The American Gold Cup @Old Salem

The main thing you need to know about the Gold Cup, a top drawer, multi-tiered equestrian event to be held September 11-15 at Old Salem Farm in North Salem, is that it is a spectacle worth watching even if you’re not particularly enamored of all things equestrian. Featuring 600 horses and 300 riders from Europe, South America, Canada and across the United States, the American Gold Cup is an important qualifying event for riders and their horses aspiring to compete in the 2014 World Cup Finals to take place next April in Lyon, France. The Gold Cup at Old Salem Farm has been designated as a CSI-4 qualifying competition by the world governing body of equestrian sport, the Federation Equestre Internationale, of FEI. Only a handful of such events can lay claim to that importance in the United States. The Grand Prix, the epic qualifying event of the five day extravaganza, will take place at Old Salem at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 15, with a $200,000 prize package for the winners. That event will be broadcast live on NBC Sports.

It’s tricky to describe the sheer star-quality glamour and sex appeal surrounding top ranked equestrians and their horses to Americans; in Europe, show jumpers enjoy the celebrity of rock stars. Even if you’re not savvy about ranking riders and qualifying competitions, if nothing else, the Gold Cup at Old Salem Farm can be viewed as a golden opportunity to ogle the athleticism and pizazz of some of the world’s most talented riders and their mounts.

A bit of history about the Gold Cup. Founded in 1970, the show is considered one of the most prestigious and iconic sporting events of International Show Jumping. The first Gold Cup took place in Cleveland, Ohio; since then, the show has enjoyed success in Tampa, Philadelphia, and, for more than 20 years, Devon. Last year, the Gold Cup moved to Old Salem Farm, where it set records for show entries, spectators, and prizes. It’s quite a feather in Old Salem Farm’s cap that for its 34^th year, the Gold Cup is returning to Old Salem.

Frank Madden, Old Salem Farm head trainer and American Gold Cup organizer, said the farm recently completed a $30 million renovation, which further established the property as a first-class show facility, highlighted by its pristine Grand Prix field. 
The five day event is estimated to garner more than $6 million dollars in revenues from attendance. Over five days, $465,000 will be awarded in prize money.

Judy Richter, esteemed equestrian, long time trainer and owner of Bedford’s Coker Farm, said she is “delighted” the Gold Cup is at Old Salem. “It’s a fabulous facility, a worthy venue for that prestigious competition,” Richter said. Heather Ward, head trainer and manager of Sunnyfield, said, “I am thrilled that such an event is being held locally. Our community is so involved in horses, it makes sense to hold a big Grand Prix here. We live in horse country and it’s exciting to have a top sport competition like this, especially since our area is home to so many equestrian Olympians, including McLain Ward , Leslie Howard, and Peter Leone.”

Kristen Kissel Carollo, owner of Courtyard Farm, said, “I think it’s great; we are such a major horse community, to have something so big in the equestrian world come to our area is not only huge for us, but an honor.” Carolla said the owners and managers of Old Salem Farm have done an amazing job making it a world-class facility. “These big competitions are so coveted; we’re incredibly lucky to have this in our back yard,” Carollo said. “Kudos to Old Salem Farm. I’m totally looking forward to having the Gold Cup here for a long time.” 

Lendon Gray, a two-time equestrian Olympian and trainer of Olympian and International Young Riders, as well as founder and president of Dressage4Kids, said, “To have one of the most respected established jumper competitions come to one of the most respected jumper show grounds is fabulous. And how lucky are we to have the opportunity to watch some of the best jumper riders in the world compete.”

“Last year it was an all-star cast,” said Michael Morrissey, president of Stadium Jumping and American Gold Cup organizer. “We wanted everybody to come here and have a good experience and go away thinking this was the climax of the season. We feel we really accomplished that. This year, we are particularly excited to share the American Gold Cup in this incredible venue with television viewers across the country.”

In 2012, the North American Riders Group voted both Old Salem Farm and the American Gold Cup as among the “Top 25” equestrian shows in North America.

Sponsored by Suncast, Ariat, Roberto Coin, Purina, Hermes, Danbury Porsche & Audi, Der Dau, Jeffrey Terreson Fine Art, and others, the Gold Cup will take place from September 11^th through the 15^th. During the week, admission is free and open to the public; Saturday & Sunday it’s $15 for adults; $10 per child 4-12 years; seniors 65+ and children 3 & under are free. Gates open at 8:00 a.m. weekdays; Saturday and Sunday, 12:00 noon.

