Charity Robey

Sara Mundy, the bravest shy person you'll meet.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on July 26, 2019

Sara Mundy grew up on Shelter Island, graduated in the Class of 2009, and spent the next decade studying and living in New York. She traveled around the world for work, including a European tour with a pop band playing keyboard and vocals.

But when older sister Melissa went into labor at their parents’ home on the Island and gave birth to a son, Marshall, a day later on August 6, 2016, Sara was right there.

Having worked as a nanny for many years, Sara knew about taking care of infants. Experience with the process that connects gestation with a fully-diapered baby — that was another thing. “At first I thought it was the scariest thing I’d even seen, and then that it was amazing, Melissa is so strong,” Sara said. “I love babies, but I don’t know if that’s for me.”

She was born during Hurricane Bob, on August 20, 1991. Her father, Mike Mundy, is a captain on the South Ferry where he’s worked for almost 30 years, including on the August day when Sara’s mother, Rebecca, urgently needed to get to Southampton with the hurricane bearing down.

“She was very happy that the ferries were running,” Sara said.

The Mundys are a large, close family geographically and emotionally. Sara and Melissa were the first two of five, followed by Michael (Zack), Megan and Nathan. Rebecca has three sisters, and two of them live on Shelter Island. Mike has two brothers, one who lives here full time.

There are many cousins, and all are regarded as first in a family where no one is second or once-removed. When the clan gathers on Crescent Beach every year for the fireworks, a festivity that involves weeks of planning, at least 30 people come to a party that starts at sunrise, involves grills, and ends with the fireworks.

Sara graduated in a senior class with 21 others, at least three of whom are still on the Island, and all are expected to return for the 10-year reunion in August. “As a group we all really got along and loved each other,” Sara said. “Not too cliquey. A good size.”

Musical training started around 5th grade and included alto sax and piano lessons. She persuaded her parents to give her piano lessons by listening in on her older sister’s lessons with Uncle Pee Wee, (Alexander Mitchell) and obsessively reproducing every note until they had no choice but to arrange lessons for her, too.

Band teacher Keith Brace and chorus teacher Phyllis Power were important influences and helped Sara develop a lovely and versatile alto voice. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a music teacher, work in choral/band or if I wanted to perform,” she said. “I always loved to sing.”

She participated in the school musicals, including “Les Miserables” in the 10th grade, playing Fantine. “I loved all the songs I got to sing,” she said. “That production was really special.”

She went to The American Musical and Dramatic Academy, a two-year conservatory program in Manhattan, in October 2009 and graduated in 2011. Working as a nanny, and auditioning in New York for roles in musical theater, put Sara in an endless cycle of hope and rejection that could not be sustained. One day her roommate told her she thought Sara had the talent and temperament to perform in a band, and soon Sara was on Craigslist looking for a band that needed a new member.

“That’s how I found Starlight Girls,” she said. “It was one of the first ads I saw for a female keyboardist and back-up musician.”

She sent the band a video of herself singing “Over the Rainbow,” and soon was on Morgan Avenue in Bushwick for an audition, where everyone walking down the street seemed to be carrying a guitar. The band members came from a variety of musical backgrounds, their sound defined by the unique and specific voice of the lead singer. Sara, who loves working musically in a group, wrote and performed harmonies and played keyboard.

While continuing to work as a nanny for a supportive and flexible family, Sara toured with Starlight Girls, including to Texas for South by Southwest and a show in Budapest before an audience of 7,000 people. But Starlight Girls’ lead singer was ready to move on, and the band stopped performing together in 2016.

“I don’t regret any of that time,” said Sara. “It was mine to do whatever I wanted to do.”
She’s been back on the Island for over a year now, and began working at the Senior Center as assistant to the director a few months ago, determined to raise awareness of the many services they provide.

“The Senior Center is a special place that goes unrecognized,” she said. “Out here, if you need help, you will get help. We try to take care of everybody.”

This summer, Sara’s been singing three nights a week, mainly solo gigs at Isola and at the Halyard and Brix & Rye in Greenport. She teaches six piano students a week, in addition to working at the Senior Center five days a week.

Sara’s solo gigs show off her beautiful voice and the breadth of her repertoire — the Sara Songbook — but she has a strong preference for singing with other people. In March 2018 she and Southold native Isabel Alvarez formed the Island Bells, singing together as they have since they were kids. They’re performing on August 2 at the Winetasting fundraiser for the Senior Center, and on August 19 at Brix & Rye in Greenport.

“There is something about this place. I wanted to be here,” she said, and gestured to the mature trees that tower over the entrance to the Senior Center. “We’re sitting in a parking lot and … this is just beautiful. I felt like I needed to move to the city to have a performing career. Once I realized I could make it work and be home it all clicked for me.”

Lightning Round

What do you always have with you? A guitar pick.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? Crescent Beach.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Paris.

When was the last time you were elated? When Marshall was born.

What exasperates you? Rude people.

When was the last time you were afraid? I was on a flight with really bad turbulence. I was O.K. until I heard the flight attendant – who was about to retire after 30 years – say it was the worst they’d ever seen.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? The day of the fireworks.

Favorite movie? ‘Arrival,’ with Amy Adams.

Favorite food? Roast chicken.

Most respected elected official? My grandfather, Alfred Kilb

Island Profile: Esther Hunt, holding onto things that truly matter.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Esther Hunt

 

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on April 4, 2019

From the floor-to-ceiling windows, in every room of Esther Hird Hunt’s home, the view of Dering Harbor is breathtaking. But the first thing that catches the eye is a 9-foot-tall avocado tree growing in a large pot.

“My mother planted that avocado from a pit,” Esther said. “I took it over in the late 1960s and kept it going since. It must be more than 70 years old.”

Esther is the 95-year-old matriarch of a family that doesn’t part with things, whether avocados or islands.

Her grandfather was Samuel Hird, a mill owner from Passaic, New Jersey, who bought over an acre of Dering Harbor waterfront property in 1913 and built a home that stands today.

She grew up in Passaic, but every summer of her childhood was spent in the house her grandfather built, and she couldn’t wait to get here. “I loved the smell of the creek at low tide,” she remembered. “I didn’t like it for the perfume, I liked it because I knew I’d arrived.”

After her grandfather died, and the house went to her father and his siblings, the family devised a plan to share it. “My family and my Uncle Henry’s family had it in July and August, because of school,” she said. “My aunts were maidens, so they had it in June and September.”

During World War II, so many people fought overseas, including Esther’s brother and her cousin Robert Hird, that employees for the family’s business were scarce. Esther operated the switchboard at the mill, commuting to work every day with a chauffeur provided by her father. She resolved to go easy on the chauffeur, who needed a break from driving her mother around.

