Riveting Riffs Magazine

Nilla Nielsen in Concert in Sweden
Nilla Nielsen by Ulf Stjernbo

Actress, Mary Jane Wells - Heroine

Whether she is talking to you on the phone or you are watching her act in a film or she is narrating a book the first thing you notice about Mary Jane Wells is the command that she garners with her voice. She possesses great vocal technique, Wells is articulate and the tonal quality of her voice is magical. Mary Jane Wells uses her voice in another way however, to draw attention to a very important issue sexual assault in the military. Her one woman play titled Heroine is a true story of a lesbian soldier named Danna Davis (a pseudonym that we will use throughout this interview) who served in the United States army.

Mary Jane Wells talks about first becoming aware of Danna Davis, “A friend of Danna Davis and who knew her when she was in basic training approached me while I was on the set for (the film) A Perfect Ending. She gave me a script that she had written with Danna Davis and then she told me that they had written a part for me. I read it and I was very flattered. I thought, this sounds like a true story and it has a ring of authenticity about it. It was thinly veiled in artistic license. I spoke to her and that script really didn’t go anywhere or not yet anyway. I gradually got to know the person behind it, the survivor and whose story it really was. We became friends over the course of several years. I also said to her now that nothing has happened with it being a screenplay would you mind if I tried my hand at it as a stage play?

I am not famous in any way and I couldn’t really help in terms of leverage and getting her script made at all, but I do have a lot of theater experience in the U.K. and that is more where I thought I might have some inroads. The possibility of it actually being told in the public arena is a very important healing ritual for her.

(I felt) it had more possibilities if it was a play. I think that it was 2013 that I wrote a draft and I used her screenplay as a springboard for it. I did what we call in Britain a scratch, which is the first fifteen minutes or a piece of it in front of an audience, so that I could see Danna’s mental health. I knew that going into the public arena might Read More

Actress Barbara Niven

Barbara Niven is a lot of things, but if you were to ask her, she would probably tell you that what she is most proud of is being a mother and a grandmother. She waves that flag proudly and so she should. Barbara Niven, the actress has appeared in more than one hundred feature films and made for television movies. Her roles have been as diverse as currently starring as Megan O’Brien on the Hallmark Channel’s wildly popular Chesapeake Shores, where she is the prodigal mother who returns home to her five adult children and her ex Mick O’Brien or in her role as Delores Swensen, mother to amateur sleuth Hannah Swensen played by Alison Sweeney in the Murder, She Baked mystery movies, also Hallmark productions and the middle-aged Rebecca Westridge in Nicole Conn’s A Perfect Ending with the late John Heard and Jessica Clark, a story in which her character is trapped in a loveless marriage and she falls in love with another woman.

While there is a part of every actor invested in every role that they play or at least there should be if that role is to be performed well, not every moviegoer or fan who sits in front of their television sets on a Saturday or Sunday night gets an opportunity to discover who the real person is behind the character. We invite you to spend a few minutes with us as we chat with an incredible woman, who seems to find the perfect balance between strength and kindness, while not being afraid to lend her voice to causes she truly is passionate about such as, animal rights, anti-bullying, human rights and helping others to realize their dreams. As Barbara Niven so often likes to say, “Don’t stop five minutes before the miracle happens.”

For those readers who are not familiar with Chesapeake Shores, now in its second season on the Hallmark Channel and in Canada appearing on the W Network, we asked Barbara Niven to take a few moments and to set the scene for us.

She says, “Chesapeake Shores is on the Hallmark Channel, which first of all tells you that it is positive programming that families can watch together. That is what drives me so much towards Read More

Design by Breuninger
Dusseldorf Photo One

Model: Kim Hnizdo, Photo by: Andreas Rentz, Courtesy of Getty Images

Peter Himmelman - No Calamity

Peter Himmelman is a lot of things and he does them all very well, he is a guitarist, film and television scorer, a composer, a lyricist, an author and he is also a motivational speaker to corporate America. Peter Himmelman is also a husband and a father and we do not want to lose sight of that, because early in his career Himmelman had a very realistic opportunity to explode globally and become part of the very upper stratosphere of Rock artists, but he chose to redefine his career and placed his family as the first priority in his life.

