From the age of 4, Michigan native Lisa Leitz thought she wanted to be President.

She followed her interest in public service to the Gerald R. Ford Institute for Leadership, Public Policy, and Public Service at Albion College. Though most students in the program focused heavily on politics, Leitz found her home in sociology.

"For me, it was a discipline that brought together economics, politics, and psychology," she explained.

In fall 1997, she participated in a peace studies program and lived in the Middle East.

"I came to see that people weren't buying into the Oslo Accords," she said. "I got a real sense of the importance of social change at the grass-roots level, and that really solidified, for me, that I'm a sociologist."

Leitz graduated from Albion in 1999 and started graduate school that fall at Ohio State University. In graduate school, she worked with at-risk girls who were physically fighting each other. She left school for a semester to serve as the assistant director of the Great Lakes Colleges Jerusalem Program, the same program she had participated in as an undergraduate student.

In Ohio, she met David Dufault, today an F/A-18 F Super Hornet pilot in the U.S. Navy, whom she married. She earned her master's in 2001 and in 2002 transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara for her Ph.D. In 2004, she moved to Florida with her husband – one of 10 moves in six years – and helped register voters.

She also worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign in Pensacola, where she met the late Elizabeth Edwards. At a campaign program, Leitz introduced Edwards and sat on a panel with her. Leitz inspired Edwards to develop a team of military mothers and spouses to travel the country for the Presidential campaign. While traveling to political swing states, Leitz and this team were covered in more than 250 media stories.

The experience was "reinvigorating," said Leitz.

Traveling with military spouses and families gave her a new research direction and dissertation topic – veterans and military families in opposition to the war.

"It's a really novel and important segment of the peace movement," she said.

Her experience with veterans and military families also reaffirmed her call to public service.

"It really solidified that I want to be an academic whose work changes our culture for the better," she said

Leitz joined the Hendrix faculty in 2009 after completing her Ph.D.

"I really wanted to get back to a liberal arts college," she said. "I just love actively facilitating students' interest and growth on various topics."

And she's done precisely that.

Last year, she helped with a student mission trip to Poland, where they toured former World War II concentration camps. The trip was funded by the Hendrix Miller Center for Vocation, Ethics, and Calling.

This summer, Leitz and three Hendrix students undertook a research project, conducting qualitative interviews with 30 Arkansas military veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to assess their access to benefits. The project was funded by Your Hendrix Odyssey: Engaging in Active Learning. Her student research assistants included Benjamin Thomas '12, Alison Pope '12, and Alison Selking '11.

The research, she hopes, will help bridge the divide between civilians and the military. She also intends to use the project as an example in her course on research methods. Later this year, Leitz will present the findings, along with excerpts from her forthcoming book titled Fighting the War Inside Out, at the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces & Society. Leitz presents often – about four conferences a year – and is an elected councilmember of a section of the American Sociological Association devoted to the study of peace, war, and social conflict.

In addition to mentoring students' public service and research projects, Leitz contributes to interdisciplinary programs in American Studies, film studies, and gender studies. She would like to see the College eventually develop interdisciplinary programs in peace studies and Middle Eastern studies.

Leitz received a faculty leadership grant in 2009 from Project Pericles, a national organization devoted to increasing civic engagement at undergraduate institutions. The grant allowed her to develop a community engagement assignment in her course on gender and sexuality. Through the grant, students developed a new student organization, planned a rally at the state capital for reproductive rights, and sponsored a conference on sexual assault.

"Challenging students to take what they learn in the classroom and do something about or with it ... That's the potential I see sociology having," she said.

By Rob O'Connor '95
Associate Editor

Stephanie Oshrin '12 can't forget the third-grade boy she met while volunteering one summer at a women's shelter in her hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss.

He was struggling in school and needed help. When Oshrin discovered the boy couldn't read, she worked with him every day until he progressed from "See Spot Run" to books on sports, his favorite subject. She took him to the library, a place he had never been before but could now enjoy, in part, because of what she did.

"I'll always remember him because it was the best feeling I ever had," she said of the opportunity to help a child learn to read.

Oshrin continues to help children at the Women's Shelter of Central Arkansas, where she volunteers two to three times a week and routinely sees seven to 10 kids and their mothers who live at the shelter.

An estimated 1.3 million women in the United States are victims of domestic violence each year. During the 1960s and 1970s, shelters like the one in Conway where Oshrin volunteers were developed to offer safety and support to women and children. In addition to food and housing, shelters offer support groups and counseling services.

