Getting in on the ground floor of a solid new venture is a smart business tactic. It’s also one that has helped propel the online graduate-degree program of IU’s Kelley School of Business to a ranking of third best in the country, according U.S. News & World Report.

The long-running Kelley Direct online MBA program earned its spot among more than 200 similar offerings nationwide. This is the first time that U.S. News & World Report has ranked online business programs. Washington State University finished first in the rankings and Arizona State University second.

The Kelley School’s high ranking wasn’t exactly a shock, says Clinical Associate Professor Philip Powell, faculty chair of the Kelley Direct online MBA program. “We were the first business school in the Bloomberg top twenty to offer an online MBA—back in 1999,” he says. “For thirteen years, we’ve been learning how to teach online. For thirteen years, we’ve known you can teach online at a level that employers respect. We’re now able to move forward on education that is organic to the online learning experience, whereas our competitors are still learning.”

The MBA online program has soared in size from just 14 students in 1999 to about 1,000 this year, making it the largest graduate program in the school.

“Because we’ve been able to teach online for so long, we can do things that nobody else can,” says Powell. For instance, the program offers global leadership training, in which online students go abroad to consult in emerging markets. It also includes virtual consulting programs that teach students how to work in teams.

Some advantages remain the same as in the residential program: The faculty includes the same professors, and students have access to the school’s network of more than 95,000 alumni.

Yet the differences are key, says Powell. “You cannot recreate the traditional classroom in online learning—it’s like trying to think of a computer as a typewriter,” he says. “Kelley Direct is able to unshackle from the concept of the traditional classroom, allowing us to innovate in ways that other programs cannot.”

(clockwise from top left): Jordana Greenberg, Chris Burgess, Rebecca Reed-Lunn, and Maria Di Meglio of the band Harpeth Rising. Courtesy photo

BY CAIRRIL MILLS

The Nashville, Tennessee-based band Harpeth Rising, a quartet made up of IU Jacobs School of Music alumni, has been on one long road trip, from Bloomington to Hawaii to the United Kingdom. The quartet’s achievements are wide-ranging, too, from being named Nashville’s top local band in 2010 to having their third and latest CD, The End of the World, at the top of an international folk chart.

Harpeth Rising’s genesis was a trip from Bloomington to California made in 2007 by co-founders Jordana Greenberg and Rebecca Reed-Lunn, with a stop in Colorado to attend the Telluride Bluegrass festival. The pair busked across the country and then shipped Greenberg’s car to Hawaii for a year-long stint playing gigs there.

While violinist Greenberg was adept at crossing between the classical and old-time music worlds, Reed-Lunn had made few forays beyond the classical canon before befriending Greenberg at IU; she trained on viola but picked up the banjo from watching Pete Seeger videos on YouTube and from other musicians.

The pair traveled to Nashville in 2009, “because that’s a wonderful place to be when you’re trying to play acoustic music,” says Greenberg. They added fellow Jacobs alumni Chris Burgess (percussion) and Maria Di Meglio (cello) and named the band after a river that runs through Nashville. The musicians, all in their 20s, now play mostly original songs shaped by bluegrass, Celtic, and folk and steeped in classical technique.

“We just started writing originals and then went with what sounded most natural,” says Greenberg. “Whenever you’re writing original music, it’s probably going to be a blend of things rather than one specific genre. We write in a very free-form style, so anything that’s influencing our lives at that time ends up coming out in the music.”

Harpeth Rising makes frequent tours of the Midwest, South, and Northeast and has toured the U.K. three times, including an appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival. They play Bloomington once or twice a year but visit Indianapolis and Louisville more often.

Reed-Lunn describes her goal as “to always keep developing. I’ve never felt static with this group, and as long as we stay that way I think we’ll all be happy.”

Did Bloomington really need another bar? That was the question many were asking last fall after The Tap opened in the building formerly occupied by Talbots at the corner of West Kirkwood and North College, perhaps the most desirable retail space in town.

But The Tap is not just another bar; it has more than 50 high-end craft beers on draft, as well as 400 bottled varieties. There’s no Budweiser or Coors to be found.

