Bringing it all together: Thea Miller, Product Manager of Brennan’s Market
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
in ANEW Magazine, May 2006
Column: Around the Table
Related recipe: Red Sangria
Remember that 1976 cooking show, “In the Kitchen With Thea”? Of course you don’t. It was never televised.
“I would stand at the counter in our kitchen that overlooked our living room and host a show to an imaginary audience,” recalls 34-year-old Milwaukee native Thea Miller. “I have a few pictures, but this was before video cameras so I have no idea what I said – though I must have thought it was important. I have always loved food.”
Today, Miller is the product manager for Brennan’s Farm Markets, southern Wisconsin’s highly regarded purveyors of specialty produce, wines, cheeses and beers purchased directly from farmers and artisans around the world. Owner Skip Brennan does most of the globe-trotting and deal-making involved with acquiring new products, but it’s Miller who brings it all together. Some of her duties: doing the research that leads to new finds, helping small producers learn the intricacies of international export, handling PR and educating each employee about new products, so they can pass on the Brennan’s enthusiasm to the customer.
For someone whose passion for spreading the good word about good eats is literally lifelong, it’s the perfect occupation.
Miller started at Brennan’s while a history major at Mount Mary College. Her mother, a fan of the grocery with the old-timey feel and distinctive selection, talked her into taking a summer job at the nearby Brookfield store. “I planned to leave at the end of the summer,” says Miller. “Labor Day weekend came and went, and I’m still working at Brennan’s.”
VVK: What do you enjoy most about your job?
TM: I get to work with my favorite things: wine and food. I’ve been lucky enough to travel all over the world meeting with our winemakers and producers, learning firsthand what they do.
Last April, I traveled to New Zealand and worked at Daniel Schuster’s winery during harvest. He is the producer of Kiwi Gold [Brennan’s first private label wine], a fantastic wine. I got to pick Pinot Noir grapes and run them through the destemmer. And learn about winemaking from a pioneer of New Zealand wine and an international wine consultant.
It was fun and very educational, but a lot of hard work. I was covered in grapes by the end of each day and exhausted. I might have snuck a few to eat, too. I can’t wait to get that vintage in!
VVK: Tell me about your involvement with the private label wines.
We started the program about six years ago. For a number of years, Brennan’s has carried exclusive wines, meaning that if you can buy it at Brennan’s, you cannot buy it anywhere else. The private label program goes further. In 2005, we launched five new lines from all over the world, including New Zealand, Australia, Chile and California. Each line includes several varieties.
We like to work with small family-owned wineries. These little guys don’t have the production to supply big importers, so they normally wouldn’t make it to the U.S. Once a winery gets the stamp of approval from Skip, the task of getting the wine here goes to me. This involves building and maintaining a relationship with the supplier, making sure labels meet government requirements, educating our staff, making signs and tasting notes and coordinating visits from suppliers.
I brainstorm ideas for label names, work with our designer, write back labels, provide support materials for each lineup – like brochures and tasting notes – and work with staff at each store to launch and promote new wine. It’s a great feeling to know that words I wrote are on thousands of labels out there in people’s homes.
VVK: What’s been your biggest challenge?
TM: Keeping balance with all of our producers, projecting, promoting and selling to meet everyone’s needs. When you have things coming in from around the world, you can’t order and have something show up the next day.
VVK: What are some foods that Brennan’s has led the way in introducing?
TM: Skip found Island Grove Olives at a farmers’ market in Tasmania. Wendy, the owner, was selling her vacuum-packed olives there. Skip drove back to her grove and convinced her to sell her olives to us. Now she sells them all around the world.
VVK: Any flops that should have been a sure thing?
TM: We carried a sparkling juice called “Uva Uva” around 1998. The company was founded by gentleman and his daughters, and they bottled it champagne style. It was hands down the best product on the market. At that time, our exclusive grocery program was very small and the owner of the company was trying to compete with lower price rather than separating from the pack. He started selling to the big wholesale stores. Unfortunately, he went out business. Today, with the strength of our sampling program, I know it would be a great seller for us and wish we could find a product like it.
VVK: How do you compete with the mega-warehouse grocery stores?
TM: People are looking for great service and great food. The big key is having both and differentiating yourself from the pack. We sell products that the big guys don’t. We seek out the best from the little guys like us. We have a story behind every product we sell, whether it’s an orange, a pistachio or a bottle of wine.
Monday, May 1, 2006
Red Sangria
Related article: Thea Miller of Brennan's Market
“Just because I’m a wine buyer, don’t think that I sit around and drink expensive bottles of wine every night,” says Miller, who adapted this robust punch from a Food Network recipe for her thirtieth birthday celebration. “I like all different kinds of sangria, but this one in particular because it can be made with fruit that’s available year-round. Sometimes it’s fun to kick back with a big plate of paella or enchiladas and enjoy a glass.”
Red Sangria
3/4 cup water
3/4 cup sugar
2 bottles dry red wine*
3/4 cup brandy
1/2 cup triple sec
3/4 cup orange juice
2 oranges, sliced in thin rounds
2 green apples, cored and sliced thin
2 lemons, sliced in thin rounds
Boil water and pour over sugar to dissolve. Cool. Combine all ingredients in a large pitcher and refrigerate covered for at least two hours and up to two days. Serve over ice.
*Miller suggests any of these Brennan’s private label picks: Bootleg Reserve Mixed Red, Riverland Merlot, Monterey Coast Cabernet Sauvignon. Or, try a single 1.5 liter bottle of Brennan’s Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon.
“Just because I’m a wine buyer, don’t think that I sit around and drink expensive bottles of wine every night,” says Miller, who adapted this robust punch from a Food Network recipe for her thirtieth birthday celebration. “I like all different kinds of sangria, but this one in particular because it can be made with fruit that’s available year-round. Sometimes it’s fun to kick back with a big plate of paella or enchiladas and enjoy a glass.”
Red Sangria
3/4 cup water
3/4 cup sugar
2 bottles dry red wine*
3/4 cup brandy
1/2 cup triple sec
3/4 cup orange juice
2 oranges, sliced in thin rounds
2 green apples, cored and sliced thin
2 lemons, sliced in thin rounds
Boil water and pour over sugar to dissolve. Cool. Combine all ingredients in a large pitcher and refrigerate covered for at least two hours and up to two days. Serve over ice.
*Miller suggests any of these Brennan’s private label picks: Bootleg Reserve Mixed Red, Riverland Merlot, Monterey Coast Cabernet Sauvignon. Or, try a single 1.5 liter bottle of Brennan’s Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon.
Saturday, April 1, 2006
Orange Tree Imports' very own Orange
Carol "Orange" Schroeder of Orange Tree Imports
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In ANEW Magazine
Column: Around the Table
April 2006
Related recipe: Orange's Roasted Veggies
In the mid-1970s a Jersey girl nicknamed "Orange" for her bright tresses, along with her husband, Dean, founded a foodie's paradise on Monroe Street. From cooking classes to gourmet cookware to exquisite serving accessories and gifts, Orange Tree Imports is one local treasure that just keeps getting better.
Though co-proprietor Carol “Orange” Schroeder has no formal business education, her shop has thrived for over 30 years, and her book, Specialty Shop Retailing: How to Run Your Own Store (John Wiley & Sons), has sold over 30,000 copies and been translated into Russian. Recently, I caught up with Orange to learn the story behind her success.
VVK: What attracted you to the Monroe Street neighborhood?
OS: I grew up in a very small town in New Jersey. When I first saw Monroe Street, it was like a village within the big city of Madison. Even today, it has its own bank, library, drug store, school and park - just like my hometown. We were lucky to buy a house a few blocks from the store when I was hired by Bord & Stol, so we feel very much part of the community.
VVK: What led to the unique configuration of your establishment?
OS: I had spent a year at the University of Copenhagen, with lots of free time to browse in Danish stores, and I wanted to bring some of their friendly feeling to Madison. I came in the early 1970s to get an M.A. in Danish literature, which was a wonderful experience but not necessarily a wise career move. A few months after receiving my degree, I was hired by a Madison-based Scandinavian furniture store called Bord & Stol to manage their new branch. I immediately fell in love with the antique bay window of the little shop.
When my husband Dean and I bought the branch six months later, we discontinued the furniture and concentrated on accessories. We changed the name of the store to Orange Tree Imports rather impetuously. It was a natural extension to expand into even more kitchenware when Dean joined the business full-time a year later.
VVK: How do you and your husband share the responsibilities at the store?
OS: Dean is in charge of merchandise relating to cooking and serving food, and I'm in charge of all the gift items. Orange Tree Imports is run as a participative democracy, with every one of our 30 staff members having real responsibility for some aspect of the store.
VVK: How about cooking duties at home?
OS: Dean is the creative cook. He’s known for his original version of Cape Breton oatcakes. But we split the daily cooking about evenly.
VVK: What’s your most popular kitchen item these days?
OS: The Santoku knife, which has been featured on several television cooking shows. It's a cross between a chef's knife and a cleaver. Dean gave me a ceramic one for Christmas. I was worried at first about it being breakable, I love using it -- it cuts incredibly well. We also sell lots of traditional forged metal ones. The other big trend is silicone, a flexible, functional material that comes in whimsical colors not previously associated with cooking. There are reusable pink silicone food loops for tying together large fish or roasts, frosted silicone multi-function lids that can go in the microwave or oven, and heat-proof silicone spatulas.
VVK: How about the most useless, outlandish kitchen item you’ve sold?
OS: The “square egger,” a mold that you could put a warm hard-boiled egg in so that it cooled in a cube shape.
VVK: What's your take on people's attitudes towards cookware?
OS: Customers, especially male shoppers, seem more willing to spend money on good knives than quality cookware. I think that is in part because men relate to knives as tools, and often want the best, even for kitchens where they aren't the primary cook. It's not quite as obvious why a high quality pan will enhance the cooking experience. Not everyone knows, for example, that food doesn't tend to stick in cookware that heats very evenly. Not everyone realizes that there are alternatives to traditional Teflon-like nonstick finishes, even though many customers express concern about the safety of nonstick cookware. As a specialty shop, it's our job to inform customers about the different options, and encourage them to try a piece or two to see what a difference a good pan can make.
VVK: When did the Cooking School begin? What role does it play?
OS: We started it back in 1980. Although we don't make money on it, we feel it helps establish our store as a reliable authority on cooking, and of course the instructors do demonstrate products that we sell. Students are offered a discount on the day of the class, and sometimes they are inspired to make rather extensive purchases.
VVK: What sort of impact have “big box” stores and Internet shopping had?
OS: We’re always looking for special products customers can't get at the big box stores. Fortunately for us, Madison has a strong interest in supporting locally owned businesses. We try to provide a pleasant shopping experience and competitive prices to reward that loyalty. The Internet has not proven to be a big competition in our type of merchandise, because customers like to examine what they are buying, and compare it to other items. There’s also the serendipity of finding things you love while just browsing. The added shipping costs and delayed gratification of shipping time have also been deterrents to Internet sales in our field, although we know that a few people come and talk to us and then make the purchase elsewhere. That is probably true in every type of retailing today.
VVK: What’s in Orange Tree Imports’ future?
OS: In the fall Monroe Street will again have a grocery store, which will help restore a part of our "town" that’s been missing for four years. We anticipate that the Trader Joe's customer will in many cases also be an Orange Tree Imports customer, and hope to introduce our shop to a whole new market as a result.
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In ANEW Magazine
Column: Around the Table
April 2006
Related recipe: Orange's Roasted Veggies
In the mid-1970s a Jersey girl nicknamed "Orange" for her bright tresses, along with her husband, Dean, founded a foodie's paradise on Monroe Street. From cooking classes to gourmet cookware to exquisite serving accessories and gifts, Orange Tree Imports is one local treasure that just keeps getting better.
Though co-proprietor Carol “Orange” Schroeder has no formal business education, her shop has thrived for over 30 years, and her book, Specialty Shop Retailing: How to Run Your Own Store (John Wiley & Sons), has sold over 30,000 copies and been translated into Russian. Recently, I caught up with Orange to learn the story behind her success.
VVK: What attracted you to the Monroe Street neighborhood?
OS: I grew up in a very small town in New Jersey. When I first saw Monroe Street, it was like a village within the big city of Madison. Even today, it has its own bank, library, drug store, school and park - just like my hometown. We were lucky to buy a house a few blocks from the store when I was hired by Bord & Stol, so we feel very much part of the community.
VVK: What led to the unique configuration of your establishment?
OS: I had spent a year at the University of Copenhagen, with lots of free time to browse in Danish stores, and I wanted to bring some of their friendly feeling to Madison. I came in the early 1970s to get an M.A. in Danish literature, which was a wonderful experience but not necessarily a wise career move. A few months after receiving my degree, I was hired by a Madison-based Scandinavian furniture store called Bord & Stol to manage their new branch. I immediately fell in love with the antique bay window of the little shop.
When my husband Dean and I bought the branch six months later, we discontinued the furniture and concentrated on accessories. We changed the name of the store to Orange Tree Imports rather impetuously. It was a natural extension to expand into even more kitchenware when Dean joined the business full-time a year later.
VVK: How do you and your husband share the responsibilities at the store?
OS: Dean is in charge of merchandise relating to cooking and serving food, and I'm in charge of all the gift items. Orange Tree Imports is run as a participative democracy, with every one of our 30 staff members having real responsibility for some aspect of the store.
VVK: How about cooking duties at home?
OS: Dean is the creative cook. He’s known for his original version of Cape Breton oatcakes. But we split the daily cooking about evenly.
VVK: What’s your most popular kitchen item these days?
OS: The Santoku knife, which has been featured on several television cooking shows. It's a cross between a chef's knife and a cleaver. Dean gave me a ceramic one for Christmas. I was worried at first about it being breakable, I love using it -- it cuts incredibly well. We also sell lots of traditional forged metal ones. The other big trend is silicone, a flexible, functional material that comes in whimsical colors not previously associated with cooking. There are reusable pink silicone food loops for tying together large fish or roasts, frosted silicone multi-function lids that can go in the microwave or oven, and heat-proof silicone spatulas.
VVK: How about the most useless, outlandish kitchen item you’ve sold?
OS: The “square egger,” a mold that you could put a warm hard-boiled egg in so that it cooled in a cube shape.
VVK: What's your take on people's attitudes towards cookware?
OS: Customers, especially male shoppers, seem more willing to spend money on good knives than quality cookware. I think that is in part because men relate to knives as tools, and often want the best, even for kitchens where they aren't the primary cook. It's not quite as obvious why a high quality pan will enhance the cooking experience. Not everyone knows, for example, that food doesn't tend to stick in cookware that heats very evenly. Not everyone realizes that there are alternatives to traditional Teflon-like nonstick finishes, even though many customers express concern about the safety of nonstick cookware. As a specialty shop, it's our job to inform customers about the different options, and encourage them to try a piece or two to see what a difference a good pan can make.
VVK: When did the Cooking School begin? What role does it play?
OS: We started it back in 1980. Although we don't make money on it, we feel it helps establish our store as a reliable authority on cooking, and of course the instructors do demonstrate products that we sell. Students are offered a discount on the day of the class, and sometimes they are inspired to make rather extensive purchases.
VVK: What sort of impact have “big box” stores and Internet shopping had?