"I tutor and help with art, but the art projects we do are a part of therapy," she said. "Even though we do plenty of really fun things together, my main purpose is to facilitate children's group."

In her three years of serving at the shelter, Oshrin has experienced a cycle of emotions.

"Some of my happiest and most cherished memories of the past three years come from the shelter, but I have also lost many nights of sleep over the things I have seen there," she said.

The opportunity has also offered her perspective both on the difficult circumstances that women and children face and the role that she can play in their lives.

"I can't change the fact that the women and children have been harmed by those who were supposed to protect them," she said. "But I can prove to them that someone cares enough to show up week after week."

Thanks to a grant she received from Your Hendrix Odyssey: Engaging in Active Learning, Oshrin is helping the shelter redo its backyard so that the kids will have a safe place to be active.

"I knew I wanted to help them through Odyssey and leave the shelter better than when I found it," she said. "I found out what they really needed was a better backyard."

"I want to fix the backyard because it is often the only place that the children can get away from what has happened to them, and it is the mothers' oasis from a crowded house," she said. "The children deserve a world that is full of love and safe from abuse. I can't give them that, but I do have the resources to give them a swing set, a garden, and a place to ride their bikes."

But a building project was a bit out of her element, she said.

"I'm good at organizing people and ideas," she said. "But as far as construction goes, I need a lot of help."

She is currently assembling a group of Hendrix students to help put together playground equipment and complete the project.

Oshrin is indeed good at organizing people and ideas.

In January 2011, she helped organize the state's first Rally for Reproductive Justice on the steps of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock. The rally brought together more than 250 reproductive rights advocates on the 38th anniversary of the U.S Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.

The seven-member planning committee for the event included Oshrin, who chaired the committee, and fellow Hendrix students Daniel Williams '12, Hailey Travis '12, and Leigh Ann Jensen '11.

The rally was sponsored by the Arkansas chapter of ACLU, Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma, and the Little Rock chapter of the National Organization for Women, a group Oshrin worked with the previous summer as an intern in NOW's national office in Washington, D.C.

Through the event, she connected with Hendrix alumna Maria Jones '77, president of the Little Rock chapter of the American Association of University Women, which also co-sponsored the event. Serendipitously, Oshrin was living in Jones' former room in Galloway Hall.

"There was definitely some really good social justice mojo going on there," Oshrin said.

One of the rally's speakers was Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former Surgeon General of the United States, who commented to Oshrin that it was the first time she had witnessed an event of this magnitude in Arkansas.

"The energy was just astounding," said Oshrin, who attributed the event's strong attendance to the intergenerational audience of older women's rights advocates and younger, college-age activists.

Oshrin clearly represents the latter group and believes she and her classmates can play an important role in social change.

"I think college students have special resources and skills, and we're capable of giving back," she said. "Why wouldn't we use the time we have to give back?"

In addition to her work on the rally and at the women's shelter, Oshrin has worked with Hendrix education professor Dr. James Jennings' Above the Line project, helping third-grade students in the Delta learn basic skills to improve their standardized test skills. This summer, she studied for five weeks in Stellenbosch, South Africa with ISEP's Nation Building and Development.

"Hendrix has given me the opportunity to learn outside the classroom and that's where I've learned the most," she said.

An international relations major and gender studies minor, Oshrin plans to go to graduate school, likely in public service.

Stop the painful craving for food

We all get spam messages. My favorite spam is the one I regularly receive from someone trying to sell me cheap Viagra pills (do they know something I don’t?). These messages usually end up in the trash, but the other day I received a spam message at work that set me to thinking.

The subject of the message read: "Stop the painful craving for food." As a natural reflex I was just about to hit the delete button but since I’m living in Africa and working for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the largest provider of food aid to the world’s hungriest people, I thought it might be worth a read.

At first I thought it might be some clever new anti-hunger slogan from one of our very creative public relations folk. Turns out, it’s about some miracle pill that helps people shed unwanted pounds.

Sign me up! I kind of like the idea of a magic pill that makes all those nasty little cravings for things like processed Velveeta cheese and pork rinds go away. Just before dialing in my pill order, it occurred to me that the state of the world’s food situation has become extreme.

On one end, obesity, which is caused by overeating, is dramatically increasing. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 1.5 billion adults and 43 million children under 5 are overweight. By 2015, the number is expected to increase to 2.3 billion posing serious health and economic implications.