“Her back-seat driving drove him nuts, so I sat there with my knitting in my lap and didn’t look up,” Esther said.

By the end of the war, Esther had graduated from Vassar and longed to see the country. The office manager at the mill had a daughter with a similar inclination, and joined by a classmate, the three young women drove west in August 1947 in a convertible Esther borrowed from her brother.

On the road, they quickly settled into a routine; “We’d drive until we found a place to spend the night, check into a motel, unscrew the motel’s 25-watt light bulbs and screw in our 100-watt bulbs, get out typewriters and write up our adventures for the day. Then we went out to supper.”

In Chicago, they visited the stockyards, “We didn’t eat bacon for a couple of days after,” she said.

They crossed Iowa, drove north through the Canadian Rockies, and west again, through northern California and down through the state. Along the way, they adopted a cat, which was subsequently shipped home to New Jersey.

Just before she went west, she was introduced to Bridgford Hunt. “I had given him an address to write to me,” Esther said. “I remembered he said that he couldn’t spell and that he came from a place in England where there is a bridge and a ford. I thought he was very nice. When I got the letter and saw that the “e” was missing in Bridgford, I thought, he really can’t spell.”

They started dating, were engaged the Christmas of 1949, and were married on Esther’s birthday in May 1950.

Esther and Bridgford continued spending summers on Shelter Island with the family. When their children — Bridgford, Ainsworth and Selina Iris — came along, they rented a house on Spring Garden Avenue, which they later bought.

Then as now, homes in the Heights were close. According to Esther, her son Bridg (who is now General Manager of the North Ferry) made quite a bit of noise, a state of affairs that was tolerated by their elderly neighbor on that quiet street, Celeste Underhill. “On the 4th of July, Celeste came roaring onto her balcony and yelled, ‘Hooray for the Fourth of July!’” Esther said. “She was an extra grandmother for our family.”

In the 1980s, Esther served as Mayor of Dering Harbor, between Stanley Gianelli, whose term she served out, and Robert Weaver, a nine-month term during which a hurricane struck the Island. She declined to run for the office, preferring to serve Shelter Island less visibly, as a supporter of the Public Library and the Shelter Island Historical Society.

Over the years, Esther’s grandfather had acquired more Island property, including the land where Esther and her husband Bridgford Hunt built a house in 1971, and about 30 acres of nearby woods, which became a preserve when Esther gave it to the town in 2015.

After Bridgford’s death in 2012, she ensured the preservation of the undeveloped land that had been in her family for decades. In a series of gifts and sales, she made possible the Mildred Flower Hird Preserve, now owned by the town, which can never be built on. “I named it for my mother,” Esther said. “Not that she was a great naturalist and she certainly wasn’t a hiker. But she did care about nature.”

The Dering Harbor home that Esther and Bridgford built, and that she still lives in, has been the site of two family births — Bridg and his wife P.A.T.’s children, Selina and Martin.

At the time of the first birth, Bridg and P.A.T. were living on a boat in Dering Harbor within sight of the house, and as the day approached, they decided to ask the doctor to attend the birth on the boat. The doctor agreed, with the stipulation that the boat be at a dock, so mother and child could be taken off easily if necessary.

When the time came, it was dead low tide, the boat got stuck, and Bridg had to get in another boat and make a big enough wake to nudge the boat off the bottom, saying, “That kid has a heck of a lot to learn about navigation.”

The laboring parents came up to Esther’s house and sat on the porch for a while, and then decided their child, Selina, would be born indoors. “When Martin came along, I was afraid that having been thwarted they would want to go back to the boat,” said Esther, “but now that they knew what was involved, they said they’d prefer to have the baby in the house.”

The name Selina is another thing Esther’s family doesn’t part with. It was Esther’s grandmother’s name, her aunt’s name, her daughter’s name and the name of more than one family boat. Across the hall from the giant avocado in Esther’s foyer is a more than century-old painting of a little girl named Selina, Esther’s grandmother. It’s destined to be granddaughter Selina’s one day.

A Shelter Island family bids adieu to a beloved baseball stadium

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO The seats were narrow and worn, but the vibe behind home plate at the Jays old stadium was so good.

Christopher Bohn is a stadium usher at the Toronto Blue Jays spring training park in Dunedin, Florida. On the concourse behind home plate, as the final game in that venerable old diamond went into the 6th inning, Mr. Bohn was getting a little misty.

“You’ll never get closer to a batter than this in a baseball stadium. I feel terrible about it,” he said. “You’ll never get closer than this to the game.”

Mr. Bohn grew up in Patchogue but has been living in Florida and working at the Jays stadium long enough to remember when this wasn’t the only intimate venue for spring baseball. When the Phillies played at nearby Jack Russell stadium, the players were so close to the fans that when our son Isaac was 8 and wanted a game ball, he could just stand by the first base line for a few minutes and eventually be handed one by a soft-hearted player.

Up until the Jays Dunedin Stadium closed for renovations last Saturday, the same could be said for it.

“This,” Mr. Bohn said, “is the last stadium of this size in the Grapefruit League.”

My family picked out Dunedin, Florida as a place to spend a week in March largely because of the stadium, both the size and scale of it, and the fact that you can walk to it from anywhere in town. This year was our 16th visit, and for the first time, we were joined by a new member of the family, Isaac’s fiancée. Getting to see Martha take part in our family’s spring training rituals was almost as moving to me as saying good-bye to the old stadium, and I had to put on my sunglasses once or twice when it wasn’t sunny and dab at my eyes.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO It looks like somebody’s first baseball game.

The upcoming renovation of the stadium was much on the minds of the morning breakfasters at the Dunedin Holiday Inn, where another renovation had taken place since last year — the replacement of the automatic pancake maker with a lamp-heated Cinnabon tray, each pastry wrapped in trademarked Cinnabon paper and topped with the signature sour cream frosting that takes the sting out of airport layovers.

Six-year-old Trent Game was getting some advice from a seasoned baseball fan about where to stand on the third base side to get a close look at Bryce Harper, the Phillies newly-signed right fielder, when the Phillies played the Jays.

Often the major leaguers show off their supernatural skills during spring training, but this year most of the surprises on the field were of the forehead-slapping kind. In a game against the Atlanta Braves, the Jays came back from a steep deficit to get the tying and winning runs aboard with two outs in the bottom of the ninth.

When the Jays batter walked to load the bases, the runner at third, possibly dreaming of postgame Cinnabons, strayed too far off the base and was picked off, ending the game in an 8-7 Jays loss.

“It was a boneheaded play,” said a kid to his dad, and fans all around shook their heads as they streamed out of the stadium.

