Football Mondays: UA vs. AU

In Alabama the most anticipated thing about the Fall isn’t escape from the summer heat, but College Football. As MADE Paper’s Bamaist, I’ll have the pleasure of guiding Alabama fans through this year’s season with weekly Monday morning online re-caps of Alabama’s game - with a little inside recruiting info splashed in for good measure - on www.madepaper.com.  Before we get into the season, however, we at MADE have decided to wet your appetite with a pre-kickoff preview of the Crimson Tide. 

How should Alabama fans feel heading into 2014? “Hopefully optimistic” best sums it up.  Despite some big questions on offense and defense, Alabama looks primed for a spot in the inaugural College Football Playoff and a run at another National Championship.

Like Auburn in 2013, Alabama will benefit greatly from one of the more favorable schedules in the SEC.  Alabama avoids the SEC East’s two best teams in South Carolina and Georgia and gets Auburn, Florida, Texas A&M and Mississippi State in Tuscaloosa.  A road trip to Oxford could be tough, and you’ll probably be able to smell the bourbon from the field when Alabama visits LSU in newly renovated Tiger Stadium with capacity now 102, 321.  Alabama’s other two road trips (at Tennessee & at Arkansas) should be smooth sailing as the Hogs and Vols must continue to dowse the flames of the dumpster fires that are their respective football programs.

The offense, save presently not having a starting quarterback, which we’ll discuss at a later date, looks to be the best of Saban’s tenure.  Led by new Alabama Offensive Coordinator Lane Kiffin, the Tide will likely have to lean on the one-two punch of star running backs T.J. Yeldon (6-2/220) and Derrick “King” Henry (6-3/240) early in the season until the quarterback, whomever that may be, settles into the starting role. 

Alabama is also loaded at wide receiver.  Coach Saban stated this group of wide receivers is his best since arriving in Tuscaloosa, and if you see a 6-3/200+ pounder wearing #8 making catch after catch, don’t worry, you aren’t having football acid flashbacks of Julio Jones. You’re watching Robert Foster, Alabama’s next great receiver to wear #8.

On the defensive side, Alabama is looking to get back to its dominating 2011 & 2012 form.  The defensive line should take a step forward with players like Freshman All-American A’Shawn “Cornbread” Robinson and Jonathan Allen ready to accept bigger roles. After two straight years loading up on speed at linebacker, look for Alabama to be better equipped at dealing with spread and hurry-up-no-huddle (HUNH) offenses. In Saban’s first seven years at Alabama he faced nine spread/HUNH teams, this year alone Alabama will face nine teams running spread/HUNH offenses.

In the secondary, Alabama is loaded at safety, led by Landon Collins and Jarrick Williams. Their experience will make Alabama more comfortable than ever when having to sit in its Nickel and Dime packages. The only question on defense is cornerback. Last year Alabama changed cornerbacks like my wife changes clothes, and I don’t expect things to smooth out this year -- especially with Alabama’s best corner Eddie Jackson sidelined with a knee injury.

For better or worse, this team reminds me a lot of Alabama’s 2010 squad, loads of talent, but young and inexperienced on the offensive linemen and at the cornerback position.  Despite the similarities with a 2010 team that went 10-3 and finished in the top 10, I agree with pretty much every other sports writer on the planet: the SEC crown comes down to one annual game, the one that turns friends against one another and can force you to throw your “lucky” visor and shaker into a roaring fire. That’s right, the Iron Bowl.  For the second straight year, I expect the Iron Bowl winner to win not just the SEC West, but also the SEC Championship and then the inaugural College Football Playoff.

Don’t forget to join us online Monday mornings for a colorful re-cap of Alabama’s game and an update on the latest and greatest from the recruiting trail.  On the quarterback front, we’ll be interviewing the starting QB’s private QB Coach - at least once a starter is named - to give fans the inside scoop on what they can expect in 2014. Until then.

ROLL TIDE,

The Bamaist

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After last year’s unexpected explosion of success that resulted in the most memorable season in Auburn Football History, it’s safe to say Auburn fans are ready for football.  As MADE Paper’s Auburnist I hope to be able to take you on another whirlwind journey that will start in Auburn, and, God willing, end in Dallas, Texas, home of the inaugural College Football Playoff Championship Game.  Along the way, I’ll provide weekly recaps of each game on MADE’s website every Monday and insider recruiting info fresh from the recruiting trail. 

While most Auburn fans went into 2013 thinking how great it would be to get back to a bowl game (and not get shutout by Alabama), it’s pretty safe to say the bar is a little higher for 2014.  With a team that boasts 13 All-SEC players, the sky’s the limit for this season.  As a friend close to a rival SEC program recently told me, “until I see someone hold Auburn to at least 200 yards rushing, it’s hard to see anyone beating them.”  I can’t argue against that, but we Auburn fans are a superstitious bunch and most are leery of the fact that Auburn has posted back-to-back 10 win seasons only once in school history (1988-1989). 

With 13 All-SEC players, Auburn’s roster is loaded - unfortunately, so is the schedule.  Unlike 2013, the Tigers will have to navigate one of the nation’s toughest schedules with road trips to Mississippi (I and II), Georgia, and Alabama, and an unusual Thursday night trip to Manhattan, Kansas to face Dan Snyder’s Kansas State Wildcats.  The home games don’t get much easier with South Carolina, LSU and Texas A&M all heading to Auburn.  All in all, the Tigers will play 7 teams who opened the season in the top 25 of the coaches’ poll.

On offense, Auburn will look to continue to make defenses look more confused than a hungry baby in a topless bar.  Since the early 1990’s, Gus Malzahn’s zone read offense has used a deadly mixture of the misdirection made popular by the triple option with zone blocking and the hurry-up-no-huddle. The results speak for themselves, so don’t expect much to change in terms of play calling.  However, Auburn will look to a trio of running backs (Cameron Artis-Payne, Cory Grant and Peyton Barber) to fill the void left by Heisman Finalist Tre Mason.  Additionally, although known more for his legs than his arm, quarterback Nick Marshall will have a host of weapons at receiver; everyone returns and the Tigers add a likely one-and-done talent in physical receiver Duke Williams.  Speaking of Mr. Marshall, its scary to think that he’ll likely improve on his 3,079 combined yards and 26 TD’s.  However, the real story on the offense is the offensive line, which boasts a combined 99 career starts, more than any other SEC team.  Expect Auburn to continue to run behind that experienced offensive line and let Nick Marshall eat defenses alive with the play-action off the read-option.  

On the defensive side of the ball, Auburn’s 2013 motto seemed to be “bend but don’t break,” a motto they’d like to shed and probably will with plenty of contributors returning.  Most of the time on defense it starts in the trenches, and Auburn’s defensive line is just plain nasty.  Even with the loss of Dee Ford, Auburn is loaded with talented defensive linemen, all of whom wreaked havoc on SEC quarterbacks and made huge plays when needed.  The Linebacker position is no different. Kris Frost, Casanova McKinzey, JaViere Mitchell, Anthony Swain and newcomer Tre’ Williams should make for a deep and athletic group of linebackers.  The secondary, however, could be a work in progress.  Jonathon Mincy and Jermaine Whitehead played well for Auburn last year and each started all 14 games, but after that, the secondary gets pretty darn thin.  In fact, while LSU and Alabama will be the “sexy” tickets, I wouldn’t be surprised to see teams that like to throw the ball (Ole Miss & Texas A&M) give Auburn more trouble than run first, second and third teams like Alabama and LSU.  I’m certainly in the minority, but I tend to think Alabama and LSU simply won’t be able to keep-up offensively in a game that is starting to leave defense on the shelf. 

Although I’ve painted a pretty picture so far, not everything will be peaches and cream for the Tigers.  Auburn fans just learned that starting quarterback Nick Marshall and starting cornerback Jonathon Mincy will not play, at a minimum, the first quarter of the Arkansas game due to some legal trouble they found themselves in over the summer.  Additionally, we learned that starting defensive end Carl Lawson, who was expected to fill Dee Ford’s shoes, is likely out for the year due to a knee injury, and starting left guard Alex Kozan “The Barbarian” is also out for the year due to a back injury. Even with those losses, I expect Auburn to have plenty on offense and defense to become the first team since Tennessee in 1997-98 to win back-to-back SEC Championships.  

Am I right? Am I wrong? Should I stick to my day job? Join us online every Monday morning starting this September to see if my predictions hold true.  Until then, 

WAR EAGLE,

The Auburnist

MADE Guide to Prattville: 1 City, 6 Activities, 3 Ways

WORDS  Brent Rosen

I took a trip to Prattville the other day. My first. I found a lot to love in Prattville, but before I can make recommendations, I need to know a bit more about you. Time for a quiz:

1.    On a typical Sunday morning, you can be found:

A    Rushing out of the house with kids in tow trying to make it to church on time

B     I haven’t experienced Sunday morning in years. I’m more of a Sunday afternoon person

C     Cuddling, all morning long

2.   On Friday night, your biggest concern is:

A    Finding a babysitter

B     Finding yourself in a police cruiser

C    Finding a Zooey Deschanel movie the two of you haven’t already watched on Netflix

3.    You get your recommended 30 minutes of daily exercise by:

A     Chasing children at bath-time and bed-time

B     12-ounce curls

C    Walking through the neighborhood, holding hands, imagining your future home together

4.   Your Social Media feed is mostly:

A    Kid pics

B    Food pics

C    “Him” or “Her,” depending. 

5.    How you connect with your friends:

A    Playdates

B    Drinking at Bud’s

C    We are so focused on each other we don’t have any other friends

6.     Your sex life is:

A    “Before or after we had kids?”

B    “Often impossible”

C    “Everything man, everything.”

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If you answered mostly “A,” you are “Married with Children” 

If you answered mostly “B,” you are “Sunday Funday” 

If you answered mostly “C,” you are “Young and In Love” 

Stop #1: Bamboo Forest 

(800 Upper Kingston Rd., Prattville, AL)

Just around the corner from Prattville High School is a 27-acre bamboo forest. The bamboo shoots climb upwards of 60 feet, creating an alien world of muscular shoots and strange shadows on a stunning scale. A trail takes you from the parking lot to a pond encircled by the forest. As you walk the trail around the pond, small, almost-invisible frogs jump into the water on your approach, creating so many ripples it looks like a rain storm. It’s a magical world, both for you and your kids. 

Stop #2: Play in Autauga Creek 

(park near Fat Boys BBQ Ranch, 154 1st St., Prattville, AL)

Not that you’ve worked up a bit of a sweat hiking around the bamboo forest, it’s time to cool off with a swim. Head to the Autauga creek near Fat Boys BBQ Ranch (a great lunch option on Saturday), and enter the riverbed from one of its many access points. This time of year the current is not all that strong. Walk all the way to the dam on the rocky stream bed, then get into the stream and let the current in deeper water carry you back to where you started. You should be reported to the authorities for animal cruelty if you own a Labrador Retriever and don’t bring it along. Ample room for picnic chairs and blankets. 

Stop #3: Look at the Fish and Hit the Arcade at the Bass Pro Shop 

(2553 Rocky Mt. Rd., Prattville, AL)

The Bass Pro Shops pioneered the concept that shopping should be an “experience.” Just to park one must take a winding drive through heavily wooded landscapes, I assume to get shoppers “in the mood” by making them feel like they’re on the way to a deer camp.  If the driveway doesn’t get you in the mood, all of the fish and game inside the place should do the trick. There are multiple aquariums full of local and exotic fish, stuffed deer, moose, bears, and birds of all variety. Your kids will love seeing the animals and the fish and climbing around in what is basically a life-sized diorama masquerading as a store. Don’t miss the kid-friendly shooting gallery on the second floor where you can measure your sharpshooting talent with a light gun for 50¢ a try.

Stop #1: Bass Pro Shop

(2553 Rocky Mt. Rd., Prattville, AL)

The Bass Pro Shop has a bar with an 11,000 gallon fish tank. The Bloody Mary’s are great, which is good because you are likely hung over. Don’t be a hero - order something fried. Drink as you gaze in wonderment at nature’s majesty - the coordinated movements of the schools, the ripple of unseen waves on a dorsal fin, the peaceful co-existence of the varied species. Had enough majesty? Great. Finish your drinks and head upstairs to the gun section, where the clerks will be offended if you don’t handle the shotgun that comes with an American flag bandana. America is truly a shining city on a hill. 

Stop #2: Time for a Swim in Autagua Creek 

(go to the Doster Road Artesian Well below Jensen Stadium)

Of Prattville’s many creek entrances, the one near the Doster Road Artesian Well seems to be the safest for repeatedly violating open container laws. The city has cleared away the underbrush on the well side of the creek, providing easy access to the water. The creek runs deep but slow, with plenty of shade from the trees lining the banks. Bring a cooler of beer and opaque cups, a lawn chair, and anything that plays music. This little park practically begs you to pull a dozen friends together and head north for a rowdy afternoon swimming hole party. 

Stop #3: Drinks at The Robert Trent Jones Trail  

(2600 Constitution Ave., Prattville, AL)

I’m more Rodney Dangerfield than Chevy Chase on the golf course (and honestly off the golf course too), so I’ve never been to the Capitol Hill golf complex on the RTJ trail. When my friend Donovan Ivey suggested we go out there for a margarita, I kind of thought he was insane. Then I went. The clubhouse features beautiful verandas and porches for outdoor seating, perfect landscaping around a classic fountain, and tremendous views of downtown Montgomery from the first hole of “The Judge.” The margaritas will blow away any of your lingering sobriety. 

Stop #1: The Singing Waffle House 

(2597 Cobbs Ford Rd. off of Interstate 65)

Slide into a cozy booth. Don’t be shy about sitting on the same side. Ask the waitress if Valerie, the singing cook is in. If you go on the weekend before 12:00, she should be. Relax and stare longingly at each other over a cup of coffee while Valerie serenades you with solid gold oldies, classic hip-hop, and the occasional gospel or Christmas song, but with added lyrics about Waffle House. 

Stop #2: Bamboo Forest 

(800 Upper Kingston Rd., Prattville, AL)

Join the hundreds before you who have memorialized their love by carving your initials and a heart into a bamboo shoot. Once you’ve made your love “bamboo forest” official, explore the forest’s 27 acres of pure romance. Go off the trail and into the dry creek beds; feel free to explore the space. Warning: no matter how tempted you are to make love in the woods, remember it is full of frogs and insects. Keep it safe, make-outs only. 

Stop #3: The Park surrounding the Daniel Pratt Gin 

(The middle of downtown Prattville)

Before you leave home, put a bottle of Rose, some chicken salad and pimento cheese, some fresh fruit, some crackers, and a serving piece into a basket. Grab a blanket and something to read. Now you’re prepared for a romantic picnic next to Pratt’s dam across Autauga Creek. You can wade in the water, lay down and read to each other on your blanket, have some snacks and just relax. Now go home and fool around until you get bored with it. Next stop, “Married with Children.” 

