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 The
story begins in a pleasant little shoreline town near New Haven, Connecticut.
Bob and Margaret begat Mark Shepard in 1950,
Elizabeth Emerson in 1954, and Paul Stuart in 1961. Looking back, the
early years were about as sweet as they come; our suburban neighborhood
was filled with families with their own three kids, plenty of woods and
brooks and caves in which to play, and a school playground across the
street that put all three of us extremely high on the list of
"Desired Friends to Go Home With After School."
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 Growing up I always thought I'd become an actor,
but a year at Emerson College, where everyone always thought they'd
become an actor, made me realize I didn't have the chutzpah needed to make
it in the industry. The food and hospitality world beckoned, and over the
next fifteen years - aside from a brief stint in a bellhop outfit
delivering singing telegrams in Santa Cruz - working as a waitress allowed
me to work hard all summer and travel all winter. Determined to lose
my preppie roots and become a hippie, I traversed the USA with friends in a VW bus, stopping along
the way in towns that intrigued us - Key West,
New Orleans, Santa Cruz…always
Santa Cruz.
Yes, that's me on the
right with the 'fro. But I never did achieve the hippie goal; preppy roots
run deep, I'm afraid…
 In the early 80s I married and settled down in Connecticut, where I
managed several restaurants (one of which received a swell review in the
New York Times food section, a stellar moment in my restaurant career)
before my love of cooking and entertaining drew me to the kitchen and my
true calling as a chef and caterer. A gal named Martha had just opened up
shop down the coast a bit and it was an exciting time to be in the food
world.
 However, one amicable divorce and two close
friends' passings later, I needed a change. In 1989, I moved back to Santa Cruz and dove
into the catering scene there. All was well, until I found myself about to
hit 40, tired of working fourteen-hour days, and wondering, "What's
next?" Little did I know that saying that out loud would lead to an
introduction to Joan Summers, the owner and creator of La Casa de Espíritus
Alegres Bed & Breakfast in Guanajuato,
Mexico. I
was looking for an adventure, Joan was looking for an inn-sitter, and
thanks to a mutual friend with a bright idea (Thanks, Jane!), my life took
a turn south of the border.
 My first-ever visit to Mexico was in December 1994. My
Spanish was limited to the days of the week, numbers from one to ten, and
phrases like "Please put the carrots in the large cold room." All
very useful in the catering kitchen, but a little out of place in a house
with seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and no big cold room in which to put
the carrots. I spent a week learning the ropes with Joan before she left
for India,
a training that more often than not meant laughing, eating, and knowing
ripe papaya when I saw one. It wasn't until she was pulling out of the
driveway that I thought to ask, "Shoot, how do you say  'guest'?" Luckily, I have a knack for
charades, I had a great Spanish dictionary, and the staff was extremely
good-natured. Oh, and all the guests spoke English!
The inn-keeping job was a perfect fit
for my talents: playing hostess and fairy godmother to a brood of
ever-changing faces from all over the globe, bringing order to chaos, creating
the recipes for the breakfasts and dinners for which we became renowned.
The six week inn-sitting job very
quickly became a full time job and Mexico became my new home.
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I realize now that the
seeds of My Mexico Tours were being sown way back then, as I began to see
Mexico
through Joan's eyes. The B&B was filled with folk art from every
corner of the country, and her passion for the art and the relationship
with the artisans was contagious. Every year we'd take a road trip
together to some village or another in search of folk art. I will
never forget pulling into a dusty village of look-alike cinderblock
houses in search of a potter she'd met years before, a town that anyone
in their right mind would have driven straight through as quickly as
possible. After knocking on a million doors and traipsing through
numerous homes and backyards filled with sleeping pigs and tethered goats
we came to an open-air workshop where the entire family was working away
on a colorful collection of ceramic chickens in various stages of
completion. There, in the midst of the menagerie, was the son of the
potter she knew. He had passed away, but the son remembered her and
clearly was moved by the respect she held for his father's work. They
hugged, I teared up, and we ordered a gazillion of whatever they were
making.
