With the threat of another disastrous wildfire season looming, Sonoma County farmworkers and their supporters are pressuring local wine businesses to improve working conditions during wildfires.
Last summer and fall, farmworkers throughout the state worked outdoors as over 4 million acres burned and the air filled with smoke. During both the 2017 and 2019 wildfire seasons, Sonoma County allowed over 250 employers to access their properties in wildfire evacuation zones, sometimes bringing workers with them to harvest grapes.
While the employers had an understandable need to complete last-minute work on their properties, local labor advocates argue that the workers taken into the evacuation zones do not have enough protections and may not have the financial resources to turn down dangerous work.
Earlier this year, North Bay Jobs with Justice, a Santa Rosa-based labor advocacy nonprofit, interviewed 100 local farmworkers about what changes they would like to see to their working conditions during wildfires. The interviews resulted in five requests: safety and evacuation training courses translated into farmworkers’ first languages; disaster insurance funds for workers who lose work due to wildfires; community safety observers allowed to oversee worker’s conditions during wildfires; hazard pay during wildfires; and clean bathrooms and water.
The nonprofit sent a letter to businesses requesting that they endorse five proposals. Many of the recipients did not respond to the letters, so, on Saturday, Aug. 21, NBJWJ rallied over 50 farmworkers and volunteers to hand-deliver the letters to more than 30 companies, including local wineries, vineyard management companies and farm labor contractors.
Max Bell Alper, NBJWJ’s executive director, frames the campaign as a fight for more equity in dealing with the impacts of climate change.
“This [issue] is not going away. Climate change is actually changing the way that it is to live on this land. And, as usual, it’s working class people, it’s immigrants, it’s people of color, it’s workers, who are most impacted by these changes. We believe that there is an opening here to say ‘We don’t want to continue the way things have always been,’” Alper told attendees on Saturday.
NBJWJ did not release current statistics as part of its campaign, but a past study indicates that Sonoma County farmworkers live precarious lives. A Sonoma County Farmworker Health Survey of 293 workers conducted in late 2013 found that 81% reported earning less than $30,000 in 2012.
“Nearly all (88.3%) of surveyed farmworkers considered Sonoma County their permanent residence, and 91.5% reported wine grapes as the primary crop in their current or most recent agricultural position,” a 2016 report on the survey’s results states.
Meanwhile, the wine industry faces its own challenges. Following several years of widespread wildfires, many wine businesses struggle to afford insurance policies due to rate hikes. Then there’s corporate consolidation. In July, after years of corporate mergers in the beverage industry, President Joe Biden signed an executive order tasking several federal agencies with studying “patterns of consolidation in production, distribution, or retail beer, wine, and spirits markets.”
Despite little response from the wine industry so far, Alper says that NBJWJ hopes to negotiate with local businesses.
“We continue to be hopeful that there are people within the wine industry that want to do the right thing by workers, and we are open and interested in partnering with growers and wineries and farm labor contractors that want to listen to the workers,” Alper told the Bohemian.
So far, at least one wine industry group seems less open to discussion. In an emailed response to questions about the NBJWJ’s petition, Karissa Kruse, president of the Sonoma County Winegrowers, said that the organization is “not negotiating or adopting any of these items as their demands are not valid. The NBJWJ is an activist organization that does not represent vineyard workers.”
For better or for worse, the NBJWJ’s campaign does seem to have drawn the Winegrowers’ attention. In her response, Kruse questioned NBJWJ’s connection to workers, citing a recent survey of Sonoma County workers conducted by the Sonoma County Grape Growers Foundation, a local nonprofit.
“Only 2 of the 965 [full-time vineyard] workers knew of [NBJWJ],” Kruse stated. The Bohemian requested the Grape Growers’ full survey and asked whether it was completed in direct response to NBJWJ’s campaign. Kruse did not respond before the Bohemian’s print deadline.
As part of a group participating on Saturday, NBJWJ volunteers Anabel Garcia and Yolanda Valdivia helped distribute letters to three wineries.
Both women told their stories of working conditions they experienced during the wildfires, and were impressed with some of the empathetic responses they received from tasting-room employees and patrons.
“They gave us attention, and they listened to Anabel’s stories, so from that we’re hopeful that the message will be passed on,” Valdivia said through a translator.
Then, Valdivia summarized the basic need for the campaign.
“Agriculture work is essential work that needs to be done. But, at the same time, [agriculture workers] are treated as if they are lesser,” Valdivia said.
Fall is the time when a theater company’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of a new season. Announcements are made, rehearsals are scheduled and the sound of buzzing returns to auditoriums as audiences enter and take their seats in support of live performance.
After being dark for a year-and-a-half, California’s June “reopening” gave theater artists hope that the hunger they felt to return to the stage would be fed by fall. Companies moved forward and scheduled their season openers. All looked promising until the Delta variant reared its ugly head.
