wagmag January 2012

January 2012

Josie Natori light, Breezy, sexy fashions The Zen of Jeff Bridges Bam!

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Steven Visscher gives ‘Boardwalk Empire’ punch

all keyed up John Ford is master of the 88s

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TIME TO LIGHTEN UP 12 it’s a mad, mad, mad world 16 hey, lighten up!

19 TRAVELS WITH ‘CHARLIE’ 22 PIANO MAN 26 the invisible man 28 past is present 30 palette-able restorations 34 net gains 36 A SINGULAR HEART 38 chic to chic 43 SELLING SEXY 52 a stitch in time 56 LIGHTENING THOSE LOCKS 58 NEW YEAR, NEW BODY 60 GETTING DOWN WITH DOWNWARD DOG 70 FROM ITALY, WITH LOVE Photograph of Josie Natori by ©David Bravo

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8 Meet the waggers 10 Editor’s letter

Michael Berger, Sophia Cruz, Marcia Pflug and Marne Roskin

Cover photograph by ©David Bravo

4

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editor's letter Georgette Gouveia

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve often thought of January as one vast icy desert to be endured in the long slog to the oasis of spring. February, too, but at least it’s short.

Still, January – indeed, the entire winter – is a good time to burrow deep within yourself to discover what you’re really made of – what you want to keep in your psychological closet, what you’d like to give to others and what you want just to get rid of. Hence our theme – Time to Lighten Up, Restore, Refresh and Renew.

There are few better people to shed light on this subject than Josie Natori, who is so much more than a lingerie designer. Indeed, the Filipino-bred Natori is more of a lifestyle goddess, exhorting and inspiring us to surround ourselves with the best, because we’re worth it.

Our fashionista-in-chief Zoë Zellers caught up with the Pound Ridge resident in her Manhattan office and discovered a feisty classical pianist turned Wall Street exec turned style empress who is not afraid to say “Out with the old and in with the new,” particularly when it comes to lingerie. It reminds me of what mothers have always said: “Be sure to wear good undergarments.

You never know when you’ll be in an accident.” (Of course, if you’re in an accident bad enough to be stripped in the emergency room, you might have bigger problems than ratty lingerie.)

Still, moms have a point: Get rid of what you can’t repurpose, but repurpose what you can. Zoë also checks in with Turkish-born rug restorer Samet Durmus, who shows us the proper way to care for our magic carpets. Home stylist Patricia Espinosa meets a Riverside couple who created their dream basement, rather than move to another house.

And I encounter the Fords, third- and fourth-generation piano restorers in Peekskill and get a firsthand taste of the heavy lifting that goes into resurrecting a baby grand. Let’s just say I’m ready for the Strongman competition.

But lightening up isn’t just about unloading. It’s also about enlightening. We put ourselves on the shrink’s couch to explore culture’s fascination with the mind – as if culture had a choice, since the mind creates it – and learn that we don’t have to be afraid of Freud and Jung. From within we travel to the far reaches of the earth as Cappy Devlin embraces lofty, light-filled Lhasa, Tibet – a place as spiritual as it is beautiful.

Speaking of spiritual and beautiful, I’d like now to say a few words about

our own gal about town Kelly Liyakasa, one of the most beloved of our beloved Waggers, who has left us to become an associate editor at Information Today in the Big Apple. Kelly has been one of our most versatile mainstays – getting celebs like Donald Trump (March) and Lucie Arnaz (December) to open up, uncovering the culinary secrets of Westchester’s and Fairfield’s great chefs and, of course, bringing her leadership and organizational skills to Watch, one of our most popular features.

She leaves on a high note. Her story on Oscar winner Jeff Bridges’ visit to the Greyston Foundation in Yonkers not only captures the actor’s breezy charm, it also chronicles the hard-luck story of Floyd “Mustafa” Bailey, whose restoration of himself, with the foundation’s help, goes far beyond what you wear or how you renovate. Kelly spent a lot of time listening to him to give voice to one Everyman. She is that rare reporter – a woman of true compassion.

We’ll miss her. But we plan to feature her byline from time to time.

And so we say not “goodbye” to Kelly but rather “à bientôt” – “see you soon.”

Oops!

A clarification about the information on Paulo’s Atelier, which appeared in our makeover story (December, p. 43). The stylist who colored and highlighted Lyanne Augustyn’s hair was Crystal Haviland. The haircut and blow-dry was done by Yasin Yartasi. Our apologies to Paulo’s Atelier and to our readers.

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Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory.” Copyright The Museum of Modern Art

It’s a mad, mad, mad world (of art)

By Georgette Gouveia

In the new film “A Dangerous Method,” Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) goes Oedipal when his feelings for a febrile patient, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly), lead him to rebel against daddy figure Sigmund (Viggo Mortensen) and the confines of his marriage.

Very Freudian, that.

The film has reviewers once more gushing about the mind as the ultimate erogenous zone.

“There are scenes of kinky activity between Sabina and Jung that will no doubt enjoy long life in specialized corners of the Internet,” critic A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times, “but the most unsettling aspect of ‘A Dangerous Method’ may be the links it suggests between sex and thinking.”

Beyond that, however, the film raises questions about another tantalizing relationship.

What is the connection between the mind and the arts?

Indeed, is it even possible to distinguish where the one 12

leaves off and the other begins? For not only is the mind used to create the arts, but as “A Dangerous Method” and other works demonstrate, the mind in turn uses the arts to explain itself to itself.

“You can’t separate art from a mental state,” says Nancy M. Boksenbaum, a clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst practicing in Stamford. “Both the artist and the viewer bring their minds to a work, including their current states of mind.”

Boksenbaum calls this “the roof phenomenon.” You redo your roof and all you can see are roofs.

So it is with a painting or a piece of music. You see or hear something you never encountered before because you’re in a state of mind to receive it.

But that’s not a function merely of your moods, says Jane Kromm, a professor of art history at Purchase College.

“In good art, you keep coming back to it.”

And like beauty or love, it happens to you all over again

every time you experience it.

Arts and minds

Throughout much of history, artistic movements and individuals alike have consciously sought to explain the mind – its wonders, its terrors – in their works. In antiquity, artists created metaphors for manic behavior in images of despotic kings and governments spiraling out of control, says Kromm, author of “The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 15001850.” The German Renaissance was characterized by depictions of emotional extremes, she says, in contrast to the relative placidity of the Italian Renaissance. Among the German Renaissance’s emblematic works is the 1514 engraving “Melencolia I” by Albrecht Dürer, an artist who was unsparing in his depiction of himself and the human condition. It portrays the rather dejected angel of genius, cheek in hand as she waits by what looks like the detritus of a shipwreck – an empty scale, a skull, a dwin-

dling hourglass – symbols of life running out.

The Renaissance and the subsequent Baroque period were high times for the mind. What is Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” after all, but the study of a brilliant mind plucking at the heart of a mystery it can never solve, “for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

Certainly, Milton seemed to agree. In a chilling passage from “Paradise Lost” – in which he gives the Devil all the best lines – Satan comforts his minions with this thought: “The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less then he Whom Thunder hath made greater?”

The writers of the 18th-century Enlightenment took Lucifer’s credo and ran with it, creating God in the image and likeness of their own minds rather than the other way around. Reason was supreme. The 19th century’s Romantics felt otherwise.

Their art, Kromm says, lay “not in being calm and mature but in loosening up and letting the self out. “ Goya’s grotesques, Fuseli’s nightmare sufferers, Gericault’s insane subjects, Delacroix’s suicidal Ophelia were all artistic attempts to pull what dwelled in the mind’s subterranean reaches into the light of day. But it would take a scientist rather than an artist to give those reaches a name.

Dear Sigmund

When Freud developed psychoanalysis around 1900, he paved the way for art movements like Cubism and

Surrealism that would make conscious the unconscious, Kromm says. Surrealism – a literary and visual arts phenomenon that came of age in the ’20s – in particular sought to capitalize on Freudian free association by bringing together seemingly unrelated objects. Among the most iconic illustrations of this is Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory,” part of The Museum of Modern Art’s collection, in which time, embodied by melting watch faces, drips down an arid seascape that contains the artist’s self-portrait as a primitive life form.

The Surrealists’ dreamscape proved irresistible to Hollywood, where some filmmakers were exploring psychoanalysis personally with satisfying results. Alfred Hitchcock even hired Dalí to design the dream sequence in his thriller “Spellbound” that provides the key to the protagonist’s amnesia and the murder at the heart of the story.

They are unlocked by a plucky young analyst played by Ingrid Bergman at her most radiant.

“Spellbound” and Bergman’s performance crystallized the cultural attitudes toward the still newfangled psychoanalysis in the middle decades of the 20th century. In films as diverse as “Now, Voyager,” “Lady in the Dark,” “The Snake Pit” and “The Three Faces of Eve,” the analyst (usually male) was the intrepid hero liberating the analysand (usually female) from the trenches of mental illness. But with the rise of a skeptical counterculture in the 1960s and increased awareness of the brutality of certain psychiatric procedures, particularly the horrors of lobotomy, the analyst lost his hero’s status. He and his disciples had become the enemy – Nurse Ratched, anyone?

– and the inmates were the existential martyrs who had

the courage to challenge, if not run, the asylum (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”).

Either that or the analysts were punch lines courtesy of Woody Allen (“Annie Hall”) and Charles Schulz (“Dr.” Lucy’s less-than-helpful psychiatric insights into Charlie Brown in the “Peanuts” comic strips and TV specials).

Throughout much of history, artistic movements and individuals alike have consciously sought to explain the mind – its wonders, its terrors – in their works.

One ’70s exception was Allan Arbus’ performance as sympathetic Dr. Sidney Freedman on the series “M*A*S*H,” in which he brought a touch of rationality to the irrationality of war.

By the close of the 20th century, the therapist was still funny (Kelsey Grammer’s pompous Dr. Frasier Crane, first on “Cheers” and then on “Frasier,” where he was joined by David Hyde Pierce as Frasier’s even more neurotic bro, Dr. Niles Crane.) But the humanity had returned as well. (Lorraine Bracco’s Dr. Melfi on “The Sopranos.”)

Today, the therapist is neither hero nor villain. As “A Dangerous Method” suggests, he’s one more empathetic antihero winding his way through the labyrinth of a psyche that just may be his own. n

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Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” Copyright The Museum of Modern Art

Some beautiful minds

There has always been a connection between art and madness. Both at the very least skirt the edges of conventional behavior and often submerge themselves in the boundless deep of human emotions.

“There is a loose filtering of the id. But (in the artist), the ego keeps it in check,” says Jan Drucker, a professor of psychology at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers.

What happens, though, when an artistic mind turns on itself? Can it still make great art? Can art help it to heal?

Here the story of Vincent van Gogh – who may have suffered from the effects of epilepsy, manic depression, alcoholism and syphilis -- is both inspiring and discouraging.

“The paintings he did, he did when he was better,” says Jane Kromm, a professor of art history at Purchase College who specializes in art and madness. “They represented health to him.”

His eloquent, heartfelt letters, mostly written to his supportive younger brother Theo, bear this out, she says, “In his letters, he writes that when he was not feeling well, his mind was speeding and he couldn’t concentrate. Also, his oil paints would be taken away 14

as he would eat the paints during these episodes.”

Still, it is a tribute to the strength of his mind that he would persevere despite his mental and emotional suffering, creating on average one work a day for 10 years until his death at age 37. (Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s new “Van Gogh: The Life” debunks the idea that he committed suicide, offering a scenario in which he was murdered by a neighborhood punk.)

The haunting notion of a mind struggling to come to terms with itself through its work has always appealed to storytellers. Sylvia Plath – whose life is explored in the movie “Sylvia” and whose novel, “The Bell Jar,” is being readied for the big screen – continued to write poetry as she battled depression, ultimately succumbing to the darkness in 1963.

In “A Beautiful Mind,” John Nash (Russell Crowe) uses the ingenuity that won him a Nobel Prize in economics as a way through his schizophrenia – a condition that Oscar-winning director Ron Howard boldly, albeit controversially, chose to capture in visual rather than actual auditory hallucinations.

Sadly, many creative types are not John Nash.

“With the kind of deterioration associated with psychosis, the art is not worth looking at,” Kromm says.

“It doesn’t cohere.”

There are few more poignant examples than Vaslav Nijinsky, generally considered the greatest dancer of the 20th century, whose impassioned portrayals (in “Petrouchka,” “Le Spectre de la Rose”) and vibrant, angular works (“L’après-midi d’une faune,” “Le Sacre du Printemps”) helped usher in modern ballet. In 1919, however, he had a breakdown and spent the next 30 years in and out of asylums, often a prisoner of schizophrenia and silence.

Kromm, who worked as an occupational therapy assistant at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston in the 1970s, says that whether or not art therapy helps a patient may depend on his talent and experience.

“There are those who never made art before and who don’t know what to do,” she says. They may be better off with a craft, like beadwork, or listening to music.

Then, she says, “There are talented people who may be bipolar. While they’re sick, they don’t produce great art. But it helps them to feel normal.” n

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Hey, lighten up!

New approaches to analysis, neuroscience helping out

By Georgette Gouveia

I

n one of the most profound of the Greek myths, the beautiful Psyche, whose name means “soul,” is beloved by the god of love himself, Eros. Under the cover of darkness, he unites with her so that their love resides in trust rather than external reality. But thanks in part to her spiteful sisters, Psyche tempts fate, uncovers his true identity and loses her gorgeous lover.

She is, however, made of finer mettle. Willingly, she subjects herself to the Herculean labors devised by Aphrodite – her lover’s jealous mama – which include a trip to the fearsome Underworld itself. And thus, she wins Eros’ hand in marriage.

The soul finds love. The soul loses love. But by going deep into itself (the Underworld), the soul regains love for all eternity.

Could there be a lovelier metaphor for the healing of the mind (psychiatry) and the study of it (psychology)?

Or more poetic evidence of psychiatry/psychology’s early antecedents?

“Before there were psychiatrists and psychologists, there were shamans, priests and counselors,” says Jan Drucker, a professor of psychology at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers. “It’s not like it’s new. Talking about one’s problems and feeling better does have ancient roots.”

The two fields are quite distinctive, however. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor, while a psychologist has a doctorate in psychology. (The experts interviewed for this story are all PhDs.) A psychiatrist can prescribe medication, whereas in most states a psychologist cannot.

Cleaning the basement

But both disciplines have followed a similar trajectory: They began in the ancient philosophies of Greece and the Near and Far East yet did not crystallize as practices until the 19th century. Prior to that, the treatment of the mentally ill consisted only of institutionalization. Among the exceptions were several medieval Persian and Arab doctors, who addressed possible emotional and physical links to mental disorders.

Since the 19th century, the fields of psychiatry and psychology have undergone many developments. One of the greatest, psychoanalysis, is on the cultural radar once again with the release of the well-received film “A Dangerous Method,” about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

It was Freud who developed the theory of the unconscious mind – that basement of repressed memories, feelings and desires – which could nonetheless be accessed through what was going on upstairs in our A young Carl Jung

16

Boksenbaum’s five steps to mind-decluttering 1. Identify the behavioral patterns – a lack of self-confidence, an addiction, a toxic relationship – that keep you down.

2. Symbolize the patterns in some way.

Draw them, write or talk about them or find pieces of music that represent them.

Max Halberstadt’s 1921 portrait of Freud with cigar that’s just a cigar.

A Who’s Who in psychology, at Clark University in 1909. Seated, Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; standing, Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones and Sándor Ferenczi.

“Before there were psychiatrists and psychologists, there were shamans, priests and counselors. It’s not like it’s new. Talking about one’s problems and feeling better does have ancient roots.”

— Jan Drucker

3. Be compassionate with yourself, honoring the idea that these patterns, though once useful, are no longer necessary.

4. Let them go and remember the words of Carl Jung, “All things that remain true, change. All things that change remain true.”

(Repeat step 4 as necessary.)

5. Let yourself shine and enjoy. You just cleared the path to do so.

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On Siggy’s couch

conscious everyday lives, particularly by talking with a trained therapist. Jung – who was a disciple of Freud’s for a brief (roughly five-year) but intense period at the 20th century’s dawn – elaborated the idea of a personal unconscious into the collective unconscious, with its own myths and symbols. An example of a collective myth, from a Jungian standpoint, would be that of the miraculous birth, which you find in Christianity, Buddhism and ancient history (the beginnings of Alexander the Great and Caesar Augustus).

Another major difference between Freud and Jung lay in what they identified as the primary motivators of human behavior, says Nancy M. Boksenbaum, a clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst practicing in Stamford. For Freud, it was sex and aggression; for Jung, self-actualization.

In the first half of the 20th century, Freudianism influenced other isms, including Cubism and Surrealism, while analysts were cast as heroic mind detectives in a number of Hollywood classics. (See related story.)

But with the rise of feminism, which attacked Freud for reinforcing patriarchal values and straitjacketed views of women, psychoanalysis lost some of its luster.

The advent of managed care as well – spurred by the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 – shifted the emphasis from mental health to behavioral health, from the qualitative effects of the talk therapy that was at the heart of psychoanalysis to the quantitative results of medication.

“At that point, the internal world was devalued by 18

insurance companies,” Boksenbaum says. “Instead of mapping the internal landscape, everyone started looking at overt behavior.”

“The advent of managed care…served to limit access to mental health professionals, especially psychologists,” says psychologist Wendy McKenna, a professor at Purchase College who specializes in gender and sexuality. “Psychiatrists still got patients to manage medication. Clinical social workers got referrals, because they were cheaper than psychologists. Over time, however, many mental health professionals of all types have just stopped taking insurance because they can't tolerate the paperwork or the low rate of reimbursement.”

Revamping Siggy

However, McKenna adds, “The Mental Health Parity Act (of 1996) has changed things for clients, who now get the same co-pays and coverage for mental health benefits as for physical health benefits. Now I think more people feel they can afford to at least try therapy.”

At the same time, psychoanalysts have put themselves on the couch to expand their thinking and approaches.

“There’s been a reformulation of psychoanalysis,” Boksenbaum says. “The analyst was once all powerful.”

Now in relational psychoanalysis, the analyst and analysand (patient) collaborate on the therapy, explor-

ing different systems of motivation, she says. Instead of sex (Hello, Sigmund) or self-expression (Hey, Carl) being the motivating factors, they might be fight/flight or attachment.

“Contemporary psychoanalysis looks at relational patterns that were once adaptive but no longer are and need to be transformed,” Boksenbaum says. “For example, a compliant child to a self-involved parent needs to live in his own integrity as an adult.”

What is also exciting about contemporary therapy is that the patient can see change as it occurs from the inside-out.

“Neuroscience is the hottest field in psychiatry/psychology today,” says Sarah Lawrence’s Drucker, who is also a member of the college’s Child Development Institute faculty group and trained as a psychoanalyst.

Using before and after brain scans, patients can observe how psychotherapy is changing not only the way they feel but how their brains are working.

Along with a holistic approach to medicine and a willingness on the part of mental health professionals to strike a balance between drug and talk therapies, Drucker says, neuroscience is giving our action- and results-oriented culture a reason to be less skeptical of what was once called “the talking cure.”

Education is also key in showing the public that there’s no reason not to be, ahem, Jung at heart.

“People have an innate need to grow,” Boksenbaum says. “Everyone can benefit from therapy. It frees our energy up for us to be more creative.” n

Travels with ‘Charlie’ Actor, social activist Jeff Bridges supports Yonkers cause Story by Kelly Liyakasa Photographs by Bob Rozycki

Jeff Bridges holds “Charlie,” a Head for Peace

19

Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman pose with workers at the Greyston Bakery.

W

hen your name is Jeff Bridges, irony can be expected.

The fact that you sport faded blue jeans and prayer beads on your wrist as regularly as you don your Dolce & Gabbana suit to pick up your Academy Award.

The fact that you were a slacker in “The Big Lebowski” before you were the star, albeit one that fell from country grace, in “Crazy Heart.”

The fact that you’re in Yonkers one day and on a Boston film set the next.

The actor and his small entourage exit an SUV with tinted windows across from the Maitri Center for individuals with HIV and AIDS on a less-than-Hollywood block in southwest Yonkers.

Bridges has that unmistakable star quality.

Like he isn’t trying.

Like he just happens to roll out of bed every day at 6-foot something with the presence of a Greek god and the personality of a jolly giant.

“I’ve seen him before,” Maitri client Audrey Wilson tells me as the rugged star readies to chat with a small group at one of Greyston Foundation’s facilities. “Bernie (Glassman) had a party two or three years ago down in the city. I’m from the Bronx. I went down, sang, and Jeff sang.

He had his keyboard. We talk about singing together.”

He had a ponytail three years ago, she tells me.

Not now.

Now he rocks long tresses of gray and dirty blond, which he frequently combs with his fingers.

