For seventeen years, Dennis Donegan shopped on behalf of the glamorous residents of Oakdale, Illinois, a cadre of fictional characters whose shenanigans have been enthralling daytime t.v. audiences for the 54 years As the World Turns has been on CBS. On September 17, that World stops in its axis, after the last episode airs, victim, as are all daytime soaps, of cable t.v.‘s myriad options and viewers’ changing tastes.
When the cancellation of the show was announced early last winter, Donegan and others in the cast and crew were given the opportunity to buy the props that for decades had been persuading viewers that Tom and Margo, the Snyders, Lucinda, and assorted friends, enemies and neighbors were enviably rich and stylish.
Now Donegan and his wife Martha have opened a shop, Donegan’s Done Ag’ins in Amenia, where they are selling the props from As the World Turns. “In the early years, they bought lots of antiques, good lamps, a practice I was able to continue to a degree, so at the final prop sale, I acquired plenty of quality stuff,” says Dennis. “But as the audience shrank, so did our budgets. Still, we had to keep up appearances. So I got good at spotting inexpensive items that, with a little work maybe, could pass for expensive.”
Dennis Donegan’s eye is so good and his choices have been so unfailingly persuasive that he has been nominated eleven times and won five Daytime Emmy Awards for Set Decoration. Though the taste level at his store is consistently high, all levels of quality are represented in the merchandise. The Donegans make no attempt to palm off cheap reproductions and Pier 1 imports as the real thing. In fact, they delight in playing a version of “Where’s Waldo?” with visitors. “See if you can pick out the item that came from Home Depot,” Martha, a graphic designer who worked in fashion in New York, challenges a visitor. This reporter, ostensibly someone with a measure of expertise in these matters, was genuinely stymied. Even after Martha revealed the identity of the item, it was still impossible, even upon close inspection, to accept its humble origin.
Before joining the show, Dennis Donegan, who has a degree in interior design from LSU, studied decorative painting at the fabled Isabel O’Neil Studio in Manhattan, then taught there for many years. While there, he began freelancing for As The World Turns, filling in for one of the set decorator’s occasionally, and eventually they offered him a job. His training in trompe l’oeil is why it’s impossible to spot the Home Depot item; as needed, Donegan messes around with the pieces he buys until they look suitably aged and of high quality. This is a practice he intends to continue at the shop, where the back room will serve as his atelier.
Presently, the front of the shop is charmingly crammed to the rafters with a mere fraction of the props Donegan acquired at the sale. His stash will roll out in waves, as the stock from the previous wave gets snapped up, which it is bound to do quickly, as the prices on all the items are beyond fair. Meanwhile, Donegan will continue to shop for his store as he has for the past seventeen years with those stylish residents of Oakdale, Illinois and CBS’s tight budget in mind. He claims that it disciplines his choices to buy for “real” people and “real” rooms. Even though, of course, everybody (sort of) understands that they were just actors mouthing lines and meeting marks on a sound stage. “A set might play for many years, then get scrapped,” says Donegan. “Later we’d reuse the props somewhere else, but, inevitably, some viewer would write in to ask, ‘Why is Tom and Margo’s quilt in one of the Snyder’s guests rooms?’ ”
Donegan’s Done Ag’ins
3324 Route 343
Amenia, NY
845.789.1331
Thursday - Saturday & Monday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Or by appointment
Petria May, a former New York City lawyer who now lives in Great Barrington, has a somewhat incompatible passion for country living and chic city clothing. For the past seven years, she has reconciled these divergent interests in a series of high-end vintage clothing stores, beginning with a shop on Route 44 in Norfolk, CT, and then a boutique by Rubi’s cafe in Great Barrington, which she closed last spring. Now, she is reconciling her return to part-time lawyering with a new pop-up shop at FACE Stockholm, the makeup boutique, on Warren Street in Hudson.
Selling and buying clothes professionally evolved from necessity. “I used to sell a lot of my personal clothes to consignment shops in New York City,” she says. “I would become easily bored with my clothes. When I opened my first store, I sold a lot of my own things.” A devotee of Belgian designers like Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten, she is drawn to “architectural and experimental clothing,” and she likes nothing more than putting together old pieces in new ways. “What makes me different than other vintage shops is my personal styling advice,” she says. Petria plans to be on the floor at FACE Stockholm every Saturday, helping women (men’s wear may come later) combine, say, a 1970s Bill Blass black-and-white tweed maxi skirt ($200) with a vintage Diane Von Furstenberg black-and-white wrap blouse ($58)—a look that she does not consider retro but fashion forward. “My approach to vintage is always with an eye to tomorrow,” she says. “I see vintage as my way of putting my finger on what’s coming next.” Does she consider what she sells investment dressing? “I think you can! It’s not fast fashion—and I love fast fashion—but I sell pieces people will keep in their closets for a long time.”