OS: We’re always looking for special products customers can't get at the big box stores. Fortunately for us, Madison has a strong interest in supporting locally owned businesses. We try to provide a pleasant shopping experience and competitive prices to reward that loyalty. The Internet has not proven to be a big competition in our type of merchandise, because customers like to examine what they are buying, and compare it to other items. There’s also the serendipity of finding things you love while just browsing. The added shipping costs and delayed gratification of shipping time have also been deterrents to Internet sales in our field, although we know that a few people come and talk to us and then make the purchase elsewhere. That is probably true in every type of retailing today.
VVK: What’s in Orange Tree Imports’ future?
OS: In the fall Monroe Street will again have a grocery store, which will help restore a part of our "town" that’s been missing for four years. We anticipate that the Trader Joe's customer will in many cases also be an Orange Tree Imports customer, and hope to introduce our shop to a whole new market as a result.
Orange's Roasted Veggies
Related article: Orange Tree Imports' Very Own Orange
Forget boiling, steaming and sauteeing! Oven roasting concentrates veggies’ flavor, carmelizes their sugars, browns beautifully and retains their shape. These easy examples – a warm side and a chilled party snack – will prove the point: no fuss, no mush.
Oven-Roasted Asparagus
Preheat oven to 450° F. Clean a pound of fresh asparagus, trimming off the woody ends. Line a jelly-roll pan with a silicone liner or aluminum foil. Spray surface with olive oil or cooking spray. Spread asparagus in a single layer. Mist with olive oil (a Misto sprayer works great), turn and spray again. Sprinkle lightly with freshly ground salt and pepper. Roast for 20 minutes, stirring once. Garnish with lemon wedges.
Marinated Brussels Sprouts and Baby Carrots
Preheat oven to 400° F. Using the same method as above, roast a pound of Brussels sprouts and a half pound of baby carrots. Let cool. Combine with 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar in a lidded container. Refrigerate at least two hours, occasionally shaking to mix.
Forget boiling, steaming and sauteeing! Oven roasting concentrates veggies’ flavor, carmelizes their sugars, browns beautifully and retains their shape. These easy examples – a warm side and a chilled party snack – will prove the point: no fuss, no mush.
Oven-Roasted Asparagus
Preheat oven to 450° F. Clean a pound of fresh asparagus, trimming off the woody ends. Line a jelly-roll pan with a silicone liner or aluminum foil. Spray surface with olive oil or cooking spray. Spread asparagus in a single layer. Mist with olive oil (a Misto sprayer works great), turn and spray again. Sprinkle lightly with freshly ground salt and pepper. Roast for 20 minutes, stirring once. Garnish with lemon wedges.
Marinated Brussels Sprouts and Baby Carrots
Preheat oven to 400° F. Using the same method as above, roast a pound of Brussels sprouts and a half pound of baby carrots. Let cool. Combine with 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar in a lidded container. Refrigerate at least two hours, occasionally shaking to mix.
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Madison Club’s Executive Chef Catherine McKiernan
In ANEW Magazine
Column: Around the Table
March 2006
Related recipe: Madison Club PBJ
For those of us who have enough trouble just mangling a supermarket pack of boneless, skinless chicken breast into stir-fry chunks, imagine the skill and nerves it would take to disassemble an entire bird – beautifully, to exacting standards of precision and cleanliness. Now add a gang of chefs scrutinizing your every move, just waiting for you to slip up by wiping your hand on your apron or leaving behind an unsightly knife mark.
That’s just a sliver of the practical exam portion of the American Culinary Federation’s grueling process of Chef de Cuisine Certification (CCC), a distinction recently earned by Catherine McKiernan. That makes her one of 726 CCCs in the nation, possibly the only one in the Madison area and certainly the only female one locally.
“It was a long process,” says McKiernan, 36, a native of Scotland who moved here in 1988 when she married her (now ex-)husband, a Madisonian. “I had to sit a lot of exams. But the hardest part for me was the practical.” Under five merciless pairs of eyes and a strict time limit McKiernan whipped up classic French sauces, crystal-clear consommé and intensive, artful platings that would make the Iron Chefs weep. “I must have washed my hands a thousand times,” she recalls.
One of a handful of women to make the difficult break into the rigidly male-dominated upper echelons of cuisine, McKiernan is executive chef at the Madison Club, a prestigious private venue located downtown on Wilson Street.
McKiernan graduated MATC’s culinary trades program, attending on a scholarship from the Wisconsin Restaurant Association. Today she’s a scholarship mentor for the Association’s Education Foundation.
As a teen McKiernan worked a fruit and veg stand on the streets of Glasgow. Later she took jobs in professional kitchens while earning her degree in English literature at the University of Glasgow.
Stateside, McKiernan started out washing dishes at Camp Ojibwa in Eagle River, where she was quickly promoted to head cook. “The camp director, Denny Rosen, is the person who really encouraged me to pursue my culinary career. No other boss since has been so fair and encouraging,” she says. McKiernan spent 12 summers at the camp. After her first marriage ended, romance blossomed with Paul Williams, camp waterfront director, who’s now her fiancé.
Q: In this day and age, is it so different for a woman to make it in the professional kitchen?
A: Yes. Part of it is the hours. I work six days a week, usually 55 to 60 hours. It’s hard to have a life, a family. I don’t have children or anything. The men have a wife who will do that.
There is prejudice, especially as you go up through the levels. I went to a chef’s conference in West Virginia recently. Out of 300 chefs, only 4 were women, myself included, and one of the women was from Dubai!
[A local magazine] just came out with an article about the top chefs in Madison. Not one woman was mentioned. This happens a lot.
Q: How about in your kitchen?
Our situation is extremely unusual – I’m sure we’re the only place in town where both the executive chef and sous chef are female. Amy Shimank is my sous chef. She just had a baby. That’s really unusual for women in our profession. Her fiancé is home looking after the baby. She’s fantastic – 100% focused. Then there’s Corrine Richardson, She’s the lead sauté chef.
I can’t say enough about these wonderful, skilled women. The three of us have skills that the men in that article don’t even have! For example, we’re all accomplished in pastry work. That opens up more possibilities for what we can do. I can describe something, and they know exactly what I mean and how to create it. But because we’re a private club, it’s harder to get the word out about what we’re doing.
Q: Did you pursue the Chef de Cuisine Certification in order to prove yourself?
A: Definitely. Especially because I’m a woman. Even if you say you’re an executive chef, it could mean nothing in sense of professional certification to back you up. I’ve interviewed so many people who say they can cook, but put them in a kitchen and they can’t. I never want to be that person.
Q: What’s for lunch today at the club?
A: A group of Norwegians get together here every month. All men. They always have the same thing: cod with lots and lots of butter. And they drink lots of Aquavit.
Q: How about the regular menu?
Our menus are seasonal, and we get a lot from the Farmers’ Market right next door. When we serve lamb, it’s organic lamb from a farm nearby.
We just did the menu tasting for spring. Amy and I are very happy with it. I really like the genuine, wild, striped bass. It’s done in a Niçoise style, with haricots verts, Kalamata olives, baby red potatoes. We’re oven roasting the tomatoes. All the flavors just work so well with that.
We’re also serving a tangerine-glazed pork belly. It’s one of those cuts of meat you have to braise for hours on end. But it comes out so tender and flavorful.
Q: Are you going to call it “pork belly” on the menu?
A: No! We’re calling it “House-Cured Pork.” Pork belly? Nobody would order that.
Column: Around the Table
March 2006
Related recipe: Madison Club PBJ
For those of us who have enough trouble just mangling a supermarket pack of boneless, skinless chicken breast into stir-fry chunks, imagine the skill and nerves it would take to disassemble an entire bird – beautifully, to exacting standards of precision and cleanliness. Now add a gang of chefs scrutinizing your every move, just waiting for you to slip up by wiping your hand on your apron or leaving behind an unsightly knife mark.
That’s just a sliver of the practical exam portion of the American Culinary Federation’s grueling process of Chef de Cuisine Certification (CCC), a distinction recently earned by Catherine McKiernan. That makes her one of 726 CCCs in the nation, possibly the only one in the Madison area and certainly the only female one locally.
“It was a long process,” says McKiernan, 36, a native of Scotland who moved here in 1988 when she married her (now ex-)husband, a Madisonian. “I had to sit a lot of exams. But the hardest part for me was the practical.” Under five merciless pairs of eyes and a strict time limit McKiernan whipped up classic French sauces, crystal-clear consommé and intensive, artful platings that would make the Iron Chefs weep. “I must have washed my hands a thousand times,” she recalls.
One of a handful of women to make the difficult break into the rigidly male-dominated upper echelons of cuisine, McKiernan is executive chef at the Madison Club, a prestigious private venue located downtown on Wilson Street.
McKiernan graduated MATC’s culinary trades program, attending on a scholarship from the Wisconsin Restaurant Association. Today she’s a scholarship mentor for the Association’s Education Foundation.
As a teen McKiernan worked a fruit and veg stand on the streets of Glasgow. Later she took jobs in professional kitchens while earning her degree in English literature at the University of Glasgow.
Stateside, McKiernan started out washing dishes at Camp Ojibwa in Eagle River, where she was quickly promoted to head cook. “The camp director, Denny Rosen, is the person who really encouraged me to pursue my culinary career. No other boss since has been so fair and encouraging,” she says. McKiernan spent 12 summers at the camp. After her first marriage ended, romance blossomed with Paul Williams, camp waterfront director, who’s now her fiancé.
Q: In this day and age, is it so different for a woman to make it in the professional kitchen?
A: Yes. Part of it is the hours. I work six days a week, usually 55 to 60 hours. It’s hard to have a life, a family. I don’t have children or anything. The men have a wife who will do that.
There is prejudice, especially as you go up through the levels. I went to a chef’s conference in West Virginia recently. Out of 300 chefs, only 4 were women, myself included, and one of the women was from Dubai!
[A local magazine] just came out with an article about the top chefs in Madison. Not one woman was mentioned. This happens a lot.
Q: How about in your kitchen?
Our situation is extremely unusual – I’m sure we’re the only place in town where both the executive chef and sous chef are female. Amy Shimank is my sous chef. She just had a baby. That’s really unusual for women in our profession. Her fiancé is home looking after the baby. She’s fantastic – 100% focused. Then there’s Corrine Richardson, She’s the lead sauté chef.
I can’t say enough about these wonderful, skilled women. The three of us have skills that the men in that article don’t even have! For example, we’re all accomplished in pastry work. That opens up more possibilities for what we can do. I can describe something, and they know exactly what I mean and how to create it. But because we’re a private club, it’s harder to get the word out about what we’re doing.
Q: Did you pursue the Chef de Cuisine Certification in order to prove yourself?
A: Definitely. Especially because I’m a woman. Even if you say you’re an executive chef, it could mean nothing in sense of professional certification to back you up. I’ve interviewed so many people who say they can cook, but put them in a kitchen and they can’t. I never want to be that person.
Q: What’s for lunch today at the club?
A: A group of Norwegians get together here every month. All men. They always have the same thing: cod with lots and lots of butter. And they drink lots of Aquavit.
Q: How about the regular menu?
Our menus are seasonal, and we get a lot from the Farmers’ Market right next door. When we serve lamb, it’s organic lamb from a farm nearby.
We just did the menu tasting for spring. Amy and I are very happy with it. I really like the genuine, wild, striped bass. It’s done in a Niçoise style, with haricots verts, Kalamata olives, baby red potatoes. We’re oven roasting the tomatoes. All the flavors just work so well with that.
We’re also serving a tangerine-glazed pork belly. It’s one of those cuts of meat you have to braise for hours on end. But it comes out so tender and flavorful.
Q: Are you going to call it “pork belly” on the menu?
A: No! We’re calling it “House-Cured Pork.” Pork belly? Nobody would order that.
Madison Club PBJ
Related article: Madison Club Chef Catherine McKiernan
This playfully layered treat features fruity preserves and fluffy mousse on that loveliest of French breads, a rich, buttery slice of brioche. Prepare the luscious components at your convenience for serving-time assembly. McKiernan assures me this is the easiest brioche recipe ever, and it freezes well, too. You can also slice up a purchased pound cake. If you can locate loaf-shaped brioche for sale in town, let me know!
One step easier? Use any of the excellent, locally made fruit spreads available at farmers’ markets and supermarkets.
To assemble, cut 1/2" slices of brioche or pound cake. Slather with PB mousse. Lay on some strawberry. Garnish with powdered sugar. Serve on pretty plates!
Brioche
1/3 cup warm (105 F) water
1 packet active dry yeast
2 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons Kosher salt
6 eggs, at room temperature
2 1/2 sticks butter, cut in cubes
Dissolve yeast in water. Sift together flour, sugar, and salt into mixer bowl fitted with dough hook. Add eggs and beat on low for 1 minute. While still beating, slowly add water-yeast mixture. Beat five minutes. Scrape down bowl and beat five minutes more. Add butter cubes, beating one minute after each addition. Beat 10-15 minutes more.
Let dough double, covered, in a bowl. Turn onto floured surface and gently work out air bubbles. Cover with plastic and refrigerate overnight. Divide in half, shape, place in two generously buttered loaf pans and let rise to about 1/2" above the tops of the pans. Bake at 350 F for 35-40 minutes, until top is well-browned. Bottom should make a hollow sound when thumped. Turn out onto rack to cool.
Peanut Butter Mousse
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup mascarpone cheese
1/4 cup whipping cream, whipped with 1 teaspoon powdered sugar
2 tablespoons whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Mix peanut butter and mascarpone. Add whipping cream and vanilla. Fold into whipped cream.
Preserved Strawberries
1 pint fresh, or 1 bag frozen, strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon each lemon and orange zest
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, cook berries (top and halve if fresh) over medium heat, stirring frequently, until they break down. Add sugar and stir until dissolved. Increase heat and stir about 20 minutes, until thickened. Remove from heat. Stir in lemon and orange zest and vanilla extract. Let cool.
This playfully layered treat features fruity preserves and fluffy mousse on that loveliest of French breads, a rich, buttery slice of brioche. Prepare the luscious components at your convenience for serving-time assembly. McKiernan assures me this is the easiest brioche recipe ever, and it freezes well, too. You can also slice up a purchased pound cake. If you can locate loaf-shaped brioche for sale in town, let me know!
One step easier? Use any of the excellent, locally made fruit spreads available at farmers’ markets and supermarkets.
To assemble, cut 1/2" slices of brioche or pound cake. Slather with PB mousse. Lay on some strawberry. Garnish with powdered sugar. Serve on pretty plates!
Brioche
1/3 cup warm (105 F) water
1 packet active dry yeast
2 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons Kosher salt
6 eggs, at room temperature
2 1/2 sticks butter, cut in cubes
Dissolve yeast in water. Sift together flour, sugar, and salt into mixer bowl fitted with dough hook. Add eggs and beat on low for 1 minute. While still beating, slowly add water-yeast mixture. Beat five minutes. Scrape down bowl and beat five minutes more. Add butter cubes, beating one minute after each addition. Beat 10-15 minutes more.
Let dough double, covered, in a bowl. Turn onto floured surface and gently work out air bubbles. Cover with plastic and refrigerate overnight. Divide in half, shape, place in two generously buttered loaf pans and let rise to about 1/2" above the tops of the pans. Bake at 350 F for 35-40 minutes, until top is well-browned. Bottom should make a hollow sound when thumped. Turn out onto rack to cool.
