BRIGHT LIGHTS
“ People don’t typically associate technology and social networking with the concept of local food, but we see it as the missing link.” farm-to-table movements,” Mayhew says. “People don’t typically associate technology and social networking with the concept of local food, but we see it as the missing link.” CitySprout, which is based in Northampton, Mass., currently hosts 260 communities at its website, connecting more than 2,000 consumers with more than 40 food producers. “We’re trying to grow CitySprout, both as a company and as a network of local-food communities around the country,” Mayhew says. After starting out in Northampton, Cambridge, and Brooklyn, CitySprout zeroed in last fall on Austin, Texas, to test its business model when the growing season wound down in the Northeast. With a year-round growing season and more than 400 small farms within a 100-mile radius, Austin is now home to nearly half of CitySprout’s communities and roughly a quarter of its members. But that, Mayhew hopes, is just the beginning.
Chinese Grammy for Chung It was while he was a student at NMH that Henry Chung ’95 heard Eric Clapton’s “Unplugged” album and discovered the blues. He picked up a harmonica a few years later, and today is considered one of the top jazz and blues—and gospel—musicians in Asia. Chung’s latest honor: He and his brother, Roger, who live in Hong Kong and perform together as “The Chung Brothers,” won the 2012 Chinese Golden Melody Award (aka the “Chinese Grammy”) for “Best Jazz Artist of the Year.” Chung first made a name for himself in Washington, D.C., where he attended law school, worked as an attorney, and, at night, played blues harmonica alongside legends such as Joe Louis Walker. He returned to Asia and in 2009, he and Roger released “The Chimes,” the first gospel album made in Hong Kong. Next came “The Chung Brothers Sing the Gospel Songbook of Benjamin Ng” in 2011, which combined jazz, rock, pop, and Christian music in a tribute to the “godfather of gospel” in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong magazine CASHFLOW pronounced the versatile Chungs as “ready to bridge the gap between traditional and new gospel music”….“[as composers] they do not make any distinction between gospel and non-gospel music because committing to a fixed model would limit creativity.”
Everyone Still Loves Lucy Sirena Irwin ’88 has a big mouth. A big, beautiful, stretchy mouth that she put to good use in her most recent theatrical role as the iconic Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy Live on Stage. The show, which premiered in Los Angeles in September 2011 and recently ended a run in Chicago, honors the Emmy Award-winning television show by recreating the experience a studio audience would have had in the 1950s, with an emcee, two completely reconstructed episodes, and commercial jingles in between. The Los Angeles Times described the show as “a hilarious real deal.” The Chicago Tribune called Irwin “funny, vibrant, and physically adroit” as Lucy. Irwin, who has appeared in films, television, live sketch comedy, and as multiple voice-over characters in “Spongebob Squarepants,” will next take I Love Lucy Live on Stage to Washington, D.C. She credits David Rowland, the soonto-be-retired director of NMH’s theater program, with getting her started. “He really ignited my interest and passion for theater, so I am eternally grateful to him,” she says.
Sirena Irwin ’88 in I Love Lucy Live on Stage.
PHOTO: ED KRIEGER
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