Thomas E. Braun As the grandson of a piano teacher, Thomas was born with music in his veins. Early attempts on trumpet and saxophone proved unsatisfactory. So at age 13 he switched to stringed instruments and never looked back. Thomas grew up with the spires of New York City visible from his home town. As a teenager in the 1960s, he frequented the Greenwich Village clubs where Bob Dylan had perfected his craft. And then there was Bill Graham's legendary Fillmore East where, as he puts it, "I saw everyone except the Beatles and the Stones." At another New York venue, he watched the Who and the Doors perform on the same bill. Ticket price: four dollars and fifty cents. "Those," he says, "were heady days." In 1969, Thomas enrolled as a music major at Rutgers University, home to one of America's best academic jazz programs. There he learned music theory and the classics, jazz and piano. At the same time he played guitar, "if not as well as Jimi Hendrix then as loud." He joined the Uncharted Bus, a professional band that worked regularly in New Jersey's top night spots such as Garfield's Choo Choo Club, where the Young Rascals had come to notice. The Bus opened in Passaic for Alvin Lee & Ten Years After (of Woodstock fame), also opening for Ozzy Osbourne & Black Sabbath at Ungano's in Manhattan. In 1978, Thomas moved to California. The need to support his young family forced him from a music career to one in computers. But always he maintained his interest in music - studying it, playing it, entertaining (and perhaps annoying) his neighbors with sounds as diverse as "Rhapsody in Blue" followed by Frank Zappa. "In all music, from J.S. Bach to Pete Townshend," he says, "I found something of worth. Music touches people as nothing else can; it is the one true universal language." In 2002, with his children grown and with a new wife, Thomas moved to San Jose. There he gave private music lessons on guitar and piano. He tried working with a few Bay Area bands, but was dissatisfied with both their limited musical knowledge and their bad habits (such as drinking while on stage). To increase his chances of finding musical work, he took up bass and fell in love with the instrument. To this day, he plays bass when performing live. In 2003 Thomas, having moved near Reno, met the lovely and talented Julianne Pepetone. As they worked together in one entertainment project after another, they developed a deep bond as best friends and talented artists with mutual admiration. Finally, they decided to ditch those who did not share their vision and work as a duo. The result is Dutch Treat, "my crowning achievement in nearly fifty years of musical and entertainment experiments." In this new millennium, may the experiments proceed!

Julianne Pepetone Julianne Hawkins was born and raised in the lovely California coastal town of Santa Cruz. There she spent eighteen years with her family, an art-teacher father and graphic-artist mother. In this wonderful environment, with her childhood home a mere half-block from the Henry Cowell redwoods and a mile from the Pacific Ocean, she began her love of music and the arts. For several years during her childhood and adolescence, her father directed a local community theatre. There she was given the opportunity to be involved with many projects, in many capacities. She learned everything from acting, singing and dancing to makeup, costuming and ad sales. She even painted scenery, ushered and swept up when the need arose. Thus, at an early age, she was bitten by the performing arts bug. And she never recovered. At age 17 she fell in love with and married a man who was an actor, musician and composer. In the late winter of 1978 she and her new husband left her home town for Hollywood, with two-month-old daughter in tow. After living some years in Los Angeles, and with three children, Julianne left for the Bay Area in July 1984. This move, following a divorce, proved to be the beginning of major changes in her life. In 1986, on the suggestion of a neighbor, she decided to pull up stakes and move to the mountains and lakes of California's Plumas County. There, in the beautiful tiny town of Quincy, she met the love of her life, Mike Pepetone. Mike, too, was a musician. With two kids of his own to raise, he and Julianne began a life-long partnership. Realizing that raising five kids was a big order, Julianne started college while Mike cooked at a local steakhouse. During their first year together, Mike lost his mother to illness. His father asked if they would like to take over the family home and property in Janesville, a town nestled in the woods of Lassen County. There Julianne completed her studies at Lassen College, after which she took tests for the Postal Service. In 1993, Julianne became a postal clerk; in 1998, the postmaster of Standish, CA. In her career, she felt like a success. But something was missing: complete fulfillment in the performing arts. By this time, all the kids had grown and moved on. So she decided to see what the area offered. To her delight, she found that an eclectic local population was hungry for good and diverse entertainment! During the ensuing years, she became immersed in an ongoing stream of theater and musical entertainment. The culmination: her co-creation (with Thomas E. Braun) of Dutch Treat. Prior to that, Julianne and Thomas had worked together on numerous benefits, gallery openings and club gigs. When she saw that Thomas could adapt his computer background to electronic music, Julianne realized that here was a whole new world in which music could be geared to her vocal style and theatrical nature. As she puts it: "So many possibilities lie in the future!"