While The Tap is a dedicated beer destination, it is not the only Bloomington establishment with a vast selection of beer. Yogi’s Grill & Bar has more than 50 taps pouring craft drafts. Patrons of Crazy Horse Food & Drink Emporium are immortalized on wall plaques after going “Around The World in Eighty Beers.” International grocery Sahara Mart offers 1,300 varieties of imported and domestic bottled beer. Plus there are two breweries in town: Bloomington Brewing Company and Upland Brewing Co. There’s no doubt, Bloomington loves beer, in all its many forms.

The culture of local beer appreciation follows a greater nationwide pattern, says Greg Kitzmiller, distinguished lecturer of marketing at IU Kelley School of Business and an expert on beverage industry trends.

The one crucial catalyst: “The home brewing laws changed,” says Kitzmiller. “Home brewing wasn’t legal until about twenty-five years ago, and it drove both consumer and brewery interest. Then in the nineties, you had a few bold restaurateurs who thought it would be a good idea to sell craft beer. From 1995 onwards, home brewers have been expanding their operations and making them commercial.” It’s been a domino effect, Kitzmiller explains, with each successive brewery inspiring others to try brewing and each new beer aficionado inspiring others to try new beers.

Doug Dayhoff, who opened Upland Brewing Co. in 1998, says Bloomington has been especially welcoming to craft beer. “Relative to the rest of Indiana, Bloomington has been way out in front in terms of valuing locally produced foods, and the microbrewing movement is a part of the larger local food movement,” says Dayhoff. “The anomaly is not the rise of craft beers. It was the nationalization and mass production of beers in the latter part of the twentieth century. What we’re reverting to—local and regional brewing—is what used to be normal.”

The presence of Indiana University also makes Bloomington’s thirst for hops more powerful than in a non-college city of comparable size. The student demographic, historically, hasn’t been known for its appreciation of craft beer; for reasons both financial and recreational, students tend to favor quantity over quality. But this is changing, claims Kitzmiller, and bars are more than keeping up with the demand.

In 2010, Chris Karl, co-owner of Yogi’s, became a certified cicerone (the beer equivalent of a sommelier) to better serve customers who come to sample the myriad brews available. Karl says younger beer drinkers are more likely to experiment. “They don’t have a habit. They haven’t been drinking Miller Lite for the past forty years of their life and are stuck on it. [Their palates] can change quite easily.”

Those looking to expand their beer horizons and refine their palates can attend Yogi’s “Beer School,” held every Tuesday evening at the bar. Admission is free, and a variety of craft beers are offered for tasting. Experts in the field, including representatives from local and regional breweries, are on hand to explain the nuances of each one. After learning the basics and figuring out one’s own palate, the opportunities for exploring the world of beer in Bloomington are virtually limitless.

On April 13, the 3rd Annual Bloomington Craft Beer Festival, presented by the Brewers of Indiana Guild, came to the old Woolery Stone Mill on West Tapp Road. For $35, guests received a commemorative tasting glass that they could fill with the wares of dozens of Indiana breweries, from the darkest stouts to the lightest lagers and many kinds in between.

iStock / konradlew

BY MOYA ANDREWS

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) are perennial weeds, with long-lived seeds and deep taproots, found everywhere in the world except in arctic regions. Nearly everybody knows their name, and they are one of the first flowers children pick. But despite, or perhaps because of, their familiarity, they do not garner much respect. Yet they are forgiving, versatile, persistent, and durable. If they are mowed down, they just shoot back up.

They increase and bloom throughout the year, but in the spring they are most noticeable on lawns. Their cheerful flowers, like discs of compressed sunshine, are followed by spherical heads that are efficient seed dispersers.

The seeds from European dandelions were transported by colonists across the Atlantic Ocean during the 17th century. They were carried in the colonists’ clothing, in seed corn, and in animals’ hooves, and they germinated in the cleared forests, plowed fields, pastures, and prairies of the New World. By 1860 they had reached the West Coast of the Americas.

Coffee can be made from their roasted roots, the fresh-cleaned young leaves are yummy in salads, and even writers like Dylan Thomas have mentioned dandelion wine.

Dandelions soaked in white wine produced a diuretic used by medieval herbalists, and their dried leaves yielded significant amounts of potassium. This resulted in the common name “piss-a-beds,” which fortunately has not survived in our vernacular.