For more information about the Gold Cup at Old Salem Farm, log on to www.theamericangoldcup.com. Eve Marx.

First day of school/Empty nesters

As I write this, it’s the first day of school for many kids. In some cases, it really is the first day, that is if you’ve got a kindergartener.

All morning my Facebook news feed has been filled with happy pictures of kids, the elementary school aged ones dressed in their “first day” clothes, proudly hoisting their backpacks. Every child’s proud, shining face filled with expectation is a poignant sight to me, as it seems only yesterday when my own son, now a man, first stepped on the school bus and drove away. I still remember ducking my head to hide my tears as he eagerly climbed aboard without so much as a look back, so eager was he to begin his new adventure. Little did I know or understand at the time it was the first of many big departures: his going away at ten for three weeks of sleep-a-way camp; his four years as an undergrad in Oregon; his six months of study in Oslo, Norway; his moving into his first solo-living apartment as an grad student in D.C. Each and every one of these leave takings has felt like a rip or a tear in the fabric of our family, and no matter how many departures there have been, I never, ever really get used to them.

In the past few weeks I haven’t been terribly surprised to see on Facebook a number of plaintive posts from saddened moms who had just packed their first (or last) child off to college. The first kid to leave the nest is, of course, the hardest; it’s even more tear-jerking when that child is your one and only. A few moms posting asked how bad would it be if they just happened to drop in on their college student, “just to say hello.” Pretty bad was the most common answer.

While other moms posted in commiseration about the difficulties of learning to grocery shop minus one, or how many nights they forgot and set a place for the missing child at the dinner table, I was thinking about my sort of step sister, Mary. A couple of weeks ago Mary’s son Will became a college freshman. She and her husband were driving Will to his college campus, 23 minutes away, a distance Mary knows by heart because she has timed it. This son is her first and only child to move out of the house to go away to college. Mary herself did not go, and her husband attended college part time while living at home with his parents. This is a proud moment for Mary, but strange territory, or so she claimed.

I disputed the fact she had no experience packing anyone off to college.

“Don’t you remember how I left?” I asked on the phone, trying to jog her memory. Mary and I are very close, although we have not seen each other for years. The last time we physically got together was nearly a decade ago when we spent an afternoon at the summer home of a sort of sibling we mutually share through our unique familial arrangement.

 “Eddie drove you and I rode shotgun,” Mary said. At the time I was 17, car-less, and desperate to get out of my mother’s house. Eddie was a friend of Mary’s half- brother, Chip, who had a license and a car and was willing to chauffeur. I told him to bring Mary along to help move my stuff, and also to keep him company on the long ride back to south Jersey. To our minds, we were strict south Jersey people and north Jersey was another planet, a planet constructed of concrete, and with twice as much traffic.

“Remember how I told you guys just to leave after we went somewhere for lunch?” I said. “You’re going to do the same thing with Will. You will not unpack his bags. You will not make his bed. You will hug him and kiss him goodbye and then you and Dave will scram. At home you will practice making small romantic dinners. You will hang out and watch TV. You will start to get used to being a pair and not a trio, because this isn’t just the start of your son’s life of independence, but your future with your husband as a child-free couple.”

“You don’t say,” Mary said. She was still adjusting to the concept of becoming an empty nester. I didn’t tell her it takes years for that notion to sink in, especially when the average college student who lives less than an hour from home drops in once a week to do his laundry.

Mr. Sax and I have officially been empty nesters now for about 7 years. Our son’s old room is making the slow transformation into a second den. Most of his personal belongings are gone and we no longer keep his favorite cereal in the house because he’s so rarely around to eat it. We baby our cats and dogs because they really have become our children. The only thing that never changes is the pang I still experience on the first day of school when I see the neighborhood kids proudly climbing on the school bus. I know just how their parents feel seeing them pull away. They feel sad because they know it’s just the beginning.