Fast forward and Peter Himmelman is the go to guy for Fortune 500 companies who are looking for a way to refresh and to renew their corporate vision and to expand the vision of their employees. He also has a brand new album with a collection of songs that are thought provoking and that possess contagious grooves and rhythms. We should also point out that these songs were written prior to the fall of 2016.

That is borne out when Peter Himmelman talks about why he chose the title No Calamity for the album, “I just liked the sound of it. It is a lyric from one of the songs on the record. I chose that title well before any elections were in full swing, just to let you know that it is not a comment on any particular thing. It is more of a personal thing.”

Himmelman talks about his unusually named song “245th Peace Song,” “I think I picked that title, because it is subtle irony, as there are so many songs that are extolling peace as a way of life. The song is personal and introspective in a way. It could allude to the interrelation piece between two people. It could be societal in some ways. It asks questions (about) the holes in people’s lives (that have) to be filled. It is a statement, but “you’ve got to be careful what you fill them with.” Read More

Cindy Morawetz - Fashion Designer

The story of German fashion designer Cindy Morawetz who established her own brand DREZZ2IMPREZZ is both inspiring and amazing. With more and more celebrities wearing her dresses and jumpsuits she can now fondly look back to where even though she did not realize it at the time, it all began, in her teenage years and she can look forward to a bright future. She already has her sights set on making a big splash on the American fashion scene.

Cindy Morawetz started designing her own clothes when she was a teenager, but she very emphatically says “absolutely not,” when asked if that was when she first started thinking about a career in the fashion world.

“I never had this idea, because it was only just for me and I never studied this. I only had fun doing things for myself, because everything that you could buy I did not like. If something was not done like I would have liked it, I recreated it.

My family is also very conservative, so they told me I had to study something to get good money, so after school I started to study (to be) a lawyer. It was my family’s idea but I only studied for one and one-half years and I noticed this wasn’t something that I could be creative doing. Absolutely not. This was the moment when I knew I had to do something creative, but I didn’t know what. Studying fashion was not an option, because my family did not have the money to send me to the school and I had no idea that I could ever earn money with this fashion stuff. It was always only for me. Later on it was never planned, it just came.

I started to look at other designers Read More

Amy Black and Memphis

Nashville based singer and songwriter Amy Black is a lot of things, but there are some things that we should dispel immediately about what she is not, just in case readers get the wrong idea from some of the titles for her original songs from her new album Memphis. Her song “It’s Hard To Love An Angry Man,” is not about any men she knows, unless we want to count the men she has encountered and observed at Home Depot (more about that later) and it is definitely not about her main squeeze, her hubby, whom she describes as her Zen master. The killer tune “The Blackest Cloud,” in no way suggests that Amy Black suffers from a Chicken Little syndrome either, far from it, as in the view of this writer she projects as being a happy, positive individual and our conversation was often punctuated with her laughter.

Memphis is the fourth album that Amy Black has released and in some ways is a continuation of the stylistic thread of her previous record, The Muscle Shoals Sessions.

Talking about the evolution of her music Black says, “I think the shift started with my second album, This is Home that I recorded in Nashville and you can definitely hear on the first three songs on that album a little bit more of a soulful, Blues thing going on, before the rest of the album goes onto singer / songwriter kind of Americana.

About the same time that I was recording the Nashville album I had this day booked at Muscle Shoals and I was going to record this song called “Alabama,” that I wrote for my grandfather who was from the Muscle Shoals area I thought it would be cool to go to FAME (Studios) and record that song. (Instead) we knocked it out Read More

Jesse & Noah - Southern Usonia

In an alternate reality Jesse & Noah’s (Bellamy) album Southern Usonia would be topping the charts in America or at least some of the songs would be, because the lyrics are great, but we have come to expect that of this duo, and there are some great guitar solos that make your ears perk up. It just so happens that the album title plays to that alternate reality.

Jesse explains, “It could refer to the American South in an alternate reality.”

