Year: 2024

Mayluna, by Kelley McNeil

Mayluna, by Kelley McNeil (Lake Union Publishing, 399 pages)

It’s tempting to compare Kelley McNeil’s excellent second novel to Daisy Jones and the Six, but Mayluna is more than rock history. Its story revolves around a fictional chart-topping rock group but is more focused on the emotional lives of two main characters: Carter Wills, the eponymous band’s creative force, and Evie Waters, a music journalist who becomes Carter’s lover and muse.

One key Daisy Jones divergence is that Mayluna the band doesn’t easily hew to any other group of the era; they could be Coldplay as easily as Radiohead. Also, and more importantly, it’s a tautly written and engaging story, full of highs, lows, passion and agony, not emotion-flattening oral history.

Carter meets Evie, who writes using a gender-neutral pseudonym, when she attempts to do a backstage interview at Jones Beach Amphitheater. McNeil’s past career in the music industry lends authenticity to Evie’s interactions with the press-averse band’s leader, and to their late ’90s pre-Napster milieu.

Their banter includes business advice from Evie to lean into the band’s mystery, make their reticence a marketing tool. There’s also plenty that could be cut and pasted into the movie version of the novel, which one hopes will come. Their connection is well-crafted by McNeil, but this love won’t last — Mayluna is a look back at what might have been.

In a clever narrative device, Evie tells her story in the present day to her married daughter, who’s returned home for her father’s funeral; he died after a bout with cancer. She stumbles onto a trove of memorabilia in a closet, and in a magazine story about Mayluna spots a bracelet on the arm of someone who looks a lot like her mom.

Evie, who wrote the article as Cameron Leigh, decides it’s time to raise the curtain on her past life.

At the same time, the members of Mayluna are on a private jet, winging to a South America stadium gig, and sharing “the whole story” with another journalist. There’s a sense that their 25-year Rock & Roll Hall of Fame eligibility date is near, and it’s time to come clean. Carter alludes to but never identifies Evie, while the rest of the group drop clues to who she is and what she meant to him — and them.

Carter and Evie’s entanglement is presented as destiny — “There are signs everywhere, Ev,” he tells her. “You just have to pay attention” — and as children they both witnessed the strange celestial phenomena referenced in one of his songs, of a star twinkling through a crescent moon. Evie saw it from her home in Pennsylvania, Carter from the English shore.

So when the relationship abruptly ends a third of the way through the novel, one wonders what will carry the story to its conclusion. McNeil handles it perfectly, giving clarity to the decisions made by Evie while watching Mayluna from a distance, until an unwitting friend’s invitation to see the band at a local football stadium, and a surprise seat upgrade, put Carter and Evie back on a collision course.

The rest of the novel revolves around reconciling, in Evie’s words, having “been gifted with the mating of souls with one man and a lifetime of loving companionship with another,” and eventually realizing that “the one we love most in life may not be the one we love the best.” Mayluna’s greatest strength is the balancing act it achieves between being about a band bound for glory and being about two star-crossed lovers.

It’s to McNeil’s credit that Carter and Evie’s meet-again-cute development doesn’t turn the novel down an easy path; rather, it never stops exploring the hard choices, and often heartbreak, that face both artists and those in their orbit. The drive to create is summarized brilliantly during their initial backstage conversation.

Evie shares with Carter her hope to “write something that isn’t terrible so that I can get the chance to do more interviews with more bands and write even more words and do more films and somehow eke out enough of a living to not worry so much about paying my rent and hope that somewhere along the way, someone will think that the stories I tell matter.”

“So we’re the same, then,” an impressed Carter answers, “That’s us. That’s our band. And our future, all in one sentence.” A-

—Michael Witthaus

Album Reviews 24/03/14

Loreena McKennitt, The Road Back Home (Ume Records)

For most people, hearing the music of this platinum-selling ren-faire folkie evokes thoughts of witch conventions (by the by, we just went to one of those the other week at the Masonic Temple in Manchvegas, and Petunia was selling her witch stuff there); stinky, allergy-triggering incense and homemade “herbal tinctures,” whatever those are. To this day her big hit remains “The Mummer’s Dance,” a lively departure from most of her other fiddle-laden, Celtic Woman-inspired songs, which at least, praise Hepzibah, don’t have much tin whistle in them. This live album features a rendition of “On A Bright May Morning,” a concert-harp-buttressed exercise that’s depressing, lonely and inspirational at the same time, you know the routine. “Mummer” isn’t here, but the violinist gets a right smart workout on “Salvation Contradiction.” “Searching For Lambs” and its bummer cello lines are here too. A —Eric W. Saeger

