Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation Names 2019 Honorees

Dana and Christopher Reeve (Image Source: https://www.christopherreeve.org/about-us/christopher-and-dana)

By Taylor Smith

This year’s gala benefit for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation took place on Thursday, November 14 at Cipriani South Street in New York City.

The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation grew out of the community-driven Stifel Paralysis Research Foundation, which was founded in 1982 when Henry Stifel, a New Jersey high school student, was involved in a car accident that left him paralyzed at age 17. The organization evolved into the American Paralysis Association (APA). When actor Christopher Reeve was injured in a horseback riding accident in 1995, the APA was one of the first places that Reeve and his wife, Dana, sought support. By 1999, the APA and Christopher’s foundation united as the Christopher Reeve Foundation (Dana’s name was added to the moniker after her death in 2006). more

An Evening with Stephen Colbert and Julia Louis-Dreyfus at Montclair Film Festival

Image Credit: NJPAC

By Taylor Smith

Experience two of the sharpest comedic minds onstage for one special evening as Stephen Colbert (a New Jersey resident) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus team up for the Ninth Annual Montclair Film Festival Benefit on Saturday, December 7 at New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Prudential Hall in Newark. The comedic festivities begin at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $79.50 and are available for purchase at www.njpac.org. more

Winter Wonderland Weekend at The Asbury, Dec. 7 and 8

Images Courtesy of The Asbury 

By Taylor Smith

Learn what makes the vibrant shore town of Asbury Park unique at The Asbury’s Winter Wonderland Weekend, December 7 and 8.

The Asbury is situated just two blocks from Asbury Park’s famous beach and boardwalk and is easily accessible from several NJ Transit lines. Designed with a nod to the shore town’s rock n’ roll past and proximity to the seaside, The Asbury offers upscale lodging, dining, multiple vibrant bars, live music in the lobby, and more. more

Edible Ornaments for Birds

Image Source: https://wilderchild.com

By Taylor Smith

Winter often signifies a challenging time of year for birds to find adequate food and sustenance.  Decorating an outdoor tree with edible ornaments is a way to attract winter birds, providing them with shelter and a wide range of foods. more

A Vintage-Inspired New Year’s Eve at Hopewell Theater

Image Credit: Thomas Robert Clark Photography

By Taylor Smith

Take a trip back to the 1920s at Hopewell Theater’s New Year’s Eve party on Tuesday, December 31 starting at 6 p.m. The evening features a three-course dinner by Brick Farm Tavern; live music by Philadelphia’s vintage swing band, Parlour Noir; a swing dance lesson; party favors; and a cash bar. The event is semi-formal and vintage attire is encouraged. more

Simple Ways to Spread Good Cheer this Holiday Season

“Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

By Taylor Smith

Giving back during the holidays doesn’t have to cost a lot of time or money. Simple gifts of happiness and good cheer can go a long way in improving another person’s day. Here are some suggestions for being more generous this time of year. more

Have a Creative Winter at The Center for Contemporary Art

Image Sources: The Center for Contemporary Art

By Taylor Smith

Registration is underway for winter art classes for adults, teens, and children at The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster. With more than 35 offerings to choose from, classes begin in January 2020. more

What to Buy at Your Local Farmers Market this November

By Taylor Smith

November is still a fantastic time to find fresh fruits and vegetables at area farmers markets. Here are just a few to look for: more

Sister Act

Princeton-Born Pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton are Rising Stars

By Anne Levin

Classical music claims a long tradition of sibling performers. There are the Shahams (violinist Gil and pianist Ori), the Labeques (pianists Katia and Marielle), and the Capucons (violinist Renand and cellist Gautier) — just to name a few.

Currently prominent on that roster are Christina and Michelle Naughton, 31-year-old virtuoso pianists who spent their first year of life in Princeton, and returned last month to perform as soloists with the Princeton Symphony Orchestra (PSO). The glamorous Naughtons, whose father taught computer science at Princeton University, are not just sisters — they are twins. Good luck telling them apart.

As toddlers, the girls moved from Princeton to Madison, Wisconsin, when their father, Jeffrey Naughton, joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. Their earliest music study was with their mother, an amateur pianist. There was no grand plan, at first, for professional careers. more

The Fight for Health Equity

Dr. Richard Besser, head of Princeton’s Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is making a difference

By Wendy Greenberg | Photo courtesy of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Dr. Richard Besser, a pediatrician and head of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), has volunteered in a clinic in every place he has lived.

Seeing children once a week at the Henry J. Austin Center in Trenton brings health inequity into focus. There, in Trenton, the life expectancy for children is 73 years. In Princeton, the life expectancy for the same-age child is 87 years.

