Sonoma Valley Shakespeare Festival

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Sonoma Valley Shakespeare Festival

Howdy, Bard’ner

The Comedy of Errors.

Michael Amsler



The Sonoma Valley Shakespeare Festival gears up for the new millennium

By Patrick Sullivan

FOR A GUY who’s been dead some 400 years, the late William Shakespeare is pretty damn lively. The playwright’s actual corpse is as quiet as Yorick’s skull, of course, but his enormous body of work can’t be entombed in classrooms and libraries; it keeps spilling out onto stages, turning up in novels, and creeping out into popular culture at movie theaters across the country.

Hollywood, for one, just can’t seem to get by without the old guy. The past year has seen big-screen versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew (retold in the teen flick 10 Things I Hate about You), and, most notably, the playwright’s own life in Shakespeare in Love.

Audiences of live theater can’t get enough of him either. In the United States alone there are over 100 active Shakespeare festivals, including nearly a dozen in Northern California.

Not bad for a man once dismissed by Tolstoy as “insignificant and immoral.” Criticism can’t kill the Bard, and neither can too much love–his vividly drawn characters have even survived being played by the likes of Mel Gibson and Leonardo diCaprio. Attacked or embraced, the Swan of Avon sails blithely on, preparing to greet the new millennium as the most-produced playwright in the English language.

So what’s the secret? How do 400-year-old plays about homicidal kings and suicidal princes continue to pack theaters and movie houses?

Carl Hamilton, co-founder and artistic director of the Sonoma Valley Shakespeare Festival, which kicks off its eighth season on July 2, offers one answer, but it’s got nothing to do with what your English teacher taught you about iambic pentameter. The plays continue to succeed, Hamilton says, because they have a lot in common with daytime television.

“They were the soap operas of their day,” explains Hamilton. “There’s love, there’s passion, there’s violence, sex, humor … You just sit there and say, ‘God, this guy wrote this stuff 400 years ago, and he’s saying exactly what I feel about love and hate and philosophy.”

Since 1992, without corporate sponsors or grant money, Hamilton, who is 42, and his crew of collaborators, including his wife, Jamie, have been staging Shakespeare’s work amid the rolling vineyards of the Gundlach-Bundschu Winery, pouring a considerable amount of time, energy, and cash into their endeavor (Hamilton estimates that he has put some $30,000 of his own money into his company over the years).

The result has been a modest but steady audience of tourists and locals who sprawl out in lawn chairs to enjoy the company’s low-key approach to the Bard’s work. You won’t find special effects or big-budget productions here; you will find a casual atmosphere that includes a celebratory glass of wine for the cast after performances.

“We could get much higher attendance if we wanted to be aggressive in our marketing and put some money into advertising, but we just don’t have that kind of style,” Hamilton says. “My philosophy is that we’re a local coffee-shop kind of thing. We’re not real interested in becoming this huge organization. That would really ruin it.”

Festival Schedule

This year, the festival is staging The Tempest and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, playwright Tom Stoppard’s absurdist take on the lives of two minor characters in Hamlet, which is the festival’s annual “Shakespeare on the Fringe” show. Hamilton, who works a day job as a counselor for troubled kids, will direct a farcical production of The Comedy of Errors set in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the mining town of Virginia City.

“Setting it in the West somehow makes it more accessible to people–they’re not intimidated,” Hamilton explains.

Of course, not everyone enjoys seeing new interpretations and settings for Shakespeare’s work. Hamilton recalls getting an angry letter six years ago from a staunch traditionalist from Windsor who was upset about a production of The Comedy of Errors.

“My director did it in sort of a vaudeville routine, which really worked, but [the Windsor lady] hated it,” Hamilton recalls with a laugh. “She said, ‘I brought my children to see Shakespeare, and what do I get? The Three Stooges running around onstage!’ What she didn’t understand is that The Comedy of Errors is a vaudeville routine. It’s slapstick, it’s incredible, it’s absurd.”

It’s that kind of rigidity with regard to Shakespeare that Hamilton is determined to fight. He speaks with considerable heat about what might be called the English-class approach to the playwright’s work, an attitude he often encountered while studying theater at UC Davis. The plays are meant to be performed, not read, Hamilton says, and they’re meant to be enjoyed by ordinary people, not endlessly vivisected by college professors.

“I think we have to battle those cultural snobs out there who put Shakespeare in this elitist, high-culture niche,” he says. “We’re always going to have to fight that. What I try to do with theater, both with Shakespeare and with contemporary theater, is bring it down to this level of ‘This is not brain surgery. This is theater; we’re here to entertain you, and hopefully we’ll make you think, too.’ And if we don’t, well, that’s OK.”

Of course, there are those who wonder what Shakespeare’s fate will be in the new century. Will Hollywood and the theater community run out of new ways to reinterpret the plays that have, after all, already been monkeyed around with for 400 years? Hamilton, who is already planning for next year’s millennium festival, doesn’t think so.

“The more I do Shakespeare, ” he says, “the more I realize that every time you look at it, you find something new. As old as it is, as many times as you see a production, you can come back to it over and over again. I think that’s why people keep coming out to the festival. It’s a good time.”

From the June 24-30, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Eel River

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D’Eel Denial

By Janet Wells

WHILE SANTA ROSA city officials mull over an ordinance to prohibit water waste, a far bigger water issue is brewing that may ultimately make Santa Rosa wish that it hadn’t agreed to ship 4 billion gallons a year of highly treated, highly usable, and potentially highly valuable wastewater to the Geysers steam fields.

The Eel River diversions to the Russian River, a neat engineering trick that steals from one river to feed another, has had environmentalists fuming for years. What started in 1908 simply as a small PG&E power-generating program in Potter Valley has expanded to the point where there isn’t enough water to sustain the Eel River’s ecosystem.

So why not just stop the diversions? Because they are the lifeblood for much of Sonoma County and some of Marin County as well.

“The Potter Valley Project is killing the Eel River to provide excess water to fuel unsustainable growth in Sonoma and Marin counties,” says Margaret Pennington of the Sierra Club.

Because of pressure from environmentalists and federal agencies, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is expected to adopt at least a 15 percent reduction in the amount of water diverted, with more substantial reductions over time.

“We believe it is preferable for water users in the Russian River basin … to begin adjusting their water-use patterns and planting less water-dependent crops in anticipation of an eventual end to water diversions from the Eel River,” the federal Environmental Protection Agency states in its comments on the draft environmental impact statement on the Potter Valley Project.

Here’s where Santa Rosa’s wastewater comes in: With less water available to fuel Sonoma County’s anticipated growth, why not use that water for crops and urban irrigation? the critics of the Geysers solution say.