As new Health Orders emerged, companies once more found themselves asking, “Should we cancel? Postpone? Move forward?” Throughout the Bay Area, the answer to all those questions has been, “Yes.”
Marin Theatre Company issued a press release on Aug. 11 trumpeting their Sept. 9 season opening with the West Coast premiere of the Obie Award-winning The Sound Inside. Eight days later they issued another press release announcing the postponement of MTC’s opening till Nov. 18, and a change in the opening show to the final installment of the Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon Christmas at Pemberley trilogy. The Sound Inside is postponed until May 2022.
This is all a way of informing the public that anything that follows regarding live theater this fall could change at any minute and several times.
Theaters moving forward have implemented stricter Covid protocols—audience members must show proof of vaccination, masks must be worn at all times indoors, concession sales have been moved outside or cancelled altogether, to name a few—and most require all members of their company—staff, crew and performers—to be fully vaccinated.
Yet with all that, a large question mark continues to hover over the theater community. Will the shows go on? Will audiences show up?
If they do, here’s a sampling of their possible options:
In Marin, the Novato Theater Company has scheduled four weekends of “variety” entertainment, starting in September, featuring open-mic nights for performers of all ages, comedy and a play reading. They’ll follow that up in late October with a full production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
September will also bring the Ross Valley Players production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s uproarious comedy Ripcord, a show last seen locally in a very successful production at Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater just before the pandemic hit. RVP’s Barn Theatre will then host the Mountain Play production of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot in November.
In mid-September, the Marin Shakespeare Company will present a new, pandemic-inspired version of Sarah Shourd’s play The BOX. It’s an immersive, socially distanced experience about resistance and survival in solitary confinement in a U.S prison, with each person in the audience seated in their own square of a grid at San Rafael’s Forest Meadows Amphitheatre.
In Sonoma County, the aforementioned Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma opens with Cry It Out, a dark-hued comedy about motherhood, female friendship, economic status and class.
The Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park will open with the pandemic-delayed production of David Templeton’s new sci-fi play Galatea. The set has been sitting on the Spreckels black box stage since the show shut down three days prior to its opening last year.
Award-winning drag performer Michael Phillis takes his “Patty from HR” character out of San Francisco’s Oasis Club and brings her to Sebastopol’s Main Stage West for A Zoom with a View, Patty’s/Michael’s response to the current state of America.
Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse follows up their currently running Love, Loss, and What I Wore with a main-stage production in mid-September of Murder for Two. It’s a musical murder mystery performed entirely by a cast of two.
Left Edge Theatre will open their season with a couple of one-acts. Lauren Gunderson’s two-hander I and You is paired with Beautiful Monsters, an avant-garde performance piece written by Kelly Gray.
Sonoma’s Rotary Stage transforms into a decaying Hollywood mansion situated on Sunset Boulevard. The Sonoma Arts Live production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is scheduled to open in late September.
San Francisco-based performer Dan Hoyle brings his long-running solo show Border People to the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center for a single night in September. The Beard of Avon, a farcical look at Shakespeare, will follow it in October.
The current drought won’t prevent Disney’s The Little Mermaid from splashing around Napa next month. Lucky Penny Productions has scheduled the family musical for a three-week run.
Check each theater company’s website for the latest on dates, times, ticket prices and possible postponements or cancellations.
Until this week, the only thing Rodney Dangerfield and I had in common was a penchant for one-liners and general anxiety about our respectability. Then we both went “back to school.” His experience was fictional—apart from the cameo by a real-life Kurt Vonnegut—and arrived in the local cineplex as the movie Back to School. My back-to-school experience was a protracted year-long Zoom odyssey as I finished a couple of semester’s worth of units at virtualized San Francisco State University.
What does this say about the relative merits of having a college degree in my industry? I’m not sure, though I think it speaks volumes about how we learn to write, which is and always has been by doing. Which SF State was fairly rigorous about—my last semester, which ended a couple of weeks ago, required me to write a children’s book, a research paper on a public relations campaign and a feature-length screenplay, all within the span of six weeks. This occurred, of course, while producing the newspapers and magazines required by my day job—not to mention a handful of writing-related side hustles. Tens of thousands of words poured out of my fingers into this laptop, and from my thumbs into my phone, where I do a fair amount of composition these days. So, if my columns sometimes read as prolonged texts, now you know why.
To say the output nearly killed me would be overly dramatic. Anyone who thinks writing is a hardship in any way is doing it wrong. It’s one of the most privileged gigs a dropout can have. The work did, however, temporarily turn me into a word-addled crank, from which I’m still recovering, glass by glass.