On Thursday, we traveled with the Jays two miles to Spectrum Field, the Phillies spring training stadium, where we got a taste of what the Jays newly-renovated spring digs will be like, with two Tiki-bars in the outfield, room for 1,500 on the berm and a wide swath of concession stands surrounding the field in a 360-degree mall of popcorn, souvenirs and sausages.

The Phillies finally beat the Jays, with home runs flying out of the stadium like popcorn from a hot pan — six for the Phillies and four for the Jays. One of Bryce Harper’s two dingers had two guys in shorts and sandals searching through the thick, swampy brush in back of the stadium for the ball, and by the time they found it, a dozen fans stood along the outfield concourse telling them where to look, and keeping an eye out for alligators.

Just then another shot came in just below the berm, this one a home run for the Jays, which was nabbed by a 10-year-old.

On our last day in Dunedin, at the top of the seventh inning, Mr. Bohn led the crowd in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” for the last time in the little stadium that had made baseball magic in Dunedin since 1977. We sang along, my husband, our grown-up sons and our new daughter, and I put on sunglasses and went through a few more tissues.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Allie Kroeker with a foul ball she chased down at the Jays stadium. She’s a catcher in her home town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.

Janalyn Travis-Messer, giving back and getting it done.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Janalyn Travis-Messer and Nushka in her Heights office.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on April 29, 2018

Janalyn Travis-Messer’s office is full of activity. She’s in the middle of building a house on the Island and as she bustles around her office/exhibition space for local artists, she’s keeping one eye on Nushka, her new, not quite perfectly house-trained puppy.

A guy wearing crusty work boots sticks his head in to say that over at the building site for her new house, “The slab is drying.”

Janalyn is a doer — a builder, a realtor and an organizer. “I hate going clothes shopping but in a hardware store, I’m in heaven,” she said. Her best Christmas present ever? “Nine nail guns and a bucket with layers to organize all of my ratchets.”

When she decided that Shelter Island desperately needed more housing options that didn’t involve a jumbo mortgage, she decided to pick up a hammer and a nail and do something about it. The structure she designed and built is almost ready to be occupied. Unfortunately, not all of her neighbors are happy about it.

Janalyn was born in California and grew up in Hawaii after her parents split and her mother moved the family there in 1965. Janalyn’s mother was an inspiration to her, working at a variety of jobs, including as a realtor to support her family and becoming the first female taxi medallion owner in Hawaii.

Janalyn studied theater arts at the University of Hawaii and in England. Her career in theater was long and varied, from stage productions to rock and roll. She built sets, did sound and lighting for stage and TV and was an extra in an episode of Hawaii Five-0. In 1980, Janalyn left Hawaii for New York, where she became head electrician for the Broadway show “Death Trap.”

Since her first job in a drug store at 16, Janalyn has worked. In addition to her work in the theater, she’s done fabric design, house design, sold advertising for this newspaper and now works in real estate and building homes.

Her general contracting company, DJTM, works with prefabricated homes that are built to her layout and specifications and then shipped to their new address with the plumbing and electrical systems in place. She’s got a fifth one under way now, and the one that is almost completed on Shelter Island will be her third such home on the Island.

Although Janalyn hasn’t lived full-time in Hawaii since 1980, her connections there still bring her back a couple of times a year, connections that include a house and a “Hawaii dog” named Rex, both under the care of friends.

“Hawaii is a fabulous place to live,” she said. “You can go hiking every day, take your dogs to the beach every day, drive legally barefoot, but if you have to get a job, it’s not easy.”

Working in New York and living on Long Island, Janalyn met Jim Messer at a bar in Bellmore when she got to talking with a matchmaking bartender who sized her up as perfect for Jim, a regular. The wingman/barkeep made the introductions and within weeks Jim and Janalyn were a couple. They married in 1983.

A long-time Long Island native, Shelter Island had long been in Jim’s sights, but it was Janalyn who grabbed the real estate ads, drove out to find a house and made it happen. In September of 1985, Janalyn and Jim were on the ferry with the moving truck on the way to their new home on Baldwin Road. Janalyn remembered Jim said, “We’ve got to thank them for letting us move here. We’ve got to give back to this community.”

Over the next 20 years, Jim and Janalyn made good on Jim’s pledge. She was active with the League of Women Voters and the Shelter Island Historical Society and he was elected to two terms on the Town Board.

When Jim was diagnosed with cancer, Janalyn and Jim met with Jim’s oncologist. She interrupted the doctor in the middle of polite introductions. “Look is he dead, or does he have a chance?” she asked.

The doctor said yes, he did have a chance. “Then let’s get started,” Janalyn said.
Jim died in August of 2005, from a series of complications initiated by a tick bite in the middle of his second term on the Town Board and only weeks after the annual Crescent Beach fireworks show he had organized for 11 years at. At that year’s show he was still fundraising, even in a wheelchair. “Jim was only 63 when he died-way too young,” Janalyn said. “I’m very grateful for all those years. He did a lot for Shelter Island.”

Janalyn continued her own volunteer activities and added new ones in honor of Jim, including the Chamber of Commerce, Deer and Tick Committee and for 20 years now the annual Shelter Island Arts and Crafts Fair, a much-anticipated annual event which she organizes, bringing together local artists and people with the wherewithal to buy their work.

Lately her attention and can-do spirit is trained on the lack of affordable housing on Shelter Island. Her work as a real estate professional makes her more aware of the problem than most people and her work as a builder makes her more able than most to actually do something about it.

When six affordable homes were built in the 1990s and six local families moved in, it was the beginning of the town’s only initiative to make homes for working — but not necessarily wealthy — families on Shelter Island.

Janalyn sees that experiment as a success and it encourages her. “Those families are still here,” she said. “Their houses look great. That’s what I’m trying to do when I build this house. The new four-bedroom house is designed to rent to one family, but it could also work for four individuals. I put a super large kitchen in so everyone could have their own cabinets.”

The house should be ready to occupy this spring.

“People are upset by this house going up, but if they think it’s going to be like a mobile home, well, it’s not,” she said. “I’m following the process, a building permit to a C of O [certificate of occupancy] and all the rest. I’m following the guidelines to build a safe house.”

Janalyn’s way of living is to go and do. “I love life. I hate laziness, excuses, not taking responsibility. I won’t give an excuse,” she said. “I’ll do as much as I can.”

Lightning Round

What do you always have with you? Right now, it’s Nushka.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? My backyard.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Kahala Beach in Hawaii.

When was the last time you were elated? The day I adopted Nushka two months ago. A rainy day, a stinky dog.

What exasperates you? Unkind people.