On the other end of the spectrum, are the almost 1 billion people who do not have enough to eat. Most of these 1 billion "food insecure" people live in developing countries. They are hungry and it’s the kind of "hungry" that stunts a child’s growth because their bodies lack nutrients needed for proper development.

With these extremes, and the expected population growth from 7 to 9 billion people in the next 40 years, we need to get smart about food production and food access, and take a critical look at the entire global food supply system. We need a frank discussion about not only the kinds of food we eat and how to expand access to the right kinds of food, but also how to create a sustainable food supply to meet rising demand for future generations, who stand to inherit a much hungrier planet.

Recently, some big names in the agriculture and food production industries came together at the World Economic Forum to launch a new vision for global agriculture. The roadmap titled "Realizing a New Vision for Agriculture: A roadmap for stakeholders" challenges the reader to think about food as our collective responsibility. It’s worth a read. The document asks the reader to think of what we can do to ensure a safe, nutritious, abundant, accessible and sustainable food supply for the coming generations. It doesn’t offer a magic pill to stop our craving for food; it calls us to have an honest global dialogue about everyone’s right to this most basic human need and how best to create a sustainable food supply. With global food prices on the rise again, this roadmap has come just at the right time.

Jonathan Rhodes ’98 has worked for WFP for five years, first in its Rome, Italy, headquarters and now in Sudan, Africa, where WFP fed 9 million people in 2010 alone. Prior to joining WFP, he served on U.S. Senator Blanche Lincoln’s Washington staff for more than seven years, including as her aide for hunger issues. Jonathan is from Cherokee Village, Ark.

For more information about WFP or the "Realizing A New Vision for Agriculture"
report go to: www.wfp.org or
www.weforum.org/agriculture

By Charles Chappell ’64,
Professor Emeritus of English

Jean-Paul Sartre would not eat crabs and lobsters because they reminded him of insects.

Galileo Galilei engaged in an egg fight with a Jesuit priest.

Flannery O’Connor received a letter from a reader who complained that one of O’Connor’s books "left a bad taste in my mouth." O’Connor’s reply: "You weren’t supposed to eat it."

Georgia O’Keefe read cookbooks in bed at night before she went to sleep.

Maria Callas, in preparation for an operatic role, lost weight by ingesting a tapeworm.

Henry Ford regularly ate a lunch featuring weed sandwiches.

Former and current Hendrix students of philosophy, physics, literature, art, music, and business will find these morsels of unusual information featured in the 2010 book What the Great Ate, written by alumnus Mark Jacob ’76, and his brother Matthew Jacob. Readers devoted to all of the other traditional liberal arts disciplines, as well as people who maintain a keen interest in popular culture or in the art and science of cuisine, will encounter in this delightful volume a treasure trove of facts concerning the food choices and dining habits of hundreds of famous or infamous men and women representing many diverse cultures and different eras.

On May 21, 2011, Mark Jacob will lead a discussion of this book at the annual Alumni Odyssey College to be held on campus.

Recently, Mark cheerfully agreed to answers questions concerning his career as a journalist and author and about the evolution of What the Great Ate.

Q. After your graduation from Hendrix in 1976 as an English major, did you directly enter the field of journalism? Please summarize your occupational history during the past 35 years.

A. After Hendrix, I had two job offers: Become a sportswriter at the Pine Bluff Commercial newspaper or manage a Taco Bell in Little Rock. The Taco Bell job paid $10 a week more, but I opted for the newspaper job. After a year, I moved to Boulder, Colo., where I washed dishes and processed magazine subscription letters for a year. Then back to Arkansas, where I was a copy editor for the Arkansas Democrat for six months and the Arkansas Gazette for five years. Then I moved to Chicago to work at the Chicago Sun-Times as a copy editor. I eventually was promoted to executive news editor and then Sunday editor. After 14 years at the Sun-Times, I jumped to the Chicago Tribune as a news editor. I was promoted to foreign/national news editor and then to deputy metro editor, the position I now hold.

Q. By what process and over how long a period of time did you and Matthew decide to undertake the project that resulted in the publication of What the Great Ate?

A. I had already co-authored three books when I persuaded my younger brother Matthew to collaborate on a book that would be his first. We spent at least six months brainstorming dozens of ideas before we settled on gathering stories about the dining habits of history’s most famous people. Matt and I both like history, and he’s a foodie. So it made sense. I was trying to get a literary agent to help me sell a novel I’d written, and the agent asked if I had any non-fiction projects. I told him about our idea and that I had come up with the title "What the Great Ate." He said he wanted to represent us. I had already been collecting historical trivia for many years (I co-write a history feature for the Chicago Tribune called "10 Things You Might Not Know"), so that gave us a start. Then Matt and I spent about two years or so working on the book.