“There are some questions about water supply and the main transportation system, yet they’re slapping in subdivisions faster than ever,” says Mark Green, executive director of Sonoma County Conservation Action, the North Bay’s largest environmental group. “There are some very strong arguments that could be made that Santa Rosa should not be issuing any permits anytime soon until they get this stuff nailed down. But there doesn’t seem to be any indication of that.”

CHANGES TO the Eel River diversions undoubtedly will most affect the northern part of Sonoma County. South of Healdsburg, much of the county relies on Lake Sonoma, which is fed by Dry Creek. The diverted Eel River water is considered “extra” to keep the lake full for recreational use. Lake Mendocino, however, relies almost completely on the diversions.

While water experts predict catastrophe for the agricultural economy of northern Sonoma and southern Mendocino counties should the Eel River supply dry up, when it comes to the impact on Santa Rosa, officials say it’s all speculation.

“Everybody’s [municipal] general plans are about to go through reworkings. Until the dust settles on all that, it’s hard to say what the implications are,” says Bill Mailliard, water resources committee chairman of the Sonoma County Alliance.

The city seems, however, to be bracing itself for impact, since it is evaluating expansion and upgrade of its eight water wells as a future back-up system, even though one of the wells is contaminated and the others have less than optimal quality and taste.

“It’s so sad that they are looking at older methods of going out and drilling groundwater in areas that potentially have toxic plumes, instead of using wastewater on urban areas,” says Krista Rector, a Sierra Club Executive Committee member.

“They are looking for more water and at the same time treating [wastewater] to a very high level and giving it away,” she adds. “They could look at very creative ways of using wastewater instead of bleeding money on both ends.”

From the June 24-30, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Natural Foods

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Natural Foods

Sonoma, Naturally!


Michael Amsler

Got their goat: Cheesemakers Javier and Patty Salmon of Bodega Goat Cheese make products that don’t taste goatsy.

A generation of local entrepreneurs find their place in the sun amid Sonoma County’s thriving natural and organic packaged-foods industry

By Paula Harris

IT’S NOT JUST a flash in the pan. The days when the only organic or natural processed foods available were plain-packed, plain-tasting, or just plain weird-tasting offerings sold by tie-dye-clad clerks at the local health food store are long gone. These days natural and organic foods packaged for convenience have become so creative and full-flavored–even bordering on gourmet–they now stock supermarket-sized natural food markets and even occupy a permanent space alongside familiar, additive-laden products on mainstream grocery store shelves.

By 1995, mainstream consumers had become more health conscious, and mass market demand for natural foods soared. Even established companies, among them household names in the food industry, recognized these trends and diversified into natural foods. There are now wholesome replicas of familiar junk-grub–even Pop Tarts and tater tots have their healthful equivalents.

“In general, whole organic-food sales are jumping significantly each year nationwide because people are very concerned about the perceived quality of foods,” says Betsy Timm, executive director for Select Sonoma County, a non-profit agricultural marketing group that develops promotions, education programs, and marketing opportunities for Sonoma County’s agricultural producers.

“Even large corporate farms are getting into the organic area. Natural foods are growing in tandem also and are becoming linked to big companies,” continues Timm. “When Kraft jumps on the bandwagon, you know it’s a trend.”

Local purveyors and manufacturers of natural and organic products are riding this wave of widespread acceptance, and natural packaged fare from the county is increasingly turning up in supermarkets and kitchen cupboards around the nation and, in some cases, internationally.

Think that’s an exaggeration? Take a peek inside your own kitchen cabinets. A quick perusal of my pantry was like taking a quick jaunt around the county. I encountered a bag of Timber Crest Farms organic sun-dried tomatoes (Healdsburg); a box of Fantastic Classico Risotto (Petaluma); Barbara’s Bakery Natural Choice toaster pastries (Petaluma); a can of Muir Glen organic diced tomatoes and one of pizza sauce (Petaluma); a bottle of Kozlowski Farms honey mustard salad dressing (Forestville); and a box of Traditional Medicinals Gypsy Cold Care herbal tea (Sebastopol).

“We nurture the natural foods industry through our general campaign of ‘Sonoma Grown’ and ‘Sonoma Made’ logos that identify products grown or produced in Sonoma County,” says Timm.

“The whole location of Sonoma County is really exciting,” says Tim Schrock, natural foods buyer for Petaluma Market, a crossover grocery store selling both natural and mainstream products in west Petaluma. “The county is really trying to be a player in the nationwide natural foods industry. This relatively new industry has flourished locally in the last 10 years.”

Schrock adds that some local family businesses that started modestly are becoming huge companies. “Before, [the local natural foods companies] were small and privately handled. Now they are corporate and have evolved into big business,” he says. “The natural foods companies are becoming structured like large conventional food companies were back then.”


Michael Amsler

Tofu kings: Bill Bramblett and Jeremiah Ridenour of Wildwood Foods.

FOR EXAMPLE, he cites Fantastic Foods in Petaluma, a purveyor of natural dehydrated foods and rices, founded by Jim and Joan Rosen in 1975. Recently the firm was acquired by Small Planet Foods, a Sedro-Woolley, Wash., company formed and controlled by Trefoil Capital Investors II LP. Trefoil is an investment partnership affiliated with Roy E. Disney’s Shamrock Holding Inc.

Small Planet–which is anything but “small”–was established in 1997. The corporation has also acquired Cascadian Farms, a Washington-based natural frozen foods manufacturer, and Muir Glen, the country’s largest producer of organic tomato products. Muir Glen recently moved its headquarters into the Fantastic Foods facility in Petaluma, consolidating the company’s operations, finance, and marketing departments. Fantastic Foods products are now sold throughout the United States in both natural and mainstream retail grocery stores and in about 15 foreign countries.

Another national leader is Santa Rosa-based Amy’s Kitchen, a frozen-foods manufacturer that was started in 1987 by a local couple as a healthful, preservative-free alternative to the high-fat, high-sodium TV dinners and convenience meals offered by the big guys like Stouffers. Now, Amy’s has grown into one of the county’s largest employers, with some 500 workers on the payroll.

But is the commercialization of organic products a sellout? Is what started as an alternative agriculture losing its underlying values? Although some natural foods purveyors are becoming huge corporate enterprises, Schrock believes the products, for the most part, are not suffering. “Quality standards are still there,” he says. “It’s just the structure of the company that’s different.”

Indeed, these products are now extremely well marketed, with slick literature, attractive packaging, and websites. Company representatives offer support at the retail level, and manufacturers are increasingly targeting their items toward mainstream groceries. Yet it’s still possible to discover companies so small they can fully participate in the community: the jam maker who still picks his own berries to make organic fruit preserves to sell at the local farmers’ market; the young woman who’s handing out samples of her sister’s secret all-natural barbecue sauce recipe slathered on crusts of bread at a natural food market on a Saturday morning.