I never graduated from anything, unless we pretend that eighth grade promotion is meaningful to anyone but eighth graders. Sometime in the late ’80s, I left high school via the California Proficiency Exam, which I passed twice—once for myself and once for a dyslexic friend, for whom the testers would not allot extra time. This was during the Golden Age of fake IDs. That said, I think I did “technically” graduate from high school—it’s a cesspool of semantics into which I won’t wade. I was quite proud of being a “dropout,” which I boldly stated on my bios until a publicist for a project I was on asked if I could supply a version that was less, ahem, “punk rock.”
Now my bio reads, “Daedalus Howell has a bachelor’s degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing that only took 27 years to finish.”
For Todd Lake, owner of Salt & Stone, there is something magical about restaurants and hospitality—though there’s nothing make-believe about the enchanting experience of a golden hour dinner at Salt & Stone. What began as a COVID-era precaution became an emblem of Sonoma County’s best views: intimate tables on a flagstone patio, surrounding a peaceful koi pond, nestled in the heart of the vineyards of Sonoma Valley. “The views are amazing and always changing with the season,” Lake says. “I believe that it literally elevates our ability to create incredible hospitality and guest experiences.”
Rarely does a play’s title capture the complete essence of a script better than Nora and Delia Ephron’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore. The Ephron sisters’ adaptation of the 1995 book of the same name by Ilene Beckerman is Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse’s season opener and runs live, on stage through August 29.
The Ephrons, whose best-known collaboration is the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan film You’ve Got Mail, enhanced Beckerman’s book with personal recollections as well as stories from friends that touched on the life experiences unique to women and the fashion connections to them.
Five stools and five music stands greet you upon entering the theatre. Two projection screens and a single chandelier adorn the back of the stage. Those screens will soon be filled with renderings of the different clothes talked about by the five performers who take the stage – Gillian Eichenberger, Elaine Jennings, Karen Pinomaki, Brittany Nicole Sims, and Jill Wagoner. Sims and Wagoner will be replaced by Heather Gibeson and Daniela Innocenti Beem for the show’s closing weekend.
The performers relate, via monologues or short scenes, recollections triggered by clothing that range from amusingly sweet to poignantly sad to boisterously hilarious. While Wagoner’s diatribe on the purse was the highlight of the evening, all five Libby Oberlin-directed performers had moments that entertained or emotionally resonated with the audience.
The opening night performance ran two hours and ten minutes inclusive of a twenty-minute intermission. While pacing might improve somewhat over the run, the show would play better as a 90-minute one act.
Covid protocols in place included the need for audience members to provide proof of vaccination and to wear a mask the entire time they were in the building, which they did. Individuals feeling the need for a “mask break” were encouraged to enjoy their intermission purchases outside of the theatre. A pre-show announcement noted that the entire cast, crew, and staff of the Playhouse were fully vaccinated.
The cast wore face shields that affected the quality of the amplified sound, but it’s a trade-off I’m willing to accept in these times. An erratic speaker in the area in which I originally sat was more of a distraction.
Love, Loss, and What I Wore is a rare theatrical opportunity for women to commiserate and rejoice over shared experiences and for men to perhaps gain some insight into those experiences.
‘Love, Loss, and What I Wore’ runs live through August 29 on the Monroe Stage at 6th Street Playhouse. 52 W. 6th Street, Santa Rosa. Fri. & Sat., 7:30pm; Sat. & Sun., 2pm. $18-$29. Also available for streaming. 707.523.4185. 6thstreeetplayhouse.com
Things aren’t always what they seem. Take the desert, for instance. Some people—most, perhaps—see it as ugly, barren and dangerous. But to me it is a place of intense beauty, adventure and freedom.
And so, where many people opt for annual vacations at “safe” luxury resorts or beach cabañas, I take my two weeks in the desert every year. Or, in the wasteland, as I call it. Because where I go is so far out there that it is way beyond the pale of civilization.
It’s a little over 80 degrees out, and at 6,000 feet in Arizona’s shadeless Painted Desert, the sun blazes down like a nuclear bomb at the white-hot moment of detonation. I’m melting inside my clothes. A slight figure in well-used work garb sits on a tractor ahead of me, slowly churning up the dust. Dozens upon dozens of tires lay all around in the sand. Slowly, the tractor scours out a shallow pit between them, pushing the sand into a pile at one end. I swing into action, piling the tires in tiers around the edge of the pit. Then the tractor begins scooping up sand and dumping it into the tires, filling the columns. I assist the process, shoveling the overflow back into the columns.
An hour later, I signal the tractor pilot, Richard Kozac. He turns off the engine and saunters over. Kozac, the caretaker of this desert place, lives a few miles down the road with his horses. He is a colorful character, as stand-up a man as I’ve ever met. At this moment, he may as well be made of desert dust. I hand him a cold beer and some cash, both of which he contemplates for several seconds. Then he nods, smiles, and cracks the beer. We stand there in the bright heat, drinking and gazing at the tire bunker we’ve built, and I’m pleased that my tribe, the cannibal biker gang Machine Army, finally has permanent headquarters.
