8 minute read
GETOUT
Mesa Market Swap Meet a bargain hunting ground
BY SYDNEY MACKIE GetOut Staff Writer
Bringing the East Valley together for over 20 years, the recently reopened the Mesa Market Place Swap Meet continues to support local entrepreneurs by hosting over 900 small businesses in one location.
Located at Signal Butte and Baseline roads and open every Saturday and Sunday from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m., the market offers a unique outdoor experience to those browsing for all manner of items.
At the market – supplemented with a restaurant, a deli, six snack bars and live music – patrons can find everything they need all within one and a quarter miles of shaded shopping space.
“We’re the largest small business incubator in the state of Arizona, you won’t find more small businesses in any one place,” said market spokeswoman Joan Wells.
Many family-owned stores are exclusive to the market such as Stella’s Fashion, Fairyland Fun, The Larimar Stone, May’s Kettle Corn and Creation Cacti.
Wells said patrons can expect to see exclusive and reasonably priced products for every demographic.
Many vendors even sell their inventions as well.
Admission and parking are free, but Wells suggests patrons will likely find many temptations for their wallets.
Last year the Mesa Market underwent more changes than it ever had during Wells’ 16 years of employment.
It closed in March 2020 and reopened only recently with mask and social distancing recommendations.
Now, Wells spends her weekends encouraging customers to return by documenting the vast array of products for the Mesa Market’s Facebook and Instagram pages.
She also focuses on forming lasting connections with the market’s customers, vendors and other employees.
“It really is a family,” she said. “I think that’s the culture here.
Keeping traditions and culture alive are an important part of the Mesa Market, as demonstrated by the authentic Native American and Southwestern art, jewelry and live music that can be found there. One vendor said she was influenced by her mother’s profession as an international bead stringer to begin a career selling jewels from around the world.
Priding itself on patriotism, the Mesa Market cultivates meaningful relationships with its 40 plus staff members, which includes many retirees and veterans.
Additionally, the market holds fundraisers and drives to send care packages to deployed soldiers and homeless veterans on top of celebrating events like Fourth of July and Veteran’s Day.
Well said the market hopes to bring back events such as pinning ceremonies for Vietnam veterans, their annual large-scale Safehaven trick-or-treating and Easter celebrations. Owners also are in the final stages of developing an app to assist customers in locating a desired vendor or product using a virtual map.
It will also feature helpful images of the stores and merchandise taken by the vendors themselves.
“You can people-watch, you can listen to music and window-shop. It’s just really fun shopping, not at all like grocery shopping, it’s better,” Wells said.
Bargain hunters flock every weekend to the Mesa Market Place Swap Meet at Signal Butte and Baseline roads. (Special to GSN)
Even the spokeswoman for the Mesa Market Place Swap Meet concedes that she has to be careful how much money she’ll bring because she knows every cent will be spent.(Special
to GSN)
GILBERT SUN NEWS | JULY 25, 2021
Puppeteer ready for a Valley road show
BY ROB WINDER
Cronkite News
Stacey Gordon’s road to becoming a puppeteer began very early in life.
“I don’t know a preschooler that doesn’t look at ‘Sesame Street’ and say, ‘I want to live there.’ I definitely wanted to do that,” she said.
The Phoenix resident made that childhood dream a reality in 2016, when she was selected as the puppeteer behind one of “Sesame Street’s” newest neighbors, Julia. Like Gordon’s son, Julia is autistic.
In addition to her work on “Sesame Street,” Gordon owns and operates Puppet Pie, a downtown studio at Grand Avenue and McKinley Street where she builds puppets available for purchase, and where children of all ages apply science, math, engineering and art concepts as they create puppets of their own.
Now, with help from a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Gordon and her puppets might soon be coming to your street.
Gordon was one of 24 Arizona artists awarded the commission’s research and development grants for 2021. The $5,000 grants were given to the artists to “advance their artistic practice, expand their creative horizons, and deepen the impact of their work,” according to the commission’s website.
Gordon is using her grant to bring the fun of Puppet Pie to Valley neighborhoods with a vehicle that’s already beloved by many children: an ice cream truck.
Last year, Gordon purchased a 1973 step van from Conrad Martinez, owner of Misfits Cick Kustoms, who is restoring and modifying the truck to be used as a mobile puppet studio and theater.
The truck won’t merely make the workshop activities of Puppet Pie portable. Gordon also will use the truck to put on full-fledged puppet shows for families.
“I’ve done short pieces for children. I do a lot of work with children, but it’s all workshops,” Gordon said. “This grant is allowing me to take time and build a show the right way. And bring in a story from start to finish that has a lesson in it, that does teach kids to be OK with themselves and to persevere and to try and think outside of the box.”
That ambition and sense of mission wasn’t part of Gordon’s original vision for putting her puppets on wheels. Initially, because many of her puppets are foodthemed, she was simply looking for a fun way to juxtapose her booth at Phoenix Fan Fusion with the food cart she always found herself next to each year.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious if I’m selling the exact same thing, but as puppets?” Gordon recalled.
Gordon credits her dad with inspiring her to use the ice cream truck for something more.
“I really was just going to do just a little space where I could keep my stuff in there and then roll into a festival or fair and sell my puppets that I made,” she said.
To create the kind of mobile show she envisions now – developing a script, music and the “actors” – would require Gordon to take a couple of months off from her puppet-building workshops, she said.
But “the constant grind of doing all the workshops” is what keeps the rent and utilities paid at her studio, not to mention what allows her to make a living as an artist.
“It would take me years to be able to do this, if it weren’t for this grant,” Gordon said.
The grant will also be used to obtain the various permits she will need to hold both public and private events across metro Phoenix, as well as purchase items needed to perform.
Additionally, the grant has also accelerated the restoration of the truck itself, which required even more work than expected, Gordon said.
When it comes to getting an old ice cream truck back on the road to bring smiles in a different way, “there’s a lot that goes into it,” Gordon said.
The same should not be true of the application process for the grant, said Kesha Bruce, the Arizona Commission on the Arts’ artist program manager. Like Gordon’s truck, that process recently underwent a renovation to be less intimidating for applicants, she said.
“The goal of it was to make it so that it wasn’t so labor intensive and cumbersome, especially for first-time applicants,” she said.
Rather than use “grant speak,” applicants are urged to be their authentic selves and talk to the selection panel “like you would speak to a normal person,” Bruce said. Answers to the application questions can be given in an audio or video recording instead of in writing, she said.
Besides passion and heart – and puppets – younger patrons of Gordon’s ice cream truck probably will want to see some actual ice cream.
They won’t be disappointed. A new freezer has been installed in the truck.
“To me, there would be nothing more fun and special than getting to come to a puppet ice cream party where you watch a show, you get to eat popsicles and ice cream,” Gordon said. “And then you get to make a puppet and bring it home. And doing that in communities and making it accessible is kind of where my heart is.”
“To me, there would be nothing more fun and special than getting to come to a puppet ice cream party where you watch a show, you get to eat popsicles and ice cream. And then you get to make a puppet and bring it home,” Stacey Gordon says. “And doing that in communities and making it accessible is kind of where my heart is.” (Courtesy of Stacey Gordon)
