 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m. weekdays. 40 Somerstown Road, Ossining; 914-944-4278, bethanyarts.org MAY 9 The Sanctuary Series presents “Songs of Spring,” a virtual concert of works by Scarlatti, Schumann and Rachmaninoff with pianist Wynona Wang. The concert will be performed in the sanctuary of the South Salem Presbyterian Church and streamed live on Facebook. 4 p.m.; thesanctuaryseries.org MAY 12 “Call in the Klezmorim” – Grammy Award winner Lisa Gutkin and Matt Darriau (of the Klezmatics) host a

Klezmer gathering, featuring the music of the Ashkenazy Jews of Eastern Europe, performed by Christina Crowder, Ilya Shneyveys, David Licht (the original drummer for the Klezmatics), and surprise guests. Presented by Jazz at La Zingara Restaurant. 7 p.m., 8 P.T. Barnum Square, Bethel; 203-247-4273, bit.ly/ BethelJazzKlezmatics. MAY 14 As part of its new Music at MoCA Concert Series, MoCA Westport presents Isaiah J. Thompson, jazz pianist, bandleader and composer, who worked on the Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack for “Motherless Brooklyn” and was named a Steinway Artist. 7 p.m., 19 Newtown Turnpike, Westport; 203-222-7070, mocawestport.org. MAY 15 AND 16 The Westchester Craft Crawl has safely expanded to include more than two dozen additional artists. The works of 56 professional craft artists – working in clay, wood, fiber, metal, glass, jewelry and mixed media – will be on display at 10 “tour stops” across Tarrytown, Ossining, Croton on Hudson, Cortlandt Manor

WAG

WHEN & WHERE and Peekskill. Times and locations vary; linktr.ee/westchestercraftcrawl MAY 15 THROUGH JUNE 26 Pelham Art Center presents Matthew Cole as the winner of the 11th Biennial Alexander Rutsch Award for Painting. A solo exhibit of his paintings will be on view at the center, along with a selection of original works by Alexander Rutsch. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays. 155 Fifth Ave.; 914738-2525, pelhamartcenter.org

MAY 16 Greater Connecticut Youth Orchestras (GCTYO) return to The Klein stage after more than a year hiatus in live performances. Nine different ensembles will entertain with classical, jazz, percussion and steel pan music. GCTYO musicians range in age from 10 to 18. Livestream tickets will be available for those who want to view the concert online. 1 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 5:30 p.m., The Klein, 910 Fairfield Ave., Bridgeport; 203-293-8447, gctyo.org. Seth Meyers, the Emmy Award-winning writer and host of “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” returns after two soldout shows in 2019. Meyers was a writer and cast member on “Saturday Night Live” for 13 seasons, hosting the show’s popular “Weekend Update” segment. In 2014 Meyers hosted the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards and was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.” In 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, he received Emmy nominations for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Ridgefield Playhouse, 80 E. Ridge; 203-438-5795, ridgefieldplayhouse.org.

MAY 18 THROUGH 20 Jib Productions’ Play With Your Food presents outdoor performances in Fairfield (May 18 and 19) and Cos Cob (May 20), featuring a new set of three short plays that use humor to explore the (crazy) things we do for love. Lynn Marie Macy’s “Sister Resisters” reminds us that you never know who you might meet in the ladies’ room. “In Metonym,” by Ellen Abrams tells the completely

May 28 – The “How to Sound Cool at Parties: Interesting Talks with Interesting People” series presents Alicia Cobb.

false story behind the creation of Roget’s Thesaurus. “On the Rocks,” by Jessica Provenz, is about a father determined to win the presidency of a Boca Raton condominium association, no matter what. Optional boxed lunches are available in Fairfield from The Pantry and in Cos Cob from MeliMelo. 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday, Fairfield Theatre Company, 70 Sanford St.; Thursday, Montgomery Pinetum, 129 Bible St., Cos Cob; 203-293-8729, jibproductions.org. MAY 23 Ballet des Ameriques presents “Dancing Caravan at Wainwright House,” a series of in-person, outdoor dance performances in Rye. 2:30 and 4:30 p.m., 260 Stuyvesant Ave., Rye; 646-753-0457, balletdesameriques.com MAY 27 Shelton artist Jill Nichols invites you to an on-location en plein air “Painting in the Garden Workshop.” The private location in Shelton will be revealed only to attendees. Nichols earned her M.F.A. in painting from Western Connecticut State University and is an adjunct professor of art at the University of New Haven. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Vatican Observatory Museum, Yale Medical Center and the collection of former FBI Director James Comey. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Shelton; 203-362-7681, jillnichols.com.

MAY 28 As part of its Friday night series, “How to Sound Cool at Parties: Interesting Talks with Interesting People,” the Westport Library welcomes artist and educator Alicia Cobb to discuss and demonstrate what inspires her art and creativity and how the body has become a particularly treasured canvas for her work. 7 p.m. Registration required. 203-291-4800, westportlibrary.org. MAY 29 AND 30 The Westport Fine Arts Festival returns downtown on Memorial Day Weekend. This juried art festival features a roster of more than 170 national and international fine artists exhibiting work in a wide variety of price ranges, subjects and styles and also includes an emerging artists exhibit. Festival attendees will also enjoy live musical performances as well as food and beverage choices. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. 203-293-0099, westportdma.com. Presented by ArtsWestchester (artswestchester.org) and the Fairfield County Cultural Alliance (culturalalliancefc.org).

MAY 2021 WAGMAG.COM

WE WONDER:

HOW ARE YOU RECONNEC TING WITH NATURE ? “The way I’m reconnecting with nature lately is going on more walks outdoors. I am still working from home, so it can get a little repetitive and boring. I like to take a break or two during my day and go out for a 10- to 20-minute walk to help me clear my mind.”

LUKE BROUGHTON

team manager, Boxer Realty Stamford resident

“Since the pandemic and taking a break from being outside, I’ve chosen to reconnect with nature by hiking. It’s so beautiful to observe and listen when taking a stroll outdoors. Just being able to de-stress and focus in on my other senses to find some peace and quiet is how I am reconnecting with nature.”

ANISIA FIGUEROA

New York state contact tracer White Plains resident

“I moved to Stamford about a month ago to a woodsier area. I find myself staring out the window and doing a lot of bird watching and looking them up to familiarize myself with their type. Moving here has given me a whole new appreciation for birds and nature in general. I think I might invest in a nice bird feeder soon.”

NADIA HUSSAINI Stamford resident

“The way I’m reconnecting with nature lately is I’ve recently started taking up hiking. A lot of the times I go with friends. We love to get together on the weekends and go together. This way I get to knock two birds with one stone – spend time with friends and get a fun workout in.”

ANNALISE TENNEY pharmacist New Haven resident

100

WAGMAG.COM MAY 2021

“I’ve recently started a new job in Stamford, and I’m very lucky to have my office building…next to the water. A lot of times during my lunch, I head out on the boardwalk to enjoy the view and go for a walk. There’s nothing like enjoying a lunch by the water. I find it very calming during a busy workday.”

CHRIS SANTORA

office administrator, Compass Stamford resident

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WAG magazine - May 2021

Articles inside

Glorious Glenmere

A career in bloom