Let Us Talk of Moonshine Things

WORDS Caroline Rosen  PHOTOS Thomas Lucas

Stills Crossroads, located at the corner of Highway 7 and Highway 8 on the Bullock County - Pike County Line, looks like any other minor 4-way in any other part of rural Alabama. Cars pass infrequently and leisurely, the woods run right up to the roadway, signs for church events, tree services and political candidates advertise like miniature billboards in one area the otherwise sparse population concentrates. A small convenience store provides necessaries to the locals who don't want to drive 30 minutes to Troy or Union Springs for bread and toothpaste. Cars honk lightly in recognition at the old men congregated under the overhang on the convenience store's front porch, the men partially hidden by advertisements for cigarettes and soft drinks tacked to the overhang's pillars.

If you just drove by on your way to somewhere else, giving Stills Crossroads only a passing glance, you'd never notice what distinguishes this particular rural 4-way from any other. You'd fail to see the Styrofoam cups in those old men's hands, those cups filled with local moonshine. You'd never know that 50 pound bags of sugar fill store shelves on Friday, but by Sunday, they're sold out. You'd fail to hear the gossip about families with "moonshine in their blood," families that took care of people and built this part of Bullock County on moonshine after World War II; families that still show up in arrest records for moonshining today. You would have no reason to know that the area surrounding Stills Crossroads is the moonshiningest place in Alabama. 

Moonshine culture is the culture in Bullock County. At the Macedonia Baptist Church Baseball Diamond, moonshiners sell their liquor on game days in the woods beyond the right-field line. Just down the street from the ball field sits the now-shuttered Almeria Club, site of early performances by Hank Williams, a raucous club where moonshine-fueled good times remain the stuff of legend. If you step off of the road in between, you literally cannot walk through the woods without tripping over a dormant (or working) moonshine still.

The indoctrination into moonshine culture starts early. The moonshine business exists in the shadows of illegality; nothing prevents youths from apprenticing under an old master long before they turn 21. The old masters hire the young people to carry heavy bags of grain and sugar out to the stills in the woods. Once there, the old master mixes the sugar, the grain, and the water, then pitches the yeast into the vat. For the next few weeks, the young apprentice keeps watch. After distillation, when the moonshine is complete, the youngster again does the heavy lifting, moving the moonshine out of the woods by the gallon jug. When the old master sells the moonshine, both locally and to places as far flung as Detroit, he shares the profits with the young apprentice.  Soon, the apprentice grows into a master moonshiner himself (it is almost always a "him"), a continuous cycle unbroken since before the Civil War.

Employment in Bullock County remains pretty much the same as it was before the Civil War too. The county's largest employers are agricultural concerns and the Department of Corrections. Not many are employed, and a good amount of those who are don't make much. What Bullock County, and other counties like it across the Eastern black-belt have, is moonshine. Moonshine is classic "dollar out of 15 cents" hustling, a way to separate yourself and your family from poverty. Moonshine subsidizes the low wages paid in Bullock County and employs hundreds in the shadow economy. Moonshiners invest their profits in gas stations, in farm land, and in timber. Moonshiners give to the church, make sure little leaguers have uniforms, and loan money to their neighbors in need. Moonshine culture, although illegal, keeps Bullock County from falling into the ever-widening economic gap between rural and urban America. But today, illegal moonshiners are under unprecedented attack.

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 Week after week, the headlines keep coming. April 18, 2014: "200 gallons of hooch seized in one of the largest moonshine operations in Lowndes County history." May 5, 2014: "24 gallons of moonshine seized, 8-barrel still destroyed in Bullock County raid." May 14, 2014: "Alabama's war on moonshine continues: ABC agents destroy 18-barrel still in Barbour County." May 28, 2014: "24-barrel moonshine still destroyed in rural Bullock County; 20th smashed since October." As I write, members of the ABC Board "Moonshine Task Force" are camped out in the woods around Bullock County, watching vapor drift from working stills, waiting for the owner's return, ready to make another headline bust.

The Taskforce's success comes from knowledge of the community, knowledge that allows the task force to avoid mistakes made in the past. For example, a few years ago some agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms went out into the woods intending to bust moonshiners. Those agents made one simple mistake: they stopped at a convenience store in Bullock County for canned fish and crackers before entering the forest. As soon as the door to that convenience store closed -- the sound of the cashier saying "y'all come back now" still ringing in the air -- the cashier picked up the phone. Within minutes, like a snow-day phone chain, every moonshiner in Bullock County and the surrounding area was aware of the agents' presence. The agents found some empty stills, but no moonshiners were present for the agents to arrest.

The work of today's Moonshine Taskforce is far less sloppy. Although less than a year old, the Taskforce has successfully forced Alabama's moonshiners into a war of attrition the moonshiners cannot win. Day after day, moonshine barrels are put to the axe, equipment is broken, and moonshine is confiscated by the gallon. The State's resources in this area are essentially limitless -- agents will get their paychecks from the ABC Board as long as Alabama remains in the liquor regulation business. The moonshiners, although operating in vast forestland with the home-field advantage, don’t have the resources to compete. At the current pace with which equipment is destroyed, moonshiners are arrested, and profits are lost, it won't be long before the price of moonshine dramatically increases.

The Taskforce will win the war on moonshine once moonshine ceases to be a low cost alternative to legal alcohol. The higher the cost of moonshine, the more likely a buyer will go to the local ABC store instead of a trailer at the end of a gravel-lined road. But what happens next? What will happen to the churches, the little leaguers and the neighbors in need? How will those currently subsidizing their income with moonshine get by? What will replace illegal moonshine in places like Bullock County?

*                      *                      *

At this point, it’s necessary to mention that not all moonshine in Bullock County is illegal. Jamie Ray owns and operates  High Ridge Spirits in Bullock County, the first legal alcohol distillery in Alabama. Ray's current bestselling product is Stills Crossroads 'Shine, a legal moonshine that has been in Alabama's ABC stores since late last year.  In early June, Ray toured me around his company's namesake, High Ridge in Bullock County, pointing out all of the locations that figure in Bullock County's moonshine lore.

Ray came to moonshining later in life. He grew up out West, and first came to the South as a renowned beer maker. He served as brewmaster across Florida and Alabama at breweries like Back Forty Brewing Company, the Brewpub in Montgomery, Hammerhead Brewing in Key West and a stint as the in-house beer maker at the Clevelander in Miami. He came to Bullock County not for liquor, but for horses. Ray and his wife purchased property outside of Union Springs to use as a horse farm, but when the economy collapsed in 2008, so did the market for $15,000 quarter horses.

When the horse business cratered, Ray needed to find a way to generate income from his Bullock County property. Ray knew the area's reputation for moonshining and knew the area had plenty of fresh spring water (it's called "Union Springs" for a reason), so Ray decided to take the lemons life had given him and make liquor.  He contacted the ABC Board and started what would become months of negotiations. At the end, Ray and the ABC Board had collaborated in re-crafting Alabama's liquors laws, culminating in Ray being granted the first liquor distilling license in Alabama since the ABC was instituted in 1937.

Ray estimates it cost him $75,000 in time and money to gain his license and set up the distillery. All of his equipment is top-of-the-line, with a custom-built copper still, stainless steel fermentation vats, and a bottling machine that fills bottles so efficiently he only uses half of its capacity in order to make it worthwhile for someone working an hourly wage to operate it. Ray's distillery is not limited to moonshine, and he will soon roll out a rum, a gin, and a vodka to go along with the 'Shine. He keeps a barrel full of exotic spices and extracts for use in his distilled spirits, and is currently experimenting with aging his 'Shine in oak barrels in an effort to eventually go beyond moonshine and into the world of craft whiskey.   

I asked Ray if he thought the illegal moonshiners viewed him as competition, or if he'd had any problems with the locals since setting up shop in Bullock County.  Ray said  he had not. An illegal moonshiner charges $30 for a gallon of moonshine. Stills Crossroads 'Shine costs about $30 a bottle, making 'Shine very much a premium product in comparison. Instead of viewing him as competition, the moonshiners view Ray as a novelty, and also as a possible source of work. Ray told me that almost every day someone claiming to have moonshining experience will drop by his farm -- on foot, in a truck, or even once on a tractor -- to inquire about a job at High Ridge Spirits.   

Currently, business at High Ridge Sprits is booming, and when Ray does well, so does the State of Alabama. For every bottle of 'Shine sold in the ABC store for $28.99,  Alabama receives $14.77 in liquor taxes and profit. With that profit margin, it's easy to see why the ABC Board has cracked down on illegal moonshining.  The ABC Board's efforts force moonshiners to make a choice: go straight and split their profits with the State, or go directly to jail.

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And now a for a tale of two cities. The first city has a population of 5,740, with median household income of $36,591 and approximately 10% of the population below the poverty line. The second city has a population of 3,670, with median household income of $18,520 and approximately 40.1% of the population below the poverty line. The first city is Lynchburg, Tennessee, home of the Jack Daniels Distillery. The second city is Union Springs, the county seat of Bullock County and a place in desperate need of an economic jumpstart.  If Union Springs looked more like Lynchburg, people would have no reason to rely on illegal moonshine for supplemental income.  

According to Jamie Ray, legal moonshine in Bullock County could easily be as big as Jack Daniels Whiskey is for Lynchburg. Legal moonshine, like that produced by High Ridge Spirits, could serve as the vehicle bringing moonshine out of the shady woods and into the bright world of economic development. Ray explained his end goal with High Ridge Spirits is the construction of a massive distillery complex featuring tours, a restaurant, an RV Park, and all the other amenities offered at the large whiskey and bourbon distilleries of Tennessee and Kentucky. The job creation and revenue a project like this could bring -- including tourist dollars, sales tax revenue, and direct investment in hotels, restaurants and shops -- is massive. A comparison of the economic situations of Union Springs and Lynchburg amply demonstrates legal distilling's potential.  

Legal moonshine, and the celebration of Bullock County's heritage as the moonshine capital of Alabama, has near limitless economic development potential. Downtown Union Springs once featured a museum celebrating the history of illegal moonshine, but that museum closed due to lack of funding. While it may be painful for some to admit, a museum is where illegal moonshining belongs. If legal moonshine achieves its economic potential, bringing money, jobs, and investment to Bullock County, the reopening of the moonshine museum in downtown Union Springs would be a symbolic way to connect Bullock County's past with Bullock County's future.

World Cup Fever Outbreak with The American Outlaws

This summer, soccer fans from all over the globe will travel to Brazil to experience the cultural and sporting phenomenon that is the World Cup. The month-long soccer tournament is comprised of teams from 32 nations, played every four years in a different country. The United States will be participating in its seventh straight World Cup this summer.

Here in Montgomery, there is a rapidly-growing groundswell of US Soccer supporters. They come together to cheer, chant, sing and proudly display their passion and support not only for the United States and its national team, but for the game of soccer as well. They are dedicated, passionate and organized: They are the American Outlaws, a national organization dedicated to increasing support for the United States men’s and women’s national teams, represented by local area chapters across the country. Montgomery officially became the 130th chapter earlier this May.

“Everyone knows that college football is king in Alabama, but you would be surprised by how many people here in Montgomery enjoy watching US Soccer,” said Bret Stanfield, Montgomery chapter president. “We started getting people on board with this group last fall and now we consistently have strong turnouts for United States matches. It’s great. The support and participation at our watch parties has been amazing.”

Now, with the largest sporting event in the world at hand, the American Outlaws welcome the city of Montgomery to join them for the festivities.

The Montgomery chapter regularly holds events at The Tipping Point in Hampstead to watch US Soccer matches and meet other US Soccer fans from around the city. The Tipping Point will host viewing parties for all United States World Cup matches. “The Tipping Point is the perfect place for our group,” said Stanfield. “It's a good venue for us for many reasons and the staff has done everything to accommodate us. We are very grateful and proud to call The Tipping Point the official home of the Montgomery chapter.”

The Outlaws will gather in full force for the first US Soccer match of the World Cup against Ghana on Monday, June 16. Ghana has eliminated the United States from the last two World Cup tournaments. Enough said. The match is scheduled to begin at 4 pm. Following the opening group stage match against Ghana, the US faces Portugal on Sunday, June 22, and then Germany on June 26. 

For more information about the American Outlaws, visit www.theamericanoutlaws.com. You can also reach the Montgomery chapter by email at aomontgomery@gmail.com.

The Bone Collector

Picking Through Alabama With Butch Anthony

WORDS Brent Rosen  IMAGES Butch Anthony

In the 1970’s, 14-year-old Butch Anthony was exploring the countryside of Seale, Alabama, when he happened upon some bones. Dinosaur bones. Seale is famously fertile fossil territory, but the find was still impressive enough for young Anthony to display. He put the skeleton in what he called The Museum of Wonder, the first of what would be thousands of pieces in Anthony’s five-hundred-square-foot cabin. From then on, love of bones would inspire Anthony’s work.

Anthony did not grow up in an artistic family. “Pinky and Blue Boy were my parents idea of art,” Anthony explained, “they didn’t really understand what I was up to. Still don’t.” But Anthony continued to explore artistic curiosities, mixing fossils, sculptures and crafts. He later attended Auburn, where, naturally, he majored in Anatomy.

Anatomy influences Anthony’s best known work, his superimposition of bones on others’ portraiture. You can think of him as a bizzaro Da Vinci. Anthony is uninterested in anatomical proportion or perfection; instead, Anthony is drawn to what’s going on beneath the human surface. Bones, veins, muscles, the commonality of what’s under the skin. Da Vinci highlighted the perfection of the human form by raising it on a pedestal. Anthony shows us that although many people believe their own perfection is worthy of artistic capture, underneath we are all the same.

Recently, Anthony added another subversive element to his already-renegade version of Southern-Gothic art, adding short, strange phrases to his bone-portraits. “I write down all the weird things I overhear, and then put them on the paintings,” Anthony said. Whether it’s their thought-provoking nature, their outsider rebelliousness, or their subtle memento mori flavoring, Anthony’s bone paintings have become nationally, and even internationally, acclaimed. Galleries in Portland, Oregon, Marfa, Texas, and London, England, regularly display Anthony’s works for sale, and Anthony has a museum show in Akron, Ohio later this year.

But the Museum of Wonder in Seale remains the best place to get the full Anthony. The difference between a hoarder and a collector is the difference between a crazy person and an eccentric: charm, purpose, intentionality. The collection at the Museum of Wonder - skeletons and bones of all kinds, wood working, random bric-a-brac in sufficient form and volume to render the otherwise unremarkable into the sublime - inspires awe because of its purposefulness. The collection may be random, the installation is anything but.

