Our August issue finds WAG morphing ”” and moving.
Beginning in September, WAG will become integrated into the Westchester and Fairfield County Business Journals. Now instead of waiting every month for WAG, you”™ll have new features about businesses, start-ups and entrepreneurs weekly, as well as a complement of columns on home, travel, food and wellness.
The shift reflects our readers”™ and advertisers”™ interests along with magazine trends, which find publications leaping from print to digital.
But before we make the big move, we”™re transitioning in style with an issue that is in the serendipitous way that has always characterized WAG all about new ventures and second acts. We begin with Jeremy”™s piece on Happy Monkey in Greenwich, the latest offering by chef-restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the cover subject of WAG”™s October 2011 issue ”” bringing us nicely full circle.
August also features a Jean-Georges friend, fashion designer Andrew Yu, who”™s left the hustle and bustle of Seventh Avenue to concentrate on capsule collections; food; mentorship; life in Katonah with his partner, Evan Goldstein, D.O., and their twin boys; and entertaining pals like neighbor and “fairy godmother” Martha Stewart.
You would think that it”™s “summertime and the living is easy” for our subjects, but no, they”™re all about big challenges. Elena Rivera-Cheek ”” who started Copy & Art advertising in the basement of a small house in the historic Battle Hill section of White Plains 11 years ago ”” has a sleek, new 7,000-square-foot office in downtown White Plains that Justin discovers is designed to be her staff”™s home away from home. Alexandra DelBello, publisher Dee”™s granddaughter, tells Ed she”™s taking her interior/carpet design business in a new direction with the launch of her allybello.com website and a collaboration with Fayette Studio in Greenwich. (Alex is one of two interior designers profiled here, the other being Ridgefield”™s Anne Nowak, who started out in the spa business.)
Mario J. Gabelli ”” who recently received a Horatio Alger Award, given to leaders who have overcome adversity in achieving professional and personal success ”” talks with Phil about his trajectory from a Bronx boy who caddied for Westchester”™s elite to chairman and CEO of Rye-headquartered GAMCO Investors Inc. and considers what lies ahead for our troubled economy.
Former New York state Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey (pronounced “McCoy”), now a health policy advocate and New York Post columnist, recently spoke at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in Athens about helping hospitals and nursing homes “RID” themselves of infections ”” the mission of her nonprofit Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths (RID). And Brian Amkraut has returned to New York from Cleveland to become vice president and general manager of Mercy College”™s new Division of Workforce Credentialing and Community Impact, whose CERTIFi offers certificate programs and nondegree courses online and at Mercy in the Bronx and Manhattan as well as on its main campus in Dobbs Ferry.
Amkraut is both a New York and Cleveland sports fan, and sports and exercise offer a subtheme in this issue. Armonk-based sports psychologist Rick Wolff ”” the Cleveland Indians”™ (now Guardians”™) first roving sports psychology coach and host of the weekly “Rick Wolff”™s Sports Edge” on WFAN ”” has joined the advisory board of Save the Game, a movement to stem declining participation and viewership in what was once our national pastime. Physical therapist Nick Rolnick offers his workout approach to anxiety. And WAG wellness columnist Gio weighs in with an important column on the mental and physical changes we can make to mitigate dementia.
Change: We would be lying if we didn”™t acknowledge a certain wistfulness in our “relocation.” WAG ”” which Dee had the genius to relaunch in February 2011 as a thematic, cultural magazine, has been a helluva ride, one that has taken us everywhere from princes (Harry at Greenwich Polo Club) to nonprofits. We liked to joke that there wasn”™t a disease or a cause that we didn”™t cover in our Watch (people) section. In these years, we were judged best or one of the best publications by the New York Press Association six times.
But it”™s more than that. As Katie, our collectibles columnist from Skinner (now Bonhams Skinner) notes in her column on books by Johann Wier, a 16th-century advocate for the mentally ill, and 19th-century author, orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “despite such treasures, print has struggled in the digital age, when even vintage works can be accessed online. Still, there”™s a unique appeal in the look and feel of a book. It may be the allure of a fine binding or the patina of long use.” Or maybe just the escapist comfort of a copy of our beautifully appointed magazine as you while away a summer day.
That”™s about to be lost. But as Cami exhorts in her column on the shifts the pandemic has brought to the home, we need to “embrace the changes” that are happening in our world. So we look forward to you joining us in our new venture and second act as we remember, in the words of onetime U.S. Treasurer Ivy Baker Priest, that “The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.”
A 2020 YWCA White Plains & Central Westchester Visionary Award winner and a 2018 Folio Women in Media Award Winner, Georgette Gouveia is the author of “Burying the Dead,” “Daimon: A Novel of Alexander the Great” and “Seamless Sky” (JMS Books), as well as “The Penalty for Holding,” a 2018 Lambda Literary Award finalist (JMS Books), and “Water Music” (Greenleaf Book Group). They”™re part of her series of novels, “The Games Men Play,” also the name of the sports/culture blog she writes.
Last year, her short story “The Glass Door” was published by JMS and exhibited in “Together apART: Creating During COVID” at ArtsWestchester in White Plains. Her latest story, “After Hopper,” is also available from JMS Books.
In September, JMS Books will publish her new historical thriller, “Riddle Me This.” For more, visit thegamesmenplay.com.