Q. At the end of the book you include a "Selected Bibliography" that covers 19 pages. What methods of research did you and Matthew employ to be able to conduct this massive gathering of facts?

A. We are speed-readers. We drafted a list of hundreds of "greats" and then checked out books about them and searched for articles online. One weekend, I speed-read about 2,000 pages from four different histories of Richard Wagner. He was a detestable guy, and I’m not just saying that because he consumed my weekend. Here’s another trick: We would go to Google Books on the web and type in search terms such as "Eisenhower" and "breakfast," or "Amelia Earhart" and "meat." Sounds time-consuming, and it was, but we found fun stories that way. We also read many, many histories of food. One of my favorites was a history of bread. Did you know that the Eucharist that Catholics take at mass used to be the size and shape of a wreath and feed an entire congregation? Another important aspect of the research was debunking stories that were too good to be true. For example, we got a nutritionist to help us disprove the story that Elvis Presley’s daily calorie intake was equivalent to that of an Asian elephant. Elvis ate a lot, but not that much.

Q. You organize the book into chapters based on the principle of the professional endeavors or life statuses of groups of individuals: Rulers; Writers; Prophets and Philosophers; nine more chapters. How did you decide upon this structure and upon the sequence, with (in this era of obsession with celebrities) stage and screen stars coming sixth and musicians ninth?

A. We tried to find categories that would cover most of humanity and were of interest to readers. We probably could have organized it in any of a dozen ways, but this way seemed to work. The book is intended to be both amusing and informative, so we knew we had to include movie stars and musicians. But we didn’t want the book to seem too frivolous, so we put the chapters about world leaders and religious figures at the front.

Q. Did you and Matthew consider devoting an entire chapter to Elvis?

A. We certainly had enough material to do that, but it would have broken the format. Besides, we wanted to touch on as many "greats" as possible. There’s an excellent book devoted to Elvis’ diet – The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley by David Adler. That book was helpful to us. But in general, we found our anecdotes about famous people by sifting through long biographies in order to sift out the one funny story that might be on Page 342. And believe me, food anecdotes are not flagged in any indexes. You simply have to read the whole book. Food must have been unimportant to the architect Le Corbusier, because I didn’t find a single food story in his entire biography. It’s a wonder he didn’t starve to death.

Q. Please talk about the website and the blog that you and your brother have created in connection with your book.

A. We created whatthegreatate.org to promote the book, and we continue to post interesting facts several days per week. Since the book came out last summer, we have encountered a lot of new food facts. For example, Tina Fey said that "the recurring dream of my childhood is to be in a room up to my neck in McDonald’s French fries and I’ve got to eat my way out." She said that after we had finished our book. Maybe we’ll put that story in a sequel someday.

Q. Please describe the three books that you have published before this one.

A. The Game That Was: The George Brace Baseball Photo Collection (Contemporary Books, 1996), co-authored with Richard Cahan. This collection of black-and-white photos, the vast majority never before published, was praised by the New York Times Book Review.

Wrigley Field: A Celebration of the Friendly Confines (Contemporary Books, 2002), co-authored with Stephen Green. Photos by Green, the Cubs’ official photographer, were combined with my text. I got terrific access to the ballpark, including spending a game inside the scoreboard with the guys who manually change the scores. I also got to interview Ernie Banks and ghost-write his foreword.

Chicago Under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News (University of Chicago Press, 2007). co-authored with Richard Cahan, sponsored by the Chicago History Museum. This was an examination of the glass-plate negatives produced by the Daily News from 1900 to 1930, with captions that provided historical insight into that era.

I also write fiction. An unfulfilled goal is to get a novel published, but my short stories have appeared in the literary magazines Other Voices, Pikestaff Forum, Samsara and Minnesota Review. My non-fiction articles have been published in Library Quarterly, Chicago magazine and Chicago History magazine.

Q. Heartiest congratulations on your winning of the Pulitzer Prize. As you may know, two other alumni – Mary Ann
Gwinn ’73 and Doug Blackmon ’86 – join you in having won this highly prestigious award. Please summarize the work that you did resulting in this honor.

A. I was part of a team of journalists who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. But it was a staff award, with dozens of Tribune employees involved and no one cited by name. Frankly, there were others on the staff that did much more than I did. It was an excellent series. Called "Gateway to Gridlock," it explained why O’Hare Airport is such a disaster for travelers. We revealed chronic overbooking that guarantees that planes are late, plus preferential treatment for some passengers at the expense of others.