20

In his own words

“It’s simple. I did this because of people. There were people that were homeless. There were people out of work, people who were sick. My understanding is that there is nobody outside of yourself. Meaning, I was sick, I was HIV, I was homeless. And when you know that that’s the case, you have to take care. It’s very simple. People get better: It’s wonderful. And some people don’t: They die. But it’s the people. It’s nothing other than that.”

– Bernie Glassman, founder, Zen Peacemakers, Greyston Foundation, Yonkers

Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman don red noses to amuse children at the day care center.

“I made these little heads,” Bridges says with semi-naughty smirk, playing with a ceramic sculpture he holds in the palm of his hand. “This is such a complicated thing to talk about. I like to do ceramics and I always had a hunk of clay left over. I found myself making these little heads in sort of an aimless place. I kind of let my hands rip. Before I knew it, I had a whole slew of these little guys and they all had different spirits.”

The one he’s holding this particular day goes by “Charlie,” and Charlie has traversed the globe with his “Head Keeper” Bernie Glassman, an American Zen master, founder of global social advocacy

group Zen Peacemakers and the community development organization Greyston Foundation.

Charlie was given to Glassman for his 70th birthday by supporter Bridges, an avid Zen Buddhist himself.

“I mean, it was just a lump of clay, I thought nobody would love the head as much as I do. But I thought every now and then, it’d be nice to give my friends a little head,” Bridges says before an intimate gathering that promptly erupts into embarrassed laughter. “Hey, that’s your dirty minds, not mine.”

Bridges’ Head for Peace, a fundraising effort for Zen Peacemakers, urges Head

Keepers to take their ceramic heads on spiritual journeys.

Charlie? Well, he’s been to Auschwitz and among the untouchables in India.

“If you walk into their shadow, they can be killed,” Glassman explains. “They’re very poor, a little like our homeless. And Charlie will spend a week helping them to design and build businesses, health services and schooling.”

Bridges is creating 18 families of heads, which individuals can sponsor for $10,800 a head. Sponsors receive a head, a photographic book chronicling the collection of heads and access to a website where they can record travels with their own Charlie.

Read more about Bernie Glassman and Jeff Bridges’ Head for Peace at zenpeacemakers.org. Then learn about local social advocacy efforts at greyston. org. n

doing good for Yonkers and the world

“Bernie is a humble savior,” Floyd “Mustafa” Bailey tells me. “He places people out there to help those in need wherever he be around the world. That body, mind, spirit, harm-reduction thing. When you come here, you may be drinkin’ and druggin.’ They don’t push you out. They enlighten you to what harm the drugs is bringing you.

Over time you stop using. Over time you start living. Over time you start giving back.”

Bailey first set foot in Greyston’s Maitri Day Program in 1999 after a life of hard blows that began on the Lower East Side, which led to a stroke and a fight to detox at Yonkers General Hospital.

“I couldn’t go into 30 days, because I had a failed kidney and I had to go on dialysis,” Bailey explains. “Someone (from Greyston) came over there and talked about a Maitri program… I was like a worm. I was angry. I was messed up, bitter. But I felt the love. Now, all this time being here trying to give back.

It’s a family, a wonderful place.”

Bailey has a warm smile and strong handshake.

He and Bernie Glassman embrace like they’re brothers.

Bernie Glassman and Floyd “Mustafa” Bailey

In spirit, they are.

“Maitri itself is a direct translation that means love,” Glassman says, or

“meeting you in the wholeness.”

The Greyston Foundation of today is a $15 million integration of for-profit

and nonprofit entities that provide employment, housing, child care, workforce development and health care programs to the disenfranchised.

It all began with the Greyston Bakery, which now churns out 20,000 pounds of brownies each day from of its waterfront plant in Yonkers.

Greyston brownies can be found in ice cream purveyor Ben & Jerry’s products.

“Ben & Jerry’s is now owned by another company, Unilever, so we send half our product to Vermont and the other half to Holland. So we are now an exporter,” said Steven Brown, president and CEO of Greyston Foundation.

The $8 million for-profit company trains and employs more than 50 workers who face barriers to employment.

Business can be a “force of social change,” says Glassman, a onetime aeronautical engineer. “Many nonprofits felt that making money was wrong. I couldn’t believe it. You can combine profit and nonprofit” to build a sustainable model.

In addition to work opportunities through Greyston Bakery, there are after-school programs, 200 units of affordable housing and an underlying mission to help those served forge their own “path.”

It all goes back to this Glassman mantra, “If people are sick, the society is sick.”

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Piano man John Ford breathes new life into grand instruments Story by Georgette Gouveia Photographs by Bob Rozycki Music is eternal. Pianos, not so much.

“Essentially, pianos are not immortal,” John P. Ford says. “They have a life span of about a half a century to three-quarters of a century.”

That’s where he comes in. Ford is owner and president of Ford Piano Inc. in Peekskill, a fourth-generation business that specializes in rebuilding the popular instruments. Together with sons John P. III and Michael, Ford will gut your piano if necessary, giving it new strings, tuning pins, tuning pin blocks, keys and hammers as well as a new finish.

Or if you’re looking to buy, he can sell you an instrument that he’s rehabilitated or one from the company’s Mathushek line, which is made with Asian parts.

Why would you need Ford’s services? First, consider the numbers: A new grand piano from the top names – Steinway, Mason & Hamlin, Knabe, Baldwin – might cost you $40,000 to $50,000. For $10,000 to $20,000, Ford can overhaul your Steinway or Mason & Hamlin over a three- to six-month period. Or you can buy a Mathushek for about $6,500.

But there’s another reason to avail yourself of Ford’s expertise: He’s that good. Stephen Sondheim had two 22

of his instruments serviced by Ford. So did Duke Ellington. One of his is now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Ford has also done work for the likes of John Lennon, Barry Manilow, Fleetwood Mac, Hall & Oates, Madison Square Garden and the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.

You don’t have to be the Duke or a Beatle to restore a piano. But it helps.

As Ford puts it, “You don’t have to know how to fly a plane to build one. But it might be nice.”

He is like that, a gregarious man who laughs and banters easily at his shop, a three-story, 20,000-square-foot space that is filled with pianos, piano parts, dust and the heady smells of wood and varnish. Ford knows how to fly the plane, so to speak.

“I am musical, and I do play,” he says, mostly jazz and blues, though he was classically trained.

Son Michael, who’s at a different kind of keyboard as we chat – the computer – also plays, mainly pop standards. On this particular day, son John P. III is out in the field, making a tuning house call. Keeping watch over visitors, including that pesky mailwoman, is Tyson, a rescue

Lab/Shepherd mix. She doesn’t play. But she does have a melodious bark. “(Tyson’s) the shop foreman,” the senior Ford says.

Getting wood on it

Piano restoration is, however, as much a craft as it is an art. And for that you need real woodworking skills. And perhaps, some training with weights. Ford lifts a plank of quarter sawn laminated hard rock maple, which is as heavy as it sounds. This dense wood is used to make the block that holds the 250 tuning pins that in turn anchor 20 tons of pressure from the instrument’s steel strings.

The strings – stretched out over a sounding board made of lighter Alaskan sitka spruce – vibrate when you strike any of the 88 keys.

The technology of building pianos has not changed since the 19th-century. It’s no iPhone.

“The piano,” Ford says, “is steeped in tradition.”

And so is he. Ford is the third generation of his family to make and restore the instrument. That story begins with Ford’s grandfather, Janos Fekete (FEH keh tah), a Hungarian immigrant who came to New York City in the late 19th century and worked as a foreman at Steinway

John Ford’s that good. Stephen Sondheim had

two of his instruments serviced by Ford. So did Duke Ellington. One of his is now in the

Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. 23

tuned in

Michael Ford John P. Ford III

& Sons on 14th Street in the action department, overseeing the keys and the accompanying felt hammers.

In the late 1890s, Fekete struck out on his own, setting up Fekete Piano at 242 E. 74th St. in Manhattan.

“I remember as a kid looking up at the business certificate and it said ‘1914,’” Ford says. “And I said to my father, ‘Aren’t we older than that?’”

It turns out the city of New York had required businesses to get new certificates at the start of World War I. But what the story really illustrates is how Ford belonged to the business even before the business belonged to him.

Family traditions

Hungarians are a profoundly musical people who can claim as their own one of the greatest pianists in the history of keyboard artists – the showman Franz Liszt, who was said to make women faint merely by stripping off his gloves before sounding one rapturous note.

He remains Ford’s favorite composer.

But Hungarian music is also rich in folk melodies, and Ford recalls growing up in the mostly Hungarian community of Yorkville on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, amid the strains of the gypsy violins and the tinkling of coins that would rain down from the apartments to the appreciative musicians below. His family would dangle a dollar on a clothes pin just to keep the gypsies playing beneath its windows.

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Kim Papa brings new meaning to the phrase “put a fork in it.”

As a piano tuner/technician for Ford Piano Inc. in Peekskill, Papa regularly uses a tuning fork, placing it in her mouth so that the sound will reverberate in her head.

The fork itself is an A440, the note to which all Western instruments are tuned, with the 440 referring to the frequency, or number of beats per second.

Once Papa gets her A on the keyboard, she follows a sequence of intervals (relationships between pitches) until the entire instrument is tuned. She works on the actions – the guts of the instrument – as well.

Papa could use a machine to tune a piano – could, but doesn’t.

“I’ve used a machine and I’ve used my ear. I had a client say, ‘Your sound is sweeter.’”

Papa has been making sweet sounds for a long time as a jazz guitarist with degrees from Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry and Western Connecticut State University and as a private teacher of piano, bass and guitar, based in Brewster.

More than a dozen years ago, “I was teaching a lot of piano and my students’ pianos needed a lot of tuning. I remember thinking it would be as easy as pie as a musician to become a piano tuner.”

One phone-book sized manual disabused her of that

Though the family would change its name to the easier-to-pronounce Ford in the 1950s, Hungary and its musical heritage remained in the soul. And while Ford would study psychology at Long Island University and Stony Brook University, he would return to the business he had known since childhood.

“My father would say, ‘If he can walk, put a hammer in his hand,’” Ford says with hearty laughter.

In the 1960s, Ford’s father started Ford Piano Supply, where he invented, manufactured and marketed many of the tools still used in the industry today. Such innovation and entrepreneurship are other family traditions. Fekete, as Ford calls his grandfather, once doubled the floor space in the Jacob Doll factory, where he worked in the 1950s, by installing old trolley tracks on the 35-foot-high ceilings from which the workers could hang pianos.

Ford himself is building a 4,000-square-foot concert hall adjacent to his business on Peekskill’s South Division Street. It’s yet another way for Ford Piano to connect with a community it’s been part of since the 1980s, a place that boasts the Paramount Center for the Arts, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art and an artists’ district that has made Peekskill a suburban SoHo. No doubt, though, the concert hall – which will open next year – will also showcase a few Ford pianos, instruments ready to last another half a century. n

thought. So she took herself off to a meeting of the Piano Technicians Guild at Steinway Hall, opposite Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. The guild happened to be honoring John P. Ford, whose innovations are still used by piano restorers today. There she met his son, also John P. Ford, the owner and president of Ford Piano. Papa was taken with his humor, humility and basic humanity. He in turn was impressed with her, for he hired her as a tuner/technician, even though she says it would take much learning on the job before she felt she had fine-tuned her skills.

Though being a good musician isn’t a guarantee that you will make a good technician, Papa says she can’t imagine someone without musical ability taking it up as a career.

Musical talent tends to run in families, and Papa’s is no exception: Daughter Anna plays the clarinet in her school orchestra. And since the clarinet’s A is usually the one to which the orchestra tunes, Anna has inherited her mother’s tuning gig as well, in a sense.

Papa says her daughter has also been a part of Ford Piano since she was a small child, dusting the pianos in the showroom.

Even though it’s a business, Papa says, the Fords “treat you like family.”

1926 Steinway player grand, with carved Louis XV case

www.bartonperreira.com

25

S

Steven Visscher won an Emmy Award for his work as Foley editor on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.”

The invisible man Steven Visscher makes movie sound magic one frame at a time

teven Visscher is the sound and the fury of “Boardwalk Empire,” HBO’s Prohibition answer to “The Sopranos.”

He’s the dull thwack of a guy getting punched in the face by star Steve Buscemi’s Atlantic City boss, the cascading crash of a dinner cart as the men tussle on the floor, the crystalline crack of the elegant French windows in the background.

Actually, Visscher is just part of the sound story. He works with Foley artist Marko Costanzo, who actually makes many of the sounds you hear on the show, and engineer George Lara. But it is Visscher’s job as Foley editor – a title that honors sound effects pioneer Jack Foley – to direct and filter the kinds of sounds Costanzo and Lara produce.

So evocative are Visscher’s creations that he has received an Emmy Award for his work on “Boardwalk Empire,” which just finished its second season. He’s awaiting footage to begin his work on the third. But the key to what he does, he says, is to be subtly dramatic, even in big moments.

“In sound, we try to be relatively invisible,” Visscher

26

Story by Georgette Gouveia Photographs by Bob Rozycki says. “We like an emotional response without people knowing we are trying to get that response.”

At the moment, Visscher is very visible – a tall, genial man with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair holding forth in the living room of his Bronxville home. It’s a pleasantly lucent space, filled with artistic flourishes – figurines, small prints and a shiny ebony Baldwin upright atop which sits that Emmy.

Visscher was unable to go to the West Coast to collect it in person – too busy working on “Empire.” Indeed, the job of a Foley editor is as painstakingly detailed and deliberate as it is incredibly intense. Call it the result of the layered-lasagna approach to TV and film.

Putting down tracks

When you experience a movie or TV series, what you are really seeing and hearing is the product of that layering effect. In shooting a film or show, the director needs to record the images and the dialogue as cleanly as possible. If he or she also tried simultaneously to record the aural backdrop – the plane passing overhead, the teacup rattling, those swelling

strings – the dialogue might be lost.

That’s where the sound crew comes in. The dialogue crew takes the dialogue track and cleans it up further, Visscher says. On another track, the sound effects editor contributes the more generic background – a car alarm going off or the buzz of a lawn mower – culled from a sound effects library. There’s yet another track for the musical score.

But what Visscher and his team do is add to the actual picture those sounds whose gradations can consciously or unconsciously make or break a scene.

“You could pull those sounds from a library,” he says, “but then the nuances of the performances may be affected.”

A good if gruesome example of this occurred in the scene from “Boardwalk Empire” in which Michael Pitt’s haunted Jimmy Darmody and Jack Huston’s disfigured Richard Harrow – two of the associates of Buscemi’s Enoch “Nucky” Thompson – scalp a rival. No hairlines were actually hurt in the making of that chilling slice, Visscher notes with a laugh. But let’s just say some fruits and vegetables will never be the same.

Visscher must match such sounds to the specific actions, frame by frame. He does this in the furnished basement of his home, using a computer and a TV set that plays the raw footage. If he were working on a movie like “Men in Black II” or “Monsoon Wedding” – two of his pictures – he’d be in a big recording studio with Costanzo and Lara.

The fast pace of TV does not afford such luxuries. Visscher has six days to complete his work on an episode.

(For a movie, he’d have six to eight weeks.) The first day is spent spotting or plotting out all the sound effects the episode will need. Costanzo and Lara have two days to record their sound material. Even as they’re working, Visscher begins editing in sounds.

Then their work goes on to the mixing stage, in which all the tracks are put together.

Like buttah

Part of what makes “Boardwalk Empire” so challenging is that it is rich in action. Visscher also works on FX’s legal drama “Damages,” starring Connecticut’s Glenn Close, which is more dialogue-driven. But even when the sound is seemingly nonexistent, it must be there to heighten the drama. For the satiric Jennifer Garner comedy “Butter,” Visscher had to convey the Sturm und Drang of sculpting the creamy stuff, which, of course, makes no sound. He and the team tried everything, in-

cluding cutting frozen cream cheese. Finally, they went with sausage.

It’s probably a safe bet that butter carving was not what Visscher had in mind for a career when he was studying communications at Hope College in Holland, Mich. But an internship with August Films in New York City, working on commercials and dubbing airline movies, led to a freelance gig on a horror movie and ultimately, a 30-odd year career.

Time was when a lot of sound work was done in two or three buildings in Manhattan. With the advent of digital, it has spread out.

Clearly, Visscher misses the camaraderie of the sound community.

“They’re some of the most wonderful, interesting people in film, with a real love of music and books,” he says.

But working at home gives him time to enjoy cooking and his family – wife Cathleen Burke-Visscher, a wine consultant, their teenagers Cecelia and Nick, and Pencil, a particularly wiry wire fox terrier.

On his walks through Bronxville’s intimate, winding roads, Visscher realizes that his sound work has also enhanced his appreciation of life.

“What I like about it is the way it makes me aware of the world around me,” he says. “What you hear centers you in where you are.”

For a list of Steven Visscher’s credits, visit imdb.com. n

Steven Visscher’s Emmy

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“If people can live with what they

love,” Monica

Rich Kosann said, “then I love the

whole idea of people wearing what they love” – a notion

she discusses in her

book “Living With What You Love.”

28

Past is present Monica Rich Kosann’s

designs are from misty, watercolor memories Story and photographs by Zoë Zellers

For a storyteller who’s an old soul, Monica Rich Kosann is generating quite the buzz these days with praise and prime placement of her jewelry in magazines like W and such stores as Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Richards of Greenwich and Mitchells of Westport.

“If people can live with what they love,” she said, “then I love the whole idea of people wearing what they love” – a notion she discusses in her book “Living With What You Love.”

Or better yet, wearing whom you love, since her jewelry line started with one locket that she put on a necklace and bracelet.

It was warmly embraced by stars like Katie Holmes and clients who had bought some of her earlier products, including black-and-white photographs, sterling silver frames and “image cases” made from Italian cigarette cases.

“A locket tells the truth,” Monica said, “so when Katie Holmes was wearing my locket for years, off and on, everyone asked me, ‘Who’s in her locket?’ and I’m like, ‘I have no idea,’” she said with a laugh.

The designer – an on-the-go New York “city chick” and constant traveler who calls New Canaan home – said she gets her inspiration from a range of influences, including flea markets, museums, galleries, early-20th century photography, old movies, Cole Porter, Twiggy, her family keepsakes and contemporary designers.

“It’s interesting: In my jewelry I find I always get my best ideas from old art,” she said. “I would look at old paintings and these women would wear lockets and have great jewelry, and I always thought that was so sexy.”

Monica Rich Kosann

Stardust memories

She’ll also turn on Turner Movie Classics and read though a week of Women’s Wear Daily, a favorite lazy Sunday ritual and obsess over Katharine Hepburn’s style.

“Oh my God, if you think about the way she dressed in some of her movies, I just want to put a long locket on her,” Monica half-joked. “She was wearing those turtlenecks and those trousers, and in “The Philadelphia Story,” I mean, it’s like made for my jewelry isn’t it?”

There is something about the clothes and accessories back then that resonates with Monica. “That whole period was so chic, and all the accessories were telling stories about the people who were carrying them.

“In those days, if you and I would have lunch and sit across from each other, and we’d take out powder compacts, those powder compacts would usually have details on them that would say something about you and me.

Mine may have my birthstone or maybe you inherited yours from your grandmother or maybe it had your initials on it or maybe you had a secret inscription behind your cigarette case. They were all very personal attributes and for some reason, all these things really spoke to me.”

Another movie star is the inspiration behind Monica’s charm bracelet – Grace Kelly, in her “Rear Window” period. But Monica also drew on her mother’s bracelet, which is in some respects the one that got away.

“I honestly got into charm bracelets, because my mom had this fantastic charm bracelet. Oh my God, it was kind of a flat gold bracelet.”

Monica’s uncle, who never married, would travel the world and bring his sisters “these fabulous charms,” Monica remembered. “One was a fan that opened up.

Another one was a skier with ski boots. I mean, they were crazy charms. But they were my mom’s story.

“And then one day she decided to give my sister and I her jewelry, and not knowing that that was my personal favorite, she gave my sister the charm bracelet and she gave me a necklace, which was beautiful but she didn’t realize how much I wanted the bracelet. So I said, you know what? I’m going to do my own charm bracelet col-

lection.

“The charm bracelet tells your story, and it’s a conversation piece.… It’s like a string of memories.”

The current chapter in Monica’s own story – one she shares with her husband and business partner, Rod – is that she’s the au courant kid in the niche “high-end memory business.” At a recent event at Neiman Marcus, The Westchester in White Plains, Monica drew customers of all ages buying holiday gifts. Perhaps they saw the designer’s 18k yellow gold and diamond bracelet featured in W’s annual gift guide supplement.

“You’d be surprised,” Monica said. “My audience ranges from 7-year-old kids to 18-year-olds, 25-year-olds and adults.” That’s because “building your story, telling your story is ageless.”