When was the last time you were afraid? When Reverend Paul Wancura was found.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island?  The day of the Art Show and Craft Fair.

Favorite movie or book? Book — ‘Lord of the Rings.” Movie, — ‘The Wizard of Oz.’

Favorite food? Poi, it’s mashed taro. I like ‘two-finger’ poi, thick enough to eat with two fingers, not as thick as one finger.

Magda Saleh-Prima ballerina, cultural diplomat and daughter of Egypt

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Jack Josephson and Magda Saleh at home near Congdons Creek.

Even if Magda Saleh, Egypt’s first prima ballerina in her 20s and founding director of the Cairo Opera House and National Cultural Center in her 40s, had not placed a large bowl of sweet, salty roasted nuts in front of me, I would not have moved from her living room sofa overlooking Congdons Creek.

It wasn’t the view, which was magnificent. She was relating the story of her life, with bureaucratic intrigue, world political movements and revolution and war as a backdrop. Her husband, Jack Josephson, an Egyptologist and the man who brought her to Shelter Island, was there to add context and avail himself of the peanuts.

Magda told part of her story in an interview on March 13 in the New York Times Magazine and in a 2017 documentary called “A Footnote in Ballet History.” She will appear at the Shelter Island Library Saturday, September 15 at 2 p.m. for a screening and Q&A.

Magda’s mother was Scottish and her Egyptian father was a well-known scholar and educator. The only girl in a large family, Magda grew up and was and educated in Cairo in the 1950s.

Professional dancers in Egypt at the time were called “Oriental” — known also as belly dancers — and their art was considered to be close to prostitution. It was acceptable for little girls to study ballet as part of a well-rounded education, but never with a view to dancing professionally.

When Magda’s father realized she was determined to be a professional ballet dancer, he warned her that it would subject the family to a grave social risk.
Egypt’s first minister of culture, Sarwat Okasha, was a hero to Magda then and now. Okasha had been a leader of the Egyptian Revolution and during the years Magda was trained as a ballerina, he was responsible for the establishment of an Egyptian ballet program.

Cairo’s theatrical and musical life was centered on a grand opera house. “People dressed up for the performances held there and became part of the spectacle. We were no strangers to performance,” Magda said. “Cairo was called Paris on the Nile.”

When the Bolshoi performed at the Cairo Opera House, Magda was there and was “just blown away by the virtuosity,” she said. “The ballet master was brought to our ballet class to watch and he called me over and said ‘I have news for you. You have talent, and next year a teacher will be coming from the Bolshoi and I advise you to audition.’”

Magda was invited to enroll in the program and became one of five Egyptian girls chosen to study in Russia, returning to become Egypt’s first prima ballerina, dancing leading roles. Her father attended her performances at the Cairo Opera House and enjoyed being congratulated, telling everyone, “I am Magda’s father.”

In addition to the social risks of a daughter who danced professionally, Magda’s parents worried about the physical stresses of ballet on her young body, a concern that proved prescient. During what would be the last year of Magda’s career as a performer, the Cairo company put on “Don Quixote,” and the short season required her to dance for 13 consecutive performances. “I don’t think any ballerina has done that,” she said. “When I went back to regular training, my leg wouldn’t bend. It just locked.”

She and her partner were scheduled to appear as guest artists with the Bolshoi in Russia and she was determined not to miss the opportunity. In the middle of this catastrophe, Magda heard that the Opera House was on fire. As she stood watching flames destroy the building, she knew any hope of continuing her career in Cairo went with it.

“The Russians invited me to the Black Sea to take the baths, and I made it through that season as guest artist,” she said. “But by the end of the last performance I knew I was done.”

Magda’s most radical act as a woman in Egypt in the late 1960s was a thing she did not do: get married. In a culture where fathers and husbands controlled womens’ lives, she had seen two of her colleagues marry at the insistence of their families and then quit ballet when the demands of family life became too great.

“I wasn’t interested,” she said.

At the time, any unmarried girl was considered risky lest she bring shame on her family, let alone a girl who was a professional dancer. But Magda’s parents supported her wish to remain single.

When suitors began to come around, her father had to entertain them. “At first he’d say, ‘She’s too young.’ And later when he couldn’t get away with that he’d say ‘She’s too busy,’” Magda said.

“That was exceptional. As conflicted as my parents were, they did everything to further my career.”

She left Egypt to study at UCLA when her performing career was over in spite of the fact that Egypt was still firmly in the sphere of Soviet political influence and the U.S. was seen as an enemy. She stayed in the States to complete a PhD at New York University before returning to Egypt in 1983. Magda remembers that period spent studying in the U.S. as “formative and transformative years.”

She became a professor and dean at the Higher Institute of Ballet in Cairo and when Egyptian President Mubarak accepted a $50 million grant from the Japanese government to build a new opera house and cultural center, Magda was asked to become founding director of the new center.

She planned the inaugural ceremonies, lobbied foreign diplomats for support from the international business community, took ambassadors for tours of the site where the center was being built and generated a constant buzz of favorable press.

Within months, she was sacked.

Magda went overnight from being talked up as a candidate for the next cultural minister of Egypt to being out of a job and unwelcome in her own country. “The new minister who invited and subsequently got rid of me may have felt threatened,” Magda said. “It ended very suddenly and I was an exile. I felt I had lost my country and my job.”

Magda had met Jack Josephson in 1978, at the Brooklyn Museum when she and her mother came to the museum looking for research materials to support Magda’s NYU dissertation. At the time Jack was married with children.

But 13 years later, Magda was back in the United States and looking for a job. She called Jack, then six years a widower, and they married in 1993.

“When we were seeing one another we were discreet,” Magda said. “When I finally decided, yes, I’ll get married, the news broke and it went like wildfire that ‘Jack Josephson has gone and married this Egyptian belly dancer.’ I’m afraid I was a bit of a disappointment. I couldn’t even offer them a shimmy.”

“When I married Jack, a whole new world opened up,” Magda said. She decided to leave dance history behind and turn her considerable skills to marriage and Egyptology, serving as an editor for Jack’s writing, which is centered on the art history of early Egypt, particularly sculpture.

Not long after Magda and Jack decided to marry, she began coming to Shelter Island on weekends. Now, 25 years later, they spend as much of their time in the house on Congdons Creek as possible, even though it means seeing friends in the city much less often.

“Peace. It changes you,” Magda said. “Here you can hear the blood tingle in your ears. It cleanses you.”

Three times Jack and Magda have led a group of friends from Shelter Island to Egypt. “We had been blathering about how wonderful Egypt was and we realized that we have a very special privilege in Egypt,” Jack said. “People recognize Magda on the street. I was referred to all around Egypt as ‘Magda’s husband.’”

