Since its debut 10 years ago, the secret has long been out on Stuart Schwartz’s The Image Flow as a go-to resource for a wide range of photography services, from high-end printing, photo scanning and art reproduction to education and workshops, not to mention they’re ever-burgeoning slate of deeply immersive trips to places like Cuba and Tuscany, allowing photographers to hone their craft while diving into the culture around them.

But while the larger Mill Valley photo community has made The Image Flow a vital hub in Miller Avenue’s Egger Plaza, some of Mill Valley’s biggest brands have taken advantage of a lesser-known component of its array of services: its commercial photography studio, and Schwartz’s commercial photography talents.

“Stuart and The Image Flow are an extraordinary resource for our community,” says Margaret O’Leary, whose 15 stores across the U.S. have used both the studio and Schwartz as a photographer on several occasions. “Having a team with such deep technical know-how in our midst has been a huge help to our business. From photo shoots to printing, we rely on Image Flow. In fact when it came time for my portrait, Stuart is the only one I would trust to capture the Margaret O’Leary brand (and me!).”

Lily Kanter, creator of the former Mill Valley Baby & Kids Co. and co-founder of the renowned home design brand Serena & Lily brand, used The Image Flow as the primary studio for the Spring 2019 catalog for her latest venture, Boon Supply, an innovative online retailer that splices retail with the democratization of crowdfunding on sites like GoFundMe, IndieGogo and Kickstarter. On every item the company sells, 50 percent of the proceeds go towards the cause of the customer’s choice, including organizations like Kiddo!. Organizations can also create their own fundraising campaigns on the site – just like they do on sites like GoFundMe.

“The Image Flow is an amazing local photo studio that works perfectly for our studio needs, and Stuart is so accommodating and service oriented,” Kanter says. “We love that studio!”

O’Leary and Kanter aren’t alone, as a diverse array of local businesses, including Studio Velo, EO Products, Marin Theater Company and Proof Lab, have used The Image Flow as a studio and/or Schwartz as a photographer.

The 411: The Image Flow offers a range of commercial photography services. MORE INFO.

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Bloom, the San Rafael-based nonprofit that provides free wardrobes and life skills training to men, women and families transitioning to a life of self-reliance and looking for a job, has plenty to celebrate in 2019. The organization, founded as Image for Success in 1999, turns 20 this year, and has just hired new executive director Lenice Smith to build on the success established by Sherene Chen.

A native of Flint, Mich., Smith has lived and worked in Marin for more than 18 years, largely in the healthcare field. She'll oversee the organization's operations and community outreach and develop resources toward its strategic goals. Smith says she was an occasional shopper at Bloom’s retail store long before she accepted her new role of executive director. Smith says she enjoys board games with her three sons and singing at local venues around town.
 
Barbara Lee founded the nonprofit after President Clinton established the welfare-to-work program and she learned that one San Rafael agency had 40 women ready to go to work but didn't have any business clothes. Prior to Image for Success’ creation, Cal Works (a welfare-to-work program) had provided each of their clients with vouchers to shop at a local discount store. But Lee wanted to create a more positive and personalized shopping experience for these women who were struggling to meet the serious challenges in their lives.

The organization morphed into Bloom in 2016 to reflect its broader array of services designed to have a direct, tangible impact on people’s lives at a critical moment: people and families transitioning to a life of self-reliance and looking for a job, whether it’s a person just released from prison, someone recovering from substance abuse or a victim of domestic abuse seeking independence. 

Bloom is set to host a number of 20th anniversary events in 2019, and the annual Bloom Spring Luncheon (fashion show) is set for April 26. They'll also offer financial and career literacy workshops in 2019. 

Located at 1557 Fourth Street in downtown San Rafael, Bloom runs a retail store that accepts donated clothing. They also take a lot of that clothing to the clients that are referred to them through a variety of social services agencies like Adopt a Family of Marin, Center for Domestic Peace, Community Action Marin and the Marin Employment Connection, as well as school administrators, clergy and teachers.

