Tallulah on Thames: An Artistic Journey

BY MEREDITH MASON
Magazine Feature Writing Class: November 5, 2013

I quickened my pace as I walked down Thames Street, dragging my best girlfriend who had fallen behind. We stopped abruptly outside of the restaurant, peering in the large glass windows, while simultaneously trying to figure out how to enter our chosen destination. I swung open what appeared to be a side door and headed into the warm entryway. The cramped foyer looked more like a room leading into an ancient Newport apartment than a waiting room for a gourmet restaurant. Suddenly, the door to my left flew open, and we heard, “Welcome to Tallulah.”

My friend and I were seated promptly thanks to the reservation I had made one day prior. I was ecstatic when I listened to my voicemail and heard that we had received the last reservation at Tallulah on Thames for Newport Restaurant Week. Although the website says, “reservations encouraged,” they appeared to be absolutely necessary once we stepped inside the crowded, ten table dining room.

I was struck with an overwhelming feeling of relaxation upon taking our seats. White tin walls, warm hardwood floors, crisp linins and mismatched chandeliers provided a sense of elegance, while a large bookshelf outlining the open kitchen created a sense of home. My creaky wooden chair felt like an antique that belonged in my grandmother’s Cape house.

Our menus were presented on clipboards and listed the complex, three-course pre-fix menu drawn up specifically for Newport Restaurant Week. Many of the descriptions were unfamiliar, but our informative waitress told us everything we needed to know about the night’s offerings. She also suggested individual glasses of wine to pair with each of our meals.

Quickly after we placed our order, the bread came. As the waitress placed the individual, steaming dinner roll on our side plates, she informed us that the bread that night had been delivered from Hyannis and the butter was from a farm in Vermont. For each additional course that followed, she told us what farm and location our food was from. Tallulah takes pride in serving only fresh, organic and local produce to its customers.

As we sat and waited for our first course to be delivered, it became apparent that Tallulah was not going to rush us out of their restaurant. The dining room music switched from Frank Sinatra to Van Morrison, a reminder that we should maintain our relaxation in the fine dining room.

Two servers presented our appetizers simultaneously while we starred in awe of the artistic creations that were placed in front of us. My organic greens were neatly tucked together and looked like tumbleweed that was about to be swept up off my plate. Curls of pear and squash decorated the greens and droplets of dressing looked like the beginning of a Pollack painting.

The bitter taste of the greens were balanced out with a sherry vinaigrette that provided a sweet and salty after taste. The greens smelled like freshly cut grass, a reminder of their organic origins.

My friend ordered the sunchoke soup that was poured for her right at the table. Although I had never heard of sunchoke before my arrival at Tallulah, the hot soup quickly warmed my chest and tasted like an artichoke with the texture of sunflower seeds.

Just when I started to wonder when our entrees would appear, two more servers placed down giant circular plates that framed our dinners like fine art. Truffled ferro and fall vegetables accompanied my organic chicken breast, while my friend’s stuffed pasta looked like an autumn wreath.

As a bit into my chicken breast, I was overwhelmed by the smoky flavor of the perfectly cooked meat. The rich truffled ferro tasted like a creamy risotto as the taste lingered on my tongue and I went in for another bite. Carrots, parsnips and brussel sprouts provided a balance to the chicken and ferro.
Just when I though my meal could not get any better, my friend passed over her plate to let me try a bite of her pasta. The plump noodles stuffed with Parmesan and mushrooms were covered in a very light cream sauce with crispy shitakes. It is rare when I try two entrees and can say that I enjoyed them both equally.

Although we did not vocalize our inner thoughts, I knew we were both thinking the same thing: how were we going to eat dessert? This quickly vanished when we both bit into the delicate pumpkin panna cotta. The smooth pumpkin was decorated with maple cream and hazelnut while providing the perfect amount of sweet. My cheese plate was presented on a black slate and had garnishes of honeycomb, apple-jam and almonds. Slowly, the cheese disappeared from my plate as we bickered over which one we thought was best.

As I looked around the room after taking my last bite of cheese, I realized that the service of our waitress and the entire Tallulah staff was what made our night simply amazing. The front of house manager not only asked us about the dinner, but stayed and chatted with us for several minutes. Our special girls night was a regal experience created by the artists bustling in the kitchen and the service experts at the front of the house.