Here is a sampling of the smorgasbord of natural and organic packaged foods and beverages produced in Sonoma County, from wholesome organic goat cheese, five-alarm all-natural tequila-based BBQ sauce, and medicinal teas to gourmet tofu. We’ve included companies both large and small, old and new.

Expanded list and contact numbers for providers of natural and organic packaged foods.

Amy’s Kitchen
It’s hard to believe that little Amy, the baby whose birth in 1988 inspired the famed local all-natural frozen foods company, will be 12 in November. Proud parents Andy and Rachel Berliner started the namesake Amy’s Kitchen in Petaluma after their daughter was born, and out of necessity. They wanted healthy, tasty, and easy-to-fix alternatives to the frozen convenience foods and TV dinners packing the grocery freezers. Thus their line of vegetarian organic frozen foods was born. Now Amy’s Kitchen is the biggest-selling natural frozen-food line in the nation. The company has moved its operations to Santa Rosa and has about 500 employees, although the Berliners are still very much at the helm. “A chef develops the dishes, but Andy, Rachel, and Amy are still the taste buds of Amy’s Kitchen,” explains a company spokeswoman. Everything is made on the premises. Favorites include vegetable pot pie, vegetable lasagna, and black bean enchiladas. In addition, the company has introduced a line of organic canned soups, and a new selection of pasta sauces will be available this summer. 578-7188.


Bodega Goat Cheese
One hundred and twenty goats roam and forage in the pastures at the rolling farmland located in the town of Bodega near the coast. Count ’em. Their “parents,” cheese makers Javier and Patty Salmon, hope soon to begin operating one of the first organic goat dairies in the country. “We’re in the process of applying for organic status,” says Patty Salmon. The Salmons have carved canals and terraces over the entire eight-acre hillside to catch rainwater and extend the pasture’s growing season, installed irrigation ponds, and planted trees with a high-protein content to return the goats to a natural diet. Their happy herd also benefits from organic alfalfa and grain. The end results of all this care, says Patty, are delightfully fresh cheeses that “pick up the flavor of the pasture.” Husband Javier, whose family owned a cow dairy in Peru, brought family recipes to the states, and the couple used them, substituting goat milk. The South American process is unlike the French method of making chèvre, says Patty. “We make the milk into cheese within one or two days, so the flavor isn’t very goaty,” she adds. “People who don’t normally like goat cheese often love ours.” Their six products include a Spanish-style manchego and queso fresco, a cheese from the Andes that Patty describes as similar to Greek feta but less salty. 876-3483.


Da Vero Olive Oil
“As with wine, it goes back to what you start with,” says Da Vero co-owner Colleen McGlynn. “We start with cuttings from Tuscany planted in 1990.” The Dry Creek Valley appellation oil produced by this Healdsburg company was the first American oil to earn the prestigious extra-virgin designation in Europe. Two years ago, the Sonoma County oil won over Italian and French equivalents during a blind tasting in Imperia, Italy. McGlynn, who works the oil biz with her husband, Ridgely Evers, describes the four Italian varietals produced as condiment oils for finishing and dressing food rather than for heat cooking. “Sautéeing would burn off all the fruit flavors,” she explains. According to McGlynn, who is an accomplished chef, the pure oil contains a harmony of flavors that needs no extra additives. “There’s a green freshness, a pepper taste, and a little bitter tone,” she says. “It all comes from the fruit–the olive–and it all adds complexity and structure to a dish.” During harvest time, two tons of olives per day are picked from trees on 22 acres, transported to Marin County, and pressed with a stone and hydraulic press in Frantoio Restaurant in Mill Valley. “The oil is ready the next day,” McGlynn says. 431-8000.

Michael Amsler



La Casa Food Co.
It all started when customers began requesting recipes for the housemade tamales, the salsa, and the tangy salad dressing all served at the venerable La Casa restaurant in Sonoma. Although the restaurant was established in 1967, it took 20 years of customer requests before the food company was launched, explains Angela Cuda, general manager of the La Casa Food Co., which is owned by her father, Ron Cuda. The Cudas purchased the company five years ago. Their line of meatless packaged products includes tamales, burritos, chips, salsa, and salad dressing. Among the favorites are Calabaza tamales stuffed with zucchini, garlic, and spices; and tamales filled with black beans and cheese. “We make everything at the food company,” explains Cuda. “It’s all handmade fresh daily.” The food really is prepared by hand and not by machine, and the small business is continuing to grow–in fact, Safeway supermarkets recently picked up the La Casa line. 996-7524.


Mayacamas Fine Foods Inc.
“There are 12 of us,” says Walter Ranzau, president of Mayacamas Fine Foods Inc., a business owned by a family and its friends. The 30-year-old Sonoma company produces all-natural low-fat dry mixes for pasta sauces and soups. “One of the owners is a certified chef. We collaborate to come up with new flavors that he’ll make fresh, and then we’ll duplicate that with dry-mix-ingredients know-how,” explains Ranzau. The company’s latest line is called Skillet Toss Pasta Products. “You add the vegetables and you stir it up–hence the name,” he says. “You add the fresh ingredients, and we supply the spices and seasonings to make a dish taste the way it’s supposed to.” 996-0955.


Mendocino Pasta Company
Don’t let the name fool you: this pasta purveyor is actually located in Rohnert Park. “There’s a Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa, so don’t let our name confuse your readers,” says owner Dan Luber when asked about his biz. “The company started in Mendocino–my home–but we kept growing and needed to be closer to our resources.” The company moved to Sonoma County in 1988, and continues to make batches of natural and organic specialty pastas in a variety of flavors on-site. “The tastes in the marketplace are constantly changing,” says Luber. “Our goal is to follow trends, stay abreast, and bring top culinary trends and styles into our product.” What are the current pasta trends? “Definitely Southwest-y,” says Luber. “We’re working on flavors we call Southwest-California, using chipolte chilies and fire-roasted peppers. But the classic Italian flavor blend of garlic and basil will always be popular.” As an added bonus, the pasta packaging features recipes by Toni Robertson, executive chef of the Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa. The company also produces a line of pasta sauces. 584-0800.


