A beloved local painter leaves a lasting contribution to the world
Some people create magic, and some people exude magic. And some people, like late Sonoma County painter Charles Robert Becker, synergize both qualities to an uncanny degree.
Born in 1952, Becker grew up in Millbrae and spent most of his adult life in the North Bay. As a 19-year-old hippie he met and studied under Italian still-life master painter Roberto Lupetti. From that experience he developed his own unique style of painting, which eventually brought him international recognition.
His work defied easy categorization. Some called it still life, or nature morte—“dead nature”—but that description didn’t do justice to the unusually lustrous quality of the imagery he painted.
Said San Francisco-based Weinstein Gallery proprietor Rowland Weinstein, who signed Becker on as his first living artist and sold Becker’s paintings exclusively from 1993–2009: “… Charles’ work was so alive to me—you could take the strawberries right off the canvas, you know. You could pick up the doily. There was something so beautiful, so complete to me, it almost wasn’t like he was painting a strawberry. He was painting a portrait of a strawberry; he was painting a portrait of a plum. He was painting them like he was painting individuals.”
In time Becker’s style came to be termed Magical Realism. In 1986 a painting of his appeared on the cover of Southwest Art Magazine, giving him widespread recognition, and in 1990 Absolut Vodka commissioned him to paint four pieces for a highly successful ad campaign, further vaulting him into the spotlight. He was featured in Time Magazine, USA Today and many more publications, and his paintings appeared in galleries, exhibitions and private collections both nationally and internationally.
Those close to Becker make it clear that the magic in his paintings stemmed from him; that the man and his art were inextricably linked, each as extraordinary as the other.
“Any discussion of Charles’ work has to start with who he was as a person,” said Becker’s partner, Amanda Roze. “Each of his actions originated in love—each gesture, brushstroke, and communication was filled with beauty and heart … He tried to translate all of his emotions onto the canvas and reach the hearts of the viewers. He used art as a means to connect with people.”
The effect of Becker’s paintings on those who owned or worked among them can’t be overstated.
“Charles’ work can’t disappear into the wall,” Weinstein said. “Once you had a painting of his it brought you back into it every time you walked by it. It wasn’t on the wall to be a beautiful decoration to complete a corner.”
For many years Becker operated two studios in Graton, while living in Sebastopol. From one he taught Bay Area students in-person and distance students online, and in the other he painted and displayed his work. He lived in Santa Rosa in his later years.
“The task I have undertaken, the journey I am on is to question, to use all of my emotions, be they joy or pain, peace or passion, to believe in the creation of magic and record it on canvas,” he said. “This is what it means to be an artist. This is what it means to be alive.”
Charles Robert Becker died Jan. 21, 2026, at age 73, surrounded by family in Sonoma County. He leaves behind a lasting legacy to the many people, near and far, who marveled at the magic that flowed through him and his art. A Celebration of Life will take place Saturday, Feb. 14, at Harmony Elementary School in Occidental.
Feb. 21 and 22 is the weekend of the inaugural Russian River Fungi Fest, a free celebration of West Sonoma County’s exceptional fungal ecosystem.
The trees will sway under the sun and clouds; the river will trickle and slosh nearby. But more quietly, underneath, the mushrooms will find their own way to enjoy the party.
“A lot of people think it’s dead in the winter up here in West Sonoma County, but it’s actually one of the most beautiful times to visit our forests,” said Spencer Scott, one half of the husband-husband power couple that founded Solar Punk Farms, the organization behind the Fungi Fest. “Winter is mushroom season, and fungi are one of the most underappreciated and wonderful aspects of our local ecology.”
As I sit here sipping my adaptogenic mushroom coffee to write this article on a perfect Northern California day, I think the mushroom’s time has come. Too long left out of the life-on-Earth dyad, animals and plants, fungi are—as all school kids now know, but maybe few of us really understand—truly a different kind of being, one ancient and essential to the rest of life.
It excites the imagination. A whole other kingdom of life bustling through the ground and materials all around. And their way of being, the mushroom way to interact with the world, with the other beings living around it, might offer us some wisdom.