Devon Thompson, “Poison Me” (Exquisite Feline Records)

Teaser single for an EP that’ll be out this spring from this Los Angeles-based singer, who’s been compared to PJ Harvey and Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano. What we’ve heard from her before has been pretty nice, starting with her 2023 debut single, “Soft Like Water,” whose plinky, vintage-themed guitars must have made plenty of Rasputina fans stand up (phlegmatically of course) and take notice. Then came “Napoleon,” which blended Sheryl Crow and both of the aforementioned ’90s-deconstruction princesses in a borderline cowgirl tune rooted in a Creedence Clearwater Revival vibe. With this new borderline-ballad song, she dabbles with a Siouxsie/Florence Welch sound but her tongue-in-cheek sensibilities lead to moments that make you think of B-52s singer Kate Pierson. She has a knack for sweeping epicness, and I think we’ll hear some remarkable stuff from her in future. But this song isn’t it, probably more a testing of the pop waters. A- —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs once sang, watch it now, watch it, watch it — here comes March 15, and it has new albums for you! Here it comes, here it comes, look at ’em all, all these new freakin’ albums, what’s a music journo supposed to do with ’em all, someone tell me! Ack, great, here we go, I suppose I’ll have to pretend I’m not mad at arena-blues hacks The Black Crowes, but that’ll be hard. You see, they’ve been very cheap about sending out review copies of their CDs to us CD reviewers, so we can review them in our CD review columns, and even worse, it’s a pain to get them just to let us stream them, like they guard their stupid songs as if they’re Queen Nefertiti’s priceless collection of bejeweled scarabs instead of a bunch of hackneyed songs that pretty much sound like a Jack White side project. You know, while I’m at it, there’s been a trend lately in which bands do all kinds of stupid things to get reviews, and those things often backfire. Like, if you want me to talk about your album, don’t send the whole thing in an email, that’s Rule No. 1. Every week I have to arrange my emailbox by email size and delete all the multi-megabyte emails from public relations people and whatnot who think I have limitless space on my server, it makes me so mad, guys. That’s not the worst, though. The worst is when I just want to review someone’s album and their PR person sends me a link to some obscure streaming service that wants me to register, which I basically never do, but when I do, the page is a horrible, idiotic mess and I have no idea what to click so I can listen to their music. Whatevs, the new album from whatstheirface is Happiness Bastards, and — wait a second, watch it now, watch it, the whole album is available on YouTube right now, so I guess I have to walk back everything I said. They’re not total cheapskates, let me go listen to one of the songs, “Wanting and Waiting.” It’s very stompy, bluesy, mid-tempo and exceptionally boring, same old stuff, a Baptist choir singing every once in a while and such and so. Let’s move along.

• False teen idol Justin Timberlake parlayed his love for being in a famous boy band into marrying Jessica Biel, sounds like a square deal to me. Of course, before he became a boy-bander he was in the actual, literal Mickey Mouse Club, where he met and started dating fellow Mouseketeer Britney Spears, you know, like normal people do. Oh, whatever, I don’t care about this stuff, and you shouldn’t either, so why don’t I mosey on over to the YouTube and check out JayTee’s new album, Everything I Thought It Was, oh let’s do. Ack, the new song, “Selfish,” is really mellow, with some old, vintage-sounding 808 drum loop holding down da beats for a makeout-sexytime song about something or other, and JT is doing the usual boy band thing, trying to sound like Usher and all that nonsense, may I go now?

• Ha ha, it’s indie-rock whatchamacallits Dandy Warhols, with a new album, Rockmaker! 2024 will see these wanton sellouts commemorating the 20th anniversary of Dig!, the documentary covering their bizarre relationship with acid-dropping loons The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Don’t you feel old now, do you still have your skinny jeans and your Pokemon backpack? The single, “Rockmaker,” has a neat 1950s sock-hop groove to it, but wait, that’s just the beginning, let’s see if it gets bad. Hm, the singer thinks he’s Iggy Pop now, that’s cool. The chorus is OK. It’s not completely worthless.

