The final event on the the multi-town Pink Week calendar is a Zumba workout in Holmdel on Saturday. (Click to enlarge)

Thirty members of the Teen Outreach Program at Red Bank Regional High completed a two-day Out of the Darkness track walk in the school gym Wednesday morning to promote awareness of suicide prevention as part of Children’s Mental Health Week. 

The idea for the walk came primarily from two proactive freshmen, Grace Rumph and Adam Canterbury, above, each of whom has lost a friend to suicide within the past two years.

“This is affecting our generation and there’s so much a person can do to help, but maybe they feel afraid to reach out,” said Rumph. “People need to know how important it is.” (Photos by Danielle Tepper. Click to enlarge)

They called it a flash mob. That would be stretching the concept.

Still, the vinyasa flow sequence performed by about 30 members of Evenflow Yoga at the Red Bank International Flavour Festival Sunday seemed a fitting tribute to the emergence of the sun after a day of rain.

The yoga enthusiasts wore pink as part of the Pink Bank celebration going on in Red Bank and neighboring towns this week.

It doesn’t look very red now, but the outlook for fans of Red Bank’s red clay courts is rosy. (Click to enlarge)

By DANIELLE TEPPER

A recent visit to Red Bank’s clay tennis courts in Marine Park found the riverfront facility deserted and unusually quiet. The courts, cracked and faded, looked more like a stretch of beige sand than a popular spot for athletes to brush up on their skills.

Not to worry though, for this is an annual lull. Over the next month or so, the only player working these courts will be court manager Rich Nicoletti, who’s been tending the facility, and its patrons, for decades.

“What you’re looking at here is the wear-and-tear of winter,” says Nicoletti. And its his job to bring the playing surface back to dusty-red glory, he said.

Each spring, the courts are stripped down to their bottom layer as Nicoletti and a team work their magic to revive one of America’s tennis rarities.

“It’s a long process,” Nicoletti said. “Repairing the damage, smoothing it out, laying the clay and the slate, nailing the lines.”

You read correctly: the court boundaries aren’t merely sprayed on. Long strips  of fabric are cut and, one by one, nailed to the court by hand.

It sounds like an arduous task, but the wait shouldn’t be too long.

“By mid-May, we hope to be just about finished,” said Nicoletti. “Then you can come back here and have your tennis match on our beautiful red clay.”

The courts are open to the public from May 26 to mid-October, seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to sundown. But they’re not free: court usage costs $28 per hour, though members get unlimited use. See the facility website for a schedule of fees for borough residents and non-residents.

For more information on the courts or lessons with “Coach Rich,” call (732) 530-2737 or email.

You can also check out redbankgreen’s 2007 article on the courts here.

Cases of new books await distribution at River Road Books, above. Soul Kitchen, below, will serve as a giver site. (Click to enlarge)

By DANIELLE TEPPER

Book fans know that when they fall in love with a story, their immediate reaction is to tell someone so they, too, can fall in love with it. Remember how you first heard about The Hunger Games or Fifty Shades of Grey? Word of mouth is the spark that starts the fire and, sometimes has the ability to ignite a full force blaze that’s pretty hard to ignore.

That’s this concept that inspired World Book Night, a campaign designed to introduce the joy of reading to those who can’t afford or are perhaps even a little intimidated to pick up a new novel.

Launched in the United Kingdom a year ago, World Book Night is now coming to the United States, with some 5,000 towns and cities expected to give away almost half a million free books. Among those bibliophilic volunteers are River Road Books in Fair Haven and Red Bank’s own pay-what-you-can JBJ Soul Kitchen. Here’s how it works: publishers of 30 specially-produced paperback titles have agreed to make up to 20 copies of each available to stores, individuals and organizations that wish to give them away. For free. All the books are to be handed out Monday night.

When she and her partners heard about the event, “we laughed about it at first,” said Laurie Potter of River Road Books. “We thought, ‘how are they going to accomplish this?’ But it’s been so well organized.”

And when Potter reached out to get Soul Kitchen involved, manager Ryan Timmons knew it would be right in tune with the overall community mission of the restaurant, he tells redbankgreen.

“We’ll hopefully be able to stock a couple of our cubbies and run it as a book exchange for our in-need guests,” he said, referring to a large, bookcase-like shelving structure that dominates one wall of the Monmouth Street restaurant. “I’m not looking to just take 300 books and give them out, I want 50 people to come in, take a book, return it and take another one,” he said.

“This restaurant gives us an opportunity to talk and meet people; that’s all it’s here for, ultimately. The goal is to put people together.”

Potter says the titles were carefully chosen to allow some variety, and include provocative books that the volunteers are passionate about and would be excited to give out. “Books that could really impact your life, that could maybe turn you into a reader,” she explained.

The list of page-turners includes H.D. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. All the authors have waived their royalties to help make it happen.

While River Road Books is the designated pick-up location for local distributors, anyone in the community had the opportunity to go online and register to become a giver. These givers will then be able to bring their books to nursing homes, prisons, VA hospitals, etc.

“They’re not meant for resale; they’re only for this occasion,” Potter said.

Located in the third floor of the Blaisdell Pavilion and overlooking the Navesink River, the Red Bank hospital’s new “surgical day-stay” features 21 semi-private and two private rooms for patient recovery from same-day procedures, replacing a dormitory-style setup.

Due in September are two high-tech surgical suites, which will bring the number of operating rooms to 12 and complete the project. Hospital employees themselves contributed $374,000 to a capital campaign for the project, a spokesman said. (Click to enlarge)

Dianne Drewing in the Monmouth Street mews where she plans to open a spray-tan salon next week. (Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

For most of her life, Dianne Drewing was a tanning nut.