“We have the plant kingdom that brings the ultimate source of energy [through] photosynthesis, and the animal kingdom is all about productivity and mobility,” noted Nick Schwanz, the right brain of the Solar Punk Farms duo and president of the Russian River Chamber of Commerce. “It’s the thing that closes the loop of those two kingdoms. Mycelium is the connector and the recycler.”
That is where we can learn from them. Zen Buddhism venerates the flexibility of the bamboo reed, and Taoism follows the lessons of water. What wisdom can we gain from listening to the mushroom?
“The fungal kingdom really is the one that makes that whole system into a loop,” said Schwanz. “They are decomposing and moving things around and making sure all of it is connected.”
“One of the reasons we wanted to host Fungi Fest was to show our love for our subterranean friends who transform decaying matter into delicious treats,” added Schwanz. “What little magicians.”
Safety, More Than Ever
At the Fungi Fest, the focus will be on safety. The rate of mushroom poisoning among foragers has reached historic levels this season, with a recent death in Sonoma County.
“No one should ever consume any mushroom that they aren’t 100% sure is safe,” advised Schwanz. “All our walks and foraging parties are led by experts who can identify and share safety protocols.”
Wait, by gathering together, we can share safety information across groups and individuals? So mycological.
“It is important to gather community around mushrooms so [we] can be safely curious with what mushrooms pop up after it rains,” said local mushroom maven Brandi Kowalski. She noted that her contribution at the event will be to “showcase all of the benefits mushrooms can bring to our lives medicinally, culinarily, scientifically.”
“Be sure to stop by the Mushroom ID display table” at Mushroom Market, she added. “Please bring whatever mushrooms you’d like to be identified, and we will do our best.”
A Movement?
Why “solar punk,” the optimism optimizing movement bubbling among creatives around the globe from which the farm took its name?
Scott calls solar punk “a genre of hopeful storytelling that imagines how we might use technology in service of ecological health and a political movement dedicated to turning our optimistic visions into reality.” That is why the festival was a fit. “We love that solar punk can both capture the imagination and get people motivated to take action,” Scott continued.
The Russian River Fungi Fest is being held at venues across Guerneville and the Russian River. Expect guided tours, mushroom talks, food, hyper-local craft products and artsy workshops on everything mushroom, from poetry and painting, to cooking and gardening and more.
First Annual Russian River Fungi Fest, Feb. 21-22, across multiple venues in Guerneville and West County. RSVP for specific events. Suggested donation of $15 (accessible to everyone). For more information and tickets, visit RussianRiverFungiFest.com.
Growing up, I listened to a folk song with the chorus, “Fire, fire, from every rooftop, I heard the cry.” But I didn’t shout “fire, fire” until I arrived in California and began to survive fire seasons that traditionally began when the rains stopped and ended when they started again.
Now of course, fire season can be anytime of the year and “fire country” can be anywhere and everywhere in the state, as the January 2025 fires in Los Angeles and San Diego County—which caused $61. 2 billion in damages—made abundantly clear.
“Why do you want to go to California?” a friend asked me when I went on the road and headed west. She added, “They have earthquakes there.”
She didn’t know and neither did I about fire, smoke and drought, too. In Sonoma County, I watched a wild fire leap across the 101, devour million dollar homes, incinerate Coffey Park, fill the air with smoke and force residents to flee their homes and seek shelter elsewhere. I learned that Native Americans used fire as a tool and in beneficial ways, and that fire was an essential and necessary part of the landscape that made for rebirth and rejuvenation.
“It’s not a foe but a friend,” a woman at the Sonoma Ecology Center told me as we walked across a blackened landscape where green growth emerged.
Most of the 12 contributors to the book Red Flag Warning (AK Press; $18) emphasize the sense of community and fellowship that has emerged in the wake of wildfires, though some of them don’t ignore the hardship, the sadness and the destruction.
Sunday, Feb. 15, the Occidental Center for the Arts Literary Series hosts collection contributors Manjula Martin, Hiya Swanhuyser, Beatrice Camacho and Amy Elizabeth Robinson.
As Canadian born author Naomi Klein observed in The Shock Doctrine and The Battle for Paradise—which can read like rejoinders to Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities—capitalism has a way of seizing on misery and squeezing profits from fires, earthquakes, tornados, droughts and more.