The clinic grants a window, he said, “into the lives of children, many of whom have profound barriers to health, children growing up in very different circumstances than the children in my hometown of Princeton.”

At a New York City health center, Besser met a grandmother who knows her grandchildren needs daily physical exercise, but was concerned about the safety of playing outdoors. He met a youngster whose asthma attacks were triggered by environmental contaminants in the family’s apartment. At the Trenton clinic, he met a mother of a son with significant developmental disabilities who has been waiting two years for services that would help him.  more

“States of Health: Visualizing Illness and Healing”

Leonora Carrington, British, active Mexico and United States, 1917–2011, Crookhey Hall, 1987. Color lithograph. Gift of David L. Meginnity, Class of 1958. © Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Princeton University Art Museum Exhibit Explores Wellness and Illness, Care and Suffering, Across Time and Cultures

By Laurie Pellichero | Images Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum

Pandemics and infectious disease. Mental illness. The hopes and dangers of childbirth. The complexities of care. These concepts and many others are explored through more than 80 art objects from around the world — from antiquity to modern times —including paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, and multimedia, in “States of Health: Visualizing Illness and Healing,” on view at the Princeton University Art Museum November 2 through February 2, 2020.

“With the medical humanities a growing field, ‘States of Health’ afforded us an extraordinary opportunity to pose important questions about how we visualize both wellness and disease,” says James Steward, Nancy A. Dasher-David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, director. “By positioning objects that have likely never been in dialogue with each other before, the exhibition draws on multi-disciplinary perspectives to consider health and healing today, how artists have interpreted these states over time, and how they both differ and share certain characteristics across many cultures.”

“States of Health” is displayed in four thematic groupings: “Confronting Contagion,” “States of Mind,” “Worlds of Care,” and “Birthing Narratives,” with cross-cultural juxtapositions throughout the exhibition considering both broad issues and specific historical events from a visual perspective. more

Q & A with Dr. Rachel Werner

“…improving the value of care in the United States is one of the biggest challenges our health care system faces. We also face challenges in providing care in a way that is equitable and that addresses other drivers of health, including social factors.”

Executive Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI)

By Donald Gilpin | Photos by Hoag Levins

Rachel Werner, M.D., Ph.D., took over last May as the first female and the first physician-economist executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI). She is a professor of both medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and health care management at the Wharton School; a member of the National Academy of Medicine; and a practicing physician at Philadelphia’s Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center. 

Werner came to Penn in 1994 after graduating from Macalester College in Minnesota. She earned her M.D. in 1998 and her Ph.D. in health economics in 2004. She joined the Penn faculty in 2005 as an assistant professor of medicine and an LDI senior fellow. A longtime member of LDI’s executive committee, Werner has played an important role in expanding LDI data services and was director of the LDI health economics data analyst pool that provides LDI fellows with statistical analysts. more

Palmer Square: A Look Back

Baker’s Alley in Princeton, looking south toward Nassau Street c. 1925. A historic African American neighborhood that was demolished to make way for Palmer Square. (Photo courtesy of Historical Society of Princeton.)

By Taylor Smith

The September 28, 1928 issue of Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) announced that “Plans for a gigantic program of reconstruction in the heart of Princeton, to cost several million dollars, have recently been made public by Edgar Palmer ’03, President of Princeton Municipal Improvement, Inc. This development will affect the section on Nassau Street from Upper Pyne Dormitory to the Second Presbyterian Church. The area to be reconstructed extends as far as Quarry Street, four blocks to the north of Nassau Street, and is bounded on the east and west, respectively, by Witherspoon Street and Quarry Street.”

Edgar Palmer.

PAW goes on to describe: “In place of numerous old wooden houses and tenements which are not only unsightly but which also form a great fire hazard, there will be two large apartment houses of the ‘garden’ type.”

The municipal square model was not everyone’s ideal. Significantly, the plan involved the removal of Baker’s Alley and the relocation of the majority of Princeton’s African American community to Birch Avenue.

Longtime Princeton resident Shirley Satterfield is an expert on the history of African American life in Princeton. “My family is six generations in this neighborhood, and I love this neighborhood,” she says.

Satterfield describes Palmer Square as Princeton’s first example of “urban renewal.” When asked to characterize the effect of Edgar Palmer’s plans on the African American community, Satterfield states, “It wasn’t a hardship for us, it was a movement for us.”

“A lot of our families were domestic workers and they didn’t talk about discontent to the children,” she adds. “In those days, a lot of people didn’t complain.” more

Trenton Farmers Market Enters a New Chapter

A new manager carefully balances what made the market a draw for 71 years with new reasons to shop under the iconic sign

By Ilene Dube | Photos by Charles R. Plohn

Cantaloupes the size of basketballs; sweet red peppers the size of, well, what I previously thought cantaloupes to be. Peaches with a blush of fuzz and tomatoes with names like Oxheart Riviera among the usual Brandywines and Sun Golds. These are among the recent finds at the Trenton Farmers Market, where the air is scented with basil, smoked sausage, and barbecue.