She continues to serve her country as a cultural diplomat, bringing together exciting Egyptian artists and American audiences. She even brought Egyptian pianist Mohamed Shams to perform for the Shelter Island Friends of Music after arranging for his sold-out Carnegie Hall debut at Weill Recital Hall a couple of years ago.

Magda understands better than most people the difficult position of the performer caught between power and art. “So much talent in Egypt and we waste it,” she said. “We are proxies for the powers that are raging above us and we get to be shuffled around.”

Lightning Round — Magda Saleh

What do you always have with you? Photographs of my parents.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? Here. We don’t leave.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? I have two, the Pyramid of Djoser, a step pyramid in the Saqqara necropolis and Seti at Abydos.

What exasperates you? Human obduracy. I saw it in Egypt over the decades … and in the U.S. now. What are we doing and why are we so bent on destroying ourselves?

Favorite book? ’The Lord of the Rings.’ I am fascinated by Tolkien, his imagination, his language and the fascinating world he wove out of whole cloth.
Favorite food? Right now, these honey peanuts. I love eating. I am omnivorous.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Sarwat Okasha. A great son of Egypt.

Most respected elected official? President Obama and his wife Michelle. A remarkable couple

The boyhoods of summer: The Reporter goes to spring training 2018

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO A day in the sun for fathers and sons, like the Diedrich Family.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on March 29, 2018

When my husband, two adult sons and I travel to Dunedin, Florida, the spring home of the Toronto Blue Jays every March, we come home improved.

We read, we sit around, we drink beer and we watch baseball. It is the spiritual and culinary highlight of the year, a place where our family can experience baseball as a kind of faith and spring training as a pilgrimage.

I start every day with a bowl of Raisin Bran and skim milk in the Holiday Inn breakfast room with the other guests, many from Canada and New York. This year a delightful Toronto-area family of five — parents, two kids and their grandmother — held the room captive. The son was the kind of talkative 10-year old boy who knows a lot of excellent jokes about flatulence. As he encountered the breakfast bar he paused by the tray of condiments to ask his mother, “Did you know that if you put ketchup packets in the freezer they will explode?”

At the table with his parents, and 14-year old sister, he tucked into a pastry completely coated in some kind of thick, white icing. “Cinnamon buns are my favorite unhealthy thing,” he said. “If you were dying, what would your final meal be? My final meal would be a giant hamburger, sausage and bacon.”

His sister took the bait: “Mine would be baby food because that’s what I started with.”

Mom corrected her, “Actually you started with breast milk, so that would have to be your final meal.”

“Gross,” said Dad, changing the subject.

A coach of his son’s team back home, he led a review of the play they witnessed at a Jays game the previous day that began with a base-running error by Dwight Smith and led to two Blue Jays standing on second base, followed by a rundown and a double play that would have been a triple if the Jays hadn’t already had one out, to end the game. Follow?

Never mind. Dad said, “By that point the whole team was laughing.” As were we.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Mother and child in the Florida sunshine on the berm at Phillies Spectrum stadium.

 

My husband reminded me that Dwight Smith hit a home run off one of our sons at a tournament in Cobb County, Georgia, back in the days when we saw base-running errors and run downs every day in Little League play.

This year, baseball talk in the breakfast room was sometimes derailed by events of the day. In the corner, near the heated box holding the cinnamon buns, three guys in Phillies T-shirts were consulting Google Maps to devise a strategy for driving to Lakeland while avoiding the worst of the spring break and Disney traffic. The guy with the gray goatee asked his Google-Mapping buddy, “What do you think of the Yankee starters?”

Engrossed in his phone, his companion gasped: “Oh my gosh, he just fired Rex Tillerson.”

Our first game was the Yankees away at the Oriole’s Ed Smith Park in Sarasota. We were delighted to see Aaron Judge had also made the trip, something marquee players rarely do in spring training. It’s said that the great Yankee reliever Mariano Rivera never even had a travel jersey for spring games. But there was Judge, a few yards away in right field, making plays and studying the replay on the Jumbotron, looking to get better, as good as he is.

His agility was even more incredible when I took in his kayak-like feet.

On Friday, we traveled along with the Blue Jays a couple of miles to the Phillies Spectrum field. Jays shortstop Gift Ngoepe, was working hard for his spot on the roster. Ngoepe is the first black African player in Major League Baseball.

The Jays recently added poutine, the Canadian comfort food to their stadium menu.

 

He played a brilliant shortstop, making several dazzling plays. After the game, fans gathered to observe an alligator floating in a fenced-in storm drain outside the stadium on the way to the parking lot.

By Saturday morning, a new front opened in the Holiday Inn breakfast battle of the bulge when the toaster, mounted on a steep angle to make it easier to grasp and remove the bread, began to pop like a fly ball, with toast landing on the floor several feet away.

“Whose toast is that?” said the breakfast room supervisor.

“Why does it jump like that?” asked the gentleman from Quebec.

Dad from Toronto chimed in, “You have to stand by the toaster and catch it, or it just flies right out.”

The matriarch of the family of five from Arkansas suggested, “You should hand out fielder’s gloves so we can get some practice shagging toast.”

Saturday at Auto Exchange Stadium in Dunedin was the Jays annual game with the Canadian National team, a chance for the most promising 16-to-18-year old Canadian players to brush up against the majors. The Jays starter against the junior team was Marcus Stroman, a Long Island native who identifies home as “Medford, LIE exit 65.” The Jays catcher, Russell Martin a former Yankee, came up through the Canadian National team.

The Jays reached into their roster of young legacy talent to make it a day for fathers and sons. Kacy Clemens (son of seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger) started at first, Cavan Biggio (son of Hall of Famer, Craig) at second, Bo Bichette, (son of Dante) at shortstop and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at third.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s father was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in January, a notorious bad-ball hitter who would swing at anything, so when Vladimir Jr. walked his first time up, his patience prompted a fan to remark that he must have gotten his plate discipline from his mother.

Braden Halladay, son of legendary pitcher Roy Halladay, pitched a perfect 8th inning for the Canadian Junior Team. His impossibly long and elegant pitching stance evoked his father’s, who threw the second no hitter in postseason history and died last year in an airplane crash. Halladay’s performance was an emotional link to his family history, as well as baseball history.

Like spring training, it was beautiful, and all too-brief.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Braden Halladay, son of legendary pitcher Roy Halladay, pitching a perfect 8th inning for the Canadian Junior Team.

Seth Nathan, a chef rising from his roots

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Seth Nathan at Isola in the Heights.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on January 11, 2018. 