Peanut Butter Mousse
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup mascarpone cheese
1/4 cup whipping cream, whipped with 1 teaspoon powdered sugar
2 tablespoons whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Mix peanut butter and mascarpone. Add whipping cream and vanilla. Fold into whipped cream.
Preserved Strawberries
1 pint fresh, or 1 bag frozen, strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon each lemon and orange zest
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, cook berries (top and halve if fresh) over medium heat, stirring frequently, until they break down. Add sugar and stir until dissolved. Increase heat and stir about 20 minutes, until thickened. Remove from heat. Stir in lemon and orange zest and vanilla extract. Let cool.
Bamboozled
Q&A with Eco-Friendly Flooring entrepreneur Melissa Clements
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Brava Magazine, March (?) 2006
In 2001 Melissa Clements began a business with a little bamboo. Today Eco-Friendly Flooring offers non-toxic, sustainable and recycled materials to customers throughout the U.S. and Canada (only a quarter of sales are local), works with several design subcontractors and employs a handful of fulltimers including Melissa’s husband, Robert. With his years of experience with floor installation, remodeling and customer service, he oversees logistics and installation contracting. We caught up with Clements to find what lies beneath.
VVK: What do you love most about your business?
MC: I love to open the door to clients. Many people think that environmentally friendly products are out of their reach financially, but I have lots of products that are actually quite competitive against their non-eco counterparts. Projects actually become doable for people.
VVK: How did you come to start Eco-Friendly Flooring?
MC: I have a background in international sales and marketing. Through my travels, I witnessed bamboo being used in a variety of applications and was fascinated by the possibilities of introducing it in our area. When I was laid off from my job at a local software company, I tested the market for bamboo with some pilot projects, and it really took off from there. My family are all builders, so I have always been in and around residential construction and design. This, coupled with my own chemical sensitivities, provided a solid background and understanding for the best way to market the products.
VVK: How has having your own showroom helped?
MC: I moved [from a home office] into the Madison Enterprise Center in September 2002. I think it is very helpful for local customers to see the product installed over a large area versus just seeing a small sample.
VVK: What has been your greatest challenge?
MC: Striking a balance between business and personal time. With a fast-growing business and a two-year-old, we have very little time to unwind. We’ll often work 80 hours a week to keep up with growth.
VVK: Who is your typical customer?
MC: Well-educated, discerning homeowners who are interested in finding a non-toxic, durable, beautiful and affordable floor.
VVK: What’s your most popular flooring, and where do people put it?
MC: For new construction, bamboo for main living areas like dining, living and kitchen areas. For remodels, cork. Our clients like to use it in kitchens because it’s comfortable to stand on, easy to install and can be put in directly over the existing floor without a messy tear-out.
VVK: What’s your favorite flooring?
MC: I like our floating linoleum flooring planks with an interlocking tongue and groove. They just float over top of the existing floor. You don’t need any glue or nails to put them in. I am drawn to the saturated color selection of this type of flooring, as it lends itself to funky, creative design.
VVK: What are the most exciting trends you see?
MC: More suppliers for cork. As the wine industry moves to using more plastic for bottle stoppers, cork farmers in Europe are looking for ways to expand their offerings, and are starting to make flooring. As supply increases, price typically drops, so this will make the market larger for us.
I am also seeing many more physician referrals for clients with chemical sensitivities, allergies, asthma, or intolerance to plastics and vinyls and the chemicals they emit. These consumers seek out healthier products that don’t make them sick.
VVK: What do you see in the future?
MC: I think that more and more big-name manufacturers of flooring will introduce a “green” offering in their lineups. This will increase consumer awareness of the products, and will lead to more competitive pricing and availability.
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Brava Magazine, March (?) 2006
In 2001 Melissa Clements began a business with a little bamboo. Today Eco-Friendly Flooring offers non-toxic, sustainable and recycled materials to customers throughout the U.S. and Canada (only a quarter of sales are local), works with several design subcontractors and employs a handful of fulltimers including Melissa’s husband, Robert. With his years of experience with floor installation, remodeling and customer service, he oversees logistics and installation contracting. We caught up with Clements to find what lies beneath.
VVK: What do you love most about your business?
MC: I love to open the door to clients. Many people think that environmentally friendly products are out of their reach financially, but I have lots of products that are actually quite competitive against their non-eco counterparts. Projects actually become doable for people.
VVK: How did you come to start Eco-Friendly Flooring?
MC: I have a background in international sales and marketing. Through my travels, I witnessed bamboo being used in a variety of applications and was fascinated by the possibilities of introducing it in our area. When I was laid off from my job at a local software company, I tested the market for bamboo with some pilot projects, and it really took off from there. My family are all builders, so I have always been in and around residential construction and design. This, coupled with my own chemical sensitivities, provided a solid background and understanding for the best way to market the products.
VVK: How has having your own showroom helped?
MC: I moved [from a home office] into the Madison Enterprise Center in September 2002. I think it is very helpful for local customers to see the product installed over a large area versus just seeing a small sample.
VVK: What has been your greatest challenge?
MC: Striking a balance between business and personal time. With a fast-growing business and a two-year-old, we have very little time to unwind. We’ll often work 80 hours a week to keep up with growth.
VVK: Who is your typical customer?
MC: Well-educated, discerning homeowners who are interested in finding a non-toxic, durable, beautiful and affordable floor.
VVK: What’s your most popular flooring, and where do people put it?
MC: For new construction, bamboo for main living areas like dining, living and kitchen areas. For remodels, cork. Our clients like to use it in kitchens because it’s comfortable to stand on, easy to install and can be put in directly over the existing floor without a messy tear-out.
VVK: What’s your favorite flooring?
MC: I like our floating linoleum flooring planks with an interlocking tongue and groove. They just float over top of the existing floor. You don’t need any glue or nails to put them in. I am drawn to the saturated color selection of this type of flooring, as it lends itself to funky, creative design.
VVK: What are the most exciting trends you see?
MC: More suppliers for cork. As the wine industry moves to using more plastic for bottle stoppers, cork farmers in Europe are looking for ways to expand their offerings, and are starting to make flooring. As supply increases, price typically drops, so this will make the market larger for us.
I am also seeing many more physician referrals for clients with chemical sensitivities, allergies, asthma, or intolerance to plastics and vinyls and the chemicals they emit. These consumers seek out healthier products that don’t make them sick.
VVK: What do you see in the future?
MC: I think that more and more big-name manufacturers of flooring will introduce a “green” offering in their lineups. This will increase consumer awareness of the products, and will lead to more competitive pricing and availability.
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
Dorothy Priske of Fountain Prairie Farm
In ANEW Magazine
Column: Around the Table
February 2006
Related recipe: Perfect Pot Roast
Lovable, charismatic moptops from the British Isles? No, they’re not the Beatles – they’re Highland Cattle, a fixture of the Scottish landscape for some 15 hundred years. And you can meet them at Fountain Prairie Farms and Inn, a bed and breakfast and so much more, owned by Dorothy and John Priske.
Just outside Columbus, about 35 miles northeast of Madison, 250 of these magnificently shaggy heritage-breed beasts roam the Priske’s grassy pastures. There the Priskes have poured their passion for environmentally sustainable farming into lovingly restoring the 1899 Victorian farmhouse that now serves as the B&B, as well as 28 acres of tal-grass prairie and 35 acres of wetland. Fountain Prairie is also home to some 50 hogs – their meat appears on the B&B menu, and you can’t eat more local than that.
For 18 years, the Priskes have been a mainstay at the Dane County Farmers’ Market. Their offerings include pork, and, of course, dry-aged, grass-fed, grain-finished Highland beef – the same beef served up at L’Etoile, the Greenbush Bar and several other fine dining establishments.
The inn and farms keep the Priskes, married 33 years, busy full-time. Dorothy once worked for a stockbroker in Madison, but she much prefers farm living. “All of our stock now is four-legged,” she says with a laugh.
VVK: Have you always been into sustainable agriculture?
DP: We’ve done a total switch. We used to do industrial row-crop farming, soybeans and corn. But things didn’t seem right to us anymore. After both of our dogs died of cancer in the same year, we thought, oh! – they’re the canary in the mine shaft.
VVK: How do Highland Cattle fit in with your goal of a more natural farm environment?
DP: We had to decide, if we have everything in grass, what’s going to eat the grass? That’s how we came upon the Highlands. They’re known for cleaning up brushy vegetation. They have a tougher tongue and throat than other kinds of cattle. They’ve been known to take down small trees!
They have two layers of hair, so they don’t need housing in winter. They get really shaggy in the winter. They look almost prehistoric when it snows. It doesn’t melt – it just sits on their back. And as a result of the extra layer of hair, they don’t put on an outside layer of fat. Of course, they make a wonderful attraction for a bed and breakfast. On a foggy, misty morning, they look so cool.
VVK: How would you describe the Highlands’ personality?
DP: They’re just so sweet. They seem smarter than Holsteins – though I shouldn’t say that in Wisconsin! Even the bulls are docile. One is named Lover Boy, and there’s a new bull named Rohan, a handsome fella. There’s Daisy. One of her horns goes up, and the other down. We call her “Crazy Daisy.”
The lead animal is a really nice cow named Gretchen. Everybody knows Gretchen is boss! She drinks first. When it’s time to move them, she leads the way. She breaks up fights between the cows. We think she’s even intervened to keep us from harm from an animal that’s being aggressive towards us. She gives them a nudge and gets between them and us.
Those are genetics we don’t want to pass on to the breed. When something like that happens, they end up in the freezer within a few weeks.
VVK: Is slaughtering difficult, emotionally?
DP: Yes. Yes. It’s not as hard now that there are more of them. But number 39 was special. And I cried the entire week. They’re a heritage breed, and the way to preserve them is to eat them. And it is difficult. But we know that that’s their purpose. We don’t name the cows that we’re going to slaughter, so that we become less involved. But they are around for at least two years. You get to know them, and some are friendlier than others.
VVK: Does the meat taste different from regular beef?
DP: The flavor is incredible. The animals older, more mature than at the supermarket. And what really brings the flavor up is dry aging for 21 days. Excess moisture evaporates, and the flavor is really intensified. The texture is different, because enzymes break down the muscle and make is tender. Wet aging is what supermarkets use. It’s packed in Cryovac, so the moisture doesn’t have anywhere to go. Wet aged beef is – ‘mush’ is the only word that comes to mind.
VVK: What do you love most about Fountain Prairie?
DP:We like knowing who eats our meat. We really enjoy working together and working at home. We adore the animals. We were talking this morning about how much we love the smell of cow breath. Kind of sweet, warm. I wonder if it makes a difference that they don’t eat silage and animal products like conventional cattle. But I’m not going to go around sniffing cows!
I love watching the wildlife – the waterfowl and deer. The other day I took a walk with the dog. The entire herd followed us. I like to go out and look at the cows, just to see who wants to come over and talk to us. Who wants a scratch.
VVK: What do you see for the future?
DP:We’re really encouraged about prospects for natural beef. Sales have increased 20 percent in the last year, which I think is a really good sign. Natural means no animal by-products or antibiotics in the feed. No hormone implants. We did all those things years ago.
I don’t know if we’ll go for organic certification or not. There are a lot of costs involved, and the federal regulations have been watered down. I believe in the importance of local and sustainable over organic.
Column: Around the Table
February 2006
Related recipe: Perfect Pot Roast
Lovable, charismatic moptops from the British Isles? No, they’re not the Beatles – they’re Highland Cattle, a fixture of the Scottish landscape for some 15 hundred years. And you can meet them at Fountain Prairie Farms and Inn, a bed and breakfast and so much more, owned by Dorothy and John Priske.
Just outside Columbus, about 35 miles northeast of Madison, 250 of these magnificently shaggy heritage-breed beasts roam the Priske’s grassy pastures. There the Priskes have poured their passion for environmentally sustainable farming into lovingly restoring the 1899 Victorian farmhouse that now serves as the B&B, as well as 28 acres of tal-grass prairie and 35 acres of wetland. Fountain Prairie is also home to some 50 hogs – their meat appears on the B&B menu, and you can’t eat more local than that.
For 18 years, the Priskes have been a mainstay at the Dane County Farmers’ Market. Their offerings include pork, and, of course, dry-aged, grass-fed, grain-finished Highland beef – the same beef served up at L’Etoile, the Greenbush Bar and several other fine dining establishments.
The inn and farms keep the Priskes, married 33 years, busy full-time. Dorothy once worked for a stockbroker in Madison, but she much prefers farm living. “All of our stock now is four-legged,” she says with a laugh.
VVK: Have you always been into sustainable agriculture?
DP: We’ve done a total switch. We used to do industrial row-crop farming, soybeans and corn. But things didn’t seem right to us anymore. After both of our dogs died of cancer in the same year, we thought, oh! – they’re the canary in the mine shaft.
VVK: How do Highland Cattle fit in with your goal of a more natural farm environment?
DP: We had to decide, if we have everything in grass, what’s going to eat the grass? That’s how we came upon the Highlands. They’re known for cleaning up brushy vegetation. They have a tougher tongue and throat than other kinds of cattle. They’ve been known to take down small trees!
They have two layers of hair, so they don’t need housing in winter. They get really shaggy in the winter. They look almost prehistoric when it snows. It doesn’t melt – it just sits on their back. And as a result of the extra layer of hair, they don’t put on an outside layer of fat. Of course, they make a wonderful attraction for a bed and breakfast. On a foggy, misty morning, they look so cool.
VVK: How would you describe the Highlands’ personality?
DP: They’re just so sweet. They seem smarter than Holsteins – though I shouldn’t say that in Wisconsin! Even the bulls are docile. One is named Lover Boy, and there’s a new bull named Rohan, a handsome fella. There’s Daisy. One of her horns goes up, and the other down. We call her “Crazy Daisy.”
The lead animal is a really nice cow named Gretchen. Everybody knows Gretchen is boss! She drinks first. When it’s time to move them, she leads the way. She breaks up fights between the cows. We think she’s even intervened to keep us from harm from an animal that’s being aggressive towards us. She gives them a nudge and gets between them and us.
Those are genetics we don’t want to pass on to the breed. When something like that happens, they end up in the freezer within a few weeks.
VVK: Is slaughtering difficult, emotionally?
DP: Yes. Yes. It’s not as hard now that there are more of them. But number 39 was special. And I cried the entire week. They’re a heritage breed, and the way to preserve them is to eat them. And it is difficult. But we know that that’s their purpose. We don’t name the cows that we’re going to slaughter, so that we become less involved. But they are around for at least two years. You get to know them, and some are friendlier than others.
VVK: Does the meat taste different from regular beef?
DP: The flavor is incredible. The animals older, more mature than at the supermarket. And what really brings the flavor up is dry aging for 21 days. Excess moisture evaporates, and the flavor is really intensified. The texture is different, because enzymes break down the muscle and make is tender. Wet aging is what supermarkets use. It’s packed in Cryovac, so the moisture doesn’t have anywhere to go. Wet aged beef is – ‘mush’ is the only word that comes to mind.
VVK: What do you love most about Fountain Prairie?
DP:We like knowing who eats our meat. We really enjoy working together and working at home. We adore the animals. We were talking this morning about how much we love the smell of cow breath. Kind of sweet, warm. I wonder if it makes a difference that they don’t eat silage and animal products like conventional cattle. But I’m not going to go around sniffing cows!