Thoughts on "Orange is the New Black" Netflix series

Mr. Sax and I just devoured the first season of the hit Netflix series, “Orange is the New Black,” starring the actress Taylor Schilling playing the character Piper Chapman, an educated, upper middle class white woman in her 30’s who finds herself sentenced to 15 months in prison after being convicted of a decade old crime she committed while in her 20’s, transporting money for her drug dealing lesbian-lover girlfriend. For reasons obvious and not so obvious, everything about the show pushed all my buttons why I had to see it. I was really missing that great 2004 Showtime series, “The L Word,” which was about a bunch of beautiful LA lesbians.

“Orange is the New Black,” is based on a memoir, called “Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,” by Piper Kerman. The book was adapted and brought to the screen by Jenji Kohan who you might recall wrote, produced and directed the Showtime hit, “Weeds,” which was about a soccer mom pot dealer. The book details Kerman’s real life experience transitioning from a woman with a career, a Smith College education, and a nice boyfriend, to a life behind bars. The show does not deviate far from this theme, and although I have yet to read the book, I have a feeling it’s pretty faithful to what Kernan put on the page.

And real.

Very real.

And I can say this because for years, I worked at a women’s prison.

In the fall of 2009, I began teaching a class called English Composition 109 at Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills. The class was for college credit and was offered under the auspices of Mercy College. Overall the class went well, and most of the ladies who took it passed and received college credit. The women were grateful for the opportunity to further their educations, most of them having only just gotten their G.E.D. while incarcerated.  But there was a lot of crying and pressure and tension involving papers and exams, and after that semester, I decided teaching English Composition wasn’t really for me. What I wanted to offer the ladies was creative writing, so I switched up the game plan. For the next four years I taught 8 week creative writing classes in the spring, the summer, and the fall.

In the show, as was true for me when I started working at Taconic, at first the women seem to fall into stereotypes. There’s always one woman everybody else calls “Crazy Eyes.” There’s edgy Latinas, feisty black chicks, tough older broads you don’t want to mess with, scary looking butch lesbians. There are junkies, and angry, religious women who won’t quit talking about the sword of Jesus. And just as is true on the outside, caged behind bars there are strong women, passive women, manipulative and subversive women, the occasional woman who used to be a man, and prey and their predators.  

Just as I discovered while teaching at Taconic, these stereotypes gradually gave way to individuals who I came to know and love. It’s been a few years since I worked inside the prison, but I still remember many of their faces, their stories, their laughter, and their tears. I saw how they formed bonds with their own tribes that were more important than any other bond. “We stick with our own kind,” one of the inmates advises Piper in the TV series, and she means it. In prison, where you sit in the mess hall is extremely circumscribed.

The major theme in the show as is true in real prison, is female relationships. Friendship in prison is all about survival because if you don’t have friends, you’re dead. Piper is advised by her so-called counselor the first day she arrives to mind her own business, keep to herself, and above all, not to get involved with lesbians. That counselor turns out to be one of the most dangerous and corrosive personalities Piper encounters. Because she is in jail with the woman who gave her up to the authorities and who was once her lover, it’s not much of a surprise when she can’t stay away from that woman, who is exceptionally charismatic. When the two fall back into their old attraction, that counselor, who is a prison officer, illegally punishes Piper by throwing her in “the shoe,” which is slang for solitary confinement.

If you’re interested at all in female relationships, or what life would be like behind bars, I recommend the series, which is on Netflix. I don’t understand how we watched it ourselves. It has something to do with Roku. Don’t ask me how that works. I still have a dumb phone.

I will close with this thought. Possibly jail is the last place in America where older women have cred. Maybe it has something to do with being post-menopausal. If you’re bleeding, you’re vulnerable. Behind bars, achieving crone-dom is a valuable asset.

My pony is ailing

Poor Buttons is having a not so good time again and it isn't even his eye

he's been picking at his food for about a week

drinking much less water

his feet seem sensitive

but he has no fever

his CBT came back showing nothing 

now we're waiting to hear about another test

something to do with his Cushings and the medication he takes for it

i asked the vet should i ride him 

and she said

"Let's not change his usual routine." 

so i took him out today for a stroll in the woods and had to get off 3/4 of the way back

after a brief canter where he pulled himself up short

he felt weird under me

he came up lame

his right hind is bothering him

i left while the barn manager was putting in a call to his vet, who was just there for the blood work

of course i'm leaving on sunday to go to Omega for a week to finish my Reiki Master training

my poor pony

he's old

it's finally all catching up with him

Tragic ending for beloved family dog; was the kennel responsible?