To which Noah adds, “Usonia is an archaic term for the United States that was favored by Frank Lloyd Wright and some other great thinkers of his day. Everyone in Americana was making “identity” albums. It plays with that idea by coming from a place that doesn’t exist. It’s an imaginary identity album!”

The ten track album opens with “This Town Was Built On Heartbreak Songs,” which pays homage to Nashville where both Jesse and Noah live. The companion music video has cameo appearances in the audience by some storied musicians, singers and songwriters.

Noah explains, “We wanted people with some history behind them. We put the concept out there and ended up with a group of legends with a deep history in Nashville (such as), Tanya Tucker, Deborah Allen, T. G. Sheppard, Ronnie McDowell, and (of course) the Bellamy Brothers (David Bellamy is the father of Jesse and Noah and Howard is their uncle).”

Jesse says, “We knew that we wanted to do a video, but ultimately we didn’t know what form it would take. Our friends at the Read More

Makeup Artistry of Margret Avery

For someone who never planned on a career as a celebrity makeup artist, Margret Avery has done a good job of becoming one of America’s most sought after artists. A very small sample of her clients has included, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Barbra Streisand, Isabella Rossellini, Annette Benning and Naomi Campbell. Margret Avery has worked with some extraordinary photographers including, Helmut Newton, Denis Piel, Herb Ritts, Eric Boman and Irving Penn, to name but a few. She has worked with major brands such as, L’Oreal, Max Factor and Revlon.

She says, “I never thought of having a career as a makeup artist first and foremost. It never entered my mind. I came to New York City from Ohio to go to college. I went to Parsons School of Design and my major was fashion design.

I came from a lower middle class family in Ohio and there wasn’t any money to put any of us six kids through college, so I had to put myself through college. I had a partial scholarship the first year and then full scholarships onward. I had to work a lot and at one point I had three part-time jobs with a full load of school. At one of the part-time jobs I met two guys who were aspiring photographers and they wanted to keep taking my picture. I felt so free in New York and being able to have this creative expression. Studying fashion design, I wore different wigs and makeup and clothes every day and it was like a game to me. It was a lot of fun. That is why they wanted to take my picture.

I however, am not comfortable with Read More

Kate Bass - Songs of the Open Road

In recent years singer and songwriter Kate Bass had the opportunity to return to her personal roots and her career roots and it brought back special feelings for her. Most recently in July of this year (2017), Bass returned to perform in Alaska where she grew up listening to music ranging from Beethoven to The Beatles and a time when the animated film The Little Mermaid served as one of her early inspirations to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a singer.

“Alaska was a particularly special tour for me, because it's my home, and I'm very proud to be from such an amazing place. I hadn’t been back in about five years, after my family moved out of state, so it was even more emotional for me because of that. The community out there is very strong, so I saw a lot of very special people from my past, and it really felt like the homecoming I was dreaming of having. My mother even flew out to surprise me. It was a very special moment getting to perform the song "Denali" in Alaska, since I wrote it about missing Alaska and wondering how I could ever find my way back there,” says Kate Bass.

Reflecting upon her childhood she says, “Alaska is one of the most beautiful places that I have been to in the world. There are vast amounts of wilderness, with big towering mountains and I grew up in Anchorage right on the coast. At least a couple of times a week you would be driving. Read More

Girl In Between - Anna Daniels

To say that there is a little bit of Anna Daniels in her character Lucy Crighton as portrayed in her novel Girl In Between, set in Rockhampton, Australia would be pretty accurate. The affable Australian author, who is an award winning television presenter for her work on the Australian network ABC and who has produced and contributed content for radio and television including the BBC production John Bishop’s Australia, grew up in Rockhampton and like Lucy Crighton whose kelpie (a breed of dog) is her constant companion, Anna Daniels also has a kelpie. Lucy the character and Anna Daniels in real life share career similiarities and Brian, Lucy’s dad Brian seems to at least in some ways resemble Daniels’ own father.

The Crighton family is to say the least a very interesting family and so are their friends, Lucy’s best friend Rosie and then there is the matter of Oscar and Ben, the two lads who move their mother in next-door to the Crightons. The Crightons are not a dysfunctional family at all, we prefer the term refunctional (yes we invented that word) and once you get to know them they will teach you how to rethink the things you thought you had all figured out.