The 71-year-old institution has been infused with new energy since Chris Cirkus, longtime manager of the West Windsor Farmers Market, took the helm in January. She is the fifth manager in the market’s history.

Cirkus wants people to know that she’s still managing, and committed to, the West Windsor market. On a recent Saturday, after breaking down in West Windsor where she’d stood in the hot sun since 7 a.m. greeting customers, making sure everything went smoothly, and playfully interacting with the children accompanying their parents, Cirkus zipped over to Spruce Street in Lawrence Township (technically it’s located in Lawrence Township, even though it’s named the Trenton Farmers Market) and continued her duties. more

A “Familiar Sensibility”: Cookbooks for Fall

By Stuart Mitchner

This Book Scene began with lunch at cookbook legends Melissa Hamilton and Christopher Hirsheimer’s newly opened Canal House Station restaurant in Milford, N.J.

At the time, all I knew about the Canal House series was what I heard from my wife on the drive up. According to an August 12 article in Food and Wine, the “meticulous restoration” of the Milford station took about two years, with the result evoking “the warmth of a dear friend’s home…. Even the entrance, past the small garden and through a back door, contributes to the familiar sensibility the brand new restaurant has already managed to create.”

I understood “familiar sensibility” as a way of describing the quality that has made the Canal House books so popular, an idea that accords with the Cambridge English Dictionary definition of sensibility as “an understanding of or ability to decide about what is good or valuable, especially in connection with social activities.”

Poetry Up Front

I found the “familiar sensibility” in evidence as soon as I opened my wife’s prized copy of Canal House Cooks Every Day (Andrews McMeel $45) to a photograph and a poem that would seem to have more to do with what is “good and valuable” than with cooking. The first image you see after turning the title and dedication pages is a blurry vision of blue sky and cloud mass photographed through the window of a plane en route to Istanbul; taking up the facing page is C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca,” which begins, “When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,/pray that the road is long,/full of adventure, full of knowledge” and ends “Wise as you have become, with so much experience,/you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean.”

As someone whose heart has never soared at the sight of a cookbook, I was more impressed by the association of cooking with a “beautiful voyage” than with any of the celebrity testimonials on the endpapers, except perhaps the tribute to “this kitchen bible” from actress Jamie Lee Curtis, a Canal House devotee who, like me, is not a “foodie” and admits to “no discernible culinary talent.” In fairness to Jamie Lee, the resemblance is strictly superficial; she cooks every day for “lots of people” and I’m a back-up cook, occasional sous chef, grater of cheese, composer of salads, and cleaner-upper. more

Well-Designed Life, Fall 2019

Have Yourself a Fall Movie Marathon

Film still from Cider House Rules

By Taylor Smith

Autumn can often induce feelings of nostalgia. As the weather turns cooler and a hint of the coming winter is detectable in the late evening air, you might be tempted to curl up with your favorite blanket and settle in for a fall movie marathon. Here are a few films that are guaranteed to send you on a journey and make for a memorable evening (or two). more

Penn Medicine Princeton Health Welcomes Sally Field — October 27 at Rider University

By Taylor Smith

“I wait for my mother to haunt me as she promised she would; long to wake in the night with the familiar sight of her sitting at the end of my bed, to talk to her one more time, to feel that all the pieces have been put into place, the puzzle is solved, and I can rest.” – Sally Field

The public is invited to “An Afternoon with Sally Field” at Rider University in Lawrenceville on Sunday, October 27 at 1 p.m. The talk is presented by Penn Medicine Princeton Health as part of its Community Wellness programming. Early registration is $40 per person and includes a copy of Field’s memoir, In Pieces. Purchase tickets, here: https://bit.ly/35itbFA more

Beneduce Vineyards Offers Aromatically Intense, Food-Friendly Wines

By Taylor Smith

Beneduce Vineyards in Pittstown, Hunterdon County, is a passion project of Michael Beneduce Sr. and his son, Mike Beneduce Jr. As a family rooted in farming for multiple generations, the Beneduces have a distinct love and understanding of the Garden State’s soil. more

Make a Lasting Impact with a Degree in Ecology

Miller Library at Colby College

By Taylor Smith

Ecology concerns the analysis and examination of the varied systems of interaction between humans and their environment. The trans-disciplinary subject matter relates to topics of anthropology, psychology, environmental management, engineering, biology, animal science, agricultural economics, geography, and sociology, among others. more