The 24th convention of the International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs is over! We arrived home after an uneventful flight talking about how this year we're going to start dancing regularly. Must have been a good convention. Slideshow from the Grand March and Opening. (Static Version) Earlier slideshow of Denver. (Static Version)
I felt like the much talked-about visitor from Mars observing local customs during our trip to Denver yesterday. Instead of traveling 100+ flights as I did in 2000, yesterday's plane ride was the first for me in 2007. I don't go to airports often, especially not during mid-week peak business travel times. So, yesterday's field trip to the human's air stations was fascinating anthropological study. The number of zombies roaming down the halls astounded me. Way past the security checkpoint these automatons bumbled into each other and into other strangers queued up in the various cost-saving lines. Mumbling or talking animatedly [...]
Harlan has joined the cult: He rolled into our driveway yesterday evening with his Silver Pine (light green) Prius hatchback and took us on an environmentally sensitive test drive around Noe Valley and the Castro. Very nice car with a comfortable back seat (where else would you put me?). Well made and the dazzling electronic displays of fun information are standard. Congratulate him! (But, if he doesn't back off from his self-righteous spouting of carbon output information, we are going to have a problem!) Slideshow or Photo Set
San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theater Blackbird by David Harrower This is a conversation play. Two actors are alone on the stage for an 85-minute one-act roller coaster. I flashed on the movie My Dinner with Andre. I loved that film's ability to renew the conversation and make me want to listen in even longer. Blackbird is better. It means more. It handles one of those hot-button topics that start the media and politicians frothing. Its dialog raises insidious question after insidious question. Moreover, there is no tidying-up of the situation. There's no relieving final clarity that lets the audience [...]
At least 150 people came and celebrated Mother's Day this morning on our church steps. Rev. Gregory Stewart talked to us of the historic meaning of the day. War veterans, war resisters, and Assemblyman Mark Leno spoke. Karen Meredith was heartbreaking as she spoke of the last Mother's Day she was able to share with her son Ken before he was killed in the Iraq War. KCBS-AM, KGO-AM, KTVU (Channel 2), Channel 11 (NBC), KPIX (Channel 5), www.Friction.TV, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and The Chronicle covered the public witnessing with reporters who identified themselves to me (I was the designated [...]
I discovered (was reminded?) this year that Mother's Day didn't start out as a time to send cards, candy, and flowers to your mother. It began in the US in 1870 as a fairly radical Mother's proclamation for peace. The author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe, issued the first Mother's Day Proclamation urging mothers to keep their sons and husbands from fighting in war.(Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_Proclamation ).This year my church, the San Francisco Unitarian Universalist church at Franklin and Geary, is celebrating Mother's Day by gathering on the church steps at 9:30 am and talking about [...]
Yesterday The City was warmer than anywhere else. People I spoke with from Ashland to Phoenix were in cooler weather, and the computer screen showed that all of my favorite cities were cooler. I was tempted to whine when the inside temperature went over 90 yesterday afternoon. Instead, I changed into shorts for the night baseball game we had tickets for. About 5:30 redozdachs and I took an empty MUNI car to the first surface stop along the Embarcadero. We walked along waterfront, past Red's Java House and memorial columns to past seafarers to the cleaned-up grassy area around the [...]
Ashland, OR at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson The excellence of Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production serves to point out the flaws in this first episode of August Wilson's 10-play series on the Afro-American experience in America in the 20th Century. The evening oozes importance and great meaning. The cast rises to the challenge. Unfortunately, this penultimately written saga tries to do too much and fails to do much. The play confuses instead of illuminates. Set in Pittsburgh in1904, the story deals with the ambiguity of the new de jure freedom for black people which runs up [...]
Ashland, OR at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival On the Razzle by Tom Stoppard Either your the type of person who laughs non-stop at silly sit-coms or you're not. If you're not, then there's no use in someone talking to you about the quality of the script, the acting, the physical humor, or any of the other skills employed in the show. I am not a sit-com aficionado. So don't waste your time explaining how right and funny a plot line you saw was. And, that's my feeling about On the Razzle, Oregon Shakespeare's obligatory farce for the season. It just [...]
A business associate of redozdachs mentioned that she was getting new clients because of favorable reviews in Yelp! So, as redozdachs's PR person, I decided I needed to check out the site. In a typical Internet free-association foray (like the ones where you start off looking for your Congresswoman's web page and you wind up reading about yak breeding in New Zealand), I spent several hours on Yelp reading and writing about San Francisco businesses and organizations. I started off looking for an alternative to Wolf's camera. I found a couple stores to check out, and then, of course, I had to add [...]