Visit monicarichkosann.com to see her designs and photographs. Visit mrkstyle.com for her thoughtful and charming e-magazine. n 29

Palette-able restorations Norwalk artist creates as well as ‘up-cycles’ old furnishings

By Mary Shustack Photographs by flöe painting, Ryan Doran and Mary Shustack

Stephen D’Louhy

T

ucked in a mainly residential neighborhood that borders Norwalk Harbor is a faded red building that resembles, in turn, a barn

and a garage.

But don’t be deceived by its workmanlike exterior.

Despite the sharp wind and steady rain on a recent morning, the middle door is raised, giving a visitor a glimpse into a wildly artistic, if unexpected, space.

There are worktables covered with samples of wall finishes, from lush florals to precise geometrics. Dozens and dozens of jars of paint and tins of finishes and stains line the shelves. Stretches of wood are tucked into every corner.

Chairs hang precariously along the walls, waiting to be revitalized. A once-stately cabinet stands in the midst of it all, its glass front removed.

It’s all a good omen – after all, what true artist ever works in neat surroundings?

Stephen D’Louhy is the man behind the workshop of possibilities, the head-

30

quarters of his company, flöe painting.

And playing with those possibilities is what keeps D’Louhy loving his ever-expanding business.

Today, the offerings of flöe painting range from faux finishes to decorative painting, murals to trompe l’oeil, custompainted furniture to custom art on canvas and high-gloss finishes to plaster wall treatments.

Early days

D’Louhy got his start working in his father’s traditional painting business, helping out during his high school and college years. It was through the company that he was exposed to decorative painting, with his father not only encouraging him, but even paying for his first class.

D’Louhy graduated from Arizona State University, having studied sociology and exercise physiology. But soon, he was in the design business, following the footsteps of both his father and a sister who’s an interior designer.

“Fifteen years ago, I did a hair salon in

Greenwich, put out a few cards and have been working six or seven days a week since then,” D’Louhy says.

He took over his father’s business in 2002, when he passed away, and managed it up until last year.

Today, his focus is on flöe painting, which grew out of simple wall treatments and faux painting – making one kind of surface mimic another. Along the way, D’Louhy has sold antiques and worked with furniture designers to create custompainted work.

A prime example

Restoration and revitalizing furniture is a growing part of what he does. A glassfronted cabinet, for example, stands in the middle of the workshop, giving a peek into what the company can do.

This piece with its elegantly spare Art Deco lines once belonged to a client’s grandmother. It has, D’Louhy shares, “a lot of sentimental value.”

“She wants to use it, but it really got beat up over the years. It’s a well-built

piece of furniture but you know, it’s tired.”

He’s already begun to strip down the wood, preparing to refurbish its walnut front panels accented with tiger-maple insets. The remainder of the piece, he says, is of a more functional wood and typical of the Depression era’s cost cutting.

“We’re going to preserve the good stuff, and silver leaf the rest of the piece to make it fun and a little more whimsical,” he says.

It makes sense from both an aesthetic and economic point of view, he says.

“Why throw this away and buy something new? It’s not the same quality and you can get a custom piece.”

As Alex Churchill, a California-born, Vermont-raised fine artist who joined the flöe painting team some three years ago adds, the project is a perfect example of taking “old stuff that would’ve gotten thrown away – and it’s up-cycled.”

Talking trends

D’Louhy says these days he finds a lot of clients are working with “transitional”

pieces or pieces he says reflect “the cross between traditional and contemporary.”

And flöe painting is right in line with that. D’Louhy takes out a strip of molding where short stretches reflect different hues, from a creamy white to a light beige.

“We can also match any tone or color the customer wants.”

And that’s usually something subtle.

Gone, D’Louhy says, are the days – hello, 1980s – when a client might splurge on an orange room. Now, with people so on the move, they want to be able to change things or take them with them easily.

Even murals are created in a new way.

“The smart thing is to do it on canvas,” D’Louhy says. “People are so transient.”

This way, a commissioned work doesn’t have to be left behind when a family relocates.

Before, D’Louhy says, people may have spent tens of thousands of dollars on a custom mural only to lose it when they moved.

Custom work

Flöe’s projects range from taking architectural salvage and turning it into art to creating a wall treatment to match a new decor.

A dining room, for example, comes to life thanks to a wall featuring a metallic harlequin pattern with a fleur-de-lis ac-

R

Materials in Stephen D’Louhy’s studio

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31

Over the years Stephen D’Louhy has worked on detailed ceiling features, murals and paintings and faux paints on walls that mimic elaborate wallpaper designs.

Furniture with classic lines are ideal canvases for Stephen D’Louhy’s restoration work.

cent. It’s a look filled with classic elements and yet suddenly appears as fresh as can be.

Strips from a wooden pallet, rescued from a job site, are artfully fashioned into rough-hewn frames that still manage to give a quirky elegance to any surrounding.

Often, one project within a home leads to another, D’Louhy says. By the time they’ve done a wall, they’ll also have been tapped to redo the kitchen cabinets and then move on to portraits of the homeowner or his or her children.

New work incorporates everything from experimental finishes, such as resin, to classics like faux marble to bold artistic moves such as graffiti.

On the road

“You see all the grass cloths that are kind of retro,” D’Louhy says of a favorite wall finish. “We do our own version of it.”

And that includes a bit of brushwork 32

and some cheesecloth to end up with a very smooth finish that appears totally textured.

When it’s time to change things up, D’Louhy says “the beauty of that” is it can be lightly sanded away instead of ripping out the wall.

“We hate wallpaper,” D’Louhy says with a smile. “You can quote that.”

“Wallpaper is the enemy,” Churchill echoes with a laugh.

The client base is both residential and commercial, primarily in Westchester and Fairfield counties, though flöe has done work across the country.

It might be an installation for Anthropologie in Westport, a showcase of work in the 2011 Designer Showhouse of Westchester – held in Bedford Corners to benefit Cerebral Palsy of Westchester – or the refreshing of Liana’s Trattoria in Fairfield, a project D’Louhy first worked on some 10 years ago.

This time, he helped renew the space,

updating the ceiling, glazing the walls and adding accents to the furniture.

“It was just time to sort of change it up,” he says.

The workshop, though, remains home base.

“We’ve been so busy in the field,” D’Louhy says. “Ideally, we’d like to have a day or two a week in here.”

That’s when the experimenting gets done.

Going green

Today, D’Louhy says both he and the clients are savvier.

“Globally, we’re exposed to so many things now” that end up translated in the work.

The colors and patterns of traditional Tibetan folk art, for example, become the motif for a painted credenza.

Across the board, D’Louhy says, customers have a clearer idea of what they want.

“Taste is simpler,” he adds.

The work of flöe painting, he says, keeps simple from being boring.

“I think our finishes definitely give the walls a lot of interest… texture,” D’Louhy says.

Most of the products, he says, are now eco-friendly.

For many years, he says, materials were often oil-based and hard to dispose of. Today, water-based (and less toxic) elements allow a brush to be rinsed and the process to continue with ease.

And that brush can be made of anything – even a feather collected from the nearby harbor.

As D’Louhy says, it’s always on to something new – and challenging.

“There’s not enough hours in the day to do everything, but it keeps it fresh, keeps it new.”

To contact Stephen D’Louhy and flöe painting, call (203) 829-9271, visit flöepainting.com or follow flöe painting and its projects on Facebook. n

Photos: Johanna Weber

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Dr. Joshua Dines assesses risks to pros and amateurs alike

By Mary Shustack

Dr. 34David Dines and his son Dr. Joshua Dines follow Davis Cup play.

Andy Roddick

When professional tennis players hit the court, they have a lot on the line.

They are fighting for their rankings, their reputations – and in most cases, their livelihoods.

When an amateur picks up a racket, the stakes are usually not as high. But the risks to one’s health can be the same the pros face, Joshua Dines says.

Dines, an orthopedic surgeon who’s a physi- Dr. Joshua Dines cian for the United States Davis Cup team, says players of all skill levels encounter a lot of the same issues when it comes to playing – and staying – healthy.

With offices in Great Neck and Manhattan, Dines is more than a keen observer of play both professional and amateur. He has come in contact with countless professional athletes through his work. Besides being a member of the sports medicine and shoulder service division at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, Dines is also a consultant for the Los Angeles Dodgers and a team orthopedist for the Long Island Ducks, a minor-league baseball team.

Dines – whose father, David Dines, is the medical director of the Association for Tennis Professionals – has treated everyone from former No. 1-ranked Andy Roddick to the weekend warrior headed to the country club to the high school student striving for a tennis scholarship. He has seen the pro game volley into high gear with a more aggressive style of play, as exemplified

by Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, the current No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.

“The pro game has become so much

more physical,” Dines says. Players, he says, are simply bigger and stronger, often reaching 6-foot-4 and topping 200 pounds. “They could play any sport, but chose tennis.”

And that play is intense, no matter who’s serving.

“It’s faster… They hit the ball harder than 10 years ago,” he says. “As soon as the bar is raised, it trickles down to the amateur level, as well.”

Amateurs are not only mimicking the style they see, they’re having some of the same issues with injuries to their knees, ankles, elbows and shoulders.

“From that perspective, we do see more injuries, even at the amateur level.”

Two sets of challenges

Dines says when it comes to amateurs, there are basically two kinds.

The weekend warriors are those who might simply play a casual match or participate in a weekly league.

“In that group, injuries are still an issue.

In the winter, you see a lot of problems.”

Players might not work out the rest of the week. “In the winter, it’s a little more difficult to do that.”

Also, they might not properly warm up for a game, but arrive at the club running late from traffic and immediately begin hitting a few balls before their allotted court time starts ticking away.

“That’s clearly less than the ideal,” he says. “You’re not warmed up appropriately.”

Instead, Dines says, a player should try to arrive early, warm up and get his or her heart rate going before play begins.

Those who play more frequently offer

another set of challenges, Dines says.

Often younger players, especially students, follow a schedule that’s not always prudent.

Dines says playing for a school team might be combined with playing for a travel team, along with individual play.

“We’re seeing a lot more overuse injuries, especially in the younger age group. I see that in baseball players as well.”

In previous years, he says, students in particular would not only rest more between play but also cross-train instead of specializing.

Younger players are more prone to ankle sprains and knee injuries. As intensity progresses, these turn into rotator cuff concerns and tendonitis, affecting both the knee and elbow.

“Tennis or golfer’s elbow are just kind of injuries related to overuse,” Dines says.

He suggests players “use time wisely.” If you don’t have a match, still work out.

“Each season leads into the next,” he says, encouraging people to continue a fitness regime all year.

Training and lessons are also important.

“Doing things with incorrect technique or form predisposes you to injury.”

The most common problems include rotator cuff tears, shoulder dislocations and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears. Dines has a particular interest in joint replacement, shoulder surgery and tendon injuries.

Should surgery be warranted, he can avail himself of the latest research and most cutting-edge techniques – no pun intended – in less invasive, arthroscopic approaches to shoulder, elbow, knee and ankle problems.

A love of the game

Dines enjoys working with the world’s top athletes.

“There’s cachet there. It’s fun. It’s celebrity.”

Dines, who was in Florida recently to address staffers from the White Plainsbased United States Tennis Association, says his work in the sport keeps him busy.

“I was away like 40 days this year,” he says of his speaking schedule. “You kind of have to do it to stay relevant.”

But that doesn’t preclude the satisfaction he gets out of helping an amateur player of any age return to the game.

“It’s equally rewarding for me to get the high school or college player back.”

Still, his higher-profile work adds to his credibility in the eyes of some, he shares.

“If you’re treating the most elite athletes, it helps in treating the people who don’t have to get to that level.”

After all, if Dines can say he counseled Roddick to sit out a tournament, then it gives him credibility when telling future Federers that a break may be warranted.

On the links

Joshua Dines says golfers also face some of the same challenges as tennis players, especially when it comes to fitness.

Since there is limited play available locally this time of year, golfers should focus their attention on staying fit with weighttraining, resistance-training and yoga – activities that strengthen the body as a whole, he says.

“The core is really the key to any of these sports. We don’t have any magic bullets yet.”

Until then, stay smart to play smart.

To reach Joshua Dines, visit dinesorthopedics.com or call (516) 482-1037. n 35

A singular heart Ridgefield psychic works to mend body and spirit

By Dana Ramos

T

here are no prominent signs outside of Move 2 Wellness, a massage and wellness therapy center that opened in Ridgefield about two years ago in the restored Stonehouse Commons. It’s easy to pass the building as you search for the address, expecting to find the name on a post or marquee. But quietly, a small sign marks the private entrance.

The studio interior is also quiet, with a welcoming lobby painted in earth tones and outfitted with comfortable chairs. A large wooden placard above the fireplace reads, “DREAM.” The calm and plaintive music of a solo Japanese flute is playing softly throughout. Inside, there is an open space for yoga and meditation classes – even belly dancing classes are taught here – and two private rooms for massage treatments, including Reiki. Other inspirational signs, posted throughout, invite visitors to “WISH,” “INSPIRE” and “BELIEVE,” to find “PEACE” and have “FAITH.” The decor is a mélange of spiritual iconography – Native American art, Hindu and Buddhist statuettes and pillows and curtains printed with East Asian and Indian patterns. Its eclecticism reflects the versatility of the staff, which includes North Salem’s Melissa Merendino, an “intuitive practitioner,” who sometimes gives psychic readings at neighboring Touch of Sedona. She is also an animal communicator, tarot card reader, past-life regression therapist and sound and vibrational healings performer. In addition, she arranges for dolphin-assisted therapy for humans and shamanic journeys. As a Reiki master and teacher, she uses the palms of her

36

hands to help align chakras—the seven energy points along the spine—and “unblock” the energy flow, or qi (“chee”).

The goal, of course, is for these treatments to work together or separately to heal your mental, physical or emotional ills.

At peace with herself

Warm and gracious, Merendino hands me several brochures and emphasizes that she’s also “trained in animal massage, healing and communication, especially with horses. I’m certified in equissage.”

She speaks and walks with the calm comfort of a woman always aware of who and where she is and of her life’s purpose – to help and heal.

“I’m extremely empathic,” she says.

“After working on very ill or disturbed people, I sometimes have to do a cleansing ritual on myself like burning some sage or meditating just to be sure I release any negative energy I might have absorbed.”

She shows me several tools used for these nonstandard therapies – crystals, an Aboriginal rain stick, tarot cards and dowsing rods to measure a person’s aura.

There are several metal bowls of varying sizes, known as “singing bowls.” As she taps one with a padded wooden mallet, she says, “This one is from Tibet and is an alloy of seven pure metals.” The bowls create lovely harmonic tones and are used for mediation, music and relaxation.

“In addition to using these in private sessions, I also present concerts with these bowls. They help you drift into an altered state.”

“You can call the universal energy whatever you want,” she adds, “but every culture since the beginning of time has defined

it and found ways to connect with it.

Christians call it the Christ energy. Buddhists, Hindus and Taoists: They are all trying to connect with the same thing.”

Swimming with dolphins

How did Merendino become so involved in these healing arts?

“My father was a standard healer, a doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology,” she says. “He never understood me. But I was born this way. I saw auras and could read palms when I was 5 or 6. He wasn’t a believer until much later in his life when he was ill and I treated him. Then he said he believed.”

Her mother, who lives in Danbury and whom she resembles, is familiar to vintage moviegoers as the beautiful actress Betsy Palmer. The star appeared in such classic films as “The Thin Gray Line,” “Mr. Roberts,” and “Queen Bee,” alongside the likes of Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, James Cagney and Joan Crawford. (Who can forget how her kindly Carol Phillips is done in by Joan Crawford’s title character in “Queen Bee,” a 1955 melodrama?)

Later in her career, Palmer appeared in more than 70 television programs, including as a charming panelist on “I’ve Got A Secret.”

Unlike her father, Merendino says, “My mother always thought it was cool that I was different in this way. She understood it was natural and instinctive for me. And I believe most Pisces – I’m a Pisces – have this trait, that we feel thoughts and feeling of others really strongly.”

As Pisces the Fish, Merendino was naturally attracted to dolphins.

“My email name is ‘Psychic Dolphin Girl’ on Yahoo. But it’s not the best way to get in touch with me. I don’t check it every day. I don’t like living with a computer in my home, it’s like …” She pauses to think a moment, trying to sum up her mixed feelings. “I mean, computers are useful and I know we need them. But it’s like living with a robot with weird vibes. So I only check email at work or other places with a computer.”

For many years, Merendino lived in a town that has become widely

known for attracting artists and alternative healers, Sedona, Ariz.

“I love Sedona, but it became too full of fakes and frauds,” Merendino says.

“Where there is light, darkness will also be attracted. Yin and yang. I began meeting too many dark and creepy people.

And it’s gotten really touristy. Sedona is on sacred ground. It’s a universal energy center. It isn’t supposed to be like that.”

One heart

So what happens during a Reiki, chakra or clairvoyant healing session?

“Well, some people visit with dead relatives. Some meet Jesus or Buddha.

Some people pass out and start snoring. Everybody is different, has different needs,” Merendino says.

But does it work?

There is plenty of empirical evidence about people who use psychics or alternative healers experiencing positive health benefits. Scientists say this is due to a placebo effect, or a type of “mind over matter.” Because of this, the medical community is becoming more open to alternative therapies as a way of enhancing traditional medical care.

Without openly discussing the placebo effect, Merendino seems to understand that it exists.

“I can’t work on someone who is not open to believing in this. They need to believe for it to work. Of course, I love to get the ‘stump the psychic’ people – like my father was – because I always surprise them by revealing things I couldn’t possibly know if I didn’t have these abilities.”

But Merendino knows that no matter what, there will always be those who roll their eyes when she discusses her work.

So she likes to explain her thoughts in a way that nearly everyone can relate to.

“There are miracles and possibilities available to all of us. We have power to heal ourselves. You can manifest your own destiny with positive thinking and action and by being thankful, gracious, and respectfully asking the universe – however you define that, maybe as God – for what you need.”

She gives me another warm smile and a hug, “We are all connected to the one heart.”

And who does not want to believe that?

For more, visit Move 2 Wellness at 635 Danbury Road, Ridgefield, or online at Move2Wellness.com. (203) 4032522. n

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Chic to chic Stamford couple bring exquisite designs to the home

By Patricia Espinosa

It all began with 40 historical glass pieces. It was 2001 and David and Capucine Gooding, looking to start a brand together, were at the Paris Trade Fair when they came across a small collection of exquisite European historic glass shapes, which would become the inspiration for the launch of the whimsical Juliska brand, which has lightened up home design.

The young couple started working directly with the glass blowers that make these shapes just north of Prague, but also went into designing pieces that were really part of the American lifestyle, such as larger goblets, hurricanes and cake domes.

Juliska first caught my eye back in 2004 while I was shopping the antique stores around Canal Street in Stamford. I had spotted the newly opened flagship store and decided to have a look. The moment I stepped in, I knew I had stumbled onto something very special.

Indeed, with Capucine’s design sensibility and David’s commercial background, the couple makes a dynamic duo.

So much so that, even in a tough economy, the Goodings’ business has grown leaps and bounds in the last 10 years – an impressive 25 percent.

The company’s not-so-secret formula is creating beautiful, functional luxe furnishings for chic everyday living. The Juliska collection has gone from 40 pieces of mouth-blown glass to 600 pieces inspired by six centuries of European design in 38

glassware, ceramics, linens, lighting, flatware and home scents.

With 50 employees today, the Goodings are intent on creating a corporate culture that is exceedingly creative, young and most of all, fun. Even the Juliska website is playful with its “Almost Factual History,” which gives a humorous account of Juliska’s journey through time.

That humor was very much in evidence when I met David at his flagship store for our interview. Flashing me a warm smile, he handed me his business card, which reads “David Gooding, Le Grand Fromage.”

How does an Englishman from Surrey end up here in Stamford, heading up one of the fastest growing home-furnishing design companies in the country?

“My father was an importer and distributor in the tableware industry in the United Kingdom, so I grew up there until I was 18 and worked in his business. When my father retired, my parents moved to the States for a couple years, so I went to an American college as every English boy wants to do, because they saw ‘Animal House.’ After college, I worked for Mackenzie-Child, a high-end tableware company in the States for one year – traveling round the country, making connections with Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. This was important, because it would later lay the foundation for me

going to the same stores and selling them my own line of goods. At 23, I started a business representing several manufacturers. I traveled every week throughout the United States. Did that for a few years, then that’s when I met my wife. In 2001, we launched Juliska.”

In 2004, you opened your flagship store and corporate offices in Stamford. Why did you decide on Stamford? Why not choose New York City?

“Well, my wife and I lived up on the Upper West Side and I had a showroom in New York City. We moved out to Shippan Point in 2001, right after Sept. 11. We bought a little house here and renovated it.

