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.
Few, if any, individuals like to hear the words “I told you so.” This seems to be as true for people who live in the North Bay as in any other part of the world.
Humans, as a species, like to believe we’re infallible, and scoff at what passes for wisdom in hindsight. The trick, if you can call it that, is to be as honest as can be in the present moment, but not so honest that people turn away and won’t listen. The truth hurts. These reflections are sparked by a recent article in The New York Times, the newspaper that has told the truth about the North Bay more often than any other publication, except the one you are now reading.
The article describes the devastation in vineyards and wineries in what ought to be called “Fire Country,” a place—like many others—where citizens try to deny climate change. I recently received a Facebook post from a dear friend who boasted about the bounty of her organic vegetable garden, and its connection to “Mother Earth,” and insisted that all was right with the world. I wonder how much longer she and others like her can avoid the reality of the fires that have swept across our hills and valleys and wrecked vineyards, wineries and homes, to say nothing of the droughts that make it increasingly difficult to grow grapes and vegetables.
When I complained to a friend, who raises chickens and who gives me eggs, that North Bay citizens are often Pollyannas who sit on their hands and hope for the best, he replied, “I’m spreading hope like chicken manure in the garden.”
I’ll take the manure any day. But spare me the hope that helps no one and I promise not to tell you “I told you so.”
Recently, the City of San Rafael approved fee hikes for the public library, parks and recreation, and child care services. It’s been 10 years since the citywide fee schedule has been updated. The City hired MGT Consulting to assess the fees, comparing fees with similar communities. Not mentioned in the assessment was the seven-year agreement between the City and Terrapin Crossroads to lease Beach Park, a publicly owned, three-quarter-acre waterfront site adjacent to Terrapin, which is up for renewal in September. The lease could be renewed, or the park could revert back to the public.
Terrapin Crossroads has turned this public property into a successful family-friendly concert venue serving food and beverages. It now appears to be an important and profitable part of the operation. In the initiating lease, Terrapin was to pay the City $15,000 a year in rent which would be offset by any improvements made by Terrapin. Terrapin holds many events at Beach Park, and it seems likely that Terrapin could net $15,000 with a couple of events. During any lease renewal meeting, might it be wise for the City to propose a profit-sharing arrangement with Terrapin? Also, the terms of the lease called for the installation, within 60 days, of an ADA-compliant public access dock. This has not been done.
To date, no dedicated park public restrooms have been built. If the park is ever to revert to public use, the promised dock and additionally some permanent ADA compliant restrooms are necessary. Since Beach Park has become integral to the business of Terrapin, I believe the current or a future city council would be loathe to wrest it back for the public. However, going forward, an equitable—say 50/50—profit-sharing arrangement is worth exploring in any new lease agreement. Any money from such an agreement could be used for the maintenance of other city parks. Since Terrapin is located in the Canal area, maybe profits could benefit the local community.
J.S. Danielson
San Rafael
The Kindness of Strangers
I had to take my dog to her vet on Center Boulevard in Fairfax. I turned into the parking area at the end of her building to turn around so that I could park in front of the vet clinic. I turned right out of the driveway and, rather than going into the traffic, I made a sharp right turn, hoping to slide into a parking space. I couldn’t see the funny, curved structure jutting out into the street, and got stuck on it. A crowd of men quickly appeared, suggestions were made, various things tried but they couldn’t move my car. A man with a truck offered to tow me out. Another man got into the driver’s seat and they skillfully moved my car and parked it for me, then came into the vet clinic to tell me that all was well. I didn’t get any names, nor did I get to say, “Thank you” to most of them. I hope some of them see my letter.
I also hope that the public works department in Fairfax sees this and removes this weird fixture. I was told that people get stuck on it all the time.
With Warren Moon—the Houston Oilers Pro Football Hall of Famer—as its spokesman, you can bet that Sweet Earth scores big-time with cannabis consumers. Like many aging as well as active athletes, Moon, once a star quarterback, uses Sweet Earth’s CBD products, including a muscle rub that relieves aches and pains, and that’s applied as easily as an underarm deodorant.
For 23 seasons, Moon was bruised by defensive linemen. “I have personally seen the effectiveness of the products,” he says in a testimonial.
Moon isn’t the only ex-footballer at Sweet Earth, which cultivates cannabis on a 100-acre farm in Applegate Valley, Oregon and sells its organic hemp products in the U.S. and around the world. And, yes—hemp is cannabis, minus the THC.
The company’s CEO, Peter Espig, played pro-football in Japan, earned an MBA at Columbia University and shined on Wall Street. At Goldman Sachs he raised billions. He’s still raising big money and pushing Sweet Earth to be a leader in the intensely competitive CBD field.