FACE Stockholm co-owner Martina Arfwidson (left with Petria), whose mother started the makeup company in Sweden more than 25 years ago, is thrilled that Petria will lure new customers into her airy corner store. “I’ve been a customer of Petria’s for a very long time,” says Martina, who just happens to be wearing a vintage Mila Schön sleveless trench dress that she bought a couple of years ago from Petria. “I think she will bring a new energy to the retail environment. We don’t have a display window here, but at my stores in Rhinebeck and SoHo we always add an artistic element. Petria’s clothes will bring a playful, colorful element into the store. The only problem is that I like what she has so much I may be her best customer.”
In the very beginning 25 years ago, there were mostly crafts and gift items. “And lots of dried flowers!” recalls Hammertown Barn owner and founder Joan Osofsky, grinning and wincing at the memory of mid-1980s country style. “We had quilting and stenciling workshops, too.” When she opened a shop in the barn next to her house on Route 199 a mile east of downtown Pine Plains, she was looking for a way to help support her family that was consistent with their new rural life. She and her now-ex-husband were both 40 years old, and they had tired of living in suburban New Jersey. “We were seeking a life change,” explains Joan, whose husband yearned to work with his brothers at the family’s Ronnybrook Farm Dairy in Ancramdale.
A former school teacher, Joan is a self-taught merchandiser and stylist with the soul of a community organizer. “There was no grand vision or plan 25 years ago,” she says. Her son, Gregg (photo right with his mom) was in sixth grade, and her daughter, Dana, was in eighth grade, and she knew the family could not live on their share of profits from Ronnybrook (which had not yet started selling milk in glass bottles at the New York City Greenmarkets.) “I spent $10,000 to fix up the barn—there were still horse stalls in one half—and $5,000 on inventory,” she recalls. “I also ran a bed and breakfast in our house to get our cash flowing.”
In fact, her pets led her into the upholstered furniture business in 1998. “I had a five-year-old sofa, and the arm was fraying because that is where my dog rested his head,” she says. “I went to Pottery Barn and other stores and could not find appropriately sized slipcovered sofas with good style.” She discovered that the North Carolina-based Mitchell Gold Company made affordable slip-covered furniture that she thought was perfect not only for her home but for her customers’ homes, too. “You had to place a minimum order of $25,000,” she recalls. “I nearly choked when I wrote that check.”
Joan can be found most days behind the register at the Pine Plains flagship, which keeps her intimately aware of her clients’ needs and desires. “My goal has always been for locals and people just visiting for the weekend to feel comfortable and inspired,” she says. “I am drawn to things that are beautiful, usable, affordable, soulful. You can always find a $10 gift here, and I think we are the easiest place in the world to buy a baby present.” With its chockablock arrangements of ottomans, rugs, pillows, coffee table books, toys, jewelry, candles, glasses, cookware and gadgets, Hammertown is a dry goods store with a modern rural flair. When did she realize that Hammertown had come to represent the Hudson Valley/Berkshires aesthetic? She pauses. “I’m just beginning to feel that now,” she says.
Her son, Gregg, a tech-savvy activist and Stanford graduate who has lived in Brooklyn but is always drawn back to Pine Plains, has come home to work with his mother to keep Hammertown vital and relevant. “I believe we can grow but without having to open more stores,” says Gregg who paid attention to Hammertown’s books even as a teenager. (His sister, Dana, left with their mother, also works at Hammertown.) Joan is clearly comforted and inspired by her children. “Gregg is the one who said we had to build an online community on the Internet,” she says. “He’s the one who said we could only do e-commerce if we created a niche, curated experience because we cannot compete with the big retailers and catalogs.”
Celia McGee, a journalist who has been spending weekends in Goshen, CT, for many years, reports from the fairgrounds:
Her opinion of the fair-program cover is favorable—“wait, there’s a poster?! T-shirts?!”— because “it shows good technique,” she said. “The chips are flying off, and Harvey and I have good form.” The man in the middle is Mark Bovat, a judge. Shannon and Harvey competed together first, got married later. “I figured if we could Jack and Jill together, we could be together,” she said. She also toured with 
The Festival theme this year, Books That Changed My Life, emerged some months ago when the writer Susan Orlean, posting on Twitter, posed the question, “What book changed your life?” and received tens of thousands of replies citing everything from math textbooks to the Bible, classics to contemporary fiction. Orlean, who lives in Gallatin, will be keynote speaker at the festival, one of twenty distinguished authors, including Ann Hood, Madhur Jaffrey, Sally Helgesen, and Emily Arnold McCully who will conduct presentations, readings and/or book signings. Orlean, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of, among other books, The Orchid Thief, will be interviewed at noon on Saturday by the author Sheila Weller. The topic: the tweet that turned into a phenomenon. 