I told a friend about the Museum of Wonder, and she immediately connected Anthony’s museum with the “Cabinets of Wonder” popular in pre-industrial Europe. Cabinets of Wonder, sometimes actual cabinets, other times entire rooms, were proto-museums, private places in private homes where the wealthy could store and display curiosities. The Cabinets served two purposes. First, the collections were meant to show the sophistication and worldliness of the collector. Only a true world traveler could amass Middle Eastern textiles or African sculptures or Jade from the Far East in a world without tracking numbers and international shipping. Second, the Cabinets existed to aid story-telling, the contents acting as visual aids for a somewhat-pretentious seeming game of show-and-tell.

Like most everything Anthony produces, his Museum takes the traditional - in this case the Cabinet of Wonder - and twists it into something new that fits his own artistic vision. Like the Cabinets of old, Anthony’s Museum tells a story, but his is a very Southern story. A story about place, about ancestry, about a connection with land, about taking nothing and turning it into something. If the Museum of Wonder were food, it would be pigs feet, oxtail, greens; food that you don’t even realize is food until someone capable prepares it. 

The Museum of Wonder will always be the personal catalogue of one man’s idiosyncrasies, but it also serves to inspire a new generation of artists and makers in the South. The next generation can come to the Museum, or the Doo-Nanny - Anthony’s annual art festival, and realize one needn’t fancy galleries, fawning critics, or formal training to make great art. The Museum also shows the next generation that curiosity, vision, and dedication are what makes a great artist - and you don’t need to be in New York or L.A. to find an audience for your work.  

One of Anthony’s works is an antique photograph of a woman’s head and shoulders, under which Anthony has painted a curly-cue stick-figure body. The caption: “Reality doesn’t interest me.” If you take nothing else from Anthony’s work, let it remind you that reality is a state of mind, and only one of many.

Into The Woods: Sondheim at The Cloverdale Playhouse

WORDS Katie Vega   PHOTOS Jon Kohn

Cloverdale Playhouse director Randy Foster puts it perfectly—theatre happens in the space between the audience and the actors.  

There is something about theatre.  Maybe it’s the fact that you are watching a story happen right before your eyes, acted out by real, live people.  Or it may be the fact that you know you are experiencing something beautiful that you will never see again, except in your memories.  Whatever the reason, the art of theatre is something to be experienced and our city has many opportunities to live out this artistic fantasy—whether for viewer or actor.  I’ve recently found the perfect place to experience this connection.

Cloverdale Playhouse, housed in a 1930s church, is the location of something spectacular—something that has disappeared into the abyss.  The Playhouse serves as a gathering place for a community of locals, working (and playing) together to create something magical.  This big, happy family, disguised as teachers, shop owners, massage therapists, and restaurateurs, gathers with one goal in mind—to create a creative outlet for ordinary locals—just like themselves—to be something more.  It is the place at the forefront for the redevelopment of our creative community.

As I sat with the actors of Cloverdale Playhouse, they didn’t even need to talk for me to experience the passion that was dripping from their cells.  Whether they had been acting for 60 years or 6 months, the commonality shared by this group of people—who actually highly differ in age, profession, and every other regard—is something to be seen, and you’ll see this unspeakable bond in the magic that happens on stage.

The group of actors I had the pleasure of talking with—including Eleanor Davis, Jonathan Conner, Emily Lowder Wootten, and Sarah Thornton—were so passionate about expressing the importance of a community theater in Montgomery.  Our city is bursting with creative beings that have a burning desire to act without necessarily making a life out of it.  Cloverdale Playhouse gives these citizens the opportunity to act while still leading their already established lives.  And the Playhouse truly is a community effort, with every single person being a volunteer—from the sound guy to the set designers.  Everyone.  

The Playhouse believes in using the resources available to them.  They don’t go out searching the world for the perfect actor to play the part—they use people who have ties to Montgomery and a passion to do what they love.  This simple mantra forces them to stick to the basics, to the true meaning of theater—telling a story that is both satisfying to an audience and gratifying to the actors.  This also allows everyone involved to try new things without having the hierarchy usually seen in the theatre world lingering above their heads.

And don’t be disheartened that these actors aren’t “professionals” (by “professional” standards).  Their unveiling passion trumps over a silly, little title.  And not only do they have passion, but every single actor involved with the Playhouse is extremely talented (the proof is in their sold out shows).  All are surprised at the level of goodness the actors possess.  Hey, you know they’re talented when 13 people are playing 24 parts…

Jonathan Conner, who plays multiple parts in the upcoming production, Into the Woods, explained his reasons for getting into theatre—all of which are intangible.  He believes that testing his own boundaries constantly keeps him on the edge of his own seat and getting into character forces him to understand his fellow man.  Eleanor Davis, who has been acting for SIXTY YEARS, was thrown into the spotlight at an early age, as her parents made her perform at dinner parties held at their home.  She swears if her father didn’t pass at a young age that he would have pushed his blonde-haired baby all the way to Broadway. She has been at the forefront for community theatre in Montgomery for years.  

Emily Lowder Wootten, a UGA theater graduate and former actress on the Chicago theater circuit, quickly learned that she didn’t like being told no, and this outlet allows her to continue living her passion without encountering the harshness of the theater world.  Sarah Thornton, who is the assistant director for Into the Woods, has been surrounded by theatre her entire life.  She grew up in the hallways of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where her father acted as artist director.  This forced her to fall in love with the beauty of a story.  Currently, Sarah lives in New York City where she is involved with Bama Theatre Company—a place where alumni from ASF perform entire plays out of a single trunk.

The Playhouse is currently in their third season and their upcoming production of Into the Woods begins February 13th and runs through the 23rd.  The musical, written by Stephen Sondheim, combines stories from the Brother Grimm into an epic fairy tale where worlds collide.  It is the story of what happens after happily ever after.  And although these fairy tales were written centuries ago, this particular musical merges them with real people and real problems, exposing daily issues we all face.  It makes the characters human, as they must make real choices about real things, things that have consequences.  The story is both hilarious and touching.  The actors of the Playhouse even admit to crying randomly during rehearsals because their hearts were touched by the story.

Everyone should jump at the opportunities available to become involved with Cloverdale Playhouse.  They are always looking for volunteers.  And don’t be scared—they didn’t make me recite every Tony award winner from the beginning of time or list every play written by Shakespeare.  The pretentiousness is left at the door, and these fine people will bring you into their family and make you feel right at home.  As Randy said, everyone has a sense of being, a sense of being a part of something larger than just a play.

So come hang out with us.  We’ll find something for you.  And whatever you’ll be doing, you will be helping to provide our community with the fostering of artistic opportunities.  And that, my friend, is something to be cherished.

For more information about classes, productions, and volunteer opportunities, visit
www.cloverdaleplayhouse.org and join the Cloverdale Playhouse group on Facebook.

Good Luck and Plenty of Money

WORDS Preston WIlliams

Good luck and plenty of money – that’s what many of us wish for as we toast good-bye to the previous year at midnight on December 31. Come lunch (or dinner, depending on how revelrous your N.Y.E.) we pile our plates with black-eyed peas, greens, and pork hoping for the promise of luck and money. Mystery and folk lore surround the tradition, and no one really knows the foundation. The only truth that matters is the one we grew up hearing.

One legend dates back to the Civil War. Black-eyed peas were considered animal food and were not worthy of General Sherman’s Union troops. When the Union soldiers raided the Confederate food supplies, legend says they took everything but the peas and salted pork. The Confederates considered themselves lucky to be left with such meager supplies and survived the winter. Peas became a symbol of luck in the South.

Black-eyed peas were also given to the slaves, as were most other traditional New Year’s foods. Let’s face it: most of the New Year’s recipes are soul food. One explanation of the superstition says that black-eyed peas were all the southern slaves had to celebrate with on the first day of January, 1863. What were they celebrating? That was the day when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. From that point on, peas were always eaten on the first day of January.

How are you supposed to eat the peas? My family always argues over this. Some people believe you should cook them with a new dime or penny, or add a coin to the pot before serving. The person who receives the coin in their portion will be extra lucky. I’ve heard you should eat exactly 365 peas on New Year’s Day; if you eat any less, you’ll only be lucky for that many days. I guess on leap years, you need to eat an extra one. If you eat any more than 365 peas, it turns those extra days into bad luck. Some say you should leave one pea on your plate, to share your luck with someone else (more of the humbleness that peas seems to represent). Others say if you don’t eat every pea on your plate, your luck will be bad.

Want to get rich? Here in the South, collard greens and corn bread bring the money on New Year’s Day, but it’s actually cabbage that is the king green around most of the world for New Year’s meals. Cabbage is a late crop and is available this time of year; because collard greens are a late crop too, they sub for cabbage in the South because that’s what grows here in winter. The southern tradition: each bite of greens you eat is worth $1,000 in the upcoming year. I love greens, all of them, and with as much as I ate last New Year’s, I’m surprised I’m not as rich as Creases! But I’ll try again this New Years!

Today, cabbage and greens (collards and turnips) both represent “green” money in New Year’s tradition, but historically, cabbage was eaten for health benefits. Cabbage was eaten by everyone from Caesar to the Egyptians to aid in digestion and for nutrition, then later for the prevention of scurvy. The philosopher Aristotle ate cabbage before drinking alcohol to keep the wine “from fuddling his prudent academic head” (I wonder why we don’t eat greens on New Year’s Eve then). Modern greens are not so different from those eaten by Caesar and Aristotle. The ancient cabbage those guys ate was closer to kale than our modern cabbage.

Corn bread represents pocket money or spending money. It’s another soul food we eat on New Year’s. The tradition stems from the color of the bread. Its color represented “gold” or “coin” money. Plus, it goes well with greens, peas and our next subject, pork.

The South isn’t the only place that eats pork on New Year’s Day. All over the world people are using marzipan pigs to decorate their tables, partaking in pig’s feet, pork sausage, roast suckling pig or pork dumplings.  Hogs and pigs have long been a symbol of prosperity and gluttony. It’s why we say someone is “being a pig” when they take more than their share. Some cultures believe that the bigger pig you eat on New Year’s, the bigger your wallet will be in the coming year. So, the “fatter” the pig, the “fatter” your wallet. While people around the world are eating pig for New Year’s, we’re the only ones who put so much faith in the jowl cut.

I probably need to explain what a hog jowl is, as some Yankees have never heard of this cut of pork. It’s the “cheek” of the hog. It tastes and cooks similar to thick cut bacon. It’s a tough cut that is typically smoked and cured. Hog jowl is used to season beans and peas, or fried and eaten like bacon. Why hog jowl? The short answer is that we eat cured pork because it’s winter time. Hog jowl is a cured product which stores well for long periods. During the winter, cured pork would be readily accessible meat.

How do you cook hog jowl for New Year’s? Some people only use the jowl to season their black-eyed peas and collard greens. Most in the south would say that’s not enough to make you prosperous. You also have to partake in some fried hog jowl. It’s cooked similar to bacon, but hog jowl is a bit tougher and takes a little longer to cook. Jowl typically comes in a package, sliced like thick bacon or uncut on the “rind.” Most people remove the rind, slice it and fry the slices in a skillet until brown on both sides. It’s then drained on a paper towel and served. Since it’s a cured food, it typically doesn’t need extra salt, but some like to serve it with pepper or hot sauce.

It’s also been said that if you eat only black-eyed peas, and skip the pork, collard greens and the accompaniments, the luck won’t stick. They all work together or not at all. It’s a good thing the people who created these superstitions up didn’t believe luck and money came from a combination of snails, cornbread and black-eyed peas. I don’t think that would have caught on. So, before you go popping those bottles of champagne, run by your local farmer’s market and pick up a mess of your favorite greens, some jowl, and a pound or two of black-eyeds -- just don’t forget to save a coin or two for the peas. 

Ask A Local: Los Angeles for the BCS Championship

WORDS Melissa Tsai

Los Angeles is really what you make of it; the city is rich in so many ways: food, art, music, shopping, nature. There’s a neighborhood for every personality. We’ve chosen Pasadena to be our first home on the West Coast. Pasadena is the home of the world famous stadium, renowned cultural attractions and educational institutions, and some of the best hotels and restaurants in the Los Angeles area. Having just moved here a few months ago with my husband and 19-month old, we already have a list of our local favorites. 

Copa Vida (70 S. Raymond Ave) is my favorite coffee spot in our neighborhood. This is where I’d go to satisfy my caffeine kick and get some work done on the side. If you’re not a coffee drinker, I’d take you down the street to Flour + Tea (238 S. Arroyo Pkwy).  This cozy little teashop has a long list of teas that will satisfy every palate. They also serve up some delicious desserts and breads. 

For a quick lunch, our go-to is Lemonade (146 S. Lake Ave). The atmosphere is casual and vibrant. Their seasonal menu embraces what Southern California cuisine is all about. I never pass up the white truffle mac’n cheese. Afterwards, we love hanging out by the fire pit and the iconic British red telephone booths in the courtyard behind the restaurant.  Another lunch (or brunch) favorite is La Grande Orange Café (260 S. Raymond Ave). If you’re going to order only one thing here (which I highly doubt), get the deviled eggs. 

For a low-key dinner, we’ll stop by Umami Burger (49 E. Colorado Blvd). You seriously can’t go wrong with anything from their menu. Our little one can eat a whole order of sweet potato fries by himself. Being so close to the Pacific Ocean, sushi is a must-eat here. My husband and I love going to Sushi Roku (One Colorado, 33 Miller Alley) on our date nights. If you still have room, walk over to The Coolhaus Shop (59 E. Colorado Blvd) to top the night off with an ice cream sandwich. I bet you’ve never tried some of these flavors: Guinness chip or fried chicken & waffles.  

If you’re visiting Pasadena with young children, Kidspace Children’s Museum (480 N. Arroyo Blvd) is a great place to burn off their energy. There are tons of hands-on activities for one-year olds and up. Old Pasadena Farmer’s Market (54 E. Holly Street; Sunday 9am-2pm) is another place we love going to as a family; it’s become a part of our weekend routine. We love walking around sampling berries while doing our weekly produce shopping. 

Melissa is an architect, mom, and blogger. www.madebymelis.com

WORDS Jeremy Silver

For music, I recommend Hotel Cafe which is by far the best place to see up and coming artists in LA, it’s a very intimate room, and occasionally some big names will pop up just to hang out or maybe even play a stripped down set. Room 5 on La Brea is another small room with great singer/songwriter talent coming through. For slightly bigger, louder shows there’s the Troubadour (another LA classic) which is another favorite of mine; the front bar at the Troubadour is also a great hang for a beer before or after a show.  The calendars for those places are already up, and good shows are happening around the weekend of the 10th.

