Truth is definitely stranger than fiction—and a lot more sinister—in Three Identical Strangers. Filmmaker Tim Wardle’s engrossing documentary follows the true story of three young men who met by chance and discovered they were triplets, separated from each other and their birth mother as infants. None of them had any idea that the other two existed. How this happened—and the darker question of why—makes Wardle’s movie as gripping as any thriller.
As in fiction, we begin with a single protagonist whose adventures draw us into a larger story. In 1980, on his very first day of community college in the Catskills, 19-year-old Bobby Shafran couldn’t figure out why people he’d never seen before kept greeting him so warmly. Looking back, the adult Bobby recalls, he just thought it must be a friendly place. The weird thing was, everyone kept calling him “Eddy.”
On a hunch, one of his astonished fellow students asked Bobby if he was adopted, which he was. This student also knew the mysterious Eddy Galland, who was also adopted, and the two men took a two-hour drive to Long Island to meet him. “The door opened,” Bobby recalls, “and there was me, standing there.” The two strangers had the same curly hair, the same wide, toothy grin, the same build—and the same birthdate, at the same hospital. They were identical twins.
The human-interest story about the twins who found each other by sheer chance got some press in the local tabloids, and that’s when things got even more bizarre. David Kellman, a student at Queens College, saw a newspaper story about the twins, and recognized his own face—and his birthdate. Also raised by adoptive parents, David called the Gallands and reached Eddy’s mom. “Oh my god,” she remembers thinking, “They’re coming out of the woodwork!”
Using archival footage and some reenactment, this first section of the movie is played for larky good cheer, as the ingratiating triplets, now inseparable, make the rounds of talk shows and nightclubs, coasting along on the fumes of their amazing story and sudden celebrity. In time, they even open a NYC restaurant together, called—what else—Triplets.
But things begin to take a darker turn when all three sets of adoptive parents—none of whom was ever told about the other two boys—-go en masse to visit the adoption agency, Louise Wise Services, to get some answers as to why the babies were split up. Besides appearance and mannerisms, what the triplets have in common is that each was raised in a household with one other adopted sibling. Each one also vaguely remembers regular visits from strangers when he was a small child who gave him tests and filmed his play. And was it sheer coincidence that the boys were placed in such a cross-section of economic households—one working-class, one middle-class, and one well-to-do?
But nothing in this story is coincidental. While the agency’s so-called answers to the parents are “elusive,” we learn that major players included an Austrian geneticist, two of his research assistants (one slightly less ethically challenged than the other, in retrospect), and a journalist writing a story for The New Yorker whose research confirms that all three boys and their adoptive families—without their knowledge or consent—were part of a scientific study that went on for decades. But the study was never published, and David goes online to discover the documents have been sealed in a vault at Yale until 2066.
As each new revelation is unearthed, Wardle keeps his focus on the long-term effects on the triplets themselves. (As babies, their adoptive mothers report, each boy went through a head-banging phase from being separated from each other at such an early age.) Even their reunion is ultimately haunted by tragedy.
None of these participants knew they were in an experiment; they thought they were having lives. The callous indifference of the researchers and their enablers is chilling.
THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS
*** (out of four)
With Eddy Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran. Directed by Tim Wardle. A Neon release. Rated PG-13. 96 minutes.
Joe Kaplow grew up on a farm in rural New Jersey, playing music, but not really knowing what to do with it. Eventually he went on a nine-month U.S. tour. Santa Cruz was one of the spots on that venture. He liked it so much that he now calls it home.
In describing this long tour, he jokingly refers to it as his “farm-to-table” tour.
“I left the farm, and now I’m playing at your table,” he tells me.
Not only did he immediately like Santa Cruz, but living here had a major impact on his creativity. For starters, it motivated him to get into a studio and record an EP, which happened months after he relocated here. This first self-titled EP, which he recorded in a single day, was released on Sept. 9, 2015.