In Parenting in Fire Country, Dani Burlison, the co-editor of Red Flag Warning, interviews Kailea Loften, an African American citizen of Liard First Nation and a member of the Tsesk’ye clan who has served as the climate commissioner for the City of Petaluma. That the contributors to this volume come from diverse cultures and backgrounds is probably its strongest recommendation.
Loften seems to stand with Klein and not Solnit, but maybe I’m reading too much into her comments. Still, she says, “We are in compounding crises.” She finds fault with people who say, “I’m an optimist” and who think that “if they just keep hoping or keep wishing, it’ll be okay.” Loften complains about the “space of toxic positivity” and adds, “We’re being constantly gaslit.”
I’ve long stood with U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has jousted with people who harp on hope. Warren insists that hope is largely meaningless unless it’s joined to meaningful political action.
Fortunately, Burlison, whose name and essays ought to be familiar to readers of the Bohemian and Pacific Sun, writes about what might be called the psychology of fire in “What Wildfires Do To Our Minds.” Her essay is based in part on a conversation with Mary Good, a therapist, ecopsychologist and California naturalist who took on as patients, pro bono, “fire survivors” to help them navigate the “aftermath of disaster.” Good tells Burlison, “It was an absolute trauma for everybody involved.” She adds, “The fire is over, but the grief may last a long time.” There’s no sugar coating trauma and no shortcut through the stages of grief.
Burlison reminds readers that “Low income and other marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted by climate disasters like the frequent firestorms we experience here in Northern California.” She suggests that marginalized individuals need “mental health services” as well as “community support and mutual aid.” Hell, they need homes, jobs, child care and more.
Another section of the book that I read and reread and that I love is an interview Burlison conducted with Brandon Smith, a formerly incarcerated firefighter with the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program who earned $2-5 per day with an additional $1-2 per hour while serving on an active fire.
Smith walked the walk and talks the talk. No obfuscation from him. “There’s something that’s very cleansing about fire,” he says. By fighting fire, he learned about fire and fire fighters like himself. “A fire camp is a half prison, half fire station where currently incarcerated people work as firefighters,” he says.
I enjoyed his candor, and Jane Braxton Little’s description of throwing the I Ching the night her town burned down and the community lost its post office, drug and hardware stores, library and 1,000 homes. “Climate disaster is the disaster lurking for all of us,” she says. “Fire delivers it to some, floods, drought and famine to others.” All those things no one warned me about when I left New York and came to California.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the first essay in the book, which has the catchy title, “Solidarity, Not Charity,” by Weeklys contributor Hiya Swanhuyser. The word disaster, she explains, means “no stars,” in other words, a world in darkness. She also informs readers that the phrase “mutual aid” comes from Peter Kropotkin, the 19th- and 20th-century Russian anarchist and scientist. Swanhuyser plugs Rebecca’s Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, but ends her essay with the sobering thought, “We are headed for disaster.”
On the way to a dark world, read Swanhuyser’s essay and all the other illuminating words that light up Red Flag Warning.
The ‘Red Flag Warning’ literary event begins at 2pm, Sunday, Feb. 15, at the Occidental Center for the Arts, 3850 Doris Murphy Ct. Free. More info at bit.ly/red-flag-oca.
An upside-down family gets right-sided with the help of a practically perfect nanny in P.L. Travers’ classic Mary Poppins. In between the 1964 Disney film adaption and its belated 2018 sequel, Cameron Mackintosh put together a Broadway musical that featured elements of the Disney film along with new material. Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse has a production running through March 7.
It’s not a carbon copy of the film, though it features many of the original Sherman Brothers songs and recreates some of the film’s magical moments in its telling the tale of the Banks family: uptight father George (Robert Nelson), overwhelmed mother Winifred (Andrea Thorpe), and unruly children Michael (Joe Schulze) and Jane (Violet Spears).
The departure of the children’s umpteenth nanny is soon followed by the arrival of their latest, Mary Poppins (Caroline Flett), who, with the help of her jack-of-all-trades friend Bert (Andrew Cedeño), teaches them all a lesson or two before flying off.
It’s a big show with a big cast (director Emily Lynn Cornelius has double cast the principal roles) and a lot of moving parts. The large cast and deck crew has responsibility for sliding Peter Crompton and Aissa Simbulan-designed scenery and set pieces on and off the stage throughout the show and do a pretty good job of it.