And then I was commuting into the city, and I said, I have this business, why don’t we try to make this a little easier. So we were looking for a building that we could have luxury retail in the front and offices and distribution in the back. At the time we needed around 10,000 square feet to do that. This building became available in the antique area. It was a natural fit to the front and because it was fairly industrial, the rents were fairly inexpensive so we could distribute out of it. Since then, we’ve moved all the distribution out to another facility and this is now really a retail and office space. Having both in the same location is really a great laboratory for the design and what we’re trying to do.”

Do you ever just pinch yourself over your company’s tremendous success?

“Yeah, I do pinch myself a lot. My daughters pinch me a lot more. We’ve been very fortunate. We have a very strong team and a clear understanding of what we’re trying to achieve. The company is driven by design. My wife is an inspired designer, so that’s really driven our development. We went from glass to ceramic to linen then to stainless steel flatware and lighting. But within those categories, we’re never trying to do something commercial.

We’re not trying to emulate something that’s out there or even think about what a consumer wants as much as design beautiful things.”

How did the name Juliska come about?

“Juliska was the name of a woman we met who had really started recreating this glassware in Europe. We collaborated with her in the beginning and ended up using her name, which we loved.

“It just really seemed to sing with the glass and had a European feel to it. But it was just very feminine and exquisite.

And just kind of spur of the moment, we decided to call it that. Back then this was just a little part of the business I’d established representing other brands, so it was very small. I was still running the agency.”

“Yeah, we like to have some fun. We are a young company. We’re rather unencumbered by any seriousness that goes with running a tableware business, which typically is not the sexiest or funniest industry. Everybody is really empowered to nail their domain. It’s not an organization that’s based on Capucine and me. We really want it to be a corporate culture. That’s always a challenge obviously, because we’re always visible. But it’s creating something that’s not in our image or likeness. It’s something that will be great and strong in 100 years and it doesn’t exist on David and Capucine.

“We’ve just had our 10-year anniversary….It’s fast and exciting and it’s overwhelming. But the feeling you get from Juliska is something that’s really important to us. We’re not just designing plates. We want to design and create lifestyle, have fun and get into the spirit to entertain.”

Your artisan mouth-blown glass is a luminous medium. How does the use of light affect Juliska glass?

Obviously, many of your customers are brides, but I would imagine that you have women like me, who have been married for a while and want to lighten up their wedding china by mixing it with Juliska mouth-blown glass and handpressed Colette glassware.

“Yes. It’s fundamental to the way we design and the way you want to live. You can have some fun with it. You don’t have to commit to an entire dinnerware story. You want to mix it in with antique things you may have from your mom’s china. Within Juliska we created, just as an example, Set My Table Tool, which is a digital adjunct to our website where you can go on and set a digital table.”

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Juliska sells in more than 800 retailers across the United States, including Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus. What’s next for the company?

“Well, although it’s been swift, we like to grow organically through discerning premium retailers. Those 800 stores around the country are the style-driven stores in their towns. So building partnerships with them has been critical to our success and our future as well. That’s fundamental to Juliska. Our new website is a fantastic and exciting new channel. …It gives us the ability to interact and communicate with the consumer directly, brides particularly, so that we can have a relationship with them and understand them better.

“We’re focusing on the interior design channel. We redesigned all of our lighting in the last year. All the lights have (new components), three-way switches, UL approved, Lucite bases, all new silk shades or natural material shades, glass finials. We’ve really made them beautiful.”

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What do you do when you’re not working?

“Well, we just spent a year renovating our home. Capucine was wanting to base the home on some French style stucco and stone homes she’d seen. It was kind of a big project. …We have three excited daughters, ages 8, 7 and 4, who take a lot of time and that is our primary focus.” n

WE

“Light is critical to our glass. For instance, when you look at our pendant lights they are an amazing category, very successful sales. The way the light shines through the decoration glass is magical.

We just renovated our home right here in Shippan Point for the last year. We just moved in a week ago. We put a lot of these pendants in and the different decoration that comes out on the outside of the pendants causes amazing light.

“In display, the way we endeavor to illuminate the glass makes the decoration magical. That is key. Now that relates to the way we design and select our ceramic glazes.

“When we went to our ceramic technologist in Portugal, we said we would like to echo the sensibility of our glassware in ceramics. How do you do that? So if you look at the majority of our glazes, they are effectively transparent. You can see the blend of clay with color as it pools over a design. And that stops it from being flat and opaque. But that comes from glass.

If you look at our green glass particularly, the gradation of color is what gives it so much depth. This new collection, Coun-

try Estate, the depth of color and the variation of color is what gives a piece its three-dimensionality and its life.”

ST

ER

Between your British wit and Capucine’s French style, it seems to be a perfect marriage, both from a business standpoint and, I’m sure, a personal one as well. Juliska’s collections seem to reflect that humor and style. Tell me about that.

CHES

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wear

riches

Bags to

Judith Leiber’s ascendance to the top of the luxe purse biz Story By Zoë Zellers Photographs by Bob Rozycki Judith Leiber, a long-standing leader in couture and creative handbag design, represents a true American success story, an immigrant’s rags-to-riches narrative Hollywood couldn’t write as well. And although Leiber stepped away from her hugely successful company in 1998, retired to the Hamptons and sold the rights to her name, the brand, under CEO Mary Gleason, continues to follow her tradition of pairing inventiveness with elegance in the form of ornate, artful handbags and minaudières (purses that are little jewels).

Just look at this season’s extravagant Habibati clutch, perhaps the most enticing example of the original Leiber MO – the brighter, the better. Take this bejeweled genie-in-a-bottle-style clutch to an evening event, and guests will be rubbing your accessory, less for the fabled three wishes promised and more for the thrill of getting their hands on $5,995 worth of pure glam.

Trying times

Leiber’s beginnings were far from a fairy tale, though. Judith Peto was born in 1921 in Budapest.

She originally studied to be a chemist at London’s King College before World War II sent her home, where she learned to make handbags to earn money.

In Budapest, she became the first woman to join the handbag-makers guild and developed her passion, sure that the craft would become her career.

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Leiber was fortunate enough to escape the Holocaust when her father obtained a Swiss schutzpass, granting a safe-conduct pass to Switzerland. Today, that document is on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. But Leiber lived in Switzerland desperately, albeit briefly, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with 25 other people. Eventually, she was able to return to her badly damaged home in Budapest, alive but with her spirit broken.

World War II, however, did bring Judith one gift.

She met her husband, modern artist Gerson Leiber, who at the time was an American GI living in the apartment below hers. The two were married in 1946 and moved to America in 1948.

In New York, Judith worked in the handbag industry as chief pattern-maker for Nettie Rosenstein for 20 years before moving to Koret. As the story goes, Gerson recognized the true art value of his wife’s one-ofa-kind creations and told her he simply wouldn’t let her work for anyone else anymore. So in 1963, Judith Leiber, the brand, was born.

With no one to answer to, Leiber was able to evolve into a luxury accessories designer, learning to embellish a single purse with so much beading and rhinestones that it could take up to a week to make. The clutches were lavishly pricey and at the same time, artistic and unique (like a tomato minaudière). Because of this, Leiber developed a special and loyal fan base. She’s remained a Hollywood red carpet staple for more than half a century and in 1994 received

Judith Leiber’s butterfly handbag ($5,495) with the “Ritz Fizz” teal clutch ($2,295) and the “Tatiana” bow clutch ($2,995). Opposite; Judith Leiber’s Habibati clutch in “Hermatite Multi” ($5,995) and Mardi Grasready crystal mask handbag ($5,795), all available at Neiman Marcus at The Westchester.

a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers.

American originals

Leiber also began an American tradition, a very strategic one, of sending a handbag to the White House with each inauguration. Almost every first lady after Jacqueline Kennedy – except Rosalyn Carter – has been pictured carrying a Judith Leiber clutch. The iconic minaudières also found a permanent home in design history in collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Today the Judith Leiber company maintains its exclusivity with its handmade haute bling, which typically costs several thousand dollars, available at a handful of Judith Leiber boutiques and at select retail stores including Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman.

There’s one other place Leiber lovers can find the bags and that’s at the Leiber Museum, which she and her husband created in Springs, Long Island, in 2005. The museum showcases Gerson’s artwork and 1,000 encased pieces of Leiber’s reclaimed eye candy.

Ironically, since her retirement Leiber has embarked on a great mission to find and buy back her original creations, turning to eBay and consignment shops. In her hunt, she’s finding proof that original Judith Leiber bags retain value. n

Today the Judith Leiber company maintains its exclusivity with its handmade haute bling, which typically costs several thousand dollars, available at a handful of Judith Leiber boutiques and at select retail stores including Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman.

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Selling

(shh!) sexy Josie Natori makes women around the world look and feel that way

By Zoë Zellers Photographs by ©David Bravo

H

er childhood home in the Philippines might be a world away from her residences in Pound Ridge and New York City, but for Josie Natori the island nation remains a unifying force in her life and work.

It also represents the dichotomous yin – growing up a good Catholic schoolgirl – to the yang of becoming a fashion leader in the creation of sexy underwear.

She is well aware of the irony.

“I’m a prude,” Josie says. “I was educated by nuns all my life – get it? So the idea that I would even think (of lingerie and sex)” – she pauses here – “never.”

Josie joined the fashion community as a lingerie designer who, for the longest time, “could not even use the word ‘sexy’ because I thought it was dirty. It was considered a cultural no-no to say ‘sexy.’ So now I’m realizing, it’s not dirty, it’s being feminine.”

As far as designing her sexy, soft, inviting lingerie with men in mind, she says, “I never think about the man.

“To me, the most important thing is to feel good about yourself. Because if you feel good about yourself, then you’re good to others. It has to start within.”

The Filipino influence is embedded in the Natori aesthetic – fine, embroidered details and luxurious, feminine materials.

She has expanded her brand to include swimwear, prêtà-porter, fragrances, home design and an intimate new collaboration with Target.

Josie travels around the globe, but particularly to the Middle and Far East to draw inspiration for her designs.

And she’s a regular visitor to the Philippines, where The Natori Co. started a factory for her lingerie and loungewear 33 years ago.

“The Philippines is a very important part of my life,” says Josie, who counts the Order of Lakandula, presented by the Filipino government, as her greatest honor. “I like the idea now of being able to give back, so it’s not just having jobs. At the same time, I’ve been very involved with the design community there and in trying to help in the government. I have this desire to help and expose really the talents of a lot of Filipino artists that are not just in fashion, but in visual arts.

“The creativity of the Filipino is our biggest asset.”

From the inside out

In 1977, Josie took an embroidered blouse from the Philippines and transformed it into a nightgown that was an instant hit with major retailers, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, the former Bonwit Teller and Neiman Marcus.

“I think (my launch) was a moment where it just came at the right time in fashion,” she says, “And I was very open.”

Today Josie’s lacy, slinky lingerie and loungewear range from soft willow greens to coppers and reds accented by black lace and leopard-prints, all with a sexy, girly appeal.

She’s bringing this appeal to Target with a line that represents a first for the retail giant – and will no doubt be a revelation.

“I’m very proud of the business we built,” she says. “It’s not about the utilitarian mind-set of wearing (something) 44

until it falls apart…. I believe our brand has been instrumental in women being more conscious about fashion in the at-home wear and in their sleepwear, I really do,” Josie says with real conviction. “Otherwise, we’d still be buying white nightgowns,” she notes with a smile.

“Look, I believe in timelessness and in building wardrobes that don’t make you a fashion victim one season later. But there are certain things that need to be refreshed and to me, the beginning of the year is a great time to do this.

“Josie is very spiritual and she’s true, she’s as sweet as can be and she cracks me up. She probably weighs no more than my pinkie and then she’ll tell me, ‘Oh Monica, you’re so skinny,’ and I’m like, ‘Well Josie, look who’s talking!’ She’s a lot of talent in a little package and she’s a ball of fire”

— Monica Rich Kosann, fellow lifestyle designer and friend of Josie Natori

“And certainly with lingerie, which is the closest to your skin and most personal, why should you have to save an old, ratty bathrobe? Why shouldn’t you be changing it?

Are you kidding?” She throws up her arms in amused exasperation, as if to say, “Come on, people.”

“These are the most personal, intimate things. To me, it’s more important than what is on the outside.”

Josie bets there are women walking around now with thousands of dollars worth of outerwear and just “the worst” lingerie, a major faux pas.

She shakes her head. “I know what it does for you when you feel fresh, which by the way, goes beyond just underwear to how you bathe, the soap you use, a new shampoo, a new cleanser, fresh, new underwear and a bra, all these ways you’re good to yourself from the inside out.

I don’t understand how women can put up with wearing ratty inner-wear.”

Refreshing lingerie “is not just a necessity” but a real treat to yourself, Josie says.

At home with Josie

But it doesn’t end there.

“I have a home fetish,” she acknowledges, a passion that manifests itself in her home collection, featuring luxury linens, bath and beach towels, ornate dragon accents, lacquer frames, wood-grain vases, napkin rings and coaster sets, as well as “The Art of Natori,” a sensuous

coffee-table book.

“I believe in being able to express that love of the home through three-dimensional things. If you love our aesthetic and appreciate the fine details of Natori, then why shouldn’t that be in your home?”

Josie’s rule of renewal extends to the home.

“Why does your bed always have to look one way? The bedroom is very important to me and that’s why what you put on your sheets is where you should not be skimping, because you spend so much of your life sleeping. And, oh my goodness, the bathroom and a great bathtub is so important… I love the ceremony of the bath.” Josie has a ceramic tub “so big by the time you fill it, there’s no more hot water.”

That tub is in her house in Pound Ridge, one of several places she calls home, including Paris, Palm Beach and Manhattan’s sedate Lenox Hill neighborhood.

Josie and Ken, her husband and business partner, have owned their Pound Ridge place, a 1741 house on 28 acres, since 1984. Though she loves its park-like setting and seclusion, it was always “just a question of time” until they built a new house nearby. Their son, Kenneth, will be moving into the family’s present Pound Ridge abode when the new place is completed in May, just after the Natori’s 40th wedding anniversary.

In Westchester, they dine out at the Glen Arbor Golf Club in Bedford Hills, which Ken bought in 2003 and had Gary Player redesign.

He’s recruited more 250 members for it, some of whom were at his blowout 60th birthday bash. Father and son also love to grill.

“Clearly, my husband and son really love this (environment). Me? I’m a workaholic so I could be in the city seven days a week… I could stay in Central Park and look at trees, so it’s not like I need a weekend house.”

Their Manhattan apartment is a brisk walk from her airy, light-filled showroom, where she is likely to play poker with fellow designer and Westchester neighbor Joseph Abboud.

The apartment contains one of her favorite spaces – the music room, which holds two Steinway grand pianos.

“Although I was a pianist from age 4, I never had the desire to be a concert pianist as a profession.” Still, she adds, “I gave three major concerts– at age 9 (with the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra), at 19, and when I turned 50, here at Carnegie Hall.”

And she remains a concert-goer, attending occasional performance at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah and serving on the board of its resident Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

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From Wall to Main Street

What Josie really wanted to do was go into business, like her father, who owns a construction company. To that end, she came to the United States to study at Manhattanville College in Purchase. Just two weeks after graduating, she got a job in corporate finance and “at age 21, swear to God, I interviewed and hired 26 people to start an office in Manila.”

Three years later, she was climbing the Merrill Lynch ladder in New York and became the first female vice president in investment banking.

She met her courtly husband – at that time an executive director and managing partner at Smith Barney – at a Wall Street party on her first, and last, blind date.

Wall Street turned out to be better for romance than for a career.

“I got bored,” she says. So the two decided to start their own company. She thought of the Philippines and that embroidered blouse, and what began as an accident is now a 35-year history.

“Every major store bought it, because it didn’t look like a nightgown at all,” Josie recalls. “I think there was a big hole there that we filled, because I didn’t have any baggage of what I was supposed to be. I was presenting something that was clothes, and really, because I didn’t come from the fashion business, nor did I come from the background, nor did I have preconceived ideas of what lingerie should or 46

could be, I just did it out of instinct and as a consumer, since I love fashion.”

That love was apparent at the recent launch of her first in-store, ready-to-wear collection at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. There a beaming Josie sipped Champagne, resting an affectionate hand on the arm of her husband.

But Josie doesn’t alight on her laurels for long. She’s in Manila to open a new boutique or visit her mother and father, ages 87 and 92 respectively, who still work. Or this “obvious shopaholic” is in Paris, Marrakesh or Kyoto, soaking up treasures and inspiration for her home and clothing lines.

“What I think is exciting, when I stop and think about it, is that in a way, when you buy a Natori something, I’m bringing this to your home and you don’t have to travel and find it, because I already did that for you. You can find those gorgeous embroidered things in the flea market, but they’re soiled already and I’m able to reproduce them and it’s affordable.”

And you deserve it: That’s what Josie, who grew up surrounded by strong women, wants to know.

“Everything we’re doing is something that’s very personal because that’s my philosophy: Treat yourself, your bedroom, your bathroom, I really believe in that, because I work very hard and I don’t apologize for treating myself. We all deserve it. Every woman, whether you’re a housewife or a mom or a teacher, works hard and we have so many rules….To me, indulgence is a necessity.” n

Saks Fifth Avenue hosted a private cocktail party Nov. 9 to celebrate the launch of Josie Natori’s instore boutique.

Guests included Stephen Sadove, chairman and CEO of Saks Inc., and his wife, Karin, as well as Natori employees, loyal customers and fans from the glossies.

Everyone enjoyed Champagne and hors d’oeuvres while browsing through the sleek racks of Josie’s debut ready-to-wear shop with its custom fixtures and clean, minimal aesthetic. Models weaved through-

out the 600-square-foot retail space on the renovated and muchimproved Wear Now Floor. They showed off sweet, slouchy graphic dresses inspired by the art of the geisha and the spirit of the samurai.

The petite designer, wearing killer heels and her own poppy red dress, was energetic from start to finish.

Josie encouraged guests eyeing her comfy knits and modern kimono dresses to step right into the fitting room. One oversized bauble wood necklace made for quite the spectacular giveaway raffle prize.

Josie Must-haves

1. Tab, Diet Coke and Champagne 2. Facial cleanser by Clé de peau 3. Eye cream and moisturizer by Dr. Sebagh 4. Guerlain Le Rouge G lipstick in Gracia 5. Regular massages 6. At least nine hours of sleep per night, on fresh sheets 7. By Terry concealer 8. Chanel eye shadow 9. YSL black mascara 10. “Cheap white nail polish” like Essie’s Marshmallow 11. Natori perfume in travel size 12. Natori candles, bath gel and body cream for the bathroom 13. Soap by Santa Maria Novella 14. Massato shampoo enriched with camellia oil from Paris 15. Chick-fil-A fried chicken.

(The pint-sized fashionista loves the stuff.)

way

January in

Think summer

A Harrison couple turns a ranch home into a showpiece

By Mary Shustack Photographs by Bob Rozycki and Tim Lee

Presented by Houlihan Lawrence

T

here are home renovations and then there are home renovations, the kind the Comizios completed.

Rebecca and Richard Comizio transformed a 1960s ranch home in Harrison into a showpiece of modern luxuries and amenities where they have raised their family for the past dozen or so years.

That home is perched on a gentle slope, presiding over a sweeping circular driveway, down the end of a quiet road in the Sterling Ridge neighborhood.

It’s a classic suburban exterior, a welcoming façade, large yet free of pretension. But a step inside the glassand-scrolled metal doors reveals a family retreat that takes that comfortable approach to a surprisingly stylish level.

The rooms are uniformly oversized and airy. A sunken family room features a stone fireplace, a mahogany-paneled wet bar and plenty of room for large gatherings (even offering the quick escape to a glass-encased “man cave”).

A formal dining room is a study in classic design, with coffered ceilings, detailed wainscoting and generous molding throughout. The kitchen – complete with an island big enough to seat four (or more) easily, a separate banquette seating area and top-of-the-line appliances – is both professional-grade and stunning, with a climatecontrolled wine room steps away.

There's an elegant master suite with French doors leading to a private balcony, a walk-in closet, a cuttingedge master spa bath (featuring a shower with changeable mood lighting); a children’s wing; and a lower level complete with a playroom, a working stage for musical performances and a gym – clearly the proverbial something for everyone.

Two home offices, two laundry rooms and a mudroom/indoor “cabana” area enhance the amenity-filled scene. And that doesn’t even begin to describe the backyard, where an in-ground pool, outdoor kitchen and grand terrace with year-round video capabilities take center stage within grounds that feature a dog run and play area.

It’s a home that says “family” at every turn, welcoming visitors with a casual warmth but also spacious enough to entertain hundreds, as the family has done both indoors and out.

No detail, it seems, was too small for Richard Comizio, who’s in the hedge-fund industry but ended up basically serving as general contractor on the entire renovation.