“I don’t use THC,” Espig tells me. “I don’t smoke THC, don’t want to promote THC and I would never work at a marijuana company.”
Sweet Earth is best known for its rubs and skin- and body-care products for men and women. The products include a CBD hydration cream, a CBD salve and a hydrating lavender, oat and honey facial cleanser. Plus, there’s a CBD rejuvenating eucalyptus mineral salt soak.
If your body isn’t purring now, it probably will be after both the soak and the salve, which “takes about 40 minutes to get beneath the skin and into the muscle,” Espig tells me.
The same 1960s folks who craved “instant gratification” now want “instant effect.” Sweet Earth aims to give ’em what they want.
Like Espig and Moon, I’m an ex-footballer who made the all-star team in Suffolk County, New York my senior year of high school. Later, I played rugby for the Columbia Blues. I have a bad knee and arthritis. I’ve used the Sweet Earth CBD salve and found that it takes away the pain.
Sweet Earth also makes organic hemp cigarettes without pesticides, tars or nicotine, that contain only 0.3% THC. Espig doesn’t smoke anything except the occasional cigar, when he wants to celebrate. “People who want to quit smoking tobacco, turn to our cigarettes,” Espig says. “They’re rolled like cigars, have brandy added in the curing process and don’t smell like marijuana. They’re the same price as a pack of tobacco cigarettes.” Sounds to me like they’re made for Wall Street and Main Street, too. I’m an ex-pipe smoker. I think the CBD cigs are cool. They give me a buzz.
Jonah Raskin is the author of “Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War.”
“What do you mean,” a Spirit reader asked, “when you say the ego feels deeply threatened by the so-called sacred marriage of the sun and moon?” It’s quite simple: The ego—or what our conscious mind thinks it means when it says “I, Joe,” or “I, Jane”—views certain qualities as belonging to itself but not to others. It classifies that which belongs to itself as subject, or “I,” and that which doesn’t as object, or “not-I.”
And so we seek certain qualities in the opposite sex because we believe we don’t have those qualities and need to find them. Likewise, we may resent people who are strong, sexy and successful because we don’t believe those traits apply to us. In Jungian terms, the undeveloped qualities we categorize as “not-I” belong to the shadow, while contrasexual characteristics belong to the anima for males and the animus for females.
But in the inner journey of the ars regia or “Royal Art” of alchemy, such oppositions are broken down and cooked in a cauldron. Before rebirth can occur, however, there is a long period bordering on madness as the ego no longer knows what it is, resists transformation and fights to hold on to its familiar self-construct.
Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. On the path of the wisdom tradition, we encounter the doctrine that in order to truly know something one must experience the thing, and in order to do that, one must become it.
Take the movie The Karate Kid. The weakling who could never imagine standing up to a bully wants to feel confident, but in order to feel that he must know he can defend himself, and in order to know that, he must be able to actually do it. Transcending this paradox is the very nature of hero mythology, as the weakling-subject becomes the distant object, or tough kid, that he never thought he could be. The breaking down of the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between “I” and “not-I” is a recurring theme of metaphysics, as in the ancient texts from India known as The Upanishads.
So with the inner union of sun and moon, or masculine and feminine energies, we may come to the realization that the long-sought object of our desire is in fact merely a dimension of our own personality. But it is trapped in our unconscious and therefore experienced as an object, or “not-I.”
Achieving such a knowledge of oneself should help eliminate projecting onto others, so we can see who they truly are and not what we want them to be.
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...
Few, if any, individuals like to hear the words “I told you so.” This seems to be as true for people who live in the North Bay as in any other part of the world.
Humans, as a species, like to believe we’re infallible, and scoff at what passes for wisdom in hindsight. The trick, if you can call it...
Fee Hikes Rankle
Recently, the City of San Rafael approved fee hikes for the public library, parks and recreation, and child care services. It’s been 10 years since the citywide fee schedule has been updated. The City hired MGT Consulting to assess the fees, comparing fees with similar communities. Not mentioned in the assessment was the seven-year agreement between the...
With Warren Moon—the Houston Oilers Pro Football Hall of Famer—as its spokesman, you can bet that Sweet Earth scores big-time with cannabis consumers. Like many aging as well as active athletes, Moon, once a star quarterback, uses Sweet Earth’s CBD products, including a muscle rub that relieves aches and pains, and that’s applied as easily as an underarm deodorant.
For...
“What do you mean,” a Spirit reader asked, “when you say the ego feels deeply threatened by the so-called sacred marriage of the sun and moon?” It’s quite simple: The ego—or what our conscious mind thinks it means when it says “I, Joe,” or “I, Jane”—views certain qualities as belonging to itself but not to others. It classifies that...