Like many of the plants we dismiss as weeds today, dandelions have a long history of coexistence with humans because of their medicinal and culinary uses. Richard Mabey, who wrote a defense of nature’s most unloved plants, states that “plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans, or our tidy maps of the world. If you have no such plans or maps, they can appear as innocents, without stigma or blame.” This belief is summed up in the old adage “a weed is a plant in the wrong place.”

It is the eye of the beholder, rather than the characteristics inherent in the plant itself, that determines the category to which it is assigned. Think on this when you take on the never-ending task of digging dandelions out of your lawn this spring.

Dandelion poems provided by Moya Andrews

Dandelions
Some young and saucy dandelions
Stood laughing in the sun;
They were brimming full of happiness,
And running o’er with fun.

At length they saw beside them
A dandelion old;
His form was bent and withered,
Gone were his locks of gold.

“Oh, oh” they cried, “just see him;
Old graybeard, “how d’ ye do?
We’d hide our head in the grasses,
If we were as bald as you.”

But lo! When dawned the morning,
Up rose each tiny head,
Decked not with golden tresses,
But long grey locks instead.

– Unknown author

To the Dandelion
Dear common flower, that grows beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold!
First pledge of blithesome May,
Which children pluck, and full of pride uphold
High- hearted buccaneers, o’erjoyed that they
An Eldorado in the grass have found,
Which not the rich earth’s ample round
May match in wealth! Thou art more dear to me
Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be.

– James Russell Lowell (first stanza of a longer poem).

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Paula Chambers opened The Dance Circus, Bloomington’s only professional dancewear store, in Fountain Square Mall in November 2012—just in time for the IU Opera and Ballet Theater production of The Nutcracker. But the timing wasn’t as great as she thought; one month later, a fire broke out in a tailor shop two doors down.

“Nothing of mine was destroyed, but everything was covered in soot, and unsafe to sell,” Chambers laments. The shop closed for a month while she reordered inventory and consulted dance schools and troupes on what products they would be needing. She also dry cleaned her vintage clothing collection, including a 1920s dance jacket, a 1960s flapper-style wedding dress, and a 1970s leotard/tutu ensemble.

The spruced-up store reopened in late January 2013 with more boutique touches, such as padded hangers, 1948 vintage pinup circus-calendar pages, historic circus posters, and her father’s 1950s travel trunk. Today, people go to The Dance Circus for the basics—shoes, tights, and leotards—but customers can find anything from burlesque fishnet tights to eye shadow.

As the founder of the Dance Network Alliance, co-founder of Bloomington’s hoop-dancing troupe The Hudsucker Posse, and the dance representative for the Arts Alliance of Greater Bloomington, Chambers has a strong connection with dance. But selling dancewear began serendipitously when Costume Delights, the venerable costume shop on South Walnut, closed in 2012 and the owner offered to sell Chambers her stock of dancewear. “I just thought, ‘Okay, Paula, this is what you’re supposed to do next.’”

Chambers has been involved with dance and theater since childhood, coming from what she calls “that family—the one where everyone is musical and artsy.” Her father sang in a barbershop quartet, her mother taught piano, and her sister is a historical costumer. Chambers learned to dance at age 5 and to sew as soon as she was “old enough to sit at a sewing machine,” she says. And that comes in handy at The Dance Circus.

“When people come in, I know their needs. I know the simple safety- pin trick for a broken shoe or the quick sewing solution. I’ve been there.”

For more information, visit The Dance Circus’ Facebook page.

Quiche with Vegetables
David Davenport
Bloomington Cooking School

9-inch pie crust
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
3 large eggs
Several scrapings of a whole nutmeg
White pepper, to taste
1/2 teaspoon salt
10-ounce bag frozen stir-fry blend of vegetables
3 1/2 ounces grated extra-sharp cheddar cheese
Parmesan cheese, to taste

1) Place pie crust in a pie tin, and prick the bottom and around the side of the pie crust with a fork.

2) Bake at 350ºF until a brown tinge begins to appear on the surface. This should take less than 10 minutes. Set aside.