COMMAND POST Tires, pallets and dirt are the free building blocks of the post-apocalyptic world. (Photo by Mark Fernquest)
We may as well be on the moon, Kozac and I. Or, more apropos, the set of a Mad Max movie. Wire fences, scrap-wood structures and walls made of tires and mud and stacked railroad ties cover the barren sand, which stretches out to all sides. Vehicles lay about the shanty town—my own outlaw Honda 70 dirt bike, a rusty ’77 Monte Carlo on oversized off-road tires and random, burned-out car bodies. I’m 16 hours from my home in Sebastopol, and this is my favorite place in the world.
Welcome to Uranium Springs—the town that doesn’t exist. My tribe and I have been coming here for years now. The freedom is unparalleled, as are the wind, the heat and the dust. There’s no other experience like it.
Uranium Springs is an artistic convergence. It draws a certain type of person. To get here is a feat in and of itself. Only those “mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage,” as we say, even contemplate coming. Are we hobbyists, a cult, a club, a sect? The answer is not that simple. We are an amalgam of artists, creatives, cosplayers, engineers, survivalists, loners, drinkers and “preenactors” who all like the post-apocalyptic genre. I’m not one for “scenes,” but a strong sense of brotherhood binds this group together.
My interest in towns that don’t exist began in 1988—the summer I hitchhiked to Alaska from UC Santa Cruz. I spent the month of July in a tiny fishing town, working in a cannery and living in a scrapwood shack in “the Cove,” a village of sorts, where all the seasonal workers lived. Trails, tents and odd structures filled the forest; about 90 people lived in various camps.
Six years later I happened upon the desert, while camping in Joshua Tree National Park’s highly magical and surreal topography. The barren landscape caught my Bay Area-raised self unawares, creeping up on me like a thief in the night. During the next 15 years, I traveled there over 25 times. In Joshua Tree I had beautiful dreams and visions, so much so that I call it my cathedral. If spiritual “power spots” exist, surely it is mine.
Then came the wasteland.
I rediscovered my Mad Max roots while attending a post-apocalyptic event called Wasteland Weekend in the Mojave Desert in 2011, and followed the breadcrumbs to Uranium Springs, driving there in 2013 to attend my first on-site event with about 60 attendees camped in an empty meadow. In the years since, the event has grown to about 400 people, and the meadow has transformed into a hard-scrabble junktown.
Uranium Springs is an event space, but this year the official event—or “Detonation,” usually held over Memorial Day weekend—has been delayed until October, due to Covid. So, I’m instead attending a long “build weekend.”
What, exactly, is a build weekend? The owner of Uranium Springs, Rev’rend Lawless, of Tucson, is a most interesting man. By his decree, every post-apocalyptic tribe that attends Detonation may stake a claim to a 50-by-50-foot patch of ground on site, and build—within certain generous parameters—a permanent, post-apocalyptic-themed camp. As long as said tribe members attend Detonation every year and pay a modest fee which helps cover site maintenance, they can keep their claim. Year by year, the camps become more and more elaborate.
Except for Machine Army’s. Our members live so far away—from Maryland to California—that merely attending is the most we’ve ever been able to accomplish. Until now. Finally, no event—just time to work on our camp.
It’s a slow week. My Texan tribemates—Dr. Freight Train, Krash ’n’ Burn and Rocket—show up, along with 50 or so various other people. Without a mandatory costume-wearing requirement or throngs of partiers beckoning from surrounding camps, my tribemates and I work on the bunker, which turns into a spontaneous artistic endeavor. We add more tires to the walls, then find metal poles we stashed in the bushes years ago and drive them into the dirt inside the tire stacks. Then I find some abandoned pallets, and we drop them over the metal posts and shore them up with scrap wood and decking screws, to form a breezy palisade on top of the tires.
We discuss plans for our next build weekend. We need to set posts for a roof, but the clay beneath us is very dense. However, our neighbors, the Kult of Kazmodaa, dug multiple 3-foot-deep post holes by hand, so we have our work set out for us.
OLD SCHOOL The author chills outside the Machine Army command bunker with tribe members Dr. Freight Train (left) and Krash ‘n’ Burn (right). (Photo by Sara Cate)
Out here we are impossibly far from the American Dream. But the American Dream was never my dream. Suburbia was never my home. By my estimation, America peaked about the time I was born, in 1968, when we put the first man on the moon. This circus has been a slow-motion riot ever since, swirling slowly down the drain. While I spend years scratching out an ever-more-meaningless existence on America’s dying streets, I dream of this, the wasteland—a freer life with community, adventure and actual value.
