Archive for September, 2011

This year, Union County will celebrate its covered bridges with the Covered Bridge Festival on Saturday, September 10. There will be guided bus tours, as well as drive-it-yourself tours. Previously, much of the festival was conducted in Marysville, but this year, there will also be lots of things planned right here in Plain City.

One of the biggest changes will be that the guided bus tours will be leaving not only from Marysville, but from the parking lot at Der Dutchman. A ticket booth in the parking lot will sell tickets ($8 for adults, $5 for kids 12 and under) for the tours leaving at 8:45 am, 10:15 am, and 11:45 am. These bus tours will visit bridges in the southeast portion of Union County.

Besides the bus tours, there will also be a Special Covered Bridge Festival postage cancellation stamp at the Plain City Post Office from 9 am to noon; a Covered Bridge Art Sale at the Plain City Historical Society featuring Bob Wilson’s art (Bob Wilson will be attending) from 9 am to 4 pm; kids’ activities, quilting, craft sale, and a spaghetti lunch (11 am to 3 pm) at the Pleasant Valley Senior Center.

Additionally, motorcyclists can participate in a C & A Harley Davidson Motorcycle Ride of the bridges for a $10 registration fee. Registration begins at 10 am with the last bike heading out at 11 am. The registration proceeds will be donated to the Union County Humane Society.

For a complete schedule of events taking place countywide, go HERE.

The Festifair Arts & Crafts Show will also take place in Uptown Marysville from 9 am to 4 pm with over 140 crafters selling their artwork. There will also be food and music, including the Black Diamond Bluegrass Band from 10 am to 2 pm.

The Shekinah Festival and Auction will also take place on Friday, September 9 and Saturday, September 10. The featured entertainment Friday evening will be The Mullet Brothers beginning at 7:30 pm. Admission is FREE to this Country Gospel concert. Our friend, Alfred Mullet, is one of The Mullet Brothers and we promise you, he is always entertaining–and a wonderful singer. You will not want to miss this concert.

Food booths will open at 6 pm and some will stay open during The Mullet Brothers concert.

Without his disguise, Alfred tries to blend in to hold the groupies at bay.

Alfred Mullet, one of The Mullet Brothers--so famous he has to dress in disguise everywhere he goes.

The rest of the Shekinah Festival gets underway at sunrise on Saturday the 10th with hot air balloon rides and breakfast beginning at 7 am. Pancakes, sausage, coffee, and donuts will be some of the mouth watering breakfast items available. As always, there will also be lots of other food, activities for children, and many homemade items for sale. The much anticipated auction gets started at 10 am with the furniture and crafts portion. The hand-quilted quilts will be auctioned at 1 pm. Many of the auction items can be viewed on the web site.

This is the 32nd year for “The Biggest Little Festival in Ohio,” which is the main way Shekinah Christian School raises money to keep their tuition rates affordable. Please stop by and support them.

We want to wish everyone a relaxing and enjoyable Labor Day. Please remember that we are allowing our staff to celebrate the holiday, so the pharmacy will be closed on Monday, September 5.

We will re-open on Tuesday, September 6, at 9 am and will be open regular business hours.

If you have an emergency over this Labor Day weekend, Joe can be reached by calling his pager at 614-240-8421.

Sarah Reinhard sent over this information on a very intriguing program, featuring actor Frank Runyeon, that will be taking place at the PAC. Sarah asked if Joe and I would try to get the word out about it. I told her we most certainly would.

I also told Sarah that my mom used to watch the daytime soap opera, As the World Turns, with my grandma when I was a kid. One of my favorite story lines of that time (yes, I was “forced” to watch, too) involved Meg Ryan as Betsy Stewart and her love interest, Steve Andropoulos. Steve, as it turns out, was played by none other than Frank Runyeon, who will be presenting this wonderful one-man show. I was just at the age where I had started to develop crushes on favored Hollywood actors. Between Frank Runyeon and Jason Bateman, I was forever in a swoon.

But enough about childhood frivolities. Here is the information you need to know from Sarah to get your ticket. Don’t wait. Tickets and space are limited.

Critically acclaimed actor Frank Runyeon will be performing at St. Joseph Parish Activity Center (the PAC), 670 W. Main St., Plain City, on Saturday, September 17, at 6:30 PM. Tickets are $10 and can be reserved by calling 614-873-8850.