As far as food, for great authentic Mexican food I’d recommend Loteria in the Farmers Market at the Grove.  Since you Alabama folks might be barbecue connoisseurs, I would offer up Bludsoe’s on La Brea as some of the best BBQ out here. Village Idiot on Melrose is a great pub and I definitely recommend the steak & potato pie. An old-school Hollywood place for maybe the best Italian food in the city is Dan Tana’s on Santa Monica (located right next to the Troubadour). Oh, and obviously In-and-Out for a hamburger. No question, it’s a must.

If you want to hang out in bars the LA classic sports bar is Barney’s Beanery, there’s one in West Hollywood and another location in Santa Monica. For a dive bar, I like Snake Pit on Melrose, it’s not your typical LA flashy bar scene, so it’s a natural favorite of mine.

Jeremy Silver is a songwriter and producer who writes music for film, television, and commercials. @iamjeremysilver

WORDS Kedist & Becky Tsadik

If you’re planning to cheer on Auburn at the BCS National Championship at the Rose Bowl in January, there’s something we have to tell you. You look like a tourist. Why? Because you’re spending all of your free time snapping pictures on the Hollywood Walk of Fame rocking burnt orange and navy blue.

Swap out your football swag for some shorts--it’s 70 degrees in January!--and steer clear of the those double decker tour buses. In the spirit of rivalry, we pit some of the city’s more famous locales against our classier, lesser-known, favorites. Enjoy Los Angeles like a local with these five destinations that are #onlyinLA. 

5. Santa Monica Pier vs. Manhattan Beach Pier

This adorable enclave just south of LAX is packed with charming shops, delicious restaurants, beautiful beach homes and more room to breathe than it’s northern cousin. No, MB’s pier doesn’t include a Ferris wheel or “jokes for $1,” but it’s also completely devoid of huge crowds and screaming ice cream vendors interrupting your blissful beachside nap. Head to MB Post for their seared diver scallops with bacon butter. YUM.

4. In n’ Out vs. Umami

Don’t get us wrong; we heart a Double Double Animal Style just as much as the next girl. But, there’s just something magical about the Umami mini-chain’s rich, creative concoctions tucked into buttery buns that’s crave-worthy. I mean, just look at this menu. House-made truffle cheese? Done and done.

3. Venice Boardwalk vs. Venice Canals

If you’re into scenery that includes men painted silver, street musicians and the half-naked gentlemen of Muscle Beach, then by all means, brave the crowds on the moving circus that is the Boardwalk. But, if you’re looking for a saner escape with a view that’s still near water, head south to the Venice Canals.  Continue your stroll through L.A.’s hippest neighborhood Abbot Kinney.

2. Sprinkles vs. Sugarfina

Perhaps The Original Cupcake Bakery’s $4 red velvet cupcake is “worth” all the hype and the perpetual lines. But, why subject yourself to that madness? Stroll a few blocks down to the magical Sugarfina, which is literally on the same street. Step inside the brand new Tiffany-blue storefront, which sources gourmet candies from around the world and presents them in the most adorable packages for gift-giving--flavors like candy-coated martini olive almonds.    

1. The Standard vs. The Bungalow at The Fairmont

If you’re not on the list at The Standard, you’ll be standing in line for awhile, surrounded by more fake bake, 5-inch heels and plastic surgery than you ever thought possible in one space. Go hang out with real people near the ocean at The Bungalow, an indoor/ outdoor multi-room haven with multiple bars, a pool table and lots and lots of comfy seats and couches for hanging out. Do go early though as a line has been known to form on the weekends (but there are often food trucks or vendors nearby to help you pass the time!)”

Find out more about their company at www.facebook.com/BereketKitchen or at www.bereketkitchen.com.  

Ask A Local: New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl

WORDS Brent Rosen

All places in bold below are recommended. If you want to know more, Google.  

About four years ago, on a trip to New Orleans, I visited my friend Alec Adamick’s house in Mid-City. The cab dropped me in front, just off North Broad Street, and I could see Alec had encased all of his 6 foot plus, 200 pound frame into a thin hammock suspended from two eyebolts, one drilled into his house and the other into one of the stocky columns supporting the  wide front porch. Kermit Ruffins poured from a small alarm clock radio, just barely audible over the hammering and sawing coming from the house next door still under renovation after Katrina.  Alec rolled over as I came up the steps, spilling a little bit of his beer in the process, and careful not to dislodge himself from the hammock, raised his hand and said, “welcome back to the Caribbean.” While I’d never thought of it before, he was right: New Orleans is not America’s most European city, and any self-respecting European would quickly back-track from the comparison. Instead, think of New Orleans as the Northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. When you think about the city that way, the place makes a lot more sense.

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If you asked me where to go for Po’ Boys in New Orleans, I couldn’t, in good conscience, recommend just one place. Instead, I’d need to know what kind of Po’ Boy you wanted. You want fried shrimp? Go to Domilese’s. For roast beef, you can’t do better than Parasol’s. Catfish? I’ve never had better than the catfish Po’ Boy at Parkway Tavern and Bakery; I like mine with lettuce, a bit of ketchup, mayo, creole mustard, and Crystal hot sauce. Putting Tobasco on a Po’ Boy should cost you a night in Orleans Parish Lockup. I hope you aren’t craving an oyster Po’ Boy, because they aren’t widely available anymore (thanks BP).

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Do you like Jazz? Rap? Funk? Soul? Are you good at dancing? Bad at dancing? Enjoy dancing with strangers? If you answered yes to any of these questions, put the Soul Rebels Brass Band on your itinerary. My first experience came in 2002, at their Thursday dance party at Le Bon Temps Roule. A friend handed me a Miller High Life -- $1 dollar on Thursday -- and we went to the back room stage/dance floor. The Soul Rebels play good high school marching band music, with drummers, saxophones, trumpets, tubas and trombones, except when you enclose a marching band in 400 square feet, the beat of the music replaces your pulse. They will go from an improvisational jam to a cover of Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” to an original composition without pause, one song segues into the next. The Soul Rebels use their horns in place of vocals, harmonizing and rearranging the music, creating new compositions out of old songs and melodies. It doesn’t matter where they are playing, just find them.

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In 2006, Alan Richman, a food critic and likely asshole, wrote an article for GQ insulting New Orleans restaurants, wondering if they were worth saving after Katrina. The only interesting thing about that article was the recognition that the city of New Orleans, and New Orleans alone, has inspired a genre of food. You don’t go to New York to eat “New York” food, nor would you travel to Los Angeles to eat “LA” food. New Orleans, however, is probably best known for its “New Orleans” food, dishes like shrimp remoulade, trout meuniere, and crawfish etouffee, to be eaten in French Quarter restaurants like Galatoire’s, Arnaud’s, and Antoine’s. These places are tourist stand-by’s, but for a reason. You aren’t going for the food as much as the feel; tuxedoed staff, elegant dining rooms, all of the formality of a fine men’s club. But the elegance is pleasantly undercut, by the sassy staff who talk back, by the tired condition of the dining rooms upon closer inspection, by the copious number of martinis you’ve consumed. Conversations in these restaurants tend to rise louder and louder the longer a meal lasts. I love Galatoire’s during the day, but do it right. Take your time. Drink a lot. Wear a tie. It’s not lunch, it’s an experience.

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Magazine Street miraculously provides something for everyone. The street has excellent cheap bars: Miss Mae’s for cheap well drinks, Balcony Bar for cheap Rolling Rock, and The Bulldog for a variety of inexpensive pitchers of craft beer. For shopping, Hemline, Billy Reid, and awesome screen printed everything from Storyville, Dirty Coast, and Defend NOLA.  Magazine has two “new school” Po’ Boy shops, Mahoney’s and Traceys, along with a classic oyster dive in Casamento’s. Try out Juan’s Flying Burrito if you’re interested in a punk rock Tex-Mex burrito bar, or Monkey Hill or St. Joe’s if you’ve seen enough hustle and bustle and just want a master-crafted cocktail. If you’ve brought your dog along (and who hasn’t?), Bridge Lounge will let your dog run around off the leash throughout the bar. The street is six miles long, so don’t try and walk it all. Pick a stretch, shop around, stop for a snack and a drink, then repeat.

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Another conversation about New Orleans restaurants currently simmering is whether newer restaurants that don’t have a “New Orleans” menu or feel are undermining New Orleans’ culture. This conversation, like any other that laments the forward march of progress, misses the point. Many of New Orleans’ newer restaurants are uniformly excellent. Domenica serves the best pizzas and pastas I’ve had in the South; Sylvain’s menu offers everything from braised beef cheeks to the “Chic-Sylvain,” a high-end take on the fast food chicken sandwich; a revamped Le Petit Grocery serves classics with flair; and there is nothing monosyllabic about the food at Pesche, Borgne, or Root. Rather than concerning yourself with whether these restaurants fit into the milieu of “New Orleans,” know that they are not only some of the best in New Orleans, but some of the best in America.

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My senior year in college, we made a commitment: visit the French Quarter once a week. Tulanians get jaded about the French Quarter quickly, failing to look past the bright lights, loud noises, and fanny packs, preferring instead the dark, cheap, and underage friendly spots closer to campus. But when the end is near, you start to see the Quarter with fresh eyes. You visit places like Chart House and realize there are smoky, cash-only dive bars that sell Schlitz. even in the Quarter. We learned about Coop’s a restaurant with the finest rabbit gumbo and excellent fried chicken, but where you can also play pool while you wait for a table. For more sophisticated moods, the W Hotel in the French Quarter (not the one on Canal) offers the best outdoor, courtyard drinking around.  You can’t beat the burgers at Yo Mama’s or Port of Call, and if you like a late night bump-and-grind party, then Goldmine will be rocking until they run out of ingredients for flaming Dr. Pepper’s. If you’re the type that likes to wander aimlessly without destination or goal, then start at the Canal end of Royal Street, have a drink at the Carousel Bar  in the Hotel Monteleone to prepare for your journey, and then walk all the way down to Esplanade. Return via Chartres Street. There are antique shops, jewelry stores, book stores, boutiques, and other purveyors of miscellanea for days. Enjoy your journey.

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New Orleans, New Orleans, you shabby bastard of a city. At the end of every trip I end up fleeing from you like a crime scene -- bloodshot eyes, splitting headache, crippling heartburn, and a nagging sense that I might not ever be the same. I’ve formed more memories in your neighborhoods than in any other place, remarkable considering how many memories never quite made it out of your morass of smoke and sin. While I’m not a “local” anymore, a large part of me will always think of you as home. I’d ask you to please show the people of Alabama a good time when they come for the Sugar Bowl next month, but I already know you have no intention of doing anything but.  

I asked some friends in New Orleans to send recommendations for places to go, or a particular story about a place that was worth telling strangers. I received this from my friend Andrew Ryba, and I am extremely pleased:

“The Kingpin is an excellent bar. The prices are decent, the jukebox diverse, the volume correct, the lighting just enough to make everyone look decent. The walls are mostly a tribute to hubcaps.

Several years ago, the ladies’ room at the back of the bar used to be a men’s room -- or at least bordered on unisex.  A painting of Satan hung on the inside of the door. It was tremendous. Bright red Satan holding up his tail, taking a shit, smoking a cigarette, a small teardrop rolling down his cheek. Bloodied toilet paper littered around him, a look of sorrow on his face. 

Last Mardi Gras, I was talking (ranting) to some strangers about the painting, mainly about how I missed it. At that moment someone walked by and said ‘I remember that painting,’ she then continued, ‘I remember that painting and I know where it is.’ I couldn’t believe it.  ‘Come with me.’ My new soul mate walked behind the bar, got a key, then headed to a back store room. She emerged seconds later, and had the devil in her dress. ‘Show me to your car.’ We walked out the front door of the bar and to my car. She put the painting in my trunk.  All I could offer her were Mardi Gras beads. She declined. ‘The thing about this painting,’ she sang, ‘is that someone tried to cover up the heroin needle that sits at his feet. But if you look close you can still see it.’

Also, Kingpin has shuffleboard and you can smoke cigarettes inside.”

ASF: Behind The Scenes at A Christmas Carol

WORDS  Jennifer Kornegay, PHOTOS Contributed ASF

No matter how many times you’ve read it, watched it on TV or seen it acted on stage, some of the final lines delivered by Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ timeless tale “A Christmas Carol” leave you feeling just as this newly reformed character does. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man.” When watching this scene at The Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the effect is particularly strong. You join Scrooge in his elation. You too are “as giddy as a drunken man.”

In the play’s last moments, and often long before, the “third wall” dissolves and there is no boundary between fantasy and reality, the fictional story and real life, as you and your fellow audience members are completely immersed in the world of the story, despite being firmly planted in your theatre seat.

ASF’s roster of over 30 actors for “A Christmas Carol” is impressive, and the holiday favorite is anchored again this year by Rodney Clark as Scrooge, always delightfully curmudgeonly in the play’s pivotal role. Yet as good as every cast member is, from local children portraying the hopelessly optimistic Tiny Tim, to the specters (including the Ghost of Christmas Future who utters not a word but speaks volumes of terrifying truth) who lead Scrooge on his journey, their talents alone can’t create the magical experience that is found at ASF. Behind the scenes is an army of equally talented folks working long, hard hours to find, invent, design, cut, build, paint, compose and otherwise make every element that you see on stage; they ensure all the pieces needed for the whole package come together, allowing you to lose yourself in another time, another place, if for only a few hours. So, like Scrooge, let us take a journey and discover what it takes to fashion the art and craft of “A Christmas Carol.”

Once Upon A Time – The Script

So much more than learning lines and practicing lines and skillfully delivering those lines goes into every ASF production. First, the lines must be written, so we’ll start at the beginning, with the words. “A Christmas Carol” was written in the mid-1800s by Charles Dickens, but while the production you’ll see at ASF is based on this classic story, it has been adapted by the theatre’s producing artistic director, Geoffrey Sherman.(He also directs the play, but more on that later.)

Sherman is a proper Englishman, and as such, you might think he grew up surrounded by Dickens work. You’d be wrong. “At least up to the point that I left England 30 years ago, there had never been a theatrical production of ‘A Christmas Carol.’ It was simply not a part of our theatre history,” Sherman said. Instead, the Christmas plays that were most often a part of English holiday celebrations were pantomime plays. “They consisted of lots of good music, some gags, and lots of interaction with audience,” he said.

So Sherman took the holiday productions of his youth, and wove their most pleasing aspects into his version of “A Christmas Carol.” “That’s why, in my version, Dickens is actually a character and has a presence on stage,” Sherman said. Dickens aids in the storytelling, interacting with the audience. Plus, there’s music and live magic. “These things really set this version apart from any other ‘Carol’ production. There’s humor, and it is entertaining in a way I don’t believe it has been before,” Sherman said.