We have a new neighbor, Haylar Garcia—or “Mad Mex”—who hails from Denver. A screenwriter/film director/social media engineer in the real world, he single handedly built a movie-worthy camp called the Aftermath Theater—replete with a school bus projector room, an outdoor movie screen and a “make-out” car in the faux parking lot—on the plot adjacent ours.
The setup is stellar, but it is his outrageously post-apocalyptic car that steals my heart. The Interceptor Drag Special is a ’73 Mustang Grande which he took down to bare metal before widening the wheel wells, installing a roll cage and adding a positraction rear differential. He replaced the stock 351 with a 402 big block Chevy with a wet nitrous tunnel ram and two hollie carbs, then wasted the exterior and interior in the name of the apocalypse. It may be his pride and joy, but it makes me very, very happy. “I’ll never be able to open the nitrous,” he tells me. “The engine will blow through the hood!” But if he’s driving at 90 miles an hour down the Fury Road when nitrous is needed, will he have anything left to lose?
ROAD WARRIOR The wasted-out interior of Mad Mex’s nitro-injected, high-speed Interceptor. (Photo by Mark Fernquest)
“After doing Wasteland Weekend for three years straight, I began to get the itch to be able to contribute to a PA [post-apocalyptic] community in a more meaningful way,” Garcia says. “Wasteland is an amazing event, but what Rev’rend Lawless, the EOD [End of Days, the group responsible for on-site events] staff and tribes and the Uranium Springs community at large have built is something very different and alluring to artists who want to express themselves through apocalyptic themes more than once a year. The people are incredible, the builds are permanent and there are opportunities for participating in build weekends throughout the year, which really gives you a chance to create something lasting. I found—and still find—that irresistible.”
What inspired the Aftermath Theater in particular? “Well, being a filmmaker, I loved the idea of having a visual attraction in the apocalypse; truly it was inspired by A Boy and His Dog, where people seem to mill in and out of the broken theater space, watching scraps of anything left over from the Old World,” he says. “So, after getting my idea and basic blueprint cleared for a spot at Uranium Springs by the powers that be, I started to come out for every build weekend I could. It’s been a lot of work in some very challenging conditions, from 100+ degrees to waking up shivering and finding it had snowed overnight out of nowhere. It took me about 9 trips, which averaged from 9 days to 22 days at a time, to get the drive[-in] into a working state.”
One must be careful out here in the wasteland. The sun sears down mercilessly through the rarified atmosphere. It burns electrolytes and it burns skin. Countless weeks spent out here collectively caused permanent sun damage on my neck. What can I do, but wear the discoloration like a badge of honor? Radiation is what made Uranium Springs great.
But the winters are harsh, too. So harsh that homesteaders move to this region and leave within months, unable to withstand the intense cold, the high winds or the deep mud that leaves them stranded for days on end.
Another neighbor, Annelise Williamson, 49, hails from Santa Fe. After five years, she has yet to acquire a wasteland name. A silversmith for the past 30-plus years, she recently transitioned into costuming in the film industry. She and her partner, Haydn Ford, have attended Detonation for five years. Their tribe, the LZRDF***S, has a wonderfully deep-desert, Western vibe to it. Williamson and I perform a wasteland trade, in which I barter some of my customized leather wasteland pouches for a set of her handmade, film industry-grade metal wasteland “sand” goggles. They are one the highest quality items I have ever owned. Her work is showcased via @annelisewilliamsonmakes on Instagram.
In the evenings we hit up a pot-luck at the Turbulence camp, or walk or drive over to the Wreck Room, a lounge on the far edge of town where the proprietors, McAwful and Auntie Virus, wine and dine the entire encampment to the tune of “Pipes” and other attending musicians.
One evening, buzzing off a few beers, I take off on my Outlaw 70 for a twilight ride. A quarter-mile down the track I hit a corner too fast, slide, hit the underbrush and go down. It’s a pitch-perfect crash, choreographed to perfection, almost a gentle roll. First my leg hits the dirt, then my hips and ribs, then, as if an afterthought, my head. Boink! I lay there in the shrubbery, staring at the sky, wondering if I’m OK. Of course I am. I’m cautious, and I’m at Uranium Springs, where crashing on my toy-like kid’s dirt bike is part of the novelty.
And yet, the next morning I have a black eye, my hip is bruised and several of my ribs are out of alignment. While pulling on my shirt, I feel an odd, grinding movement in my chest. It feels weird, like a bruise, but doesn’t hurt. Now I belong to the wasteland.