Pool Ridge Herbals
Feelin’ frail? Brew up a nice pot of tea. That’s the advice from Donna Burch, owner of Pool Ridge Herbals, an up-and-coming tea company located in Forestville. Pool Ridge Herbals produces a line of 16 medicinal blends. “These are loose, whole herb teas that you brew yourself,” Burch says. All the ingredients are organic or wild-crafted, meaning they were gathered from the wild when available. Burch, a nutritional consultant and a clinical herbalist, began the company five years ago by growing a lot of the herbs herself. “I’ve always been interested in alternative health approaches, playing with herbs, understanding the body systems, and talking to clients,” she says. “My teas are geared for specific health areas such as the thyroid, memory function, and joint function.” A couple of her popular specific blends are Live-Clean, which Burch says helps liver function better by cleansing, detoxing, and aiding food digestion, and Kidni-Clear, which she says helps keep kidneys functioning properly and prevents bladder infections. “The herbs are full of trace minerals, vitamins, and nutrients,” says Burch. 632-6509.


Sartain’s Menu
“Some people run screaming and some say, ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ when they taste my barbecue sauce,” says James Sartain, owner of Sartain’s Menu in Petaluma, a small but growing company. Sartain works for the phone company by day, but has parlayed his love of cooking into a second career. His sole product, called simply The Sauce, consists of a palate-rousing blend of chipolte chili peppers, soy sauce, lime juice, honey, garlic, tequila, and sesame oil. “It’s an Aztec-Szechuan combo,” says Sartain with a laugh. His recipe took six months to perfect. His focus groups were friends who participated in dinner parties to sample sauce variations and rate the competition. “I thought about it a long time, hemmed and hawed, and people kept asking, ‘When’s the sauce gonna be ready?’ So I just decided to call it The Sauce,” he explains. Later this year, Sartain will be branching out into marinades with an alcohol theme: tequila-based for poultry, ale-based for beef, and white wine-based for seafood. “It’s a small company, but we’re sold in Seattle, Alaska, Florida, and New York,” says Sartain. “Word of mouth has been good to us.” 763-6335.


Solana Gold Organics
John Kolling, president of Solana Gold in Sebastopol, left his engineering career at Hewlett-Packard and became an organic-apple farmer and manufacturer. The 20-year-old company produces five flavors of organic apple juice and 11 flavors of applesauce (including blackberry-apple and Island Passion), and has just introduced natural cider vinegar. All the products are organic and made from the area’s famed local apples. “The organic industry is just growing leaps and bounds,” says Solana Gold national sales manager Janielle Marie, who adds that the company’s products are even exported to Canada and Japan. “You used to just find the products in health food stores. Now they’re in crossover markets and mass markets, which are all responding to consumers asking for organic products. It’s more than just a trend.” 829-1121.


Tierra Vegetables
“The first thing I tell people is that we’re not a company, we’re a small family farm,” explains Evie Truxaw, of the Healdsburg-headquartered operation. The multifaceted farm, owned by the sister and brother team of Lee and Wayne James (Evie is Wayne’s wife) began in 1980 and grows a wide variety of veggies. But Tierra is also known for its packaged smoked and dried chipolte chilies, which are grown locally sans pesticides or herbicides. The packaged chilies are a spicy staple of chefs at several local restaurants, including Equus in Santa Rosa. The plain dried chilies are great in enchilada sauce, chili rellenos, and mole sauce, says Truxaw, while the smoked ones liven up black beans and chicken dishes. “The smoked version has been smoked for five days and has a beautiful aroma,” she adds. “And don’t just use it in Mexican and Southwest dishes–try a few snippets on a pizza!” 837-8366.


Wildwood Natural Foods
OK, so we cheated a tad here. Wildwood is actually located in Fairfax, Marin County, but Wildwood’s general manager, Billy Bramblett, is such an effusive character, and he does live in Petaluma … The 19-year-old company produces gourmet tofu products, which are made from organic soybeans and are available in many local stores. Gourmet tofu? “A lot of people had a bad tofu experience as a child,” admits Bramblett, who used to guide a cooperative natural foods restaurant in Fairfax. “It’s my job to make tofu taste great and reverse that experience.” He and his partner, Jeremiah Ridenour, call themselves the “Jer and Billy” (as opposed to Ben and Jerry) of soy. There’s a line of baked tofu in four flavors, including Royal Thai (lemongrass, ginger, cilantro, and red curry) and Aloha (ginger and pineapple). There’s also a line of tofu salads, tofu veggie burgers, soy milk, and such Middle Eastern products as hummus and tabbouleh. The company is working on several new lines, including a vegan aioli spread and drinkable soy yogurt in various fruit flavors. Bottoms up! 415/459-3919.


From the June 17-23, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Russian River Blues Festival

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Russian River Blues Festival

Russian River Blues Festival

THE Sonoma County Independent presents the fourth annual Russian River Blues Festival on Saturday and Sunday, June 26 and 27, on the sun-drenched sands at Johnson’s Beach in Guerneville.

This year’s stellar roster includes some of the cream of the blues–both Etta James and Koko Taylor won national W.C. Handy Blues Awards on May 27 as Soul Blues Female Artist of the Year and Traditional Blues Female Artist of the Year, respectively–a reunion of the original Booker T. & the MGs, and a rare Bay Area appearance by Chicago bluesman Magic Slim, one of the last of the real Southside blues players.

The two-day festival includes a winetasting offered by several of the region’s finest wineries, plus gourmet food, and arts and crafts. Gates open at 10 a.m.; music runs from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. Tickets are $35-$65 (gold-tier seating is $75). For details, call 510/655-9471.

Here is this year’s complete lineup: On Saturday, performers are Etta James & the Roots Band, Tower of Power, Joe Louis Walker, Magic Slim & the Teardrops, and the Sy Klopps Blues Band.

On Sunday, catch Booker T. & the MGs, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Koko Taylor & her Blues Machine. Tommy Castro, and Dan Hicks & the Delta Devils.

From the June 17-23, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The Guilty Mother

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The Guilty Mother

Judgment Day


Chris Murphy

Young love: Jereme Anglin and Mikka Bonel star in The Guilty Mother.

‘The Guilty Mother’ leaves questions

By Daedalus Howell

IS THE THIRD TIME the charm, or are three a crowd? The question lingers after the end of The Guilty Mother, the final installment of the Cinnabar Theater’s Figaro Fest–a two-year exploration of three Figaro plays of 18th-century French playwright Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.

Directed by Robert Currier, The Guilty Mother continues the saga begun in The Barber of Seville, in which the rapscallion hairdresser Figaro aids his employer, Count Almaviva, in wooing the comely Rosine. In the Marriage of Figaro, the title character saves Rosine’s handmaiden Suzanne, his bride-to-be, from Almaviva’s lecherous invocation of “seignorial rights.”

The Guilty Mother finds the same cast relocated to France some 20 years thence and in the company of the dubious Major Honore Begearss, who underhandedly sets about trying to acquire Almaviva’s fortunes as well as his beautiful young ward Florestine. The facts that the ward is secretly Almaviva’s illegitimate daughter and that his son Leon is actually the progeny of Rosine and a randy page also serve as fodder for Begearss’ nimble-witted malfeasance.