Dress the Part – The Costumes

From the shoes on their feet to buttons on their coat, every detail of a character’s clothing is given attention at ASF, and the costumes used don’t come from some theatre super store. Most every item of clothing worn is designed and made in house, in ASF’s costume shop. Porcupine-like pin cushions; stacked spools of thread; headless, limbless dress forms; and more than a few pair of scissors fight for space in a room filled with bolts of fabric, racks of costumes from previous shows and the multiple pairs of hands busy drawing, cutting and stitching. Over the hum of sewing machines, Jeffrey Todhunter, director of costume production, explained how most pieces come to be.

“Each costume to be made starts in our costume designer’s mind, and then it is put on paper. Then our drapers create a pattern from the design drawings and the actor’s measurements. Next, the first hands cut the fabric as designated by the pattern, and then the stitchers begin to assemble it,” he said. 

Once it is complete, each costume is tried out a dress rehearsal, and they often get sent back to the shop for a few final tweaks. “Sometimes a skirt just doesn’t move right or a pair of pants isn’t functional for a certain scene,” Todhunter said. “Other times the fabric doesn’t look right under the stage lights; the color or texture looks off.”

Finishing touches like jewelry and shoes come from a variety of sources and, if not made from scratch, are often embellished or stripped down to arrive at “just right.” When we visited, plain straw hats were being fashioned into bonnets for some of “Carol’s” children, having their brims reshaped and ribbon added by Amy Johnson, one of ASF’s resident milliners. Wigs are also made in house in what can be a very time-consuming and delicate process.

Imagination Station – The Sets & Props, Lighting & Sound

In contrast to the low drone of sewing machines, the high-pitched whir of table saws fills the air in the scene shop, where carpenters and other workers cut and build the backdrops and other scenery required to transform the empty stage into a bustling London street, Scrooge’s bed chambers or a cozy Christmas party. Props like furniture, lamps, even tiny things like a pen or coins tossed to purchase a prize goose are period appropriate and procured or made by skilled theatre arts professionals. 

Lighting and sound are the intangible parts of the scenery. Lighting in a play is about far more than ensuring the audience can see the action on the stage. It draws attention to a certain character or movement at the crucial moment. It can change the mood from joyful to somber in a matter of seconds and does so masterfully in “Carol.” The fact that you don’t always notice the import of illumination is a testament to the true skill of the lighting designer and lighting crew. And while hearing the actors clearly is critical, sound engineering for a production is about more too. If there’s music involved, like in “Carol,” it adds an extra layer of drama to the story being acted out, and is perfectly timed for effect.

“Give Me More…” – The Direction

Sherman is directing “A Christmas Carol” this year, and during a short rehearsal he wasn’t shy about sharing his thoughts with his actors after a scene. “Too loud!” he said. “But good,” he added, a bit softer. “Now again.” But this part of the process is the culmination of months of directing work that have gone on with no actors involved.

Before he ever critiques or commends an actor’s work, he must first understand the play from every angle. “I immerse myself in the writing of whatever it is before I go into rehearsal. I try to enter that world that the writer creates,” he said. “Being good director is like being good detective, you are looking for clues along the path. The playwright is telling his story in a very specific way, and you as director must find the heart of their story so you can tell it in the way it was meant to be told. Good directors are those who can see it off the page.”

And Sherman has to go even farther. As producing artistic director for ASF, he is in charge of the business side of things in addition to the artistic, and this requires a delicate balancing act when he’s directing a show. “To direct well, I have to mute the left side of my brain; I have to focus on the art and tune out the money side,” he said. “If I don’t, I will automatically short change the size of the show, the entertainment value.”

Illusion Complete – The Curtain Rises

When the house lights go down, and curtain goes up to signal the start of “A Christmas Carol,” you’re almost instantly transported to mid-19th century London and meet your tour guide, Charles Dickens himself (played by Wynn Harmon). Can you smell hazelnuts roasting? Do you feel a chill in the air as the snowflakes flutter down? When The Ghost of Christmas Present sweeps on stage in his vibrant green robe, it and he seem to fill the theatre with a spirit of generosity that warms your heart. When Scrooge visits his own grave, the lighting, sound and other effects that accompany the scene are bound to bring on shivers. Every aspect of what you see and hear is as important as the other in making you feel something. That’s the magic of theatre, and thanks to the efforts of Sherman, the actors and the huge behind-the-scenes crew you’ve just learned a little about, you easily and happily buy into the illusion they present you.  

So as the actors take their last bow, when you’re standing and clapping and smiling, take a moment to think about the many, many people who are not on stage, but who poured their creative energy into the unforgettable evening you just had, folks like Paul Wonsek (set design), Phil Monat (lighting design), Beth Novak (costume design), Richelle Thompson (sound design) and Ruth Kramer (stage manager). Remember them and add an extra thunderous round of applause.

Get Your Tickets

ASF’s production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” runs now through cember 24. Ticket prices start at $30. Get them by calling 800.841.4273, visiting online at www.asf.net or drop by the ASF box office located at 1 Festival Drive in the heart of Montgomery’s beautiful Blount Cultural Park.

To Bid or Not to Bid? 

I don’t have to be the Ghost of Christmas Future to confidently predict that once you’ve seen “A Christmas Carol,” you’ll be in awe of the time and talent it takes to put on such a marvelous show, and you’ll be inspired to find a way to support our state theatre and all its artistic and educational endeavors. You’re in luck. The 11th annual ASF Armchair Auction is coming up on January 25, and is the major fundraiser for the theatre. Check out all the fabulous items that will be up for bid at www.asf.net and make sure you tune into the radio broadcast (on Mix 103.3 and other Cumulous stations) and the televised hour (on WSFA) on the big day and then bid, bid, bid!! You’re likely to get some great deals on things you both want (a stay at The Grand in Point Clear) and need (pet grooming and boarding), plus, since every penny raised goes straight to the theatre and its programs, you get the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing you’ve helped keep the art alive at ASF.

MADE Holiday Gift Guide

WORDS Anna Lowder & Tiffany Bell

A call to put our collective money where our mouth is, the MADE Holiday Gift Guide highlights this year's very special, and very local, gift ideas. Selected from makers, artisans and small businesses, this bunch features unique finds that honor the spirit of thoughtful gift giving. 

With three types of guides, we've included goods and makers working throughout the Southeast (and mainly in Alabama) that will thrill your friends and family who support creative goods. For good measure - and to level out the commercial mayhem the holidays can brew up - we've highlighted charities and organizations that need support and can offer great gift ideas too. Happy Holidays!

FOR THE STYLISH GENTS

Billy Reid Organic Cotton Socks by Zkano

Nothing says warm, fuzzy and stylish from head to toe like a pair of Billy Reid socks by Zkano. The two Alabama-based makers joined forces this season to bring stylish gents a limited-edition collection of organic socks knitted in Fort Payne, Alabama. Knot your average socks. $18; www.billyreid.com.

Stills Crossroads ‘Shine

Alabama’s first legal moonshine since Prohibition hit the stores this Fall and is flying off the shelves like White Lightning. Master distiller Jamie Ray (previously of Back Forty Beer Co. legend) has turned his chemistry skills to moonshine in Union Springs, famous for its secret stills and pure water. Jamie’s pure rye formula has lovely flavor and depth - ideally suited for bloody mary’s or hot cider toddies for the holidays. Hurry, this is almost impossible to find due to demand. Visit Montgomery area ABC Stores.

Wood Studio Lookout Mountain Rocker

This custom crafted woodwork studio was named Garden & Gun’s Made in the South Awards 2013 Overall Winner for its Lookout Mountain Rocker. Hand made with native woods such as walnut and cherry, the curving frame and hand-dyed leather hint at 50’s minimalism and sleek refinement made right here in Arley, AL. Made with integrity by Randy and his sons, Keith and Dylan. From $3,950; www.woodstudio.com.

Yellowhammer Creative

This Birmingham outfit creates inspired, often tongue-in-cheek printed matter spanning from t-shirts to posters. Give the guys you know a bit of street cred while sporting these hand-printed threads. For Birmingham or vintage lovers, there are fantastic industrial-aesthetic pieces that set Yellowhammer apart from the crowd. From $10 posters or $20 t-shirts; www.yellowhammer.org.

River Region Alternative Gift Fair

If you’re lucky enough to know some selfless men - or those who have all they need - honor them with a gift from the first annual Alternative Gift Fair. Saturday, December 7 at Huntingdon College’s Cloverdale Campus, 24 charities and organizations will assemble  so “shoppers” can buy “gifts” from these groups to give to their friends and families. Instead of another item for the shelf, these gifts will fund specific needs of the nonprofit—for example, the shingles for a Habitat for Humanity home or one night’s shelter for a homeless family. Your beloved gent will receive a card recognizing the donation in his honor. Gifts from $5; Fair is Saturday, December 7 from 10am - 2pm. www.givehoperiverregion.org.

PHOTOS: Contributed Billy Reid, High Ridge Spirits, Wood Studio

FOR THE SOUTHERN TRENDSETTER

Alabama Chanin Organic Cotton Scarf 

Alabama Chanin founder, Natalie Chanin, designs world-renowned textiles from small town Florence, Alabama. All of Natalie’s pieces are hand-sewn by local artisans using recycled or organic fabric and materials, including this 100% organic cotton jersey scarf. Choose  from one of 45 colors options and the perfect length (short 72” or long 108”) for countless ways to wear and layer for $40. Or give the gift of Handmade Holiday with the DIY Anna’s Garden Tree Skirt. $168; www.alabamachanin.com.

Cotton + Quill Coco Pillow and Holiday Collection Flat Notes

Birmingham-based collection of stationery, papers and textiles designed and custom-made by Mary Catherine Folmar. With punchy colors, bold designs and a variety of fabrics, her textile collection features great gifts like this Coco 22” Pillow in Emerald color way for $166. Also worth noting: Cotton + Quill’s hand-illustrated stationery. The Holiday Collection comes complete with 8 flat notes and equally artful hand-lined envelopes. $33; www.cottonandquill.com

Anchor & Daisy Statement Necklace

A Martha Stewart Living 2013 American Made Award nominee, Andrea Marty makes and sells her one-of-a-kind pieces right here in Montgomery (look for her pieces at Hue Studio, Welle Studio, ML Bailey Clothing & Accessories and Naked Art Gallery.) Her eco-friendly jewelry line of cuffs, necklaces and earrings is created from found branches and salvaged wood. She’ll love this statement necklace in pine green, berry red and emerald. $36. Also available this month, limited-edition wooden gift tags and handmade Christmas tree ornaments. www.anchoranddaisy.etsy.com

Catherine Brawner Handcrafted Jewelry

Take a little piece of home with you everywhere you go. Catherine Brawner hand-forms each “Alabama” charm necklace right here in Montgomery (now available as a sterling silver holiday ornament.) Necklace $30; ornament $15. Find these and this season’s new designs at Hue Studio, Goathill Museum Shop or www.catherinebrawner.com 

Aid to Inmate Mothers Donation

Help comfort and reunite children with their incarcerated mothers in her honor with a donation to Aid to Inmate Mothers (AIM.) AIM non-profit provides incredible services to Alabama’s incarcerated women and their children through monthly visitations, storybook tapings, reentry programs, family outreach and child sponsorship programs - all to enhance personal growth, provide much-needed support and strengthen family bonds. Make a donation in her name online or donate staple items for children from the AIM wish list. Visit inmatemoms.org for details and easy donations.

PHOTOS: Contributed Alabama Chanin (Robert Rausch) and Cotton + Quill

FOR THE SERIOUS FOODIE

McEwen & Sons

Located in the quaint community of Wilsonville, AL, Frank McEwen founded his corn-grinding business to embark on a healthy diet of organic foods and whole grains. The stone burr grist mill churns organic corn into delicious cornmeal, grits, and polenta that’s touted on the menus of the Southeast’s most gourmet restaurants. Order a bag of yellow grits or popcorn - perfect for stringing around the Christmas tree. From $3.95; www.mcewenandsons.com

Phickles Pickles

This Athens, GA company pickles local carrots, asparagus, jalapeños, green tomatoes, beans, and the ever popular - okra. The secret is in their “liquid gold” pickling juice - spiked with dill, garlic and jalapeño for a flavor that is out of this world. Sold in specialty shops throughout the Southeast, or can grab your jar online including mix-and-match sampler packages. Perfect for your friends who love a good martini. From $42; www.phickles.com

Belle Chèvre DIY Cheese Kit

Screw the gift box: give a gift that is literally a box. A do-it-yourself box with all the how-to on making your own cheese from scratch. This is possibly the least intimidating way you could ever make cheese; simply add milk to the kit and 10 minutes of active kitchen time. They also sell a Kid Kit! Delight your food-curious friends who’ve always told you how much they want to live on a farm. From $27.95; www.bellechevre.com

The Bang Candy Company Marshmallows & Syrups

Give the gift of fluff this season from this artisan, all-natural marshmallow company “specializing in candy for the discerning palette.” We’re talking Rose Cardamom and Chocolate Chili flavors, with reviews that the confections taste like  “swallowing God in velvet pants!” New in for the holidays: hot chocolate on a stick, holiday simple syrups, and Sparkle Bark - pink and dark Belgian chocolate with sparkles and pop rocks. From $3.50; www.bangcandycompany.com

Montgomery Area Food Bank

While the cult of handmade jams and heirloom pork rinds is great and all, there are many in our community who do not have enough to eat. In our area, 22% of all individuals live in poverty. Worse, 30% of children - 1 in 3 - live in poverty. Help our fellow neighbors living meal-to-meal by donating to the Montgomery Area Food Bank. They serve over 300,000 in need and donate over 20 million pounds of food annually - to children, seniors, emergency food pantries, and mobile operations. Give online at www.montgomeryareafoodbank.org.

PHOTOS: Contributed McEwen & Sons, Phickles Pickles (Terry Evans), Belle Chevre, Bang Candy Company (Brett Warren

MADE Previews: Interpreted Architecture

WORDS Caroline Taylor

Oliver Michaels, Gamaliel Rodriguez and Harvi Sahota utilize individual approaches to architecture as a vehicle for narrative or story. Interpreted Architecture is the inaugural exhibition at Made Gallery.

Artist Spotlight: Gamaliel Rodriguez
Influenced by both his years spent in the military and his native Puerto Rico (particularly the 1950s industrialization of the island, “Operation Bootstrap”) Gamaliel Rodriguez executed his series Dark Thoughts while in residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York. Other works in the series are currently on view at the Museum of Puerto Rico.

The paintings – from viewpoint of an aerial photo or surveillance video, give clear image of a situation, but relay misinformation about what is actually happening in the image. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ rhetoric of semiotics, architectural elements imagined and created by the artist act as clues, but the story is completed by the viewer with his or her personal references and experiences – eliciting a state of nostalgia and obscurity in the work.