SUICIDE MACHINES Rev’rend Lawless (left) and Mad Mex pose beside their highly customized wasteland vehicles. (Photo by Mark Fernquest)
All is good. The long weekend ends, I say goodbye to my wasteland friends, and we scatter to the four corners of the Old World. Sixteen hours later, I’m back in Sebastopol. Ten days after that, my bruises heal. But the wasteland stays with me. Haylar Garcia’s last words resonate in my ears: “I find Uranium Springs inspiring every time I go there. And I cannot wait for Detonation 6.5, which is coming up on us fast this October. I encourage anyone who loves PA [the post-apocalyptic genre] to get a ticket, it’s unlike anything else in the country.”
A couple of months ago we learned that the Sebastopol Living Peace Wall committee is planning to honor Rep. Barbara Lee as a “peacemaker” Sept. 11, along with three local activists. But wait a minute, we thought, she has a terrible record when it comes to supporting peace and justice for Palestinians.
For example, in 2016, when Lee was on the Democratic Party platform committee, she rejected a rather mild amendment, put forward by Bernie Sanders, to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the construction of illegal settlements there, and to aid in rebuilding Gaza. She also refuses to co-sign a bill by Rep. Betty McCollum, which would prevent Israel from using the $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid it receives annually, for the military detention of Palestinian children, for the seizure and destruction of Palestinian property, forcible transfer of Palestinians in the West Bank and illegal annexation of Palestinian territory.
Thirty members of the House have signed on as co-sponsors, including Rep. Jared Huffman—but not Barbara Lee.
And most recently, as chair of a House appropriations sub-committee, she shepherded a bill which continues to give Israel its annual military aid with no conditions. The bill also provides $225 million in aid for Palestinians, but with conditions so egregious that it would prevent them from acting on their own behalf in the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
It is unlikely that the Sebastopol Living Peace Wall committee had any knowledge of Lee’s position on Palestine/Israel—at least until we met with the Wall’s director and sent letters to him and his board members.
But that is just the point. For more than 70 years Americans, including our elected officials, have been led to believe that supporting Israel, and ignoring the Palestinians, was the right thing to do. But in the past year, three human rights organizations have crafted reports calling Israel an apartheid state.
So, Barbara Lee, and others who are Progressive Except for Palestine (PEP), isn’t it time to reexamine your unconditional support of Israel, and step out onto the side of justice for all?
Lois Pearlman is a member of the Ad Hoc Committee to Call Out PEP’s.
The views expressed in Open Mic do not necessarily reflect the views of the Bohemian or its staff.
So many cultures revere their elders; they are held in the highest regard, protected and cared for by society. I value our elected officials who take this same approach. Leaders like our District Attorney Jill Ravitch, who has consistently proven her passion for protecting seniors by prosecuting those despicable people who abuse them. She even opened the Family Justice Center of County County so that seniors who have been victimized have a safe and supportive place to go to get all of the vital services they need to not only get justice, but start to heal. Contrast that with a local developer whose company left frail, vulnerable seniors to die as the Tubbs fire roared toward their assisted living facility … and then was so angry that our DA held him accountable that he is trying to recall her. To me there is only one choice in this recall election. Please join me in voting no on this revenge recall.
Marcie Call
Santa Rosa
Chronic War
I strongly oppose the United States’ chronic involvement in wars all over the world. The use of violence and wars have definitely failed to bring any semblance of lasting peace and happiness to the human race. So if we Americans sincerely want to become a positive force in international relations, our nation must search for more sane and humane alternatives to fighting and killing as our way of resolving conflicts and disagreements with other nations. The United States government argues that other nations or groups of people are doing wrong things and so must be stopped with force. Yet our government’s use of military invasions only convinces those other nations that they must practice even greater violence to protect themselves from us. It must be obvious that saving humankind from the constant suffering and hell of future wars requires something better and more intelligent than fighting with other nations to see who can practice the greatest violence.
Two lawsuits that made local news last week feature questions about freedom of speech in Petaluma.
A resident is suing the city for free speech violations one month after he was kicked off a city committee tasked with discussing race relations and policing. And a local company won the right to advertise its plant-based products with words historically reserved for traditional dairy.
City Committee
On Thursday, Aug. 12, an attorney representing Stefan Perez filed a lawsuit alleging that the City of Petaluma violated Perez’s freedom of speech when the city council voted last month to remove him from a 28-member advisory committee formed earlier this year.
In March, the Petaluma City Council appointed Perez to the Ad Hoc Community Advisory Committee (AHCAC), a group formed to offer the city advice on race relations and police reforms.
In the months before the council voted on July 12 to remove him from the AHCAC, Perez’s past social media posts came under scrutiny. While many committee members and Petalumans consider the posts racist, Perez and his attorneys insist they were meant as jokes.
The July 12 resolution used to remove Perez from the AHCAC relied on the city council’s inherent power to remove or replace members of it with or without cause. A 7-page staff report explaining the resolution does not mention Perez’s social media posts and does not cite a specific reason for Perez’s removal.
