union station | The train station has gone to the dogs — and that’s a good thing! Talented animal athletes and trainers of the Purina Farms Incredible Dog Team have a summer residency at St. Louis Union Station, performing two free shows daily at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Thursday to Sunday through Sept. 28. Although they don’t have collectors’ cards with stats to verify it, these are some of the most talented canines in the country. The daring and delightful dog team consists of more than 20 pooches in top competitive condition, along with two trainers, who entertain audiences with extraordinary feats of athleticism and skill. Spectators can marvel as the team demonstrates a variety of canine sports. Dogs of different breeds fly through the air to catch a flying disc, leap over a high jump and maneuver through a series of obstacles in an agility course. The team, which features several rescue dogs, is on a mission to prove that with good nutrition, proper training and lots of love, any dog has the ability to love back unconditionally and to perform incredible feats. While the Purina Farms Visitor Center remains temporarily closed, the dog-team spectacles will take place on the Purina Performance Plaza near the St. Louis Wheel Park. For a full schedule of events and updated information on Purina Farms, visit purinafarms.com.
the metro
Scams and scammers may seem to be getting more and more sophisticated, but essentially it’s the same old story: Smooth-talking salesperson on the phone tries to get something that you or any other alert consumer should know better than to give. Around tax season, it’s IRS scams. No, you should never give your Social Security number to anyone over the phone. If the agency needs something from you, they’ll request it by mail. And all year long, it’s common thieves posing as long-lost friends asking you via email to buy them something using your Amazon account, and of course they’ll reimburse you. (I know, right?) Unfortunate widows get bilked out of their life savings by hoodlums posing as potential paramours. Alas, it’s the elderly who always seem to fall prey to these wild schemes. Which is why Medicare is running PSAs on TV and radio warning about fraud. I’m of Medicare age, and an email I received from the agency linked me to a YouTube warning from none other than Dr. Mehmet Oz, now the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Your Medicare number is as vulnerable as your Social Security number, and as long as there are bad actors, they’ll try to score something in your name that they’re not entitled to. In the fraud that Dr. Oz is warning us about, the scammer will sign you up for hospice care and fraudulently bill Medicare in your name. Of course, if you’re too young for Medicare, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to warn your parents or grandparents. If you think you may have experienced fraud, call 1.800.MEDICARE (1.800.633.4227) or report it online at medicare.gov/fraud.
ladue
Join journalist and documentary filmmaker Laurie Gwen Shapiro for a discussion and signing of The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon. The author will appear on July 29 at 7 p.m. at the county library’s Clark Family Branch, 1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd., directly across from Plaza Frontenac. The presentation is free. In 1928, legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart arrived in the office of George Putnam, heir to the Putnam & Sons publishing throne. A ‘hitmaker,’ Putnam was searching for the right woman to secretly fly across the Atlantic and a partnership—professional and soon otherwise—was born. Shapiro’s nonfiction book unveils the untold story of Earhart’s marriage to Putnam and the pivotal role it played in her enduring legacy. Earhart was fiercely driven, brave, a lifelong feminist and trailblazer. Putnam, the so-called ‘P.T. Barnum of publishing,’ often pushed his authors to extreme lengths in the name of publicity. No one bore that weight more than Earhart did. Their partnership supported her grand ambitions—but Putnam also pressed her into more treacherous stunts for promotion, influencing a certain recklessness up to and including her final flight in 1937. Earhart’s real-life story is often overshadowed by myth and legend. In this cinematic new account, Shapiro emphasizes Earhart’s struggles, her authentic aspirations, the truths behind her brave pursuits and the compromises she made to fit into societal expectations. Drawing from a trove of new sources including previously undiscovered audio interviews, the book is a gripping and passionate tale of adventure, colorful characters, hubris and a complex portrait of a marriage. Shapiro has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, The Daily Beast and Slate. She is the 2021 winner of the Damn History Article Award for “The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes” in The New Yorker. She is an adjunct journalism professor at New York University.
notable neighbors
old town florrissant
Lia Holter has it Made.— a capital ‘M’ and that period makes up the first third of her craft bakery’s official title: Made. by Lia (with no second period, notably.) That’s in a stylish, raised black script above the door on the neat white brick building, agut-rehab at 610 Rue St. Francois in Old Town Florissant, where we sat on the patio. That recent Tuesday morning, the ample space was sunny and buzzing, with pollinators—and with customers going in and coming out, many if not most greeting her by name and vice versa. You could be forgiven for not recognizing her on sight, because it was 11 years ago that Holter and her team won America’s Next Great Baker on the TLC cable network. Since 2014, Holter and her family have Made. quite the life for themselves, within a space of just a few blocks. Alas, poor husband Max has to drive—all the way south, maybe 20 minutes, to Clayton—for his job in the financial sector, while Holter can stay right in Old Town and get her kids Ella, 8, James, 5, and Naomi, 10 months, ready for their day, walk them past the bakery to school, then back to work in just a few minutes (in our photo, the two oldest help their mom create scrumptious cupcakes). It’s a long way from there to the Venetian in Las Vegas, where Holter et al. were crowned America’s Next Great Baker, but Holter’s vision has been pretty much clear, and local, since she was a kid helping grandma bake Christmas cookies. “But I was a dreamer,” she says. “I have a dreamer mentality, and the kitchen is my comfort zone.” And though one day she dreams of more coffee offerings, smoothies and the like at her bakery, wedding cakes are her stock in trade. For many of her unique, exclusive creations, she paints on some colorful icing, with a neo-Impressionistic flair. And she’s soon to give away some trade secrets in her first cookbook—and, no, none created to impress ‘the Cake Boss’ on TLC: “These are recipes someone might actually make,” she laughs. She has an ‘everyday loaf’ that even someone who’s never baked on TV might be able to adapt by switching out ingredients in the dough to create baked goods that may become focaccia or maybe even muffins. The book is rich with tales from her family blended in, before and after Max, and Holter’s financially adept husband has been essential to the craft bakery’s inexorable rise. “Before we started, he told me I could have one employee,” she recalls, with a dash of disbelief. But so much has happened since she met him over a glass of tequila on a Cinco de Mayo after graduating in 2012 from Fontbonne with a business degree. Now she has enough trusted associates that the entire Holter family, including Naomi, could be assured of their trip to Italy in mid-July. ”I want my kids to be adventurous!” Hungry for more? Visit madebylia.com.