Seth Nathan is the executive chef at Isola, a restaurant in the Heights. Halfway through his first winter on Shelter Island, he’s still — remarkably — smiling. For a guy born in Ojai, California, and raised in Malibu, staying warm and cheerful in a Northeastern winter is no minor accomplishment.

He points out that it’s been a rough winter in SoCal, as well. The area ravaged by the largest wildfire in California history is still home for most of his family, including his aunt and uncle who had 15 minutes to get out of their house, which was reduced to ash.

“It is a part of life there,” Seth said.

When he was 6, his parents split up. He and his father settled into a beachside community called Paradise Cove, where his father still lives (and surfs). Seth’s mother stayed in Ventura, where Seth’s grandfather, Jaime Santana, ran a popular bakery — a place that had been supplying wedding cakes and challah to the community since the 1960s. Seth had his run of the place.

A 6th-grade chemistry class on the science of chicken parmesan stimulated the boy’s first solo foray in the kitchen. After taking copious notes on the recipe, not the chemical principles it demonstrated, Seth found all the necessary ingredients on hand when he got home from school, and decided to surprise his working, single father with dinner.

“I can’t tell you if it was any good,” Seth said. “And I didn’t do well in chemistry, but the science of cooking has always intrigued me.”

Chicken parmesan is now a regular item on the menu at Isola, and judging from its popularity, Seth overcame any difficulty he may have had with the recipe when he was 11.

In spite of his early interest in cooking, Seth bounced around after graduating from high school, thinking about culinary school, but never quite getting there. It took an accidental visit to San Sebastián on the Spanish coast to lead him to a career as a chef.

“It was a wrong turn that turned out right,” he said.

In the summer of 2000 while traveling around Europe with friends, the group rented Vespas to tour the area near Biarritz, France. Seth, who was not familiar with roundabouts, got disoriented as his friends rode off in one direction, and he rode in the other.

He found himself on a highway, crossed the border into Spain, and arrived at a beach in San Sebastián at sunset, where he felt something special about the place. “That night I made it back somehow,” he recalled, “and told my friends, we have to go there.”

Seth stayed for close to six years, working in a bar, and later enrolling in the Escuela de Cocina Irizar, a small, excellent culinary school with a list of prominent alumni, some of whom have become stars in the cooking world. The school is known for the internships that place its students in one of San Sebastián’s renowned restaurants for hands-on experience at the highest level.

For Seth, that meant a stint at Urepel, a family-owned restaurant with one Michelin star. The green American intern who barely spoke Spanish was put in charge of cleaning artichokes, a complex and spiny vegetable that requires knife skills and dexterity to process. His internship became a job, and he worked at Urepel for three years. “I became part of the family,” he said.

Back in Ventura for the funeral of an uncle, Seth noticed the food scene had undergone a renaissance while he was away. Farm-to-table restaurants were opening up, and even his grandfather had closed his bakery and gone into farming.

Seth stayed in Ventura, doing pop-up events, and opening restaurants using his European experience to create a menu, train a staff, and establish relationships with vendors until the new restaurant was on its feet and he could move on to the next one.

While running a wine bar in Ventura, Seth met Casey Garrison — a journalist who is now his partner — when Casey came in with a mutual friend. The friend was the one trying to get cozy with Seth, but that was not what Cupid had in mind.

“Casey and I just knew there would be something,” he said. Casey moved to Washington state and for two years they kept in touch.

When Seth agreed to open a new restaurant in a 40-room hotel in Solvang, California, he and Casey embarked on the adventure together, naming it Mad & Vin, (Danish for food and wine) and it was a hit.

In the spring of 2017, Seth heard that Brad Kitkowski was looking to hire a chef for the new restaurant he was opening on Shelter Island.

Shelter Island was not what Seth was expecting. “I expected the Hamptons,” he said. “I grew up in Malibu, so I’m familiar with that. I’m glad it’s not that.”

In April 2017, Seth and Casey got engaged, and moved to a cabin on Rocky Point Road behind the Pridwin.

Seth was delighted to find a supportive restaurant community on the Island.

“Everyone has a huge amount of pride in their establishments, and could see us as direct competition,” he said. “But we help each other out. On an island where vendors can’t always get here, if we run out of something it’s nice to know we have good neighbors.”

At Isola, Seth is finding a good match for the skills and interests he’s developed, from his 6th grade chemistry class, to Basque Country cooking to contemporary farm to table.

He’s excited by the rich variety of seafood here, including some fish he cooked with in Europe, but could not get on the West Coast, such as hake, which he prepares at Isola Basque-style with an Italian-influenced salsa verde and local littleneck clams — a dish equal parts Europe and the North Fork.

He loves to cook slow. “The technique of braising is my calling card,” he said. “There is always a lamb shank or a short rib on my menus. I’m enthralled by the science of it, the way meat will break down at the right low temperature. The change in aromas, when everything softens and gets caramelized.”

As Seth’s tattoos reveal, he’s an admirer of David Bowie. A large inked area on his chest is a portrait of Bowie as the Goblin King Jareth, from the 1986 film “Labyrinth.” The other, a lightning bolt, was added to Seth’s forearm on the day the star passed away.

“Bowie reinvented himself, but he always kept a signature,” Seth said. “It’s how I’ve fashioned my career. Ever changing but still keeping those roots.”

Lightning Round

What do you always have with you?  A photo of a Chihuahua named Peaches.

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  Rocky Point Road, leading down to the beach.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?  San Sebastián, Spain.

Last time you were elated?  Last time I bought a plane ticket.

What exasperates you?  Lack of work ethic.

Last time you were afraid?  I’m always afraid of things not going out of the kitchen properly.

Best day of the year on Shelter Island?  The Tumbleweed Tuesday beach party, a day when all the restaurants are closed after a season of hard work.

Favorite movie or book?  The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Do you have a most-respected elected official?  I’d like to.

Island chefs get a love letter from James Beard

COURTESY 18 BAY RESTAURANT

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on February 22, 2018

Elizabeth Ronzetti and Adam Kopels, chefs at 18 Bay Restaurant, were nominated for a James Beard award in the very competitive “Best Chef-Northeast” category last Thursday.

They say when you score a touchdown, you should act like you’ve been there before. But Ms. Ronzetti and Mr. Kopels have not been there before, and neither has any other chef currently working on Shelter Island.

“It is thrilling and stunning to be included on such a prestigious list,” Ms. Ronzetti said. “Really extraordinary."

The awards are a very big deal in the world of food. James Beard was a cook, educator and author who became a champion of American cuisine in the 20th century.

After his death in 1985, the James Beard Foundation was established in his honor.

In 2018, there were 23,000 entries for the James Beard Restaurant and Chef awards, and 20 semifinalists were chosen for each of 10 geographical regions.