Clients can come back to Bloom every season, and the organization’s volunteer dressers are trained to deliver a “Nordstroms-like experience,” the organization says. “They act as personal shoppers for their clients. And those clients feel really respected, which is part of our mission. It’s not just about clothes.
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Over the years, the program grew, expanding to include men in 2005, and then relocated to Fourth Street in 2007, allowing the organization to open a consignment store. In 2011, bolstered by revenue from that store, Image for Success hit a milestone of having served 10,000 clients. The organization continued to expand on its partnerships with referring agencies, and had served more than 15,000 clients by the end of 2015. 

The 411: Bloom is constantly seeking funding and clothing donations to continue to serve its clients and expand its services. The organization's annual gala and fashion show is set for April 26, 2019. MORE INFO.
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In the coming weeks, Depot Bookstore & Cafe owner Paul Lazzareschi and his team are set to embark on a renovation of the longtime City-owned building at 87 Throckmorton Avenue that it calls home. The project is extensive but largely has two components: an overhaul of the Depot space, bringing the historic building, particularly its bathroom and kitchen, up to code, as well as the construction of a long-sought, much-needed public restroom adjacent to the Depot.

To accommodate the construction, the Mill Valley Chamber, whose Visitor Center and office has also been in the City-owned building for decades, is relocating to a temporary mobile office a few hundred feet away, in a pair of parking spaces on Miller Avenue across from Piazza D’Angelo, as indicated in the illustration at left. The project is expected to take at least 6 months, and the Chamber will operate out of the mobile office with the same level of digital-centric service to its members and the larger Mill Valley community.

“We’re moving a short distance away, but very little will change about our day-to-day operations,” says Chamber Co-Director Paula Reynolds. “Our Visitor Center in the Depot Building gets a ton of foot traffic, and our ace staff will continue to dole out shopping and restaurant recommendations, give out our MV Community Map, directions to Muir Woods and Mt. Tam, and mostly brag about our incredible Chamber members.”

“We appreciate the City’s willingness to support our temporary relocation to a nearby space, as proximity to our current space within our downtown core is critically important,” Reynolds adds. “And we look forward to returning soon to a Depot that is gorgeous and strikes a balance between the building’s historic character and some much-needed modern infrastructure.”

The impending project kickoff comes on the heels of the longstanding efforts of Lazzareschi, who also owns Vasco restaurant across the street from the Depot to revitalize the Depot. Lazzareschi first put forward plans soon after he and partner Gary Rulli bought the business in 2016 from the family of the late Mary Turnbull, who founded the famed bookstore and cafe with her husband William Turnbull in 1987 and died in September 2015.

The Depot pays the City a base rent plus a percentage of total sales. The depot building was built by the Northwestern Pacific Railroad in 1928. It served as the terminal for electric and oil trains that between Mill Valley to the Sausalito ferry docks. The railroad shut down in the 1940s and morphed into a bus depot, used first by Greyhound and later by Golden Gate Transit.

In the 1970s, the building was re-invented as Ganey’s Bookstore and Cafe, which it remained until the Turnbull family took over the lease in 1987.

In April 2018, the Mill Valley City Council unanimously rejected an effort to stop plans to renovate the space and allow the construction of a long-delayed downtown public bathroom to proceed. City officials and Lazzareschi reached an agreement to incorporate the public bathroom construction into the Depot project to save costs and time. The public bathroom project was regularly discussed in 2014 and was fully budgeted in 2015 and conceptually dates back to 1984, when then-Mayor Richard “Dick” Jessup, who designed the Depot Plaza, first sketched out a downtown bathroom location.

The 411: The Mill Valley Chamber is moving to a temporary mobile office space on the Miller Ave. side of the Depot Plaza in the coming weeks. Regular hours will remain: Tues.-Sat., 10am-4pm. MORE INFO.

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In two very disparate modes of expression, Janet Weaver has spent much of her adult life trying to heal others.

In the first of those efforts, Weaver spent nearly six years in Kampala, Uganda, managing programs for GOAL, a Dublin, Ireland-based nonprofit, with her work spanning adult literacy, small business development, women’s development and more. She later served as the field director for GOAL, administering grants to dozens of nonprofits in Calcutta, working to rehabilitate street children there.

“I used my anthropology background, research skills and my curiosity about people, places and cultures to design programs that helped people,” she says. “I felt there might be other ways to live in the world, and doing so in Africa and India surely were one way.”