Runyeon will perform his “Sermon on the Mount” play and share his talk “Hollywood vs. Faith.” There will be a free will offering for beverages and appetizers; attendees must be 21 years or older.

Frank Runyeon has won national acclaim for his work as a translator and performer of Biblical texts over the past 20 years. He has performed the gospel for hundreds of thousands of people in almost every state in America, earning rave reviews from critics, scholars, and church leaders of every denomination. He is regularly reviewed as “the best speaker we have ever heard” by students and faculty at private and public schools across the nation.

He is perhaps still best known, however, for his many roles on television. He starred for seven years as Steve Andropoulos on As the World Turns opposite Meg Ryan, a storyline that garnered the second highest ratings in the history of  daytime television.  He next appeared for four years as Father Michael Donnelly on the Emmy award-winning Santa Barbara, and as tycoon Simon Romero on General Hospital, opposite Emma Samms.  Frank has also guest-starred in recurring roles on L.A. LAW as talk-show host Brooks Tapman, on Falcon Crest as chess genius Jovan Dmytryk, on Melrose Place as Father Tom, and on All My Children as Forrest Williams. Frank starred as Detective Marty Lowery in the feature film Sudden Death and as Pierre Lyon in Bolero. He appeared to rave reviews on the New York stage as Hercules in Aristophanes’ The Birds, and in regional theater as Clifford in Deathtrap and Oliver Costello in The Spider’s Web.

Frank is a graduate of Princeton University with a degree in Religion. After studying acting in New York and Los Angeles for 15 years, he attended Fuller Seminary in preparation for the writing and performance of his first one-man play, AFRAID!: The Gospel of Mark. He continued his studies at Yale Divinity School and General Theological Seminary, from which he received his Masters, with honors, in l994. He workshopped his first productions in cooperation with the faculty of Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA, and the University of Dayton.

Frank has now translated and adapted six Biblical texts for performance as one-man dramas and will be performing one of them while at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church.

Don’t miss this opportunity! Contact the St. Joseph Church office, 614-873-8850, for more information or to reserve your tickets.

For more information on Frank Runyeon, visit his web site: www.frankrunyeon.com

To enlarge and print out the flyer above for distribution, click on it.

When Joe and I were in the process of opening the new pharmacy, we talked about having a soda fountain in the front. We even looked at gorgeous, antique wood, marble, and glass soda fountain fixtures that had been pulled from a pharmacy that had closed. The counters and cupboards were from a different era, created with intricate carvings and stained glass that you just don’t see in pharmacies today. 

Long before we opened Plain City Druggist, Lucas Drugs, which is shown in the photos here, boldly advertised not only that they sold medicine to the Plain City community, but sodas, too. Joe and I missed our opportunity for a drugstore/soda fountain combo shop by being born a little too late.

Because Joe and I had considered a soda fountain (we were talked out of it by several naysayers), I was really interested to hear a story on National Public Radio (NPR) about the revival of soda fountains and old-time concoctions. 

As the story recounted, soda fountains came in to being, because the medicine pharmacists mixed for their patients was so nasty tasting it required something sweet to help it go down more easily. In the time before pharmaceutical companies mass produced the now familiar bottles of pills and syrups, pharmacists made all of the medications on the spot for their ailing customers. Medicine in hand, those customers would then approach the soda fountain for flavoring.

Perhaps, like Mary Poppins, they also sang, “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way.”

Today, we do the same thing when we compound medicines. We don’t have a soda fountain, but we do have a whole shelf of flavoring to help remove the bitterness from some of the medicinal liquids we make. 

From the past, NPR’s story then jumped into present day and went on to tell about modern “mixologists” who have discovered old pharmacy soda fountain recipes and are reviving them in restaurants and bars across the United States. There are a few recipes for flavorful beverages on the NPR web site. You can find even more information about old fashioned concoctions on Darcy O’Neil’s web site, Art of Drink. 

O’Neil’s book, Fix the Pumps, tells the history of soda fountains and O’Neil provides an abridged history on the site under the heading “Soda Fountain.”

Soda fountains are no longer a memory from the past, however. They are becoming trendy, as people acquaint themselves with flavors their older relations once relished.

Maybe Joe and I weren’t born too late. Maybe we were just ahead of our time a few years ago when we thought about reviving the soda fountain in Plain City. 

To read the NPR story and also listen to the broadcast that I heard, go HERE.