• Finally it’s Lenny Kravitz, also known as “the ex of ex-Mrs. Jason Momoa,” is this dude really still around? The new LP, Blue Electric Light, features the single “TK421.” It sounds like Living Colour trying to be Men Without Hats. How did this even happen? —Eric W. Saeger

Exotic and dangerous

First, travel to somewhere people don’t know you. You can try this at home, but frankly, convincing people you already know that you have a mysterious past is an uphill slog. You can pretend you have a history of things like knife-fighting in an alley in Eastern Europe, but your friends and family will remember the time you walked into a telephone pole, or laughed so hard as a kid that milk came out of your nose.

When you get there, pepper your conversation with small clues to a worldly past. If anyone asks what you do for a living, say vaguely, “I’m in imports and exports.”

If your brain cramps up in a conversation, and you can’t think of a word, say, “I forget how to say that in English.”

If there’s a loud startling noise — a busboy dropping a dish, or a seagull screeching suddenly — adopt a martial arts stance, then relax it very slowly, looking conspicuously from side to side.

Ask a bartender for something really exotic, something you know she won’t have, then “compromise” with this:

The Alias

2 ounces peach-flavored whiskey – I like one by Whiskey Smith; Crown Royal makes one, too

1 ounce orange juice – fresh-squeezed is really good; you only need an ounce, so you can take out your inner rage on half an orange, if you want to; alternatively, if your supermarket sells fresh-squeezed juice near the takeout coffee counter, that would be super-excellent

½ ounce orgeat (almond syrup)

large pinch of black pepper – if you don’t like the look of black specks of pepper swirling through your drink, white pepper will work almost as well, but the black pepper will make you look more exotic and dangerous

5 ounces (give or take) plain seltzer

Clear your mind, and open yourself to your instincts. This is what an unpredictable, mysterious stranger would do before mixing a drink.

Pour the whiskey, orange juice and orgeat over ice in a cocktail shaker. Grind some pepper over the top. Ask your digital assistant to play the theme to Mission: Impossible. This will bump up your shaking game by at least 20 percent. Shake for at least 30 seconds.

Strain over fresh ice in a Collins glass. Top it off with seltzer. Stir gently.

Garnish with a paper cocktail umbrella. Sip with a straw, which probably won’t make you look any cooler but will keep you from accidentally jamming a paper umbrella up your nose. If you want more spy music to drink a couple of these to, look up “Sneaky Spy Music for Writing Heists and Mysteries” on YouTube and play it in the background.

If it weren’t for the pepper and a back note of whiskey, this would taste a lot like a tropical soda. It’s deceptive, the sort of drink a mysterious stranger would drink in order to throw any enemies off their scent. Goons in trench coats will look for a tough guy in a nice suit drinking straight whiskey, or a woman in an exotic evening gown drinking a martini, not a relaxed-looking bystander in a concert T-shirt, drinking an umbrella drink.

Peach has an affinity for almonds and for black pepper. Orange juice gets along with almost any other fruit. The base flavors for this drink get along very well but are on the sweet side on their own. Instead of adding lime juice or bitters to offset the sweetness — which would cover up some of the more subtle flavors — the plain soda dilutes it and gives it some sparkle.

If anyone asks what you’re drinking, you can say, “Oh, just a little something I picked up in Mandalay….”

(It’s a city in Burma, if they ask any inconvenient follow-up questions.)

John Fladd is a veteran Hippo writer, a father, writer and cocktail enthusiast, living in New Hampshire.

Featured photo: The Alias. Photo by John Fladd.

Sweet time in a tough season

New Hampshire celebrates Maple Weekend

Each year, on the third weekend in March, the maple producers of New Hampshire celebrate Maple Weekend, a statewide event to share the maple syrup making process with the public. Dozens of local producers will hold open houses on Saturday, March 16, and Sunday, March 17. According to Andrew Chisholm, President of the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association, this maple weekend is very important to New Hampshire’s maple producers.

“There will be lots of unique opportunities for visitors to see a multigenerational tradition, first-hand,” Chisholm says. “For us, this is like the Super Bowl and Daytona 500 wrapped up into one.”

