Dan's Pumpkins

Sacred Heart University's "Big Red" 2008

(Courtesy of Tracy Deer-Mirek)

CONNECTICUT POST

By TONY SPINELLI
Staff writer

FAIRFIELD -- There are poet laureates, but not every university has a pumpkin-carving master in residence.

Sacred Heart University's grants writer, Dan Drew, carves pumpkins of celebrities like Joe Torre and Elvis Presley with such detailed accuracy that you could probably call him a photo-realist.

Drew, 28, demonstrated his craft outside the university's William H. Pitt Health and Recreation Center this week as he carved out a likeness of Big Red, the Sacred Heart sports mascot.

"I just started carving pumpkins about five years ago," Drew said, explaining he believed he had no talent for carving them freehand so he worked with photographic stencils he made himself with his Adobe Photoshop computer program.

He showed how he tapes the halftone image to the pumpkin and punches holes along the detail lines to transfer the design to the pumpkin, much like a tattoo artist working from a stencil,

Then the Middletown resident used a variety of cutting tools including knives and scrapers to nick out the skin along the punched-out lines, cutting down to the orange rind but not entirely through it.

The results are nothing short of masterful: see them for yourself at his Web site, danspumpkins.blogspot.com.

Of course, not everybody who takes up pumpkin carving is going to be a Rembrandt at it. But it's still fun.

"I think I enjoy carving pumpkins more now than when I was a little kid," said Matt Telvi, a student at Sacred Heart who saw Drew working his magic on a big pumpkin fresh from the farm.

While Drew, a former Connecticut Post reporter, specializes in celebrity likenesses, the typical pumpkin carver at home is just going for a traditional jack o'lantern face. According to the Web site history.com, people have been making jack o'lanterns at Halloween for centuries in Ireland, using potatoes and other vegetables, but the tradition switched to pumpkins when the Irish and the Scottish came to the United States in large numbers in the mid-1800s,

The practice originated from an Irish myth about a man nicknamed "Stingy Jack." According to the story, Stingy Jack invited a devil to have a drink with him. True to his name, Stingy Jack didn't want to pay for his drink, so he convinced the devil to turn himself into a coin that Jack could use to buy their drinks. Once the devil did so, Jack decided to keep the money and put it into his pocket next to a silver cross, which prevented the devil from changing back into his original form.

Jack eventually freed the devil, under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die, he would not claim his soul.

The next year, Jack again tricked the devil, this time into climbing into a tree to pick a piece of fruit. While he was up in the tree, Jack carved a sign of the cross into the tree's bark so that the devil could not come down until the devil promised Jack not to bother him for 10 more years.

After Jack died, as the legend goes, he was unfit for heaven but the devil, upset by the tricks Jack had played on him, would not allow Jack into hell. That left the cunning trickster to wander the dark night with a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved-out vegetable and has been roaming the earth ever since, in the form of the jack o'lantern.

But pumpkins are much more than Halloween decorations, of course.

After Drew scooped out the meaty pulp of the pumpkin Friday, he talked about the good foods he could make with it.

"I love pumpkin pie," Drew said. "And my 3-year-old daughter loves pumpkin seeds."
Tony Spinelli, who covers the region for ConnPost.com, can be reached at 330-6361.

Jimmy Cagney 2008