2008 First Person Festival of Documentary & Memoir Arts Volunteer Orientation!

Who: Interested volunteers
What: Volunteer sign-up and brief orientation for First Person Festival (Nov.11-16)
Where: First Person Arts Offices:
1 S. Broad St., 17th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107
When: Wednesday, October 29th, 6pm-7:30pm
Why: Eat, drink, meet, and sign-up to volunteer at the First Person Festival!

If you volunteered last year, you know this is a great opportunity to meet like-minded artists and arts lovers and get a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into producing an event of this scope.

Now through the Festival

• Distribute brochures, fliers, and posters
• Coordinate volunteers

At the Festival

• Manage and staff the Cafe and Bookstore
• Assist festival-goers
• Coordinate events
• Tote and transport via Zipcar

Schedules are flexible, the time commitment is small, and we’ll ‘pay’ you in vouchers you can use to attend Festival programs, so let us know how you can help.

To attend the volunteer orientation or if you are interested but are unable to attend, please contact Maggie Saia (267) 402-1413 or msaia@firstpersonarts.org

Rick Nichols, veteran award-winning food columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, opens the official beginning of the First Person Festival with Edible World: East Passyunk. He will take a few intrepid, hungry souls on a tasting tour of the ever-diversifying “restaurant row” of East Passyunk. That’s the diagonal South Philadelphia street as it runs between Broad and South Streets. Once an Indian trail, it became a commercial street in George Washington’s time. During the 19th century it became increasingly Italian, and is still very much so, but now with Mexican, Cambodian, and Ecuadorian influences–and more. Rick and the group will stop and eat at Le Virtu, sample some Cambodian-Parisian treats elsewhere, and see and taste several other gastronomic highlights.

It’s a storied street, and Rick Nichols focuses on how the current scene overlays the past, enriching and complicating East Passyunk’s identity. He will weave this story in with a walking tour of some of his favorite spots along “The Avenue,” several of which will be revealed only as part of the tour. If you read The Inquirer, (of course you do!), you’re familiar with his interest in all sorts of cuisine and the people who create it. You can learn a lot about him by checking out his own story of his kitchen.

Bring your curiosity and your appetite!

Other food-related events at this year’s Festival are First Taste Preview Dinner, Trail of Crumbs, Swallow Your Pride, Mural Arts Tour, and Crazy Sexy Cancer.

Founder and director of First Person Arts, Vicki Solot, sometimes goes on vacation, but she never travels without her love of true stories from real life:

It’s my fourth trip to Belize, but the first time I’ve thought much about the skinny, barefooted children you see selling beaded jewelry, hawking papaya chips, helping to load luggage or roaming the streets or the beach.  They aren’t in school, though school seems to be in session.  Their sales skills are good – they know how to pull at your heart strings.  It’s hard to resist a kid who needs money to buy medicine for his sick mother.

At eight, Abner was one of those kids. His father had walked out on the family, leaving his mother alone in Guatemala with four young children to care for.   With few opportunities for employment, she went to Belize to look for work.  When she found a job, she sent for Abner and his five-month old brother, but with what she was earning, she could only afford to bring the two of them.  The others had to stay behind to be raised by an aunt.

“I quit school in third grade,” Abner tells me.  “The teacher was prejudiced toward me because I was dark-skinned and Guatemalan.  She picked on me all the time, so I just walked out.”

That’s when he went to work – helping out in the produce market — working every day from 6 AM until into the night and earning only $80 Belize ($40 US) each week, which he gave to his mother to help cover the family’s living expenses.   He has worked continuously ever since – in various markets, on a farm (a job he walked away from – literally — because the farm-lady worked him to the bone but never paid him) and eventually in construction.

At eleven, he learned the tools of the trade that ultimately led him to Captain Morgan’s, where his story finally took a turn for the better, thanks to the support and encouragement of its owners Karen Riley and Ernie Olmstead.

Captain Morgan’s is a gorgeous resort on Ambergris Caye off the coast of Belize that includes time-share units and a booming, new development of condo residences.   Captain Morgans also owns a lumber mill on the mainland, where they mill all the wood for the residences, and a farm where they grow produce for the resort’s restaurant.  They employ more than one hundred fifty people, many of whom have been with them since they opened the resort 15 years ago.

Abner, a soft-spoken, heavy-set young man in his mid-20’s has worked there for five years.  He started out as a construction worker, then developed skill as a tile craftsman.  At first, he was responsible for laying tiles for floors, shower stalls, counters, etc.  Now, he designs them as well, incorporating explosive patterns and innovative installation techniques for outdoor fountains, customized hot tubs.  Any surface that can be tiled is, it seems and they all contain evidence of Abner’s artistry. This year, he will travel to Miami with Karen so he can have a hand in the tile selection.  He is modest about his talents, but Karen boasts for him.  The beauty of the resort is testimony to his achievements.

Though he works exclusively for Captain Morgan’s, he runs his own business and employs five workers, including the younger brother he grew up with in Belize.  Although he needs help preparing contracts and invoices, due to his lack of formal education, by Belize standards, he is quite successful. He bought his own house and rides a swanky motorcycle.    Recently, when his mother was hospitalized, he was able to pay her medical bills out-of-pocket.  This summer, he flew his whole crew to Guatemala to spend a month building her a new house — at his expense.

