The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 230

ET THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION SUNDAY, DEC. 12, 1999 Dixie InStyle Jewelry by local designers, such as Cara Markowitz, shown peering through her "icicle dream" necklace, is bolder this year. Back page, M8 Southern Chefs At Smokes on the Gorge in West Virginia, James MacKay surprises diners with gourmet dishes in a rustic setting. M5 Southern Almanac, M2 Reading the South, M4 Puzzles and Horoscope, M6 Ann Landers, M7 Miss Manners, M7 V-. ivm Am Am VIRGINIA-BASED PETA WILL DO ALMOST ANYTHING TO GET ITS ANIMAL RIGHTS MESSAGE OUT 11 1 VA LUC, 1 ii li Jl.il- tL II vr.rt it 1 IdLU i jaw II i 1 1 1 I 1 grass-roots members and convert the rest of the world, no news is bad news.

Any news is good, even if it's something goofy like a woman with weenies and a message about impotence, because it gets attention and makes people think. At PETA's modern, three-story glass building on Norfolk's harbor, security is tight. Ceiling cameras whir perhaps to spot a backsliding vegan? No, says Bruce Friedrich, PETA's vegetarian campaign chief. A 30-year-old Tolstoy-reading weightlifter who attended the London School of Economics on an academic scholarship, he seems shocked at the question. A PETA staffer showing up in leather would be like a televangelist sipping Jack Daniel's while preaching against sin.

It just couldn't happen. "The policy is very clear, says Friedrich. "Everyone who works here goes through an orientation explaining the reasons. I really can't even imagine a PETA employee wearing leather or wool or eaing meat in the building." Vending machines are stocked with peanuts, potato chips and sodas, but no milk and no cookies made with milk or eggs. Lots of nuts and vegan chocolates, such as Clark Dark bars and Peanut Chews, but no cheese crackers or ham sandwiches.

The cameras weren't put up to catch meat-sneakers, but to protect PETAns, who must punch in a code to enter or exit the building, from their many foes. The group has never had an incident in the workplace, but it gets its share of threats, from restaurantgoers, hunters, businesspeople, fishermen and sometimes even scientists. In the building, mostly youthful staffers 90 percent have college degrees, and they make an average of $23,000 a year proselytize to anyone not in the fold, showing off their faux leather shoes and handbags. But you don't have to hear them to know you're in an unusual office building. You don't see pictures of corporate chief executives or U.S.

presidents on the walls, but gruesome posters of slaughtered animals. Woods, who is actively involved in many campaigns, works at a desk decorated with a huge poster of a human corpse and the words "Don't be caught dead in fur." Another poster asks, under a picture of a skinned cow's head, "Do you want fries with that?" On yet another, James Cromwell of "Babe" fame hugs a pig. "We don't need to eat anyone who would run, swim, or fly away if he could," reads the caption. Some days, live animals appear as well! PETAns consider it cruel to leave "companion animals" unattended, so they welcome them here. PETAns' pets Please see PETA, M3 BETH BERGMAN NAKAMURA Norfolk Virginian-Pilot Even the animals eat veggie: At lunch in her Norfolk office, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk offers lettuce to one of the cats that roam the building.

Below: Bruce Friedrich, PETA's vegetarian campaign chief, peruses some propaganda. p.w.'ji.iJ-u. i.j The party line: With faux sausages in hand, PETA staffer Melynda DuVal poses for posters and billboards that link meat consumption with impotence. By Bill Hendrick bhendrickajc.com Norfolk, Va. he vegans of PETA consider themselves the world's real "beautiful people." And they're eager to support that belief with lots of hard facts and figures.

Figures like Melynda DuVal's. A curvaceous, 34-year-old PETA staffer with tawny hair and a fetching smile, DuVal routinely dons a red, white and blue bikini for the cause. On billboards, on posters or in person, she poses with a fat necklace of faux sausage links and any number of mottoes claiming a link between carnivorous habits at the table and an inability to perform in the bedroom. DuVal is one of 90 full-time employees of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which moved its headquarters from the Washington suburbs to this old port city three years ago. A sort of guerrilla marketing group for animal rights, PETA uses flamboyant protests, celebrity endorsements and media savvy to spread its gospel: that it's wrong to kill or mistreat any creature with a brain, from cows, pigs, fish and minks right down to cockroaches, mosquitoes and ants.

