Sara Levy was born in Atlanta Georgia at a hospital with the very Southern name of Crawford Long. She grew up in a small brick house on a small hill in the now fashionable, then unfashionable, neighborhood of Morningside, where she knew all of her neighbors. In fact, in true 1950s fashion, the neighborhood kids separated into gangs, The Medallions and The Blue Devils and had rumbles where they threw sticks and rocks at each other.
Sara’s father owned a woman’s apparel manufacturing company and spent a lot of time working (though he did play baseball with the kids every night when he got home); her mother was, as custom at the time demanded, often getting her hair done. This meant that Sara, her 2 sisters and one brother (who spent most of his childhood waiting to use the bathroom) were raised by a nanny named Minnie who was only a teenager herself.
(While this may sound very Gone With The Wind, it was still the way things worked in Jim Crow Georgia. It has since changed and as the Jerry Springer show so helpfully attests, most Southern children are no longer raised by anyone at all.)
Sara spent her high school years hanging out with football players, going to rock-n-roll clubs and switching clothes with her identical twin sister in order to confuse teachers and boyfriends.
After high school, she became a surgical technician at an Atlanta hospital, which always amazes Darren and his sister since their Mother is averse to blood.
Darren isn’t quite sure how his mother and father met, but he knows that they were married early in 1970. Darren’s father and uncle owned a successful clothing manufacturer, which claims to have been the very first company to use scrubbed denim and the first to make bell bottom blue jeans.
Sara's description of herself during this period is as follows: “In my early years with your father I traveled extensively in the US and Europe and lived the life of a rich, Studio 54 going, jet-setting, spoiled, child-bride ( Probably not for print).”
[Luckily for our readers, the internet is not print.]
In 1970, Darren was born and within a few weeks had started annoying his family with extensive questions about Watergate. In exasperation, his parents, in 1972, gave him a sister, Kailey, to annoy instead.
Late in the 1970s, maybe while listening to the Bee Gees, Sara discovered that she had an incurable muscle disease called Myasthenia Gravis. She was told that it would be dehibilitating and that she would have to start taking it easy and get used to a limited schedule.
Sara promptly started jogging, ran numerous 10K road races and, in 1980, won the silver medal in the Atlanta Masters Race. (So much for the expertise of doctors.) She also started the Atlanta Chapter of the Myasthenia Gravis foundation, which is still going.
Sara and her first husband divorced in 1979. She met her 2nd husband, Pierre, at a Halloween party that same year. He was wearing a Jimmy Carter mask. It’s a good story and one of the 5+ people reading this should ask her to tell it.
Since I should speed this up...in the 80’s she went into the antique business, the hair roller business and made various forays into the food world.
Once her two kids had both gone to college, she and Pierre moved to England where they lived in Surrey and Gloustershire. Though she liked living there, she also missed her family and she and Pierre moved back after a few years.
Back in Georgia, she started working as the kitchen director for Nathalie Dupree and doing freelance food styling jobs, eventually becoming a full-time food stylist. She’s also a food writer doing articles for numerous Atlanta-based Southern regional magazines. She recently had a feature in Flavor’s Magazine about South African cuisine that she also took all the photos for.
She lives in an extensively redone Federal style house built in the early 1900s in Norcross Georgia with X number of dogs (Darren can't quite keep up with how many), her husband Pierre and a room and a half of cookbooks.