Kudos go to Cinnabar’s Quicksilver II theater company for being the first to bring Beaumarchais’ final Figaro vehicle to the American stage. However, it seems there are actually two plays in this production–the wan and ponderous one that opens the evening, and the spry, light-on-its feet show that begins after intermission.

Though mercifully trimmed by Currier, the 200-year-old play has forgotten whether it’s a light-hearted comedy or a heavy-handed drama. The first act suffers from the wooden exposition of a convoluted plot and the fact that the melodrama is, well, mellow.

The second act–which is rife with comic asides and often campy delivery on the part of players–works wonderfully, and the audience’s response takes a dramatic turn for the better. It’s as if the ticket-holders are dying to boo and hiss the villains and cheer the heroes in a manner appropriate to an old school vaudeville show.

Mother gives them what they want. Lucas McClure’s Begearss, described by Figaro as “a complete army of demons stuffed within a single shirt,” dons such mock-sinister trappings as a facetious little smile and haughty guffaws from the wings. He was merrily booed by the audience during his curtain call–an excellent indicator of his character’s success.

Though Figaro is relegated to the background for much of this play, actor Sean Casey brings him to life in a decidedly blustery performance complemented by Laura Jorgensen’s portrayal of Suzanne, his saucy wife.

Jereme Anglin’s Leon, the earnest young swain, is well paired with Mikka Bonel’s fresh-faced Florestine.

Though The Guilty Mother is not Beaumarchais’ greatest play, this premiere American performance marks a triumph for the Cinnabar’s efforts to revive the obscure. With this production’s nurturing, The Guilty Mother will undoubtedly re-enter the world an improved work.

The Guilty Mother plays June 17-19 at 8 p.m. at 3 p.m., at the Cinnabar Theater, 3333 Petaluma Blvd. N. Tickets are $14 general, $12 for seniors and students. 763-8920.

From the June 17-23, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Magic Slim

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Magic Slim

Blues Storm



Magic Slim whips up a ‘Black Tornado’ on newest CD

Nicky Baxter

MEATY and somewhere north of six feet, bluesman Magic Slim is a large man. His voice is, if anything, even larger. The native Mississippian is a better-than-average guitarist as well. On 1998’s Black Tornado (Blind Pig), an excellent disc showcasing Magic Slim’s aggressive, take-no-prisoners style, those two attributes are fully evident. After spinning this disc for just a short while, I know why Westside Chicago blues pioneer Magic Sam anointed Morris Holt “Magic Slim.”

The album is ripe with high-voltage Chicago blues power.

Scattered throughout the album are numbers scripted by Magic Slim himself. The title track is a chugging, country-spiked instrumental that sounds more like a train leaving the station than anything else.

Things get off to a pepper-hot start with “Jealous Man,” with Slim shouting out a lyric clearly designed to let his woman (and everybody else) know the ground rules of a relationship–it’s his way or the highway. When he roars, “You can look at my woman, but man, you better not touch,” there is no doubt he means every word.

“I Can’t Trust My Woman” is another exercise in paranoia on which Slim & the Teardrops perform with bone-chilling ferocity. Equally fearsome is Slim’s guitar playing; he is an awe-inspiring technician. More significantly, he uses that facility to extract every conceivable emotion from his instrument. One moment, it’s sharp and brazen; the next it plunges deep into Muddy Waters country with low, menacing bass notes.

“Crazy Woman” is a slow-paced tour de force. Slim’s guitar sets up the all-blue scenario. This track more than any other demonstrates why Magic Slim has attained legendary stature. His guitar moans, whines, and pleads. By the time Slim utters the opening line, the teardrops have already commenced to flow. His lyric is seemingly bereft of all hope.

Nevertheless, Tornado‘s final tune, “Love Like I Wanna” is positively cheeky, shuddering with braggadocio. The song is a declaration of emotional independence. Magic Slim & the Teardrops may sometimes get low-down, but nothing can keep them there.

From the June 17-23, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Talking Pictures

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Talking Pictures

Talking Dirty

Double trouble: Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant try to find true love in Notting Hill.

Novelist Ciji Ware on true love, untidy apartments, and ‘Notting Hill’

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This column is not a review; rather, it’s a freewheeling, tangential discussion of life, alternative ideas, and popular culture. (The following conversation marks a milestone for Templeton: it’s officially his 200th such cinematic téte-â-téte.)

IT WAS FILTHY,” remarks award-winning novelist Ciji Ware, author of A Cottage By the Sea and Island of the Swans, halfway through lunch. “It was disgusting.”

“It was horrible,” agrees Susan, my wife, accepting a refill of iced tea. “Revolting.”

“I was pretty comfortable with it,” I interject.

Both women turn, treating me to a bemused and silent gaze.

Hmmm. I seem to have stumbled into one of those battle-of-the sexes situations. All because of Hugh Grant’s living room. Allow me to explain.

About midway through Notting Hill–the otherwise charming new romantic comedy from the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral–there’s a scene in which a thoroughly smitten, low-wage English bookseller (well played by Grant) escorts a sheltered, world-famous Hollywood movie star (even better played by Julia Roberts) into his spectacularly untidy house. (He’s just spilled orange juice on her in a “meet cute” way, and has offered her a place to clean up.) Sadly, the bookseller’s home–in part because of Spike, his peculiar Welsh “flat-mate”–is an icky, smelly mess.

I thought it had a nice, cozy, lived-in feel to it.

“I suppose it’s a guy thing,” Ware patiently murmurs.

I glance around the restaurant. Unfortunately, Ware’s husband–Tony Cook, managing editor and publisher of Quicken.com–is next door getting a haircut, and is thus unavailable to help defend our gender.

“I was glad, at least, that when Hugh Grant went upstairs to his own room, it was very nice and neat,” Susan points out.

“That’s right,” Ware nods. “And there was that shot of the blackboard in the apartment: ‘Spike! Clean Up!‘”

So it’s Spike’s fault. Good.

At least the film’s romantic lead can avoid the sharp sting of domestic unacceptability. Unfortunately, that still leaves poor Spike–and me, I suppose–to lurk uncleanly among the ranks of the slobs and clutterers.

CIJI WARE, a newly arrived resident of San Francisco, stands among the ranks of a far loftier group, that of best-selling authors with Emmy awards on their mantles.

Formerly a high-profile TV journalist in Los Angeles (thus the Emmy), Ware also co-hosted a popular drive-time radio show in L.A. for over 16 years. After writing a well-regarded book on stepparenting, she turned her efforts to historical fiction, crafting a series of colorful time-traveling adventures that have gone on to become a brand-name staple of supermarket checkout stands. (This is no slight; commercially speaking, the supermarket is where the majority of Americans now find their reading material.).