3) Mix mustard and a small amount of the whipping cream in a small dish. Mix thoroughly.

4) In a separate container, whisk the eggs. Add the mustard mixture to the egg.

5) Add the rest of the whipping cream, nutmeg, salt, and white pepper and whisk.

6) Set the pie tin on a half-sheet pan.

7) Place cheddar cheese evenly on the base of the pie crust. Spread drained vegetables evenly over the cheese.

8) Pour the cream mixture over the vegetables and cheese. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese on top of the quiche.

9) Bake at 350ºF for 35-45 minutes. Check quiche with a knife; it is done when the knife comes out clean.

When Joan Fischer of Joan’s Caramels talked with her husband, Frank, about a slogan for her new business, she said, “It has to have the word ‘smile’ in it. Everyone who tries the caramels smiles.” The result? “Put a smile on your taste.”

Fischer, 49, who had been making caramels for years, tweaking an old family recipe, finally began selling them in February 2011 at the urging of friends and family.

What finally got the enterprise to become real, she says, was a serendipitous relationship with Deanna Hawkins, owner of Sugar Daddy’s Cakes and Catering. Fischer happened to notice that the bakery closed at 2:30 pm each day, leaving the commercial kitchen unused. “Without Deanna saying yes [to sharing the kitchen], I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get this off the ground,” says Fischer. The two businesses now jointly occupy a store at 5340 S. Old State Road 37.

This wasn’t Fischer’s first foray into business. In the 1990s she ran a furniture upholstery operation out of her home’s lower level. After ten years, this self-professed people-person told her husband, “I’ve got to get out of this basement!” She then pursued a career in nursing, and although she loved the work, she found it stressful. Her employer allowed her to continue working part time until the caramel business took off.

And take off it did. Joan’s Caramels sells not only at the bakery but also on the Internet, where orders come in for weddings, fundraisers, and corporate events. One client, Employment Plus, sends caramels to their employees across the country on their birthdays. Catering with Sugar Daddy’s, the two women are able to provide a full range of candies and baked goods.

Fischer describes her caramels as a soft, melt-in-your-mouth confection that won’t stick to your teeth. Her primary flavors are Original Vanilla, Salted, Turtle, Peanut with Sea Salt, Maple Pecan, Caramel Crispies, and Mocha Espresso Sea Salt. She also offers seasonal flavors, such as Eggnog during the Christmas holidays. In addition to the candy, she sells caramel apple dip and caramel brownies.

Joan’s Caramels is open weekdays 10 am to 6 pm and Saturdays 8 am to noon. For more information, visit the website or call 320-5638.

For the past 45 years, shoppers have found unique treasures and low-cost clothing, household items, jewelry, crafts, books, and more at Opportunity House, a nonprofit resale shop that still operates at its original location at 907 W. 11th St.

As a nonprofit, Opportunity House has two major priorities. First, the store’s volunteers help disadvantaged and low-income people find affordable goods and basic necessities, including shoes, dishware, and linens. Second, Opportunity House funds community programs by donating its profits to Monroe County United Ministries (MCUM).

“All of our funds stay in Bloomington,” explains Julie Farris, co-chair, with Jill Argenbright, of Opportunity House. “Everything we sell is donated by people in the area, and the funds we raise are used to help the people that need it most. It really is an ideal situation for the community.”

Farris describes Opportunity House’s system of charity as a cycle: Low-income and underprivileged shoppers buy goods, and profits from those sales are used to support MCUM, which, in turn, provides services—primarily child care—to low-income families in the community.

But the cycle doesn’t stop there. “MCUM also offers a voucher program,” says Farris. The needy can use the vouchers at Opportunity House. “United Ministries provides food, clothing, and other items through us.”

Opportunity House has its share of regular clients, but through new initiatives, more and more people are coming in search of unique items and the occasional thrift-store hidden gem. Argenbright credits Farris’ use of social media and local radio to bring in additional demographics, including IU students and faculty. Still, they both want to spread the word to new shoppers and people interested in contributing to Opportunity House’s mission.

“We could always use more donations and volunteers,” says Farris. “We are actually in need of specialists to test electronics, but volunteers can work as cashiers or assist in checking new donations if they’d like. Every little bit of help counts.”