LIFESTYLES

Multitasking alum whips up recipe for success
By Jean Manning
Contributing Writer

It was the big day. With about 110 hungry people waiting, the kitchen of the Trotter Convention Center had become a battlefield of disaster. Salad dressings and employees were missing in action, and ovens weren’t working right, leaving chicken undercooked. The first-time caterer, Celsie Staggers watched the Annual Columbus Main Street Meeting fall apart.

Today, she looks back and laughs. Hundreds of successful events later she remembers her husband’s encouragement that terrible day: “You can’t let one bad thing stop you.”

Jan Miller, then the Columbus Main Street Director, remembers the episode well. “We wanted to show off the skills within the Main Street members,” she said, “and we still use her. Everybody has a bad day, so we just chalked this up as a learning experience.”

Staggers in fact thrives under the pressure of catering. “I love the adrenaline rush of getting it done,” she says. One Saturday in September, she smoothly handled both a wedding and the Tennessee Williams Moon Lake party. On Friday, she will be catering The Department of Music and Theatre’s madrigal dinner featuring singers and actors from her alma mater at the First Presbyterian Church. On the menu: a classic Italian salad, wassail, French onion soup with mozzarella cheese, grilled and smoked pork tenderloin with marinated green beans over a rice pilaf, and a finale of  dark chocolate tort. The money raised at this dinner will go to the music program at the W.

When Staggers, 29, graduated from Mississippi University for Women seven years ago, she had no plans to become a professional cook. Managing the bakery at Food Max and later working at Oby’s in Starkville were just jobs paying her way to a degree in commercial music. Music, in fact, was her first love, and through it, she found love. Staggers met her husband, Robert, while singing in the W pop group New Horizons. The composer of 17 songs, Staggers comes from a musical family. Her father played the guitar and trumpet and sang, and her mother is a Christian artist with over 1,800 songs published.

Although Staggers continues to be engaged with music by teaching voice lessons on Tuesday nights, her energy now goes into a wide array of projects. Aside from the catering business, she parents daughter Natalie Grace, works full-time as an advertising account executive with The Commercial Dispatch, and volunteers in church and community projects. Describing herself as a “chaotic person,” Staggers adds, “I like it that way because I get bored easily.”

Her catering company, Celestial Creations, was inspired by her real name, Celeste. Her specialties include her Sausage Starlet, a cheesy sausage baked wonton; The Pluto, a grilled texas toast sandwich with ham, special seasoning, havarti cheese and mayonnaise and mustard; and a Heavenly Heath dessert, a cinnamon and toffee cookie created because a friend was allergic to chocolate.

Staggers’ family is a big help with her business. Her mother-in-law researches ideas, displays, and recipes, and her husband handles most of the grilling and meat preparation. “It wasn’t planned out that I would do the meats, but I love creating things,” he said. “ I am an artist, I create music every day, so accomplishing a recipe is the same thing, created art.” 

Even with all the help she receives from her family, she still needs help- “high-quality, part-time workers.” So she hires mostly college students and stay-at-home moms to cook and serve.

Staggers also works with a community project that utilizes both her culinary background and her social skills. The unofficial Columbus soup kitchen, known as “Loaves and Fishes,” has three locations: Harvest Life Church, Central United Methodist Church and the Salvation Army. She and others volunteer to provide meals for people, recently serving around 120 people for lunch. Soon after she became involved with this project, she felt the need to deliver random lunches door-to-door. Behind the first door she found a family distraught by a suicide. Staggers said they were stunned that someone had heard their prayers. The caterer referred to her family time as “scattered.” She and her musician husband

They have been married for nine years and say they still can’t seem to attain the ideal “date night,” she explained, “because no matter what, something always comes up. It’s OK, though,” she commented. “As long as you make the most out of your time wherever you are, your relationships will prosper.”

Her husband, 35, owns a recording studio and is the director of operations for Hope Community Church. He is currently working on two projects dear to her heart, Gas, a band working with local musicians, and Murphy’s Might, a band with original songs that donates $3 of the $10 CD sale to the Li Muru Children’s Center in Africa, which helps children afflicted with AIDS and living in poverty. The couple is teaching their child about selflessness. At Natalie grace’s fourth birthday party the family, knowing that she had more than enough toys, asked guests to bring a gift or donation for the Lowndes County Humane Society.