When they’re not moving chairs or sliding frames into view, the cast is acting, singing and dancing their hearts out. Almost all the musical numbers are large ensemble pieces (“Jolly Holiday,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”), and the cast delivers them with gusto. Jonathen Blue’s choreography honors the original while making it work in the 6th Street space.
Flett is the perfect Poppins, in both physicality and attitude, and possesses a fine singing voice. Ditto for Cedeño. Nelson is a staid George, and Thorpe brings the heart as Winifred. I found young Schulze a bit unfocused as Michael, particularly when compared to Spears’ dynamo of a Jane.
Veteran Jill Wagoner delivers two crackerjack performances, first as the Bird Woman (“Feed the Birds”) and then as Miss Andrew, the holy terror of a nanny whose approach to child rearing explains George’s personality.
Musical director Les Pfützenreuter leads an eight-piece orchestra that robustly delivers the beloved songs (“A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Step in Time”) and new additions (“Practically Perfect,” “Brimstone and Treacle”).
Mary Poppins is the type of show that better deliver what an audience expects.
It does.
‘Mary Poppins’ runs through March 7 in the GK Hardt Theater at 6th Street Playhouse, 52 W. 6th Street, Santa Rosa. Thurs–Sat, 7:30pm; Sat & Sun, 2pm. $32–$56. 707.523.4185. 6thstreetplayhouse.com.
Published in cooperation between bet105 and the Bohemian
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What’s the cost of childhood fame? Is it always exploitative? How do children navigate being adults in a world that refuses to see them as anything but the child they were? These are the themes of John Logan’s Peter & Alice. Alex Gomez directs the production now playing in Napa at the Lucky Penny Community Arts Center through Feb. 15.
The stellar script begins at the opening of the 1932 Lewis Carroll exhibition in London. It is a fictionalized version of a real meeting between Alice Liddell Hargreaves (Bright Eastman) and Peter Llewelyn Davies (Max Geide). If those names don’t ring a bell, the books written about them will.
Alice Hargreaves was Carroll’s (Dennis O’Brien) inspiration for Alice in Wonderland (Pilar Gonzales). Peter Davies was J.M. Barrie’s (Kade Morrill) inspiration for Peter Pan (an excellent Arthur Mautner). Slipping between memory, fantasy and their current reality, this is a heartbreaking but fascinating look at what it means to grow up.
While the cast as a whole was good (with a special shoutout to utility actor Scott Schwerdtfeger for portraying three diverse and profoundly tragic bit roles), it was Morrill’s Barrie that stole the show. Their deeply reflective portrayal of the enigmatic author brought a layer of grounded reality and maturity that made Barrie a sympathetic character, even as we are asked to question the true nature of his relationship with the Davies boys, and his emotional complicity in Michael Barrie’s death.
The production values were also great, notably the set by Barry Martin, which, due to some whimsical stage magic, becomes a character itself, and the costumes by Barbara McFadden.
Although the show has some blocking and pacing issues, of greater impact is the insertion of an intermission into the otherwise 90-minute play, a growing trend in theater. While there are always reasons for this choice, in this instance it completely undercut the power and emotion of the preceding scene, leaving what immediately followed the nearly impossible task of rebuilding the moment. This isn’t to say the show didn’t recover, but it did dampen the power of what immediately followed.
Even with the aforementioned issues, this is a show not to be missed. This script is so tight and these actors are so earnest that one might leave with some tears, but one will also leave smiling.
‘Peter and Alice’ runs through Feb. 15 at the Lucky Penny Community Arts Center, 1758 Industrial Way, Napa. Thurs–Sat, 7:30pm; Sun, 2pm. $30–$40. 707.266.6305. luckypennynapa.com.
On Friday, Feb. 6, more than 300 poets and writers from across California will gather on the west side of the state capitol in Sacramento for A Courage of Poets, a peaceable, statewide act of remembrance and resistance.
This four-hour gathering will honor Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Silverio Villegas González and all individuals who have been killed by ICE on the streets or in custody across the United States.
The event, sponsored by Sonoma County’s Sixteen Rivers Press, with support from the Sacramento Poetry Center, brings together a wide range of voices from poets laureate to spoken-word artists and community members. Participants will link hands and create what organizers describe as a “collective poem,” with each poet offering two to three lines of poetry spoken aloud, one after another, in an unbroken chain of witness.