When the Lafayette, Calif., native eventually moved back to the Bay Area, Weaver turned her attention to healing on less global, more intimate way.

Weaver spent a lot of time at a meditation ashram in Oakland upon her return, taking a yoga philosophy class and studying the teachings of yoga philosophy, meditation and Ayurveda, the latter of which operates on the principles that the mind and body are inextricably connected, and that nothing has more power to heal the body than the mind.

Weaver became a licensed massage therapist and later a yoga instructor. Within a few years, she garnered her certification as a yoga therapist, opening her own healing practice in 2006 in the East Bay, and in Mill Valley in 2010. Now on Miller Avenue, Weaver has a pair of distinct but related practices: Yoga Therapy for Life and Massage & Healing.

Weaver specializes in treating athletes, injuries, pain, stress and muscle soreness, offering specialty courses in yoga therapies and working one-on-one with clients to assess injury, diet and lifestyle imbalances using Ayurveda and yoga therapies and massage therapy.

Weaver says she prefers to start with a body work session – “that helps me to get to know the body of the person and identify areas where I can help,” she says – followed by 2-3 yoga therapy sessions. She also teaches a class at College of Marin on using yoga therapy to address anxiety and mental emotional imbalances. “It’s not just musculoskeletal, it’s also diet and lifestyle imbalances.”

“I treat all over the map,” she says.

The 411: Janet Weaver’s Yoga Therapy for Life and Massage & Healing practices are on Miller Avenue. MORE INFO.

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With 2018 in the rearview mirror, Melinda Neal's Marin Conservatory of Dance is moving swiftly into the new year, performing its Winter Showcase at the Marin Center in San Rafael on Sunday, February 3 at 2pm.

With choreography from Neal, her daughter Leilani Neal, and Calvin Thomas, the showcase features MCD students performing excerpts from the classical ballet “Sleeping Beauty,” as well as guest artists from San Francisco Dance Theatre performing "And If It's Still Black Outside." Dancers are Jackie McConnell and Michael Wells. The performance also features choreography by Sandrine Cassini with Christopher Dunn, as well  as "Close, Far and Somewhere in Between," choreographed by Alyssa Mitchel and performed by Gretchen LaWall and Linda Steele II.

Neal, a longtime professional ballet dancer and revered Bay Area ballet instructor, opened the Marin Conservatory of Dance on Miller Ave. in 2018, hoping to provide "high caliber pre-professional training in classical ballet for students of all levels an opportunity to explore and express themselves physically and emotionally." Spring Semester begins February 5, enrollment for all levels is currently open. Click here for a trial class.

The 411: Melinda Neal's Marin Conservatory of Dance performs its Winter Showcase at the Marin Center in San Rafael on Sunday, February 3 at 2pm. Tix $30 for adults, $17 for children 12 and under. MORE INFO.

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Jeffrey M. Smith has made a career out of highlighting the risks he believes are associated with genetically modified foods (GMOs). He's done so with a pair of books, Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating, and Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of our Lives, the latter of which he made into a film in 2012.

On Thursday, February 7 at 1pm, Smith, the executive director of the Institute of Responsible Technology, comes to the Outdoor Art Club to discuss his work and the risks associated with GMOs. This event is free and open to the public.

The 411: Consumer activist and author Jeffrey M. Smith speaks about the risks associated with GMOs on Thursday, February 7 at 1pm at the Outdoor Art Club. One West Blithedale Avenue. Free. MORE INFO.

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Makers Market's shop at the Mill Valley Lumber Yard is rolling into 2019 with a full slate of monthly (second Saturday) Outdoor Markets, kicking things off January 12 (10am-5pm) with more than a half dozen independent creators, artists and makers who will be showcasing their wares, including jewelry, body products, ceramics, glassware and pottery throughout the property. There will also be live music throughout the event, which runs from 10am-5pm, and free drinks in the Makers Market store. In the event of rain, the makers will be in the former Guideboat space at the northwest end of the property.

Among the artists and vendors at the Outdoor Market will be Collective Hearts, founded by a group of women with deep Marin roots, including Playa co-owner Vanessa Higgins. Co-founder Lisa Rueff says Collective Hearts "was created to spread love freely and abundantly, front and center, and always from the heart."