Staggers is also an account executive at The Commercial Dispatch full-time. A co-worker, Mandy Wells, commented, “Celsie took me under her wing. We are like a family and she was like my mama when I first got there.”

During her lunch breaks Staggers works at her church three days a week, cleaning, stocking coffee, and doing anything else that may need to be done.

Staggers is involved in numerous community events. She oversees the design, supplies, volunteers, and construction of the annual Christmas parade float for The Commercial Dispatch. She also organizes the Relay for Life for the Commercial Dispatch, thinking up the theme and working the tent. “It’s a balancing act; delegating to people makes it all succeed,” she said

Asked to describe herself, Staggers replied, “multifaceted, excited, and a disciple.”

 “I am passionate about anything I do, whether at the Commercial Dispatch, voice lessons, or throwing parties,” she said. And in the past two years she has come to realize that “as a flawed person who needs God.” she has become “less intimidating and more able to reach out and show God’s love in a more practical way.”

Her definition of contentment? “Being happy means being OK with where you are and what you have,” she said. “Stop trying to be in the next phase of life or have the next thing.” If that sounds easier said than done, she recommends taking five minutes to “put yourself in relation to every other person in the world. Remember that children in Africa may not eat a single meal today, and if they do, it will be porridge.” Staggers added, “We have no reason to be unhappy, if we could just stop and realize what we have.”

 

Massachusetts goes to pot
Joshua Lee
Columnist

Help! I'm trapped in an alternate dimension where Massachusetts has suddenly become the most liberal state in the nation. I went to bed with dreams of California as a liberal utopia, but when I woke up on Nov. 5 I found that in Massachusetts, not only was gay marriage still legal, but the laws regarding the possession of marijuana had shifted so far to the left that I almost didn't notice them sneaking away. The talk radio hosts are going to have to start making jokes about another state drifting off into a different sea.

Overwhelmingly, the denizens of Massachusetts voted to “decriminalize” possession of up to an ounce of marijuana, meaning that as long as you are caught by a state official, you get a ticket instead of being hauled into jail and left there to rot on taxpayers’ money. Even Michigan, among others, voted to allow the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

Of course, I personally do not engage in the use of illicit drugs, but as a Southerner I'm afraid I have to support these two states because if I don’t, southern politicians spit chewing tobacco at me and call me “son.” We in the twin southern jewels of Mississippi and Alabama have a long history of supporting the state's ability to say “Heck, yes” to the “wacky tobaccy” without any of our citizens actually knowing about it.

For instance, in 2004 Alabama Attorney General Troy King (Yes, Mr. “I don't like the internet” himself) along with two of his conservative cohorts from Mississippi and Louisiana filed a brief supporting California's attempt to allow medicinal marijuana using a “State's Rights” argument.

However, talk about that case has been peculiarly absent from the political landscape. Unless you follow the High Times or just really hate attorney generals, it's probably unlikely that you ever heard anyone raise a stink about that brief. There were no attack ads accusing King of corrupting California's youth with blunts. Just a pleasant acquiescence.

Not many people talk about this because because, frankly, the way our Southern politicians support the wackiest stuff and justify it by way of “States rights!” is somewhat of a Faustian bargain. If they don't support a state's right to allow their citizens to answer the green phone, then later on when they want to do something like ban baggy pants or make it illegal to wear the color red, people will complain about their hypocrisy.

This means that conservatives, who generally are the ones who favor states rights, are actually the ones helping push through decriminalization bills. So all of you who support bills like this have right-wing politicians to thank for accidently helping the country become more and more liberal every day.

Of course, the cynic in me feels obliged to point out that this isn't the great and powerful victory the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws or the State's Rightists want. We still have federal laws against possession of the ganja, and if the feds catch you it doesn't matter whether or not you ideologically believe that states should be able to determine their own laws. But with 12 states under their belt, the unholy alliance of drug-addled hippies and Republicans is well on its way to changing that.