“As poets and writers, we feel kindred to Renée [Good] since she, too, was a poet,” says Moira Magneson, the event’s organizer. Good was the winner of the Academy of American Poets 2020 Poetry Prize.
In addition to the names of Good, Pretti and González, names including Heber Sanchez Dominguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, Keith Porter Jr. and Geraldo Lunas Campos will all be spoken aloud—an insistence that none of those killed remain invisible.
“Our event will certainly remember them all,” says Terry Ehret of Petaluma, a poet and member of the Sixteen Rivers Press.
At some point during the event, participants will raise their voices together in a 15-second “barbaric yawp,” a collective cry inspired by Walt Whitman’s famous line from Song of Myself: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Organizer Moira Magneson describes the yawp as a way to voice “grief, outrage, hope, joy,” and to summon Whitman’s vision of democracy at a moment when many feel it is under threat. The gathering will conclude with a final poem offered by California poet laureate Lee Herrick before participants disperse, “energized and inspired to engage in continued peaceful acts of resistance,” says Magneson.
The idea for A Courage of Poets emerged from private grief and collective urgency. Magneson traces its roots to a poetry reading she attended last fall, where a question posed to the audience—what can poets do to stand up against the rise of fascism in America?—lingered long after the event ended. The use of the word “Courage” as a collective noun was chosen by the Sixteen Rivers Press collective itself.
For Sixteen Rivers Press, the structure of the event reflects the values the collective has practiced for decades. Founded as a non-hierarchical, all-volunteer press, Sixteen Rivers operates through shared responsibility and consensus decision-making.
Ehret notes that the capitol gathering mirrors this model: “with every person attending having equal status and an equal voice.” In that sense, the collective poem becomes not only a memorial, but a lived expression of democracy at its best.
Choosing the state capitol for the event was deliberate. Rather than holding a traditional memorial in a literary venue, organizers wanted poetry to occupy California’s seat of legislative power. Magneson envisions the event as a linked poem unfolding in public space, where the eloquence of poets won’t be separated from the political realities being addressed.
As Magneson puts it simply, A Courage of Poets seeks to recognize “all individuals killed by ICE,” and to affirm a belief shared by those gathering: that art, arising from the human heart, still has the power to kindle compassion and imagine and model a more just democracy.
‘A Courage of Poets’ will meet from 10am to 2pm Friday, Feb. 6, west side of the state capitol, 10th Street and Capitol Avenue, Sacramento. sixteenrivers.org.
In a culture increasingly mediated by social feeds and mass narratives, Found Poets offers something stubbornly analog: real voices from real people in a real place. Found Poets makes a persuasive case that poetry is not only alive but urgent—and perhaps best experienced in-person.
For Michael Giotis, the upcoming edition of Found Poets, on Feb. 7 at Petaluma’s The Big Easy, feels like a hinge moment. Fresh off a strong ensemble showing at the Petaluma Poetry Walk, he senses a shift in how people are responding—not just to poetry as text, but poetry as performance.
“I think people appreciate the unique value of poetry when performed,” he notes. “And that’s our specialty.”
That distinction matters. In an era saturated with content, poetry can easily get flattened into something passive or ornamental. Found Poets pushes in the opposite direction, framing spoken word as a live, communal act—entertainment of the spirit, yes, but also a shared reckoning with the era in which we live.
“At this moment in time when we’re so frustrated with the way things are,” Giotis says, “we may want to put our energy into things that are the way we want them to be.” He’s quick to note that there’s nothing wrong with how we often entertain ourselves via Netflix, doomscrolling, etc. But poetry, he argues, belongs in that same entertainment conversation—especially when it’s delivered by local artists in real-time confrontation with the most vital issues of our times.
This is where showing up becomes the point. “It’s the kind of thing you want to be putting your money into,” Giotis explains. “And your time is rewarded with a powerful show at a great venue and an experience of community.”
That sense of intention carries through the lineup. Headlining the February show is AJ Houston, appearing in Petaluma for the first time. Houston is an author, poet and creative writing educator often described as a “slam godfather,” with a long track record of shaping both performers and audiences. He is the founder of the Psychology of Writing Institute and the author of multiple books, including The Black Book of Black and Makin It: Life Poetry and Everything Else, works that braid lived experience, reflection and craft.