I love watching the wildlife – the waterfowl and deer. The other day I took a walk with the dog. The entire herd followed us. I like to go out and look at the cows, just to see who wants to come over and talk to us. Who wants a scratch.
VVK: What do you see for the future?
DP:We’re really encouraged about prospects for natural beef. Sales have increased 20 percent in the last year, which I think is a really good sign. Natural means no animal by-products or antibiotics in the feed. No hormone implants. We did all those things years ago.
I don’t know if we’ll go for organic certification or not. There are a lot of costs involved, and the federal regulations have been watered down. I believe in the importance of local and sustainable over organic.
Perfect Pot Roast
Related article: Dorothy Priske of Fountain Prairie Inn and Farm
In ANEW Magazine
Column: Around the Table
February 2006
This simple, hearty dish is perfect during a rugged Wisconsin winter. Made with high-quality, dry-aged Highland beef from Fountain Prairie, it’s rich in natural flavor, with a sumptuous buttery tenderness and an intensely flavorful, thick gravy.
Perfect Pot Roast
1 3 lb. chuck roast
1 onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, sliced
4 sprigs fresh thyme
1 cup red wine
1-2 tsp. salt (or to taste)
Pepper to taste
Optional: cubed root vegetables
Place onion, garlic and thyme in bottom of roasting pan. Sear chuck roast (thawed and patted dry) on both sides in skillet. Place atop onions. De-glaze skillet with wine and pour over roast. Season with salt and pepper. Cover and roast at 300° F for 3-4 hours. Remove roast to a warm platter and cover. Discard thyme stems. With roasting pan over medium heat, whisk juices to incorporate garlic, onions, and any brown bits into a thick, savory gravy to pour over the roast.
Extra tips:
- You can add cubed root vegetables such as carrots, turnips, rutabagas or potatoes in the last hour of cooking.
- You can also make this dish in a crock pot. If you do, add vegetables at the beginning of cooking.
- You can use beef that’s not dry-aged, but because dry-aged beef contains very little water, you will end up with significantly more moisture and less meat in the roasting pan.
In ANEW Magazine
Column: Around the Table
February 2006
This simple, hearty dish is perfect during a rugged Wisconsin winter. Made with high-quality, dry-aged Highland beef from Fountain Prairie, it’s rich in natural flavor, with a sumptuous buttery tenderness and an intensely flavorful, thick gravy.
Perfect Pot Roast
1 3 lb. chuck roast
1 onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, sliced
4 sprigs fresh thyme
1 cup red wine
1-2 tsp. salt (or to taste)
Pepper to taste
Optional: cubed root vegetables
Place onion, garlic and thyme in bottom of roasting pan. Sear chuck roast (thawed and patted dry) on both sides in skillet. Place atop onions. De-glaze skillet with wine and pour over roast. Season with salt and pepper. Cover and roast at 300° F for 3-4 hours. Remove roast to a warm platter and cover. Discard thyme stems. With roasting pan over medium heat, whisk juices to incorporate garlic, onions, and any brown bits into a thick, savory gravy to pour over the roast.
Extra tips:
- You can add cubed root vegetables such as carrots, turnips, rutabagas or potatoes in the last hour of cooking.
- You can also make this dish in a crock pot. If you do, add vegetables at the beginning of cooking.
- You can use beef that’s not dry-aged, but because dry-aged beef contains very little water, you will end up with significantly more moisture and less meat in the roasting pan.
Sunday, January 1, 2006
Good energy: Acupuncturist Dr. Leaf Song
Traditional Chinese Medicine with a gentle touch
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In ANEW Magazine, January 2006
In the reception area of the Beijing Acupuncture & Chinese Herbal Medicine Clinic in Middleton, the air is fragrant with the stinging scent of Chinese medicinal herbs. On the counter a blue glass vase brims with fresh flowers of purple, yellow and pink. These blossoms have a bite, albeit a painless one: they’re snapdragons. If you were to squeeze open and then release one by its bulb-like, jointed base, it would shut with a snap – firm and lightning fast, but also velvety, petal soft.
They seem an apt decoration for the acupuncture clinic founded in 1997 by Leaf Song, O.M.D., M.S., L.Ac., who specializes in “creating the energy flow” that she says promotes weight loss, facial rejuvenation, lifting of depression, smoking cessation, pain relief and more. And it’s not only because beautiful items from nature befit the natural healing philosophy behind Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The gentle nip of a snapdragon mirrors her style of acupuncture needle insertion, as well.
“Her touch is very soft,” explains her husband, Jonathan Song, O.M.D., M.D., Ph.D., L.Ac., who is also a TCM doctor and who joined the Beijing Clinic early in 2005. “Patients like when she’s needling. She knows the American style.”
After the Chinese-born Dr. Leaf realized that “Americans’ bodies tend to be more sensitive to needles,” as she puts it, she applied herself to developing techniques that would be acceptable to even the most needle-shy among us.
“She practiced at home to learn how to maneuver needles so that they would be painless. That’s what makes her different from other acupuncturists,” says Dr. Jonathan. “She practiced on her own body. And on me and our daughter,” he adds with a laugh.
Dr. Jonathan says that each TCM practitioner has a different style; it’s more of an individual art than Western medicine, even though both are rigorous professions based on vast, time-honored bodies of knowledge. Dr. Leaf, he says, “has a unique view. She sees the problem precisely and gets a very good result. She’s particularly good at lower back pain and at women’s health issues, like infertility. It’s often a complicated situation. She can see it as a simple thing and treat it in a simple way.”
Dr. Leaf’s therapies include Chinese herbal medicine as well as acupuncture; both have been essential components of TCM for thousands of years. The slim 44-year old is particularly enthusiastic about her herbal approach to weight loss. “We’ve developed our own herbal formula that’s very safe and effective,” she says. “It opens up your energy and moves out stagnation. It’s a circle: overweight causes energy stagnation, and stagnation causes overweight.”
Though terms like “energy” and “stagnation” might sound like fuzzy New Age talk to the Western ear, they have ultra-precise meanings for a doctor of TCM. And Dr. Leaf is well qualified to use them. She began her studies at the Zhejiang College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Hongzhou, where she met her future husband. They moved to Beijing, where he went on to get his M.D. at the Peking Union Medical College and she continued TCM studies at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. There Dr. Leaf was awarded her the Hu Shi-Xi award for distinguished achievement in Chinese medicine in 1987.
In 1989, Dr. Jonathan arrived in the U.S. for the Ph.D. program at Michigan State University. Dr. Leaf followed soon after with their baby daughter, Willa, who is now a 15-year-old Middleton High student. After postdoc work at the University of Rochester studying Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Jonathan came to the UW-Madison for multiple sclerosis research in 1997.
The doctors chose their lyrical, Westernized names after coming to the States. Dr. Jonathan’s birth name, Jian Xiong, is pronounced like “John Song.” He found the name “Jonathan” – he prefers it to “John” – in a baby name book presented to him by his Ph.D. professor, who encouraged a name change to facilitate his American career.
Dr. Leaf followed suit, translating her family surname, “Ye” into its English meaning, and making it her new first name.
The daughter of a doctor of Western medicine and an office administrator, Jia Nong Ye was born in China in 1961. “I grew up in a hospital. The front was the hospital building, and the back was where the doctors and nurses and their families lived. You couldn’t go out without going through the hospital part.” When it came time to choose a career, says Dr. Leaf, medicine was the natural choice. “I didn’t know anything else,” she says.
In the mid-1960s, during China’s Cultural Revolution, “Mao gave the order that all M.D.s must study acupuncture,” says Dr. Leaf. Her mother was among them. Later she encouraged her daughter to go into TCM. “She said it was a good career for a female. Western doctors are on call and in the hospital for such long hours. So acupuncture would be good for a woman, a wife. That was the reason I went to school for Chinese medicine.”
Since then Dr. Leaf has distinguished herself as an accomplished and caring healer. Along with her many years of practice, she has published several peer-reviewed journal papers and book chapters on TCM. She is working on a book about diet and health.
In addition, she and Dr. Jonathan are senior clinic supervisors for the Midwest College of Oriental Medicine in Racine. One or more students works as an intern at the Beijing Clinic – the only one authorized by the school – most days. Debbie Gordon, R.N., who will be graduating in June, is impressed with her experiences here. Many patients, she says, arrive after Western medicine hasn’t been able to help them. “They have test after test, and can’t get a diagnosis for their pain or chronic fatigue. But their condition fits an Eastern diagnosis,” she says. “This is a wonderful clinic. They do wonderful work here.”
In recent years, awareness and acceptance of TCM has come a long way in America, says Dr. Leaf, but still “there’s a lot we can do. The American diet, stress – people don’t know how much these things affect your health. They never make any connection with their chronic pain or allergies,” she says. “Diet and herbs, properly chosen for the proper effect,” can be powerful tools for health: “You can revive up your body and move your energy.”
Looking to the future, Dr. Leaf plans to move the clinic out of the storefront rental and into its own building, expanding it into a total center for holistic health. “I want to do more group practice. Add other kinds of health care, with nutritional consultants, massage therapists and more,” she says.
After practicing in two countries and several American cities, Dr. Leaf Song is here, in the Madison area, to stay, to grow and to continue to blossom. And that’s good energy.
Dr. Leaf Song's bio page at the Beijing Acunpuncture Clinic Web site
The Beijing Acupuncture Clinic is located at 6255 University Ave., Suite 202 in Middleton, Wisc. Phone: 608-238-3333. URL: beijing-acupuncture.com
Thursday, December 1, 2005
Cholesterol: It does a body good
A growing group of folks dare to say that more might just be better
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
It’s an integral part of every cell in your body; embedded in each one’s membrane, it quite literally keeps you together. Over a remarkably wide range of temperature, it keeps your cells firm enough that they don’t soften into mush, yet supple enough not to crystallize. It’s also a vital ingredient in cell manufacture and repair.
This same substance is the principal building block of many of your most important hormones, including the sex hormones progesterone, estrogen and testosterone, and several adrenal hormones, too: cortisol, cortisone, aldosterone. You need it to make the glucocorticoids that regulate your blood sugar. You also need it to make the mineralocorticoids that balance minerals and regulate blood pressure.
Pivotal in brain synapse function, this plentiful component of mother’s milk is critical to the development of a baby’s brain and neurological system.
As if this all weren’t enough, this same substance is also essential for your body’s synthesis of Vitamin D. Your liver needs it to create bile salts and acids for effective digestion; its name means “bile solid” in Greek.
What is it, this magical substance so central to all animal life? Here are some clues that probably won’t help. It’s soft, white, waxy and crystalline. You have about five ounces of it in your body, most of which you make yourself. Some comes from the food you eat.
It’s cholesterol.
We hear about cholesterol all the time, everywhere from the evening news to product labels. Many of us plan our diets, if not our entire lifestyles, around it – or anyway, around avoiding it.
But for something we spend so much energy thinking about, how many of us know what it actually is: what it’s made of, where it comes from, what it looks like? And what, if anything, it’s good for?
The information is not so readily available to the casual seeker. Even an Internet search for “cholesterol benefits” will turn up mostly information about ways to get rid of it – or, more precisely, how to have less floating around in your blood (serum cholesterol) – rather than about the various benefits of cholesterol itself.
Cholesterol fits many categories. It’s an alcohol, by virtue of having an OH component. It’s a lipid, which is a family of substances that includes fats and waxes. It’s also a steroid, which is a type of lipid. Cholesterol is the precursor to pregnenolone, used to synthesize all the body’s steroid hormones.
Cholesterol needs to get wherever cells need mending. The logical way to travel is through the circulatory system; that is, by floating along in the bloodstream. But there’s a problem: cholesterol can’t dissolve into your blood, because it’s not easily soluble in water. Our bodies have developed an ingenious workaround. We pack up individual molecules of cholesterol into lipoproteins, little globes made of water-soluble protein on the outside and fat-soluble lipid on the inside – and away they go, like little submarine travelers.
The lipoproteins that carry cholesterol away from the liver toward cells that need repair are less dense than the ones that bring it back to the liver. Hence the familiar terms low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) – the so-called “bad” and “good” cholesterols. Technically, the cholesterol itself is the same; it’s the submarines that are different.
Incidentally, plaque, that infamous cholesterol-laden tissue of arterial walls, is not a residue of cholesterol swimming by, even though it is associated with high blood cholesterol levels. It’s not like a bathtub ring; rather, it’s built into the artery tissue on a deeper level.
All animals produce cholesterol. Plants don’t. That’s why meat, eggs, butter and other animal foods contain cholesterol, while absolutely all vegetable oil is cholesterol free. Same goes for all grains, fruits and veggies.
Even the strictest vegetarian folks have cholesterol – sometimes even at levels deemed too high by current standards. In fact, some research seems to show that our bodies work to maintain a level of cholesterol that’s consistent within each individual, so that if you eat less, your body makes more, and vice versa.
None of the information above is considered controversial. Recently, though, there has been a groundswell of controversy regarding cholesterol’s role in coronary heart disease (CHD).
A growing community of physicians and layfolk worldwide reject what they’ve dubbed the “diet-heart idea”: the view that saturated fat and cholesterol (read: animal food) leads to blocked arteries and heart attack. According to them, the reason cholesterol is present in damaged, lesioned arterial walls is because of its role in cell repair. They hold that cholesterol is part of the solution, not part of the problem.
High levels of blood serum cholesterol don’t cause heart attacks, they say, any more than high numbers of plaster casts cause broken bones. They point to examples that seem to contradict the conventional view, like the Masai tribespeople of Kenya who live almost entirely on meat and milk, yet have ultralow rates of CHD.
As possible culprits for the CHD epidemic, they cite smoking, stress, bacterially caused inflammation, and modern “fabricated” foods – margarine, nonfat cream cheese, boxed breakfast cereal. To the typical health-conscious consumer, theirs seems a topsy-turvy worldview in which just about all the modern dietary improvements turn out to be positively lethal.
The critics of the diet-heart idea admit that not all animals are designed to eat food that contains cholesterol. Lettuce-chomping rabbits, for instance, are virtually unable to metabolize this substance in their diet, even though, like all animals, they produce it internally.
In fact, they use this well-established bit of rabbit biology to bolster their pro-cholesterol view. They say it renders useless the many studies of harmful effects of dietary cholesterol using rabbits as test subjects – that although the results are dramatic, they can’t shed light on how dietary cholesterol affects humans.
One of the voices in the forefront of the diet-heart detractor movement belongs to a general practitioner in Sweden, Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., spokesperson for The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (thincs.org) and author of The Cholesterol Myths, which purports to detail how, from a seminal 1950s cross-nations study on, the actual findings of cholesterol research have been grossly misreported in study abstracts and by the press.
Ravnskov goes so far as to maintain that it’s only because rabbits are small, cheap and easy to handle that so much cholesterol (and other human-health-related) research has been done on them – and that the public pays the price in terms of misleading results that lead us – with futility – to adopt diets that are unappetizingly low in fat, to choose modern, high-tech alternatives (like margarine) to foods that have been part of the human diet for millennia, and to consign ourselves to a lifetime of taking expensive, powerful, yet little-understood drugs.
Moving our story closer to home, 2005 saw the birth of a Madison chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation, an international organization dedicated to promoting traditional, natural foods. This is a natural foods movement with a difference.
