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Health and Fitness

[click "Play" for Kristin Holbrook interview]

Intro:

IMG_1550 Who needs Andre Leon Talley when Telluride has Kristin Holbrook, fashionista/co-owner of local fashion emporium Two Skirts?

Kristin is a New Jersey native and graduate of the University of Virginia in English and Art History. After college, she spent three years teaching skiing in Vail, where she met her future husband Kevin, a broker at Peaks Realty. A year later, she moved to town. Within two years, in 2001, Kristin and Joanne Corzine had opened their store on Main Street, 127 West Colorado Avenue.

Two Skirts features fashion classics and the latest and greatest from New York – but only trends immune to altitude sickness.

Kristin will be posting a regular column for "Telluride Inside...and Out," "Fashion Friday."

12 June, 2009 /

[click "Play" buttons to hear each conversation with Dr. Ptak] Dr. Jeff Ptak is the surgical dermatologist at the Telluride Medical Center. He is also aboard certified plastic surgeon (since 1989)...

26 May, 2009 /

[click "Play" button to hear Susan's conversation with Kimberly Rose] The adjective "hairy" has two distinct meanings. Telluride locals seek out hairy moments in the mountains: hazardous and frightening are turn ons. Hairy also means "having or covered with,...

13 May, 2009 /

(editor's note: Quiet offseason in Telluride? Let's shake things a bit with Dr. Susannah Smith's next installment of Shrink Rap: Sex and Marriage.)

by Dr. Susannah Smith

Most comedy routines eventually target marriage and sex.  The joke usually goes like this: if you want a good sexual relationship, don’t get married. The bare naked truth is we all know married couples who complain  they never have sex, and one partner who wants more sex than the other. So, what’s going on?
The human sexual response is a complex one, especially when love and intimacy enters the equation. Erica Jong wrote that, for many, including the heroine of Fear of Flying, it is easier to have sex with someone we barely know than with our own mate.  The sexual response requires a degree of abandon and emotional freedom that familiarity often belies: with our mates, unresolved emotional issues build walls.

Women in particular have been raised to believe having sex when feeling distant from their spouses puts them in the position of being untrue to themselves, compromised, or forced.  Women (not always – sometimes it is the male in a relationship) believe that they must be communicating and emotionally close for sexual intimacy to feel appropriate and good.

26 April, 2009 /


Capella Telluride's GM, John Volponi, donates to online auction for Med Center's FEAST. See Susan's videocast with John at the end of this article.

It really did take a village – in this case, Telluride's sister city, The Mountain Village, to get the job done. But with two visionaries – architect/developer Robert A. Levine, and hotelier Horst Schulze, former president of Ritz-Carlton – driving the train, plus a cast of thousands willing to do the grunt work, the Telluride region's newest hotel is likely to become its crown jewel. Capella opened triumphantly on February 12, 2009.

Aptly named for the alpha star of the constellation Auriga, Capella Telluride is a tour de force. The complex of 100 hotel rooms and about 50 condominiums should transform its new address from a launch pad for intermediate skiing and hang-out for the Prada brigade into a go-to spot for food, drink and events, even for townies. The spa and the restaurants have the welcome mat out for the entire community.

07 March, 2009 /

Dirk DePagter talks to Kate Wadley about Hotel Columbia's donation to Telluride Medical Center's Feast. See the videocast at the end of this article.


Dirk DePagter remembers Telluride's wild and wooly days of the 1970s. A  master carpenter/contractor back when, he was hired to do the remodel that transformed a shed owned by the Idarado Mining Company into the building that is now the Telluride Medical Center. What remains of his handiwork is the eastern part of today's structure.

Dirk, who became a developer, is now the proud owner of his first hotel: he and his partners purchased the Hotel Columbia from close friends Jim Lincoln and Jeff Campbell in January 2008.

07 March, 2009 /

FEAST baskets 005 Dr. Jeff Ptak wears two hats in the Telluride community: he is a board certified plastic surgeon with a private practice and the dermatologist at the Telluride Medical Center. In both contexts, however, he regularly confronts the vicissitudes of altitude and aging on skin and finds solutions.

Dr. Ptak first visited the Telluride region 40 years ago. Since then, he has watched the community grow and change, and the town's small "clinic" grow into a Medical Center now bursting at the seams, just as the demand to deliver more and better state-of-the-art services is growing.

01 March, 2009 /

The Telluride AIDS Benefit is Robert Presley’s legacy. It now reaches out in many ways to many different places/institutions: locally, through its education initiative; regionally to the Denver Children’s Hospital Immunodeficiency Program (CHIP) and Brother Jeff’s Health Initiative; internationally, through The Telluride Project in Manzini, Swaziland, Sub-Saharan Africa and Ethiopia; and to neighbors on the Western Slope through TAB’s primary beneficiary, the Western Colorado AIDS Project or WestCAP.

In 1994, WestCAP  was still a very small nonprofit operating out of Grand Junction under the direction of a small board of directors and administered part-time by a nurse, Shelley Nielsen. Nielsen did great work with the Mesa County Health Department and as part-time executive director/case manager for WestCAP. Clients being served lived primarily in Mesa County, until Presley worked his magic.

26 February, 2009 /