Name: Tallulah on Thames
Address: 464 Thames Street, Newport RI 02840
Website: http://www.tallulahonthames.com
Phone number: 401.849.2433
Hours of operation: Wednesday-Sunday 5:30PM
Reservations: Highly recommended
Credit Cards: Yes
Parking: Street parking, taxi suggested during seasonal months

How to Raise Your Teen in a Hypersexualized Culture

BY MEREDITH MASON
Magazine Feature Writing Class: October 24, 2014

It is a Sunday afternoon and you decide to pack up the car and head to the mall to complete some last minute errands before the chaos of the week erupts. As you walk by the perfectly decorated storefronts, you notice that the clothes on the children’s manikins are looking a lot more like something that belongs in the Victoria’s Secret window display than an outfit your 10 year old would wear to school. What is scarier than the prepubescent push up bras and low cut tops? Your daughter tugs at your shirt and asks if she can try them on.

Whether it is the magazine racks at the end of the grocery store checkout line, the newest MTV television series or the next billboard top 100 hit, sex is everywhere. Images and conversations that were once limited to the pornography industry have now become integrated into mainstream media and every part of our now highly sexualized society.

According to a study conducted by the American Psychological Association Task Force, four components of sexualization set it apart from “healthy sexuality.” The last component, “when sexuality is inappropriately imposed on a person,” is often linked to adolescents because adult sexuality is often “imposed upon them rather than chosen by them.” Poor body image, anxiety, depression and eating disorders are just a few of the damages caused by early sexual objectification in teenagers.

Although you may not be able to eliminate these hypersexualized messages from your child’s daily life, steps can be taken to combat these images on your own.

Make Sure Your Child Learns About Sex From You

The reality is that in a hypersexualized society, your child is not going to hear about sex for the first time in their junior-high school health education course. According to a Longitudinal Study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, teens who have a higher level of communication about the risk of sexual practices with their parents are less likely to engage in early sex practices.

Debra Curtis, an assistant professor of anthropology at Salve Regina University, believes that parents should begin to introduce these lessons to their children as early as the second grade. “Early on, it is probably appropriate to teach them the proper names for the human body, just so that they don’t pick up the message that the nose is any less taboo than the part below their belly,” states Curtis.

As children mature into adolescents, you should continue to have an open line of communication with your child about this topic. Curtis, whose research focuses on how popular culture influences sexuality, says, “You have to get them all the right information.” From the reproductive cycle to birth control, you want to be the one giving the message to your child, not someone else.

Communicate Your Values

Do you ever feel as though you are talking to a brick wall instead of your teenager at the dinner table? Melissa Henson, the director of grassroots advocacy and education at the Parents Television Council, says that the best thing to do is talk to your children, even if you don’t think they are paying attention. “Kids listen to you more then you might tend to believe,” states Henson
According to A Longitudinal Study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, adolescents who reported to have positive communication habits with their parents were less likely to engage in early sexual behavior then those who reported to have more negative communication with their parents.

Communicating with your teen also means listening to what they have to say. Curtis says that parents need to teach their children to be critical about popular norms. “If they don’t want to go to homecoming when they’re freshmen, they don’t have to,” states Curtis.

Parental Monitoring

Although it almost impossible to know what your child is doing twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, experts like Curtis and Henson believe that parental monitoring is essential to keeping your child from becoming overly sexualized. “I think that at a young age when their brains are still developing, you want to put controls in place so they don’t end up in situations that are too exciting,” says Curtis. “It is like driving around without your seatbelt, you’re bound to get into trouble.”

Major parental involvement between the ages of 12 and 16 needs to be in place in order for this practice to be successful. “It’s not just dropping them off at the mall,” says Curtis. This includes everything from calling the parents of the friend’s house your child is visiting to make sure the parents are going to be home to attending events with your child.

Research has also been found to support parental monitoring. According to the Longitudinal Study, adolescents who are unsupervised less than five hours per week are less likely to engage in early sex practices and have fewer lifetime sexual partners than students who are unsupervised for more than five hours.

