Press Clippings
Raleigh News & Observer - July 13, 2004
Live the simple life: Mount Airy couple show you how in their series on PBS
By Vicki Hyman
Neighbors in Mount Airy have long relished (and profited from) their status as a small-town utopia, a real-life Mayberry popularized by native son Andy Griffith. Now a new television series on PBS will burnish that image as a bucolic icon of simple living.
This time, though, the citizenry isn’t just the inspiration. These folks are the investors and occasionally the guest stars on Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska, a paean to a more meaningful life with less debt, less clutter and less stress. The Utne Readers calls it “a kind of ‘This Old House’ for the American Dream.”
Urbanska and her husband, writer and orchardman Frank Levering, produced the eight-part series from offices overlooking Mount Airy’s Main Street, just down the street from the Mayberry Five & Dime and one door away form the Ideal Beauty Shoppe. They raised about $475,000 from friends, local businesses and foundations to develop and film the series, and neighbors are as likely to ask for a progress report as they are to inquire about Levering’s latest crop of sweet cherries.
The series debuted Saturday on UNC-TV. It will airy on dozens of public television stations across the country, reaching more than half of U.S. television households. The series is available to PBS stations free of charge so that its makers can accept non-profit, tax-deductible donations, but the couple has also written a companion book, “Nothing’s Too Small to Make a Difference,” Due out in August.
Urbanska says the book and series celebrate a return to traditional American values of thrift and community. The couple is not anti-money, but she and Levering point to studies showing that at a certain level of income, the level of happiness starts to decline as people get richer. “I would actually worry about getting wealthy,” Levering says.
Urbanska, 48, is a professor’s daughter, slender, blonde and dressed in white linen, a sort of pre-felonious Martha Stewart. Levering, 52, is a Randy Travis lookalike, with a long, thin mouth and crinkled eyes the exact blue of his faded denim work shirt.
The couple met at Harvard, then made a hectic life together in Los Angeles. She was a journalist; he was a screenwriter who co-wrote 1982’s “Parasite,” an early Demi Moore vehicle billed as the first futuristic monster movie in 3-D.
Nearly 20 years ago Levering’s father had a heart attack, and the failing family orchard in the Virginia mountains, near the North Carolina border, could have slipped way. So the couple decided to move back to Levering’s home, figuring they could write from the orchard. If they lived frugally, they thought, they could make a life there.
Checklist for life
They did, and what they wrote was a book about it: “Simple Living: One Couple’s Search for a Better Life.” This was in 1992, when simple living hadn’t yet become a hot new catchphrase, an excuse to buy sisal rugs and John Tesh CDs.
Today, the self-help shelves at bookstores teem with such titles as the almost oxymoronic “The Joy of Simple Living: Over 1,500 Simple Ways to Make Your Life East and Content” and the inevitable “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Simple Living.” A glossy magazine, Real Simple, purports to inspire women with “practical, actionable solutions to everyday challenges” – such as buying a $20 styling cream to fix frizzy hair.
Over coffee at the Bluebird Diner in downtown Mount Airy, Urbanska and Levering dismiss the upscale pretenders as “chic simple.” Their own strategies center on making do with less, making things last and building relationships with people, not things. Go without a watch. Buy used. Eat lower on the food chain. Limit yourself to one credit card. Learn people’s names.
On the television show, Urbanska dispenses such sturdy, no-nonsense tips through profiles, interviews and a segment titled “The Thing That Refused to Die,” be it Mount Airy barber Bill Casstevens’ 1920s cash register or a decommissioned 1931 fireboat docked in New York City that was pressed into service during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
She visits Durham’s Scrap Exchange, where children (including the couple’s 8-year-old son, Henry) create their own toys with wire, foam, bolts and other industrial remnants. She goes to Chapel Hill’s Southern Village where residents can work, shop and play without getting in a car.
She talks with officials at Winston-Salem State University, which requires students to volunteer. One fraternity holds an annual sleepout on the coldest night of the year to give students an idea of what it’s like to be homeless.
Urbanska is an earnest, enthusiastic host, if a little inexperienced. She made her PBS debut in a 1994 special, “Running Out of Time,” that featured the couple, and the producers asked her to host a later special, “Escaping Affluenza: Living Better on Less.”
The concept for the series grew out of that special. The couple pitched the idea to then-PBS executive Dick Hanratty, who they hoped would sign off on a letter of interest they could show to potential sponsors.
“There’re very few programs that essentially give you a checklist for making life more enjoyable and less complex,” Hanratty says. “I would have public television programmers call up and say, ‘No more cooking shows. We have enough cooking shows.’ I was looking for things that were unique and yet had a definite usefulness.”
‘You give…you get’
Hanratty later left PBS and formed his own distribution company, and now he is helping Urbanska and Levering persuade stations to carry the series.
But it took several years to get to that point. The couple had never produced anything and didn’t realize how long it would take to assemble the series – and the funding.
They formed a national advisory board of academics, money experts, environmentalists and writers, including Sarah Susanka, a Raleigh writer-architect who specializes in “not-so-big” houses (her own home is featured in one of the segments).
Local business chipped in money and in-kind services. A car dealer donated a two-year lease on a station wagon. The production office landlord cut the rent in half. An accountant donated her services. Twyla and Roger Sickmiller, who moved to Mount airy two years ago to run the Maxwell House Bed and Breakfast, even housed a “Simple Living” staffer free of charge.
“I’m a believer in when you give, you always get in return,” Twyla Sickmiller says. “When I look down the road, those who want to come visit where the ‘Simple Living’ series has taken place, they will recommend you come here, I’m sure.”