It was a labor of love, no doubt — and I’m sure the tile work is exceptional!

You can get a little taste of Belize yourself now that the online portion of First Person Arts Auction is open.  The auction will run through November 6, 2008, concluding live at our “First Taste Festival Preview Dinner” at Ristorante Panorama on November 6, 2008. (Click here to purchase tickets!)

Proceeds go to First Person Arts to support our annual Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art, our monthly StorySlams and Salons, and our artist-in-residencies and Community Writing Program.  Auction items range from exotic vacation getaways to activities and gift items guaranteed to delight and surprise.  So, get in on the action and start bidding!

A wine tasting is all very well. A wine pairing with dinner is even better. But Sergio Esposito’s stories about Italian wine, its territorio, and the people whose lives revolve around it, are best of all. And he opens our First Person Festival with wine, dinner, and stories.

Esposito is a partner in Italian Wine Merchants, and has just published Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy. This book is no foodie fantasy, although it does have more than its share of mouthwatering descriptions. Rather, it’s a full and rich account of a life in which wine and food are metaphors for the human connection. Like the best Barolo wine, the book is complex and full of surprises.

We learn that Little Sergio killed his first chicken at age four and fell in love with wine at age seven. For his first seven years his family lived in Barra, on the outskirts of Naples. “In Barra, you were never alone, even when you slept. And nothing you owned was simply yours. Were you missing your lipstick? Check next door. Where was the sugar? Probably down the street. What about your favorite blue sweater? Cousin Margherita was wearing that at the movies yesterday.” Sundays in Barra were as full as the households, dedicated to two things, church and supper.

When his family moved to Albany, New York to join other relatives, it was a shock for everyone. They moved to an all-black neighborhood where “We stood out terribly with our brown leather shoes and our pale faces, and, none of us having learned English in school, we couldn’t communicate at all.” The new foods were just as incomprehensible: cottage cheese, barbecue sauce, marshmallows, dry cereal, peanut butter, and ketchup. “We especially didn’t understand marshmallows. A white spongy hunk of gelatin that is hard to digest, and, on Easter is dyed bright yellow and shaped like a chick? But why?”

As a young teen, Esposito saw the movie A Cuckoo’s Nest, in which he finds parallels between the lobotomized Jack Nicholson character and the people around him in Albany, seeking routine and monochrome sameness, and eating, he imagined, Hamburger Helper. With that wake-up call, he vowed to lead a life full of variety, flavor, and warmth, from that day forward.

Esposito grew up into someone who can write about wine this way: “It wasn’t a catchy pop song or a girl in a makeup commercial. You couldn’t pin it down by saying it smelled like rose petals. That was as reductive and senseless as looking at The Birth of Venus and saying, “It’s a painting of a girl in a shell.”

You can buy tickets to the First Taste Preview Dinner at Brown Paper Tickets.

Of course, if it’s whine you’re looking for, check out the Complaint Choir!

Just in case you’re not keeping up with the Complaint Choir blog (Wait, you’re not?), you should know that the next meeting is Monday, October 13th (6pm) at the Terra Building (211 S. Broad Street, 17th Floor).  It’s okay if you missed the first meeting, and you can take a look at the schedule of practices and performances to make sure you block out the requisite time in the month ahead.  And make sure you tell your friends about the Choir performance at the festival.

If you HAVE been keeping up with the Complaint Choir blog, you know a lot of the complaints have been transportation related.  The SEPTA Watch blog noticed too!

Regular Salon-goer, friend of First Person Arts, and owner of the storytelling site Philastories.org, Michael Feagans attended a Digital Storytelling Workshop (at the Philadelphia Center for Digital Storytelling) recently and produced the following moving account of his relationship to his father and his father’s life as a black firefighter in Philadelphia at Engine 11:

You can hear more from some of Philadelphia’s black firefighters at philastories.org.  If you’d like to try your hand at creating your own Digital Story, the First Person Festival offers an introduction to the form in Storysmithing 101 (other options during the session include writing and oral storytelling).

The Linda Creed Foundation is staging its Paws for the Cause Dog Walk and Horse Trot on Sunday October 5th in Fairmount Park, and First Person Arts will be there! Stop by our table, pick up a festival brochure, and say hello!

This year we welcome our other most-loved four-legged animals – Horses.

* When: SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2008
* Where: Chamounix Drive (Near Belmont Plateau), Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, PA 19131
* Philadelphia, PA 19102-2909
* Horse Trot registration begins at 8:00 a.m.
* Doggie Walk registration starts at 10:30 a.m.
* Family Fun until 2:00 p.m.

First Person Arts will be there to meet people and hand out what will then be our freshly printed Festival brochure for the First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art (11/11-11/16 @ the Painted Bride in Old City) Plus we’ll be selling tickets to our Crazy Sexy Cancer screening and brunch! (You can see a description and buy tickets right here!) A portion of the proceeds go to the Linda Creed Breast Cancer Foundation.

Paws for the Cause
First Person Arts