“I picked every piece of granite, every piece of tile, every piece of wood,” he says. And that attention to detail is evident at every turn, from the gleaming foyer to the kitchen countertops to the hardwood floors in the bedroom suites.

But for everything you see, there’s more you don’t, from radiant heating throughout the first floor to a sophisticated alarm system to extensive Smart House technology featuring automated climate, lighting and sound controls.

It wasn’t, however, always that way.

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At first glance

Comizio still remembers the day in 1998 when he was introduced to what would eventually become his new home.

“The first time the broker took us here, I actually walked into the house and was laughing, and I was like, ‘Why would you bring us here?’”

Comizio and his wife were in and out in less than 15 minutes, passing on the straightforward ranch – then a single-level design with two dormers – and moving on to explore other properties in Harrison and Purchase.

With one child and plans for a larger family, the Manhattan-based house hunters were looking for a bigger home… but the property on Seneca Trail stayed in Comizio’s mind.

“I liked the location of this,” he says. “I found this one to be the most appealing.”

Soon, he and his wife were back to look again at the home. It was autumn. They stood in the backyard, with Comizio, a onetime Ivy League football star (University of Pennsylvania), asking his wife to picture the house totally transformed, with a full second floor filling out the living space.

“She’s like ‘OK. I can’t see that, but OK,’” Comizio says.

And the rest, as they say, is history. The family bought the home and moved in – and around and around – during a two-year construction period.

Today, with the children ranging from 9 to 14, the home serves as both a perfect place for play dates (think arcade games in the basement) with close proximity to all the children’s schools.

The next owner will relish the space, from the built-ins and window seats throughout the bedrooms to the sheer scale of the home itself. The second floor, for example, hosts not only an office now used by Rebecca Comizio (who’s studying for an advanced degree in school psychology) but two guest bedrooms with private baths, an expansive/additional playroom, a laundry facility and a dedicated wing for the four children’s bedrooms. Each child’s room also features extensive built-ins. There are bathrooms with double sinks, too – one for the two girls, one for the two boys.

As the family prepares to move on, Richard Comizio pauses to reflect.

“We probably have outgrown the lot itself… you know, with the four kids.”

But the time spent on Seneca Trail will remain full of memories for them all – especially of the renovation that forever changed the home itself.

“It was a fun experience, but it was very taxing to do this,” Comizio says, adding with a smile, “Would we do it again? Probably not.”

But the next owner will certainly benefit from their renovations, as the Comizios search instead for a new home.

Make that a new home that’s move-in ready.

For more information, contact Susan Glasgall at (914) 649-0850. n

Richard Comizio 49

SENECA TRAIL at a Glance • Harrison • 7,713 square feet • 1 acre • Bedrooms: 7 • Baths: 6 full, 2 half • Amenities: First-floor master bedroom, master bath, patio, alarm system, pool, privacy, cul-de-sac, eat-in kitchen, exercise room, walk-in closets, fireplace, walk-out basement, formal dining room, wet bar, high ceilings • Price: $3,595,000

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“I’m originally from eastern Turkey, and this job goes from generation to generation. There’s no place to go there to learn. you just have to learn when you are little from your parent.”

Samet Durmus restores an 1880s Persian rug by hand.

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A stitch in time Samet Durmus’ skills steeped in family tradition Story and photographs by Zoë Zellers “It’s a dying art, that’s exactly the term,” Samet Durmus said, fingering a patch of deep blue wool on the oversized 1880s Persian rug that was draped over his work table.

He’d already been restoring this particular carpet for a month, but that’s only considered a “medium-size job” for the owner of The Golden Horn, an antique-rug restoration service in Port Chester.

“Restoring can take from one week to one year. It can be a big job to fix these rugs. Some are huge, 12 by 18 feet or 18 by 24 feet, and it takes a lot of patience.”

And in addition to patience, it takes creativity, artistic appreciation, nimble fingers and strength to lift 100 to 150 pounds of 100-percent pure, vegetable-dyed wool.

These are just a few of the qualities Durmus had to develop in order to build his reputation as an authentic rug restorer working in the old ways his family taught him.

Durmus lives in Ridgefield with his Taiwan-raised wife, Claudia, a Mandarin language teacher at Ridgefield High School, and his trilingual daughters, 8 and 5. But this is a far cry from his beginnings.

“I’m originally from eastern Turkey, and this job goes from generation to generation. There’s no place to go there to learn. You just have to learn when you are little from your parents,” he said, his fingers toying with wool as he continued to hand-stitch his latest project.

Actually, he said, “You don’t even know you’re learning when you’re just growing up in this business.”

Patience required

Durmus laughed, thinking back on his early encounters.

“It is boring, because with this job you just sit down and it’s all stitch by stitch, and when you’re a kid, you don’t have the patience. Slowly, you start enjoying it and then grow to love it. My dad taught me, and this is his business taken to America.”

Durmus started The Golden Horn 15 years ago on Mamaroneck Avenue in Mamaroneck and relocated to his Port Chester store five years ago. He and his four coworkers need this bigger space since they do all of their restoring in-house with materials imported from his homeland. He said doing it all at The Golden Horn gives him “total control” over the final product.

Referring to the rug he’s currently working on, which shows signs of basic wear and tear, Durmus explained, “The hard part is that this carpet is from 1880 and the color’s been faded by the sun and time, so we have to dye the wool to match the color and we do all that here.”

Once the stitching is complete, he’ll shear the wool to match the original precisely. “And then it’ll last for another 100 years.”

The Golden Horn also sells rugs – new, handmade carpets imported from Turkey, Pakistan and India as well as antique Persians.

“If the carpet’s in such bad condition that customers don’t want to get it fixed, we’ll buy it, fix it and sell it.

And because of the Iranian embargo, you cannot bring a Persian carpet into this country today, so most of the antique business is Persian carpets.”

Without any formal study, Durmus can spot a rug and “tell right away that this is from this age and it came from here,” a valuable service since many customers who in-

Imported Turkish wool is vegetable-dyed to match coloring in antique carpets.

herit beautiful rugs “don’t know what they have, so that’s why I go myself to see if it is or isn’t worth it to restore.”

Most of the time he and a mover will travel to the customer, usually in Manhattan, Fairfield County and Westchester County “to give free estimates, because every carpet is different and we cannot tell on the phone and the price range is all totally individual.”

Because Durmus works long hours, six or seven days a week, he averages an impressive 20-plus finished restorations a month. Typical services include restoring color and worn patches, repairing holes, fixing fringes and binding, putting in a cotton foundation and cleaning pet stains.

“We get a lot of business because of the pets, you know? And we love the pets,” Durmus joked.

“Most of the time, we’ll fix a hole or worn area and the customer will say, ‘Where’s the restoration?’ They cannot see where it’s been fixed. I mean forget about somebody else, even the carpet owner can’t tell where it’s been fixed and that’s what we want to hear from our customers, and it happens all the time. That’s a good restoration.”

Avoid the cheap fix

There are two major reasons to get a rug restored, he said.

“A lot of these carpets go generation to generation and they have a real sentimental value. They’re attached to the family” and worth treating well, especially if they’re displayed in a prominent place in the home.

But these rugs obviously have another kind of value, too, and that’s one that owners may be overlooking.

“If your carpet gets aged, it’s worth more money. But

if it’s worth $100,000 and it gets aged in poor condition, then it’s not worth anything and so you have to get it restored in the right way.”

Durmus said cheap, quick-fix tricks can cost customers more in the end, yet most aren’t even aware of authentic done-by-hand services like The Golden Horn’s. He’ll go to The Pier Antiques Show in Manhattan, for instance, with his table and carpets, and passers-by will say, “I didn’t know this could be done.”

It’s smart visual marketing for a man whose business is based on a 50-percent referral rate.

“The other day I went to a customer’s house over in Peekskill and she lost the binding and fringe on a Chinese Art Deco 1920s carpet.

“And then she found a local company to fix it and they got artificial fringe and put a lot of glue – yeah glue – and they glued some kind of fabric to the carpet like a binding. Later on the glue will get dry and it’ll come right off.

And it’s a big mess,” he lamented.

“They called us to take a look and now it’s become a triple job for us to fix, because the glue is very, very hard to work with. Everything we do is by hand with a needle, so to do this we had to take the glue out. You can really ruin the value of the carpet doing that and it winds up costing more money. It’ll take double time for us to fix and I have to charge double. Nobody told the customer there was another option to fix it. They thought that was the way it should be.”

It takes time and a good eye to do these things correctly, said Durmus, regretting time away from his children, who can’t go to their father’s shop as he did growing up in Turkey. But, he said, “After a while you get used to it and you work like a machine. You have to work very fast in this business and your hands and brain get so used to it that you cannot work slow anyways.”

Visit The Golden Horn at 464 North Main St., Port Chester or online at rugrestoration.com. For a free estimate, call (914) 935-1111. n

Samet Durmus’ tips for restoring and preserving rugs 1. Clean carefully. “When you vacuum the carpet, you shouldn’t go all the way to the fringe, but three or four inches from the fringe. Plus, if you have an antique carpet, just have the vacuum air-touch the dust, not the brush on the wool or it’ll destroy it.”

2. Don’t procrastinate. “In most cases, people wait too long for restoration. Sometimes the carpet has a worn area and they’ll wait longer and it becomes a hole and the foundation breaks, and then they have to spend more money and we have to spend more time fixing it.”

3. Don’t be cheap. “Spend money and do it right the first time,” and don’t let anyone fix a hole by cutting and patching from another carpet.

4. Use the right padding. “It’s not just for preventing sliding and moving. Good padding should protect the carpet, too, and makes a big difference in making a carpet last much, much longer.”

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wares

Before

Lounge act A Riverside designer creates her dream basement

By Patricia Espinosa Photographs by Anthony Carboni “Refreshing what you have” has been my mantra at WAG. So you can imagine my glee when I found out that the magazine was devoting its January issue to the concept of lightening up, refreshing, renewing and restoring.

Indeed, the month of January is a great time for taking stock of our lives and purging ourselves of all that we don’t need to make room for the new. That’s exactly what one Riverside couple – interior designer Eileen Deschapelles and her husband, Charlie – did when they renovated their basement instead of buying a new house.

A modern feel

The home is Dutch colonial and was very traditional when the couple first bought it in 1997. Five years ago, the kitchen underwent an overhaul. But instead of turning the space into a traditional kitchen, Eileen chose to move in a modern direction.

“As I’ve gotten older, I’m drawn to simpler lines. So when I did the kitchen remodel, I realized that I could make this transition.”

The basement renovation was the next step in her evolution to modern living.

As the mysterious voice whispers to Kevin Costner’s Everyman in “Field of Dreams”: “If you build it, he will come.”

The same holds true for the basement. Build a cool space and your kids and their friends will come.

What once served as a modest guest room and simple playroom for the Deschapelles’ three children has morphed into a cool space where teenagers gather with their friends.

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“We call it the lounge room. That’s the look I was going for.”

The designer started the project with a distinct vision in mind.

“I knew I wanted a white-bleached wood look and all the other finishes just fell into place.”

As Eileen observes, one of the advantages of being your own client is that it’s very easy to make decisions. When I ask her if she was trying to work within a set budget, she sheepishly admits not to having one but is quick to point out that when it comes to her design work, “I’m all about mixing high and lows.” Part of her talent lies in her keen ability to know where to splurge and where to economize.

The renovated space is a testament to that talent. The high-tech fireplace was definitely an extravagance. Manufactured by Los Angeles-based Ecosmart, it does not require a flue or a gas connection. It burns denatured ethanol and provides heat along with ambiance.

On the other hand, costs were kept in check with built-in cabinets made for a “fantastic price,” two rugs purchased at Costco that were cut and bound together for the perfect size underneath the sectional couch and knobs used for the builtin, wet bar and bathroom that were all bought at IKEA. Dead set against using tile on the floor, however, the designer splurged. Even though the basement is dry, she used an engineered wood floor made by Dutch company Du Chateau because the basement is below grade and solid wood isn’t stable enough for that.

Personal touches

Just off the living room are stairs leading down to a glass door, which opens into the expansive renovated space. Ei-

leen cleverly chose a glass door so she could “come down the stairs, peek around the corner, make sure everyone is OK, and I don’t need to walk through the party.”

The door also provides some needed protection against the inevitable noise that will emanate from a room filled with teenagers.

The finished lounge room is a far cry from the mildewsmelling, dark and creepy basements many of us remember from our childhood. White oiled 8-inch wood plank floors surround the redefined space, giving it a look that is both light and fresh. Your eye is immediately drawn to the wall on the right, where artist Lisa Warren’s luminous and vibrant abstract acrylic and tempera on canvas paintings hang in four niches, striking just the right note between modern and playful.

At the far end of the room is the sleek and decidedly modern-looking fireplace, built into a wall made of what appears to be a slate slab. It’s actually a less expensive tile version by Porcelanosa – Ruggine Aluminio, 13 by 40 inches. Above that sits a big-screen TV with surround sound. The ubiquitous sectional couch made of taupe-colored ultra-suede fabric on top of a beige shag carpet finishes the cozy yet airy look.

No lounge room would be complete without a wet bar.

Guests can help themselves to beverages and snacks, which come in handy because anyone who’s ever been around teenage boys knows how much they can eat.

Polished white-lacquered cabinets beneath a Caesarstone in concrete countertop are set against a backdrop of translucent glass, 2-by-6 inch tiles and open shelves. All come together to create a crisp, clean look that would be worthy

of any kitchen.

Even for an interior designer, it sometimes makes sense to choose function over form. Eileen is the first to admit that the pingpong table is not exactly beautiful to look at, but it pleases her to hear the kids playing it.

“To have them there in a safe place and a little bit separate, but I can still supervise them, they’re using the space exactly the way I thought they would. That makes us happy.”

So does creating personal touches, with family pictures inside various glass bottles and labeled sand-filled bottles identifying the family’s beach vacations.

Surprisingly smooth

Working within the existing square footage, the bedroom and bathroom were also updated during the renovation.

For the bedroom, it was simple. The designer painted the walls, changed the rug and switched out the folding closet doors from a colonial style to a more modern one.

The bathroom, on the other hand, required a complete overhaul. For the shower, pebble tiles by Misty Cloud were selected for the floor and the walls were covered in Mirage 4-by-12 inch glass tiles, as was the sink wall. The entire bathroom floor was done in Doga Sandal 4-by-36 inch ceramic tiles made to look like wood. All tiles were purchased from Marble America in New Rochelle. The vessel sink is from Klaff’s of Norwalk.

The redo took three months to complete, but Eileen claims that, “it was an easy renovation, because it was my lower level, so our day-to-day living was not disrupted at all, which is always pleasant.”

For more information about the designer, contact her at eileendeschapellesdesign@gmail. And for more information about artist Lisa Warren, visit lisawarrenswork. com. n

Classic Contemporary Home Decor & Gifts 20 Purchase Street, Rye 914.921.NEST (6378)

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Lightening and enhancing your locks Story and photographs by Zoë Zellers

Paradise shows off her refreshed tresses.

Katie Doherty gives her loyal client, Lisa Paradise, the Balayage treatment.

Katie Doherty’s bearable lightness of being

I

f dry air, hot showers and snowy weather have locks looking less than less than lustrous, it’s time to lighten up.

I caught up with master colorist, stylist and makeup artist Katie Doherty at Greenwich Avenue’s Jaafar Tazi salon to observe how one hot highlighting technique can bring that hair from blah to bam in just a couple hours.

Greenwich’s Lisa Paradise, who has been a Doherty fan for the past five years, was ready to try something new so she chose Balayage coloring treatment on her blond do.

The technique, which originated in the salons of Paris in the 1970s, is seeing a major upsurge with America’s highend clients seeking a low-maintenance, longer-lasting and natural-looking way to brighten up.

“The word ‘Balayage’ means ‘to sweep.’ It came back to America about three years ago and it’s become a big trend,” said Doherty, who has been doing hair since she was 16 and has a way with hair analogies. For instance, she always says “Getting a split end is like a snag in your tights. It’s only going to keep splitting up higher.”

To her, Balayage “sweeping” is like painting the hair, so she carefully applied Paradise’s color with a brush from base to tip, strand by strand for her partial highlights. She explained to Paradise that she decided against doing full highlights “to keep the integrity of your hair,” something Jaafar Tazi is dedicated to, refusing to over-treat clients and recommending hair-healthy products like Moroccan oil scalp treatments for winter months and L’Oreal’s

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Balayage highlights are applied with a paintbrush.

sulfur-free anti-aging conditioning products.

With Balayage highlights, “There’s no foil so it will literally look exactly as you apply it,” Doherty said. “It’s different (than other highlighting techniques), because, unlike foils, it doesn’t give hair direct lines of demarcation and you don’t see roots right away. The roots are diffused.

Just like Sarah Jessica Parker and a lot of the stars are revealing, the rooty look is really in, so as the highlights grow out and you have roots, it doesn’t look bad.”

Following 10 minutes of heat and a blow-dry, the resulting look is a sun-kissed throwback to summer that will lighten your January and last for months without a streaky phase.

To Jafaar Tazi’s chill-out lounge soundtrack, Paradise said,

“I only get highlights once a year.” She crossed her legs and sipped her foamy Thursday-eve cappuccino. “So this is it.”

Doherty pointed out to Paradise, “You can stretch this as long as you want and you can mix it with different styles and color techniques.”

She said, “Balayage brings vibrancy to your face and your hair that you have during the summer that you don’t necessarily get in the wintertime and it refreshes everything and gives you a pop.”

The Greenwich mother of four, who sends her kids to Doherty too, was all smiles and said she “absolutely” recommends Katie, who’s “just so sweet and honest. She has the best memory and she’s very down-to-earth.”

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What she has right now is very dull, old color. It’s an ugly, brown-reddish color that’s faded so we need to refresh it to make everything look better ... and create a consistent canvas.”

The fast-fingered Arocha cut angles and layers, blowdried the hair and “followed the shape of the haircut as our guide” for placing highlights. She parted then teased or “feathered” sections of Gangemi’s hair, a crucial step she said, to “achieve a diffused highlight only on the midlengths to end of the hair” and avoid those dreaded harsh color lines.

In the front, Arocha foiled the hairline, lightening the frame around her face and rinsed, noting that “You always want to use a wide-toothed comb with wet hair and go finer to get the knots when it’s dry.” She finished with a blow-dry and gorgeous curling for a polished look – just before the two hit the town for a sushi night.

“The best compliment is hearing you’ve made someone feel better about themselves,” Arocha said.

Gangemi pointed out that school demands will keep her from perfectly curling her hair like Arocha, but the Ombre coloring, which can carry her into the spring semester, will make it simple to keep her tresses looking happy and healthy every day.

Visit Jafaar Tazi at 149 Greenwich Ave., Greenwich, or call (203) 340-2525 to schedule a consultation. n

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Losing weight always tops the list of popular New Year’s resolutions, but Sarah Tazi thinks keeping hair beautiful should be a New Year’s priority, too.

“After the holidays, sometimes you feel it’s just been a tough year and you always want to freshen up for the new year, and of course your hair is very important. You look at your face every day in the mirror,” said the wife of the salon’s owner, Jaafar Tazi. “I feel that the hair is really an accessory to you and it reflects your personality.”

She said, “Jaafar opened this salon because he wants to offer his personal touch … and with a new Keratin treatment, a good cut or a nice color, you can walk out feeling like a new person.”

Stylist Stephanie Arocha was on hand to show how easy it is to add renewing dimension to flat, one-note hair with Ombre color treatment, which keeps the top of the head dark, gradually lightening up to the ends of hair. “Ombre is the French word for shading,” Arocha said.

For her demonstration, Arocha cut and styled a special friend in need. She and Jessica Gangemi have been friends since their high school days in Trumbull. Gangemi came to the salon straight after a final (she’s studying nursing at St. Vincent’s College), needing a pick-me-up.

First Arocha, who “works off instinct,” applied a 10-minute glaze. “That’s just to tone down the hair.

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New year, new body Winning the battle of the bulge Story and Photographs by Kelly Liyakasa

Terry Ellman, medical director of WellU Medical Weight Loss center in White Plains

N

ow that the Christmas cookies and Champagne toasts are behind us (or on us), it’s time to get down to business, blast the fat and regain that pre-holiday bod.

Weight loss at the turn of a new year is as old as Proverbs.

What is new, however, is the method to the madness.

More health conditions to consider.

An ocean of information to navigate.

Nonsurgical (and surgical) procedures to take you there.

Fast.

And, by the way, what the hell is BMI?

To B(MI) or not to B(MI)?

“For me, the focus is on treating the individual, keeping them healthy, preventing obesity and helping the patients lose weight,” said Terry Mahotière Ellman, medical director of WellU Medical Weight Loss center in White Plains.