Far from the conventional pro-vegetarian mindset that characterized the health foods movement throughout the 20th century, the WAPF view focuses sharply on the animal foods of our not-so-distant ancestors – beef, lamb, eggs, milk, butter – with an emphasis on natural, small-farm products, minimally processed and without artificial ingredients.
WAPF proponents like to point out that the rise in heart disease since the 1920s is concurrent with the decline in these foods.
At monthly meetings, local farmers bring their wares – raw-milk cheeses, grass-pastured meats and more. A lively Internet community thrives via a Web site (geocities.com/madison_wapf/) and online discussion boards. Topics include tips on home preparation of cream cheese and naturally fermented and cultured foods like yogurt and kefir – using whole milk, of course – and pointers to articles and books featuring obscure – some say suppressed – cholesterol-friendly nutritional and medical information.
If this seems far-out, consider that there are over 300 WAPF chapters in the United States alone. The Madison chapter is Wisconsin’s fifteenth.
Last April some 250 people flocked to the local group’s inaugural event, a talk given by the national organization’s founder and president, Sally Fallon, to hear her message of the dangers of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs (she says they’ve been linked to depression, cancer – and, perhaps ironically, heart disease), hydrogenated and trans fats (the mainstream is catching up to this particular caveat), and modern low-fat dairy products (she says they are thickened with dry milk powder for palatability – a source of “damaged,” or oxidized, cholesterol, which actually is dangerous for your heart.)
Testimonials to the healing power of cholesterol-rich foods are rife. Mary Smith, trim and energetic at 54, one of the event’s organizers, says following advice like that found in Fallon’s book Nourishing Traditions changed her life. “I was depressed and anxious for years,” says the former vegetarian. “I had terrible cravings all the time.” Now, when symptoms begin to return, Smith cuts out most everything except eggs, meat and, doled out over the course of the day, a full stick of butter. “I spread some on my eggs and some on my meat. If the eggs and meat are gone before I’ve eaten my full portion of butter, I just eat it straight.”
Another chapter founder, Mary Jo Fahey, suffered from chronic fatigue. “I wasn’t getting enough fat,” says the lean, self-employed writer who teaches workshops on making kefir and other naturally cultured foods. “I needed the energy.” Her favorite foods include a local farm’s heavy cream that’s “so thick, it’s like custard – you can practically stand up a spoon in it.”
And Martha Reilly, 50, an optometrist whose professional background includes nearly a decade of medical research, says she lost forty pounds and reversed her diabetic symptoms by switching from a low-fat diet centered on whole grains to one built on what she calls “good fats” – those found in grass-fed beef and raw milk. “Commercial livestock are fed the wrong foods to begin with,” she says. “So their fats aren’t as good.”
Certified Nutritional Consultant Kristina Amelong, 41, struggled with chronic bladder, sinus and yeast infections. “I was very, very sick. I was in pain all the time,” she says. She devoted herself to natural remedies, acupuncture and natural foods for years, but, she says, “It wasn’t until I started a diet with lots of fat that my health turned around.” In addition to her Atwood neighborhood practice, Amelong and her husband, Tim Cordon, boards goats at their farm in Blue Mounds. The goats belong to fellow natural foodies who want raw, non-homogenized milk.
Of course, conventional medicine does not condone these examples. Nor does it consider the diet-heart connection to be an open question. Major organizations ranging from the National Institutes for Health, the USDA, the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association and the Centers for Disease Control all are unequivocal that low-cholesterol diets can help prevent CHD, and that the opposite is risky.
But the cholesterol skeptics are confident they have the facts, and the history of human nutrition, on their side. “If the mainstream is right, then maybe I won’t live as long,” says Smith. “But it tastes good. And I feel good. And it’s better than being depressed.”
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
It’s an integral part of every cell in your body; embedded in each one’s membrane, it quite literally keeps you together. Over a remarkably wide range of temperature, it keeps your cells firm enough that they don’t soften into mush, yet supple enough not to crystallize. It’s also a vital ingredient in cell manufacture and repair.
This same substance is the principal building block of many of your most important hormones, including the sex hormones progesterone, estrogen and testosterone, and several adrenal hormones, too: cortisol, cortisone, aldosterone. You need it to make the glucocorticoids that regulate your blood sugar. You also need it to make the mineralocorticoids that balance minerals and regulate blood pressure.
Pivotal in brain synapse function, this plentiful component of mother’s milk is critical to the development of a baby’s brain and neurological system.
As if this all weren’t enough, this same substance is also essential for your body’s synthesis of Vitamin D. Your liver needs it to create bile salts and acids for effective digestion; its name means “bile solid” in Greek.
What is it, this magical substance so central to all animal life? Here are some clues that probably won’t help. It’s soft, white, waxy and crystalline. You have about five ounces of it in your body, most of which you make yourself. Some comes from the food you eat.
It’s cholesterol.
We hear about cholesterol all the time, everywhere from the evening news to product labels. Many of us plan our diets, if not our entire lifestyles, around it – or anyway, around avoiding it.
But for something we spend so much energy thinking about, how many of us know what it actually is: what it’s made of, where it comes from, what it looks like? And what, if anything, it’s good for?
The information is not so readily available to the casual seeker. Even an Internet search for “cholesterol benefits” will turn up mostly information about ways to get rid of it – or, more precisely, how to have less floating around in your blood (serum cholesterol) – rather than about the various benefits of cholesterol itself.
Cholesterol fits many categories. It’s an alcohol, by virtue of having an OH component. It’s a lipid, which is a family of substances that includes fats and waxes. It’s also a steroid, which is a type of lipid. Cholesterol is the precursor to pregnenolone, used to synthesize all the body’s steroid hormones.
Cholesterol needs to get wherever cells need mending. The logical way to travel is through the circulatory system; that is, by floating along in the bloodstream. But there’s a problem: cholesterol can’t dissolve into your blood, because it’s not easily soluble in water. Our bodies have developed an ingenious workaround. We pack up individual molecules of cholesterol into lipoproteins, little globes made of water-soluble protein on the outside and fat-soluble lipid on the inside – and away they go, like little submarine travelers.
The lipoproteins that carry cholesterol away from the liver toward cells that need repair are less dense than the ones that bring it back to the liver. Hence the familiar terms low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) – the so-called “bad” and “good” cholesterols. Technically, the cholesterol itself is the same; it’s the submarines that are different.
Incidentally, plaque, that infamous cholesterol-laden tissue of arterial walls, is not a residue of cholesterol swimming by, even though it is associated with high blood cholesterol levels. It’s not like a bathtub ring; rather, it’s built into the artery tissue on a deeper level.
All animals produce cholesterol. Plants don’t. That’s why meat, eggs, butter and other animal foods contain cholesterol, while absolutely all vegetable oil is cholesterol free. Same goes for all grains, fruits and veggies.
Even the strictest vegetarian folks have cholesterol – sometimes even at levels deemed too high by current standards. In fact, some research seems to show that our bodies work to maintain a level of cholesterol that’s consistent within each individual, so that if you eat less, your body makes more, and vice versa.
None of the information above is considered controversial. Recently, though, there has been a groundswell of controversy regarding cholesterol’s role in coronary heart disease (CHD).
A growing community of physicians and layfolk worldwide reject what they’ve dubbed the “diet-heart idea”: the view that saturated fat and cholesterol (read: animal food) leads to blocked arteries and heart attack. According to them, the reason cholesterol is present in damaged, lesioned arterial walls is because of its role in cell repair. They hold that cholesterol is part of the solution, not part of the problem.
High levels of blood serum cholesterol don’t cause heart attacks, they say, any more than high numbers of plaster casts cause broken bones. They point to examples that seem to contradict the conventional view, like the Masai tribespeople of Kenya who live almost entirely on meat and milk, yet have ultralow rates of CHD.
As possible culprits for the CHD epidemic, they cite smoking, stress, bacterially caused inflammation, and modern “fabricated” foods – margarine, nonfat cream cheese, boxed breakfast cereal. To the typical health-conscious consumer, theirs seems a topsy-turvy worldview in which just about all the modern dietary improvements turn out to be positively lethal.
The critics of the diet-heart idea admit that not all animals are designed to eat food that contains cholesterol. Lettuce-chomping rabbits, for instance, are virtually unable to metabolize this substance in their diet, even though, like all animals, they produce it internally.
In fact, they use this well-established bit of rabbit biology to bolster their pro-cholesterol view. They say it renders useless the many studies of harmful effects of dietary cholesterol using rabbits as test subjects – that although the results are dramatic, they can’t shed light on how dietary cholesterol affects humans.
One of the voices in the forefront of the diet-heart detractor movement belongs to a general practitioner in Sweden, Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., spokesperson for The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (thincs.org) and author of The Cholesterol Myths, which purports to detail how, from a seminal 1950s cross-nations study on, the actual findings of cholesterol research have been grossly misreported in study abstracts and by the press.
Ravnskov goes so far as to maintain that it’s only because rabbits are small, cheap and easy to handle that so much cholesterol (and other human-health-related) research has been done on them – and that the public pays the price in terms of misleading results that lead us – with futility – to adopt diets that are unappetizingly low in fat, to choose modern, high-tech alternatives (like margarine) to foods that have been part of the human diet for millennia, and to consign ourselves to a lifetime of taking expensive, powerful, yet little-understood drugs.
Moving our story closer to home, 2005 saw the birth of a Madison chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation, an international organization dedicated to promoting traditional, natural foods. This is a natural foods movement with a difference.
Far from the conventional pro-vegetarian mindset that characterized the health foods movement throughout the 20th century, the WAPF view focuses sharply on the animal foods of our not-so-distant ancestors – beef, lamb, eggs, milk, butter – with an emphasis on natural, small-farm products, minimally processed and without artificial ingredients.
WAPF proponents like to point out that the rise in heart disease since the 1920s is concurrent with the decline in these foods.
At monthly meetings, local farmers bring their wares – raw-milk cheeses, grass-pastured meats and more. A lively Internet community thrives via a Web site (geocities.com/madison_wapf/) and online discussion boards. Topics include tips on home preparation of cream cheese and naturally fermented and cultured foods like yogurt and kefir – using whole milk, of course – and pointers to articles and books featuring obscure – some say suppressed – cholesterol-friendly nutritional and medical information.
If this seems far-out, consider that there are over 300 WAPF chapters in the United States alone. The Madison chapter is Wisconsin’s fifteenth.
Last April some 250 people flocked to the local group’s inaugural event, a talk given by the national organization’s founder and president, Sally Fallon, to hear her message of the dangers of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs (she says they’ve been linked to depression, cancer – and, perhaps ironically, heart disease), hydrogenated and trans fats (the mainstream is catching up to this particular caveat), and modern low-fat dairy products (she says they are thickened with dry milk powder for palatability – a source of “damaged,” or oxidized, cholesterol, which actually is dangerous for your heart.)
Testimonials to the healing power of cholesterol-rich foods are rife. Mary Smith, trim and energetic at 54, one of the event’s organizers, says following advice like that found in Fallon’s book Nourishing Traditions changed her life. “I was depressed and anxious for years,” says the former vegetarian. “I had terrible cravings all the time.” Now, when symptoms begin to return, Smith cuts out most everything except eggs, meat and, doled out over the course of the day, a full stick of butter. “I spread some on my eggs and some on my meat. If the eggs and meat are gone before I’ve eaten my full portion of butter, I just eat it straight.”
Another chapter founder, Mary Jo Fahey, suffered from chronic fatigue. “I wasn’t getting enough fat,” says the lean, self-employed writer who teaches workshops on making kefir and other naturally cultured foods. “I needed the energy.” Her favorite foods include a local farm’s heavy cream that’s “so thick, it’s like custard – you can practically stand up a spoon in it.”
And Martha Reilly, 50, an optometrist whose professional background includes nearly a decade of medical research, says she lost forty pounds and reversed her diabetic symptoms by switching from a low-fat diet centered on whole grains to one built on what she calls “good fats” – those found in grass-fed beef and raw milk. “Commercial livestock are fed the wrong foods to begin with,” she says. “So their fats aren’t as good.”
Certified Nutritional Consultant Kristina Amelong, 41, struggled with chronic bladder, sinus and yeast infections. “I was very, very sick. I was in pain all the time,” she says. She devoted herself to natural remedies, acupuncture and natural foods for years, but, she says, “It wasn’t until I started a diet with lots of fat that my health turned around.” In addition to her Atwood neighborhood practice, Amelong and her husband, Tim Cordon, boards goats at their farm in Blue Mounds. The goats belong to fellow natural foodies who want raw, non-homogenized milk.
Of course, conventional medicine does not condone these examples. Nor does it consider the diet-heart connection to be an open question. Major organizations ranging from the National Institutes for Health, the USDA, the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association and the Centers for Disease Control all are unequivocal that low-cholesterol diets can help prevent CHD, and that the opposite is risky.
But the cholesterol skeptics are confident they have the facts, and the history of human nutrition, on their side. “If the mainstream is right, then maybe I won’t live as long,” says Smith. “But it tastes good. And I feel good. And it’s better than being depressed.”
Saturday, October 1, 2005
Rub Out TMJ
Therapeutic massage holds out healing hope for sufferers of jaw joint disorders
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Anew magazine, Autumn 2005
He was graceful, lean but not quite lanky, with high, well-defined cheekbones, a broad, intelligent forehead, and a thoughtful, artistic intensity in his eyes. He pretty well fit the description of all my youthful crushes – like Fred Astaire and Ludwig Wittengstein (yes, the philosopher) – and also of – maybe you could guess it, but I was 30 before a girlfriend pointed it out to me – my father. My heart leapt. My blood rushed. My brain – scandalized – scolded and denied. I shouldn’t be feeling any of this.
It was my ex-boyfriend from L.A., whom I hadn’t seen for nearly a decade, come to visit. It hadn’t occurred to me that, after years of friendly correspondence, I’d be so primally attracted to him on sight, just like when we first met. I suddenly and painfully recalled that he dumped me. And what a fool of myself I’d made over it.
My body fairly vibrated as I accepted his warm hug. I watched as if from a great distance as he cordially shook hands with my husband. I tensed. I didn’t know what to say.
And then my jaw locked shut.
My jaw remained clenched, frustratingly, through the wonderful Chinese dinner we went out for. (Sucking Lo Mein wasn’t too bad, but oh, those big, juicy dumplings!) Long past that short-lived, but intense, jolt of first encounter. All through the perfectly normal and lovely week the three of us enjoyed together. And a few days thence.
This was one of the many episodes of TMJ (temporomandibular joint, or jaw joint) disorder (sometimes abbreviated as TMD) I’ve experienced over the course of my adult life. And I’m not alone. The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, one of the National Institutes of Health (www.nidcr.nih.gov), estimates 10.8 million Americans share my pain.
Recently I decided to find out more about TMJ, and explore the possibilities for a healing journey. I discovered some surprises along the way. And I came to the conclusion that the most promising avenue for treatment might be one that most of those millions will, unfortunately, probably never pursue: therapeutic massage.