The participants represent a wide spectrum of producers, from large operations that produce several thousand gallons of maple syrup to hobbyist producers who finish the season with less than 100.

Big or small, one thing that all the maple producers agree on is that this has been a rough year for maple production.

The weather hasn’t cooperated. According to Darcy Lefebvre of Peterson Sugarhouse in Londonderry, maple producers need a combination of cold nights and warm days to collect enough sap from maple trees to make syrup.

“It’s been a really weird winter,” she says. “It’s been either too frigidly cold this winter, or the nights have been too warm.”

According to Emily Sliviak, the operations manager for Ben’s Sugar Shack in Temple, this will probably be a short maple season as well.

“If the weather continues to be this warm, the maple trees will wake up and start to bud; that leads to some ‘ropey’ [off] flavors,” she said.

According to Christopher Hicks, owner of the Sugarhouse at Morningstar Farm in Plaistow, this is not an isolated phenomenon.

“This is shaping up to be an especially tough year,” Hicks said. “It’s an El Niño year,” he explained, referring to a weather pattern that often blows mild weather into New England. “It’s affecting producers all the way up to the north of the state and into Quebec. That’s farming, though; last year there was too much rain for us to harvest much hay, and the year before that there was a drought.”

Hicks said there are a lot of factors that affect the quantity and quality of sap.

“The trees aren’t developing their sap now,” he said. “That all happened last summer. They [the maple trees] need a lot of sunlight and water to develop the sugars that go into syrup.” Over the past couple of years, he said, New Hampshire has gotten a lot of one or the other, but not in the right ratio for sap production. This year Hicks is expecting to produce a little more than 10 percent of the syrup he would in a good year.

“I’ve heard that some farms are getting as much as 50 percent, but that’s not what anyone hopes for,” Hicks said.

Dale Smith, owner of Mt. Crumpet Farm in New Boston, is excited by the changes in the maple syrup this year. Even though there is less of it, the syrup this year is darker than usual, with a stronger maple flavor.

“Early-season sap makes a lighter syrup,” Smith said; it gets darker throughout the season. This year’s syrup has been darker from the start. He likes that. “Everyone thinks they like lighter syrup,” he said, “but in blind taste tests, almost everyone prefers the dark.”

You get the feeling, talking to maple producers, that they really enjoy what they do. They get to spend time outdoors, working with their hands and producing a tangible, delicious product. But most of them seem especially excited about the equipment they get to work with. Darcy Lefabvre says that the No. 1 item on Peterson Sugarhouse’s “I Want” list is a reverse osmosis system, which can remove up to 40 percent of the water content from sap before it even gets to the boiler that cooks it down into syrup.

“We’re trying to do a little bit more each year, and we’d love to have reverse osmosis here,” she said.

Emily Sliviak agrees.

“We have one of the largest R.O. systems in the country,” she said. “It’s really advanced; we can control it from our phones. It’s a real game-changer.” She says that going out to the sugar house in the middle of the night used to be one of those things that a farmer just had to do. Now she and her husband have a better chance of sleeping through the night.

Marc Fortin of 2 Sappy Guys in Bedford puts it more succinctly: “There’s so much equipment to play with,” he said, “so much shiny equipment….”

This year’s Maple Weekend is shaping up to be a big one. Christopher Hicks, one of the biggest maple producers in the state, with almost 10,000 taps in operation, is enthusiastic about Maple Weekend.

“We’re expecting between 6,000 and 7,000 visitors this year,” he said.

Emily Sliviak said Ben’s Sugar Shack is planning several activities, from wagon rides and sugar-on-snow to tours that show visitors how the syrup is produced.

“We start tours every 10 to 15 minutes,” she said. “We take visitors out to see how we collect the sap — our plastic lines and some of the old-fashioned buckets. They have a chance to watch us boiling [the sap into syrup], and we give out samples of the syrup and some of our maple products.”

Marc Fortin is excited about showing off his operation.

“We’re not usually open to visitors,” he said, explaining that because he produces such a small amount of syrup — he estimates about 50 gallons this year — he doesn’t boil frequently enough to have regular hours. “We’re hobbyists,” he said.