Finalists will be chosen by a vote of about 600 people, about half of whom are previous winners. Semifinalists will be announced on March 14 and the winners at a May awards ceremony that has been called the Oscars of food.

Ms. Ronzetti and Mr. Kopels are partners in work and life, joined, he said, “at the hip.” But when a friend called to tell them they had been nominated, Ms. Ronzetti had just left their Southold house to visit her mother and was driving through a wireless reception-deficient zone around Wading River.

“I saw that Adam called me five times, and I thought this can’t be good. When I reached him he just said, ‘So, we were nominated.’ And I said, ‘Yeah. Right.’ Then I went in the house and told my mother, and she said, ‘A James Beard award, what’s that?’”

A James Beard nomination for a restaurant or chef this far east of New York City is exceedingly rare. A search of past nominees turned up only one, Gerry Hayden, the late, revered chef at North Fork Table and Inn in Southold who was both a nominee and semifinalist.

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, a successful food writer with several James Beard awards for journalism, is the older sister of Mr. Kopels’ childhood friend Alex, and Mr. Kopels said she was a big influence on him growing up. He beamed as he described hearing how happy Dara was to learn about the nomination. “All of a sudden I was 14-years-old again, trying to live up to Dara.”

They didn’t have long to revel in the nomination before turning to preparations for a night of diners. “We are so hands-on,” said Ms. Ronzetti, a pastry tube in one hand, about halfway through a batch of love letters ­— homemade pasta squares stuffed with a dab of caramelized parsnip that tasted like butterscotch.

Mr. Kopels dashed by looking for something, “Can’t talk, I’ve got a reduction going.” His wife asked him to describe how he cooked the parsnips. “Yes, well we are basically overcooking them. Very hot oven, the tips get burnt and when we remove the tips and process it, the result looks like caramel.”

When Ms. Ronzetti and Mr. Kopels moved their Bayville restaurant to Shelter Island in 2011, they created an Italian-inspired, four course chef’s menu that changes every week, and shows off the animals, fruits and vegetables that only the North Fork can produce.

The chefs are not afraid to push against tradition and customary restaurant practices, in favor of showcasing the best of what the land and sea produces here and now.

Ms. Ronzetti remembered the reaction when they began to use celtuce, a green vegetable that looks like a mash-up of asparagus spear and celery stalk. “We did a bluefish crudo with celtuce and everybody said, ‘What is celtuce?’ They were growing it at Sylvester Manor, and no one had heard of it.”

Terry Farm, Southold Fish Market, The Farm Beyond and Lathams are just a few of the local farms and fish-sellers who provide the inspiration for the couple’s ever-changing menus.

People who watch the James Beard nominees closely say this year’s nominees skew to small and rural places more so than in years past. One of the nominees is Erin French, chef/owner of The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine, a celebrated restaurant in a place that makes Shelter Island look urban.

Mr. Kopels said the attention is especially important to a restaurant that can feel isolated for much of the year. “It reminds me that this isn’t all for naught, and we’re not just going on mindlessly year after year.”

The James Beard nomination is an indication that Ms. Ronzetti and Mr. Kopels are up to something exceptional at 18 Bay.

“One of the things we have always wanted to do was to build something a little bit bigger than us; something of value,” he said. “We have a mantra in the kitchen, ‘There is an easier way to make dinner, we just don’t do it.’”

This land is your land.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO

Sometimes in a dream, I open a door in my house, and find a room behind it that I never knew existed.

The dream is so common that psychologists even have a term for it, the “unused-room dream,” said to occur when the dreamer discovers new capabilities or embraces new experiences. Last Saturday, my dream came true when I stepped into the woods behind the Shelter Island Craft Brewery and emerged an hour later with a new perspective.

In that hour, I walked with 20 of so of my fellow citizens through acres of woods, along clearly marked trails that led through and around the heart of Shelter Island. Joseph Denny, the organizer of the Shelter Island Group for Trail Preservation, led the hike through wooded parts of the Island I have only glimpsed from the IGA parking lot.

In spite of the fact that I lived about 300 yards from Sachem’s Woods for almost 30 years, until Saturday I had never walked there. For most of that time, I didn’t even know I could.

It was a joyful group of walkers, with children so young they had to be carried, guys with hiking boots, one with a multi-tool hanging from his belt (defense from marauding wild turkeys?), and sturdy, surefooted grandmas, one in tights and another wearing a hand-knitted sweater.

There was forest humor, like when someone commented that the woods were surprisingly dense, and her companion said, “How come you looked at me when you said that?”

When we passed within sight of Midway Road, I remembered the yellow “Posted. Private property” signs that still face the road, signs that could be replaced with eye-level blue blazes, welcoming walkers to follow the trail. Because although this has been public land for a long time, it’s only in the last year or so, thanks to the Group for Trail Preservation folks, that everyone has been encouraged to visit and enjoy this land.

The group stopped to admire an enormous white pine in Sachem’s Woods, with a trunk like the mast of a ship, and a delicate, green haze of needles on its branches. The ground around this mighty tree was softly padded with fallen yellow needles so thick that nothing grew up through it.

We also saw squirrels, turkeys, deer droppings and the remains of a young eastern box turtle.

The Island is about 8,000 acres of land, and two-thirds of that is private property. But the other third is public land, including over 2,000 acres of Mashomack, with its well-known and much-loved trail system.

Less well known is how much public land there is outside Mashomack, land that is crisscrossed with footpaths that can take you — in surprising ways — to landmarks such as The Islander, the Windmill Field at Sylvester Manor, the Whale’s Tale and St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.

When I ask people who grew up here in the 1950s and 1960s how things have changed, they often talk about the way the Island used to belong to everyone, how no one thought twice about walking through a neighbor’s property. I thought this was a quaint relic of the past until this summer, when I visited the Cotswolds, an area of rural England with about 3,000 miles of footpaths that cross farmland, through woods, and right through people’s back gardens. And no one seemed to mind.

While visiting the town of Burford, we walked to a village a few miles away and were able to make a close examination of the grazing lands, dairies and cow pies necessary for the production of the meal we planned to eat at the end of our hike. After a mile or so, we wandered off the path and up a driveway past the patio of a family in the middle of their dinner. They cheerfully pointed us in the direction of the Inn in Swinbrook that we were looking for.

There was a time when the idea that the town should establish public access points to the water was considered ridiculous. Now, waterfront homeowners sometimes have to be reminded that they do not own the beach itself, prompting local musician Tom Hashagen to write a song in which he explains to a property-owner he calls Mr. Mean High Water:

“I may be a local son of the beach,
But I’m just saying that we each,
Have the right to alight on that sandy shore.”