TMJ problems can be difficult to diagnose, partly because there are so many possible symptoms: pain; impairment of motion; a jaw that’s locked in an open or closed position; clicking, popping and crunchy noises; headaches; eyelid twitching; sleep disturbance; dizziness; a changing bite; flu-like symptoms; bad wear on the teeth; even toothaches. For some, the symptoms are mild and/or infrequent; for unlucky others, persistent and/or excruciating. Episodes are often triggered by stress, as in my case, and are intermittent – and that also makes it hard to judge the effectiveness of therapy.
The cause of “TMJ syndrome,” as this cluster of conditions is often called, is unknown. There are plenty of theories: orthodontic work, malocclusion (bad bite), stress, chewing gum or ice, tooth grinding at night, injuries or trauma to the head or neck, posture, playing woodwind instruments, tooth extractions. But for just about each theory, there’s at least one scientific study that contradicts it.
Treatments include braces to correct jaw position, grinding down the teeth to change the bite, “splints” that can be inserted or else implanted surgically – an irreversible procedure – hot and cold packs, and rather dreary advice to subsist on soft foods for life. None of these are known to work terribly well, according to the NIDCR’s 1996 Management of Temporomandibular Disorders conference assessment statement.
Another wrinkle: 90% of folks seeking treatment are women in their childbearing years, according to the TMJ Association (tmj.org), a national non-profit advocacy, education and support group based in Milwaukee.
So here’s a condition that (1) is generally reported by women, (2) is associated with stress, (3) has no known cause, and (4) resists treatment. Put all that together and you shouldn’t be surprised that TMJ sufferers are too often told that their condition is merely psychological – all in our pretty little female heads, as it were. For many, the legacy of this invisible pain can be alienation from friends and family who have run out of patience, humiliation by condescending or unsympathetic doctors and dentists, frustration and despair.
Add to this the likelihood that the number of TMJ sufferers is far greater than statistics indicate. There’s reason to believe that many, if not most, do not report their condition to anyone. Or that when they do, it’s shrugged off and not referred for treatment, as happened with me some 23 years ago when I consulted a physician soon after first experiencing jaw locking. More recently, I told my dentist that my bite sometimes changes from day to day. He looked puzzled, then told me that was impossible and changed the subject.
This time, I decide to investigate massage therapy. I speak to Rebecca Massman, LMT, a massage therapist who specializes in site-specific, medically directed, therapeutic bodywork. Massman tells me she encounters plenty of TMJ troubles in her work; about one in eight of her clients report it. “I think it’s way more common than people think,” she says. But only rarely is it the reason for their visits.
Massman works at the UW Health Center for of Integrative Medicine, as well as in private practice. She is an instructor of soft tissue techniques and clinical anatomy at the East-West Healing Arts Institute, a local school for therapeutic massage. (“Soft tissue” refers to all sorts of features softer than bone, even though they may not seem squishy-soft to us layfolk.) The massage modalities she uses include myofascial release (the stretching and pulling of fascia, fibrous bands of connective tissue) and trigger point techniques (areas that, when touched, feel painful at that spot and in other “referred” places as well).
Massman is trained in TMJ massage. But having the opportunity to use it is another story. “Clients will usually come for something else, and the TMJ is secondary to other issues,” she says, but as “everything’s connected, everything’s related in the body,” these could be addressed holistically together with the TMJ. “It’s not well known that massage can help,” she says. “They don’t think we can treat it, or what to do. I let them know we can work on it, and they can get relief. They listen. I do a little jaw work to let them know. But then the numbers go way down, like one out of 50 says, yeah, go ahead, let’s do it.”
Why not? One reason is insurance. It’s rare to find coverage for TMJ massage – even though more invasive approaches that are far more expensive, like surgery, are readily covered. What’s more, Massman says TMJ is just one of many conditions that could be treated successfully with massage, but that few people get because of insurance. She lists Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, frozen shoulder and Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, which causes numbness, pain and pins-and-needles sensations along the arm.
Massman says that a full course of TMJ therapy can take anywhere from one to 10 hour-long sessions, “depending on the individual, what’s involved, how long it’s been an issue. Years, or months? The longer it’s been around, the more time and work it will take.” In south central Wisconsin, massage typically costs $60 to $70 per hour.
Another reason could be that physicians traditionally have referred TMJ cases to dentists and orthodontists, who are not usually experienced in soft tissue work in the same way that massage therapists are. These specialists do not ordinarily make referrals to massage therapists.
Another factor that keeps people from diving into TMJ massage treatment: pain. “It’s an ongoing series of treatments, and it can be really painful,” says Massman. “Probably the most painful area of the body to work on.”
I get a demo session from Massman, and I can attest to the pain – but also to the effectiveness. The experience transforms how I think and feel about my TMJ issues.
Massman begins by palpating my subocciptals, the muscles down at the back of my skull. As she presses on the trigger points that she finds there, I feel sensations shoot through my cranium and then subside as the muscle fibers relax. A classic trigger point response.
Next, she squeezes along the length of the sternocleidomastoid (SCM), the long, ropy muscle on the side of the neck that connects chest to collarbone to jaw. Not much pain there, in my case. “I would do the scalenes in further sessions,” she explains, with an explanatory nudge at the raft of muscles that run underneath and crosswise to the SCM. “You have a lot of work to be done there.” Ouch. Sounds right.
Finally Massman moves to the three key muscles of the TMJ assembly. She finds some tension and knotting in the medial pterygoid (poke upwards under your jaw toward the back and you’ll find it) and lateral pterygoid (under the cheekbone). But it’s in the masseter (reach inside your mouth for a tough, fin-like ridge) that she finds scores of trigger points. She methodically applies steady, firm pressure to individual spots. “It feels like a wad of tissue,” she explains, “Thick and hard. Then I can feel it release.” What I feel is exquisite pain during that release, as if she is pushing harder (she isn’t), and then nothing, as if she’s let go (when she hasn’t). Also classic trigger point behavior.
There are plenty more points to be resolved, she assures me, but they will have to wait for future sessions. “They’re deeper. It’s like peeling the layers of an onion,” she says. And it would be a mistake (besides unbearable) to attempt it all in one day: “Your jaw would probably seize up, go into shock.”
Massman explains that the patterns of tensions she has found are unique to me, and have developed over years in response to numerous factors and life events, probably including clenching when stressed, poor postural habits and the trauma to my jaw of wearing braces and then getting them removed. (That doesn’t mean that braces are bad – just that getting massage in conjunction with them is probably a good idea.)
Over the next several days, I feel increased mobility. My jaw feels markedly more open and relaxed – and it’s quieter during chewing. The familiar crunchy feeling is gone. Perhaps most important, my point of view is greatly expanded.
I’ve begun to appreciate the truly marvelous, complex system of muscles and other tissues that keep my jaw in place, allow movement for talking, provide force for chewing. I’ve learned that tensions and knots in some of these muscles have pulled my jaw out of kilter in a highly individualized way.
In other words, there’s a lot of stuff there, and all those parts work really hard, all day, every day. No wonder things go awry fairly frequently. Or that different bits go wacky in different ways for different people. In fact, the very term “TMJ syndrome” begins to sound silly to me. Would we say there is a “knee syndrome” because many people are susceptible to various injuries to that complex and heavily used part of the anatomy?
I’ve discovered that my TMJ tensions are responsible for more of my symptoms than I had dreamed. I’ve learned how far-reaching and variable TMJ effects can be, and how common. I am convinced that therapeutic bodywork, given time and in the hands of a properly trained practitioner, can resolve most, if not all, of these effects in my own case, and that the potential is great to help others, as well. I have a long way to go on my TMJ healing journey. But for the first time, I believe my path is clear.
To learn more about the TMJ and related areas, and for massage you can do yourself, check out The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Second Edition, by David G., Md. Simons (New Harbinger Publications, 2004).
Rebecca Massman, LMT, can be reached at 608-222-7473.
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Anew magazine, Autumn 2005
He was graceful, lean but not quite lanky, with high, well-defined cheekbones, a broad, intelligent forehead, and a thoughtful, artistic intensity in his eyes. He pretty well fit the description of all my youthful crushes – like Fred Astaire and Ludwig Wittengstein (yes, the philosopher) – and also of – maybe you could guess it, but I was 30 before a girlfriend pointed it out to me – my father. My heart leapt. My blood rushed. My brain – scandalized – scolded and denied. I shouldn’t be feeling any of this.
It was my ex-boyfriend from L.A., whom I hadn’t seen for nearly a decade, come to visit. It hadn’t occurred to me that, after years of friendly correspondence, I’d be so primally attracted to him on sight, just like when we first met. I suddenly and painfully recalled that he dumped me. And what a fool of myself I’d made over it.
My body fairly vibrated as I accepted his warm hug. I watched as if from a great distance as he cordially shook hands with my husband. I tensed. I didn’t know what to say.
And then my jaw locked shut.
My jaw remained clenched, frustratingly, through the wonderful Chinese dinner we went out for. (Sucking Lo Mein wasn’t too bad, but oh, those big, juicy dumplings!) Long past that short-lived, but intense, jolt of first encounter. All through the perfectly normal and lovely week the three of us enjoyed together. And a few days thence.
This was one of the many episodes of TMJ (temporomandibular joint, or jaw joint) disorder (sometimes abbreviated as TMD) I’ve experienced over the course of my adult life. And I’m not alone. The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, one of the National Institutes of Health (www.nidcr.nih.gov), estimates 10.8 million Americans share my pain.
Recently I decided to find out more about TMJ, and explore the possibilities for a healing journey. I discovered some surprises along the way. And I came to the conclusion that the most promising avenue for treatment might be one that most of those millions will, unfortunately, probably never pursue: therapeutic massage.
TMJ problems can be difficult to diagnose, partly because there are so many possible symptoms: pain; impairment of motion; a jaw that’s locked in an open or closed position; clicking, popping and crunchy noises; headaches; eyelid twitching; sleep disturbance; dizziness; a changing bite; flu-like symptoms; bad wear on the teeth; even toothaches. For some, the symptoms are mild and/or infrequent; for unlucky others, persistent and/or excruciating. Episodes are often triggered by stress, as in my case, and are intermittent – and that also makes it hard to judge the effectiveness of therapy.
The cause of “TMJ syndrome,” as this cluster of conditions is often called, is unknown. There are plenty of theories: orthodontic work, malocclusion (bad bite), stress, chewing gum or ice, tooth grinding at night, injuries or trauma to the head or neck, posture, playing woodwind instruments, tooth extractions. But for just about each theory, there’s at least one scientific study that contradicts it.
Treatments include braces to correct jaw position, grinding down the teeth to change the bite, “splints” that can be inserted or else implanted surgically – an irreversible procedure – hot and cold packs, and rather dreary advice to subsist on soft foods for life. None of these are known to work terribly well, according to the NIDCR’s 1996 Management of Temporomandibular Disorders conference assessment statement.
Another wrinkle: 90% of folks seeking treatment are women in their childbearing years, according to the TMJ Association (tmj.org), a national non-profit advocacy, education and support group based in Milwaukee.
So here’s a condition that (1) is generally reported by women, (2) is associated with stress, (3) has no known cause, and (4) resists treatment. Put all that together and you shouldn’t be surprised that TMJ sufferers are too often told that their condition is merely psychological – all in our pretty little female heads, as it were. For many, the legacy of this invisible pain can be alienation from friends and family who have run out of patience, humiliation by condescending or unsympathetic doctors and dentists, frustration and despair.
Add to this the likelihood that the number of TMJ sufferers is far greater than statistics indicate. There’s reason to believe that many, if not most, do not report their condition to anyone. Or that when they do, it’s shrugged off and not referred for treatment, as happened with me some 23 years ago when I consulted a physician soon after first experiencing jaw locking. More recently, I told my dentist that my bite sometimes changes from day to day. He looked puzzled, then told me that was impossible and changed the subject.
This time, I decide to investigate massage therapy. I speak to Rebecca Massman, LMT, a massage therapist who specializes in site-specific, medically directed, therapeutic bodywork. Massman tells me she encounters plenty of TMJ troubles in her work; about one in eight of her clients report it. “I think it’s way more common than people think,” she says. But only rarely is it the reason for their visits.
Massman works at the UW Health Center for of Integrative Medicine, as well as in private practice. She is an instructor of soft tissue techniques and clinical anatomy at the East-West Healing Arts Institute, a local school for therapeutic massage. (“Soft tissue” refers to all sorts of features softer than bone, even though they may not seem squishy-soft to us layfolk.) The massage modalities she uses include myofascial release (the stretching and pulling of fascia, fibrous bands of connective tissue) and trigger point techniques (areas that, when touched, feel painful at that spot and in other “referred” places as well).
Massman is trained in TMJ massage. But having the opportunity to use it is another story. “Clients will usually come for something else, and the TMJ is secondary to other issues,” she says, but as “everything’s connected, everything’s related in the body,” these could be addressed holistically together with the TMJ. “It’s not well known that massage can help,” she says. “They don’t think we can treat it, or what to do. I let them know we can work on it, and they can get relief. They listen. I do a little jaw work to let them know. But then the numbers go way down, like one out of 50 says, yeah, go ahead, let’s do it.”
Why not? One reason is insurance. It’s rare to find coverage for TMJ massage – even though more invasive approaches that are far more expensive, like surgery, are readily covered. What’s more, Massman says TMJ is just one of many conditions that could be treated successfully with massage, but that few people get because of insurance. She lists Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, frozen shoulder and Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, which causes numbness, pain and pins-and-needles sensations along the arm.
Massman says that a full course of TMJ therapy can take anywhere from one to 10 hour-long sessions, “depending on the individual, what’s involved, how long it’s been an issue. Years, or months? The longer it’s been around, the more time and work it will take.” In south central Wisconsin, massage typically costs $60 to $70 per hour.
Another reason could be that physicians traditionally have referred TMJ cases to dentists and orthodontists, who are not usually experienced in soft tissue work in the same way that massage therapists are. These specialists do not ordinarily make referrals to massage therapists.
Another factor that keeps people from diving into TMJ massage treatment: pain. “It’s an ongoing series of treatments, and it can be really painful,” says Massman. “Probably the most painful area of the body to work on.”
I get a demo session from Massman, and I can attest to the pain – but also to the effectiveness. The experience transforms how I think and feel about my TMJ issues.
Massman begins by palpating my subocciptals, the muscles down at the back of my skull. As she presses on the trigger points that she finds there, I feel sensations shoot through my cranium and then subside as the muscle fibers relax. A classic trigger point response.
Next, she squeezes along the length of the sternocleidomastoid (SCM), the long, ropy muscle on the side of the neck that connects chest to collarbone to jaw. Not much pain there, in my case. “I would do the scalenes in further sessions,” she explains, with an explanatory nudge at the raft of muscles that run underneath and crosswise to the SCM. “You have a lot of work to be done there.” Ouch. Sounds right.
Finally Massman moves to the three key muscles of the TMJ assembly. She finds some tension and knotting in the medial pterygoid (poke upwards under your jaw toward the back and you’ll find it) and lateral pterygoid (under the cheekbone). But it’s in the masseter (reach inside your mouth for a tough, fin-like ridge) that she finds scores of trigger points. She methodically applies steady, firm pressure to individual spots. “It feels like a wad of tissue,” she explains, “Thick and hard. Then I can feel it release.” What I feel is exquisite pain during that release, as if she is pushing harder (she isn’t), and then nothing, as if she’s let go (when she hasn’t). Also classic trigger point behavior.
