It could be a script from a documentary: Jerusha Stewart, founder of the Vero Beach Wine and Film Festival and a Stanford-educated attorney, woke up gasping for breath.
“I have vivid dreams,” she says. “I thought that’s all it was.”
It was a busy morning, as usual: a marketing meeting, a doctor’s appointment and a client meeting in Jacksonville. She figured she’d ask the doctor when she got there. But the doctor was late. She couldn’t wait – she had to get to Jacksonville for a big meeting, her first national client with her new job.
Stewart had just discovered Vero six months earlier. She signed on with Legal Shield, the pre-paid legal services firm, as a way to stay here and ocean kayak to her heart’s content.
As it turned out, her heart was anything but content.
Pulling out of the doctor’s office parking lot, she had 15 minutes before she had to be on I-95. Impulsively she pulled into the emergency room at Indian River Medical Center.
There, despite her protests, the staff refused to let her leave. “I had my laptop open, I’m making calls trying to rearrange my schedule, and the doctor walks in and says, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ ”
What followed was a string of near misses – a pulmonary embolism, a tumor pressing on the vena cava, three surgeries. When it was all over, she knew one thing.
“I don’t want to die doing Legal Shield,” she says with a laugh.
Today, she is the sole salaried employee of the film festival, an LLC. Along with a job, she has created what she hopes is a legacy here, when if all goes well on June 9 -12, 3,000 people will materialize for a weekend of films, wine tasting and parties in various venues around Vero Beach.
Net profits will go to a cause she already supported: Suncoast Mental Health Centers. Stewart sits on its board.
As soon as her vision took shape, Stewart landed a major Vero player: Michael Thorpe of Treasure Coast Sotheby’s International Realty, who signed on as a partner offering promotional and financial support.
“It didn’t take a lot of convincing,” Thorpe says. “Who wouldn’t want to be part of something like this? It’s such a good idea. We live here. We want the community to thrive. We want different events to bring people to town.”
“It’s such a ground-breaking and wonderful concept and to be invited to participate on the ground floor of something like this is truly remarkable,” says Thorpe.
That was six months ago. Since then, Stewart has enlisted Riverside Theatre, Vero Beach Museum of Art and the Heritage Center as screening venues. Costa d’Este and Citrus Grillhouse are hosting the festival’s two winemaker’s dinners. Blue Star Wine Bar, Orchid Island Brewery and Osceola Bistro are holding other parties.
Developer Keith Kite’s two hotels, Spring Hill Suites and Hampton Inn, are partners, and son Kelly Kite is on the board. Also on the board: Christian Garcia and Mark Edmonds of Patisserie Vero Beach, and Dr. Ray Adams of Indian River Charter High’s School for the Visual and Performing Arts.
Guest speakers include New Zealand vintner Beth Ann Dahan, now a lecturer at Boston University’s School of Hospitality; Brahm Callahan, a young master sommelier from Boston; and Edie Widder, ocean researcher who first filmed a giant squid.
A panel of judges is already taking shape, with Warren Obluck, director of film studies at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, topping the list.
Stewart says they’ve narrowed a list to 40 from more than 250 entries from as far away as China (a documentary about organ harvesting of political prisoners) and as near as a U.S. 1 vet’s office (Dr. John Stein’s short film “Ludwig,” with a cast of folding chairs.)
And then there’s “Ron Taylor: Doctor Baseball,” the story of a World Series-winning pitcher for the Cardinals and the Mets who quit to go to med school. The film is produced and directed by his sons.
”I saw it at the Napa Valley Film Festival,” Stewart says. When she came home, she and festival co-founder Gail Shepherd made a trip to Port St. Lucie to try to get the Mets involved.
Also on the schedule is a screening of the movie “Bottle Shock” for the 40th anniversary of the Judgment of Paris, the 1976 blind tasting in Paris that pitted French wines against American wines. That historic event was reported on by Vero’s own George Taber, a former Time magazine reporter who wrote a book about the event.
“The audience will do a blind tasting reenacting the event,” says Stewart. Chateau Montelena, a participant in the Judgment of Paris, is sending one of its chardonnays to the Vero event.
“Things are happening so fast, it’s hard to keep up,” she says.
And it’s hard to keep up with Stewart, who came ashore in Vero like a water spout, touching down and carrying off everyone she meets.
Raised in the small town of Wahiawa on Oahu (her friends say it resembles Vero), Stewart was the eldest of five children. Her father retired from the military and became a school teacher, the same career as Stewart’s late mother.
Together they showered their children with confidence, Stewart says.
“People always wondered, what did they feed them?” she jokes. “Talk about five egos – we each grew up thinking we were the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
They were also taught to value happiness. “The one thing our parents gifted us with was that you could have work you loved. They loved what they did, and it really permeated the family.”
After decades in the Bay Area in California, Stewart was working with a legal client in Vero three winters ago and found herself at the beach on Christmas day – “just what I would have been doing if I was home in Hawaii.”
Walking down the shoreline, she saw a family with a half-dozen ocean kayaks and asked who was renting them. “They’re ours,” they told her. “Would you like to take one out?”
“I thought, these people are as nice as people are in Hawaii,” she says.
In Hawaii, she was always meeting people who had come on vacation and then never left. She decided to do the same here. “I thought, what’s the worst that could happen?”
“Oh, my gosh, you never know who you’re going to meet or where they came from,” she says. “Everybody’s had more than one career, they speak more than one language and they’re interested in the world.”
What Vero lacked, she discovered, was a film festival.
“You guys have some powerhouse people here who want this to happen,” she says.
“The true fun of film festivals is the hunt. You go and see a movie at the museum, then you see there’s something cool playing at Project Space 1785, or there’s something at the Heritage Center and you say, Oh, let me go there.”
Stewart has a team of 14 key players, including a number of young entrepreneurs who have recently settled in Vero. With so many dots to connect, she has compiled what she calls the Festival Bible. And though she is in perfect health, she always CC’s two people in her emails.
“People are always asking me, why do I need to know this? I just tell them if I drop dead tomorrow, this festival has to happen.”
