Explore Inside Santa Fe: Santa Fe People

We tend to think of chefs as exalted beings, godlike in their miraculous and mysterious abilities to transform ordinary old food into manna, whose time is largely spent creating their gorgeously presented entrées in huge, bustling kitchens from whence, at the end of the day, after taking a bow, they retire to some glorious pantheon in the sky. So when a chef is having major renovation done in order to open his or her own restaurant, we’d expect them to be hovering up there, removed, as others do the grunt work of making it ready.

He’s an easy figure to miss, sort of a blur, as he scurries from one event to another at the Santa Fe Wine and Chile Fiesta — baseball cap cocked at a jaunty angle atop his head and courier bag slung over his shoulder. But when the curtain rises on the first wine seminar at this year’s 19th event, Joe Spellman will be at his accustomed place on the podium as panel moderator. That this is his twelfth appearance at the event gives you an idea of how popular and how valued he is.

On August 10, 2009, I had the pleasure of speaking with Santa Fean Sheila Devitt in a telephone interview on her two decade career in the theater.  Speaking from San Francisco (CA) where Sheila has relocated with her partner of seventeen years, Joe Vigil (an Espanola native), I began our discussion with her current work as an intern with the Marin Shakespeare Company where she is taking on-going training in such areas as Shakespeare textual analysis, audition techniques, stage combat, and Alexander technique (focus on breathing and building vocal power).  She is also working backstage for this summer’s production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

For the past 25 years, people in Santa Fe who have done something — or many things — to help the community have been recognized as Living Treasures. But this year, for only the second time, a book is being published telling the Treasures' stories.

Eloy Martinez, a former district attorney who died Sunday, was remembered this week as a talented politician whose career was sidetracked by the 1980 prison riot.

A funeral Mass will be celebrated at 2 p.m. Thursday at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Las Cruces, where Martinez had lived since leaving Santa Fe in 1997.