“Some have underlying obesity-related diseases, such as hypertension or diabetes. My goal is to help them come off the medication and part of that is losing the weight.”

The doctor broke down the particulars of diet and weight loss for me, beginning with that semi-scary acronym – your BMI. Think of the “body mass index” as a 58

general barometer by which to determine whether you’re in the clear or need to hit the gym.

“BMI is kind of a quick and dirty way for clinicians to assess your risk for obesity-related conditions like diabetes, cancer and metabolic syndrome,” Ellman said.

“But there are some limitations to BMI. It doesn’t take into consideration gender or information about fat mass.”

For instance, you might be an athlete with lots of dense muscle tissue.

But the BMI test doesn’t differentiate between fat mass and lean body mass, so you may end up classified as overweight or obese when you pump iron and eat your veggies. That means you, Alex Rodriguez and former President George W. Bush.

Ethnicity matters, too. Studies indicate that Asians have a greater percentage of body fat.

“They actually are at a higher risk for obesity-related conditions at lower BMI, so a BMI of 22 is not healthy for them, whereas it may be healthy for a Caucasian,” Ellman said. “The same is true for blacks. You have to be careful of how you interpret BMI.”

The sweet enemy

The next leg of your journey to weight loss is proper dieting.

“Carbs have gotten a bad rap,” Ellman said. “Not all carbs are bad. The carbs you want to stay away from are highly

processed foods, like cakes, pies, cookies.

You want to pick foods that are nutrientdense. Salmon has a lot of Vitamin D, is low in fat and gives you polyunsaturated fats that your body can’t make.”

Ellman said the twin epidemics – diabetes and obesity – have experienced a surge over the past few years.

Bleached white sugar is to blame, said Dana Cavalea, director of strength and conditioning for the New York Yankees.

“We have a lot of sugar addicts out

there and that’s causing this elevation in overall body fat,” Cavalea said at his newly opened ML Strength Performance Center in downtown White Plains.

“There are alternatives, like using things like Stevia to sweeten up, or even different kinds of rock sugars. Those should be moderated, because sugar is really the enemy to an extent.”

Sugar is the main culprit in mood swings that lead to binge eating.

Another culprit is culture and lifestyle.

Steps to a better bod • Why weight loss? Terry Ellman said, “The first thing you want to do is look at the reason why you want to lose weight. If you want to do it just for cosmetic reasons, it’s not enough.”

• Make it fun. Dana Cavalea said, “We try and drive a (workout) session with high-intensity music, elevated volume and the personality of our coaches to inspire members to bring energy.”

• Be part of something bigger.

Cavalea said, “Our whole concept is based on a team. It’s based on training together … we’re looking to build out some Saturday and Sunday hikes, doing team-based hikes in Westchester and beyond (Fairfield, Hudson Valley).

Our whole goal is really to inspire our members, which we call our ‘athletes.’

We really promote them to get involved with different kind of events, whether it be 5k for one person, 10k for another person, half-marathon, full marathon.”

• It’s not all in the genes. Ellman said, “Some individuals do have a genetic susceptibility to being obese, but you’re not doomed if your parents are obese. Obesity is multifactorial. Yes, genetics play a big role, but it’s also your lifestyle.”

• Strength and conditioning as fat burners. Cavalea said, “We do some work on the physioball. We also do a lot of work with what we call bridging, holding … and we also look at the core in terms of the glutes. They’re a part of the core as well, and the abdominals and the upper back, so all of that kind of works together.”

“Obesity is a chronic condition where you have genetically susceptible individuals whose environment or sedentary lifestyle contributes to weight gain,” Ellman said. “You see a higher prevalence of obesity in low, economically depressed neighborhoods.”

Lack of safe access to parks or other forms of physical recreation, as well as grocery stores that don’t stock healthy fruits and vegetables are other contributors to the socioeconomic aspect of weight gain.

Then again, “there are certain cultures where being overweight or obese is seen as an attractive or positive feature.”

In the U.S., we’ve witnessed lawmakers, restaurants and corporations adopt a healthier mien.

The state of New York made caloriecounts law. Last year, as part of federal health care reform, restaurant chains nationwide had to comply.

Consumers witnessed burger giant McDonald’s and other chains implement healthier alternatives, like fruit and oatmeal over fatty breakfast fare and apple slices over fries in Happy Meals.

“There is increasing awareness that we have a problem as a population,” Ellman said. “With this increased awareness, people are more educated about what’s healthy and what’s not, which increases the demand for healthy foods.” n

Dana Cavalea, founder of ML Strength Performance Center in White Plains

A WESTCHESTER MAGAZINE PRODUCTION

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Peggy Berenblum, yoga instructor, Equinox in Greenwich

Getting down with downward dog Yoga hits its stride once again Story and photographs by Kelly Liyakasa “If Robert Downey Jr. were five inches from you, it wouldn’t be so bad, huh?” a chipper Peggy Berenblum says, exhorting a jampacked room of deep breathers. “Take yourself there.”

It’s 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning at Equinox in Greenwich, a bona fide fitness nightclub complete with valet attendants, diesel boys at the front desk and techno beats.

But in this sweat-drenched oasis of power vinyasa yoga, we’re in another place. Another realm, really.

“All those spinners, they have no idea what they’re missing,” Berenblum playfully taunts. “Deep inhales.

Deep exhales. That breath allows you to get rid of all the chatter. Scoop your belly. Good, Sara. Really, really strong core.”

Berenblum chats to the rhythm of the breathing.

“My daughters make a lot of my music,” she says as the class perfects a warrior pose (front leg lunging, arms at 180 degrees) to Usher’s “Without You.” “I love this song. It always makes me want to dance.”

Berenblum is a Yale University grad with an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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She was a marketing director for Mott’s before she taught chair and happy baby poses on the mat.

“All yoga is good,” she says. “Variety makes life more interesting. You have to find the style and teacher that appeal to you. All yoga helps you connect your mind and body to learn to be an expert in your own body and what you need.”

During class, Berenblum calls this “your yoga.”

“It’s your practice, not mine” she repeats. “Make it work for where you are today.”

That’s the thing about yoga.

It’s a discipline, a ritual, a dance that reinforces the power of now.

Not what you did yesterday.

Not what you have to do in two weeks.

Nothing but the moment.

And there are as many forms of yoga to get you into the moment as there are food groups.

“You’ve got the super-duper, ‘I’m going to knock the socks off everybody,’ you have the, ‘Breeeeathe’ super airy fairy, the stereotypical, which at the beginning, I think a lot of people were resistant to and now, it has ex-

ploded,” says Patty Holmes, the pretty blond founder of the Yoga Garden at St. Bartholomew’s Church in White Plains, where she teaches five days a week.

Indeed, 18 million Americans now practice some form of yoga, which hit its stride in the countercultural

Popular forms of yoga

Bikram: Sweat, baby, sweat. This form takes yogis through a sequence of poses in a heated room.

Vinyasa: Rides a flow of movement with synchronized breathing.

Hatha: Centers on breath and meditation.

Iyengar: Places an emphasis on physical alignment, posture and harmonious movement.

Ashtanga: A vinyasa-style practice that follows a series of poses.

Anusara: Yogis experience openness through light-hearted fun.

Tantra: Explores sexual energy as a contributor to wholeness.

Yoga class at Equinox in Greenwich

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’60s after being introduced to the United States in the early part of the 20th century. In our anxious, hurried times, people are focusing on their core.

“We’re in a culture that pulls us in a billion directions,” Holmes says. “There’s so much fear right now. There are no institutions that are trustworthy right now, from politics to religion to government.

To me, this is breaking it down and losing a sense of outer authority to say, ‘You know what? We need to learn to turn inward and to trust our inner resources and our inner guides and strength.”

Yoga utilizes four basic principles – grounding your energy, centering, alignment and breathing. The practice originated in India roughly 5,000 years ago. Since the 1960s, it has garnered a more mainstream following with celebrities, ranging from the aforementioned Downey to the Los Angeles Lakers openly embracing their own yogic journeys.

“I’m seeing more people coming to yoga from all different ages and walks of life,” says Greg Barringer, director of yoga at the just opened Scarsdale Yoga Studios. “From children to senior citizens, people are realizing the wonderful benefits of yoga. Additionally, as people practice longer, they are going deeper into their yoga. It is no longer enough to get their exercise. They want to learn about and practice the deeper aspects of yoga, like pranayama (breathing), mantra (chanting) and meditation.”

Visit equinox.com and yogagardenwp.com. n

Patty Holmes, founder, Yoga Garden, White Plains

Hot Yoga Looks

Patty Palmieri, owner, Lv2bfit, Rye Brook

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When it comes to yoga fashions, comfort is key.

“People like basics,” says Patty Palmieri, owner of Lv2bfit in Rye Brook, a boutique that includes the latest fitness wear. “It depends on whether they’re comfortable in long pants or short pants, but there is a really comfortable line called Beyond Yogaj and these are basic, easy, comfortable, fashionable pieces.”

One of Lv2bfit’s best-selling lines is California-based brand Splits 59, with super-soft, drywick fabric designed to absorb perspiration fast and comfortably, while keeping you sexy and stylish in hoodies and shirts with thumb holes.

Margarita Women’s Sportswear is another funky line of fitness fashion with unique touches like tie-dye.

“I don’t want to carry what the department stores carry. I want to keep it boutiquey.”

Visit lv2bfit.net.

AT THE

FaTye: Performing his way from

the Streets of the South Bronx into the Hearts of Westchester’s Residents

W

hen asked to name a famous personality who is known to the world with just one name, several folks come to mind. There’s Prince. (Or is that the entertainer formerly known as Prince?) Then there is the ageless Madonna.

And how can we forget the world’s most recognized diva, Cher?

However, there is a new name we in Westchester will be hearing much more in the coming months - FaTye (pronounced Fah Tie). While not yet a national celebrity, FaTye is about to take the Westchester Broadway Theatre by storm in the February production of Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

“This actor is the most talented performer I have ever had the pleasure to work with,” said John Fanelli, the show’s director. A Westchester native, Fanelli directs the Family Theater Company, a Thornwood business with a huge mission. “My theatre and my training program is about more than just teaching individuals to be quality actors, it’s about molding them into good people who understand through the arts anything is possible,” he explains. “FaTye is the best example of how this program works. It’s not just that FaTye commands the stage and literally brings the audience to their feet - he is also one of the kindest young men I know,” he adds. “FaTye is a true professional. This 23 year old works hard at his craft and his career.”

A hulking talent, FaTye is what they refer to in the business as a triple threat. He dances, he sings and he acts with the vigor and panache of a Broadway baby. And while there are countless triple threats out there, FaTye is new and comes to show business after overcoming amazing odds to get there.

Now a Westchester resident and graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan, FaTye was born in the Bronx and spent most of his life in and out of New York City’s foster care system. While he was homeless and

on the streets of the South Bronx, FaTye found himself in situations he wishes were different, including minor brushes with the law. “I remember having to take food from a few places in order to survive. It’s not something I am proud of, but it is part of what made me who I am today. I know it certainly is a non-conventional way to enter showbiz,” he notes.

So, it is no surprise that FaTye’s first feature show is anything but run of the mill or predictable. Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn portrays the truthful and compelling story of a runaway slave, Jim, and his non-stereotypical relationship with a forward thinking son of the town drunk, Huck, during the time of segregation and racism. Their friendship transcended the norms of their time and in the end, Jim chooses saving a friend over his own freedom. The moving music runs the gamut from rock-a-billy to country to gospel to soul. During its run on Broadway in the 80’s, Big River won seven Tony awards and eight Drama Desk awards.

“If there is one thing that folks will remember after seeing this show ...it’s a story of courage,acceptance and passion, said Fanelli. “It’s not the kind of show that is staged over and over again. But it’s by far an American musical gem that will leave you mesmerized begging for more,” he sums.

FaTye

Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

February 2 thru February 26 • Westchester Broadway Theatre

Matinee and evening performances are available and all tickets include a full meal and free parking.

For tickets please call 914-592-2222 or visit www.broadwaytheatre.com. Use the code RIVERTIX for discounted prices.

wheels

The 1 percent solution At Mercedes-Benz of Greenwich, every customer is treated like a captain of industry

By Ryan Doran “Many of our clients work on Wall Street or own multiple businesses,” said Lou Liodori, general sales manager of Mercedes-Benz of Greenwich. “They can’t come between eight and five o’clock to service their cars. We have some of the most hard-working and demanding professionals as our clients, and we work harder for them.”

And if that means staying open until midnight at the service center or ferrying customers to shops and restaurants, well, so be it.

“In this market ($250,000-$500,000), when you cross the line and you are no longer convenient to a person, you’re done,” Liodori said. “You might buy your first car from me, but the second, third and fourth car are sold by the service department.”

To enhance that tradition of service, the 52-year-old dealership – now owned by Roger Penske and his Penske Automotive Group – is undergoing a face-lift slated to be completed in the next few months.

The renovation features 15 new service stalls, a heated drive-up reception area, a multistory showroom and new customer lounge and reception areas. It is certain to bring distinction to the blue and silver building that sits amid the Porsche, Maserati and Ferrari flagships that make West Putnam Avenue a high-end automobile mecca.

But the beauty of Benz is that you don’t have to be a 64

captain of industry to be treated like one. No one knows that better than Liodori, a self-proclaimed “Yonkers boy” who’s just as happy to have a presence in Greenwich.

“I grew up on Carroll Avenue,” he said. “In Yonkers, some parts are just like Scarsdale while others are some of the toughest streets in the country. I’m proud of that. You are truly able to relate to all kinds of people, poor or rich, blue- or white-collar. It is directly related to my success in the car business and gave me a very broad view.”

One that embraces his staff: “Our people are our most important asset.”

Liodori was once a starving writer and actor living in Manhattan, making ends meet by working at restaurants.

“It was from working at restaurants that I began to understand that if someone is expecting and paying for a higher level of service, you need to deliver on that expectation.”

He had his first car sales job at Curry Chevrolet on Central Avenue in Scarsdale and went on to hone his skills at Pepe Motors in White Plains.

Mercedes-Benz still has some mystique to Americans, Liodori said. Perhaps that’s because the story of Karl Benz (1844-1929) – the German designer and engineer who is credited with inventing the gas-powered car – is less wellknown to them than that of Henry Ford. Nevertheless,

the company Benz helped found patented the first petrolpowered car, the Benz Patent Motorwagen, in 1886. Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler and engineer Wilhelm Maybach

“We have some of the most hard-working and demanding professionals as our clients, and we work harder for them.”

— Lou Liodori

were the forefathers of the elite brand of German autos.

Today the company is still revolutionizing the industry with technologies like its crash Pre-Safe system and multithreshold airbags. For many Americans, a Mercedes-Benz remains a dream, the coach of comfort immortalized in Janis Joplin’s rasped singing.

“People buy a Mercedes often to celebrate something,” Liodori said. “When they come through the door you don’t know whether they’ve just gotten their bonus, been promoted, graduated from college or beaten cancer. Buying a Mercedes is still very much about celebration.” n

“People buy a Mercedes often to celebrate something. When they come through the door you don’t know whether they’ve just gotten their bonus, been promoted, graduated from college or beaten cancer. Buying a Mercedes is still very much about celebration.”

Lou Liodori, general sales manager of Mercedes-Benz of Greenwich.

65

wanders

Sky-high adventure

For tourists, Lhasa is no longer the city of elusive dreams

By Cappy Devlin

Monks 66 at the Sera Monastery.

N

estled high in the Himalayas, light-filled Lhasa – the onetime home of the Dalai Lama – has always been the city of elusive dreams, as James Hilton’s haunting novel “Lost Horizon” and the subsequent film versions attest.

Today those dreams are no longer so elusive. After Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping toured Tibet in 1992 – China had annexed Tibet in 1950 – Lhasa was declared a special economic zone, with an emphasis on tourism and service industries. The Chinese authorities have an ambitious plan for tourism in the region, aiming at 10 million visitors by 2020.

Tibet’s first International luxury hotel, The St. Regis Lhasa Resort, opened in November 2010. Standing on the “Roof of the World” at 12,000 feet above sea level, The St. Regis Lhasa Resort offers awe-inspiring views of the Himalayas and the Lhasa Valley from each of the 162 distinctive guest rooms, suites and villas, which blend modern luxury with traditional Tibetan elements. Another luxe hotel, the Shangri-La Hotel Lhasa – named for the fictionalized Lhasa in Hilton’s novel – will open in 2013.

But such sumptuousness has come with a heavy price.

The incorporation of Tibet into the People’s Republic of China after the Communist Revolution in 1949 ushered in a period of instability and oppression that led to the self-imposed exile of the Dalai Lama – the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people – the deaths of thousands of Tibetans and the destruction of many Buddhist monasteries.

Despite China’s commitment to modernization in Tibet, concerns about human rights violations and the loss of the pure Tibetan culture remain. Among its total popula-

tion of 474,500 in the year 2000, the Tibetan people still make up 87 percent. The rest are Han, Hui and some 30 other nationalities.

Perhaps more than any other city, Lhasa invites the tourist to bring a certain Buddhist mindfulness to visiting.

World heritage sites

Those who make the journey will find it a heady experience and not just because of the altitude. Lhasa has many sites of historic interest, including the Potala Palace, Jokhang Temple, Sera Monastery and Norbulingka.

The Potala Palace was the chief residence of the Dalai Lamas and their winter retreat. After the 14th Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, the Chinese government converted the palace into a museum. The palace underwent a $6.9 million restoration from 1989 to 1994 and was inscribed to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994.

The Norbulingka palace’s surrounding park is considered to be the largest man-made garden in Tibet. It was built in 1755 and served as the traditional summer residence of the successive Dalai Lamas until the current Dalai Lama’s departure. The Sho Dun Festival, popularly known as the “yogurt festival,” is an annual event held at Norbulingka in the first seven days of the full-moon period in July.

Tibet isn’t just palaces, however. The Barkhor – an area of narrow streets and a public square in the old part of the city – is the most bustling shopping place in Tibet.

With its variety, quantity and quality, Barkhor Street is a perfect mirror of the culture of Tibet. The street is dotted with ancient houses that also serve as shops. You can find

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67

Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet

all kinds of items, including statues of the Buddha, silk embroidered Thangka paintings, Tibetan joss sticks, Tibetan wool carpets, gold and silver jewelry and the huge waist sword, which is the most famous in Lhasa. But the specialties of this street are the eateries offering the savory dishes of Tibetan cuisine, like sha balep, a kind of pot sticker made of fried bread stuffed with beef, and thentuk, a vegetable noodle soup.

On Barkhor Square, the Jokhang Temple is generally considered the most sacred and important one in Tibet.

Along with the Potala Palace, it is probably the most popular tourist attraction in Lhasa. The temple is a fourstory construction with roofs covered in gilded tiles. The Jokhang Temple has remained a key center of Buddhist pilgrimage for centuries. The route around the temple is known as the “kora” in Tibetan and is marked by four 68

large stone incense burners placed at the corners of the complex. The walk is about six-tenths of a mile.

Sun city

Lhasa enjoys sunlight 300 days out of 365, so it is often referred to as the “Sunshine City.” January is the coldest month of the year and June, the warmest. Generally, the period from March to September is the best time to visit. Because Lhasa is at such a high altitude, it is wise to be prepared before starting your journey.

Sunglasses, suntan lotion and a sun hat are indispensable items when traveling in the daytime. However, the temperatures drop drastically in the evenings, so you’ll need warm clothes to ward off the chill. Before traveling to Lhasa, have a checkup with your doctor, especially if you have any heart disease or other complications for

high-altitude sickness.

Before 1951, Lhasa had no road reaching the outside world. Today, Lhasa has become a transportation hub both for highway, train and air travel to Tibet. For those who need to fly, the nearest airport is the Lhasa Gonggar Airport, about an hour from the city.

The Qinghai Tibet Railway started service in July 2006 and goes from Beijing to Lhasa in three days. For tourists, riding a train to Tibet is an opportunity not to be missed. The most phenomenal part of the journey is from Xining to Lhasa, where you can see the magnificent snow-capped mountains, stretching hundreds of miles, endless steppes, vast deserts and blue lakes. It is perhaps only then that you begin to understand why Lhasa means “place of the gods.” n

The fare: “We look to get the freshest ingredients available. We have a classic Italian menu with a coastal Italian theme. We have a lot of fish, and the fish are sourced throughout the whole world. We go down to market ourselves three to four times a week to the (New Fulton Fish Market at Hunts Point), and handpicked Dover sole gets shipped to us twice a week from KLM (Dutch Airlines) and we get it fresh. We don’t use any frozen product, from the branzino to the orata from Greece to the seasonal fish from Italy.”

The alcohol: “Our most expensive (wine) would be a ’94 Vega-Sicilia.

I believe it’s $800. We do infused vodkas. We’re partnered up with Diageo, and Ketel One is our ‘well.’