Giotis doesn’t hesitate when describing Houston’s stature. “AJ is like the godfather of the whole thing,” he says.
What sets Houston apart, in Giotis’ telling, is his attentiveness to language.
“So much of what he does happens in the magic of the page,” he notes. Even in performance, Houston’s poems remain aware of the borders of paper, of what form can and cannot contain.
The unsaid, Giotis adds, is often as present as the spoken word.
That sensitivity extends beyond Houston’s own work. “He’s a great listener,” Giotis says, “and in that way is a great giver to other poets.” Houston’s reputation as someone who actively supports and uplifts fellow writers, including Giotis himself, makes him an especially resonant fit for a series built around mutual investment rather than star turns alone.
The rest of the bill reflects that ethos. Alongside Houston, the afternoon features Bay Area favorites Jamie DeWolf and Audio Angel, as well as Sonoma County’s own N’Game’ Gray, whose work bridges vulnerability and urgency. Hosting duties fall to Josh Windmiller and Giotis himself, grounding the show in the community that has sustained it.
“We really tried to be as Sonoma County poet–focused as we can with our lineup,” Giotis explains, “and then bring in headliners from outside of the area, out of state like AJ.” When Bay Area poets return to perform in Petaluma, it’s not treated as a booking coup so much as a shared celebration. “Everyone should be stoked,” he says. “Come see them.”
Underlying all of this is a larger idea about what constitutes meaningful action right now. For Giotis, gathering people in a joyful space to process challenging and jubilant art is not escapism—it’s resistance of a quieter, sturdier kind. “Radical action takes many forms,” he notes. “I believe that Found Poets is one.”
Doors open at 3:30pm for the Found Poets performance at 4pm, Saturday, Feb. 7 at The Big Easy, 128 American Alley, Petaluma. $15.
Here, journalist and organizer Cincinnatus Hibbard shares the first chapter of his forthcoming book, ‘Love is The Answer,’ as part of a two-part series in our pages. —Editor
“ … Love… Love is the answer—the solution … to everything.” The words were wrenched out of me. That inner critic that sat watch on my words was aghast. Suddenly I was ill at ease…
These were serious people I was sitting down with. Worldly people—Adults. And I was being hopelessly naive.
True, they had progressive leanings—but they were operators … heavy weights—such as the machine makes—keen animals, such as the jungle breeds. I had almost convinced them that I was a killer myself this hour and more. But then—for some damnable reason, I turned up my soft white underbelly and gave up the game by professing love … damn.
I had brought these two professionals together in a glass and steel corporate office so that they could meet each other. As a journalist and an organizer, this is what I do—I bring people together to help solve the problems of our community. And the problems these two brought both had broad social implications and vague affinities with each other.
Sitting to the left of me, drinking a matcha latte, was a regional figure. Her work and mission was a project to change the culture of consumption among middle-class consumers. Her method was educational—she taught awareness. She wanted people to shift their business from cheap Walmart and fast Amazon to local businesses promoting a slow culture of quality, ecology, and community. But people were stuck in their ways, frozen.
Sitting to the right of me, drinking black tea, was a national figure. He was an expert and consultant to the wealthy. His work and mission was to change the culture of work (and overwork) among executives. His clients were money mad, productive machines chasing empire and breakdown. Like addicts, they wanted to stop—but couldn’t. His methods were therapeutic. He wanted his clients to slow down, take time for family, reconnect with friends, rediscover hobbies, and build legacies of philanthropic giving.
As he spoke, he gave me pause. “Even the rich and the powerful are unhappy in this system,” I thought. “The winners” of “the game.”
I sat between right and left with my double-shotted dirty chai, and between them we talked around and around the twin poles of the two issues. We talked long, with speed, fluency, urgency of cause, and intellectual aggression—spiraling up, up, into the blue sky like raptors, until, sighting the horizons, their problems seemed the problems of the world.
We spitballed. But all our solutions seemed to make these matters worse. I think we knew in our hearts that our “solutions” derived from the system itself, and partook of its brutality. It has been said that “you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” And all our solutions amounted to more commands—more complexity, longer lists, more hurry, fear and shame, and burnout productivity—the fuels and the fire accelerating us into the slow motion train wreck of total crisis.
