Much Ado to Do
Arts United Day a dizzy calendar
Thursday, Oct. 20. The first-ever Arts United Day in Sonoma County.
7:30am Wake up. Drink coffee. Check www.theartsunited.com to see what free events have been added. Make adjustments to schedule if something super exciting has been listed overnight. Send an e-mail to remind my pal Skipp that today is not only Arts United Day in Sonoma County, but also Free Theater Day for the whole Bay Area.
I’ll want to make sure that he hasn’t forgotten we are either going to the KRSH’s backyard concert with Plum Crazy and Dave Insley at 5:30pm or going to see Katie Ketchum’s one-woman show The Magdalene Stories at Spreckels at 6:30pm. Tell Skipp to check the website to see if there’s anything else he wants to do.
8:30am Swing by the Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma. From 8:30am to 6pm, Cinnabar, which doesn’t have a show running this week, is hosting an open house with munchies, offering tours and giving away free tickets to the Edith Piaf show No Regrets, to be staged in January. After acquiring tickets, call friends to remind them that the box office at Pegasus Theater in Rio Nido is giving away tickets today for its upcoming production of the sexually explicit drama Bent, and that the Santa Rosa Junior College is similarly distributing tickets for its next show, the sexually nonexplicit musical Anything Goes.
From 7:30am to 9:30pm, Sonoma State University is giving away 50 tickets to its Oct. 21–30 production of the French farce Ring Round the Moon. Make sure everyone remembers that tickets should be picked up at the box office and remind them to check the website to see if there’s anything else they want to catch for free today.
11am Since there are a number of visual artists involved in this sprawling extravaganza, choose at least one gallery or studio to visit. High on the list is the four-person show at Santa Rosa’s Finley Center, where David Gordon is showing cool underwater photography, there is metal sculpture by Aileen Cormack, sculptor Monty Monty contributes his assemblage and there’s also some classic junk art by 3D Edddy. That show is one of about 30 exhibitions open today.
Noon Lunch time. Take a brown bag to the Main Quad at SSU, for poetry by Armando Garcia-Dévila and Lilith Rogers.
2pm Stop to reflect on the incredible blend of artistic expressions around us in Sonoma County, every day. Say it out loud until it doesn’t sound like liner copy from a promotional brochure. After all, it is true.
4pm Stop by the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma to catch the poetically inclined high school students reading, in its rowdy entirety, Allen Ginsberg’s mighty free-verse epic Howl.
6:30pm Check the website again for any new updates. If Skipp’s up to it, we could go up to Healdsburg to the Plaza Gallery to see scenes from Light Sensitive, performed by the Bodega Theatre Company at 7pm, or we could see an 8pm performance of A Year with Frog and Toad at the Sixth Street Playhouse, or the Sonoma County Rep’s innovative world premiere Drake’s Drum at the same time.
6:45pm Finally decide which free show to see tonight. Remember that it’s too late to have seen the live 1950s-era radio show Rocky Fortune: Too Many Husbands, complete with sound-effects guy and actors with scripts, onstage at the Sebastiani Theatre in Sonoma because that started at 6:20pm.
7pm See something. Anything. It’s not every day that Sonoma County celebrates the arts by giving away 15 hours of first-rate entertainment.
11pm Go to sleep remembering how lucky you are to live here. Have interesting dreams. Make a mental note to check the website again . . . next year.
From the October 12-18, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.