There are plenty more points to be resolved, she assures me, but they will have to wait for future sessions. “They’re deeper. It’s like peeling the layers of an onion,” she says. And it would be a mistake (besides unbearable) to attempt it all in one day: “Your jaw would probably seize up, go into shock.”
Massman explains that the patterns of tensions she has found are unique to me, and have developed over years in response to numerous factors and life events, probably including clenching when stressed, poor postural habits and the trauma to my jaw of wearing braces and then getting them removed. (That doesn’t mean that braces are bad – just that getting massage in conjunction with them is probably a good idea.)
Over the next several days, I feel increased mobility. My jaw feels markedly more open and relaxed – and it’s quieter during chewing. The familiar crunchy feeling is gone. Perhaps most important, my point of view is greatly expanded.
I’ve begun to appreciate the truly marvelous, complex system of muscles and other tissues that keep my jaw in place, allow movement for talking, provide force for chewing. I’ve learned that tensions and knots in some of these muscles have pulled my jaw out of kilter in a highly individualized way.
In other words, there’s a lot of stuff there, and all those parts work really hard, all day, every day. No wonder things go awry fairly frequently. Or that different bits go wacky in different ways for different people. In fact, the very term “TMJ syndrome” begins to sound silly to me. Would we say there is a “knee syndrome” because many people are susceptible to various injuries to that complex and heavily used part of the anatomy?
I’ve discovered that my TMJ tensions are responsible for more of my symptoms than I had dreamed. I’ve learned how far-reaching and variable TMJ effects can be, and how common. I am convinced that therapeutic bodywork, given time and in the hands of a properly trained practitioner, can resolve most, if not all, of these effects in my own case, and that the potential is great to help others, as well. I have a long way to go on my TMJ healing journey. But for the first time, I believe my path is clear.
To learn more about the TMJ and related areas, and for massage you can do yourself, check out The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Second Edition, by David G., Md. Simons (New Harbinger Publications, 2004).
Rebecca Massman, LMT, can be reached at 608-222-7473.
Jan Wheaton: All That's Jazz
This reluctant diva is a shy violet offstage
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
in ANEW Magazine [Brava Magazine as of 2006]
October 2001
Cover story
Jan Wheaton’s cat is hiding behind the curtain.
All afternoon he’s been out of sight behind the curtain by the sliding glass door leading to the backyard. When I ask about him, Wheaton rises lightly from her forest-green, leather armchair – at the start of my visit, she had melted into it luxuriantly, resting her bare feet on a matching Ottoman – and calls for the cat, a golden-eyed Persian Himalayan.
“Fuji!” Wheaton pads across the room and pulls aside the drape. Fuji lies along the carpet, absolutely unruffled by the reveal. But I am ruffled. Transfixed. It’s not just the ethereal cloud of blizzard-white fur, or the energized tranquility of his eyes. Such explosive glamour, so modestly sequestered – it’s startling.
In a way, Fuji is an apt mirror for Wheaton, a prominent local jazz song stylist who is quick to describe herself as “very reserved.” A bacteriologist by training – she entered the sciences hoping “not to be bothered with people ... so I could be in my little lab room with my lab coat and Petrie dish” – Wheaton is nothing short of a diva, in the truest and best sense of the word. Modest and retiring offstage or not, no lesser label would be sufficient for her star combination of beguiling onstage charisma, vocal talent, inventive approach and musical mastery.
She might spend her days at home – and preferably alone – listening to jazz tunes on her stereo, or on the links practicing her golf swing (she got a hole-in-one at Glenway a while back), but nights and weekends she’s out on the town, drawing cheers from enthusiastic audiences who’ve come to hear the sweet tones of her uniquely high-octane, velvety renditions.
“There are in fact two of me living in this body,” she offers bluntly, but with a wink. “One is this
educated university administrator. The other is this bitch who like to hang out in bars.”On the Madison music scene for 40 years, it seems that only recently Wheaton has been getting the level of recognition she’s earned. Her first CD, Love’s 3 Faces, released in 2001, went into multiple pressings. At the 2002 Isthmus Jazz Festival, she was chosen Jazz Personality of the Year. This year, at the second annual Madison Area Music Awards (the MAMAs), she was named Best Female Vocalist, a distinction that covers all genres. And this year Wheaton became the second-ever recipient of the MAMA’s Michael St. John Lifetime Achievement Award.
Rick Tvedt, executive director of the MAMAs, says that among the award organizers, support of the choice of Wheaton for the lifetime award was “pretty much unanimous right off the bat.” The Lifetime Achievement Award is “for individuals who have dedicated large portions of their lives to music, who have committed themselves to the music community here, and who have stayed local,” he explains.
The timing was right on, he says, because of the way Wheaton’s career has exploded in recent years, including a second CD release this fall, Expressions of Love.
“I’m really happy to see Jan getting some of the attention she so rightfully deserves,” says Tvedt. “She’s very humble and very vibrant. I get a really good buzz when I talk to her.”
Madison’s Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is also a fan. “Jan Wheaton has long been a jazz pioneer in Madison. She is one of the people who opened Madison’s eyes to the jazz scene,” he says. “I asked her to perform at my inauguration party, and she was incredibly well-received.” Cieslewicz even appointed Wheaton to the city’s Alcohol License and Review Commission (the ALRC) because, he says, “she is so well-respected, both within and beyond the local music scene. I felt she would bring a musician’s sensibility to the ALRC’s discussions, and that’s exactly what she’s done.”
Small-Town Roots
Born in 1943 in Cherryvale, Kansas, a predominantly white, “tiny little town of 4,500 people” near the borders to Oklahoma and Missouri, Wheaton grew up on her family’s cattle ranch. She remembers well the discrimination of those days. In the early 1950s, when the town planned a new municipal swimming pool for whites only, Wheaton’s family successfully “raised a bunch of hell,” she remembers. “They were using our tax money.” Besides, she says, “school was integrated. There weren’t enough of us to segregate.”
Getting out of Kansas was top priority, so the young Wheaton followed her parents’ advice to get a college education, studying science at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. Wheaton's mother was a church pianist and organist who taught her daughter to play the piano; her father "thought he could sing," she says, rolling her eyes heavenward. Growing up, Wheaton had sung for her classmates at assemblies and traveled the tri-state region in her church choir. But music as a profession? "They just about killed me when I told them," says Wheaton, with a laugh. Although "they were always pushing me to sing, every time someone came to visit," Wheaton's parents didn't anticipate that their daughter would make music a career. And neither did she.
When she first left for college, Wheaton felt relieved: “OK, I never want to sing another note.” But in her first week away at college, fate got the better of her. Out one night at a local club, Wheaton asked a jazz trio if she could sing a few numbers, just for fun. “They were playing all those sappy love songs Mom and Dad were always singing,” she recalls. So why sing them? "I knew them." And Wheaton has been singing those songs ever since.
After earning an M.S. in bacteriology, Wheaton embarked on a university career that was to span 35 years. She began at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, then soon went on to the UW-Madison Department of Bacteriology for the next 13 years. From there she moved to the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, where she worked as a teaching specialist and the coordinator for minority and disadvantaged students. For 10 years, she served as an assistant dean for the college before becoming Associate Athletic Director for Student Services. Through much of the 1990s and until retiring from the UW in 2001, Wheaton was Assistant Dean of Students at the Student Affairs Office and the director of the Campus Information and Visitor Center at the Red Gym.
Nights and weekends, she sang.
“Music is my life. It’s what allowed me to stay at the University for 35 years and not go berserk,” she says. “So did changing jobs over the years. I don’t think there’s any job that you just absolutely love every day. Or if there is, I wasn’t in it.”
Wheaton has never married or had children. “I figured out a long time ago, this music takes a lot of time. A career takes a lot of time. And families take a lot of time. So I picked the two I wanted,” she says.
Breaking In
“I kind of muscled my way in,” says Wheaton of breaking into the early 1960s’ Madison music scene. “Subtlety is my mantra. If somebody I liked was playing, I would show up and ask to sing.” For years, she wasn’t taken seriously, she felt. “It’s hard, really, being a girl singer. The other musicians – the men – didn’t consider me a fellow musician. They’d just put me on near the beginning for diversity.
“That's how I was used. The audience would get restless, start talking, waiting for the real act.” She had a different opinion of her role on the music stage. “This is my instrument," she says, and points to her throat. "I don't blow a horn or bang on a drum."
And she began getting phone calls. People who’d heard her sing wanted her to play as a featured artist at parties, cocktail hours, festivals and other functions. No longer the token girl singer, Wheaton now holds the reins, sizing up the budget and scope of the gig and hiring musicians to form a backing combo to fit the venue.
The Third Act
Since retiring, Wheaton has had more time to spend on her musical development. “It’s still the same old music that I’m exploring, but I haven’t done some of these songs in this way,” she explains. “I take more chances. I’m testing my range.”
Pianist Matan Rubinstein, a Ph.D. candidate in music composition at the UW, has Wheaton’s
regular accompanist for the past few years. “She’s wonderful to work with. Very tough and strong,” he says. “She’s brilliantly musical. She has some of the most interesting phrasing I’ve ever heard in my life in jazz. Ella Fitzgerald or Sara Vaughn – she’s up there with them. She’s a real musician.”For her part, Wheaton says, “I feel comfortable scatting with Matan. Other musicians don't always trust that you can do it." ("Scatting," or improvisational singing using nonsense syllables, is the jazz singer's version of an instrumental solo.) "If I do get out there and can't get back, he'll help me back. He gives me that space. What's happened is, I listen differently now."
Their chemistry on Expressions of Love is dynamite. Venerable standards receive novel approaches. On the shimmering first cut, “It’s Almost Like Being In Love,” Wheaton springs effortlessly against Rubinstein’s nimble piano into a breathtaking scat solo. “It’s about being excited. ‘What a day’! ‘What a rare mood’! But people don’t sing it that way,” says Wheaton. To demonstrate, she mimics a more pedestrian interpretation, and I can practically hear a metronome clanging: "What a da-ay-ay this has been...what a ra-a-are mood I’m in..."
“Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man” is similarly refreshing: it’s carefree, defiant, sparkling – not the usual anguished victim’s confessional. And her voice has somehow become more youthful over the past five years.
“Some of these songs, they tell you how to sing them,” she says, explaining how she arrives at her innovative, fully realized interpretations. “Like in ‘Don’t Explain’: ‘Skip that lipstick. Don’t explain...Right or wrong don’t matter...’ ” she says, quoting from the Billie Holiday tearjerker. “That’s pathetic!” I consider myself a strong woman, and here I am singing these weepy songs." I ask how she does it, and how does she pull it off with such conviction? "I'm an actress," she states, plainly.
Another factor, one she would be too modest to claim herself, is what Rubinstein calls her “extraordinary musicianship.” He elaborates, “Her sense of rhythm is really unique. Her sense of harmony is interesting. We really never do the same song in the same way when we play – we take the jazz approach. There are moments when we have the same thoughts, and take the plunge into the same direction, take the same risk. It’s a great treat.”
So what’s next for Jan Wheaton? “I want to play as much golf as I can. It’s the challenge,” she says. “I used to think it was silly, hitting a little white ball. But I cannot let this game beat me.” And, of course, there’s the musical goal of “continuing to live this life of music for as long as I’m able.”
Sidebar
Favorite musical artist: Nancy Wilson.
Why: “Her phrasing. You have no doubt what she’s singing about. The way she ‘works’ her notes.”
Favorite song to sing: “None. I like everything I do. I prefer sultry love songs.”
On expanding her repertoire: “Somebody asks, do you know this song? I look it up and listen to it. If I like it, I add it.”
Formal music training: “My mother taught me piano. I played clarinet in the marching band. I can read music and play a song, but not in a room where anyone else can hear me.”
Community involvement: Board of directors, Dane County Rape Crisis Center; member, Madison CitiARTS Commission, Madison’s Affirmative Action Commission, Madison’s Alcohol Licensing and Review Commission.
On Madison: “This is as big a city as I need. I love to visit big cities, but they’re just too much. This is home. Even if I had been ‘discovered,’ this is where I would be.”
Thursday, September 1, 2005
I drive by night
Behind the wheel with a taxi-driving mama
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
Anew Magazine
2005
It’s 4 a.m. Saturday morning. I let myself into the quiet house where my husband and baby slumber. I pull a folded stack of cash from my pocket, count out half and leave it in the center of the kitchen table. He drives, too. And we always split the tips.
I crawl into bed. Images of the past 13 hours flicker and fade as I sink into a sleep that I know will be deep and will only last a few hours.
I started work yesterday afternoon by selecting a car key in the dispatch office and heading to the lot to prep my taxicab for the shift ahead. Tire pressure, wiper fluid, headlamps, signal lights, empty trunk, clean interior – check. I flicked on the dispatch radio, logged onto the onboard data terminal and headed downtown, alert to the radio.
The dispatcher called out a string of intersections representing ride origins. I listened, thinking of a frequent call that comes out of a nearby high school around this time of day, a partially disabled student who rides home clear across town: a nice girl, prompt, and good booking on the meter. No tip – they just don’t happen with calls on social services accounts – but a plum ride, nonetheless.
What’s more, there’s a bartender in her neighborhood who often takes a cab to work right around the time she gets home. A good tipper, like most barkeeps and waitstaffers – gives a twenty for a $15 ride. The two calls together make a lucky combo, though they weren’t mine today.
During the four hours before my first baby break I shuttled a gang of Dutch bicycle executives from hotel to mall, an urban-landscape planner from office to car repair shop, seniors to fish fries, and, Lord help us, a guy from a tavern to the state Capitol Square. The early drunks – those are the surreal ones.
“Name anything you want to hear a poem about!”
“The moon,” I suggested.
“That’s good! Ahem. Placidly, vociferously, without surreptition… The empathetical vacuity awaits the… the… Wait. OK. Moon. OK. Here it is. The seashore magic of the… the… What was the poem about?”
The poem never was completed. He tipped $10 to make up for it.
I hit the road again around 8 p.m., after nursing and playing with the baby. Haven’t had to pump since quitting that office job. Nice. My husband’s homemade stew fueled the hours ahead.
Lots of rides back from fish fries. Then, a tavern call to the ER. Uh-oh. Bar fight? No – bicycle wreck, and the fellow needed stitches. He had walked to the closest establishment with a phone; it happened to be a bar. Whew.
After that, the radio was silent. I cruised to the airport and queued up behind a dozen other taxis. The 45-minute wait was excruciating. We don’t get hourly pay. Only a share of the meter, and tips.
Three uniformed flight attendants and a pilot piled into the cab ahead of me. Again, whew. Flight crews never, never tip. Once I even dared say it – “They say flight crews don’t tip, ha, ha!” – just to see what would happen. “Ha, ha!” laughed the pilot. “My passengers don’t tip me, either!”
My ride: a friendly Australian couple to a pricey downtown hotel. They were taking a months-long trip around the States, instead of their usual annual months-long European vacation, they said. The man handed me a twenty saying, grandly, “Just give me two back.” A $1.25 tip.
I should have known, but I’m always floored. Fancy vacation = crummy tip. Other bad-tip predictors: old mansions, new construction, verbal promises of a wonderful tip, praise for being “the best cab driver ever” and – mysteriously – somber, whispering couples.
After the second baby break, midnight. Empty streets. Many stop lights set to blinking. Perfect for shuttling bar-hoppers from one watering hole to the next. For taking folks to that next party. For gliding back downtown fast after delivering folks home.