Q. What are your most vivid memories of your experiences working as a member of The Profile staff?

A. When I was a freshman and worked on The Profile, the editor was Larry Jegley ’74, who is now the prosecuting attorney for central Arkansas. We would go down to the Log Cabin Democrat every two weeks, where our news stories had been set into print and were waiting for us. We’d use X-acto knives to slice the copy into strips and put melted wax on the back. Finally we would "paste up" the newspaper pages by hand. The process was barbaric—just a little more sophisticated than chipping words into rocks.

The next year I was co-editor with Junius Cross ’75. We went hunting for controversy, which is what newspapers are supposed to do. In an interview with the chief officials of the Hendrix administration, we learned that these leaders believed our students to be satisfied with the strict dormitory visitation policy then in effect. When we published the interview, the resulting uproar led to a reform of the policy. We also caused trouble when Congressman Wilbur Mills got into a scandal in Washington with a stripper named Fannie Fox, also known as the Argentine Firecracker. The new social science center on campus had just been named for Mills, and we demanded a name change. I know now that we were wrong about that stance. Mills was actually a responsible lawmaker with a temporary drinking problem, and later he reformed himself nobly. It’s easy for 19-year-olds to be overly judgmental.

Q. Do you have any particular recollections relating to food while you were attending Hendrix?

A. I ate at Hulen Hall, since my parents paid for it and I was quite poor in college. I liked the food quite a lot. I recall mixing red Jell-O and vanilla ice cream for dessert every night. (I think of the Hendrix cafeteria whenever I tell the story of Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam War memorial on the mall in Washington. Lin was a student at Yale when she created the winning design, and her brainstorm occurred in the school cafeteria. She created the original model out of mashed potatoes. And then she ate her design.)

I lived in Couch Hall and Martin Hall, where we ordered pizza deliveries a lot (my roommate got a monthly Social Security check, and spent it on pizza for himself and his friends). We drank Tang during the day and Pabst Blue Ribbon at night.

In the student union, we used to order "grichburgers," which were cheeseburgers cooked like grilled-cheese sandwiches.

Late at night, we would go to an all-night diner down the road. I’m not sure what it was really called, but we always referred to it as the Glittering Jesus Truck Stop, or GJ’s, because there were religious icons inside. We were served by an old waitress we called the skull lady.

Mark Jacobs will discuss What the Great Ate at Alumni Odyssey College May 21-22.
www.hendrix.edu/odysseycollege

By Werner Trieschmann ’86

The restaurant industry never sits still.

There are always new movements, new ways to make a plate into an adventure and turn a night out into an evening of surprise and delight.

Not surprisingly, Hendrix alumni are at the forefront of satisfying Arkansas’ ever-changing appetite, giving customers a singular dining experience, whether that be pizza from an Italian built wood-fired oven, authentic French crepes from a mobile truck or a smorgasboard of local food grown within miles of the table where it is served.

John Beechboard ’01 majored in history but was lured away during his last year with classes in the business department.

"It kind of piqued my interest," says Beechboard. "The rest of my senior year I took all business and finance courses."

While Beechboard, a co-owner of ZAZA Fine Salad and Wood Oven Pizza Co. with Scott McGehee, enjoyed cooking back in his Hendrix days, he says, "I never thought it would be my profession."

But business was on his mind, even in high school, where he started his own record label. After college, he worked for a time for McGehee at his Boulevard Bread Company in Little Rock’s Heights neighborhood.

"I just started out in front retail," says Beechboard. "Then I started cooking and became a sous chef. The way that it all started was that Scott and I both like to sit around and come up with restaurant concepts that would never see the light of day. These were outlandish ideas. ZAZA was one of those concepts."

Outlandish idea or not, ZAZA has been nothing short of a hit in Little Rock. Raves came almost immediately in the form of long lines. While the frenzy has died down a bit, ZAZA is consistently earning first-place accolades in readers’ polls taken in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Arkansas Times.

Beechboard admits that at the start he and McGehee were passionate about different aspects of ZAZA’s yet-to-be formulated menu.

"We almost didn’t do it," Beechboard says of his restaurant. "He thought I was insane for wanting to do salads the way we do them. I thought making gelato from scratch was too laborious. It was just one of those things. I had to take him to New York to this one salad place I liked. He took me to a place in Brooklyn that made gelato. Everything started making sense."