http://www.record-review.com/record-review/Record-Review_080213_RR.html

Always a Campfire Girl

The summer I was 12 years old, my mother packed me off to a sleep-away camp in the Poconos. It was called Timber Tops, and the camp still exists, a fourth generation family run operation in Greeley, Pennsylvania. Described as an overnight camp for girls offering an overall-activity program with an emphasis on “FUN,” the fun is posted daily on FB now with lots of wonderful pictures of girls swimming, performing, canoeing, dancing, and having campfires by starlight.

My start at Timber Tops was rocky; about 3 days into to my month-long adventure, I spent a night in the infirmary for colic. Or maybe it was food poisoning. I did not like the food or the sweltering dining hall and I hated the mandatory morning swim in a lake of freezing water. Until Timber Tops, I’d never swum in anything besides a pool or the Atlantic Ocean. I hated the uniform, which was a white tee shirt and red shorts. Can you believe there was a uniform? The second week of camp my life took a turn for the better when I landed a role in the camp play, cast as Shroeder in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” which thanks to the rigorous rehearsal schedule, got me out of tennis, which I hated.

The reason my mother gave for sending me to camp was she wanted me to have a more well rounded childhood. She also had just started dating a man named Maurice, but more on him later. A friend of hers, Ruth, was sending her girls, Leslie and Barbara, to the same camp; I was friendly with both Ruth’s daughters. Another girl we knew, Wendy, was also going.

What I remember most about Camp Timber Tops was that everything happened on a schedule. There was a rotation of waterfront activities including swimming and canoeing; there was tennis, arts and crafts, theater arts, and riflery. I actually was very good at riflery. I didn’t like walking en masse to the showers and I was very grateful a toilet and a sink were inside our rough-hewn bunk house. There were 12 girls in my bunk, including Leslie and Wendy. Barbara, being a year younger, was placed in another bunk dwelling. Wendy was certain this was going to be the summer when she got her period. Her trunk was packed with Kotex.

One of the girls in my bunk was named Reisman and her family was in the pretzel business. We had pretzels at every meal. Most of the girls at camp came from lovely upper middle class Jewish homes in the Philadelphia area. Today the girls come from all over the country. On a recent video I watched on the camp’s website, one girl was from Scarsdale. Back in the 60’s, the camp was dubbed “The Mountain Camp for Girls,” and even though we lived in bunks not tents, it was pretty close to providing a wilderness camping experience. Built from scratch on the banks of Lake Selma (the wife of the couple who were the camp’s founders), and carved into the side of a mountaintop of pine trees, Timber Tops embodied the spirit of adventure.

I spent the month of August at the camp. When I returned home, my mother had married Maurice in my absence. He and I met for the first time at the train station in Philadelphia on the platform when my mother came to meet the camp train. Maurice bought me a fall (a hair piece very popular in the ‘60’s) and we all went to Bookbinder’s  Restaurant in center city for dinner. He asked me that night if I had ever considered boarding school. To this day I regret my smart-ass answer.

The takeaway from my Timber Tops experience was that camp was very good for me overall. At camp I learned water tastes so much better than the sweet soft drink they served called “bug juice.’ I learned to shoot and clean a weapon and perfected my aim. I learned about flip flops. Prior to Timber Tops, it was strictly boots or barefoot for me. From early May through late September, if I didn’t have to, I wore shoes. I didn’t even know the word ‘sandal.’ But at camp every girl wore flip flops, except for our bunk counselor whose name Leslie (but not me) still remembers, a large, soft, grouchy girl in her early 20’s who snuffled in her sleep and cursed us. I am still a reluctant flip flop wearer after being chewed out at work in my early 20’s for my footwear. I can still hear Ira Kirschenbaum, one of the bosses, saying, “The workplace is not a beach,” and let’s face it, I’m always working and when I’m not, only an idiot would wear flip flops to a stable.

The most important thing I learned at camp was independence and a sense of ‘can do.’ And being in an all-female environment at that particular time of my life was inspiring. It’s thrilling to me that the legacy of Timber Tops lives on, although I see they no longer offer riflery. But now they have horseback riding. Even better.