With an MFA from Kent Institute, UK, Gamaliel’s works have been shown internationally including Galería Espacio Minimo, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, Arnhem, The Netherlands; Sandbekkstua, Raelingen, Norway. His work is included in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, and Comunidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain.

Interpreted Architecture is the inaugural exhibition at Made Gallery. Oliver Michaels, Gamaliel Rodriguez and Harvi Sahota utilize individual approaches to architecture as a vehicle for narrative or story.

November 7 from 6-8pm, Opening Reception of Interpreted Architecture.
Oliver Michaels, Gamaliel Rodriguez, Harvi Sahota
Curated by Caroline Taylor
MADE Gallery, November 7 - 21, 2013, The A&P, 505 Cloverdale Road, Unit 102

MADE Thanksgiving: New South Holiday Sides

WORDS Anna Lowder

Turkey is fine and all, but let’s be honest here: you like Thanksgiving for the sides. I said it. That bird is average at best, but those mounds of mashed potatoes, piles of skillet corn, bowls of sautéed greens… well, those are worth writing about. Some would say even worth traveling across country for every November.

To honor the proud tradition of the Thanksgiving side dish, we’ve elevated its standing to The Crucial Component of the holiday meal. The comforting starches, fresh vegetables, and sweet casseroles are what make memories for most of us. Thanksgiving sides are what keep us, literally, coming back for more each year.

MADE reached out to our favorite local chefs to find out their beloved dishes. Chefs Wesley, Leo and David - they each jumped at the opportunity to share some old family recipes or restaurant best-sellers. All feature seasonal and local - the best way to savor this festive fall holiday.

I’ve also added a MADE Reader Favorite. We reached out to our readers via Facebook & Instagram for their favorite holiday sides. The favorite is featured here, updated with a contemporary Southern slant.

MADE Reader Favorite: New South Waldorf Salad

This 1890’s classic holiday staple was born in New York’s Waldorf Hotel, created by Oscar Tschirky, the famed maitre d’hotel. Traditionally composed with apples, celery and walnuts, I’ve updated the century-old recipe with this New South version.

Livened up with southern apples and radishes, this seasonal rendition also throws local pecans and blue cheese into the mix. The result is a bright side dish that wakes up the palate, perfectly complimenting your turkey and cranberry sauce. Throw chopped turkey in for a delicious leftover.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup pecan halves
3/4 cup greek yogurt
2 tablespoons minced fresh flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons minced fresh chives
1 T lemon zest, finely grated
sea salt & freshly ground black pepper
2 large crisp red apples
1 cup red grapes, halved
2 stalks celery (with leaves), sliced into 1/4” thick pieces (leaves chopped)
1/2 lemon, juiced
1 bunch fingerling radishes, sliced into 1/4” thick pieces
1 cup blue cheese, 1/2” pieces (sweet grass dairy asher blue or similar)

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degree F. Place pecans on a baking sheet and toast 8-10 minutes. Cool and break into small pieces.

2. Whisk yogurt, herbs, lemon zest in a large bowl and season to taste.

3. Halve, core, and cut the apples into 1/2-inch chunks, leaving the skin intact. Add apples, grapes, celery, radishes, and lemon juice to dressing bowl and toss. Cover and refrigerate if not serving immediately.

4. When ready to serve, stir pecans and small blue cheese chunks into the salad. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Oyster Rockefeller Stuffing: True Montgomery

Chef Wesley shares his version of Thanksgiving stuffing. Drawing on his seasoned knowledge of Gulf seafood (Wesley is one of the prominent chefs featured in the national Gulf Seafood campaign), he creates a classic oyster stuffing in place of the more conventional Southern cornbread dressing. The oysters had a briny, unexpected flavor that matches well with the mildness of turkey.

Ingredients:
1 pint shucked oysters
4 T pistachios chopped
1 T Tarragon chopped
1/6 cup parsley chopped
1 pound bread (or 10 cups packed & cubed bread)
2 cups sautéed spinach
1 cups raw onion
1 cup celery chopped
8 cloves garlic chopped
½ t nutmeg
4 T butter
2 large eggs
½ cup chicken broth
½ cup oyster juice (from pint)
½ cup Parmesan
¼ cup white wine
1 T salt
½ T black pepper

Method:
1. Toast cubed bread in oven 15 minutes at 350˚ til golden brown

2. Place butter in medium hot pan. Add onions, celery, garlic and sauté for 4 minutes

3. Deglaze pan with oyster juice, chicken stock & white wine. Add oysters and cook 2 minutes

4. In a bowl, combine this sautéed mixture with parsley, tarragon, bread, beaten egg, Parmesan, nutmeg, salt & ground black pepper

5. Transfer to casserole dish and bake 40 minutes at 350 until golden brown, or stuff into turkey and bake for a traditional stuffing.

Gambas al Ajillo with Fall Squash & Sweet Potato Risotto: Central

Chef Leo brings his Panamanian heritage to the table, combining traditional Thanksgiving fare with new bold flavors. Saffron, garlic, Spanish paprika and lemon wake up root vegetables, while risotto and Catalan-style shrimp offer a bold replacement for rice and gravy.

Risotto ingredients:
½ t saffron threads
fresh thyme
fresh parsley
fresh rosemary
½ onion chopped
1 clove garlic minced
2 T butter
1 cup EVOO
1 cup cubed acorn squash
1 cup cubed sweet potato
2 cups of butternut squash puree
2 cups Arborio rice
½ cup white wine
1 qt chicken or vegetable stock
¼ cup Parmigiano Reggiano

Method:
1. Peel and dice acorn squash and sweet potatoes to ¼” pieces. Set aside.
2. In a medium sauce pot, bring 4 quarts of salted water to a boil and drop squash and sweet potatoes in for 4 minutes. Remove from water and place in an ice water bath until thoroughly cooled. Reserve.
3. Place wine and saffron in a small pot over low heat and begin to “bloom” saffron.
4. Melt butter and 2 ounces EVOO in a saucepan over medium heat. Add diced onions and garlic. Cook until translucent and add rice. Continue cooking and stirring until the rice begins to brown.
5. Pour saffron-infused wine over rice, stir and cook until evaporated. Add enough chicken stock to cover rice, stir and cook until liquid is reduced. Repeat this process 2 more times and add diced acorn squash, sweet potato and butternut squash puree.
6. Hit the risotto one more time with chicken stock, reduce completely.  Season with sea salt and pepper to taste and fold in fresh minced herbs. Sprinkle liberally with Parmigiano Reggiano.  

Shrimp ingredients:
1 lb fresh Gulf shrimp
4 large cloves of garlic, shaved
1 shallot shaved
1 t sweet Spanish paprika
1 t red pepper flakes
3 oz bourbon (traditional recipe calls for cognac)
4 oz EVOO
3 t fresh parsley chopped
1 lemon for juice

Method:
In a sautee pan, bring olive oil to temp over medium heat. Add garlic, shallots, paprika, red pepper flakes. Sautee for 1 minute, then add shrimp.  Sautee shrimp until firm, pour cognac and lemon juice over shrimp and sautee for 2 to 3 minutes. Reserve for plating over risotto.

Sweet Potato Goat Cheese Dip: Acre

Since we’re breaking all the rules, here’s another curve ball. Why not invite a spread or “dip” to your holiday table? Chef David Bancroft shares his sweet and tangy recipe - an ideal replacement for tired sweet potato casserole, if you dare. Brightened with local goat cheese and bacon, this pairs with bowls of green beans or biscuits. Not brave enough? Serve as an hors d’ouevres with sparkling wine as family arrives.

Ingredients:
1 large baked & peeled sweet potato
¼ cup honey
3 T sugar
2 t kosher salt
1 t ground ginger
1 t fresh black pepper
½ t cinnamon
6oz cream cheese- room temp
6oz Belle Chevre goat cheese
1 cup crispy chopped bacon
1 cup chopped toasted pecans
½ cup minced green onions

Method:
1. Bake the sweet potato wrapped in aluminum foil until completely tender. Remove the potato from the foil then peel and discard the skin.
2. While the potato is still warm, place in a mixing bowl and add the honey, sugar and spices. Mix ingredients into the potato using a large fork until completely smooth.
3. Add the softened cream cheese and goat cheese to the potato mix and fold together - careful not to over mix. 4. Place the dip into a serving bowl and top with bacon, pecans and green onions. Allow the dip to cool before serving. Serve with favorite crackers.
 

McAlpine Tankersley Architecture: Analog In A Digital World

WORDS Brent Rosen 

Butcher shops, artisanal pickles, urban agriculture, craft beer, millinery -- at best people view these as charming anachronisms, at worst as the domain of the silly hipster.  But 50 or 60 years ago, meat came from the butcher shop (“I’m like Sam the butcher bringing Alice the meat”), all pickles were “artisanal,” agriculture did not mean factory farms, most beer remained regionally, if not locally produced, and hats were still made by hand and sold to stylish people of both sexes. It’s not just work, but our culture that has been outsourced to foreign lands or computerized to the point that no human element remains.

In our rush to maximize efficiency and computerize everything, we have certainly made progress. But progress is not always progressive, and some boons are sordid. The return of the butcher shop, urban agriculture, local beer and the like feels somewhat transgressive, as if it is taboo to buck the trend of the high-efficiency/low cost model. Some of the pleasure that comes from shopping at the farmer’s market -- beyond meeting the farmers and the sense of community you get when you know where you food comes from -- is that in truth you should not be there. It would be easier, cheaper, to just buy your tomatoes at the grocery store. You feel like you’ve broken the rules when your tomatoes come from a blue-haired old lady who lives outside Clanton.

In that same spirit of rule-breaking sits the architecture firm McApline Tankersley. For the past 30 years, the firm founded by Bobby McAlpine has refused to be pushed into the high-efficiency, low cost model.  The first thing I noticed after walking in the door of the McAlpine Tankersely offices was the absence of computers. Ok, that’s a lie. I knew a little about the architecture firm, had heard off-hand remarks about the firm’s use of hand drawings, heard that the cost of those drawings was quite high. Computer aided drafting is the norm in the architecture world. The computer helps you draw straight exact lines, assists in developing drawings with the proper proportions, allows for easy correction of mistakes and saves the architect countless hours crouching atop a drafting table. In truth, I looked for computers when I walked in the door, ready for rumors to be confirmed or dispelled. Anyway… there are almost no computers in McAlpine Tankersley’s Offices.

According to Chris Tippett, a McAlpine Tankersley architect, the firm’s choice to draw by hand is both “happenstance and purposeful.” It’s happenstance in the sense that the principals of the firm prefer to draw by hand, and therefore ask their employees to work in their preferred medium. But it’s also purposeful. John Sease, the other architect I spoke with for this story explained that “there is a tactile nature to the drawing part of it that makes it easier and more real than it would be just a line on a screen. It’s a romantic thing. Even a modern house has romance to it. That romance gets lost in a computer drawing.” While hand-drawing architectural plans results in a substantial increase in cost, McAlpine Tankersley believes the value of hand-drawing makes those costs worthwhile. Apparently, so do McAlpine Tankersley clients.

Now, clever reader, you may be wondering how an analog architecture firm can find suitable employees in a digital world. University architecture programs are fully computerized for the most part, with learning to draft by hand  akin to learning Latin: It’s fine as an exercise in the humanities, but has limited practical application. Tippett explained that even though hand drawing is becoming a lost art, students still learn to hand draw if they take advantage of study abroad programs. “Study abroad programs don’t use computers -- they have a sketch book and they are out drawing,” Tippet said, and it is during these abroad programs that students have a “first experience being able to look at something, to figure out the proportions on a piece of paper.” Tippett thinks that once you start drawing by hand, you are inspired to draw more. One need not be a great artist to draw by hand, but someone with an eye for drawing can put art into their drafting. Or, as Sease put it, “The technique, the quirks, each individual’s drawings are like each individuals handwriting.”

McAlpine Tankersley’s quest to find qualified young architects is aided by the firm’s relationship to Auburn. All but three of the firm’s architects in the Montgomery office attended Auburn, and many of them were actually taught by Bobby McAlpine himself. While McApline no longer teaches, Auburn’s study abroad program -- where students get their first taste of hand drawing -- is directed by Scott Finn, whose partner works for McApline Tankersley. This pipeline helps McApline Tankersley identify potential interns who can draw, who have a good work ethic, and who have promise. Often, those interns end up becoming full-time employees.

Bobby McAlpine has a favorite saying, something he impressed upon his students and stresses with his colleagues: “Why it is is what it is.” This simple aphorism drives the firm’s entire approach. During early interviews with clients, it is the architects job to figure out the “why.” A client says, “I want a large dining room so that I can regularly host dinner parties for at least 12 people.” The why -- entertaining -- leads to the what -- a dining room sufficient to graciously host parties. Start with the dining room table. If you want to seat 12 people, how large must the room be accommodate a table of that size? What size windows are proportionate? How high must the ceilings be to create the feeling of grandeur the client desires? Is the dining room sufficiently important to this client that it can serve as the heart of the house? Should the entire home revolve around this room, or would the client prefer a living room in that role? If the dining room’s dimensions are X, what dimensions will the remaining rooms need to be in order for the entire house to have the proper proportions? These are the “why” questions that make the house “what” it will be for the client.

One thing all McApline Tankersley projects share, regardless of individual clients’ desire, is a grounding in classical architecture. McApline Tankersley pulls from Europeans influences, whether English, French, or Mediterranean, but then puts a modern gloss on those classic forms. History creates a base and informs the finished product, no different than how a guitar player must learn the chords before its possible to jam. Using classic structures and forms as a base makes it easier for the firm’s architects to solve problems. There are dozens of books of classical architecture in the firm’s library and sprinkled throughout the office, and the architects can look back to the past to see how a current problem can be solved.

Sease explained that each unique project shares some common problems. “Every house must have a kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, and each house has its own heart and soul. That said, you still need to figure out where the sink will go, where the shower will go, and how all the rooms will interact.” Another frequent problem results when a client’s wish list includes “laundry rooms, mud rooms, dog rooms, home gyms, etc.” and “the tail begins to wag the dog” according to Tippett. Adding all of these rooms requires the proportions of classic architecture to be stretched, and then the architect must to figure out how those rooms will interact with the necessaries. Often, people will live in a home for a year and realize they use the home completely differently than they thought they would upon moving in. The architect’s job is to learn about the client, determine the client’s style of life, and then help the client edit their needs in order to avoid that sinking, one-year-in feeling.

In a similar fashion, architects can use design to determine how their projects will interact with the community at large. Tippett talked about a development in Atlanta where each house is built along a huge common green. Each house shares its “yard” with its neighbors, and this builds a sense of community impossible to create when fences and privacy are the primary concern. This sense of community inspired Tippet when served as lead architect on the A&P Loft project. Tippett designed the A&P to have a pedestrian environment with shopping, communal spaces, and numerous areas that everyone -- tenants, home-owners, random passersby -- can use. At the A&P there are balconies that look out onto a common courtyard so you see your neighbors. In the old days, before air conditioning, neighbors would sit on their porches and their stoops to avoid the heat trapped in their dwellings. Neighbors could visit, gossip, chat, laugh, and get to know one another. Tippett tries to design projects like the A&P to bring that community interaction back.