“A perfect day for me was always a day at the beach, tanning with friends or family,” she tells redbankgreen‘s Retail Churn. She even chose a college in Florida in part for the rays.

Then came an awareness of what kind of damage the sun can do to human skin, a lesson amplified when Drewing began noticing its adverse effects on her own skin, which she describes fair.

Demolition work appeared to be underway earlier this week at the future home of a Subway sandwich shop. (Click to enlarge)

That was seven years ago, right around the time a friend persuaded Drewing to set aside her aversion to spray-on tans. The effect was transformative, she said.

She’s been a “sunless client” ever since. But not just any sunless client. Drewing acknowledges that salon owners might be forgiven for regarding her as the client from hell, the perfectionist who insists on an even application of a color that’s natural to her pigmentation. None of that John Boehner orange cast for her.

Now, she’s the one who will be holding the spray nozzle. Next Tuesday, Drewing plans to open Sunkissed Airbrush Tanning in a tiny second-floor space upstairs from That Hot Dog Place, in the alleyway beside the Dublin House on Monmouth Street in Red Bank.

But there’s a twist. This is an all-organic salon, said Drewing. The main ingredient in her aerosol solution, she said, is dihydroxideacetone (DHA), which she describes as “a colorless sugar that reacts with the amino acids of dead skin cells” to produce a different hue of tan in each client, depending on his or her own body chemistry.

“My goal is to never make a client look overdone, but to have the most natural-looking, even tan possible,” she said.

Sunkissed doesn’t use a spray tent, as other salons do, because the noiseless compressor Drewing employs enables her to control the spray, she said.

The salon will offer services from a face-only tan for $12 to full-body, for $38. Package deals for weddings, proms and girls-nights-out are available.

The salon is the first business venture for Drewing, 41. She grew up in Warren and now lives in Tinton Falls. She works as a high school and college English teacher, and plans to be open in the evenings during the school year and all-day during the summer.

# # #

In other Churnings, Lucki Clover opened Wednesday in half the space formerly taken by Zebu Forno, at 20 Broad.

And workers were seen doing early prep work this week in the planned home of Subway Café, a 28-seat “hip” variation on the sandwich shop chain’s usual offerings, at 60 Broad Street, in a long-vacant space between the Red Bank Nail Salon and Hip & Humble Home furnishings.

By JOHN T. WARD

For George Sheehan Classic organizer Phil Hinck, the annual Red Bank running event is really several races in one.

The foremost is the one in which hundreds of runners, walkers and wheelchair users strive to cross the finish line on Broad Street in as little time as possible.

But well before that race, there’s the pressure to prop up the number of runners, which has been in gradual decline since the event moved to the borough from Asbury Park in 1994.

And then there’s the race against the clock to break down the street barriers and timing equipment to get out of the way of downtown merchants opening for Saturday morning business.

Now, in the biggest change to the event in years, Hinck and the race committee have decided to shorten the main race to a five-kilometer event, from five miles, a move that they hope will juice attendance and expedite post-race clean-up.

Sheehan Classic organizer Phil Hinck in 2009. (Click to enlarge)

Hinck said that starting with the June 16 event, the race will no longer include the nearly two-mile stretch that took place in Fair Haven. Instead, it will follow its traditional course from downtown Red Bank into Little Silver. But instead of heading east on Harding Road into Fair Haven and back, it will turn west on Harding from Prospect Avenue, directly up the dreaded Tower Hill, and on to its customary finish.

“I know they’re happy about it in Fair Haven,” Hinck tells redbankgreen, adding that residents of the Alderbook community in Little Silver, with a single access point on Harding, will also no longer be “trapped” in their development by the road closure.

The race, named for longtime Rumson resident and Red Bank physician Dr. George Sheehan, who popularized the sport through books and newspaper columns, was launched in Asbury Park in 1981 and relocated to Red Bank in 1994, when it was shortened from a 6.2-miler to a 5-miler.

The latest curtailment, Hinck said, is a reflection of runner preferences for either short runs or longer one, such as marathons and half-marathons. Five-mile races have fallen out of popularity, he said, noting that Rumson’s traditional five-miler is going to a 5K this year. Summer heat and humidity are factors, too, he said.

“Last year, there were good conditions, but there were only 1,500 runners,” he said. “We used to get 3,000.”

Hinck said the edited course will mean cost savings in terms of police protection, but it’s unclear if it will translate into lower entry fees, which ranged as high as $35 for late arrivers.

“We’re still working on that,” he said. The decision will rest on the level of corporate sponsorships, he said.

The shorter course should also translate into earlier postrace breaktown time. Hinck said he still hears complaints from some merchants that the race disrupts their business, but “we really hustle to get the streets open by 9:30 or 9:45,” before most shops are open.

“Every year it’s gotten better,” and the quicker race can be expected to shave a large block of time off the earliest street reopening, he said.

The decision to shorten the race, though, was a tough one, Hinck said.

“The hardcore runners don’t want to see these distances go away,” he said.

Registration opens March 15.

Wednesday was the first day of the outdoor season for members of RFH Rowing, the sculling crews of Rumson and Fair Haven teens. 

The kids spent the session on dry land, at the club’s home next to Rumson’s Victory Park, where they rigged shells with oarlocks and other equipment – duties they’re required to perform before and after away races. “It teaches them responsibility,” said assistant coach Dan Murphy. “They take ownership of their boats.” (Click to enlarge)