Today Beechboard is overseeing the ZAZA that opened in the Hendrix Village in October. He is quite high on the location and is especially proud of the wood-burning pizza oven in the Conway restaurant.

"One of the things that the Little Rock restaurant can’t touch is that we have this absolutely incredible oven over here," says Beechboard. "It was shipped over from Italy piece by piece. It is amazing."

Beechboard likes the fact that his restaurant doesn’t just attract one type of customer. He noticed this on a recent night after coming back from a catering event.

"There were different age groups all over the place. This was nine at night. You had thirtysomethings. There were grandparents with kids and college students. I just looked around and there were all these elements that had come together. Wow, this is really awesome."

Jack Sundell ’00 won’t likely open his Little Rock restaurant, The Root Cafe, until May but a website (www.therootcafe.com) is up and running and anticipation is building.

The Root Cafe, which is taking over an old burger and ice cream place on Main Street, aims, as the website notes, "to build community through local food."

The website also touts a quote from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.

"Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people."

Sundell graduated from Hendrix in 2000 and majored in International Relations and Global Studies. He worked for while in a restaurant in New York City before eventually joining the Peace Corps. It was while he was with the Peace Corps in Morocco that he started to see food in a different way.

"It was where I got interested in food systems and animals," says Sundell. "It seemed like the people doing this kind of work were doing something productive. There in Morocco having a cow and chickens in the backyard was a normal part of life."

When Sundell came back to Arkansas, he went to work for Heifer International and had an internship in livestock. He made connections with area farmers during his internship. Those connections have come in handy as he and his wife Corri prepare for opening day at the restaurant.

"I had always had this idea that I would like to someday own a cafe," says Sundell. "I guess a lot of people have this idea. Just by happenstance the local food movement had become a big thing around the country and it was something I wanted to participate in."

Root Cafe will have fans at the ready because Sundell and his wife have spent the last two years as caterers and holding workshops on canning and other food-related topics. Sundell says the part about opening a restaurant that he had not anticipated was the depth of government regulations.

"We met with the health department and had inspections from the city," says Sundell. "I had to meet with the fire marshall the other day."

But the Root Cafe is slowly coming into view. Sundell notes that those interested can keep current thanks to the blog on Root Cafe’s website.

"We’ll have breakfast and lunch," says Sundell. "We are striving to have all our meat from local suppliers. When you come, you’ll have an experience unlike anywhere else. We want the food to be delicious and want you to be totally satisfied whether you care about local food or not."

For Sundell, his restaurant and the local food movement are small parts of a larger idea.

"Food is a good entry point in a conversation about local as a lifestyle. The dollars stay in Arkansas and increase the tax revenues we have here and make the place better."

In her post-Hendrix life Paula Jo Chitty Henry ’88 has worked as an actress in Key West and in France, where she filmed a scene in a cab with Omar Sharif.

But today she can be seen working cast iron skillets while making French crepes for Crepes Paulette, the mobile trailer restaurant that’s currently parked in downtown Bentontville.

Crepes Paulette is a partnership Henry shares with her husband, Frederic, who is a native of Brittney, France. The couple wanted to open a sit-down restaurant but went another direction when they looked at the numbers.

"We worked a couple years trying to get a brick and mortar place," says Henry. "We didn’t feel like taking on that much debt. This is a way to step back from that and see if it works."

Crepes Paulette, which opened alongside the Bentonville Farmers’ Market, has been a draw from the first day. Henry says that it wasn’t necessarily part of the plan that she do the cooking.

"We didn’t have any idea what we were doing," says Henry with a laugh. "I had made 10 crepes in my life. Fred started taking the orders and he would take all comers. We had people waiting for an hour for their crepes. Now we only take five orders at a time."

They are still working out issues with what hours they are going to be open — the winter weather has played havoc with Crepes Paulette’s schedule — but they try to serve crepes at least two days a week. Henry is trying to keep fans notified by e-mail and through Facebook.

Crepes Paulette serves authentic French sweet and savory crepes filled with various fruits and meats. For the winter, French soup was added to the menu.

"We don’t do any plate service," says Henry. "We have tables near the trailer."

Henry’s restaurant fits right in with a growing downtown Bentonville that will get an even bigger boost when the highly-anticipated Crystal Bridges Museum opens in November 2011. Henry is quite happy to have Crepes Paulette be part of the scene.

"We enjoy the idea of people strolling around with the crepes and being casual about it."

Hendrix alumnus Werner Trieschmann is a freelance writer, playwright and instructor. He lives in Little Rock with his wife and two sons.