“We are still learning from things we knew a long time ago, but that we forgot,” Tippett said.  Winding streets that go nowhere, people isolated from each other on huge lots, communities where no one speaks to one another -- these are modern inventions. Before the suburb, before the highway system, back when the home was your castle, not a castle, you had interactive neighborhoods. While residential architecture can only do so much to encourage this interactivity, Sease told me that in meetings with clients they often ask their clients to think communally, and not to build residences that could double as fortresses.

After speaking with Tippett and Sease, I got the sense that the firm does things the old way if that method remains the best way. When cabinets are installed in the homes they design, the architects ask the carpenters to paint the cabinets on site. If the cabinetry is painted in a box in the carpenter’s shop, it looks like a car -- high gloss finish, totally fake. The carpenters will often argue, “’but if we hand paint the cabinets, they will not have a consistent finish,’ but that’s exactly what we want” Tippett explained. A rough, textured, uneven finish lets the homeowner know that the cabinets weren’t  simply machined along with thousands of other, identical, pieces of wood and metal.

And that goes back to the hand drawings. McAlpine Tankersley stands against the notion of, as Sease put it, “the machine does that… why are we worried about it?” Computers and industrial processes can make everything in life fast and easy, but at a certain point, it all becomes cut and paste. Computers and mass manufacturing make it easier to be lazy, to ignore differences in conditions and to apply the same solution to every problem. Hand drawing forces McAlpine Tankersley architects to view each project as unique, to solve each design problem based on the individual project’s unique conditions, to put sensitivity and soul into every set of plans.  Although it’s not the cheapest or easiest way to design houses, hand drawing performs a beautiful bit of alchemy: it takes engineering and turns it into art.

PHOTOS  Courtesy Mick Hales, Kris Kendrick, Tria Giovan, Jean Allsopp, Erica Dines, mcalpinetankersleyblog.com

SFA Annual Symposium: Christmas in October for Foodies

WORDS & PHOTOS Caroline Rosen

Consider the okra. The word originated in Nigeria, where abundant varieties of the vegetable grow freely. Not native to the American South, had West Africans never been forcibly brought to the United States as slaves, okra would not be served in every restaurant from New Orleans to Charleston. While we use the Nigerian word for okra, in other Bantu languages the vegetable is known as “kingombo.” Unsurprisingly, the vegetable stew that makes great use of okra goes by the name “gumbo.” The history of okra cannot be decoupled from the history of slavery.
           
If you found that last paragraph interesting, then you will love the Southern Foodways Alliance. The SFA is a group of academics, chefs, food producers, food writers, and food lovers who study and celebrate Southern Food and Southern Culture. SFA calls Oxford, Mississippi home, based at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The organization’s mission: “set a common table where black and white, rich and poor — all who gather — may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.” SFA uses food as the starting point for conversations about culture, race, gender and religion in the South.
           
Alabama features prominently in the history and leadership of the SFA. The organization was founded in Birmingham in 1999, and dinner at Highlands Bar and Grill was the SFA’s first act after its founding. Frank and Pardis Stitt of Highalnds Bar and Grill have served on the SFA board of directors at various times, and Jim ‘N Nicks BBQ Restaurant provides enormous financial support for the organization.
           
SFA’s biggest event of the year is the symposium, held in and around Oxford, Mississippi annually in October. The symposium features speakers from across the United States who discuss different aspects of Southern food and Southern culture. For instance, a few years ago a speaker discussed a specific species of mirliton (or chayote squash) that grew in backyards in New Orleans. For decades, people in low-income areas of New Orleans grew mirliton in vines that wrapped around the chain-link fences of their backyards. The fruit grew prolifically, meaning neighbors constantly shared extra with neighbors, making slaws, salads, and seafood and breadcrumb stuffed mirliton during holidays. The mirliton was part of the fabric of life for these communities.
           
Then came hurricane Katrina, flooding New Orleans and drowning all of the the backyard mirliton. After the storm, communities in New Orleans tried to re-introduce mirliton, but the Costa Rican variety brought to New Orleans failed to grow. Researchers determined that the pre-Katrina backyard mirliton had evolved to grow in the rough, shallow, wet and often contaminated soil of New Orleans. The new varieties, coming from Costa Rica, were acclimated to rich, tropical soil, having never been forced to develop the ability to grow in unfavorable conditions. Today, almost 10 years after Katrina, mirliton remains a casualty of the hurricane. While mirliton initially seems like a fairly limited topic, this lecture made it clear that an important part of New Orleans food culture was lost, and was likely never coming back.
          
In addition to the lectures and speakers, the SFA symposium features food. Lots of it. Chefs from around the United States are asked to prepare meals for lunch, dinner, and a Sunday brunch to close the symposium. These meals have become a competition among the chefs, each trying to outdo meals cooked at the symposium the year before. The winners are the attendees, who have enjoyed dishes such as boiled peanuts and edamame from Chef Edward Lee of Louisville, a 12 course barbeque lunch made entirely of vegetables from Chef Ashley Christianson of Raleigh, North Carolina, and a brunch featuring squid-ink pasta from Alon Shaya of New Orleans, Louisiana.
           
This year, the SFA is celebrating “Women at Work,” and women will do all of the speaking, cooking, and presenting at this year’s symposium. Although tickets for the event have already sold out, MADE will be there covering all of the talks and all of the food. Check our website regularly between October 4 and October 6 for updates.
For information and SFA memberships, visit www.southernfoodways.org.

Interpreted Architecture

WORDS  Caroline Taylor 

ARTWORK Courtesy Oliver Michaels, Square in Square Series, 2013 

Oliver Michaels, Gamaliel Rodriguez and Harvi Sahota utilize individual approaches to architecture as a vehicle for narrative or story. Interpreted Architecture is the inaugural exhibition at Made Gallery.

Artist Spotlight: Oliver Michaels
Oliver Michaels, whether working in film, photography, or sculpture, creates structures that combine documentary and fantasy, resulting in objects or interactions that are impossible or irrational. The composite buildings in his most recent series, A Square in Square (above), shot primarily in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, lack windows and doors, or general function. Train pulls the viewer through a series of unconnected interior spaces – a dislocating journey in which narrative is clear but story undefined. A Journey Between Two Fixed Points glides from one unrelated interior or exterior to the next in an elegant rotation.

Holding a BA from Central Saint Martins in Fine Art, Oliver’s works have been widely exhibited at venues including Cole Gallery, London; Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld, Germany; Tate Britain, London; and P.S. 1, Long Island City, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Kreferlder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld, Germany.

Join us on November 7 from 6-8pm for the Opening Reception of Interpreted Architecture.

Interpreted Architecture
Oliver Michaels, Gamaliel Rodriguez, Harvi Sahota
Curated by Caroline Taylor
MADE Gallery
November 7 - 21, 2013
The A&P, 505 Cloverdale Road, Unit 102

Rob McDaniel: Food Invader

WORDS Brent Rosen   PHOTO SpringHouse, contributed

The idea came from my sister. We were talking at the bar at True, she working, me drinking, when she said “doesn’t Rob kind of look like the Capital One Vikings from the commercials?” Why don’t you make something up about that.” Interesting, I thought - a profile as historic fiction.  I went home, poured a tall glass of Weller, and came up with the following:

“Rob McDaniel keeps a cluttered war room. Crumples of balled-up loose leaf strewn about the floor, the script so small you can barely make out words like “prosciutto,” “padron,” and “porchetta” among the folds. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of cookbooks: lining the bookshelves, stacked on the floor, some piled in a heap on the table, now used as a makeshift armrest. An apothecary cabinet bulged in a corner, its haphazard drawers of cumin, curry, coriander, cast jagged shadows in the low light coming through the room’s only window. In the middle of it all, a map. And over that map hulked McDaniel.

There, in the map, Montgomery, beckoning - the prize of the River Region. McDaniel plotted for days in his stronghold on Lake Martin; he strategized, worked through plan after plan in his mind. This would not be Rob’s first invasion. In February 2012, Rob invaded Kitchen Stadium, ready to do battle with the culinary worlds keenest warriors. McDaniel used his secret weapon - Alabama Peach Moonshine - to help Chris Hastings unseat Bobby Flay, the “King of Sausage.” That invasion was successful, but Rob knew not to rest on his laurels. Montgomery would produce unique challenges all its own.”

That’s as far as I got before realizing fiction is much harder than fact.

“Actually, that’s pretty accurate. Especially the part about the clutter. I like it” Rob told me, laughing, after I asked him to read those two paragraphs.  Rob is an old friend, and someone I’ve written about at least a half dozen times for various publications and websites. I’ve interviewed him about the Front Porch Revival, Lambstock, winning Iron Chef, and opening Kowliga, as well as about various dishes served at SpringHouse, his restaurant on Lake Martin. I was hoping he’d hate the idea of Rob McDaniel, Food Invader - Rob bearded, in furs and horned helmet, ready to raid. I wanted him to get into “aw shucks” mode, turn a little red in the face, and tell me the Food Invader idea was cool, but too much. Unfortunately, He didn’t.
           
“Well, I’ll probably hurt myself if I try to extend that metaphor any further than a couple of hundred words, so maybe we need to turn this into a more traditional newspaper piece.” I admitted, not wanting to figure out another dozen clever puns, another hand-full of alliterative descriptions.
           
“No problem,” Rob told me, maybe a little disappointed, “where do you want to start.”
           
Realizing that all of my prior interviews concerned only Rob’s role in a particular event, I thought this interview could be different. More in depth. I realized I had no idea when he graduated college, where, or if, he attended culinary school, where he first worked in a kitchen. I told him “let’s begin at the beginning”.
• • •  
Rob started working in kitchens while still at Auburn University. First at Ruby Tuesdays, then at Auburn’s chef incubator, Amsterdam Café. After his time at Amsterdam, he knew he wanted to be Chef, so Rob changed his major to hotel and restaurant management, and prepared himself for the graduate program at the Culinary Institute of America. Then, something unexpected happened -- The New England Culinary Institute (NECI) in Vermont offered him a spot in its program.
           
Rob left Alabama for New England, but only made it as far as the mountains of Tennessee before he panicked. “I got really nervous,” Rob said. Imagine Rob -- before any accolade, before any accomplishment, before he’d cooked with anyone of note -- doubled over on the side of the road, breathing hard, feeling smothered by the haze drifting down from the Smoky Mountains. What if I fail? What if I have to turn around and go back to Alabama with my tail between my legs? What if no one likes me? What if I make no friends? I’ve never been outside of the South, what am I doing going to Vermont? Don’t the girls there have hairy armpits? Do I even want to do this? If you haven’t been there before, you haven’t lived right, and that moment forced Rob to make a choice. Be comfortable, or be the best that he could be. Rob chose the latter.

Shortly after arriving in Vermont, Rob realized his fears were unfounded. The people were great, he made lasting friendships and enjoyed his time in Vermont immensely. NECI taught him the skills of a chef, the techniques he would rely on for the rest of his career. He also learned he was a good cook, at least as good as his classmates. Upon graduation, confidence built, Rob left Vermont for Birmingham ready to show everyone back home his hard-learned culinary skills.

After returning to Birmingham, Rob spent time cooking under Chris Hastings at Hot and Hot Fish Club, and then several years at Jim N’ Nicks before Russell Lands brought him to SpringHouse. SpringHouse features an open kitchen, allowing guests to watch Rob and his team at work. The first thing you’ll notice: Rob’s calmness, his near serenity in the kitchen. Activity whirls around him, chefs performing the complicated dance of prep, to stove, to finishing, but all the activity purposeful. There is economy in the kitchen Rob runs, no wasted movements, no extra processes, no unnecessary steps. Part of that is experience, but the rest is personality. He has the look of a raider, but the temperament of a yogi.
• • •
 I asked Rob why he agreed to participate in the Food Invasion at EAT South’s Hampstead Farm at the end of October, and his answer bordered on riddle. “Alabama is in the moment,” he told me. Puzzled, I asked, “um… could you maybe elaborate a bit on that?” Rob further explained, “we are at a moment where we are on the fence. We can keep going as a food state, continuing to climb upward, or we can roll back down the hill into a rut.” For years, Alabama food had two names, Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings, and those two carved out a path leading people outside of Alabama to see our food scene as more than barefoot people eating boiled vegetables. Rob believes that as a younger chef with a growing profile, it is his job to keep clearing the path forward, to continue the work of Frank and Chris, making sure that their hard-won achievements aren’t swept under the rug, forgotten.
           
This need to keep clearing the path, to keep pushing the boundaries of Alabama food forward makes Rob EAT South’s perfect partner for the Food Invasion. Rob already challenges himself to make certain the ingredients he uses are the finest and freshest available. While everything can’t be local -- for instance there isn’t a local producer of duck, or rabbit, or chicken -- Rob makes sure to use local, seasonal produce as frequently as he can. Rob buys vegetables direct from small farmers, and he picks figs and pears right from the trees of folks who live around Alexander City.  Rob’s foraged for mushrooms in the woods and used hand-picked edible flowers in dishes at SpringHouse. The EAT South dinner will make Rob’s ingredient quest easy: every vegetable served at the dinner will come right from the farm.
           
I asked about the menu, and Rob coyly referred to it as a variant on “Surf and Turf.” What, I asked, do you mean by variant? While Rob remained evasive, it sounds like the “Surf” portion of the dinner will be Gulf seafood. As far as “Turf,” think things that grow in turf, and not animals that graze on turf. Rob wants there to be some mystery to the dinner, so anything more concrete about the menu became an off-limit topic. Rob would say he intends to do much of the cooking on open coals in a pit dug close to the dining area, and that the entire idea of cooking without a kitchen presented an excellent opportunity to explore other, rustic cooking methods. Rob says he looks forward to cooking for Montgomery out under the stars, and those fortunate enough to have a seat at the table should prepare for a night of expanded expectations and culinary truth and beauty.
• • •
On the day I interviewed Rob he had just returned from Charleston, where he cooked in a “Young Guns” dinner fundraiser for the Southern Foodways Alliance. The dinner had been silent-auctioned at Blackberry Farms during “Taste of the South,” and the winning bid was somewhere pretty close to the federal poverty line. At the seated dinner for around 70 people, Mike Lata and Sean Brock -- two luminaries on the national food scene -- served Rob’s food. “It was pretty awesome” Rob undersold. He’d come a long way from Ruby Tuesdays.