NOTE: Help the environment and take advantage of the easy transit, pedestrian and bike access to the Lumber Yard, with 60 bike parking spaces onsite. If you need to drive, don’t park in front of neighbors homes as there is ample median public parking in the surrounding area.

​HERE ARE THE VENDORS:

The 411: Makers Market in the Mill Valley Lumber Yard at 129 Miller Ave., hosts an outdoor market featuring an array of artists and makers on Saturday, January 12 from 10am-5pm. MORE INFO. And here's the full story on Suzy Ekman and Makers Market.

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Having tackled The Wizard of Oz, Annie and Sound of Music over the past three years, the Mill Valley Middle School’s Cabaret dives into the world of a hugely popular modern musical with the usual twists, including talent acts and other surprises. 

MVMS Cabaret presents Middle School Musical, an adaptation of the acclaimed High School Musical, the 2006 hit musical that became the most successful Disney Channel Original Movie ever produced, with multiple sequels and the best-selling album in the U.S. for that year. The plot is "a modern adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, telling the story of two high school juniors from rival cliques – Troy Bolton (Zac Efron), captain of the basketball team, and Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens), a shy transfer student who excels in mathematics and science. Together, they try out for the lead parts in their high school musical, and this causes division among all the school's students.

In typical Cabaret tradition, the MVMS production will be filled with unexpected surprises and is sure to entertain audience members of all ages, according to organizers.

The 411: The Mill Valley Middle School Cabaret takes on Middle School Musical with a trio of performances on March 1 (7:30pm), March 2 (7:30pm) and March 3 (1pm). Tix are $20 for adults and $10 for kids, with limited reserve seating for $35. MVMS Gym, 425 Sycamore Ave. Tix available on the day of each performance 30 minutes prior to show time (cash or check only). MORE INFO.

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Wendy Xa and her team opened the new K-8 Terra Marin School and the Terra Mandarin Preschool, a Reggio Emilia-inspired Mandarin immersion preschool and transitional kindergarten, located within the former Ring Mountain Day School space on Lomita Drive in Mill Valley, in September 2018. 

The schools are built around an “interaction-rich” K-8 curriculum that incorporates ideas from John Dewey, Howard Gardner, Edward Harkness and John Muir and helps students “know their gifts and empowers them to forge ahead with purpose.”

​With that in mind, the schools are hosting their latest open houses around the theme of "What's Your Child's Super Power?" an effort to help kids "reveal, nurture and celebrate every child's unique strengths, guiding them to discover and embrace their true potential." The events are set for Sunday, Jan. 13, at 9am for the preschool and 11am for the K-8 school. Both open houses are at the school at 70 Lomita Drive.

“We have been extremely busy,” says Xa, a former vice president at Goldman Sachs and a mother of two who founded the Mandarin immersion Presidio Knolls School in San Francisco in 2008 as a preschool before expanding it to a K-8 program. “But it’s all because we're building a world class institution in the heart of Mill Valley.”

The 411: Terra Marin School and the Terra Mandarin Preschool host a pair of "What's Your Child's Super Power?"-themed open houses on Sunday, Jan. 13, at 9am for the preschool and 11am for the K-8 school at the school at 70 Lomita Drive. Free. Space is limited. RSVP at www.terramarin.org or www.terramandarin.org, respectively.

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For more than 40 years, Agnes Martin created paintings composed of grids and stripes, and her work sold for millions of dollars and exhibited at the world’s greatest museums. Kathleen and Jina Brennan created the film Before the Grid about Martin's life and work, capturing little known stories from friends, lovers and classmates who knew her well. 

Before Martin died in 2004 at the age of 92, her paintings were displayed in the world’s greatest museums but despite the many interviews she did, very little was known about her life. This film gives insight into Martin’s personality and development of her creative process.  

On Friday, January 18 at 7pm, the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts screens the film as part of its Art Film Fridays series, captures. Tix are $10.

The 411: On Friday, January 18 at 7pm, the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts screens Kathleen and Jina Brennan's film about Agnes Martin as part of its Art Film Fridays series, captures. Tix are $10. Both Kathleen and Jina Brennan will be on hand for a Q&A. 616 Throckmorton, 7pm. $10. View a trailer here.

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