The lawsuit alleges that the council’s action was “motivated at least in part by Stefan Perez’s participation in the protected activity of making social media posts.”
Perez’s attorney, D. Gill Sperlein, separately asked Northern District Court Judge Jon Tigar to enact a temporary restraining order forcing the city to halt two upcoming AHCAC meetings unless Perez is able to participate as a member of the committee. In an Aug. 13 response, Tigar denied the request, allowing the city to hold an Aug. 17 meeting without re-appointing Perez.
In his response, Tigar noted that Sperlein’s legal filings do not explain why Perez waited to file for an emergency temporary restraining order against the city days before the AHCAC’s Aug. 17 meeting instead of when the city council removed him from the committee a week before the committee’s July 20 meeting.
“Plaintiff’s unexplained delay in seeking relief undermines his claim that he will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of a [temporary restraining order] TRO,” Tigar wrote in part.
Perez’s social media posts first received broad public attention in May after Chad Loder, a Twitter user with over 100,000 followers, shared some of Perez’s past posts online.
Initially, the city seemed to want to discourage discussion of the issue.
On June 9 the mayor and two city council members signed a letter urging committee members to refrain from “participating in disparaging behaviors on social media and elsewhere.” Although the statement does not name Perez, it came as discussion about his past social media posts raged online.
The statement also says that “the First Amendment prohibits the City from regulating Committee members’ speech, or participation in the AHCAC based on protected speech.”
However, according to a timeline laid out in Perez’s lawsuit, city officials soon started to ask Perez to resign from the committee.
Hours before a June 15 AHCAC meeting, three city employees requested that Perez step down from the committee. Perez agreed to skip the June 15 meeting but did not resign.
In a July 1 phone call, city attorney Eric Danly again asked Perez to resign, this time allegedly stating that the city council would vote to remove him if he did not leave on his own accord by 5pm on July 7.
At the July 12 meeting, the city council voted 5–1 to remove Perez.
During the meeting, Councilmember Mike Healy, the lone dissenting vote, condemned the resolution as a violation of Perez’s First Amendment rights. City attorney Danly and other members of the council defended the action’s legality during a public discussion of the item.
At an Aug. 2 meeting, the city council privately discussed a letter from Sperlein, Perez’s attorney, threatening legal action unless they reinstated Perez to the committee. The council did not act and Sperlein filed the lawsuit on Aug. 12.
The city’s response to Perez’s allegations remains unclear as of press time on Tuesday, Aug. 17. Tigar ordered the city to respond to Perez’s request for a restraining order by Wednesday, Aug. 18.
NOTE: The city’s Aug. 18 responses to Perez’s request for a temporary restraining order are available here and here.Perez’s original complaint and request for an emergency order are available here and here. Judge Tigar’s response is available here.
Freedom to Label
On Aug. 11, the Animal Legal Defense Fund announced a court success on behalf of companies selling plant-based dairy alternatives.
In early 2020, Petaluma-based Miyoko’s Creamery received an enforcement letter from the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) telling the company not to label its products using terms such as “cheese” and “dairy” even if they used qualifiers that noted the food was plant-based. The CDFA alleged that the company’s labeling practices violated Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules.
In response, the company filed a lawsuit alleging that the order was a violation of the First Amendment. The court granted the company temporary permission to use the terms last year and, on Aug. 11, ruled in favor of Miyoko’s indefinitely.
Miyoko’s founder Miyoko Schinner and her supporters seem to view the victory as part of a larger fight, as the market for dairy alternatives continues to grow.
“Food is ever-evolving, and so, too, should language to reflect how people actually use speech to describe the foods they eat. We are extremely pleased by this ruling and believe that it will help set a precedent for the future of food,” Schinner said in a press release last week.
Indeed, consumption of plant-based dairy products has grown quickly in recent years, but still makes up a fairly small portion of total consumption. “Fifteen percent of fluid milk sales in retail are now plant-based, plant-based butter is at 7 percent, and plant-based coffee creamer 6 percent,” Vox reported this April.
After twice seeing Ron Rogers’ powerful documentary “3 Seconds in October: The Shooting of Andy Lopez,” this concerned citizen was more than a little interested to see what Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch would have to say about it at the Oakmont Democrats meeting on July 22.
The film revealed that the Santa Rosa Police Department, which was charged with investigating the death, applied a heavy layer of twisted logic into its investigation of Sonoma County Sheriff’s Deputy Erick Gelhaus, who shot the 13-year-old boy as he quietly walked down the street with an airsoft rifle in his left hand.
As shown in the documentary, Gelhaus mistakenly took the toy gun as real. He jumped out of the squad car, shouted “drop the gun” and began shooting “within a couple seconds,” after issuing the command. All told, Gelhuas pumped seven rounds into the boy in six seconds.