Ware’s latest effort is Midnight on Julia Street (Fawcett Gold Medal; $6.99), an engagingly romantic, slightly mystical drama, following Corlis McCullough, a burned-out TV reporter in New Orleans, who tackles a long-forgotten mystery after she begins reliving the 150-year-old memories of her own ancestor and namesake, the passionate and secretive Corlis Bell McCullough.

ASIDE FROM the aforementioned housekeeping deficiencies, Ware loved the love story at the heart of Notting Hill.

“There was no cynicism. Just truth,” she observes. “We need films like this these days. I think a love of romantic fiction is hard-wired into our species. It’s part of our drive to perpetuate the species. Stories like Notting Hill are a good sign, because it means our species still stands a chance of continuing.”

So many modern love stories, Ware believes, are laced with cynicism. She cites The Bridges of Madison County and Message in a Bottle. In each case, once true love is discovered, something occurs to force the lovers apart.

Ware feels this is no coincidence.

“I think, as a culture, we are really unsure and doubtful that we can sustain emotional intimacy,” she explains. “And guess what? The only way you really can sustain it is to work at it, to gain the knowledge you need, knowledge about your own self, so you are somebody who is fit to be in a sustainable intimate relationship.

“I think a lot of people in our lives don’t even recognize that as a goal. They never say, ‘Gee, I guess it requires work on myself to become fit company. Maybe I want to start out on a path where I try to become the best I can be, to learn who I am and what my boundaries are.’

“In the movie, Julia Roberts has to come to that point,” she continues. “The famous actress has to learn who she really is, and to admit how empty she is, and to find a way through that.”

“So what about love at first sight?” I ask. “Soul mates. Prince Charming and all that?”

“I don’t believe in instant compatibility,” she replies. “Love is the process, it’s not the person. It’s all about how you work your way to the point where you find, not your ‘other half,’ but–and this really, really is romantic–you find the person who is walking a parallel path.

“In the movie, she’s a movie star and he’s a bookseller, but ultimately, their paths are the same paths. And now they have to go through a similar process, where they define who they are, for themselves, then have to find where they meet and they each have to change a little in order to get there.”

That’s for sure. For one thing, Hugh’s got to get rid of Spike.

“Ultimately, I think Notting Hill might end up helping relationships,” Ware concludes, approvingly. “It would certainly make a great date movie.”

With a laugh, she adds, “It could end up being a very good date.”

From the June 10-16, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The Elephant’s Child

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The Elephant’s Child

Morality Play

The Elephant’s Child.

Meg Dakin



‘The Elephant’s Child’ benefits child soldiers in Africa

By Patrick Sullivan

THESE CHILDREN are used as mine sweepers,” explains Gabriella Randazzo, her normally cheerful voice nearly choking with outrage. “They’re put right on the front lines. It’s really awful stuff.”

Indeed, for sheer horror, it’s tough to surpass the situation about which Randazzo is so understandably upset. In Uganda, according to the international group Human Rights Watch, children as young as 8 are being kidnapped from their homes and schools by rebel soldiers and forced into a life of war, used as the most expendable of cannon fodder in the civil war that has engulfed the small country in Central Africa. A few escape and return to their villages, traumatized for life by their experiences.

This tragedy unfolding halfway across the world might seem a distant horror, but it’s anything but remote to Randazzo. As the head of the Children’s Theater of All Possibilities, a 3-year-old Sebastopol organization, Randazzo, 47, works with kids constantly, and her concern for their welfare doesn’t stop at national borders. That’s why her company is mounting an ambitious theatrical production to raise money to help rehabilitate the war-damaged children in Uganda.

On June 12 and 13, a theatrical version of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child” will be brought to the stage at Sonoma State University by an all-volunteer 75-member company composed of local children and a handful of adult performers, including Georgia Churchill, a local storyteller who will take the part of the narrator. The cast of singers, dancers, and actors will tell Kipling’s quirky and amusing story, full of the English writer’s sparkling gift for peculiar language, of how the curious little elephant’s child got his boot-sized nose stretched out to its present useful length by a hungry crocodile on “the banks of the great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River.”

But Randazzo hopes that The Elephant’s Child, which is adapted from one of Kipling’s famous Just So Stories, will do more than just raise badly needed funds. The production also testifies to the director’s belief in the healing power of art. The play, which is set to a musical score created by noted musician Bobby McFerrin, will be videotaped, equipped with subtitles, and sent to rehabilitation centers in Africa to be viewed by the former child soldiers themselves.

At first glance, it’s an odd juxtaposition: the grim reality of children enslaved to a killing machine stands in sharp contrast to Kipling’s basically cheerful fable of innocence redeemed. But Randazzo believes that the alternately whimsical and terrifying tale will strike a deep chord with child victims.

“The Elephant’s Child is an initiation story. It’s a story about how a child overcomes the predator, the crocodile,” Randazzo says. “I chose it because I thought it mirrors in a wonderful way the possibility of a naive and innocent child confronting a predator and overcoming the challenge. I think that’s a positive theme that will help create the possibility of hope for these children.”

To achieve that effect, Randazzo has added a few small touches to Kipling’s original story. On the one hand, the crocodile will be dressed in army camouflage; on the other, the original violence of the story will be toned down a bit. Rather than being constantly spanked by his many relatives for his “satiable curiosity,” the elephant’s child will be “twizzled,” which means being spun around and confused.

Randazzo’s young performers, who are mostly first- through sixth-graders from local schools, were delighted to learn that their efforts would help other children–though the kids haven’t been told the grim details.

“I just call [the Ugandan children] war orphans. I don’t go into the real horror of it,” Randazzo explains. “But when they find out they’re actually helping other kids, there’s something that shifts in them. They’re doing something meaningful. These kids stand tall. They’re pretty amazing.”

The Elephant’s Child is staged June 12 at 7:30 and June 13 at 2 p.m. at the Evert B. Person Theater, SSU, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park. Tickets are $10 for adults and $4 for kids . For details, call 823-8036.

From the June 10-16, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Walkable Communities

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Walkable Communities

Foot Fetish

Dan Burden walks the talk–a pedestrian-friendly world

By Janet Wells

CALL IT AN EPIPHANY. Twenty-five years ago Dan Burden and his wife, on a bicycle trip from Alaska to Argentina, stopped in Anaheim, where they decided to take a break from their bike seats and walk to a movie in town. “It was only a mile and a half, but we ran into obstacle after obstacle and realized that you couldn’t walk in America,” says Burden, who was inspired by the experience to develop strategies for creating pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly cities.

