Cindy Sheehan
Cindy Sheehan, the mother who became an anti-war leader after her soldier son was killed in Iraq, is credited for being one of the initial voices of protest over the Iraq war. Helping to galvanize a fledgling peace movement in the summer of 2005, Sheehan first emerged as a public figure and sparked nationwide attention in August with a personal protest at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. At the time, Sheehan requested to personally meet with President George W. Bush at his vacation ranch to ask why her son was killed. After failing to obtain a meeting the Bush, she continued to protest the administration's Iraq War policy, and was ultimately arrested by police in the House gallery prior to President Bush's State of the Union address on January 31, 2006.
With the movement building momentum, Sheehan next appeared as the featured speaker at Bring 'Em Home Now, a concert for peace in New York. In the months that followed, she was joined by such celebrities as Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon and Willie Nelson who lent support to her Troops Home Fast campaign which she began outside the White House on July 4th. At the time, Sheehan announced that her plan was to abstain from eating and to consume only water or juice throughout the summer in her continuing protest against the war. But with the war still raging by 2007, Sheehan had all but given up on her mission, and finally announced her personal "heartbreak" in a farewell message in which she admitted that for so little in return she had sacrificed her health, her husband, and her life savings.
Only six weeks later, however, Sheehan was again making headlines with news that she planned to run against House Speak Nancy Pelosi if impeachment hearings against President Bush were not enacted. With the peace movement now having come full circle, her ultimatum coincides with a poll illustrating a growing number of Americans polled are now in favor of impeaching both Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, for lying about WMD and other falsehoods in the onward march to war in Iraq in 2003.
Chef Erik Walkirch and Locally Grown Foods
From an article in the Commercial Appeal...
There's a culinary miracle happening in Binghamton. It involves a Culinary Institute of America-trained caterer, a Sudanese immigrant turned sous chef, one determined mother-in-law, and a leap of faith. It happens six days a week at the nonprofit Caritas Village, located in a rehabbed Masonic Temple at 2509 Harvard. Most people know Binghamton for the Lester Street Massacre, which took the lives of four adults and two children last spring.
Few realize that here, amongst the working-class bungalows and sundry stores, churches and community centers, Erik Waldkirch, Ibtisam Salih and Onie Johns are cooking up change. Inside Caritas Village's ground floor coffee shop, business people, church groups, and neighborhood folks eat lunch on tables topped with brown-and-white checked oilcloth. Teenagers linger with their laptops, taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi, while sitting in a jumble of chairs juxtaposed against a vivid backdrop of art created by Frank D. Robinson. An intoxicating array of flavors -- garlic, cinnamon and charred hamburger -- wafts from the kitchen, where Waldkirch and Salih create meals for the 50 or so customers they serve per day before launching into the complex catering menus that help keep the coffee shop afloat.
Waldkirch, a 36-year-old native of Lancaster, Pa., has lived in Memphis just seven years. Around the time he moved to town, Johns, his mother-in-law, gave up her home in Germantown and relocated to Binghamton for what she describes as "a ministry of presence," which, in late 2006, spread to the building on Harvard. By the end of that year, Waldkirch's business, Maximillian's Catering, was up and running in the kitchen at Caritas Village.
"The theory behind the food," says Johns, 63, "was that was how we were going to pay for the building. I thought we'd have a pot of coffee and a pot of soup, and Erik could pay rent. Of course, it didn't really work out that way." With 20 years of cooking under his belt, Waldkirch has worked most avenues of the culinary industry, from airline food to creating meals at lush eateries like the Four Seasons restaurant in Chicago and the Keystone Resort. But he took a step back from the business when he realized he had become, in his words, a "selfish, egotistical" chef.
"I was in it for the wrong reasons," he says. "I wasn't appreciative anymore. Then I realized I didn't need to be (famed Chicago restaurant owner) Charlie Trotter; I just needed to be me. My food didn't have to be about me, and my career didn't need to be about winning anything. I just have to be of service." As Waldkirch has grown his business, which he originally ran from a rented kitchen on Highland, the menu in the Caritas Village coffee shop has expanded, too. Today, diners can choose between grilled salmon or chicken salad, panini sandwiches, hot muffalettas, and hearty burgers. They can go vegetarian, try the soup of the day, or taste African flavors in dishes prepared by Salih, Waldkirch's 38-year old Sudanese sous chef who received her American citizenship last month.
"American people love this food, because it tastes different than anything else here," says Salih, who, back in Africa, would dine on soup and a spongy flatbread similar to Ethiopian injera three times a day. "I feel like I'm putting some of my country in here, and when people like it, I feel good." "Food is a thing that gathers people together," Johns confirms. "Here, it brings in all kinds of people. This neighborhood is diverse: We have Caucasians, African Americans, Africans, Latinos, and Afghans in a four- to six-block area." But not all the food made in the kitchen at Caritas Village goes out on the coffee shop floor.