That night back at the
B&B I wrote in my journal "You could come to Mexico
for twenty years and never see what I saw today, thanks to
Joan."
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 Working with Joan was a dream, and by 1997 La Casa de Espíritus Alegres was
featured in numerous magazine and newspaper articles and was named one of the "Best Inns of
Mexico" in
Fodor's and chosen by Frommer's as one of the "Most Unique Inns of Mexico."
Luckily, Joan lived to see that happen before she succumbed to cancer in
1998 at the age of 64. I've kept in touch with many of the wonderful
people who stayed at La Casa over the years, in fact many of them travel
with me now, and the altar I create for Joan every year for Day of the Dead
gives me a chance to relive all those rollicking good times we all had  at the House of Happy Spirits.
I managed the B&B
for five more years after Joan’s
death, and with the help of some wonderful people it continued to
flourish.
After eight exciting and challenging
years, I left the B&B in the fall of 2002 and was asked to work with
Bon Appétit on their Special Travel Issue for 2003 on Mexico. I
traveled across Mexico
with them for several weeks working on a feature article (18 photo shoots
in 23 days!) and Lunch at the Hacienda, featuring my recipes, was
shot at the home of my wonderful neighbors' Rosendo & Carline. In May
of 2003 their fabulous house and my Pork Tenderloin with Orange Chipotle
Sauce graced the cover of Bon Appétit, The Soul of Mexico.
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After many months traveling across Mexico with Bon Appetit and with
friends, meeting cooks, artists, hotel owners, and warm, friendly people
everywhere I went, it became very clear that all the while I was laying the
groundwork for my next project: a tour business in which I could share - as
Joan had with me - the people, places, folk art, and flavors of Mexico I
had come to love.
I returned to Santa Cruz
in 2003 to launch My Mexico Tours, but before I’d even gotten started
another opportunity came my way. Melba Levick, a photographer whom I met
when she was shooting the B&B for Mexicasa, invited me to do the
text for a new book she had in mind on Mexican kitchens. After about three
minutes of serious consideration,
I accepted. For the next three years, I
dovetailed my research for the book with my tours and wrote like mad when I
was home. Mexicocina: The Spirit and Style of the Mexican Kitchen was
released in September 2006 and I couldn't be prouder.
MY MEXICO TOURS
has been growing since my first folk art trip to Pátzcuaro in the fall of
2003. Since then I've  introduced numerous intrepid travelers to the
villages, ruins, and textiles of Chiapas; elegant colonial cities of Puebla
and Tlaxcala; the folk art of and fabulous cuisine of Oaxaca and Pátzcuaro,
crumbling Maya ruins and thriving Maya culture in Yucatán; recipes and
regional specialties shared with us in humble huts and palatial homes; and,
of course, my favorite haunts in my beloved Guanajuato. We've hiked in
jungles, boated through the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City, painted
in the courtyards of convents and private estates, scaled ruins, spent the
night in three hundred-year old haciendas and cemeteries glowing with
candlelight, and tasted the best blue-corn quesadillas in the world. Not all of Mexico,
but my Mexico. Artisans, cooks, and
characters. Out of the way places and undiscovered restaurants. Boat rides
and mariachi music. Drag queens, chefs, and shamans. Wacky beautiful
fiestas and deeply moving traditions. It's a great job.
 When I'm not on the road with a tour or
researching a new adventure, I'm in Santa
Cruz. Home is a big old farmhouse on an organic
apple orchard in Happy
Valley I share with a
friend and her four-year old son. Living in the country is sweet, and
living with friends, especially a child, is working out great. I still
sometimes feel like a foreigner here after all those years in Mexico, but
I like it just fine. I do a radio show at the college station here in Santa
Cruz (log on to kzsc.org the first Sunday of the month, 9am to 12noon and
you might just find me spinning the tunes) which brings me great pleasure,
and I'm still catching up for lost time with friends and family all over
the country.
Life is
good, never boring, and it feels pretty darned good to say, "I live in Happy Valley."
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