Press Clippings
The Picayune Times - January 11, 2004
Simple City
By Angus Lind
They came to New Orleans from Mount Airy, N.C., in search of “things that refuse to die,” vintage appliances or products that haven’t been sold for decades, that should be in museums or attics but are still working and doing the job.
Wanda Urbanska was once an aspiring business writer for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner who was told she was on the fast track to the Wall Street Journal. At the same time her husband, Frank Levering, was cranking up his Hollywood screenwriting career. They lived life in the fast lane, frequented trendy restaurants, hung out with celebs, went to Hollywood screenings and kept late hours.
Eventually they became disillusioned and decided speeding was not for them.
In 1986 they moved back to the Levering family cherry tree orchard north of Mount Airy—Mayberry, as it’s called, thanks to its distinction as Andy Griffith’s hometown. They came in search of a simpler, slower life—a life with meaningful friendships, conversations they could actually remember a week later and Norman Rockwellian values.
These days Urbanska is traveling with her husband and a camera crew shooting segments for the upcoming PBS TV series SIMPLE LIVING WITH WANDA URBANSKA. The series, which Urbanska hosts and produces, will begin airing on PBS stations in June.
This week, they showed up at Robert and Elizabeth Thompson’s Fair Grinds Coffeehouse, where the throwback retro atmosphere couldn’t have suited their show any better.
“You’re almost like the city that refused to die, that whole simple living philosophy,” said Urbanska. “The pace is so different from other cities—that’s why we wanted to come here. Everywhere you turn, you find out that people here don’t throw things out.”
“I told her that New Orleanians are doing well to be simply living,” said Robert Thompson, commenting sarcastically on the city’s well-known partying lifestyle.
The Mount Airy crew was rewarded with several objects still in service beyond the projected date of planned obsolescence. Maryann Cook brought in an all-metal Electrolux vacuum cleaner from the ‘60s that had never been repaired and is still going strong. Frank and Cindy Hayes showed up with a hand-crank applesauce maker that has been in his family for decades and is still functional—as long as you peel the apples first.
Mary Youngblood Cooper, a chair caner for 32 years, brought in an antique chair she was working on. “Chairs are forever, especially in New Orleans,” she said. “I’ve had chairs arrive in shopping bags, in pieces. They won’t let go. It belonged to my aunt. I inherited it from my cousin. They don’t die.”
Cooper’s work and lifestyle is a microcosm of what SIMPLE LIVING WITH WANDA URBANSKA is preaching. She does a chair a day, providing no one calls her on the phone or stops over for coffee—which happens every day. “My friends consider it a salon,” she says of her old Bywater home, where she works. “They just come over, chat and I keep working. I absolutely love it. I feel so lucky.”
And that’s what part of the show will be all about—a slower pace with thoughtful consumption and financial responsibility.
“We’re not advocating turning back the clock,” said Urbanska. “We’re talking about getting away from the buy-and-spend pattern and holding on to things. Just because there’s a newer and better product out there, you don’t have to have it.”
Back in Mount Airy, husband Frank Levering has turned what was once a red ink orchard operation into a profitable venture. And there, he doesn’t get the razzing he did when he went to college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
“My nickname was Goober because they found out I was from Mayberry,” he said. “When I was writing screenplays in L.A., the big interest was that I was from Andy Griffith’s hometown.”
But no more. Levering these days plants, prunes and fertilizes his trees, then picks and hauls the fruit. The orchard even has an outdoor theater. And last year they produced, quite fittingly, Anton Chekhov’s play, “The Cherry Orchard.”
People who espouse the type of lifestyle that the SIMPLE LIVING WITH WANDA URBANSKA show will portray will tell you this: If you live in a small town like Mount Airy, with the money and the time you save, you can fly or drive anywhere you want to see and do anything you want. Because of technology, no small town is remote or isolated any more.
They’ll also tell you that as a society, we are totally tied to our workplace, we work 40 more days a year than our parents did and that by and large, people have forsaken sociability. There are certain trends in the American psyche that no longer exist in many places, such as talking to neighbors.
But in small neighborhoods, such as the one surrounding the Fair Grounds Race Course, there is hope.
“You see it in here,” said Robert Thompson of his coffee house. “Someone comes in and says my car won’t start. And someone else says, ‘Let me take a look at it.’ ”
Not long ago, the coffee house refrigerator went out. “The customers took the milk and cream home and brought it back the next morning until I could get a repairman.”
Simple living advocates yearn not for yesteryear but for the days when someone would open up his shop in the middle of the night if you needed to buy something.
“It’s been said that New Orleans is 10 years behind the times,” said Thompson. “We’re really ahead of the times. We’ve got small shops, our streets are set up for pedestrians and we’re keeping people close together. We like to buy from our neighbors, we preach buying locally and we love mom-and-pop businesses.”
And that’s exactly why SIMPLE LIVING WITH WANDA URBANSKA came to New Orleans.