As founder and director of Walkable Communities Inc., Burden spent 357 days last year on the road, giving slide shows, lectures, and training workshops on such esoteric-sounding topics as “traffic calming.”

Burden, who will offer similar workshops in Petaluma–a city that has an ambitious downtown walking plan–on June 18 and 19, is chatting about “walkability” on a cell phone while conducting a pedestrian audit of downtown Palo Alto, a city he says “pushes a high nine” on a walkability scale of one to 10. Turning a community into a pedestrian paradise goes beyond speed bumps and stop signs, says Burden, who describes a foot-friendly community in five words: security, comfort, convenience, efficiency, and welcome.

Mixed-use, higher-density development makes communities more convenient, and quality planning and construction leads to efficiency, he says. “Security, well, you want to stay away from dark alleys and scary spots. Comfort, that calls for all kinds of amenities, like shade, places to sit, ways to get a drink of water, places to go to the bathroom. Welcome is even harder,” he adds. “Aesthetics, making it pleasing, even tantalizing. It’s how to get people out of a car.”

Stephen Weinberger, a traffic engineer with the Santa Rosa consulting firm W-Trans, has attended several of Burden’s workshops and believes that a good pedestrian plan must be compatible with other transit options. “Traditionally, traffic engineers have been viewed as professionals who do facilities for the car,” he says. “It’s our firm’s opinion that we need to consider all forms of transportation. There has been a growing awareness of pedestrian and bicycle issues over the last five years or more.

“A downtown core needs to be as accessible to a pedestrian as to a car,” he adds. “The parking, the traffic circulation, the pedestrian facilities all need to work together to bring people in and allow them to walk around.”

Is Santa Rosa a good example of a walking city? Weinberger laughs, then tries to be diplomatic. “There are some communities that are much more walkable than Santa Rosa,” he says. “The city has been increasing bicycle facilities through use of some of the creek trails and bike lanes.”

Several of the recommendations made by a national urban-design team that visited Santa Rosa last year addressed the downtown’s decidedly unfriendly layout that features an underutilized central square, bisection of the downtown by a major highway, a dearth of bike lanes, and more than a few busy intersections with heart-stopping crosswalks. The city recently received a $500,000 grant from the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission to forge ahead with one of the recommendations to create a pedestrian link from Fourth Street to the orphaned Railroad Square.

“Anything that works toward making a strong pedestrian connection between Railroad Square and Courthouse Square would be high on my list,” Weinberger says of making downtown Santa Rosa a walkable city. “You’ll find a lot of downtowns that have seen an economic revitalization; a number of those were started from improvements to the streetscape, the circulation system, incorporating changes to parking, traffic calming.”

Calming traffic does not involve New Age chanting or meditation. Rather, the stress relief comes from “changing the behavior of motorists to have them be more civil toward pedestrians,” Burden says. Narrower streets, landscaping, and–Burden’s favorite–replacing intersections with mini-circles and roundabouts all result in increased safety by slowing motorists down.

Burden praises Arcata’s central plaza in Humboldt County and parts of Davis as examples of what makes for good walkable cities in Northern California. But the best in the world, he says, is Melbourne, Australia. “As recently as 20 years ago, it was considered the most dangerous place for traffic in the industrialized world. Now, statistically, it’s the safest, and it was voted the most livable,” he says. “They changed their planning, built higher-density, mixed-use projects, narrowed the streets, and put in hundreds and hundreds of roundabouts and good transit delivery.

“America is in its most prosperous decade ever, and each of us is making more expendable income,” Burden adds. “But we’re dumping our money into ridiculous things that don’t matter. Cities that care put money into things that do matter–downtowns, planting lots of trees, making things more livable.

“If we want to go forward, we spend the money upfront.”

Dan Burden will talk on “Creating Walkable Communities” on Friday, June 18, at the Mystic Theater in Petaluma. The cost is $35. On Saturday, June 19, Burden will lead a free pedestrian audit-training workshop at the Petaluma Community Center in Lucchesi Park. For more information, call 415/488-4101.

From the June 10-16, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Francois Truffaut

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Francois Truffaut

Truffaut à Go-go

Life sentence: French New Wave director François Truffaut took the cinematic world by storm in 1959 with his semi-autobiographical debut film, The 400 Blows, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud (above) as the abused adolescent hero.

New biography and local screenings recall career of director François Truffaut

By Michelle Goldberg

A TEMPESTUOUS prodigy who grew up to symbolize the film establishment that he scorned as a young man, François Truffaut changed both the movie industry and the way we all think about cinema. He was so pivotal in shaping his generation’s aesthetic ideas that Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana’s excellent new biography of him reads almost as a history of French film, a critical survey full of the romance, nuance, and bittersweet drama of a good novel.

Additionally, so much of Truffaut (Knopf; $30) resonates with our own culture that it seems to illuminate the dead ends that American movies have reached–surprisingly, the manifestos that Truffaut penned in the ’50s seem equally revelatory today.

The leader of the French New Wave, Truffaut fought for a highly personal, independent cinema, first as an enfant terrible critic and later as a director. (You can see a selection of his films, including The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim, through June 24 at the newly renovated Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.)

Truffaut was still in his 20s when he formulated the auteur theory, the idea that a director is the “author” of his films (an idea that is somewhat taken for granted–even taken to excess–today). It was largely through his tireless championing of Alfred Hitchcock that the master of suspense was recognized as a genius in America, years after he’d been canonized by the gang at Cahiers du Cinéma, the critical organ of the New Wave.

As a writer, Truffaut cleared the way for his films and those of his compatriots–Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and others–by mercilessly attacking the generation preceding him. Reading his jeremiads today, one is struck by how accurately they depict the malaise our own film industry is suffering from.

“The director should have the same humility toward his characters that St. Francis of Assisi had toward God,” wrote Truffaut in “The Time of Contempt: Notes on a Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” the essay that launched his career as a critic.

“For us to accept infamous characters, the person who creates them must be even more infamous,” he wrote. “Anathema, blasphemy, sarcasm are the three passwords of French screenwriters … . These ‘superior’ artists claim to be superior to their creations; this presumption explains, but fails to excuse, the bankruptcy of the arts since the invention of motion pictures.”

At the time, we learn in Truffaut, his attack on the cynicism of the French film industry was seen by some as right wing, and, indeed, Truffaut began his career as a conservative, largely in response to the dogmatically Communist cultural establishment. But the director, who would, in middle age, sell copies of the banned newspaper La Cause du Peuple in the street with Sartre and de Beauvoir, wasn’t a moralizer in his films. He was a humanist, lyrical and empathetic but unsentimental, alert to contradictions and distrustful of all politics.