We were paralyzed. We—and the world itself, were now at an impasse… And with that, our over-caffeinated conversation stalled, and entered free fall.
It was at that moment, in the mounting pressure of nothing to say, that I had said it—the inexcusable thing. It just rose up inside of me—“Love is the answer.”
My words were received with shocked silence. And then, there was a sudden unexpected softening—like a long exhalation. Slowly, and somewhat shyly, they agreed. Love was—somehow, some way—the solution. In the great paradox of love, these two heavies had been disarmed by my vulnerability.
We did not attempt to answer why or how love could be the answer to society’s problems (of frenzied over-work and hollow hyper-consumption). Really, we couldn’t. But somehow we knew it in our hearts, and our agreement was enough that day. The meeting ended shortly thereafter, floating away on a lightness of being…
Two Become One
In hindsight, I think things had been building to that moment. Perhaps deep intuition had guided me to bring those heavyweights together to bring it about—a catalyst. Making my statement there had in some sense committed me before my peers to pursue love as “the answer.” Truth be told, I had been thinking a lot about love—love as an alternative to our world, founded in fear. I had been dreaming about it—at the margins of my hectic life.
Reading into the wisdom traditions, as best as I could tell there are three alternative ends in life—three goals, three drives, and three outcomes. The first is the most familiar, because it is our choice. We seek it. And its pursuit gives rise to our world-system. One can call it “status,” or one can call it “power.” But it is the control of money and people as safety. To lack power in this system is to be in danger. Thus we are driven toward the accumulation of power in pursuit of safety, whipped by fear. As only total control is total safety, power is a zero-sum game. We immediately come into conflict with each other. It gives rise to competition, violence, and exclusion—and thus to sexism, and racism, and nation set against nation. The world as we know it is born in fear.
WRITER Cincinnatus Hibbard believes that deep in our hearts everyone knows that love is the answer (to fear), but few advocates of love can say why (love is the answer, or how it applies). Love is vague and seemingly impractical. So Hibbard undertakes to define love and how it addresses itself to the problems of modernity and the present political crisis. Photo by Loren Hansen.
You have only to define the emotional constructs drifting along the spectrum of fear to describe our lives within this system—anxiety, stress, dread, pessimism, cynicism, phobia (such as xenophobia (racism) and neophobia (conservatism)), panic, PTSD, mania, paranoia, decision paralysis, nightmare, and terrorism.
Now for the two alternatives to fear/power. They are rare in this world—but they do exist—uneasily, because they are antithetical to fear/control, opposing it. Hypothetically, alternative worlds could be built around them. But they are not considered practical or serious. Perhaps because they are so hard to define—they’re vague, nebulous, numinous.
The alternatives to fear are love, and the mystical experience. Love is the end-all-be-all of lovers, the pursuit of poets, and the naive—the child-like. And, the mystical experience is the one true goal of the spiritual, some religionists, and the mystics—those wild, poetical, lovers of god.
Power/fear, love, and the mystical experience are our choice of three. But perhaps it is only a choice of one—the one that is workable and practical. I myself chose the pursuit of status (fear).
I still pursued love and the mystical experience, but academically—in library cross references sprawling across continents and millennia. There were partial definitions—fragments of pieces, vague and incomplete. Although I pursued these two alternatives separately, along parallel lines, I began to see that there were overlaps in the two definitions—commonalities, and I dare say affinities…
For example, “otherworldliness” was a quality-characteristic shared both by love and the mystical experience—as was “timelessness”—the suspension of all madly ticking clocks and countdowns. “Love is the answer,” said my heart.
“Euphoria” or heavenly “bliss” was another quality common to love and the mystical experience—as was “healing.” Either act as a kind of medicine to our inflamed, cortisol-drenched bodies.
But most provocative of all was a characteristic central to the definition of both love and the beatific experience—“ego death,” and the emergence of “soul”—experienced as a kind of liberation. That too seemed medicinal—the medicine to treat our ego-dominant world. Indeed, each quality held in common seemed to address the issues of the world with a profound and penetrating directness. “Love is the answer,” said my head.
