Nonprofits

The Woodland Opera House is doing so well that they are adding an annex to the front, which will house a black-box theatre seating about 50. They actually got the city to fund it with some of the proceeds from a new sales-tax increase. Unfortunately, the independent bookstore across the street is going to close. It\'s as hard to make money selling books as it is with theatre.

This is the inside of the Woodland Opera House, where I tuned today. Many years ago I performed here with the Light Opera Theatre of Sacramento, doing Gilbert & Sullivan. They have a huge dressing room right underneath the stage. 

There are going to be at least three memorials for Erik Kleven. We went to the first yesterday --- a block party on his street. He lived most of his life here, and many of his friends, lovers, and colleagues also lived on this street. Someone should write a novel, or at least an article, about it.
There was a nice flyer about Erik with quotes and pictures and I was happy that they used a cartoon of mine.
Go look at the memorial page on the Skip's Music website. 

Brushes down under

Ever heard how toilets drain in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere? It also applies to how drummers play brushes on a snare drum.

This girl is a pirate/cowgirl/ballerina. 

This is the alley next to Java City, where poets go to do some of the things that they later write about. 

Paul waiting to set up for the poetry marathon. In the background is a poet reading; in the foreground is my equipment. 

In preparation for playing at the poetry marathon, I made these stickers representing Paul and me. I stuck them on the register at Espresso Metro. 

This scar on Paul Basye's bass came from a flying beer bottle.

One of my customers has this fairy-tale armoire. 

This was from a truck stopped in front of me at a traffic light. 

Gina Livingston is a talented singer-songwriter. (She's on the left in the photo above.) She asked me to play in her band and even came over one night to show me some of her songs. We weren't compatible, but check out her website! 

Michael Evert, my old college friend who sculpts the originals for high-fashion mannequins and dolls, sent me a wonderful collectible from a doll convention. It's a letter "written" by Gene Marshall, a doll based on movie stars of Hollywood's Golden Age. The letter is written to her parents in Connecticut and tells of her plans to move back East (to New York) from Hollywood. This parallels the buyout of the Gene Marshall doll line by a New York company.
The letter is typewritten and comes with a matching envelope. The letter and envelope come in two sizes: human- and doll-(see lower right of photo). 

Paul Basye and I are going to play music at a poetry reading so I made these masks to represent us. 

There are a couple of women who want to start a coffeehouse but haven't found a site yet so they do once-a-month events where they set up a coffeehouse in a building for one night, with art and live music. They call it VOX, and last Sunday they had one and I hung up some paintings and gave out stickers and bookmarks. 

This guy was at the last Peace Corps dinner. His name is Fulton (I forget the first name) and yes, many people have told him he resembles George Bush the elder. He told a great story about building roads in Nepal. They had been using black powder to blow up the mountain, which is inefficient and dangerous. He spent about a year and a half arranging to buy dynamite in India. Finally he was driving the dynamite back from India across the border. But he knew that if the border guards found the dynamite, they would confiscate it all. So he waited at a distance until he saw they were on a break and drove quickly across. 

This article appeared in this week's Land Park News. I took the photo myself in the bathroom with a timer. 

This picture appeared in a News & Review piece on Stan Lunetta. Note my mask in the background. 

At the Peace Corps dinner tonight (Mehran --- great Pakistani/Indian food), I saw Rich (pictured) and Mary Howard. They came back from Australia the same day as the SCC choir and saw us at the baggage claim. He is also friends with Terry Throop of the SCC choir. 

I got this great work light at Radio Shack. You wear it on your ear. Resistance is futile. 

Snufflepeep

A couple of years ago I did a cartoon about spelling bee also-rans that included a reference to "Snufflepeep, the spelling cat." (an obscure reference to the musical Cats.) One person was so taken with this that she made a hand puppet out of it.

My Wings Are Like a Shield

This customer is a real Beatlemaniac. She is making a quilt with images from Beatles album covers. Also, she has the same model electric bass that McCartney used, a guitar signed by McCartney and Ringo, and another guitar signed by Jewel.

Our friend Erik Kleven won a critic's award recently and had a blurb in the last News & Review, shown here taped to the Espresso Metro espresso machine. Tragically, a few days later he died in an auto accident. 

We threw boomerangs too

The famous explorer

Our group on the Great Barrier Reef

Australians refer to bathing suits as bathing costumes, or cozzies, leading to the expression Ozzies with cozzies.

Our farewell dinner was held in this gorgeous colonial building. It reminds me of the Governor's home on Monserrat (my Peace Corps island). 

On the plane from Sydney to Los Angeles we sat next to Susan, who could be an advertisement for Australia. She is still gorgeous at 57 and gave us many new expressions, including "skippy" (an Australian living in the bush; metaphorically, a kangaroo). 

Cassandra has been on several of the choir's overseas trips and always gets a new tattoo. She stayed up all night the final night and got a new tattoo on her left foot at around 11 pm. She protected it with cellophane to prevent infection. 

A bold declaration of Australian society's attitude about smoking: legal, but discouraged. 

Orlana, like her friends from BofB (back of the bus), stayed up all night before the morning we started home. In the terminal in Cairns, she curled up with her luggage and plush frogs. 

This dramatic graphic was posted near the big commercial toaster.