Some of it travels to the exclusive tables of Waldkirch's catering clients; people like Mamel McCain, an East Memphian who has used Maximillian's for nearly two years. "The first thing Erik did for us was a wedding day brunch," says McCain, who has since hired Waldkirch to do themed sit-down dinners, cocktail buffets, and lavish New Year's Eve meals. "He's just an excellent, all-around, very creative cook," McCain says. "He doesn't go extremely over-the-top, but we've had some really adventuresome meals, like black escolar, smoked wild mushroom and brie Napoleons, and veal chops served with an apple calvados reduction."
McCain is also a believer in Caritas Village. "I think it's a good landmark for the [Binghamton] community," she says. "Erik has done a nice job training people to work in a commercial kitchen, and teaching them how to get involved in the business. He seems to have a great rapport with a lot of people in that neighborhood."
The bulk of Waldkirch's supplies comes from local purveyors -- community garden plots like the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center's gardens in North Memphis and Orange Mound, and the McMerton Community Garden, which is facilitated by an outreach program at Idlewild Presbyterian Church. "I'm not a food fascist," Waldkirch says, shaking off comparisons to Alice Waters, the West Coast-based patron chef of community gardens, "but when we get stuff from the community gardens, it's exciting. Over time, I'd like to see how much these gardens can do."
Those who labor in the gardens eat at Caritas Village for free -- one meal for every hour worked. "The challenge," says Waldkirch, "is that we need to keep the food affordable. On the flip side, we need to be able to feed people who can't afford it, which affects my inventory." The relationship he depicts between Caritas Village and Maximillian's Catering is a symbiotic one.
"There's a trust," Waldkirch says, "and a level of professional courtesy between us. We have limited space to use here, so we have to be resourceful. We're dealing with these crazy catering requests, but on the flip side, we're running a better-than-average deli with a grill and a stovetop. It's all about making those two things work in conjunction with each other."
Playback Memphis
From Memphis Magazine....
If there are 8 million stories in the naked city (to borrow a line from a famous police drama), how many could we find in the Bluff City?
Virginia and Joe Murphy believe we all have several inside us and all of them are worthy of attention. Through Playback Memphis, an interactive theater group the Murphys recently started, individuals can share those stories and, in the process, strengthen their connections to each other.
A native Memphian, Virginia Murphy attended college in California, where she earned a master's degree in counseling psychology with a concentration in drama therapy. There, and later in New York City, she became active in Playback Theater, which was created in the 1970s and now has 60 companies around the world. "Members of the audience are invited to tell their stories," says Virginia, "and those are spun into theater on the spot — it's all improv — by a team of actors, musicians, and dancers."
She hesitates to call the drama therapeutic because "that could cause people to run away from it," Virginia says. "But there's something healing in the process. That happens not by any kind of analysis, but within the telling and witnessing of the enactment. We want to affirm the story's worth."
While in New York, Virginia met Joe Murphy, an actor who has performed on and off Broadway and in such hit TV shows as Law and Order and Sex and the City. The couple joined the Big Apple Playback Theater, hear-ing and re-enacting stories told to them in prisons, hospitals, drug rehab centers, AIDS hospices, community centers, and homeless shelters. "That's where it really sings," says Virginia, "in places where voices aren't traditionally heard or where groups are in conflict. We also worked with Palestinian and Israeli dialog groups."
After they married and started a family, Joe convinced his wife to move back to Memphis. "I really like it here," says the Wisconsin native who also runs a children's music program. "All I see is potential, opportunity, good people. Sure, there's work to be done, but that's true everywhere. I'm very pro Memphis." The Murphys believe their company — which operates out of First Congregational Church — can play a role in the city's "community building" and help organizations with staff development, teamwork, communications, and creative brainstorming.
So far, Playback has been building its actor base with the help of Bill Baker and Our Own Voice theater troupe. "We share many of the same values," says Virginia, "in that we see theater as a vehicle of social change. The main difference is that theirs is rehearsed and ours is totally improv, so I've been doing some workshops to teach them our [approach]."
Playback has taken its enactments to a University of Memphis theater class, where a theme emerged from class members about being disappointed by people they love: a brother borrowing a car and returning with the gas tank empty; a daughter going on spring break and sticking her folks with a huge bill; a woman who appreciates her mother-in-law babysitting but not her meddling. Playback also performed at the main library, as part of a program whose goal is to discover Memphis stories. At each one, Virginia emphasizes to the audience that "the stories of ordinary folk are in fact extraordinary and as important as those of the Hollywood famous and infamous that our culture seems obsessed by."
Aiming to make Playback Memphis a paid professional company, Virginia hopes to partner with such groups as the Child Advocacy Center and the Literacy Council, as well as schools and businesses. She and her husband believe interactive theater can help strengthen any organization: "I've seen rooms transformed," says Joe. "At the beginning, people are quiet and self-conscious. At the end, after telling their stories and seeing them enacted, they're talking to each other. It breaks down barriers. And it can be very funny."
Adds Virginia: "I've seen groups who can't even sit around a table together because each one is so stuck with clashing visions and ideas. But Playback helps them find the humanity in each other." M