A call to arms? Hardly. This is a call to feet.

I’m heading out for a walk.

Someone told me there’s a nice grove of black walnut trees near the part of the trail that goes past Sylvester Manor.

I can’t wait to see my trees. This land belongs to you and me.

Partners in life, food and loving the Island

 

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Dulcinea Benson and Frank DeCarlo on the dock/dining room of Barba Bianca, their Greenport restaurant.

Published on September 19, 2017 in the Shelter Island Reporter

On a Friday afternoon before Labor Day, a vintage Mercedes sports car the color of New England clam chowder pulled up to Southold Fish Market, inches from picnickers enjoying oyster po’boys.

A white-bearded man in chef’s whites and worn leather clogs hopped out. Carrying a large, empty plastic tub, he jogged inside and began sorting through every porgy in the store. There were a lot of them.

“Too small Charlie, these are all too small,” he said, peering around the wide glass windows that covered yards of iced monkfish, bluefish and striped bass. Charlie Manwaring, who owns the market, produced another 30-gallon tub of iced fish, and the man rifled through the glistening porgies, rejecting the too-small and the too-large, and tossing the just-right into his tub.

Minutes later he arrived at the boardwalk in front of Barba Bianca, the restaurant on the Greenport waterfront that he opened in May.

Chef Frank (Frankie) DeCarlo and Dulcinea (Dulcy) Benson, his wife and business partner, have lived in Silver Beach for 12 years, but claim that no one on Shelter Island had heard of them until they opened Barba Bianca — Italian for “white beard” — in Greenport. They were fine being anonymous, but Frankie admitted he likes that the guys on the ferry have started to greet him when he goes to work in Greenport every day.

Frankie was one of the first chefs to marry fine-dining and the now ubiquitous wood burning oven. For more than 15 years, Frankie and Dulcy’s restaurant, Peasant, on the Lower East Side, has been the place to enjoy rustic Italian food as well as a gathering place for chefs who want to see how Frankie tames the flames.

At their new place, fishing and the waterfront are the show. Barba Bianca, situated in a wooden building surrounded by other wooden structures, required a shift from 600-degree open flames to 300-degree open views of the harbor and Shelter Island.

Dulcy grew up in Shirley and spent a good chunk of her childhood clamming, crabbing and fishing with her father on the Great South Bay. “We couldn’t put our pole in the water without catching something,” she said.

Frankie started cooking as a child growing up in Mountainside, New Jersey in an old house on five acres with a pond. “I was in a household where, when I came home at night, I had to cook for myself. I started early.”

He often made “a pot of gravy,” slang for a tomato sauce served with supermarket pasta. He was an enthusiast for Velveeta Pillows, a bizarre early 1970s corporate-invented snack. For this delicacy, teenage Frankie employed a hinged griddle, loaded with two pieces of buttered Wonder bread and four lumps of processed cheese to make four pillows per slice — a shotgun marriage of grilled cheese sandwich and ravioli.

Cooking was a positive channel for Frankie’s early fascination with fire. “I was a bit of a pyromaniac,” he admitted. He began working in restaurants when he was 14 and has never stopped.

Never much of a student, he barely made it through two years of high school.

Dulcy went to American University, worked in public relations and then got into restaurant management. She and Frankie met when he was the chef at Circa, an East Village restaurant, and she came in to talk to the owners about being a manager.

“He was all disheveled, and he ran over and asked if I wanted a coffee.” Dulcy said. She considered this odd. In her experience, a chef’s interaction with the staff was mainly to yell at them.

“I wanted to meet this girl,” Frankie explained.

The owners asked Dulcy if she had a boyfriend. She did, and remembers them saying, “That’s good, because the chef has a problem.”

“Frankie is so talented, but with no discipline,” she said. “I like things orderly, I love rules.”

It was a year of battling before they worked out a relationship that has endured for almost 20 years. “We’ve been through it all. It’s hard to work with your spouse,” she said.

“I couldn’t be happier,” he said.

After years of cooking in New York, Frankie went to Italy to learn traditional Pugliese cooking. In many of the kitchens he visited, cooking didn’t involve using gas. “People would light olive or grape trimmings, and they’d cook at home that way, lighting little fires in their ovens or on a rotisserie. I used to dream one day of building a kitchen and having only wood fires and I did, and that was Peasant.”

Today restaurants that cook with wood or charcoal are more common, but 20 years ago Frankie was a pioneer; he’s still the rare chef who cooks on the line every night.

Peasant had been open a little over a year when the terrorist attack of 9/11 took place. Dulcy and Frankie were in their apartment five blocks from the Twin Towers, just returned the night before on a 20-hour flight from Korea, and were so disoriented they both thought they were hallucinating the events of that September morning. Frankie went up to the roof and watched the first tower come down.

With the city in shock, and lower Manhattan a smoky scene of ruin, running Peasant, their livelihood, seemed impossible. “But we opened,” Dulcy said. “People came in. They’d feel awkward, maybe order some appetizers. I don’t even know how we got food in there. They talked and they felt better.” By the end of October Frankie and Dulcy knew they would make it through the crisis.

The couple had “a first second home” in Delaware, but Dulcy longed to be on the East End.  She knew she’d found the right place when she spotted a modest house a short walk from Crab Creek with a pool and a 60-foot American Sycamore in the yard.

“You can build a house in a few months, but to grow a tree that size takes a lifetime,” she said. “There’s a certain kind of person who is on Shelter Island, who doesn’t mind waiting for a ferry, who won’t have access to everything 24/7. Impatient people can’t be here.”

Frankie and Dulcy plan to retire on the Island, hoping to hang onto an old-school way of life, in a place where people don’t think of honking their horns. “I hope it doesn’t change,” said Dulcy.

We’re honest people, simple people, Frankie said.

“One of us is simpler than the other,” said Dulcy. She was looking at him.

Lightning round

What do you always have with you?  Frank: I have a very unusual knife, about 80 years old, bone handle, handmade, birds eye rivets. It’s always in my pocket.

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  Dulcinea: Crab Creek

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?  Both: Venice.

Last time you were elated?  Dulcinea: I never get elated. That’s never happened. I’m not like that.

What exasperates you?  Dulcinea: We’ve had people throw things, and threaten to kill you because they can’t get a table.

Best day of the year on Shelter Island?  Frank: Any summer day that I’m not working and able to stay home.

Favorite movie or book?  Dulcinea: “A Moveable Feast,” Ernest Hemingway

Favorite food?  Frank: Spaghetti pomodoro, especially if Dulcy makes it.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?  Frank: Chef Jean-Louis Palladin.