Levi St. Germain of MapleSaint in Deerfield is looking forward to a relaxed experience at his open house. “People come, get to see the evaporator working, and ask a lot of questions,” he says. “Some people stay for a couple of hours; some stay 10 minutes.”

Like many maple producers, Peterson Sugarhouse has diversified its products from traditional maple syrup.

“We’re looking forward to sharing our candy, maple pecans, and our bourbon barrel-aged syrup,” Darcy Lefebvre said. Other producers mentioned maple cotton candy, maple barbecue sauces, spreadable maple cream, maple kettle corn and even maple hot sauce.

Maple producers in general are excited advocates for how versatile maple syrup is. Christopher Hicks likes to use it on the grill.

“We make two types of maple mustard,” Hicks says, “but we make a maple-garlic barbecue sauce that will knock your socks off.”

Dale Smith likes using it as a dipping sauce for sharp cheddar cheese: “You get that whole sweet-salty thing going, and it is fantastic!” he says.

Emily Sliviak likes a maple pulled pork sandwich with sliced ham, called a Boss Cuban sandwich. Darcy Lefebvre has two favorite uses for maple syrup: on ice cream, and in cocktails. “The other night, I had a bourbon Old-Fashioned, with maple syrup instead of simple syrup,” she said. “It was a revelation!”

Sugar houses

Here are some of the sugar houses participating in this year’s Maple Weekend, according to nhmapleproducers.com, where you can find more locations across the state.

• 2 Sappy Guys (324 Joppa Hill Road in Bedford, 860-7992) Open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days with tours of the maple sugar bush and sugar shack, according to their Facebook page.

• Ackerman Brothers (137 Amherst Road in Merrimack, 714-9784)

• Babel’s Sugar Shack (323 Hurricane Hill Road in Mason, 878-3929) Open both days, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• Ben’s Sugar Shack (8 Webster Hwy. in Temple, 924-3111, bensmaplesyrup.com) Ben’s is open every weekend in March, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with tours and samples, according to a Facebook post. The Temple location also has a deli/cafe selling breakfast and lunch.

• Blue Roof Sap Camp (6 Carter Hill Road in Canterbury, 234-5067, sugarbonesfarm603.com)

• Blueberry Hill Sugarworks (31 Blueberry Hill Road in Raymond, 300-6837, wickedsappy.com) Open both days, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to their website.

• Briar Bush (160 Briar Bush Road in Canterbury, 809-6393, briarbushfarm.com)

• Brookview Sugar House (154 Gage Road in Wilton, 731-5214)

• Dill Family Farm (61 Griffin Road in Deerfield, 475-3798, facebook.com/DillFamilyFarm)

• Ice Mountain Maple (276 Queen St. in Boscawen, 341-4297, icemountainmaple.com)

• Lamb’s Maple Syrup (228 Shaker Road in Canterbury, 783-9912) Open Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• LMP Maple (6 Jump Lane in Hudson, 781-539-2087)

• MapleSaint (28 Lang Road in Deerfield, 235-7167) Open both days, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• Meadow Ledge (612 Route 129 in Loudon, 798-5860)

• Mt. Crumpit Farm (207 Lull Road in New Boston, 325-5900)

• Munson’s Maple (44 Blueberry Hill Road in Raymond, 303-8278) Open both days, according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• Peterson Sugarhouse (28 Peabody Row in Londonderry, 247-5289)

• SMD Maple Syrup (6 Falcon Drive in Merrimack, 978-815-6476, facebook.com/SMDMapleSyrup)

• Sugar House at Morningstar Farm (30 Crane Crossing Road in Plaistow, 479-0804)

Open both days, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. There will be a pancake breakfast both days, fresh cider doughnuts, maple dogs, farm animals and syrup production, according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• Sunnyside Maples (1089 Route 106 North in Loudon, 783-9961, sunnysidemaples.com)

• Windswept Maple Farm (845 Loudon Ridge Road in Loudon, 435-4003, windsweptmaples.com) Open both days, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to their website.

Featured Photo: Courtesy of Ben’s Sugar Shack.