Media Consumption

In most cases, your child is probably getting subjected to the most sexualized content on the big screen in your living room. The American Psychological Association has determined that children and adolescents spend more time with entertainment media than they do with any other activity except school and sleeping. For media analysts like Henson at the Parent Television Council, these statistics confirm that parents need to be active in their children’s media consumption habits.

The PTC advises parents to keep the television set out of children’s bedrooms and in the living room where you are in the vicinity. “If something comes up on the screen, you have an opportunity to talk with them then and there about what they are seeing,” says Henson.

Parents should also question whether a smart-phone is necessary for their child. “As long as they have phones that can make an emergency phone call and reach you… that’s sufficient,” says Henson. “They don’t need to have a smart phone because we know that kids are able to get themselves into a lot of trouble between sexting and the ability to stream video without parental controls.”

Although this level of parental commitment is necessary during the specified ages, Curtis and Henson agree that there is an age when your teens should be ready to navigate on their own. For Curtis, this age is 18, or when your children are seniors in high school. “You don’t just cut them loose at 18 and say okay, here is your first date,” says Curtis. If you give your son and daughter the right information, they can learn to develop their own values instead of letting popular culture decide it for them.

Beyond the Bridge: Aquidneck Island Students Become Global Citizens

BY MEREDITH MASON
Magazine Feature Writing Class: October 6, 2013

With passports in hand and four students in tow, Kimberly Cunningham, a mathematics teacher at Portsmouth High School, boarded the six-hour flight from Boston to the Dominican Republic.  For one week, Cunningham and her students left behind the glamour of Bellevue Avenue and historic mansions to work in one of the world’s most impoverished countries.  Using basic tools and limited resources, the students built a school for Haitian refugees. To the Portsmouth students, school stood for early mornings, standardized tests and no cell phones.  To the Haitian students, school stood for something entirely different: a chance at freedom, an attitude that struck the Portsmouth students like a freight train.

One week later, Cunningham was back to her daily routine in the Portsmouth Public School System. It wasn’t until she answered an incoming call on her cell phone and heard the words, “my child has changed,” that she really understood the impact of the trip.

Seven years later, Cunningham has grown this small service trip into an official non-profit organization called Infinity Volunteers. Nicole Kelly, the parent who told Cunningham of the change she noticed in her child after the Dominican Republic trip, now works as a partner in the organization.

With the original mission of providing service to others intact, Infinity Volunteers takes students from around Aquidneck Island throughout the world to complete humanitarian trips.  The group has completed projects in Africa, India, Nicaragua, Guatemala and New Orleans, Louisiana.

“I think it is really important for the students to participate on these trips,” says Cunningham. “As a teacher, I got to see all of these wonderful kids with big hearts every day of the week, but they didn’t have an outlet to participate in something like this.”

This February, Cunningham and sixteen students are traveling back to the same village they visited two years ago: Pueblo Modelo, Guatemala. For one week, the Aquidneck Island students are trading their warm beds for sleeping bags and mosquito nets at a local orphanage.  Although all of the countries and cities that the organization serves are in dire need, Pueblo Modelo is the poorest city that the group travels to.  The locals struggle, with no running water or electricity, they survive on beans and corn tortillas. Even rice is too expensive.

The mission of this trip is to build a school for children in the village.  In addition, the students plan to check on the water filtration system and other projects that were established on the previous trip. All students are required to fundraise 3,400 dollars before the February departure date to cover expenses and supplies that can be used to serve the Pueblo Modelo residents.

To become a member of Infinity Volunteers, students must show their commitment to local service before traveling abroad.  Beach clean-ups, peer tutoring and cooking for the homeless are just a few ways that students have given back to Aquidneck Island.

Although the organization is made up entirely of high school students, their newfound global citizenship does not end when they receive their diplomas at graduation. Many Infinity alumni have gone on to start similar organizations at their universities across the country. Cunningham has also noticed that a number of students have chosen careers in service such as international nursing, law and the Peace Corps.

“These students are changing the way that they view the world,” says Cunningham. What started as a one-time service-learning trip has evolved into a life-changing experience for dozens of Aquidneck Island students. Their new perceptions of the world carry them well beyond the Pell Bridge.