Truffaut was 28 when he demonstrated his conception of a new cinema with the groundbreaking The 400 Blows, based on Truffaut’s own bitter adolescence as a neglected, somewhat hapless juvenile delinquent. The 400 Blows captures both the conspiratorial joys of childhood and the horrific frustration of being at the mercy of unkind adults. The movie introduced Jean-Pierre Léaud, who was to be Truffaut’s alter ego in several other films, and, after winning the prize for best direction at Cannes, it spurred a national debate on child abuse.

One of the things that makes Truffaut such a fascinating biography is the way the book’s authors, like Truffaut himself in Day for Night, switch effortlessly between the films themselves and the behind-the-scenes dramas. Truffaut’s habit of having affairs with his leading ladies surely helped in this regard–it certainly sheds light on the melancholy passion of Jules and Jim, a film about an impossible ménage à trois in which two best friends live together with Catherine, the woman they both love.

Catherine was played by Jeanne Moreau, who became Truffaut’s lover and muse. Toubiana and de Baecque quote a friend of Truffaut’s who stopped by the set, “It was complicated because everyone was in love with Jeanne Moreau–the producer Raoul Lévy, who came by unexpectedly, Henri Serre, François himself. He was literally fascinated by her. The ambiance was euphoric at times and at times painful, almost tragic,” a perfect description of the ambiance of the film as well.

Jules and Jim was, of course, enormously celebrated. After such a rocket rise to the top of his profession, it was inevitable that Truffaut’s ferociously adversarial stance would mellow. In the biography, this makes him a much more interesting character, because Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana capture the tension between Truffaut’s anarchistic streak and his mainstream ambitions.

The director, they write, considered himself a craftsman, not an artist, and had little use for the avant-garde, which led to a falling-out with his friend and colleague Godard. Godard sent him a scathing letter after seeing Day for Night, ending insolently with the line, “After Day for Night, you ought to help me, so that audiences don’t think that the only kind of movies being made are your kind.”

The split that followed would mark the end of the New Wave, and while Godard wasn’t the only one at the time to decry Truffaut’s increasing conventionality, our authors’ sympathies are clearly with their subject. “Refusing to play the martyr (he left that to Godard), Truffaut pleaded his cause, that of an independent director whose career was punctuated with both success and failure: “‘I take complete responsibility for the films I make, their qualities and faults, and I never blame the system.'”

Indeed, there’s a deep respect for Truffaut that’s implicit in every line of the book and that suggests the authors’ willingness to always give the director the benefit of the doubt. With his compulsive womanizing, his shifting values and uneven oeuvre, there’s much in Truffaut’s life that Toubiana and de Baecque could have used against him. Though the man was eternally unfaithful to women, for example, there’s little evidence here of the pain and bitterness he must surely have caused at least a few of his lovers.

But while the biography surely glosses over a few of the messier aspects of Truffaut’s personal life, the writers’ sympathy ends up being a virtue. Like Truffaut’s greatest films, Truffaut is both authoritative and humble, with a truth and morality born of suspended judgment.

From the June 10-16, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Sonoma Valley Shakespeare Festival

Howdy, Bard'ner The Comedy of Errors. Michael Amsler The Sonoma Valley Shakespeare Festival gears up for the new millennium By Patrick Sullivan FOR A GUY who's been dead some 400 years, the late William Shakespeare is pretty damn lively. The playwright's actual corpse is as quiet as Yorick's skull, of course, but his enormous...
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Eel River

D'Eel Denial By Janet Wells WHILE SANTA ROSA city officials mull over an ordinance to prohibit water waste, a far bigger water issue is brewing that may ultimately make Santa Rosa wish that it hadn't agreed to ship 4 billion gallons a year of highly treated, highly usable, and potentially highly valuable wastewater to the Geysers...
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Natural Foods

Sonoma, Naturally!Michael AmslerGot their goat: Cheesemakers Javier and Patty Salmon of Bodega Goat Cheese make products that don't taste goatsy.A generation of local entrepreneurs find their place in the sun amid Sonoma County's thriving natural and organic packaged-foods industry By Paula HarrisIT'S NOT JUST a flash in the pan. The days when the only organic or...
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Russian River Blues Festival

Russian River Blues FestivalTHE Sonoma County Independent presents the fourth annual Russian River Blues Festival on Saturday and Sunday, June 26 and 27, on the sun-drenched sands at Johnson's Beach in Guerneville.This year's stellar roster includes some of the cream of the blues--both Etta James and Koko Taylor won national W.C. Handy Blues Awards on...
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The Guilty Mother

Judgment DayChris MurphyYoung love: Jereme Anglin and Mikka Bonel star in The Guilty Mother.'The Guilty Mother' leaves questionsBy Daedalus HowellIS THE THIRD TIME the charm, or are three a crowd? The question lingers after the end of The Guilty Mother, the final installment of the Cinnabar Theater's Figaro Fest--a two-year exploration of three Figaro plays of 18th-century French playwright...
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Magic Slim

Blues StormMagic Slim whips up a 'Black Tornado' on newest CDNicky BaxterMEATY and somewhere north of six feet, bluesman Magic Slim is a large man. His voice is, if anything, even larger. The native Mississippian is a better-than-average guitarist as well. On 1998's Black Tornado (Blind Pig), an excellent disc showcasing Magic Slim's aggressive, take-no-prisoners style, those two...
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Talking Pictures

Talking Dirty Double trouble: Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant try to find true love in Notting Hill. Novelist Ciji Ware on true love, untidy apartments, and 'Notting Hill' By David Templeton Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This column is not...
Read more

The Elephant’s Child

Morality Play The Elephant's Child. Meg Dakin 'The Elephant's Child' benefits child soldiers in Africa By Patrick Sullivan THESE CHILDREN are used as mine sweepers," explains Gabriella Randazzo, her normally cheerful voice nearly choking with outrage. "They're put right on the front lines. It's really awful stuff." Indeed, for sheer horror, it's tough...
Read more

Walkable Communities

Foot Fetish Dan Burden walks the talk--a pedestrian-friendly world By Janet Wells CALL IT AN EPIPHANY. Twenty-five years ago Dan Burden and his wife, on a bicycle trip from Alaska to Argentina, stopped in Anaheim, where they decided to take a break from their bike seats and walk to a movie in town. "It was...
Read more

Francois Truffaut

Truffaut à Go-go Life sentence: French New Wave director François Truffaut took the cinematic world by storm in 1959 with his semi-autobiographical debut film, The 400 Blows, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud (above) as the abused adolescent hero. New biography and local screenings recall career of director François Truffaut By Michelle Goldberg A...
Read more
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