We don’t have well alcohol. If someone orders a vodka cranberry, they’re getting Ketel One. We’re not putting Fleischmann’s in there. We also have many artisanal beers. We have Captain Lawrence on tap because I want to do the local stuff.”

The mission: “If people come in

here and they want to remember their youth because of their mother or their grandmother or the restaurant their parents took them to and in their mind they want a classic, Italian dish, as long as we have the ingredients, the kitchen is very versatile.

We will accommodate every request.

As long as the ingredients are there and it’s within reason, our whole philosophy is, ‘We’re only as good as the people coming through the door.’

It’s not about us, what a critic says about us. It’s about what the people say. We’re here for them and without them, we’re nobody.”

70

From Italy, with love The family behind Massa’ savors good food

By Kelly Liyakasa Photographs by Diana Costello

A

father and son team has taken the Five Corners landmark of 2 Weaver Street in Scarsdale and transformed it into the 6,000-square foot nouvelle Massa’ Italian Restaurant & Wine Bar. The space has had a colorful past, first as Donnybrook Lodge, which became a speakeasy in the Roaring ’20s, and later as the Piedmont Inn during the Swinging ’60s and ’70s.

Today, after a full renovation, its new owners are bringing their heritage and their appreciation of quality wine and food to the establishment.

“When I walked in, the first thing I saw was ‘Massaria,’” said Francesco Coli, owner of Massa’ Italian Restaurant & Wine Bar. “Massaria” means farmhouse in Italian. But it also had some Aspen-like qualities to it, so we took apart two barns in Vermont.

This is all 100-year-old reclaimed wood.

We added brand-new stone fireplaces, new floors. We gutted everything.”

Coli’s entry into the restaurant business

Francesco and Pasquale Coli

was purely intentional.

“Being immigrants from Italy, the number one thing was education, education, education,” Coli said of his father Pasquale, whom patrons can find manning the kitchen at Massa’. “The American dream was brought to us because my

father was an executive chef at many restaurants in the city. But he wanted different things for my brother and I.” That’s when Coli eyed law school, but decided – for better or for worse – to pursue restaurants.

Coli ran Ocean Grill in New York City

before he and his father set their sights in 2000 on Larchmont, where they opened La Valetta. It’s now under new ownership.

Their newest endeavor is somewhat of a nod to their southeastern Italian roots.

“Every single place and spot in this restaurant books a coziness to it,” Coli said. “It’s warm, whereas before it was very cold. No matter where you sit, you’re comfortable. In front of the fireplace is the most requested during the winter.”

Massa’ is multilevel, with an upstairs bar, open cucina, several party rooms and a wine room with some 20,000 bottles.

“The beauty about it is because we’re a restaurant and wine bar, we offer 50 wines by the glass, which is unique and very hard to find,” Coli said. “We offer you $8 on up to $50 glasses of wine. We also offer premium selections. Anything on our list (300 labels) we will offer and go by the glass.”

Due to popular demand, Massa’ will also be instituting a bar menu with burgers and individual pizzas.

For more, visit massascarsdale.com. n

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71

wine&dine

Twist of fate Chiara Vigo survived Mount Etna to become an innovative vintner

By Geoff Kalish, MD

Chiara Vigo of Fattorie Romeo Del Castello in Sicily

I

t was Socrates who said “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

That sentiment has not been lost on Sicilian vintner Chiara Vigo. Hers is the enlightening tale of a woman who in living the examined life, chose to buck tradition to achieve excellence.

I first met Chiara this past fall at her winery, Fattorie Romeo Del Castello (see November WAG), then learned more of her dramatic story over two luncheons when she visited New York City recently with her mother, Rosanna.

In 1981, when she was 7, Chiara witnessed the eruption of Mount Etna and its resultant lava flow that threatened to destroy her family’s house and surrounding ancient vineyards, just outside the town of Randazzo. For some reason, which locals hail as a miracle, the lava turned just a few feet from the property – sparing the vineyards and the central compound, containing a house, church and wine cellar, all built in the 18th century. Chiara relates with pride that after the lava cooled, her father (who has since passed away) and mother struggled to work the land. Like most grape growers in the area at the time, they sold their crop to others to vinify into 72

bulk wine for production of Marsala or to fortify the reds of northern Italy.

Chiara went off to college in Milan and upon graduation began a doctorate degree in art history – quite unconventional for the daughter of Mount Etna farmers. But this only child never lost her love for the land. For her thesis, she chose to research the relationship between artist-produced labels and the wine inside the bottle, focusing on whether or not the aesthetics of the wine were considered by the artist before rendering the drawing for the label. Exuberantly, she explained to me that while conducting research in Verona in 2007, she met consulting winemaker Salvo Foti and an almost-revolutionary idea clicked – producing premium wine by totally traditional methods from the native Nerello Mascalese grapes growing on the family’s vines and bottling it for sale.

Next came a flurry of minor miracles.

Her thesis was published by a major literary press, Cicero Edizioni, shortly after its completion. The first vintage of her Etna Rosso wine – a 2007 labeled with a somewhat abstract image of the family vineyards – exceeded all expectations and was “discovered” by Dressner, a major

U.S. importer. Top U.S. restaurants such as Barbetta in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills included it on their lists. And the 2008 vintage turned out to be even better than the 2007, with greater depth of flavor and an earthy taste rather unique to Mount Etna.

So what does the future hold for Chiara?

On an individual note, she sees production of two lines – one, a modestly priced, food-friendly, ready-to-drink brand with a name yet to be determined that’s brought to market annually, and a second bottling – the continued production of the Vigo Etna Rosso, but only in those years when the quality of the harvest warrants it. The estate also produces some high-grade olive oil with expanded production under consideration.

For the Mount Etna region, Chiara envisions recognition as a great producer of wines not only in Sicily but compared with the world’s top wine regions. She predicts an even greater role for women in winemaking, as newer generations shed the vestiges of the ninth- and 10th-century Islamic influence in Sicily, with its prohibitions on the consumption of alcohol and female involvement in business. And,

ever an optimist, she sees another kind of Italian Renaissance with the academic economist Mario Monti as Italian prime minister.

More miracles? I don’t know, but based on Chiara’s past history, I wouldn’t bet against them, or her.

Experts agree

After tasting the 2007 and 2008 vintages of the Vigo Etna Rosso, award-winning wine educator and book author Thomas Maresca (“La Tavola Italiana,” “Mastering Wine”), thought that the two wines represented the great strides made by Mount Etna producers in the past 10 years and that the wines would only improve with age, perhaps the very concentrated, intense 2008 vintage more than the 2007.

The following day, these thoughts were echoed by Pedro Goncalves, long-time wine director at Oceana, the Livanos family seafood outpost in Manhattan. He particularly liked that the wines tasted of the volcanic soil in which the grapes were grown and thought that they complemented food quite well, especially traditional Sicilian sea-fare items like tuna, swordfish and stuffed squid. n

well

Goodbyegluten

By Erika Schwartz, MD

Thanks to Novak Djokovic – who soared to the number one ranking in men’s tennis after a breakthrough season that has been hailed as one of the greatest ever – the glutenfree diet is all the rage. Not a day goes by that we don’t hear about a grocery that’s stocking gluten-free products or a celebrity or athlete who’s decided to lighten up by trying it, like Djokovic pal Andy Murray, the number threeranked player.

But what is the gluten-free diet? Does it work for all? And what does it say about our ambivalent relationship with carbohydrates, since gluten is a protein composite found in breads and pastas?

Gluten-sensitive enteropathy (GSE), also known as celiac disease or sprue, is a disease in which the malabsorption of nutrients from food in the small intestine causes gluten intolerance, which

is apparently what Djokovic has. This condition also affects an estimated 1 percent of Americans.

The most common symptoms of gluten intolerance are body aches, fatigue, headaches, joint or muscle pain, bloating, diarrhea, heartburn and other digestive problems. In some scientific studies, autoimmune illnesses such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, rheumatoid arthritis, thyroid disorders and diabetes have been connected to gluten intolerance.

There is a test to determine if you are gluten-intolerant. However, it is quite painful and eliminates too many people who might actually benefit from trying a gluten-free diet.

Indeed, there is no down side to trying the diet and seeing how it affects you. Initial fears associated with the gluten-free diet revolved around the potential loss of B-vitamins, iron and

fiber and the carbohydrate/energy connection. Carbohydrates during training or competition have traditionally been considered essential in maintaining blood-sugar levels and energy while providing for a quick recovery.

As research has advanced, so has the information rebuffing the glutenfree diet fears. The diet is more likely to increase the amount of energy production and improve vitamin and mineral absorption, the immune system and hormone balance by reducing the stress on the intestine caused by gluten.

And it’s not as restrictive as you might think. A gluten-free diet includes fresh fruits, vegetables, meats and many dairy products like eggs, as well as rice, corn, soy, potato, tapioca, beans, sorghum, quinoa, millet, buckwheat, arrowroot, amaranth, teff,

Montina and nut flours. Here you’re going to have to do your homework and read food labels. Gluten-free foods are labeled as such.

Try following the gluten-free diet for a week first, see how you feel, then go on to the 30-day diet: Go to drerika.com and search for “The Hormone Friendly Diet.”

Most who try it, myself included, say there is a miraculous improvement in their symptoms and an overall sense of well-being.

Having said all this, I’d like to add that unless you are mortally allergic to gluten, you can certainly splurge here and there and have a slice of pizza or a bowl of fresh cacio e pepe pasta or a slice of panettone. It won’t kill you, and you’ll enjoy going back to your gluten-free diet even more.

Remember, it’s all about balance. n

73

well

A kinder, gentler approach to plastic surgery

By Michael Rosenberg

W

hen it comes to lightening up in the new year, refreshing the face is probably near the top of the agenda. But who has the time for the full-blown face-lift? Particularly for those in the prime of life, looking good at work is imperative. But taking a lengthy period of time off to do so? That’s near impossible.

Fortunately, plastic surgery has in recent years been on a course similar to other surgical disciplines – more individualized, less invasive treatments that result in shorter downtime and fewer scars. So let’s dive in, shall we?

The more traditional face-lift, brow lift and eyelid plasty all have options for less surgical intervention. The short scar facelift, trampoline lift and Bellalift are all

versions of a face-lift that address specific patient concerns with less scarring, and in appropriate patients, allow the procedures to be performed with local anesthesia only. Eyelid surgery can be approached through the inside of the lid with no visible external scars and use redistribution as opposed to elimination of the localized fat deposits to improve the result, particularly in the tear trough under the eye. Brow lifts can be performed endoscopically through small incisions with minimal scars, and the list goes on. In addition, where appropriate, surgery can be avoided altogether.

My options for facial rejuvenation now include liposuction, micro-fat transfer, Botox injections, fillers and laser resurfacing.

The facial areas most suitable for liposuction include the lower face, neck and jowl lines. When working in the neck, the

surgeon removes just enough fat to restore a 90-degree angle between the chin and neck. The idea is not to remove every drop of fat, but to improve the individual’s facial shape and make it more pleasant and youthful-looking. Using SmartLipo to bring the benefits of the laser to the liposuction procedure has improved the results in this area. The use of micro fat transfer or fillers for the depressions in the nasolabial fold and along the lines of the lip completes the liposculpture portion of the rejuvenating surgery. Botox can be added to treat lines in the forehead, creases at the base of the nose, crow’s-feet and even fine lines on the upper lip and neck.

Rounding out the options for facial rejuvenation is laser resurfacing, which can be used to improve some wrinkles as well as defects of skin color and texture. While

Red

Go

these procedures involve less surgery than the traditional face-lift and have lesser anesthesia requirements, they should still be undertaken with adherence to the same safety principles that apply to other surgeries.

In summary, after an appropriate consultation, each individual patient can be treated with the right combination of liposculpture, relaxants, fillers or laser treatments that will provide the best overall result. In those patients for whom surgery remains the best option, newer, less invasive techniques can be used as well to limit the recovery period.

The overriding principle remains to match the optimum approach to the needs and desires of the individual patient.

Please send any questions or comments to mrosenberg@nwhc.net. n

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JAMES G. KATIS 145 Old Mill Road Greenwich, CT 06831 (203) 622-1213

KASEY SPOONAMORE Greenwich Medicine L.L.C. 38 Lake Ave., Greenwich, CT 06830 149 Rowayton Ave. Rowayton, CT 06853 (203) 769-5369 drspoonamore.com

JESUS LAGO 558 Westchester Ave. Rye Brook, NY 10573 (914) 882-6890 LISSETTE LEON Greenwich Hospital Center for Healthy Aging 5 Perryridge Road

ORTHOPAEDIC SURGEONS JOHN N. AWAD HENRY A. BACKE JR. DAVID F. BINDELGLASS

ROBERT V. DAWE JAMES J. FITZGIBBONS HERBERT HERMELE ROLF H. LANGELAND JOEL W. MALIN MURRAY A. MORRISON JEROLD M. PERLMAN ROSS J. RICHER ROBERT A. STANTON Orthopaedic Specialty Group P.C. 75 Kings Highway Cutoff Fairfield, CT 06824 (203) 337-2600 osgpc.com BENJAMIN B. BEDFORD STEPHEN J. NICHOLAS Scarsdale Orthopedics/ NY Orthopedics 2 Overhill Ave., Suite 310 Scarsdale, NY 10583 (914) 725-6970 nyorthodoc.com Michael L. Bernstein Joel S. Buchalter Winshih Chang Douglas J. Fauser Lawrence G. Foster Victor Khabie Scott M. Levin YARIV MAGHEN NICHOLAS R. PANARO Andrew M. Peretz STUART T. STYLES Jeffrey H. Yormak Somers Orthopaedic Surgery & Sports Medicine Group P.L.L.C. 657 E. Main St., Suite 3 Mount Kisco, NY 10549 (914) 666-5550 somersortho.com MICHAEL BRAND ANGELO CIMINIELLO ROBERT DEVENEY JOSEPH DIGIOVANNI JOHN DUNLEAVY ROSS HENSHAW FRANK HERMANTIN PHILIP MULIERI RANDOLPH SEALEY 226 White St. Danbury, CT 06810 (203) 797-1500 dortho.com ADAM BRODSKY FRANK DIFAZIO Orthopaedic Surgery and Sports Medicine 1290 Summer St. Stamford, CT 06905 (203) 323-7331 WILLIAM R. BUSCHMANN PAUL D. FRAGNER MICHAEL A. SCHWARTZ ROBERT D. SMALL RICK WEINSTEIN Bone & Joint Associates L.L.P. 7 Reservoir Road White Plains, NY 10603 362 N. Broadway Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591 (914) 684-0300 wphospital.org

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worthy docs RUSSEL J. CAVALLO JOHN D. DOWDLE Premier Medical Group 31 Strawberry Hill Ave. Stamford, CT 06902 (203) 325-8888 230 Westchester Ave. West Harrison, NY 10604 (914) 684-6113

MICHAEL CUSHNER 73 Market St. Yonkers, NY 10710 (914) 831-4160 210 Westchester Ave. White Plains, NY 10604 (914) 682-6540 westmedgroup.com

MICHAEL R. CLAIN JOHN F. CROWE JAMES G. CUNNINGHAM FRANK A. ENNIS TIM GREENE STEVEN E. HINDMAN BRIAN F. KAVANAGH SETH R. MILLER DAVID P. NOCEK PAUL M. SETHI KATIE B. VADASDI Orthopaedic & Neurosurgery Specialists P.C. 6 Greenwich Office Park 10 Valley Drive Greenwich, CT 06831 (203) 869-1145 onsmd.com

JOSEPH M. D’AMICO ANDREW L. HAAS PETER W. HUGHES W. TRACY SCHMIDT MARC D. SILVER Orthopedic Associates of Stamford, P.C 90 Morgan St., Suite 207 Stamford, CT 06905 (203) 325-4087 oasmd.com YOUNG DON OH 210 Westchester Ave. White Plains, NY 10604 (914) 682-6540 westmedgroup.com CHARLES W. EDELSON DAVID E. LENT ERIC M. SPENCER Southern Westchester Orthopedics & Sports Medicine 970 N. Broadway, Suite 204

Yonkers, NY 10701 (914) 476-4343 westchesterorthopedic.com ERIC GROSSMAN EVAN KARAS DAVID J. YASGUR Mount Kisco Medical Group 90 S. Bedford Road Mount Kisco, NY 10549 (914) 241-1050 mkmg.com EDWARD V. GUNDY CHRISTOPHER MATTERN 1 Theall Road, Rye, NY 10580 (914) 848-8870 westmedgroup.com SCOTT V. HAIG 49 Lake Ave. Greenwich, CT 06830 (203) 661-9340 SHANKER KRISHNAMURTHY BARRY I. KROSSER ARTHUR J. PIDORIANO JR. YAIR RUBINSTEIN SCOTT RUSSINOFF STEVEN R. SMALL Mount Kisco Medical Group 1985 Crompond Road Cortlandt Manor, NY 10567

(914) 739-2121 3630 Hill Blvd.

Jefferson Valley, NY 10535 (914) 245-1022 RONALD MANN Westchester Health 1888 Commerce St. Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 (914) 962-7712 401 Columbus Ave. Valhalla, NY 10595 LOUIS F. MCINTYRE MICHAEL PANIO ERIC ZITZMANN Westchester Orthopedic Associates 222 Westchester Ave., Suite 101 White Plains, NY 10604 (914) 946-1010 westchesterorthopedics.com KEVIN D. PLANCHER Plancher Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine 31 River Road Cos Cob, CT 6807 (203) 863-2003 plancherortho.com

Forever Fab YOU LOOK GOOD BUT

ROBERT L. CRISTOFARO 175 Memorial Highway New Rochelle, NY 10801 (914) 632-4420

KRISHN M. SHARMA RUDOLPH F. TADDONIO 70 Mill River St. Stamford, CT 06902 (203) 327-9844 244 Westchester Ave., Suite 316 White Plains, NY 10604 (914) 288-0045 DAVID E. ASPRINIO DAMON DELBELLO JOHN GALENO ANDREW GROSE DANIEL KELMANOVICH ADAM LAZZARINI HOWARD J. LUKS RICHARD MAGILL ANDREW W. MOULTON IRIS SCHLESINGER WILLIAM J. WALSH DANIEL ZELAZNY University Orthopaedics P.C. 19 Bradhurst Ave., Suite 1300 North Hawthorne, NY 10532 (914) 789-2700 755 N. Broadway, Suite 510 Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591 (914) 703-6001 222 N. Westchester Ave., Suite 204 White Plains, NY 10604 (914) 288-0036 (Dr. Galeno) (914) 288-0226 (Dr. DelBello)

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when&where THROUGH SATURDAY, JANUARY 7 CRAFT-TASTIC

SATURDAY, JANUARY 14 THROUGH SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19 A sale and exhibition of ceramics, jewelry, glass, ‘ART TO THE POINT’ furniture and more, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Friday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Pelham Arts Center, 155 Fifth Ave. (914) 738-2525, pelhamartcenter.org.

THROUGH SUNDAY, JANUARY 8 VICTORIAN HOLIDAY

The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum celebrates the holiday season with three exhibits on traditions, noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday, 295 West Ave., Norwalk. $10; $8 seniors. (203) 838-9799, lockwoodmathewsmansion.com.

REMBRANDT TROVE

“Drawings by Rembrandt, his Students and Circle from the Maida and George Abrams Collection” spotlights work acquired from more than five decades, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday; 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Bruce Museum, 1 Museum Drive, Greenwich. $7; $6 students and seniors. (203) 8690376, brucemuseum.org.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 10 AN EVENING WITH TOM

News anchor Tom Brokaw sits down with Geoff Colvin from Fortune magazine for a discussion on America, 7 to 9 p.m., Palace Theatre, 61 Atlantic St., Stamford. $65, $50, $45; plus SCA fees. (203) 325-4466, scalive.org.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 14 DRAMA IN THE CHURCH

The Red Monkey Theatre Group performs William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” 1:30 p.m., St. Paul’s Church, 897 S. Columbus Ave., Mount Vernon.

(914) 667-4116.

THROUGH SATURDAY, JANUARY 14 HART AND SOULS

A display of works by Melinda Hunt from The Hart Island Project database, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays to Thursdays; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays; 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays, Westchester Community College, Center for the Digital Arts, 27 N. Division St., Peekskill. (914) 606-7304, sunywcc.edu/peekskill.

The Katonah Museum of Art’s juried show features paintings, drawings and sculptures, reception: 5 to 7 p.m. Jan. 14; gallery: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays; noon to 5 p.m. Sundays, Katonah Museum of Art, 134 Jay St. $7; $5 seniors and students; free 10 a.m. to noon Tuesdays to Fridays.

(914) 232-9555, katonahmuseum.org.