Bar time was most exciting, with plentiful rides. But also riskiest. I screened carefully for possible troublemakers – and pukers. “Hi, what’s your name?” I would ask, reading body language and checking against my data terminal. “Where ya headed?” Wrong answers: “Just unlock the *!#&#! door!” “Hey! A girl! Let’s party!” and “Uhhhhhh....”
Best were the jolly, comfortably tipsy, groups of friends. The ones who told each other “I love you,” and “Take care, sweetie,” at ride’s end. And the ones who said, “Let’s give the cabby some more tip.”
Their faces and voices fading lightly from my mind, I drifted to sleep, looking forward to the next shift.
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
Anew Magazine
2005
It’s 4 a.m. Saturday morning. I let myself into the quiet house where my husband and baby slumber. I pull a folded stack of cash from my pocket, count out half and leave it in the center of the kitchen table. He drives, too. And we always split the tips.
I crawl into bed. Images of the past 13 hours flicker and fade as I sink into a sleep that I know will be deep and will only last a few hours.
I started work yesterday afternoon by selecting a car key in the dispatch office and heading to the lot to prep my taxicab for the shift ahead. Tire pressure, wiper fluid, headlamps, signal lights, empty trunk, clean interior – check. I flicked on the dispatch radio, logged onto the onboard data terminal and headed downtown, alert to the radio.
The dispatcher called out a string of intersections representing ride origins. I listened, thinking of a frequent call that comes out of a nearby high school around this time of day, a partially disabled student who rides home clear across town: a nice girl, prompt, and good booking on the meter. No tip – they just don’t happen with calls on social services accounts – but a plum ride, nonetheless.
What’s more, there’s a bartender in her neighborhood who often takes a cab to work right around the time she gets home. A good tipper, like most barkeeps and waitstaffers – gives a twenty for a $15 ride. The two calls together make a lucky combo, though they weren’t mine today.
During the four hours before my first baby break I shuttled a gang of Dutch bicycle executives from hotel to mall, an urban-landscape planner from office to car repair shop, seniors to fish fries, and, Lord help us, a guy from a tavern to the state Capitol Square. The early drunks – those are the surreal ones.
“Name anything you want to hear a poem about!”
“The moon,” I suggested.
“That’s good! Ahem. Placidly, vociferously, without surreptition… The empathetical vacuity awaits the… the… Wait. OK. Moon. OK. Here it is. The seashore magic of the… the… What was the poem about?”
The poem never was completed. He tipped $10 to make up for it.
I hit the road again around 8 p.m., after nursing and playing with the baby. Haven’t had to pump since quitting that office job. Nice. My husband’s homemade stew fueled the hours ahead.
Lots of rides back from fish fries. Then, a tavern call to the ER. Uh-oh. Bar fight? No – bicycle wreck, and the fellow needed stitches. He had walked to the closest establishment with a phone; it happened to be a bar. Whew.
After that, the radio was silent. I cruised to the airport and queued up behind a dozen other taxis. The 45-minute wait was excruciating. We don’t get hourly pay. Only a share of the meter, and tips.
Three uniformed flight attendants and a pilot piled into the cab ahead of me. Again, whew. Flight crews never, never tip. Once I even dared say it – “They say flight crews don’t tip, ha, ha!” – just to see what would happen. “Ha, ha!” laughed the pilot. “My passengers don’t tip me, either!”
My ride: a friendly Australian couple to a pricey downtown hotel. They were taking a months-long trip around the States, instead of their usual annual months-long European vacation, they said. The man handed me a twenty saying, grandly, “Just give me two back.” A $1.25 tip.
I should have known, but I’m always floored. Fancy vacation = crummy tip. Other bad-tip predictors: old mansions, new construction, verbal promises of a wonderful tip, praise for being “the best cab driver ever” and – mysteriously – somber, whispering couples.
After the second baby break, midnight. Empty streets. Many stop lights set to blinking. Perfect for shuttling bar-hoppers from one watering hole to the next. For taking folks to that next party. For gliding back downtown fast after delivering folks home.
Bar time was most exciting, with plentiful rides. But also riskiest. I screened carefully for possible troublemakers – and pukers. “Hi, what’s your name?” I would ask, reading body language and checking against my data terminal. “Where ya headed?” Wrong answers: “Just unlock the *!#&#! door!” “Hey! A girl! Let’s party!” and “Uhhhhhh....”
Best were the jolly, comfortably tipsy, groups of friends. The ones who told each other “I love you,” and “Take care, sweetie,” at ride’s end. And the ones who said, “Let’s give the cabby some more tip.”
Their faces and voices fading lightly from my mind, I drifted to sleep, looking forward to the next shift.
Home in the Highlands
Highlights of the Symphony Designers Showhouse 2005
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In ANEW Magazine
September 2005
Suppose over a dozen of the area’s most talented interior designers offered to make your home unimaginably fabulous for free: they’ll descend upon your house, bestowing their full range of creativity and skills, repainting and decorating everything from mud room to master bath and in between, and you’ll get the option to buy, or not, whatever furnishings and objets d’art they place. Ooh, la la, right?
But now suppose this means you and your brood can’t live there for the several weeks or months it’ll take the design teams to do their thing. And that thousands of people will come streaming through your abode for a 10-day period, just a-partyin’ and a-gawkin’.
Would you take the bait?
This summer one pair of Madison homeowners did just that. Ellyn and Dan Mohs entrusted the decor of their just-purchased house in the West side’s Highlands neighborhood to the capable hands of the 13 design studios participating in the 14th Symphony Designers Showhouse presented by the Madison Symphony Orchestra League.
And this month you’ll have the chance to feast your eyes on one of the most glorious remodels around during the open-house hours and the cavalcade of special events the MSOL has conjured up, with complete house tours accompanied by refreshments, live music, fine cooking demonstrations, craft beer tastings and more. (See sidebar.)
MSOL volunteers orchestrate a Showhouse every other year, in addition to their many other educational and social projects. The 1,500 to 2,000 visitors who visit each Showhouse typically bring in about $20,000 in donations for the MSO.
How does a home become a Showhouse? “Someone in the league usually hears of a special house being built or renovated with interesting features that would attract an audience,” explains Jean Peterson, the MSOL volunteer who is chairing the publicity for the event. “And then hopefully the owners are willing to participate.”
Each design team gets one room to do up. The goal is to show off their talents, present the cutting edge of interior design, and give showgoers inspiration and ideas for their own home projects. Ideally, they also strive to create an environment where the Showhouse owners will feel comfortable and at home for years to come. That means coordinating their plans with each other, so that all the rooms work together as an integrated whole. It also means working with the homeowners to understand what they want, to establish a direction for the overarching style, look and feel of the place.
Ellyn Mohs describes the experience of working at the hub of so many skilled professionals and craftspeople: “Really busy. Pretty crazy, with so many deadlines and decisions.” Ellyn previously worked for a condominium company at Bishop’s Bay as a liaison between builders and home buyers, “but I’ve never done anything on this scale,” she says.
Ellyn and Dan, an executive in his family’s business, Placon Thermoformed Products (an international resource for plastic containers headquartered in Madison) knew they would need some updates to the 1940 house before moving in. Working with Architectural Network, Inc. and Thomas Zimmer Builders to optimize the structure for their 21st century family, which includes two children aged six and seven – and one big dog – the Mohs soon saw their plans snowball into a major renovation. After the MSOL approached them with the Showhouse idea, the project escalated in scope to include design and decoration on top of the architectural changes, rewiring and new plumbing already in the queue. Now there was a deadline, too: the September 8 Showhouse Preview Party.
The Highlands house for many years housed the family of George Icke, one of Madison's foremost builders during the 20th century. Mr. Icke died in 2003 at the age of 92. “Our main vision was, we wanted to maintain the integrity of the property,” says Ellyn Mohs. “We wanted to maintain the 1940s look, but make it more in line with us. How we live.”
The changes to the exterior alone are nothing short of dramatic. A two-car garage has been attached to the side of the house. Space has been added to the second story, and the house now sports a second major peak. The original, modest entrance way has been walled up and a set of double doors under a portico now welcomes visitors into a soaring double-storied foyer. But in keeping with the Mohs’ goal, the transition between old and new appears seamless, both literally and figuratively. The new cream-colored brick magically matches the old, and the additions enhance the quiet elegance of the 65-year-old design.
Inside, the house has been tricked out with the latest luxuries: three surround-sound systems – one on every floor (University Audio) – Sub-Zero refrigerators, a fully-equipped exercise room with a full-wall mirror, flat-screen plasma televisions in the living room and the master bedroom. In a creative twist, the laundry room is upstairs, handy to the bedrooms. Solid Brazilian walnut laid down in a range of deep, glowing hues provides flooring throughout much of the first story.
But the interior renovation is far more radical than that; it was taken down to the very studs and completely re-envisioned.
“People were surprised we didn’t just tear it down and build a new house,” says Mohs. “But we didn’t want to do that. We just couldn’t resist this property, though we knew it needed a lot of work. We just wanted to update it to our lifestyle.”
Gone now are the small closets and bathrooms, the maze-like hallways of an earlier era. Blunt separation by walls on every side and narrow access through closeable doors are essentially a thing of the past for the common areas.
Sandra Belozercovsky of Design Forward LLC worked on the lighting and other visual elements of the new kitchen, a roomy space with plenty of access to the living room, dining room and backyard. Design Forward also worked on other rooms throughout the house. She explains the appeal of what’s known as an open floor plan for today’s families. “You use the whole house at once, or at least, it feels that way. You can see into the other areas. You no longer have so many formal, separate rooms, like a formal living room, a formal sitting room.” Use is more casual, and more inclusive of the whole family, too. “When I was a kid, there would be whole rooms that were off limits for kids,” remembers Mohs. “We don’t want that.”
For starters, consider the kitchen. “The kitchen is where people hang out these days,” says Mohs. But in the original kitchen, a small room near the front of the house, that wasn’t possible. “It was a tiny kitchen,” she says of the space that’s been transformed into her personal study (Zanders Interiors). Grass-textured wallpaper and a rust-red office chair give it a lively, contemporary feel today , but its sequestered location – perfect for a private space – makes it hard to imagine as a kitchen choice nowadays.
Paul Dybdahl of Dybdahl’s Classic Kitchens and Cabinets talks about how the new kitchen was designed expressly with the Mohs in mind. “Ellyn wanted to take more advantage of the backyard,” he says of the move to the back, near the door to the screened-in back porch. “My favorite room in the house,“ she says. A mini-fridge for beverages is installed under a counter near the back door but out of the main workflow area of the kitchen. “During family play time, kids can run in and grab juice without disrupting anything, without even approaching the main refrigerator. That’s good for energy use," Dybdahl adds.
For Dan, who “likes to do a lot of chopping, vegetable prep, that sort of thing,” the kitchen island is the main work area, and it’s topped with mesquite wood from Texas. “The whole island is a cutting board,” says Dybdahl, who first saw this use for mesquite at a recent trade show. “Nobody’s heard of it yet. It’s a very, very, hard, very dense wood. Ellyn wanted a work table they could chop on.” But Dybdahl needed to coordinate with the cherrywood cabinets he was installing. He recalls his thought process: “Well, we can look at maple and have it stained darker. Or there’s teak, but as that ages, it goes to gray. Then I got an idea in the corner of my mind, how about that mesquite?” This surface will naturally age to a “deep reddish brown, almost rosewood-like,” he explains, “very similar to the cherrywood.”
Deep sage walls and celadon tile, in the minty hue of classical Asian porcelain, play against the cherrywood for a warm, substantial feeling in the kitchen, evoking the natural color scheme of the woods outdoors.
The creamy-colored tumbled limestone flooring, carved into a rectangular brick pattern, resonates with the house’s exterior and provides a magnificently durable, easily cleaned surface that only improves with age. Its comfortably worn look makes for a sturdy, Old World atmosphere.
Handy features built into the island include a vegetable and rice steamer and a slot for waste. In general, the layout facilitates Ellyn and Dan cooking side by side, as they like to do, and feels connected to the kids’ play space. “If you interview your customer properly, you know how to lay out your kitchen,” says Dybdahl, who says he has enjoyed working on his first Showhouse. “It’s going to be a wonderful home.” he says.
The living room is done in neutral tones for “a Zen quality, very relaxing,” according to designer Phil Levy (Phillip Levy Fine Furniture & Interior Design, Inc.), and the style is “quite contemporary.” A plasma TV above the fireplace sports a contemporary arts screen saver. Ample windows look into the yard, and the relaxed, spacious feeling is enhanced by the way the room opens to the kitchen.
This is Levy’s seventh Showhouse. “It’s really a treat,” he says. “This house is great fun. It’s fun to work with all the other designers – an opportunity to get to know them and work with them. Even though we get one room apiece, the whole house has to coordinate.”
This room was added several years ago as a four-seasons space, but only during this renovation was it fully integrated into the house for complete insulated comfort. “It was the logical place for a living room,” says Ellyn. “Everyone who came here said, ‘Wow, what a nice room!’ But functionally, it was freezing cold. Now it doesn’t have that add-on feel anymore.”
The second story was extended above the living room, creating the master bedroom suite, another major departure from the former floor plan. Alan Boehmer (Alan Boehmer Interior Design) collaborated with lighting specialists Design Forward on the master bedroom suite, a stunning array of rooms accessed through a doorway off the top of the stairs.
The bedroom itself is around a bend and up steps within the suite. A bracing ice blue continues above the walls and partly up a nave-like pitched ceiling, between a white gridwork of molding. The blue bedclothes adorn the dark walnut bed. Boehmer describes the look as “American. Not English, Italian or French. Clean lines. Fresh colors. Not at all cluttered.”
Tilework in the master bath, a spacious walk-in closet for Dan and a cozy, windowed dressing room for Ellyn complete the suite.
Perhaps the most drama is to be found in Dan’s office (Decker-Cole Interiors) on the first floor, a traditionally styled gentleman’s study cased lavishly in cherrywood complete with a sunbathed reading nook. Walls of indigo are set off by cherry panels. A wood-mantled fireplace and handsome furniture and accents in upholstered in wines, deep blues and golds come together for the manliest variety of staid Victorian opulence.
These are just some of the splendid features that have come together in this venerable house, happily remade into a home once again through the artisanry and craftsmanship of talented professionals working together.
Fortunately, we all have the opportunity to enjoy their creations through part of September during the Showhouse hours – and to raise money for the artistic talents of the Madison Symphony Orchestra at the same time.
What could be a better housewarming?
Symphony Designer Showhouse
The Showhouse will be open for tours Sept. 9–18, 2005 Monday–Saturday 10 a.m.–4 p.m. and Sunday 1 p.m.–5 p.m. Wednesday, Sept 14 it will be open till 7 p.m. Call (608) 257-3734 x232 for tickets. Admission is $15 per person or $10 for groups of 10 or more. A $100 Patron Ticket includes raffle ticket for a Wolf Barbecue Grill and almost all special events.
See www.madisonsymphony.org/showhouse for details on the many special events planned, including the Showhouse Preview Party Thursday, Sept. 8, 5–7 p.m. ($30 admission), featuring wine, hors d’oeuvres and music from the Michael BB Trio. Mention ANEW magazine to get an extension past the official Sept. 1 reservation deadline!
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