Anna Daniels says that her book Girl In Between resonates with “women from twenty-five up to seventy-five years old. I didn’t write it with men in mind, but a lot of guys have been reading it and getting in touch with me and saying that they are really enjoying it. It is obviously from a female voice and a female point of view, but I don’t Read More

Joan Severance - Manifest Your Mate

What do you do when you are a super model who has graced the covers of every notable fashion magazine for decades and who is also a film and television actress? You have been the face that launched campaigns for Versace, Armani and Chanel. You were asked to endorse Maybelline, Clairol, L’Oréal and Revlon and you have had a career in which you were in demand as a model for top designers worldwide. Well if you are Joan Severance you are confident enough to let your thick hair stay gray and you write a book called Manifest Your Mate. Severance also acts as a personal coach providing guidance to others in the area of manifesting their mate, as well as other areas of their lives. There may be those who are somewhat dubious about how someone so beautiful and accomplished could possibly understand their plight of attracting Mr. Right to their lives, so we posed just that question to Joan Severance when we chatted with her recently.

“First I would say to them, they are incorrect in making the assumption that I can attract any man that I want. They are incorrect and they don’t know my life and I can’t (attract any man that I want). You can’t just go and get exactly what you want, because of your looks or your status. That’s not it. They can make assumptions and I can say the assumptions that they make are probably not only about me, but those assumptions are against themselves.

The book and the content of the Read More

Design by Beate Heymann Streetcouture

Dusseldorf Photo Two

Photo by Andreas Rentz, courtesy of Getty Images & Platform Fashion

Lene Fogelberg - Beautiful Affliction

It almost does not seem appropriate to refer to Lene Fogelberg as an author, because that moniker almost sounds too distant, too formal, for the young Swedish woman, for really she is a storyteller and that has a much warmer feel to it, as does her book, Beautiful Affliction A Memoir. Not many people write their Memoir when they are still thirty-something, but Lene Fogelberg has already lived a lifetime and more. Her story begins as a young child in Sweden when the doctors determined that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her health and how throughout her life when it became apparent that something was going on inside of her and that she could not do even the simplest of activities without tiring quickly, that indeed something was wrong. This is also a love story, about the love of Lene and her husband Anders who met when Lene was twelve years old and he was fourteen. It is the love of a family, their two young daughters and Lene and Anders’ parents. It is about how Anders’ job transfer to America for the briefest period of time, slightly more than a year, became the catalyst in enabling doctors to discover that if Lene did not have open heart surgery quickly that she would die.

Like no other book that we have ever read before Beautiful Affliction A Memoir will have you crying, will have you believing once again that miracles really do happen and will have you grow in admiration of Lene Fogelberg and be moved by her husband’s devotion to her. The book also ends on a bit of a funny note, but we will leave that for the readers to discover for themselves.

Fogelberg uses an interesting style of writing, as the chapters alternate between different times in her life. One chapter will begin with her life in Sweden as a child and through to adulthood, while the next chapter will begin with their belongings arriving in America from Sweden and progressing through her brief stay in America. This book reads like a suspense filled novel and you sometimes have to remind yourself that this is a real story. Read More

Pegi Young Releases RAW

Pegi Young’s new album RAW featuring her band The Survivors opens with the plaintive song “Why,” a question one party or the other always seems to be left asking when a divorce takes place. RAW is Young’s musical chronicle of her journey through divorce from Neil Young. “Why,” a song written by Kelvin Holly, Spooner Oldham and Pegi Young asks the question “Why’d you have to ruin my life?” The song looks through the eyes of the one being left and she wants to know why he avoided the hard questions and she says he was not straight with her. The playing of Holly, Oldham and newcomer, bassist Shonna Tucker is perfectly balanced and serves as a fine accompaniment to Young’s vocals.