Rural Intelligence bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes:
Times have changed. I still feel that French fries are incomplete without ketchup, but I sense that America’s love affair with the condiment has faded somewhat. Marketing firms focused on the increased influence of Hispanics in America have proclaimed that ketchup is no longer king of American condiments, having been supplanted by salsa. (It turns out that salsa’s triumph is only in the dollar value of its sales. The absolute volume of ketchup sold still exceeds that of salsa, and three times as many families use ketchup in a week as use salsa.) In New Orleans, I’ve seen t-shirts that slyly poke fun at ketchup enthusiasts, proclaiming: “I put ketchup on my ketchup.” 
Etymologists and cooking historians tell us that the term ketchup derives from east Asia, but the details of that origin are a bit obscure. Calvin and Audrey Evans Lee’s “The Gourmet Chinese Regional Cookbook” says that the term derives from the Chinese words for “brine of pickled fish.” Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s “Chinese Kitchen” reports that it may come from a very specific concoction on the island of Amoy, a combination of fish essence and soy sauce called “keh chap”. Some on-line dictionaries report that ketchup derives from a Malay word. 
In the past few years I’ve particularly come to value cucumber ketchup. I came across the recipe for it in The White House Cookbook, by Mrs. F.L. Gillette, an invaluable reference library components for anyone striving for a high-quality, 19th-century lifestyle. Originally published in 1887, we have the 1889 version published by L.P. Miller & Co (Chicago, Philadelphia and Stockton, CA), and the early pages are so dog eared and disconnected (we keep that part of the book in a plastic sleeve) that I can’t really tell if the recipes purport to come from the White House. I think not. From the portion of the preface I can read, it seems these are just recipes tested by Mrs. Gillette over a 40 year period until she established to her satisfaction that they invariably succeeded and were the best of their kind. She did, however, dedicate her book to “the Wives of Our Presidents, Those Noble Women who have Graced the White House, and whose Names and Memories are dear to all Americans.” The updated versions of this cookbook, from what I can see on Amazon.com, do have actual White House recipes, but I think mostly what the original version had was pictures of the various first ladies and a misleading title.
“Take cucumbers suitable for the table; peel and grate them, salt a little, and put in a bag to drain overnight; in the morning season to taste with salt, pepper and vinegar, put in small jars and seal tight for fall or winter use.”
My new ketchup for this summer is plum ketchup, which the 1960s’ American Regional Cookbook I inherited from my mother says is a traditional condiment with meat and poultry in the Pacific Northwest. I made my first batch with our Shiro plums. I left it boiling a little too long, turning it into a paste rather than the flowing consistency you’d associate with a ketchup, but I am very pleased with the taste. I think I can save it by mixing the paste with a little vinegar and water to achieve the desired consistency when I’m ready to use it. This week I’m trying our tiny little wild American plums, which are not very good eating (they go from bitter to bloopy very quickly, and to my mind resemble in flavor and texture very large Delaware or Catawba grapes). But I have the sense that they will make an interesting ketchup—that is, if I keep my eye on the boiling pot.
The Mount, writer Edith Wharton’s magnificent property in Lenox (executive director Susan Whistler, at right), was the scene on Wednesday August 25 of a party celebrating the release of an audio book, Edith Wharton on Audio, Vol. 1, three stories by Wharton read by Shakespeare and Company’s Jonathan Epstein (The Winter’s Tale), Tod Randolph (Richard III) and Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Tara Franklin (The Guardsman). The project is a collaboration between The Mount Press and Berkshire Media Artists (BMA Studios). Why a mid-week celebration? So contingents from five theater companies (Shakespeare & Company, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Barrington Stage, WAM, and the Wharton Salon) could attend. 
Crave boasts not just one, but three 
The food, décor .and atmosphere embody what Kowalski desires in a dining experience: “With Crave, I wanted to create an intimate, romantic restaurant, serving City-caliber food, where I could take my wife to dinner.” 
Main dishes are well-executed, if a bit hearty for the summer season. The pan-roasted duck (right), toothsomely tender and pink inside, with perfectly crisped skin—comes with a creamy mash of polenta, topped with foie gras and Swiss chard ($28). While tasty, the wild striped bass, served with a too-crunchy ratatouille of summer squash, artichoke hearts, haricots verts and an overabundance of green and black olives, didn’t quite hang together ($25). 
Crave famished. My husband opted for the pork tenderloin (left). First cooked sous vide (in vacuum-
He worked at the Inn at Wicopee in Hopewell Junction (it has since closed), then switched to catering in 1999, when a friend, then owner of 
Despite “the neighborhood”, Lola’s, which serves freshly made sandwiches, panninis, soups and salads, was an instant success. Kowalski, who had originally anticipated running the entire catering and café operation himself, now has a dozen employees at Lola’s. 