225BatonRouge.com

Separation anxiety

Degrees of Separation was scheduled to go live Aug. 29, 2005, as an online postcard magazine for the New Orleans creative set. Then Hurricane Katrina intervened, changing the city and the project forever.

Site founder Samia Saleem settled in Seattle where postcards poured in from designers and friends. The project transformed into a limited edition book featuring 33 full-color, detachable postcards created by 24 designers. Among them are five artists with local ties, including Baton Rouge native Yvonne Cheng, now an art director for a New York City ad agency.

One of Cheng’s postcards describes the post-Katrina trip back to her old neighborhood. “I remembered this particular house had a pet pig living in the backyard,” she says. “My boyfriend and I would take our dogs to visit the pig. We drove by, and someone had spray-painted ‘snake and pig rescued.’ It felt like a little piece of my life in New Orleans had been saved.” degreesnola.com.

—SARAH YOUNG

Roman glass eye beads

A customer recently commissioned Bead It owners Tad Speegle and Joe Wells to make a bracelet for his wife. Nothing out of the ordinary, but the beads to be used were rare Roman glass eye beads dating back anywhere from 200 B.C. to 400 A.D. Among the oldest and costliest carried by the antiquity traders—a single strand runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000—eye beads are evident in nearly every ancient culture. The eye symbol was primarily seen as apotropaic, or possessing the power to prevent evil or bad luck. Now recognized more for their aesthetic value than supposed healing power, evil eye beads have already caused a stir in Hollywood among fans like Madonna, Gwen Stefani and Steven Tyler. And now, in Baton Rouge.

—MEGHAN CORNAY

Breaking waves

“Do not let me out of the water unless I’ve been bitten by a shark or suffered a heart attack.”

This is what local restaurant owner Pat Fellows wrote to his team of volunteers who helped keep the triathlete hydrated as he swam along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to raise money for Rocketkidz, a new foundation for combating child obesity.

Fellows swam all night for 15 hours to cover 34 miles across the Mississippi Sound. As “small-craft advisory seas” overturned his friends’ kayaks, Fellows grew nauseous and vomited. His body slammed into a pier, and his foot sliced open. But he never gave up. The swim raised more than $10,000.

Read about Fellows’ feat in his blog at rocketkidzfoundation.com.

—JEFF ROEDEL

Step it up!

About 135 bicyclists, carpoolers and pedestrians in Baton Rouge rallied April 13 on the steps of the State Capitol, urging Congress to “Step It Up” and lower carbon dioxide emissions 80% by 2050. Activists in cities across the United States snapped group photos to send to Congress as part of Step It Up 2007, a national campaign against global warming.

—AMANDA JOHNSON