Guitarist Kelvin Holly has performed and / or recorded with Little Richard, Bobby Blue Bland and Gregg Allman to name a few. He also was a studio musician at Muscle Shoals. Keyboardist Spooner Oldham was also part of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm section and he has played on such iconic songs as Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman,” and Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally.” He co-wrote “Cry Like a Baby,” for The Box Tops and “I’m Your Puppet,” recorded by James and Bobby Purify, a tune that rose to # 5 on the charts. Shonna Tucker played with the Drive By Truckers and appears on records by Booker T. Jones and Bettye LaVette.

As for the album RAW, Pegi Young says, “When (the album) was done and I was listening to it as I was driving down the road one day, I thought shoot this is like the soundtrack of the stages of grief. It was all over the map emotionally as I was for a good amount of time after things changed as dramatically as they did.

I was fishing around for a title in my head and in the band we were talking about it and again one day I was driving down the road and RAW (came to mind). This is just raw emotion, pretty unfiltered. I threw that name out there and everybody seemed to think that it was apropos. It stuck. My friend Eric Johnson who was our tour manager for years and who continued on with Neil in the ensuing years did all of the package art. He is also Read More

Fashion Designer Pamela Quinzi

Pamela Quinzi, a fashion designer originally from Rome, Italy, via Milan and who now makes her home in New York City, is considered to be one of the rising young stars on the international fashion scene. Her collection of couture shoes, Kilame is popping up in boutiques in Beverly Hills and in New York City and since there are no two shoes exactly alike you can also contact Pamela Quinzi directly through her website and follow her on the official Kilame Facebook page. Pamela Quinzi also has an accessories collection, but her main focus right now is Kilame. In the past she has collaborated with some of the world’s leading designers and fashion houses to design dresses, handbags and other accessories and she still does create new designs for dresses, jewelry and accessories. Kilame however is her baby and she works feverishly day and night to grow the international presence of her brand (the shoes) and it has earned her the nickname Cinderella of New York.

During our recent conversation Quinzi was in the southern part of Italy on the coast of the Adriatic Sea for a month where she works closely with manufacturers, creating new styles and in May she will be heading back to Los Angeles for the second time in 2017.

“I had been before to LA for traveling and for checking out everything, but this was the first time for the collection to be in LA and a whole new world opened up to me. I will be in New York and then in Los Angeles for a month in May. I will be with the showroom (in Los Angeles) that is representing the shoes for all of the celebrities. We had a connection with the Oscars through Blanca Blanco the actress. We are (making connections) every day in photoshoots and we have other possibilities. For Kilame shoes right now it is really important to get into the celebrity world and that is what I am focused on. Then I will come back to Italy, before heading back to New York to get ready for September when we will be in New York Fashion Week, then back to LA again. There is a lot of traveling. Read More

Design by Thomas Rath

Film Review - Super Speed Dates

Carolyn Bridget Kennedy’s short film Super Speed Dates which made its Toronto premiere September 8 th (2017) at the Toronto Independent Film Festival at the Carlton Cinemas presents speed dating in a quirky and fun fashion. Kennedy wrote the script for, produced and starred in this comedic expose that takes a look at dating or even finding a date in today’s hectic world when time is at a premium, work takes up the majority of our waking hours and many are faced with the simple challenge of where to find potential people to date?

Whether we are talking about speed dating or some form of online dating or similar there are always adventures, misadventures and in some cases love is found. As for Carolyn Bridget Kennedy’s cast of rather, hmm, shall we say rather interesting characters, film fans will have to be the judge as to whether or not this is art imitating life.

Kennedy says, “I started with the concept of whether superheroes, attending as their alter-egos, could be good dating material. I then brought in the concept of speed dating as the format for the dates. I wrote the script so that the viewer is left to interpret whether the male characters are actually the alter egos of the superheroes or just men who are simply weird (Editor’s note: We are siding with the latter option!). The comic book fans may latch onto the characterizations and Easter eggs and hopefully enjoy it from that perspective. Others may be entertained by the quirky, but honest, responses from these characters. In either case, the answers the men give to the questions at the event reveal that the men are not really “super guys” as far as potential dates. The female characters represent the observer trying to figure out what the men’s responses mean.”

Carolyn Bridget Kennedy says she drew upon some of her own experiences, as material for her script, “Having attended some speed dating events, I know that frequently there are standard Read More

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