The Weekly Dish 24/03/14

News from the local food scene

• Maple wine tasting: As part of Maple Weekend, Wine on Main in Concord will host a tasting of Averill House Vineyard’s Sweet Moonlight Red, a raspberry-maple merlot. The wine is made using raspberries and locally sourced maple syrup. Wine on Main describes the merlot as a “dark, fruity merlot that is deep and balanced with just the right amount of sweetness.” This wine tasting is scheduled for Saturday, March 16. Wine on Main will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. It is at 9 Main St. in Concord, 897-58128, wineonmainnh.com.

• Kegs and eggs: Derryfield Restaurant (625 Mammoth Road in Manchester, 623-2880, thederryfield.com) will offer a St. Patrick’s Day special of “Kegs and Eggs” — two eggs, corned beef hash, home fries and toast with a Bud Light, Coors Light or Sam seasonal draft beer — from 8 a.m. to noon on Sunday, March 17. The restaurant will keep the celebration going with live music from D-Comp from 4 to 7 p.m.

• Irish breakfast buffet: The Red Blazer Restaurant and Pub (72 Manchester St. in Concord, 224-4101, the redblazer.com) will have a breakfast buffet on Sunday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, from 8 to 11 a.m. They will serve their regular menu and offer a traditional boiled dinner along with other Irish specials. The cost will be $20 for adults and $10 for children. Fifty percent of the proceeds will go to benefit the Boys & Girls Club of Central and Northern New Hampshire.

• Easter bread and baklava: The Philoptochos Ladies Society at Assumption Church (111 Island Pond Road in Manchccester; 623-2941) will hold an Easter Bake Sale on Saturday, March 23, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The event is walk-in and will feature spinach peta, cheese peta, baklava, kourabiethes, finikia, koulourakia, tsoureki (Easter bread) and pastry platters, according to an email.

On The Job – Elaine Setas

Owner of Taste & Art of Greece

Elaine Setas is the owner of Taste and Art of Greece at 32 Hanover St. in Manchester.

Explain your job and what it entails.

I am the owner of Taste and Art of Greece. We are a Greek import business supporting small-batch artists and designers of Greece… .

How long have you had this job?

I started in 2018, with launching a website, TasteandArtofGreece.com. Since 2021 we have had some pop-up boutiques that were temporary around Manchester. [The Hanover Street location opened in 2023.]

What led you to this career field and your current job?

…A friend of mine in Greece who lives on the island of Lesbos who is my business partner, he had the idea to bring a traditional store but didn’t know how to launch it. I… I ended up getting laid off from my office job right before Covid in 2019 and decided to give this 100 percent of my energy, and it has become a labor of love for me.

What kind of education or training did you need?

Everything I have done has led up to this point. I was an English major, I was in theater, but I was an office assistant. What helped me with what I took in school: I was well-spoken, well-read, I could write well. I wasn’t shy in front of people because of my theater training. I learned a lot from my various office jobs over the years. Especially my last job I was at, 11 years working for CEOs and presidents. … They showed me a lot of the marketing that you need for this kind of job, because I am not just selling product. We are sharing stories about the artists, about who made the product… .

What is your typical at-work uniform or attire?

Well, right now, I try to wear Mediterranean-inspired clothes, but on occasion you will see me in leggings and a sweatshirt.

What is the most challenging thing about your work, and how do you deal with it?

I want to say sometimes people don’t understand what goes into the price of something. Or they don’t understand that a handmade item that’s being shipped from Greece might be at a certain price point … we are not buying our things mass-produced. Then we’re paying for customs, we are paying for shipping, we are paying the artist to support their work.

What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?

Learning how to bring things in through customs was not easy. We wanted to have more food coming from Greece and we realized we had to deal with FDA regulations. … I wish I knew more Greek. … I can answer in English, I can understand [Greek] but I speak in English.

What do you wish other people knew about your job?

I don’t take the fact lightly that I am representing special artists and designers.

What was your first job?

The first job I ever had was working for my dad at Dunkin’ Donuts. As a waitress.

—Zachary Lewis

This interview was condensed.

Five favorites
Favorite book: short stories and short story anthologies
Favorite movie: A Room with a View
Favorite music: U2. ’80’s music. Anything with George Michael.
Favorite food: Chinese
Favorite thing about NH: I love that it’s got mountains and lakes, and you can feel like you are in another world in some parts of the state.

Featured photo: Elaine Setas. Courtesy Photo.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!