In the immediate aftermath of the death, Gelhaus was escorted to meet with his union rep and an attorney in a hotel room for six hours before reporting to the police to give his testimony. At the outset, Detective Brian Boettger advised Gelhaus that “this is a criminal investigation and you are being interviewed as the victim, strictly the victim at this point.”
That astounding revelation with its undeniable bias made clear that the singular purpose of this investigation would be to clear Gelhaus of any criminal charges. During a 2014 press conference, Ravitch exonerated the deputy, saying that his actions had been “reasonable.”
At the Oakmont meeting, Ravitch tried to defend her decision by repeating some of the old tropes in the case, i.e. “He didn’t know that [Andy] was a child. He saw who he thought was a young adult.” And the most egregious of the lot: “He saw what he believed to be a weapon pointed toward him and he reasonably believed that he was at imminent threat of great bodily injury and harm.”
As we all are now well aware from Gelhaus’ 2015 deposition in the Lopez family’s civil suit, when asked “Did he actually point the gun at you,” Gelhaus responded, “I don’t know.”
A bit later in the testimony, Gelhaus was given a replica weapon and asked to demonstrate just how Andy turned. He held the rifle in his left hand and turned his torso slightly to the right. “It was this,” he said. And, as clearly shown in the film, the rifle remained squarely pointed at the ground.
At this juncture at the Oakmont Dems meeting, this member of the public emphasized the emergence of significant new information about this case and implored Ms. Ravitch to reopen the case. She responded that, if provided new information, she would “take a look at it.”
You already have all of this information but here it is again, Jill. We expect you to take action before mid-September. We demand justice for Andy and we’re not going away.
Kathleen Finigan is a Sonoma County resident and longtime law enforcement accountability activist.
With the threat of another disastrous wildfire season looming, Sonoma County farmworkers and their supporters are pressuring local wine businesses to improve working conditions during wildfires.
Last summer and fall, farmworkers throughout the state worked outdoors as over 4 million acres burned and the air filled with smoke. During both the 2017 and 2019 wildfire seasons, Sonoma County allowed over...
Fall is the time when a theater company’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of a new season. Announcements are made, rehearsals are scheduled and the sound of buzzing returns to auditoriums as audiences enter and take their seats in support of live performance.
After being dark for a year-and-a-half, California’s June “reopening” gave theater artists hope that the hunger they...
Until this week, the only thing Rodney Dangerfield and I had in common was a penchant for one-liners and general anxiety about our respectability. Then we both went “back to school.” His experience was fictional—apart from the cameo by a real-life Kurt Vonnegut—and arrived in the local cineplex as the movie Back to School. My back-to-school experience was a...
For Todd Lake, owner of Salt & Stone, there is something magical about restaurants and hospitality—though there’s nothing make-believe about the enchanting experience of a golden hour dinner at Salt & Stone. What began as a COVID-era precaution became an emblem of Sonoma County’s best views: intimate tables on a flagstone patio, surrounding a peaceful koi pond, nestled in...
Rarely does a play’s title capture the complete essence of a script better than Nora and Delia Ephron’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore. The Ephron sisters’ adaptation of the 1995 book of the same name by Ilene Beckerman is Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse’s season opener and runs live, on stage through August 29.
The Ephrons, whose best-known collaboration is the Tom...
Things aren’t always what they seem. Take the desert, for instance. Some people—most, perhaps—see it as ugly, barren and dangerous. But to me it is a place of intense beauty, adventure and freedom.
And so, where many people opt for annual vacations at “safe” luxury resorts or beach cabañas, I take my two weeks in the desert every year. Or,...
A couple of months ago we learned that the Sebastopol Living Peace Wall committee is planning to honor Rep. Barbara Lee as a “peacemaker” Sept. 11, along with three local activists. But wait a minute, we thought, she has a terrible record when it comes to supporting peace and justice for Palestinians.
For example, in 2016, when Lee was on...
Respect Elders
So many cultures revere their elders; they are held in the highest regard, protected and cared for by society. I value our elected officials who take this same approach. Leaders like our District Attorney Jill Ravitch, who has consistently proven her passion for protecting seniors by prosecuting those despicable people who abuse them. She even opened the Family...
Two lawsuits that made local news last week feature questions about freedom of speech in Petaluma.
A resident is suing the city for free speech violations one month after he was kicked off a city committee tasked with discussing race relations and policing. And a local company won the right to advertise its plant-based products with words historically reserved for...
After twice seeing Ron Rogers' powerful documentary “3 Seconds in October: The Shooting of Andy Lopez,” this concerned citizen was more than a little interested to see what Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch would have to say about it at the Oakmont Democrats meeting on July 22.
The film revealed that the Santa Rosa Police Department, which was charged...