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Photo: KBK Photography

Oktoberfest Round Up

WORDS  Anna Lowder, Brent Rosen

Google “Oktoberfest” and you’re sure to find the usual suspects: damsels in dirndls and blokes in lederhosen, braids and brats, steins, pretzels and kraut. And while I’m certain our readers have few objections to most of the above, Oktoberfest can have an air of tongue-in-cheek cliché about it. So before you turn your nose up at the Lowenbrau-ness of it all, take a second to consider the history of the festival.

Sixteen days dedicated to celebrating beer in Bavaria. The sheer enormity of that much revelry is laudable. Add to it that Oktoberfest (running late September through the first weekend in October annually) is the world’s largest fair with over 6 million participants in Bavaria alone, and you’ve got yourself a party.

Montgomery is not ever going to have 6 million people at an event. That being said, there are still plenty of ways to celebrate Oktoberfest Southern style. Here are our picks of the best and most unique upcoming Oktoberfest events.

If you had to guess the oldest building in Montgomery County, you’d probably say a church. Good guess, but you’d be wrong. It’s actually a tavern. Lucas Tavern, on N. Hull Street in Old Alabama Town is the oldest building in Montgomery County, and on Friday October 4, come out and celebrate the spirit of the old tavern at Tavernfest. There will be craft beer and wine tastings, music from The Goat Hill String Band, tavern-style food, and games for the childrens. Everything is set up in a courtyard behind the Tavern; tickets are $10. If you want to go all-in, for $125 you can purchase a “Porch Pass” that will give you and ten of your friends your own private porch on the courtyard, along with a table, chairs, and great views for the concert. All proceeds benefit the Landmarks Foundation. Octoberfest, restored buildings, and historical stories - this sounds like the recipe for making a Montgomery episode of “Drunk History.” I’ll call Comedy Central, you just go to Tavernfest.
Gates open at 6pm, band starts at 7pm. For info call 334 240 4500. Proceeds benefit Landmarks Foundation and help bring more school children to learn about history at Old Alabama Town

Putting their usual spin on the celebration, El Rey and Leroy join forces tonight selling their famous chorizo dogs (house-made pork chorizo verde and vegan chorizo, no less). Live music with three bands - Eleven Year Old, Koko Beware and Burning Itch - is on the cards, and select Oktoberfest beers at both locations.
For info visit burritolounge.com

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is hosting its second annual Art In Concert featuring two renowned up-and-coming bands, The Banditos and St. Paul and the Broken Bones. This event was a massive success last fall, so don’t miss these great musicians on their tour through Montgomery. A gorgeous outdoor setting (chairs and lawn blankets welcome), original music, and food and drink available for purchase … sounds like a great night to us.
Tickets are $10 in advance, $15 at the door and are on sale now at www.mmfa.org/museumInformation or call 334 240 4348.

Don’t let your furry pal miss out on the German fun. Bring your wingman along to BarktoberFest where you can both enjoy the great outdoors at Hampstead. This 3rd annual event features live music, a “Hot Dog Bar” and dogs of all shapes and sizes frolicking in The Tipping Point’s Beer Garden. Proceeds benefit the Montgomery Humane Society. Thursday 17th, 6-9pm, tickets $10 at the door. Weiner dogs obviously encouraged, just for the sheer fun of it.
For info call 334 260 9110.

Kung Fu Kicks, Cold Beer & Billion Dollar Ball Clubs

WORDS Will Steineker

Word is you don’t like soccer.  It probably has something to do with all of those faux-European hipsters who go out of their way to call it football.  It doesn’t help that they’re usually wearing skinny jeans while they rant about how much you should like their version of the game.  The worst part is how the condescension just oozes out of them as they look down their noses, right through their conspicuous glasses, and chirp about how “you just don’t get it.” 

Word is you don’t like soccer and that makes perfect sense.  After all, soccer’s just a bunch of pansies and pretty boys running around playing a child’s game.  Nobody ever scores.  Games can end in a tie.  You can’t even touch the ball, for God’s sake!  The fact of the matter is that soccer’s a sport for seven year olds, and sports for seven year olds are not real sports.  It’s a game played by children and wannabe male models.  Real men don’t play soccer.  Real men play American sports.  Real men play real football, not that hot pansy nonsense.

And every single bit of that may be true.  But before you decide to consign soccer to the wastebasket reserved exclusively for soft sports played by soft people who do soft things, consider the events of the evening of January 25, 1995.

It was a damp, chilly night in South London when Manchester United forward Eric Cantona was ejected from his team’s English Premier League match at Crystal Palace.  He was tossed for blatantly kicking a Palace defender and was headed back to the locker room when a Palace fan named Matthew Simmons made his way to the front row to toss a couple of insults in the visiting player’s way as he made his way down the tunnel.  It seems Simmons was no fan of the forward, a fact he made known by shouting a few choice words Cantona’s way while insulting his nationality.   Cantona, a proud Frenchman with an often-volatile temper, had just spent the last ninety minutes running at full speed while taking cleats to the shins and elbows to the face.  As such, he didn’t appreciate what the home team’s supporter had to say.  He registered his dissatisfaction by launching himself from the field, kung fu kicking Simmons in the chest, and punching him in the face.

Think about that. 

A professional athlete kung fu kicked another team’s fan in the chest and punched said fan in the face, and he did so after exerting more energy in an hour and a half than the average person goes through in a week.  In most countries, that kind of assault gets you arrested.  In the UK, it made the Frenchman a god.  That night, Cantona went from mercurial professional athlete to the nation’s most famous celebrity.  His endorsements exploded, his jerseys sold out, and his next contract was a record breaker.  Still think your favorite football player’s a hard ass?  Think again.

Listen, that hipster who’s always talking about how everyone else in the world calls it football may very well be insufferable.  Nobody’s going to argue with that.  Still, there’s a very real chance he’s actually onto something.  It happens to be that soccer’s played by tough guys in top physical condition, and it turns out soccer fans are notorious for their passion and intensity. And nowhere are the players tougher and the fans more intense than in the English Premier League.  Here’s the skinny on how it works:

The English Premier League (the EPL or, alternately, the Premiership) is made up of the top twenty teams (or clubs) in English soccer, and it works in a manner that’s pretty easy to understand.  Each team plays thirty-eight matches, with each match lasting ninety minutes (plus a few extra minutes added onto the end of each half to make up for any stoppages in play due to injury).  Each club earns three points for a win, while a tie (or draw) gets you one point and a loss gets you none.  The points are tallied at the end of each season, and the club with the highest points total wins it all.  It’s that simple. 

In a twist that might seem amazing to the average American sports fan, the bottom of the EPL’s standings are even more interesting than the top.  The three clubs with the lowest points totals at the end of the season are sent down to the Football League Championship (a professional division that can best be described as the AAA baseball league of English soccer) in a process known as relegation, while the League Championship’s top three teams are promoted to the Premiership.  Relegated teams miss out on the massive revenue that’s shared among the top flight’s teams, while promoted teams get a cash infusion that can change their trajectories for years to come.  And while there are a few traditional league powers who consistently remain in the top tier of English soccer (London clubs like Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham Hotspur come to mind alongside powerhouse sides from industrial towns such as Liverpool and current league champions Manchester United), there’s a parity that’s created by the struggle to remain in the Premiership that gives every single one of the season’s 380 games the sort of meaning that you just won’t find in your average week twelve matchup between the Buffalo Bills and the Cleveland Browns.

The Premiership’s rules of the road certainly offer an interesting twist or two, but the truth is that rules don’t make fans. No, fans need teams.  Fans need teams because nobody cheers for a league.  Fans need teams so they can buy shirts, learn chants, and talk trash.  Fans need teams so that they can properly live and die with each and every weekend’s results.  Premiership fans, referred to as supporters, understand what it is to do all of those things in a way that can challenge the faith of even the most fervent American football fan.  In fact, EPL fans are so ardent that sold out stadiums are the norm and pubs across the UK are packed on game day with supporters sporting their team’s colors as they drink beer and sing songs in support of their most beloved players.  And those are just the guy and gals watching in the UK.

Over 2,700,000,000 people in 212 countries watched the EPL last season, making it easily the most followed professional sports league on the planet.  The question of fandom is one that’s decided at birth for most Britons, but fans around the world have the privilege of choosing for themselves.  Which begs the question of which teams you should consider when choosing your side.  It’s a tough question, but the good news is that we’re here to help you make what very well may be the toughest, most important decision of your sporting life.  Here goes nothing...

Are you a fan of teams that have been good for so long that finishing second is unacceptable even if it means everyone else hates you (Manchester United) or do you prefer scrappy underdogs with a ton of oft-unrealized upside (Arsenal)?  Speaking of underdogs, how do you feel about hopping on board with one of the teams that were just promoted (Cardiff City, Crystal Palace, Hull City) and are looking to make top-tier soccer an engagement that lasts longer than just a year?  Perhaps you’re the sort of person that has a taste for eccentric owners (which means you’re probably a Dallas Mavericks fan).  How about a side owned by a Russian billionaire (Chelsea) or a Sheik from Abu Dhabi (Manchester City), both of whom spend money like crazy while enjoying their fair share of time in the tabloids?  No?  Maybe you need an American connection.  What about team that’s owned by the same guys who own the Boston Red Sox (Liverpool) or the Jacksonville Jaguars (Fulham) to ease yourself into your newfound fandom?  Or maybe you’re just looking for a way to cheer for American players abroad (Aston Villa, Everton, Stoke City, Sunderland, Tottenham Hotspur).  No matter your angle, the fact of the matter is that the only issue you’ll have when choosing an EPL club to support is narrowing it down to just one.  Just take your time, do a little research, and remember that the cheering’s the thing.  You can’t make a wrong decision.

If you’re still reading, you’re probably interested in finding out how you can give this whole Premier League thing a shot.  The good news is that watching EPL games in the US has never been easier.  This season’s action kicked off on August 17 and will run through May 2014, with the every single match being carried live on the NBC family of networks.  Comprehensive online coverage is available through the Premier League’s website (premierleague.com), the BBC (bbc.co.uk), and ESPN FC (espnfc.com).  But watching the Premiership’s biggest matches is a communal experience best enjoyed while sharing an adult beverage or two with a few dozen of your team’s biggest supporters. Give Hampstead’s The Tipping Point or Cloverdale’s Bud’s a shot if you’re looking to have a beer as you cheer for your boys alongside your fellow fans.  Once you’ve decided where to watch the game, all you need to do is sit back and enjoy the experience.  It’s big, it’s loud, and it’s strangely familiar.  Matches flow beautifully and the crowd practically tells you when to cheer.  It helps that NBC’s announcers are among the best in the business.  So grab a beer and cheer your face off, folks.  Give it enough time and you’ll fall in love.  Give it a little more and you might even find yourself buying that condescending hipster a beer when you finally admit that he was right all along.  That’s not so bad, really.  After all, there are worse fates than having to admit you were wrong.  Just ask Matthew Simmons.

A Gentrification As Preservation: Previewing The Landmarks Foundation Cottage Tour

WORDS Brent Rosen  PHOTOS Jon Kohn

The welcome mat in front of Rich and Christy Anderson’s house says everything you need to know about the Landmark Foundation’s upcoming cottage tour: “Sometimes I feel like I’m the Only One Trying to Gentrify this Neighborhood.” This is not a tour of mansions for the unattainably wealthy. Instead, every house on the tour was bought by someone willing to see opportunity in a neighborhood where others only saw blight. The homeowners in these areas weren’t worried about whether they knew, or even had anything in common with, their neighbors, and were willing to take a chance in order to create something beautiful. Fortunately for everyone in Montgomery, on September 29, you will be able to share in that beauty.

Scott Finn and Charlie Caldwell live in the beautiful hacienda-style home on the corner of Girard and Felder. While the outside looks like something from the old west, the inside is European influenced Southern beauty. Scott teaches architecture at Auburn, and you can tell from the details in his home. Look for the armoire/head board in the rear bedroom, the candle chandelier on a pulley in the dining room, and the re-purposed set from the Shakespeare Festival Scott and Charlie use as a screen to block their fireplace during the summer to make their living room feel cooler. This is just one example of how Scott and Charlie live seasonally, changing the layout of their house from Winter to Summer.

Dr. Susie Paul found beauty in a concrete, mid-century modern home in Historic South Hull. Susie has lived there for the last five years, continually collecting period appropriate pieces at flea markets and antique stores to complete a thoroughly unique home. Originally, the home was built by a concrete maker as a part of a series of display homes, but now Susie’s house is one of the last ones left. Susie severs as President of the Historic South Hull neighborhood, and she loves the fact that White, Black, Latino, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Rich and Poor all call Historic South Hull home. While we walked through her home, looking out through the enormous windows that run the length of the house’s southern face, Susie explained that a neighborhood like Historic South Hull forces you to understand people that are different from you, and makes you learn how to get along with others you might never otherwise meet. Historic South Hull is an example of diversity that works, and everyone that lives there is better because of the experiences shared with neighbors.

On Plum Street in the Highland Park neighborhood, Emily Burge has rebuilt a 1910’s home from the ground up. Originally created by a builder that owned the entire block, Emily’s house was originally built identically to the house next door. Over time, each house has taken on a character of its own, as different owners expanded and contracted until the houses no longer no longer share much of a resemblance. The most impressive thing about Emily’s house isn’t the homes age, but that Emily has renovated everything in the house on her own. She has redone floors, built and stained bookshelves, and even wallpapered the ceiling of her house in order to restore  period detail that had wilted over the decades. Emily praises her neighbors and the sense of community she feels when neighborhood children on their walk to school stop and visit with her as she sits on her porch.

 In Capitol Heights, Rich and Christy Anderson rehabilitated a home from the 1910’s with near perfect attention to detail. The wood paneling, exposed beams, antique floors and high ceilings are pure old South, while the Ikea kitchen, modern bathrooms and well-appointed study bring their home into the present. The Andersons have an amazing heart of pine table in their kitchen they repurposed from a wall they tore down during the house’s renovation. That is the beauty of old homes -- if it was built in the 1920s, everything in it was built to last. The walls, the windows, the doors, the floors: everything in that house is a good today as it was 100 years ago.

That quality of construction is what separates the neighborhoods being redeveloped from the neighborhoods currently in development. Montgomery’s original neighborhoods have been around for over 100 years, and with owners willing to put in a little time and effort, those neighborhoods could still be around in another 100 years. While gentrification may have negative connotations in other places around the country, in Montgomery, it’s not so much gentrification as preservation. We have an amazing stock of historic properties in this town, and right now many of them are falling apart. Take the tour of homes, talk to the homeowners, and see that living in a historic neighborhood isn’t dangerous or crazy, but an investment in Montgomery’s past that will preserve our unique historical heritage for the future.

The Landmarks Foundation Cottage Tour takes place on September 29, 2013. Visit their website for more details.