Last night I attended a fancy-schmancy gala in the good old-fashioned Millenium Hotel. The night, besides being one of the must-attend events of the year for the national green, organic, natural products industry, is a helluvalotta fun. There’s organic wine, courtesy Organic Vintners, there’s lots of my heros—Steve Demos, Mark Retzloff, Mo Siegel…people who’ve changed the world for the better through green business, worked their butts off and sacrificed, made millions (sometimes due to selling their businesses to big uncaring companies, which I always makes me feel a little queasy) and still, after all these years, and all the accolades, don’t take themselves too seriously. If only I should be so lucky as to live a life that matters.

Mark Retzloff, http://www.elephantjournal.com/2009/08/not-too-big-to-get-the-signatures-himself/, who I’ve known a little bit (mostly through Peggy Markel, our cooking columnist) for years, was the man of the hour. They showed a bunch of embarrassing photos of his childhoos, hippie days in an ashram, his entrepreneurial days at Pearl St. Market with Hass Assan (where my mom and I shopped, growing up), then Alfalfa’s, which became Wild Oats, which merged with Whole Foods…Mark is also the man behind (with others) Aurora and Horizon daires, and literally about 40 other great green companies that are helping fight the good fight ‘gaints the onslaught of GMOs and processed food and pesticides and agribusiness.

I sat at a table with my friends Gwen Bell, Mistress of Social Media, Paul DesRosiers (who works at Vermilion Design, my fave firm in town), my longtime pal Sandja Chizzick, and cooking teacher Casey Easton. Lovely company.

At one point, a little inch worm or whatever they’re called, a caterpillar (I’m no gardener, clearly) crawled out of one of our salads. We all laughed, and snapped bad iPhone photos (sorry for the [lack of] quality). I’d asked our waiter earlier if the salad was organic, and he’d confirmed it was. This was proof.

I’ll be reporting back on Naturally Boulder today—I’ve already biked and walked my dog and posted three blogs and facebooked and tweeted them…and I can’t wait to bike down the bike path to the Millenium—all while trying to keep our web site running along, gathering traffic, and winning new advertisers.

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Waylon Lewis is the founder of elephantjournal.com

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