Some rooms hold on to their history. Upstairs at Page & Palette in downtown Fairhope, a space that once rang with piano scales, tap shoes and ballet counts has found a new calling as Plot Twist Yoga Studio, a serene, community-minded yoga studio built by two experienced local teachers and the family behind one of Alabama’s best-known independent bookstores. For those who remember what the space used to be, the new chapter feels like a homecoming.
The studio’s story, shared in January 2025, begins nearly five decades earlier with a young dance teacher, a hand-painted door and a group of children climbing a staircase above a bookstore.
The First Chapter: Creative Outlet
Forty-seven years before Plot Twist opened, a 22-year-old college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in dance education and big dreams opened a studio above Page & Palette and named it Creative Outlet. In its first form, it offered a wide range of classes: piano, calligraphy, guitar, tai chi, drama and, of course, dance.
Her father, a hands-on dad, co-signed the loan and taught her how to run a business the old-fashioned way, with handwritten financial ledgers, postcard marketing and in-person registration on 3×5 cards. After about a year, the other classes dwindled and dance took over, growing to about 20 students.
Among the first were twins Karin and Kelley Wolff, granddaughters of Betty Jo Wolff, who owned Page & Palette. There were lighthearted moments, too. When the founder hired a sign painter to letter the entrance door, she came downstairs to find he had painted “Creature Outlet.” Plenty of dancing creatures climbed those stairs over the years that followed.
Karin Wolff, who now owns Page & Palette, remembers those classes fondly. “My father who was one of the owners at the time, Robbie Wolff, signed me up for ballet classes, making me one of her very first students. I fell in love with ballet and continued dancing with the studio all the way to high school. The memories I made during that time are some of my most cherished—Creative Outlet was truly a magical part of my childhood.”
A Bookstore Family Embraces Yoga
Page & Palette is a Fairhope institution, a family-owned bookstore on De La Mare Avenue that has been run by three generations of the Wolff family. Over the years it has grown into much more than a bookshop, with a coffee bar, author events and the Book Cellar, a gathering space that hosts readings, music and community events.
The idea for Plot Twist came from Karin. She and her family, who all work in the family business, had been embracing yoga as a way to promote their health and happiness and, as she put it, “save their lives on-site.” She approached Angel Curtin, an accomplished local yoga teacher, about creating a studio in one of her upstairs vacation rental spaces above the Book Cellar.
After a two-hour conversation, they were ready to make it happen. Curtin brought in another experienced yogi, Catherine Teal, whom she describes as “trustworthy, stable, grounding, and smart as hell.” Together they created a calm, Zen-like environment designed to support the holistic practice of yoga.
The name fits the setting. A plot twist is the unexpected turn that sends a story in a new direction, a fitting image for a studio tucked above a bookstore and for a space that has now lived two very different lives.
Classes Organized by the Seasons
Curtin and Teal originally planned to be the only teachers on staff, but as word spread, nine more instructors joined them, most of them familiar to yoga students on the Eastern Shore.
The class schedule is organized into “Seasons,” with each quarter exploring a theme meant to deepen students’ practice: Winter, “Turning Inward”; Spring, “Planting Seeds”; Summer, “Blooming”; and Fall, “Letting Go.” Classes are offered throughout the day, six days a week, with names such as Infinite Stretch, Epic Flow, Align and Shine, and Unbound.
For newcomers, the seasonal structure reflects something important about yoga. The practice is not only about postures and stretching; it is also about building personal insight and awareness on the mat. Many traditions describe yoga as a combination of physical postures, breathing practices and meditation or reflection, and teachers often weave a theme through a class to give students something to carry with them after they roll up their mats.
Meet the Founders: Angel Curtin
Between them, Curtin and Teal have more than 1,200 hours of yoga certification training. Curtin found yoga in 2007 while serving as a caregiver for her grandmother, a demanding role. She arranged private yoga lessons for herself and her grandfather to help them cope with the challenges of caregiving.
From 2013 to 2016, she completed 700 hours of teacher training with Augusta and David Kantra and with Rolf Gates, a widely known yoga teacher and author. She taught yoga to children at the Organic School in Fairhope, the progressive school founded by educator Marietta Johnson in the early 1900s, and was certified in a children’s yoga program called Kidding Around. She also opened Jellyfish Yoga Studio in Fairhope and has taught at various studios on the Eastern Shore.
Curtin developed a workshop called “Walk the Talk—A Path to Recovery,” which helps people who are struggling find wholeness through yoga practices. The subject is personal for her. “Peace begins with me and the ripples go out into our daily life,” she said. “I have been almost 13 years sober and credit my practice as one of the crucial components.”
Meet the Founders: Catherine Teal
Teal began practicing yoga in 2014 at Alabama Healing Arts in Mobile. She never intended to teach; she simply wanted to deepen her own practice, and she accumulated 500 hours of training over three years. Because the training required students to teach, she tried it and discovered she loved it. She went on to offer classes at Night Owl and Thrive Yoga in Daphne and at Creative Outlet in Fairhope.
In 2016, she completed Mindful Resilience Training for Veterans, a program that helps veterans manage anxiety, stress and sleeplessness through yoga and breathwork. As part of the Baldwin County Veterans Court, she offers a five-week yoga series as part of participants’ court-appointed rehabilitation.
Veterans treatment courts, which have spread across the country since the late 2000s, offer eligible veterans charged with certain offenses a structured program of treatment, mentoring and supervision as an alternative to traditional sentencing. Wellness practices such as yoga and breathwork are increasingly used alongside counseling to help participants manage stress and trauma.
Teal describes the work as the heart of karma yoga, the path of selfless action, which asks practitioners to serve others with no expectation of outcome.
“The More Yoga, the Better for Everyone”
Curtin explains that the word yoga means “to yoke together,” keeping everything moving in the same direction. That spirit extended to the local yoga community. When she let other studios know about her plans for Plot Twist, one replied, “The more yoga, the better for everyone.”
The Eastern Shore has developed a strong wellness community over the years, with yoga studios, fitness centers and outdoor classes on the beach and the bluff. Research supported by the National Institutes of Health has found that yoga can help improve flexibility, balance and strength and may help people manage stress, which helps explain why the practice has become so popular with people of all ages.
The downtown setting adds to the appeal. Fairhope’s compact, walkable core, with its flower-lined sidewalks, independent shops, cafés and galleries, rewards people who arrive on foot or by bike, and a studio in the middle of it makes it easy to fold a class into a morning of errands or an afternoon downtown. For visitors staying in town, a drop-in class above a bookstore is a memorable way to experience Fairhope the way locals do. And for the Wolff family, having a yoga studio upstairs means the practice they adopted for their own well-being is now literally part of the building where they work every day, a small example of how a longtime local business can keep reinventing itself while staying rooted in community.
Trying a Class
- Where: Upstairs at Page & Palette in downtown Fairhope, above the Book Cellar.
- When: Classes are offered throughout the day, six days a week; check the studio’s current schedule before visiting.
- For beginners: Let the instructor know if you are new or have injuries, arrive a few minutes early, and wear comfortable clothes you can move in.
- Make a morning of it: The studio’s downtown location puts coffee, books and Fairhope’s shops and restaurants just steps away.
For the woman who once taught ballet in that upstairs room, the studio’s arrival is a joy. Former students may climb the same stairs and remember their younger selves, and a new group will discover the slow, flowing, stretching and strengthening movement that is a close cousin of classical dance. As she put it, there are really good vibes in that space.