SantaFe.com

Admittedly, I tend to have an overactive imagination. When allowed to wander untended through the amazing carnival of sights and smells that is the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, I stare at everybody–at their tables full of locally grown and produced goods, invariably losing myself in reveries about their lives. Usually, they turn out to be a lot more ordinary than the romantic tapestry I’ve imagined. But not in the case of Daven Lee.

Owner of the local business Milk and Honey Soap, Daven’s childhood was the perfect launching pad for someone who would grow up to make handmade soap in her...

Monday, June 9, 2008
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

April 1, 2008 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

“We’ll make people sing, and we’ll dance on their tables!” laughs Wise Fool’s Amy Christian, recalling that one year the “Feast of Fools” April Fools’ Day celebration culminated in a gustatory and performance finale that was a giant sheet cake iced to resemble a dollar bill. The performers dramatically cut it up and distributed it to the people. That, in a nutshell, is both the philosophy and the style of performance troupe Wise Fool New Mexico. “We’ve done this before where people got so into it, they were so raucous, we actually couldn’t really perform after a while–the people just went...

by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

Thoreau would definitely love this place, I think as I sit with longtime Plants of the Southwest employee Susan Westbrook, each of us haloed by shafts of golden sun at our backs. Feeling like a warm, contented cat, I gaze around their spacious sales area, marveling at the simplicity. Nothing is extraneous in this nursery–there’s a modest selection of well-made gardening tools, wall displays of seeds and a collection of carefully-chosen resource books, most of them describing details about how to live la vida sustainable.

Back in the mid-seventies–1976, to be exact, a tumultuous year as...

Saturday, March 1, 2008
by Gail Snyder and Jennifer Spelman (Photographer) • localflavor magazine

Within the ancient art form known as flamenco, many who love it best believe, lies the heartbeat of the entire world. Julia Chacón sensed that inexorable truth early on, as a teenaged ballet student. Extensively trained at the Phoenix School of Ballet, she was also exposed to other forms of dance expression there, including Spanish dance, and took to it immediately. By the age of 16, she was professionally performing with the Artes Bellas company in Phoenix–and she’s never looked back.

When she talks about her passion, this performer, teacher, choreographer and model fairly sings the word...

Saturday, March 1, 2008
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

In the low shadow of the Ortiz Mountains along Highway 14, huddled into the nook of a shallow valley, lies the tiny village of Madrid. Few trees survive here on this rocky, parched land. In fact, besides the piñons and junipers dotting surrounding hillsides and the spindly-armed cholla growing everywhere, the landscape is virtually barren. Once a mining town, Madrid’s soil has been severely degraded for over a century. Piles of mining tailings towering at one end of the greenbelt attest to that. Grazing and flash flood erosion have also taken their toll. In the unrelenting glare of...

Tuesday, May 1, 2007
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

You wouldn’t close the door on your friends just because of a few feet of snow, would you? Neither would the Zia Diner–unlike other restaurants around town who canceled their New Year’s Eve parties because of the recent sudden winter storm paralysis–the Zia rocked on, celebrating their 20th anniversary with all and sundry who were lucky enough to be there, along with Busy McCarroll and her Ambassadors of Pleasure, welcoming in 2007.

That level of commitment is what we’ve come to expect from our erstwhile diner. And they continue to deliver. “We had linens on all the tables, we turned the...

Thursday, February 1, 2007
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

You’re standing in the grocery check-out line, staring robotically at the covers of People and the National Enquirer and it’s verging dangerously on dinnertime when suddenly the child in the cart just ahead lets out a banshee wail so high-pitched it pierces your fillings. The mom is saying, “You have to let the nice lady have the box of popsicles so she can put them in the bag;” the child’s screams now resemble the shrill intensity of a car alarm. Ignoring you and everybody else around her, the mom resolutely tugs while the child holds on for dear life to the ripped open box, a...

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

Since its earliest inception, Santa Fe’s yoga community has evolved and expanded by leaps and bounds–or maybe we should say stretch by careful stretch, pausing to breathe into each increment. Rima Miller, of Yoga Moves, one of the originals on the scene, has personally witnessed its phenomenal growth.

“A lot of teachers have been around since the early ‘90s and before,” and she ticks off a litany of the names: “Steven Norvell, Gail Ackerman who founded White Iris Studio, Deborah Bristow, Michael Hopp who began the Community Yoga Center, David Riley, Dorothy Tanoux, Tias Little and myself.”

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

You can tell when it’s lunchtime just by driving by the Bobcat Bite on Old Las Vegas Highway–the parking lot is jammed, no matter what day of the week. And they don’t take reservations. “It’s always packed out here,” says one long-time customer about the familiar landmark mom and pop diner, “and a crowd’s always waiting outside to get in, but no one minds!” She’s right.

With the ambiance of a small town joint, Bobcat Bite is like an old friend you might not see too often but, the next time you do, you just pick up where you left off last time, and a good time is had by all. Strangers...

Tuesday, August 1, 2006
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

If you’re a person of, say, moderate means here in what is, let’s be frank, a pretty pricey tourist town like Santa Fe, the high season can feel a lot like a Tarot card–the one that shows a bedraggled waif, feet wrapped in rags, peering forlornly through the window at all the Gatsbys and the Daisys decked out in their crisp summer whites, champagne flutes in hand, lingering over a lavish buffet spread. In the words of a friend of mine, “If I had their money, I’d burn mine”!

Gone are the days when, for the $10 price of a standing room ticket to see The Magic Flute, you could move down into...

Tuesday, August 1, 2006
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine