Re: “Aptos in Shock” (GT, 9/8): The tragedy that is the murder of the youth at Aptos High is huge. It will be embedded in our community’s consciousness for a long time. It is deeply sad and heartbreaking for everyone involved, including those who caused the harm, families, students, teachers—the whole community.
I commend and fully support the decision to keep police off our school campuses. While the police would have you believe their presence would have stopped the violence, data and research have proven time and time again that police do not make communities safer.
Danielle Sered, author and leader in researching true solutions to violence, sums it up when she says: “Safety is not produced primarily by force. Safety is produced by resources, by connection, by equity, and by reciprocal accountability among neighbors.” As she sees it, the vision of a society that does not rely on policing or on prisons as its primary response to harm is not mostly a vision of less, but a vision of more. It is a vision where the space freed up by the staged withdrawal of the criminal legal system is filled instead with what has been available all along but rarely invested in.
In Sered’s view, “This vision of safety, to be fully realized, includes and requires the redistribution of resources from the criminal penal methods to more productive, reliable measures of producing safety: investments in health care, in education, in housing, in living wages, in violence interrupters and intergenerational interventions that draw on the moral authority of those most respected by their neighbors, in conflict resolution and restorative and transformative justice, and in a social service infrastructure and safety net that in time will render enforcement not just less dominant, but obsolete.”
We need to create stronger communities and show up collectively for our young people rather than continue to rely on weaponized responses to violence. Police do not create trusting, cohesive environments—social workers do, community organizers do, youth allies do, caring teachers do.
Let’s keep focused on true solutions to violence and avoid knee-jerk responses to bring in more armed police to our schools.
Alan Z.
Santa Cruz
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Adam Roche’s Secret History of Hollywood podcasts have kept me entertained over many a long run in the last couple of years. Each episode is generally two or three hours long, and while he’s gotten flamed on social media for his ultra-long releases, they’re actually really perfect when you’re looking for something to stay engaged with over 19 or 20 miles. While sweating through some ridiculous slog in the Santa Cruz Mountains back in March, I was listening to his mini-series The Adventures of Alfred Hitchcock, and he mentioned Hitchcock’s second home in Scotts Valley. I’d read about that estate (which is now home to Armitage Wines) before, and it got me wondering why Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville chose this area in the first place—a question I’d never seen anyone even attempt to answer.
Months later, I was talking to GT’s Managing Editor Adam Joseph about how the only contribution to scary movies Santa Cruz ever really gets credit for is The Lost Boys. I love that movie, don’t get me wrong—the poster is hanging in my office—but there are other Santa Cruz connections to scary-movie history that are interesting, too. Adam mentioned his own fascination with Killer Klowns From Outer Space, the 1988 cult classic that was filmed in this area. We decided to team up for this Halloween Issue double-feature that explores a couple of Santa Cruz County’s contributions to horror movies, Non-Lost-Boys-Division. We hope you enjoy it, and happy Halloween!
STEVE PALOPOLI | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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GOOD IDEA
DEAD MAN’S PARTY
Looking for a way to celebrate Día de los Muertos? The Watsonville Film Festival (WFF) is putting on a free event honoring Día de los Muertos that will include music, dance performances, mosaic making, Watsonville Library’s BiblioVan and more.
The celebration will be at the downtown Watsonville plaza, and will also include a screening of the movie Coco. The annual event went virtual last year, but organizers are excited to be in-person again, as the lively event usually draws thousands.
A group of cyclists rode from Healdsburg to Santa Cruz, over 200 miles, and raised more than $200,000 to support local youth organizations, putting us couch potatoes to shame. Over 80 bikers and crew participated in the fundraising ride, which lasted three days and was organized by the Santa Cruz Sunrise Rotary. The money raised went to Santa Cruz Children’s Museum of Discovery, Teen Kitchen Project and Second Harvest Food Bank Food. Always good to remember to always share the road.
There are countless Alfred Hitchcock biographies, and many of them mention that he had an estate in the Santa Cruz area. But they never seem very interested in why he chose Scotts Valley as his home away from home—which is curious, since a sense of place was extremely important to the legendary director. He rose up through the ranks of a very regimented film industry in his native Britain, and was stung by accusations that he’d forgotten his roots after moving to the U.S. He found his lifelong love of “pure cinema” working in Germany early in his career, observing experimental film geniuses like F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. And he worked hard to fit into Hollywood, hosting dinner parties and becoming close friends with the likes of Clark Gable, Carole Lombard and Cary Grant, among others.
The details of how Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville came to adopt Scotts Valley as their second home are well documented. In 1940, they purchased the 200-acre “Heart o’ the Mountains” estate there for $40,000, building onto the ranch house on the property. They had recently moved to Hollywood from Britain after Hitchcock signed a seven-year contract with producer David O. Selznick.
His first film for Selznick was to be Rebecca, an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s creepy thriller. Some of the location shooting was done at Point Lobos, which gave him his first taste of the Northern California landscape that he would go on to use in several films. One of the stars of Rebecca was Joan Fontaine, who was from Los Gatos, and when he expressed interest in buying land in the area, she is said to be the one who pointed him to Santa Cruz County (Highway 17, it should be noted, had just been finished that year, making it easy to travel from her hometown to the coast).
But even if we know how the Hitchcocks got to Scotts Valley, there’s still the question, as in any of the legendary director’s mysteries, of motive. What would make the couple, who had lived in a flat in London for the previous 13 years of their marriage, and spent most of their California time in Bel Air, choose what 80 years ago was a very rural community, to say the least? Why was Hitchcock—even by this time the epitome of a cosmopolitan director of blockbuster films—suddenly interested in a life of growing grapes and keeping horses in the mountains?
Adam Roche, who wrote and produced the exhaustively researched, 30-hour podcast The Adventures of Alfred Hitchcock, has a theory about this, and it stretches back nearly a century, to when Hitchcock and Reville first visited the mountain resort town of St. Moritz in Switzerland in 1924. Two years later, on Dec. 2, 1926, they married, and returned there for their honeymoon.
“They spent every anniversary in St. Moritz after doing some filming location work there, and they set The Man Who Knew Too Much—the original one—there. And they fell in love with the mountains, I think. So every year, they would go back there for their anniversary.”
While the snowy winters of St. Moritz and the semi-permanent sun of Scotts Valley are opposites in many ways, Roche can imagine the similarities that drew in Hitchcock.
“I think he was just attracted to that kind of rugged piece of the world,” he says. “And I think he did like the fact that he could go and escape and be away from the chaos of a city. And having seen his home now in Scotts Valley, you can really see it. He just liked to garden, he liked to walk out and have a coffee on the terrace in the mornings. It was very remote, but for him to have a home in one of those locations, and then always make a yearly pilgrimage to another one of those locations, I think that must have spoken to him.”
Roche, a Brit himself, released the Adventures of Alfred Hitchcock podcast as part of his ongoing series The Secret History of Hollywood, which has also explored Universal’s classic monster films (A Universe of Horrors), gangster films (Bullets and Blood), and several other corners of moviemaking history. An independent podcaster who has built a bit of a mini-empire with a huge Patreon following—“someone said to me the other day, ‘It’s almost like the MCU of Old Hollywood,’” he says—Roche formerly worked as a driver and chef before he turned his love of old-time radio shows and films into a weekly podcast called Attaboy Clarence.
These short stories, though, were nothing compared to the complexity of his Secret History series, and his original documentary-like writing has evolved over the last decade into an engaging and literary narrative style that combines thorough research with real character development and dramatically recreated scenes from the lives of his subjects. That storytelling flair has become his signature, and recently New Republic Pictures optioned the film and television rights to his entire series. The first project to come out of the deal will be a feature film based on the life of 1940s RKO producer Val Lewton—responsible for such atmospheric horror classics as Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie and The Body Snatcher—which Roche documented over 32 hours of his Secret History series Shadows. The idea for that series was suggested to him by Mark Gatiss, who wrote for Doctor Who before co-creating the Benedict Cumberbatch series Sherlock. Roche was frustrated with the lack of information about Lewton, until a woman working for the Library of Congress contacted him out of the blue on social media.
“She said, ‘I heard you’re doing a series about Val Lewton. We have cartons and cartons of his correspondence, his diaries, stuff that’s never been seen, not even by people who’ve written about him before. Would you like it for this show?’ And I was like, ‘Yes!’” he remembers. “So she went and scanned just hundreds and hundreds of sonnets he wrote to his wife, poetry, full diary entries for a whole year, scrapbooks he had. All of the eulogies read at his funeral. I mean, the stuff that was in those cartons—basically his soul was in there, and no one had seen it before.”
Alfred Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville
Capitola’s ‘The Birds’
Roche is currently in the midst of a Secret History series on Cary Grant, called Cary, and he continues to present his weekly virtual film club (drawn from an extensive classic-movie library) for his Patreon members. And he recently returned to Hitchcock, as well; he’s featured (along with directors like John Landis, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth) in the newly released documentary I Am Alfred Hitchcock.
When he started his Hitchcock series, he explains, he knew very little about the director, but was a big fan of his films. And the first one he ever saw was a late-night TV showing of The Birds—a movie which also has a connection to the Santa Cruz area.
Though that film is, like Rebecca, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, those who go back and read the source material might feel a bit confused.
“It is nothing like the film at all,” says Roche. “It’s just about a man in a house, and suddenly birds start attacking.”
The missing piece, so the legend goes, is a news item Hitchcock saw about a bizarre incident on Aug. 18, 1961, when thousands of birds infected with the neurotoxin domoic acid went crazy in Capitola. They hurdled into buildings and cars, and even attacked people. What killed them was a mystery until many years later, giving the story an especially sinister edge at the time.
Since Hitchcock was already working on The Birds, which was released in 1963, no one really knows how much he was influenced by coverage of the incident in his depiction of the harrowing attacks in the film. But we do know that Hitchcock read about it—he even called into the Santa Cruz Sentinel to inquire further—and Roche calls it “serendipity” that the director had something on which to model his vision for a grittier, modernized update of the original story.
Interestingly, the biggest surprise for Roche in doing the Hitchcock series wasn’t about the man himself, but his wife.
“Alma’s story, for me, was the real revelation. Alma Reville is such an unsung hero—she had far more of an influence over the way the films came out than people give her credit for,” he says. “I’m so glad when people get to the end of that thing and they go, ‘God, Alma Reville, wasn’t she marvelous?’ Whenever I get an email like that, I’m like, ‘I’ve succeeded.’”
Find Adam Roche online at attaboyclarence.com. Armitage Wines goes a “Tiny Winery Concerts” series on the former Hitchcock property, go to armitagewines.com.
The movie’s opening credits flash block letters with an icy-blue glowing outline. The background is dotted with stars against the nighttime sky. An ominous soundtrack, which sounds like a big band on ether performing a loose variation of circus music, accompanies an orchestra of menacing laughs in the distance. The culmination leads to the title credit—“Killer Klowns” leaps on the screen, vibrant red font with sharp corners reminiscent of fangs. “From Outer Space” appears below.
The soundtrack with the eerie laughs screeches to halt. Then quintessential circus music shreds crisply on electric guitar with Steve Vai-precision, kicking off the title song, written and performed by SoCal punk rockers the Dickies.
The shot pans down from space onto a busy Saturday night in Anytown, U.S.A., centered around a teen hotspot aptly named Big Top Burgers; the credits continue rolling, as the song’s lyrics offer some foreshadowing: “Everybody’s running when the circus comes to town.”
When we stumbled across it on cable TV, my brother and I—he was 6, I was 11—watched speechlessly for 90 minutes as Killer Klowns from Outer Space blew up in our faces like a giant red and white-striped balloon full of severed fingers and teeth bursting above our heads.
The quick and dirty plot summary: An alien spaceship lands on earth. The spaceship resembles a circus tent, and the aliens resemble clowns. Scary fucking clowns, but clowns nonetheless. Using clown-like birthday party tricks—including puppet shows, balloon animals and shadow puppets—the aliens easily fool inconspicuous townsfolk, who they gelatinize in cotton candy cocoons, and later feast on with “silly” straws. However, a few locals catch on to this strange clown activity and take on these extremely dangerous beings whose perma-smiles are spookier than fangs.
Scared shitless, yet mesmerized by the film’s aesthetics and effects, Killer Klowns became much more than a campy movie that we stumbled on one uneventful Saturday afternoon. It was one of those few unforgettable childhood movies that ended up inspiring us both in unexpected ways for years to come.
“It’s really like nothing I had ever seen, especially as a 6-year-old,” recalls my younger brother Daniel, who now creates special effects for Disney rides. “I ended up seeing it many more times, because I love the creature effects. I have to believe in some way, even indirectly, it helped me discover what I wanted to do as a career, eventually working at Disney.”
Thanks to the Chiodo Brothers—Stephen, Charlie and Edward—Killer Klowns from Outer Space has affected millions since its 1988 release. Since the early ’80s, the Chiodos’ independent company has been a one-stop shop for special effects—clay modeling, creature creation, stop-motion, animatronics, costumes, makeup, and everything in between. Their mantra: “Bring fantastic characters to life.” While Killer Klowns is their sole feature-length film, the Chiodos’ effects can be seen in dozens of Hollywood films and television shows, including Elf, Critters and multiple episodes of The Simpsons.
When I Zoomed with Edward and Stephen Chiodo—Charlie couldn’t make it—they used stills from Killer Klowns as backgrounds, changing scenes every so often.
“We create characters and worlds according to what producers would like to see,” Stephen Chiodo says. “We don’t have tons of feature film credits, but the ones that we do have, we got lucky. We’ve gotten to do the highlight-the-key effects or the takeaway effects that people remember.”
One of their most well-known effects of all time remains “Large Marge” from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.
“The way Tim [Burton] directed that sequence, it was a great ‘boo’ cut,” Stephen recalls. “We were lucky to work on that; [Pee Wee] is such an iconic character in a classic film. TheLarge Marge scene is only 26 frames, about a second. But it’s memorable. It’s the thing people talk about 35 years later. The ’80s was a great time for traditional effects in monster movies. We were fortunate to be involved in projects that have inspired people to keep on making them.”
Killer Klowns from Outer Space was the Chiodos’ debut film; Stephen directed, Charles and Stephen wrote the screenplay, and all three were producers. It was filmed almost entirely in Watsonville, with some scenes shot at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and other local spots. So why did the Chiodos choose Santa Cruz County for their debut feature?
“The film was so absurd that if we shot in L.A. with palm trees, it would have a Hollywood feel to it that would have made it feel artificial,” Stephen explains. “We wanted to make it more about that East Coast look—a more serious location for something so absurd to happen. We also wanted a pine tree forest and an amusement park by a pier and water, which reminded us of summer days at Rye Playland, an amusement park we used to go to on the beach in Rye, New York.”
Santa Cruz had already been on the Chiodos’ radar after TheLost Boys, so they set off on a scouting trip to check out the Boardwalk and the pier, which they felt could be the ideal spot to film a couple of Killer Klowns’ most essential scenes. On the way to downtown Santa Cruz, they hit Watsonville, which would become the fictional town of Crescent Cove.
“[Watsonville] had that small-town feel we were going for,” Stephen says. “We wanted the klowns to attack a small town in America; it could have been anywhere in the United States. Then, we shot the end parade sequence in [downtown Santa Cruz], and the Big Top Burger location was on the Boardwalk.”
Watsonville buildings, streets and parks are recognizable throughout the film, including the Goodwill on Main Street, the building that once housed the Register-Pajaronian, the former police station on Union Street, and Watsonville City Plaza, where the Killer Klowns’ deadly puppet show scene occurs.
“[Watsonville] didn’t make us go through any hoops, and was totally open and amenable to production,” Stephen says. “In Los Angeles, you need two to four policemen, firemen—it’s a way for [cities] to make money, so they tack on a lot of extras. Watsonville wasn’t like that at all. They were very lenient, and our location fees were very reasonable, which allowed us to free up money to make the movie.”
The city was helpful in other ways: One of the unforgettable moments of horror in the film, simply dubbed “the shadow gag,” involves a klown putting on a shadow puppet show against a brick wall for a group of unsuspecting people waiting at a bus stop. The wholesome shadows quickly turn evil, and the onlookers eventually succumb to a shadow T-Rex that gobbles them whole. A bus was swiftly needed to make the scene happen. Within minutes of the request, the city provided a public bus.
Logistically, the slew of challenging effects made Killer Klowns a complex film to complete. On top of that, the film takes place during one night, mostly outside, so the shooting schedule involved working primarily exteriorly from sunset to sunrise, six days per week.
Meanwhile, the crew transformed a giant newly constructed warehouse in Soquel into the klowns’ spaceship’s interior.Much of the klown-world aesthetic was created by Charlie Chiodo, who employed a lot of Memphis Design, a style characterized by specific primary colors, geometric shapes and repetitive patterns—think Pee Wee’s Playhouse. A series of tubes, cubes and balls, easy to rearrange at any time, made up most of the set, enhanced by hanging cotton candy-like pods stuffed with congealed dead bodies. Art designers created seamless matte paintings that stretched to the ceiling, but the cool coastal April weather became another hurdle in the middle of production. The paint hadn’t dried by the following morning.
“We got so far behind on that first day on set, so we decided to keep the company on at nights, so the art department could create during the day,” Edward says. “So, it ended up being six six-day weeks, all at night.”
From the warehouse, the shoot moved to Cooper Street in downtown Santa Cruz. The streets were just wide enough to get wide shots with buildings on both sides—the tight thruway between buildings was essential.
“Once you make a movie and release it, it takes on a life of its own,” Edward Chiodo says. Photo: Courtesy of MGM.
“[Downtown Santa Cruz] was perfect for shooting Klownzilla and the klown invasion,” Stephen says. “You could see the buildings, get that urban feel and a small-town feel all in one shot.”
The last day of shooting was May 30, 1987. When the film opened in 1988, critics expressed mixed feelings.
“A lot of reviewers didn’t get it,” Edward says. “But it was generally well-received by people who love that genre. It’s an homage to those ’50s and ’60s monster movies that we loved growing up.”
Stephen adds, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the cocoons; Forbidden Planet with the ‘Power Chamber’; The Blob with Steve McQueen—if you follow the plot, I thought it was the perfect 1950s sci-fi movie. We took that through-line and substituted it with clowns from outer space. I think a lot of people picked up on that. It has kind of a nostalgia feel. Many people think the acting was bad—it was a ’50s movie made in the ’80s, and it was exactly what we wanted. We played with that genre.”
Around the middle of the film, Killer Klowns’ campy comical schtick effortlessly transitions into more horror territory in one of the film’s most vile moments involving a klown using Deputy Curtis Mooney—played by John Vernon—as a human ventriloquist dummy.
“It was kind of a light, sci-fi comedy, then got into horror,” Stephen explains. “As soon as we get on the chase, and Mooney gets killed like that, it gets darker. I didn’t think it was a real horror film, but the horror community says that it has enough horror elements to satisfy that group. But no matter how serious we tried to make a film, I think it ends up being funny.”
Since the earliest days of the Internet, Killer Klowns has taken on a life of its own, thanks to fans.
“Over the last 35 years, we’ve enjoyed the evolution of the klown lore,” Edward says. “Some of it involves basic backstories of who they are and why they’re here—it’s quite entertaining for us to see the theories now.”
Many Killer Klown threads regularly trending on Twitter, Reddit and other back alleys of cyberspace still want to know if there will be a Killer Klowns sequel.
“This is where we get in trouble every time we talk about it,” Stephen says. “If there were to be a sequel, 3D would be perfect for clowns, but the business is complicated. MGM, who controls the copyright, wasn’t the original studio that made the movie. There’s always a conversation, but it’s always complicated on the genre title, something like Killer Klowns, because it was not a box office success.”
In addition to video rentals, the way my brother and I happened upon Killer Klowns—a happy accident on cable television—is how a vast majority of fans first saw it. Despite a large following that continues to grow, a Killer Klowns sequel is not an easy sell.
“It’s tough to relaunch a franchise on cult classics,” Stephen explains. “Studios want something that made $50 million in a weekend.” Still, he admits, “We’ve been thinking about a sequel since we made the original.”
In 2020, Funko Pop! even released a set of Killer Klowns vinyl collectibles. The toy company contacted the Chiodos for the klowns’ names. They realized they never gave any of the klowns official names; during the shoot and on set, the crew used descriptors like “the tiny clown interacts with bikers” and “the fatso clown sucks the cocoons with a silly straw.” The tall clown was simply referred to as “Stretch” in the screenplay. Those names were just used so the costume designers and other crew members could keep track of them.
“Over the years, fans have named each of the klown characters; they’re not the names we had on set, but we let them have that now,” Stephen says. “For us to say, ‘That’s not what we called that klown?’ Fuck that! It’s great that [fans] embraced it, and it’s theirs. We made a decision not to change the names from what fans think they are [Jumbo, Shorty and Spikey are a few examples], and that’s what the Funko toys are named.”
Edward adds, “Once you make a movie and release it, it takes on a life of its own. Fan interpretations and meanings are almost as valid as our inspirations because that’s what it means to them now.”
After nearly 40 years, the Chiodo Brothers’ company is one of the oldest stop-motion outfits in Los Angeles. From stop-motion, it broadened into what the company is now: a “character-designing company with an expertise in special effects; from animatronics to miniatures to costumes.”
These days, the Chiodos are busier than they’ve ever been, as younger generations yearn for more traditional effects in the films they’re watching.
“Now, younger audiences seem to like those tangible effects that were popular in the ’80s,” Stephen says. “They like puppets, they like stop-motion, they like those physical effects as opposed to CG. It’s like a cycle like anything else. It comes back.”
Over the last two years specifically, the Chiodos have seen an explosion of demand for stop-motion. They worked with Jon Favreau on Netflix’s 2020 Alien Xmas. They recently finished work on Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, an indie stop-motion film voiced by Jenny Slate, Isabella Rossellini and other notables, currently playing the festival circuit with hopes for a wide release in 2022. The Chiodos have other projects in the works they’re not at liberty to discuss yet.
“When the time is right, we always let our fans know what we’re up to,” Stephen says. “It takes a long time to put deals together, and it’s not real until you’re sitting in the theater watching it. One thing’s for sure: we’re not going anywhere.”And it doesn’t appear as though the Killer Klowns are heading back to outer space anytime soon.
There has been no shortage of work for Mimi Hall over the past 19 months.
Since last March, the County Health Services Agency (HSA) director and her peers have had the enormous responsibility of trying to slow the spread of Covid-19 in Santa Cruz County—while weighing the effects their health orders will have on the lives of those they’re trying to protect. That has meant poring over thousands of data points, following and communicating mandates handed down from the state and guiding some 300 county health employees toward the ultimate goal: saving as many lives as possible.
Hall was, for most locals, just another county worker before the novel strain of coronavirus arrived. But after businesses were forced to close, schools sent children home and masks and vaccinations were required for everyday life to return, she, like many public health officials, became a target.
Through it all, Hall never wavered—and she spoke up about the treatment she was receiving, in hopes it would inspire other health officials to do the same. For those efforts, Hall and County Health Officer Dr. Gail Newel earlier this month were awarded the PEN/Benenson Courage Award by PEN America—a national nonprofit that advocates for literary freedom and human rights—during a ritzy awards gala at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
While rubbing elbows with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jodie Foster, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Awkwafina at the gala might have made the past two years a bit more palatable, they have undoubtedly taken their toll on the lifelong public servant.
Hall will step down from her position at the end of the month, a move she tells GT is bittersweet after an exhausting but rewarding career in public health that has spanned multiple California health agencies and began during the AIDS epidemic.
Hall is not only stepping away at a time of mass exodus for those in public health leadership, but also at a key period of transition for the public health realm. Still, Hall, a staunch advocate of public health equity, believes the county will be just fine without her so long as it follows the golden rule: “every life matters.”
Reunion Tour
When Hall abruptly stepped in as director in 2018, roughly a month after joining HSA as second in command, she knew her first job was to get to know the community. What she didn’t know was that she would have to rehabilitate several relationships. The county had for years served as somewhat of a competitor to nonprofits and health care providers that were trying to help some of the same populations. Her goal to improve those relationships was simple: stop being an adversary and become a partner.
That groundwork paid off when Covid-19 began to ravage Watsonville and its densely populated community full of essential workers. When federal and state funds started flowing into the county, Hall immediately turned to service providers in the county’s southernmost city and told them it was time to get to work.
“It was time to save lives,” Pajaro Valley Prevention and Student Assistance CEO Erica Padilla-Chavez remembers. “She could’ve very easily said, ‘No, the county health department’s got it,’ but she didn’t do that. She created space for conversation. She really brought in her team to listen to us, to listen to what we were hearing from our community members. I think that speaks to Mimi’s true understanding of equity.”
Salud Para La Gente CEO Dori Rose Inda says that those efforts were borne out in data that shows the 95076 zip code, which covers much of Watsonville, has the highest vaccination rates in the county. Inda says that Hall’s most impressive attribute during the pandemic was her understanding of the Watsonville community and the challenges those residents—many of them immigrants living below the poverty line—faced.
“She not only understood the people who live here, but she identified with their experience,” Inda says. “She understood what it meant to work hard and earn less, to worry about having enough food and a safe environment to live and work in. She made those inequities the focus of the public health response during the pandemic.”
Equating Equity
Hall spent the first four years of her life in Myanmar, a Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma that is home to the world’s longest running civil war. Her father and mother were once civil service physicians there working in a hospital that was “six cots and a dirt floor,” Hall says, before a hospital in New Jersey sponsored her father to help the family escape the decades-long conflict. They eventually moved to Chicago, where her father gained residency at a hospital. She grew up in a public housing building that was a “broken-down, decrepit high-rise” that has since been gentrified.
After his residency, her father struggled to find a hospital that would hire him. Looking back, she believes it was because of strong anti-Asian American sentiment in the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Her father eventually did find a job in a hospital on the north side of Chicago, where she says he worked for half the pay and took on twice as many on-call shifts as his white counterparts.
“He would curse when he had to do the extra on-call [shifts]. He knew it wasn’t right,” she says. “He told me when I was young, ‘When you grow up, you’re going to feel racism and sexism. But you won’t be able to name it and you won’t be able to prove it because it’s going to be so subtle.’ And he was absolutely right.”
Hall didn’t find her calling until she went to college in Hawaii during her late 20s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. It was then that she saw the beautiful, albeit chaotic, dance between health agencies that public health directors help coordinate. It was also when she learned that to really make a difference in people’s lives through public health, the emphasis must be on prevention.
When she arrived in California in 2005, she wasted no time making her mark in public health, first serving as assistant health and human services director in Sierra County before moving to Plumas County and becoming the lead health official there. Although she oversaw a county that was only 18,000 people strong, Hall made sure their voice was heard at the state level. While serving on the County Health Executives Association of California (CHEAC), she advocated for the state to reform its funding strategies to bring needed services to small rural counties where treatment was lacking.
Hall remembers applying for a federal grant and telling the agency that it can’t say that “because it’s too hard and it costs more, these people don’t deserve the same kind of treatment and care if they were somewhere else.”
“Bringing that care to those communities, that’s equity,” Hall says. “I’m so grateful for my time in those small counties. It doesn’t matter how small you are … as long as you can be a voice for the whole public health community, you can make a change so that wherever you work you can elevate public health overall.”
The Future Of Public Health
In a slideshow presentation that Hall uses to teach county supervisors throughout the state how public health works, she has a quote from famed American engineer W. Edwards Deming: “Every system is perfectly designed to achieve exactly the results it gets,’” Hall says with a trailing chuckle. “If you don’t change and grow, you’re going to only do what you’ve always been doing.”
Hall, a steadfast rule follower, says that public health is all about structure, responsibilities and laws. But for the first time in her career, she will get to work outside of those lines a bit. Next month she’s joining Manifest MedEx, a nonprofit health data network, as its director of public health innovation. In that role, she’ll work with county and state agencies to improve public health and prevention by using Manifest’s data network that spans more than 28 million Californians, 125 hospitals, 1,500 ambulatory care sites and nine health plans—the largest such web in the state.
“With the expansion of Medi-Cal and bold legislation that will require providers, hospitals and health plans to share health data, California stands at a pivotal moment when we can truly transform public health for generations,” said CEO Manifest MedEx Claudia Williams.
Part of that evolution, Hall says, is a campaign coined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as Public Health 3.0. That initiative, in a nutshell, says that although the U.S. has made progress in increasing the health and longevity of its residents through public health interventions and high-quality health care, it must now work to address the widening gap in life expectancy between the highest and lowest income communities.
Public Health 1.0 brought forth, among other things, basic sanitation, improved water and food safety and the introduction of vaccinations, and Public Health 2.0 focused on “siloed” funding streams such as alcohol or tobacco prevention campaigns. Public Health 3.0 emphasizes that a person’s zip code is the strongest determinant of their life expectancy, and that public health agencies must be the catalyst for change in their community by bringing various sectors—education, transportation, local government, health care providers—together in order to improve a region’s health outcomes.
“It takes a whole community, because there’s no one thing that influences health,” Hall says.
In many ways, Hall’s leadership style from the past four years mirrors Public Health 3.0. County health department heads in the future will likely be the strategists of long range plans who will then be tasked with getting multiple organizations to buy in and execute it.
Of course, these plans will need funding to be completed, but Hall says she’s confident those dollars are on their way. As CHEAC Board President, she helped get the state legislature to fund a $300 million yearly allocation for public health infrastructure in next year’s legislative cycle. “And that’s just the start,” she says.
Locally, the county’s Freedom Boulevard location is set for a large expansion that will add some 10 to 15 dental chairs in a partnership with Dientes, and a 16-bed children’s residential crisis center. Hall says those upgrades were set for two years down the road, but the money is expected to be there now and the need in Watsonville after the pandemic is very high.
“The time is now, the money is coming now, let’s serve our community,” she says.
The Hall family isn’t leaving the area—she will be working remotely for Manifest—but she will have to watch the department move forward from the sidelines. Looking back at the last four years, she says she’s proud of what HSA accomplished.
“But I’m also not full of myself enough to think it’s me—this is an amazing team,” she says. “The only thing I did was allow them to work the way their training said it should work. I know they’re going to be more than fine when I leave.”
On the Nov. 2 ballot, there will only be one local issue for Santa Cruz voters to weigh in on: whether to increase the portion of funds generated from the city’s cannabis tax going to children’s programs.
Measure A would increase funds going to children’s programs from 12.5% to 20% and establish a dedicated Children’s Fund to collect and allocate the money. The rest of the money collected from the cannabis tax goes to the city of Santa Cruz’s general fund.
The measure is going out to voters at a time when the City is projecting the pandemic-related recession and budget crisis will last for at least the next four years. Bringing this measure to the voters is estimated to cost the city between $141,804 to $177,255, based on figures from the County Elections Department.
Councilmember Martine Watkins, who proposed the measure alongside Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson and Renee Golder in June, said Measure A was not supposed to be the lone measure on the ballot. A half-cent sales tax increase that would have brought an estimated $6 million annually into the city’s general fund was also planned for the ballot, but that measure, which required unanimous approval from the council, was struck down by Councilmember Sandy Brown. Brown, the lone holdout, cited the city’s inability to increase its lowest-paid employees’ wages as one of her primary reasons for blocking the measure.
While Watkins wished voters would have had the chance to vote on both measures, she still believes the expenses associated with bringing Measure A to voters are justified.
“It’s really an incredible investment and in the immediate term when you think about the childcare crunch and the essential workers needing childcare during the pandemic,” Watkins says. “We talk a lot about equity, and now we have a chance to take action.”
If voters affirm the measure, she says, it would make the fund permanent, rather than beholden to whoever sits on the council.
“We have been seeing a lot of turnover on the council,” says Watkins. “This is my last term on council, and policies over time can lose intention.”
How It Started
Watkins first thought of the idea of having a dedicated children’s fund after California legalized recreational cannabis in 2016. She was excited about the city’s new source of revenue, and went to work advocating for a portion of those funds to go to underserved youth. The council created the Children’s Fund in 2017, and since then it has distributed $83,634 to children’s programs in Santa Cruz. The money has gone to programs like the Neighborhood Childcare Center and the Toddler Care Center, specifically dedicated to making sure these services are accessible to low-income families.
If Measure A is approved, the Children’s Fund will see a much larger chunk of the $1.7 million in cannabis tax revenues the city projects for 2022.
Watkins says that since the cannabis industry is growing, more money going to children’s services doesn’t necessarily mean that the city’s general fund will take a hit.
“The increase wouldn’t be taking away from something, since the cannabis industry is a new revenue source that just continues to grow,” says Watkins.
It’s true that cannabis tax revenues have been on a steady incline since 2016, often exceeding the city’s projections. In 2021, it has exceeded projections by over half a million dollars, according to the balance sheet for the cannabis business tax fund sent to GT by city spokeswoman Elizabeth Smith.
While Watkins acknowledged that the cannabis industry is bound to plateau, she says the investment in childcare will be lucrative in more ways than one.
“When we think about how a lot of our dollars are spent dealing with really complex social issues before us, this is just the longer-term investment to set kids up for success,” she says. “And hopefully, they will be successful contributing members of our community, which can really pay off in the long term in terms of our costs associated with the police or fire department.”
In addition to increasing money that is allocated to the children’s fund, Measure A would set up a Community Oversight Committee. Who will sit on this committee will be critical to the success of distributing the money to the kids who truly need it, says Councilmember Justin Cummings.
“I think that the makeup of that committee needs to be diverse, racially and socioeconomically,” Cummings says. “And with regards to gender as well, because we need to make sure that those funds are going to the families that need it the most.”
It’s not pre-determined exactly how these dollars will be used, but it’s expected that funds will be distributed similarly to how they are now, with 50% of the funds going to childcare, and the remaining 50% providing scholarships for kids to participate in parks and recreation programs.
Status of Childcare
Federal funding is slated to come from President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan, which promises to lower child care expenses based on income, and would cover care costs for children from the lowest income brackets. In total, the plan would spend $200 billion on universal Pre-K and inject $225 billion into child care. But the infrastructure required to get that money out to states and local governments could mean it will take years for programs to see that money.
While Biden’s plan is a step in the right direction, it still might not be enough, says David Brody, executive director of First 5 Santa Cruz County.
“What we know from our work at the national, state, local level is that the cost of providing really high-quality care often exceeds federal and state subsidies that are available to do that,” he says.
And, Brody says, the pandemic has only exposed how critical accessible childcare really is.
“We need everyone to step up to get us to the place that we want to be as a community in terms of a truly well-supported system of care for young children and families,” Brody says. “Local measures like the Children’s Fund, in our view, are absolutely essential.”
Ballots were mailed to Santa Cruz registered voters on Oct. 4. To vote, visit Santa Cruz County Clerk/Elections Office 9am to 5pm on Oct. 30-31. On Election Day, Nov. 2, polls open at 7am and close at 8pm. Visit the County Clerk’s website for more information.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries philosopher Emil Cioran wrote, “When I meet friends or people I know who are going through a difficult period, I usually have this advice for them: ‘Spend 20 minutes in a cemetery, and you’ll see that, though your worry won’t disappear, you’ll almost forget about it and you’ll feel better.'” I don’t think you’re weathering a terribly difficult phase right now, Aries, but you may be dealing with more riddles and doubts and perplexities than you’re comfortable with. You could be feeling a bit darker and heavier than usual. And I think Cioran’s advice would provide you with the proper stimulation to transform your riddles and doubts and perplexities into clarity and grace and aplomb. If you can do Halloween without risk from Covid-19, here’s a costume suggestion: the spirit of a dead ancestor.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): According to some spiritual teachers, desire interferes with our quest for illumination. It diverts us from what’s real and important. I know gurus who even go so far as to say that our yearnings deprive us of freedom; they entrap us and diminish us. I strongly disagree with all those ideas. I regard my longing as a primary fuel that energizes my drive to free myself from pain and nonsense. How about you, Taurus? In alignment with astrological omens, I authorize you to deepen and refine and celebrate the yearning in your heart. Your title/nickname could be: 1. Yearning Champion. 2. Desire Virtuoso. 3. Connoisseur of Longing.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Author Jessamyn West confessed, “I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.” I offer her testimony as a cautionary tale, Gemini. There’s no astrological reason, no cosmic necessity, that decrees you must become like a sausage anytime soon. Such a fate can be easily avoided. All you must do is commit yourself to not jumping into the sausage grinder. Also: In every way you can imagine, don’t be like a sausage. (To meditate on sausage-ness, read the Wikipedia entry: tinyurl.com/SausageMetaphor)
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Our fellow Cancerian, author Franz Kafka, told us, “It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.” And yes, some of us Crabs go through phases when we crave safety so much that we tolerate, even welcome, being in chains. But the fact is that you’re far more likely to be safe if you are free, not in chains. And according to my reading of the astrological omens, that’s extra true for you now. If you can celebrate Halloween without risk from Covid-19, here are costume suggestions: runaway prisoner, escape artist, freedom fighter.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Some of us yearn for allies who can act like saviors: rescue us from our demons and free us from our burdensome pasts and transform us into the beauties we want to become. On the other hand, some of us do all this hard work by ourselves: rescue ourselves from our demons and free ourselves from our burdensome pasts and transform ourselves into the beauties we want to become. I highly recommend the latter approach for you in the coming weeks, Leo. If you can do Halloween without risk from Covid-19, here is a costume suggestion: your own personal savior.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “One of the reasons people are so unhappy is they don’t talk to themselves,” says author Elizabeth Gilbert. “You have to keep a conversation going with yourself throughout your life,” she continues, “to see how you’re doing, to keep your focus, to remain your own friend.” Now is a favorable time to try such an experiment, Virgo. And if you already have skill in the art of carrying on a vibrant dialog with yourself, now is a perfect moment to upgrade and refine it. Try this experiment: Imagine having a conversation with the Future You.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “In the absence of willpower, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is worthless.” Libran occultist Aleister Crowley wrote that, and I agree. But let’s phrase his idea more positively: To make full use of your virtues and talents, you must develop a strong willpower. And here’s the good news, Libra: The coming weeks will be a favorable time to cultivate your willpower, along with the assets that bolster it, like discipline, self-control, and concentration. If you can do Halloween without risk from Covid-19, here are accessories I recommend for you to carry with you, no matter what your costume is: a wand, a symbolic lightning bolt, an ankh, an arrow, a Shiva lingam stone or crystal.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Mardi Gras is a boisterous festival that happens every February all over the planet. One hotspot is New Orleans. The streets there are filled with costumed revelers who enjoy acting in ways that diverge from their customary behavior. If you want to ride on a float in the parade that snakes down Royal Street, you must, by law, wear a festive mask. I invite all of you Scorpios to engage in similar festivities for the next three weeks—even if you’re not doing much socializing or partying. It’s a favorable time to experiment with a variety of alternate identities. Would you consider adopting a different persona or two? How could you have fun playing around with your self-image?
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Jungian psychotherapist and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estés reminds us, “In fairy tales, tears change people, remind them of what is important, and save their very souls.” I hope you’re open to the possibility of crying epic, cathartic, catalytic tears in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. According to my analysis, you have a prime opportunity to benefit from therapeutic weeping. It could chase your fears and cure your angst and revivify your soul. So please take advantage of this gift from life. Be like a superhero whose superpower is to generate healing by crying.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Filmmaker Wim Wenders said, “Any film that supports the idea that things can be changed is a great film in my eyes.” I’ll expand upon that: “Any experience, situation, influence, or person that supports the idea that things can be changed is great.” This is a useful and potentially inspiring theme for you to work with right now, Capricorn. In accordance with astrological rhythms, I hope you will be a connoisseur and instigator of beneficial, beautiful transformations.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Fitness buff Jack LaLanne was still doing his daily workout when he was 95. He was also famous for performing arduous feats. At age 65, for example, he swam a mile through Japan’s Lake Ashinoko while towing 65 boats filled with 6,500 pounds of wood pulp. I think you’re currently capable of a metaphorically comparable effort, Aquarius. One way to do it is by mastering a psychological challenge that has previously seemed overwhelming. So meditate on where your extra strength would be best directed, and use it wisely! If you can do Halloween without risk from Covid-19, here are costume suggestions: fitness buff, bodybuilder, marathon runner, yoga master.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): When birdwatchers describe a bird, they speak of its “jizz.” This term refers to the distinctive character of its habitual movements, flying style, posture, vocal mannerisms, and coloring. One aficionado defines jizz as the bird’s “indefinable quality,” or the “vibe it gives off.” I’ve got a theory that right now you’re as bird-like as you’ve ever been. You seem lighter and freer than usual, less bound to gravity and solemnity, and more likely to break into song. Your fears are subsiding because you have the confidence to leave any situation that’s weighing you down. If you can do Halloween without risk from Covid-19, here’s a costume suggestion: the bird that has your favorite kind of jizz.
Ian Brand had already made a name for himself in the wine business, but his popularity skyrocketed when he won the San Francisco Chronicle’s Winemaker of the Year award in 2018. With three labels under his belt, including Le P’tit Paysan, La Marea and his namesake, I.Brand & Family, he’s a busy guy.
We headed to Deer Park Wine & Spirits for one of their early afternoon tastings featuring Ian Brand’s wines. I was immediately impressed with I.Brand & Family’s 2017 Grenache—Besson Vineyard, Santa Clara Valley ($42).
“This old-vine Grenache is bursting with red ripe fruit and baking spices,” the folks at I.Brand say. Juicy cranberries and raspberries with some eucalyptus and herbs linger on the palate. With its natural light color and earthy-rich flavors, this medium-bodied red wine is often a favorite over more robust wines like Pinot Noir and Zinfandel. And with Thanksgiving coming up, it’s a good time to start thinking about wine as well as turkey!
I.Brand & Family, 19 East Carmel Valley Road, Carmel Valley Village, 831-298-7227. ibrandwinery.com.
Shake Up Your Date
My husband and I love to stay in Palm Desert, and we always have our favorite places lined up to get a date shake—a tasty blend of vanilla ice cream and dates from local desert orchards. Our first stop is Hadley’s in Cabazon—just before you get to Palm Springs. Chock-full of tiny date pieces, Hadley’s makes one of the best date shakes around. Another place we visit is Shields Date Garden in Indio. Their date shakes are enormous, so we always share one. There’s also Oasis Date Garden in Thermal, which is worth the drive out there for one of their terrific shakes. All these places sell dates, of course, and it’s an opportunity to bring home date varieties that are not easy to find elsewhere. Most people have heard of Medjool and Deglet Noor dates, but have you ever tried Khadrawi, Halawi, Zahidi, Abbada or Thoory dates? If not, I strongly recommend you do!
The Crepe Place has become an iconic Midtown fixture. The restaurant/bar/live music venue’s owner is a local music icon in his own right. Chuck Platt, bassist for the popular local rock band Good Riddance, bought the place four years ago. After playing shows worldwide and eating so many varieties of cuisine, he came to appreciate the restaurant industry, which led him to discover another means of self-expression. He always wanted to own a local bar and jumped at the opportunity to purchase the Crepe Place, serving up sweet and savory crepes, craft cocktails and good live music. A couple of the most rocking crepes include Crepe Gatsby, chicken with red pesto, and a dessert option, Banana Rama, smothered in Nutella and vanilla ice cream. They also offer vegan and vegetarian versions of any crepe. Other menu favorites include the Cobb salad and housemade soups. Open every day except Monday, they also serve brunch Saturdays and Sundays. Platt spoke to GT about cool upcoming Crepe Place shows, and reminisced about Good Riddance’s early days.
What future music acts are you excited about?
CHUCK PLATT: We’ve started slow with music acts coming back. Our Halloween shows are always incredibly fun, with local bands playing tribute songs, and another one that I’m looking forward to is Henry Chadwick. He’s played here several times, and the customers love him and his power-pop style. We are hoping to have a big New Year’s Eve party as well.
How did you become a part of Good Riddance?
I was working at a local Kinko’s in 1994, and our guitar player Luke came in to make “Bass Player Wanted” flyers to post around town. I was helping him at the counter and told him I could play bass. He didn’t make the flyer. He went home and brought me back a cassette of their music, and I loved it. Ten albums later, the rest is history, and we’re still going strong.
1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz, 831-429-6994; thecrepeplace.com.
Nick Sherman is the chef of the moment, finessing gorgeous food at his new Capitola restaurant Trestles. Food that tastes even better than it looks. From irresistible sauces to impeccable seafoods, the Trestles menu is both playful and serious. Sherman, who opened the attractively decorated restaurant on the site of the former Bella Roma, is a Santa Cruz native who earned his credentials cooking in the Napa Valley until the pandemic brought him back home. From where I sat last week, overlooking charming Capitola Village, Trestles has already found an approving audience for Sherman’s expert way with vegetables and seafoods. Melo, Patti and I shared a seafood special as an appetizer and were treated not only to succulent octopus, but also to its brilliant accompaniment of pale green squash, baby haricots verts and fresh from the cob corn arrayed on a tomato-infused sweet-tart sauce ($20). Octopus so tender and toothsome that we began swapping tales of past visits to Greece. From the eclectic wine list, we chose a trio of generously poured varietals. A light, crisp 2018 Terres Dorees Chardonnay ($14), a 2020 les heretiques vin de rouge, spicy and rustic, full of berries ($11), and a satisfying 2017 Martin Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Clara Valley ($17).
In an effort to try everything on the menu, we next launched into a flawless plate of fresh roasted trumpet mushrooms atop a gruyere fondue with balsamic glaze. Tart baby greens and a generous dusting of cheese played counterpoint to the meaty funghi ($12). Patti’s Caesar salad ($13) was also perfection, offering the right balance of garlic, cheese, and anchovy on crisp baby romaine plus featherlight crouton cubes and a hint of preserved lemon. Nothing is just a garnish at Trestles. Every detail sings.
For entrees, we again wandered the menu. I chose crispy pork belly, sitting alongside pretty cubes of roast watermelon, with jalapeño vinaigrette, frisee, and sliced daikon, on a pool of addictive soy-laced glaze ($17). Chef Sherman likes sauces that spark flavors, rather than mask or drown them. Each dish arrived with a piquant glaze or sauce, and nowhere more intriguing than in Melody’s order of caramelized scallops ($31). The plump golden shellfish was accompanied by tiny dice of kohlrabi, on a bed of kohlrabi puree, amidst a few perfect brussels sprouts leaves. Everything was embroidered with an intense port reduction, flavors yielding to ever-more interesting flavors. Same with Patti’s main dish, a tostado-style layering of crudo tombo tuna. The tiny tostadas were frosted with avocado mousse and layered with radish, rings of micro-thin green peppers and micro cilantro ($16). All sprinkled lightly with togarashi. However complex the flavors that blossomed from each dish, nothing overwhelmed the palate. My cab proved outstanding, with the pork belly and the mushrooms throughout the meal.
We pretty much fell in love with this menu, as did the diners who’d filled up the dining room as well as the outdoor patio by the time we were finished with our early dinner.
Couldn’t resist trying the house desserts, including a luscious butternut squash cheesecake with a crust of almonds and pepitas. Also wonderful was a warm light chocolate brownie topped with its perfect companion, vanilla ice cream (both $10). The comforting desserts deserved a more imaginative presentation. They looked a bit lost in their deep white bowls.
Kudos to the chef and the smart, patient wait staff. Trestles gave me the best variation on bistro-style California cuisine I’ve enjoyed in a long time. A word to the inquiring diner: make reservations as quickly as you can. Trestles is already wildly—and rightfully—popular.
316 Capitola Ave., Capitola. Open Th-Fri 4-9pm, Sat-Sun 4-10pm. trestlesrestaurant.com.