PETA says it advocates for "animal rights" as opposed to the more limited "animal welfare." It opposes not only the meat and fur industries, but anyone who exploits animals for human benefit or entertainment: fishermen, circuses, hunters, researchers who test products on animals even zoos. Not content with being merely vegetarians, PETA staffers are strict vegans (pronounced VEE-guns), vehemently opposing the consumption or use of any animal products, including milk and wool. PETA eschews violence but embraces civil disobedience, and at times it has publicly sympathized with violent elements of the animal rights movement. On Wednesday, USA Today reported that vandalism and other incidents at A animal research labs are up in recent years. The newspaper implicated a group called the Animal Liberation Front "We understand the frustration of groups like ALF, because change is coming about very slowly," says PETA spokeswoman Lisa Lange.

"It makes you wonder if they're going to have more success with their methods than we are." Still, she says, PETA will keep its actions nonviolent The group is now gearing up for a major anti-leather campaign. Plans call for protesters carrying "Leather Is Dead Skin" signs to show up in January at dozens of factories and tanneries that process leather for shoes, jackets and purses. "We'll be targeting younger people mostly, around the world," says longtime PETA campaigner Jenny Woods, 37. "There's a lot of fake stuff out there that looks just like leather, and it doesn't cause animals to suffer and die. We'll be urging people to wear faux leather." PETA's presence has made Norfolk, once known for drunken sailors, tawdry brothels and tattoo parlors, a major port of call for vegans, though some locals consider the group wacky or worse.

"Norfolkians have a little problem with them because they're so says Scott Bernheisel, head chef than d'Amboise. At 65, the former principal dancer for the New York City Ballet is trekking the Appalachian Trail to raise money for his New York-based National Dance Institute, which he created in 1976 to teach teachers, and sowing the seeds of his art along the way. He and his son George, 42, began the journey May 29 in Maine. They expect to finish it this Saturday on Springer Mountain in Georgia, then celebrate in Atlanta. Everyone will be doing a little jig that d'Amboise created called "The Appalachian Trail Dance." "I have taught at least about 100,000 mint.

0 r. BILL HENDRICK Staff annual budget of $13.2 million and 600,000 members who receive its slick quarterly magazine, Animal Times. Some of its support comes from celebri- ties, but most comes from ordinary folks who have been persuaded by one of PETA's never-ending protests to take up the animal rights banner. For this group, with its need to inspire want it any other way. But next year he plans to approach foundations and corporations for matching money.

The money will go to scholarships for teachers to come to the dance institute to learn his "step by step" program and take it back to their communities. It was one of the few dreams left unfilled for d'Amboise in 1998, when a benefactor gave him $120,000 to use as "dream money." D'Amboise, who began dancing professionally at age 11, joined the New York City Ballet at 15 and was a lead dancer by 17. He ended his career at 50 WDM Ex-ballet star's Appalachian Trail trek hikes interest in dance at the swanky Sheraton-Norfolk Riverside Hotel. "They show up in leaves toting signs about animals. We don't go to their rallies wearing steaks around our necks." Wacky or not, PETA seems to be doing well.

The largest animal rights organization in the world, with offices in Paris, Rome and Stuttgart, Germany, it has an people since the beginning," he said. Cadets at Annapolis, prisoners in Vermont, 800 children at one time in Charlottesville, armed police officers in Roanoke, and 100 people a minister, a mortician, a police chief, etc. considered the least likely dancers in Roxboro, N.C., all have learned the Trail Dance. "Plus all the people I teach on the trail," d'Amboise said. "I have taught the dance to hikers on mountain ledges.

It has been wild." He said he has raised about $500,000, mostly in penny and nickel donations from children. And he said he wouldn't By Duncan Mansfield ASSOCIATED PRESS Knoxville After 1,926 miles on the Appalachian Trail, Jacques d'Amboise is still light on his feet and eager to teach. "When people say they don't dance, they don't know what they are talking about," he said. Any "controlled use of how we move" is dance. And dancing, he said, is "something magical." Even hiking is a form of dance, he told about 100 eager young dancers gathered around him in the atrium of the Women's as one of the world's most acclaimed classical dancers.

After an Academy Award, six Emmys, a Peabody, the National Medal of Arts and countless other awards, d'Amboise pondered what mountain was left to climb. "I thought, 'What if I hike the Appalachian Trail, invent a dance and teach it along the He could raise money for the institute and realize a childhood dream put on hold for his art to one day walk the trails of Daniel Boone and the Cherokee Indians. "It has been extraordinary," he said. Basketball Hall of Fame on Nov. 30.

Probably no one knows that better J'.