MONDAY, JANUARY 16 FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS

Music and hors d’ouevres at the Westchester Library System’s 14th annual African-American Writers & Readers Literary Tea celebration, honoring authors Claudia L. Edwards and James McBride, 3:30 to 6 p.m., Abigail Kirsch’s Tappan Hill, 81 Highland Ave., Tarrytown. $75. (914) 231-3226, westchesterlibraries.org.

An exhibit organized by the Photography Club of Lower Fairfield County, displays photographs of the Bartlett Arboretum through the seasons, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays to Sundays, Silver Educational Center, 151 Brookdale Road, Stamford. $6; free for children 12 and under. (203) 322-6971, bartlettarboretum.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2 KING OF TALK

Broadcaster Larry King gives a comedic performance, 7:30 p.m., Palace Theatre, 61 Atlantic St., Stamford. $123, $88, $68, $48; plus SCA fees.

(203) 325-4466, scalive.org.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4

THROUGH MONDAY, JANUARY 16 LIGHTHOUSE EXHIBIT

Entrees from the recent 2011 Festival of Lighthouses Contest are on display at The Maritime Aquarium, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays to Sundays, 10 N. Water St., Norwalk. $12.95; $9.95 children (ages 2 to 12); $11.95 seniors (65 and up). (203) 8520700, maritimeaquarium.org.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22 DANCEFEST

The 10th annual festival has more than 370 dancers, ages 10 to 18, performing classical ballet, modern, theatre dance, contemporary, Latin jazz, hip-hop/jazz/funk and tap, 6 p.m., Palace Theatre, 61 Atlantic St., Stamford. $34; $15 (ages 17 and under). (203) 325-4466, scalive.org.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28 HOT MUSIC

Westchester Jazz Orchestra presents rhythms and melodies of Brazil, Argentina and Spain featuring Jofre Romarion, bandoneon, and Rogerio Boccato, percussion, 7:15 p.m. interactive chat with artistic director Mike Holober; 8 p.m. performance, Irvington Town Hall Theater, 85 Main St. $35. (914) 861-9100, emelin.org.

WINTER CARNIVAL

The Alcott School hosts a carnival and fundraiser with a raffle, silent auction, music and more, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Alcott School, 27 Crane Road, Scarsdale. (914) 472-4404, alcottschool.org. Snowdate: Sunday, January 29.

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THROUGH TUESDAY, JANUARY 31 SEASONAL LOOKS

ON KEY

Pianists Alon Goldstein and Lucille Chung perform Mozart’s “Concerto for Three Pianos, no.

7, K. 242,” as the centerpiece of the Westchester Chamber Symphony’s concert, 7 p.m., Iona College’s Christopher J. Murphy Auditorium, 715 North Ave., New Rochelle. $50; $40 seniors; $15 students. (914) 654-4926, westchesterchambersymphony.org.

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blair

blazek

ferone

Horton

imperial

wit wonders: What aspect of your life will you renew this year?

“My career. I am a pediatric dentist. … I love what I do because I am not only a doctor, but I am a mother and a teacher to my patients. I would like to utilize my teaching skills to focus on community outreach this year, especially with the special-needs population. I find that special-needs children need a strong network of people, professionals and doctors to support them and their families in life. If I could help with that, then I feel I will have renewed one very important aspect of my career.”

– Jennifer Blair DMD, Valley Pediatric Dentistry, Yorktown, White Plains resident “I recently moved to the Heineken USA headquarters from Chicago, so I’m hoping to take some time to explore Fairfield and Westchester counties with my family.”

– Scott Blazek senior vice president, sales, Heineken USA, Fairfield resident “I definitely would like to be more involved in the community by mentoring young women who want to be in the hospitality business.”

– Linda Ferone director of catering, DoubleTree by Hilton Tarrytown, Yorktown resident “The first thing I want to renew is my library card. I did get a Kindle for my last birthday, but for me there are few pleasures in life better than wandering through the stacks at my town library finding debut novels by new writers before sneaking off to pick up the next romance novel in the J. D. Robb series. Like Eve Dallas, the heroine chronicled by J. D. Robb, I want to wake up each morning in the new year with a renewed belief that people working together can make a difference in the world.”

– CarlLa Horton executive director, Hope’s Door, Pleasantville, and board member, Westchester Women’s Agenda, West Milford, N.J. resident

kohn

landau

“My commitment to social justice. As the CEO of the YWCA White Plains & Central Westchester, I am passionate about our mission of eliminating racism and empowering women. However, the day-to-day operations often consume me and I lose sight that we are part of a movement. Every day there are boundless opportunities to build a better world.... On a personal level, I aim to spend more quality time with my family and friends – more romance, more laughter and less nagging.”

– Maria Imperial CEO, YWCA White Plains & Central Westchester, Yonkers resident “My ability to sleep soundly and without interruption.

This may require shooting the dog, but I hope not. It will require becoming less agitated by daily reminders that our political system may be broken, by that nagging feeling that there is a lot more to that ‘Occupy’ movement and what am I doing about all this? Hmm, maybe silencing the dog is easier.”

– Amy Kohn CEO, Mental Health Association of Westchester County, Croton-on-Hudson resident “My commitment to my family, clients and community by balancing time better. I want to focus on devoting more time to mentoring young lawyers and handling pro bono work, which is always rewarding. I would also like to get more involved in causes that are meaningful to me, such as volunteering with my wife at a local animal shelter. While I’m at it, I would also like to renew my commitment to get in shape, take longer walks with my dog and finally be able to play a full song on my guitar.”

– James K. Landau partner, Trokie Landau L.L.P., Stamford resident

like many people, to put my own needs last on my long to-do list. In 2012, I will carve out more time to properly exercise and focus on staying healthy, which includes making sure I get enough sleep in between all the excitement of life. I think sometimes we all need to remind ourselves to slow down a bit and realize that not everything is as urgent as we sometimes act like it is.”

– Christina Rae president, Buzz Creators Inc., Yorktown Heights resident “My commitment to living in a state of gratitude and love. No matter what life throws at me, no matter what financial situation I find myself in, I’m going to do my best to keep things in perspective and not let my fears get the best of me. Being a very emotional and passionate person, I've never been short on love. I just need to relax a bit and let things work themselves out. Being grateful for what I have should keep me on the right path.”

– Roman Tytla graphic artist, songwriter and president of bigbangprints.com, North Salem resident “Generosity is the quality I will bring forth manifesting with a gentle smile to all that I encounter – in listening, thought and energies – in all places and at all times, for as long as I can. My patients in my holistic practice, my family and my friends deserve the generosity of my attention and knowledge. I also want to be generous with myself in terms of self-acknowledgement and forgiveness.”

– Michael B. Wald, MD Integrated Medicine & Nutrition of Mount Kisco, Chappaqua resident

“As a busy entrepreneur, wife and mother of two, I tend,

rae

tytla

Compiled by Alissa Frey Contact her at afrey@westfairinc.com 80

wald

watch Rockin’ Moroccan

Greenwich Hospital’s 16th annual gala at Greenwich Country Club, benefiting the Cancer Institute, featured full Moroccan décor and garb. More than 520 guests were treated to an elegant evening of dining and dancing in a giant Bedouin tent in vermillion. Gretchen Carlson of Greenwich, co-anchor of Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” program, was the mistress of ceremonies, and Dr. Dickerman Hollister Jr. was honored with the 2011 President’s Award for 30 years of service.

Photographs courtesy of Greenwich Hospital

Dr. Dickerman Hollister Jr. and Gretchen Carlson

Aundrea Amine, Anne Juge and Sabrina Forsythe

Broadway singer Meg Tolin Piper with Dee Mayberry

Natalie and Malcolm Pray with Judy Ritcher

Jill Weiss with Amanda Miller

Amy and Bob Hyman with Linda and Steve Munger

Shelly Tretter Lynch, Sonia Hedvat and Lola Carlson

Carrie and Dr. Barney Newman with Leslie and Dr. Kenneth Schwartz

Dr. Modestus Lee and his wife, Dr. Lia Ming Yu

Maura and Frank Corvino

Marsha and Ken Schlecter with Mary Brauer

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watch Hungry like the wolf

Last month, the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem held its annual “Wine and Wolves” event at the Waccabuc Country Club Carriage House. More than 100 guests enjoyed donated vintages and foods from several restaurants as well as a special appearance by Atka, the center’s senior ambassador wolf. The evening raised more than $20,000 for the center.

Photographs by Dana Ramos

Marilyn Camarda admiring silent auction items

Susan Freund, Brad Nathanson and Tamlyn Freund

Pat Normandeau, Mariann Casarella Paul and Beth Visintainer and Charles D. Casarella

Nathaniel and Courtney Morse

Martha Handler, Christiane Schell and Mike Chebetar

Billie Jo and Ronnie D’Ambrosio Richard Garvey and Nicole Nemeth

Celebrating an opening

Plastic Surgery of Westchester and MediSpa opened the doors of its ultramodern office at 500 Mamaroneck Ave. in West Harrison to friends and guests to raise funds for Toys for Tots. Drs. Richard Garvey and Nicole Nemeth, partners in the practice, greeted guests who then enjoyed wine and socializing.

Photographs by Kelly Liyakasa Jackie Minnock

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Kristin Regno and Marianne DeAngelis

Hope floats

The Prince George Ballroom in New York City played host to the fourth annual “Journey of Hope” gala for the Brain Injury Association of New York state. Tom Llamas, anchor and reporter for NBC4 New York, was the master of ceremonies.

Photographs by Patrick McMullan Film director Penny Marshall, ESPN analyst Chris Mullin and actress Lorraine Bracco

Danielle Logo, Patrick Fields and Amy Sigona

Mike Kilmartin, Betsy Simons, Chris Kilmartin, Heidi Madera, Keith Poisella and Deirdre Dunn Weil

Honorees Scott Gundersen, Nancy Gundersen and Bob Gundersen

Tom Llamas and Jennifer Llamas

Masque ball

The Kennedy Center in Trumbull marked its 47th annual “Four Seasons Ball” with a glorious gathering at the Patterson Club in Fairfield. Nearly 200 guests played “Deal or No Deal” in their most festive attire, all in support of individuals with disabilities and special needs.

Photographs by Stuart Walls/ Woodstock Studio Nancy and Armando Gonçalvez with Elaine and Martin Schwartz

These five incognito gentlemen mug for the camera.

Joseph Emanuel; Katie, Barbara, Rob, and Kelly of the Scinto family; Dana and Matt Colangelo

Vincent Santilli and his wife, Jeanine; David Galla and his wife, Traci, with Kim and Dean Fabrizio

83

watch Dreamy night

About 800 attended Stamford Hospital’s seventh annual “Dream Ball” at the Tully Health Center. The black-tie affair featured dinner, dancing, silent and live auctions and a Giving Tree.

WABC-TV meteorologist Bill Evans entertained the crowd, as did The Subscribers Band, a group of four hedgefund professionals who burst out in an eclectic compilation of cover songs.

The night raised $700,000 for Stamford Hospital.

Photographs by Tim Coffey Photography

Lee, Denise and Babe Rizzuto

Drs. Noel Robin, Stuart Waldstreicher, Robert Fields and Sherman Bull

Carol and Michael Fedele

Ginny Landle and Lisa Molinaro

George and Patti Sarner

Stamford Mayor Michael Pavia with Bill Evans

Paula Callari, Carol Fedele and Kathy Sachs

Linda Sage, Dara Richardson-Heron Blythe Masters and and Heather Dacus Maurice DuBois

Cause for celebration

The Greater New York City Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure staged its first event in Rye Brook honoring New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the “Today” show’s Hoda Kotb (a breast cancer survivor), and PepisCo. Hosted by CBS2 anchor Maurice DuBois, the event featured apparel provided by Saks Fifth Avenue in Greenwich, modeled by breast cancer survivors.

Photographs by Margaret Fox 84

Anne Fink and Blythe Masters

Toasting the arts

A passion for fashion took center stage Nov. 19 at ArtsWestchester’s “Anything Goes” gala, a highlight of the social season that attracted more than 400 people to The Atrium at 1133 Westchester Ave. in White Plains. Guests were treated to an evening of music, dining and a silent auction at the event, which honored White Plains Mayor Thomas Roach and financial firm Wells Fargo for their steadfast support of ArtsWestchester’s programs and services.

County Legislator John Nonna and his wife, Jean Nonna; County Legislator Judith Myers, second from right, with her husband Ira Schwartz; and state Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti, far right

State Sen. Andrea Stewart Cousins, a model showcasing Proctor’s fashion designs, Denise Proctor, owner of the Westchester Fashion Academy for Children and state Assemblyman Robert Castelli

Joan and Bill Mooney with Janet Langsam

Gil and Doreen Bassin with Jacqueline Walker, far right, and her husband, Arthur

Mary Ann Petrilena, Nancy Karch and Vivien Malloy

Candace Schafer

John and Brenda Fareri, Dr. Mitchell Cairo, chief of pediatric hematology and Ellen Cairo, and Dr. Edmund La Gamma

Wendy Weinreb, Michael Gewitz and Judy Gewitz

Al DelBello, George Bianco and Marti Dinerstein

All about the kids

Land stewards feted

The Westchester Land Trust feted its former board members recently with a party at the Bedford home of chairman George Bianco. About 25 people were on hand to enjoy hors d’oeuvres from Table Local Market in Bedford Hills and toast honorees Seema Boesky, Marti Dinerstein, Mary Boies, Al DelBello, Bill Mayo-Smith, Linda Viertel, David Swope and Mackin Pulsifer, each of whom received a sterling silver key chain engraved with the land trust’s logo.

Froma and Andrew Benerofe

Drs. Robin Altman and Carey Goltzman

Novice wine tasters and oenophiles alike poured into the main ballroom of the Ritz Carlton, Westchester, in White Plains for the “Wines of the World” fundraiser, benefitting Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at Westchester Medical Center. More than 400 guests savored fine food while sampling wines chosen by local experts.

Photographs courtesy of Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital 85

watch Martha in Manhattan

The Orthopaedic Foundation for Active Lifestyles hosted its seventh anniversary gala fundraiser at the Harvard Club in Manhattan. The soirÊe honored Bedford resident Martha Stewart, Greenwich physician Russell Warren of the Hospital for Special Surgery and also New York Giants’ team physician, and John M. Bader, chairman and chief investment officer of Halcyon Asset Management. With celebrity chefs Peter X. Kelly and Michael Mina on hand, no one had a bone to pick with the menu.

Photographs by Patrick McMullan Kevin Plancher presented Martha Stewart with the Leadership Award for Nonprofit Philanthropy

Peter X. Kelly and Michael Mina E.D. Hill and Bill Evans

Kevin Plancher, MD and Mayor David Dinkins

Fran Durekas, Charles Ferri and Penny Bunnell

Russell Warren, MD and Bobby Valentine

Peggy Bader, John M Bader and George Kollitides

Bobby Valentine

George Kollitides and Curt Cornwell

Camille Duvall Hero

Hentz Menard and Anne Renken

Festive night

Jeff Nyikos, Steven Spivak, Elizabeth Spivak and Santiago Carmona

86

Karen Zaretzky, Charlie Coleman, Holly Anderson-Bender and Pam Martin

More than 50 members of the WestField chapter of Meeting Professionals International gathered for its annual holiday networking bash at the Copacabana Brazilian Steakhouse in Port Chester. Guests enjoyed a festive rodizio dinner where a bountiful array of seasoned meats are carved and passed table-side, along with bossa nova tunes from classical guitarist Marco Figueira.

Paul Thomas and Valerie Hovasapian

Jon Schandler and Geoff Thompson

Liz Bracken-Thompson, Judith Huntington and Janet Hasson

Sandy Miller, Joanne Fernandez and Howard Arden

John Ravitz, John Tolomer and Mischa Zabotin

Bill Mooney

Natasha Caputo, Dan Conte and Misty Moore

Ken Theobalds Dean Bender, Joe Simone and Joe Kelleher

Fun at the top

Tom Roach and Kevin Plunkett

Marsha Gordon and Robert Weinberg

David Harris, Laurel Borowick and Stuart Ginsberg

The folks at Thompson and Bender hosted a holiday party at 42 Restaurant at the top of the RitzCarlton, Westchester in downtown White Plains featuring everyone from college presidents to inkstained wretches. The people, views and food all made for a fun evening.

Photographs by John Vecchiola

Lawrence Otis Graham and Pamela Thomas-Graham

Legal eagles

Retired judge Sondra M. Miller and attorney Lawrence Otis Graham were the first Westchester County recipients of the AJC Judge Learned Hand Award that recognizes excellence of members of the legal profession. More than 200 guests attended the event at Chappaqua Crossing that included a lively moot court discussion on student free speech.

Scott Richman, Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino and Sondra M. Miller

Want to be in Watch? Send event photos, captions (identifying subjects from left to right) and a paragraph describing the event to afrey@wagmag.com.

87

class&sass Well, another year has come and gone and I am sitting here, like millions of others, making my resolutions list.

It is a long one, as usual, and as usual, I will probably not accomplish many of the things on it for various reasons.

Some of the things on my list are: 1. Reading the Bible in its entirety, daunting to say the least. (Those pages are really thin, which leads one to think that it is a quicker read than it actually is).

2. Skydiving (not likely because I am afraid of jumping out of fast-moving things at great heights. But it sounds cool).

3. Writing my screenplay, which has been in the works for about a decade, so this year is as likely as any, I suppose.

4. Learning another language.

5. Learning to play the tuba (I'm not kidding).

6. Taking up fencing.

7. Giving up coffee (been trying that one for a while).

And so on. Perhaps I should make an easier list to ensure a higher success rate?

J

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I love clean slates. I start off every Monday morning with a list of resolutions for the week (e.g., eat less, drink more water and less wine, etc.) and then

by Wednesday afternoon, when I’ve blown them all, I say to myself, “Next Monday I’ll….” But New Year’s resolutions are a whole different animal. On New Year’s Day, I like to sit at my kitchen table, take stock of my life and write out a game plan for becoming a better and more evolved soul. So far this year I’ve resolved to: 1. Drive closer to the speed limit and not just when there is a police truck flashing my speed.

2. Replace the gas nozzle before driving away from the pump (don’t ask).

3. Find a scale that doesn’t exaggerate my weight.

4. Never again take a sleeping pill and laxative on the same night.

5. Not buy any more books until I finish the 120+ on my Kindle and the 50+ on my nightstand.

6. Not listen to Howard Stern on the car radio until after I’ve dropped the kids at school.

7. Fine-tune my bored and unamused look.

8. Stop buying clothes that will look good “when I lose a few pounds.”

9. Listen more and judge less.

10. Edit, print, organize and make books from the photos I download rather than allowing them to simply exist on my hard drive.

M

By Martha Handler and Jennifer Pappas 11. Not scare my husband by answering my (hands-free) cell phone while I’m in my car crying hysterically over an audio book.

12. Resist the urge to rear-end cars with bumper stickers proclaiming their children are “honor students at….” or are attending Harvard, Yale, etc.

13. Not immediately dislike my fellow middle-agers who are naturally thin, wrinkle-free and ache-free!

14. Take my Rosetta Stone Spanish CDs out of the box and listen to them.

(I’ve owned them for three years.)

15. Get back into yoga, meditate daily and stop drinking coffee.

16. Complete the “All About Me” book so my kids and grandkids will know that, before my mind began to deteriorate, I was a semi-interesting person.

Yikes! Your list is longer than mine!

J I feel better already. So why DO we make these crazy, unachievable lists? Because I usually just get upset with myself for failing to accomplish my goals. It’s very upsetting to look at a notepad with no check marks on it. I guess it’s the fact that a new year seems so, well, new. It’s enticing to think of a clean slate, a new beginning and a chance to change. But alas, there are no clean slates. We can only hope to embellish and to enhance the beautiful works of art that we all already are, stroke by stroke, layer by layer, day by day. So, I will keep making my lists and keep hoping, thinking and believing that one day, I will see a sea of red – check marks that is.

Email Class & Sass at marthaandjen@wagmag.com.

You can also follow Martha and Jen on Facebook at Jennifer Pappas Wag Writer.

Maybe we should all just work on being a bit better than we were the last year (whatever that means for you).

Giving up Howard Stern cold turkey in the mornings is too drastic a change. But perhaps I could manage to tune into NPR at least two days a week – at least until all the kids have gone off to college.

M

Wag Up: • Books on the Common in Ridgefield and Diane’s Books in Greenwich – we’ve got to support the local bookstores while we still can. (M) • Mass transit – I love the ease of moving around the city. It’s fast and affordable and you don’t have to depend on taxis, which seem to be nonexistent for two hours mid-afternoon. What’s up with that? Can’t taxi services figure out how to stagger their shift changes? (J) Wag down: • Drivers who don’t understand that slower cars are supposed to stay in the right lane. (M) • Mass transit – People are so grumpy down there. It must be a subterranean thing. (J)

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