I pursued this research project with a detached intellectual rigor. So it embarrassed me to admit to myself that these incomplete definitions of love and the mystical experience seemed to yearn toward each other … almost as lovers yearn…
And there the project stood for some time, waiting.
Until my fool utterance—that catalytic spark compelling me to explain to all my peers why love was in fact “the answer.” I came home from the meeting all in a passion. I was going to fit the full fragmentary definitions of love and the mystical experience together, as one…
And as I did, so I discovered … that they completed each other…
It is hard for me to relate the raw and ecstatic emotional power that was released in that epiphany, but it contained within it the simple mechanism of a key sliding into a lock.
Something opened—the barred gate of our collective impasse. The unified definition was still “love”—but love in its aspect transformed. It was love surrounded by a nimbus, a halo—an aura of spiritual power. Like a sacred heart.
In what I had, love was at long last, definitively, “The Answer.” I could prove it. I looked up from my writing blinking tears of joy. Life had become, in that moment, simple. Decision became simple. Action became simple. Ours was a choice … between love and fear.
Bastet Dance Fitness is located in Rohnert Park. It’s situated between a Pentecostal church and a Packard car museum—in what looks to be a battered old Safeway.
“Interesting neighborhood,” I thought to myself. I knocked and entered. Thotty McNaughty was waiting.
As we stood at her ad hoc work station inside the stripper pole dance studio, she made a wholly unexpected disclosure—she is a martial artist trained in traditional Filipino melee weapons. It is “her first love.” Conversationally, I asked her which was her favorite weapon. “Knives,” she said. Could she, I began, kill someone with a knife? “Yes” was the response. She finished my sentence for me. Charmante. It was good to know—my work as an interviewer is to quickly establish the basic facts of my subject.
At her work table, Thotty was constructing fans out of tall and airy ostrich feathers of the purest white—instruments that carried their own danger. Like many of the stars of the
burgeoning North Bay burlesque scene, Thotty Mc Naughty is incredibly handy and makes many of her own costumes and accessories. Soliciting a breakdown of her skill sets, Thotty said her “superpower” was that she could break down and build most anything she saw—something she had inherited from her dad—an auto mechanic and rock bassist.
Thotty started her adult dance career as a curious student at that very studio—Bastet Dance Fitness, a school for sensual dance styles. Sensuality—an embodied awareness and aliveness of the senses—is emphasized at Bastet, although sexy often flows out from it. Discovering a real aptitude, Thotty soon became a teacher herself. Event production flowed naturally as she sought new performance opportunities for her advanced dance students.
Weaving through the stripper poles, we came to a non-mirrored wall hung hip-to-ceiling with photos of past dance productions. Below the hip were low display shelves of half a hundred pairs of eight-inch stripper heels—beautiful art objects even before one considers their associations. I’ll mention in passing that Thotty was herself wearing overstuffed bear slippers for the interview.
What personally interests me about burlesque as an art form is that it has been progressively expanded until it can be quite anything one can do in a corset—stand-up, physical comedy, acrobatics, satire, protest, theater, singing, lip sync, storytelling and dance—as well as striptease. And local shows, such as those Thotty McNaughty produces, reflect that variety.
Thotty went even further, saying, “Diversity is super important; there is no set standard of body type. I love the glitter and the glam, but that’s just me. There’s nerd-lesque; there’s boy-lesque; there’s gore-lesque. There is something for everyone. And no one should be afraid to try it. Dive into your interest, and people will be interested.”
Then Thotty flipped through some recent burlesque photos in which she had been sexy Super Mario, sexy Gandalf, a sexy James Bond, a sexy cocaine reindeer, as well as a vintage Hollywood bombshell—for the record, also sexy.
“Thotty, you’re an expert. Tell us how to be sexier. Tell our readers how to tease. Just a tip,” I said. Briefly, she considered and then replied, “Some people get up there and take it all off. But you want to give it and take it away from them…”
Learn more: Thotty McNaughty will be featured at ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ a burlesque tribute to Led Zeppelin, at The California in Santa Rosa on Feb. 7. She will be dancing to ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby.’ Thotty has other shows on Feb. 13 and 21. Show descriptions and ticket links are available at thottymcnaughty.com. Thotty is also on TikTok at thottymcnaughtyofficial.
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