“I grew up in the middle of nowhere, so there wasn’t an active scene in music. I was essentially a bedroom musician up until then,” Kaplow says. “Things like making records and having websites were foreign to me. When I moved here, I saw this is what people are doing.”
The record showcases his stripped-down singer-songwriter approach to music. After being actively involved in this scene, and continuing to tour, he decided that he really wanted to take his time and make a record he felt really proud of, so he took most of 2017 off from touring and focused on creating this record, Ain’t That Much of a Smoker, which he did in his home, with as much time as he possibly needed.
“It was unbridled creativity,” Kaplow says. “I had all the time to explore any idea or any arrangements, so that lends itself to having a lot more instruments on the record.”
For the most part, Kaplow no longer plays as a solo artist because he used a band to create the music on this record. His current live lineup includes Elliott Kay on guitar, Kai Kopecky on bass, Mikey Whalen on drums, and Rob Armenti on keyboards. The album will get released in November. This coming show at the Crepe Place he will release its first single, “I Said I Was Going and I Went.”
INFO: 9 p.m. Friday, July 13. Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $10. 429-6994.
Skov Winery was closed for a period while owners Annette and David Hunt attended to various business interests and family matters, but now they are back in action–and their tasting room is open every Saturday. Skov is situated in a picturesque setting among the redwoods a couple of miles down bucolic Bean Creek Road in Scotts Valley, and it’s well worth a visit.
I attended an event recently in the winery’s spacious party room, a perfect spot to hold family gatherings, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and more. It was also an opportunity to try some of their wines—and I loved the Skov Winery 2014 Pinot Noir($28) Russian River Valley, a voluptuous mouthful of inky purple nectar filled with red fruits and earthy flavors that would delight any picky Pinot-phile. Skov also makes Chardonnay, Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc.
Skov is participating in Taste of Scotts Valley on July 12 at Kiss Café in Scotts Valley, the kickoff party to the main Scotts Valley Art, Wine & Beer Festival in August. Visit svartfestival.com for more info.
Skov Winery, 2364 Bean Creek Road, Scotts Valley, 854-7384. skovwinery.com.
Farm-to-Table Dinner at Chaminade
The featured winery for the next farm-to-table dinner at 6 p.m. on July 13 is Martin Ranch. The annual series of summer dinners are gastronomic delights—abundant with food, wine, stunning views and fun. Visit chaminade.com for more info.
Burrell School Vineyards Introduces Happy Hour, Thursdays and Fridays
Burrell School is now open from 4:30-6:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays for Happy Hour—so you can start the weekend early! Five wines will be featured by the glass for $8, and bottles to-go for only $25. Choose from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Old School Cabernet Sauvignon. Come get your happy on. Burrell School Vineyards & Winery, 24060 Summit Road, Los Gatos, 408-353-6290. burrellschool.com.
Route 1 Farms Dinner Update
For those lucky people with tickets to the next Route 1 Farms dinner on Aug. 12, there has been a change of chef from Tabitha Stroup of Friend in Cheeses to Gema Cruz of Gabriella Café. The winemaker remains the same, Nicole Walsh of Ser Wines. Contact ro*********@***il.com for more info.
Now that summer is here, it’s time to take a little break and maybe trade in a few vacation days, even if the plan is to stay in town. My staycation starter kit involves grilling everything in sight, keeping a beach bag in my car and always having something cold, boozy and refreshing on hand.
This summer, I’m taking inspiration from Westside craft distiller Venus Spirits, where Sean Venus has created a seasonal spirit that will help get you into the spirit of the season—a gin with tiki-inspired botanicals. Gin X Summer follows the inaugural release of Gin X Spring, and is the second in an ongoing experiment (that’s what the ‘X’ stands for) by Venus to play with new recipes. Distinctly different from his award-winning Gin 01 and Gin 02, the summer release boasts serious island vibes with aromas of pineapple, lime, passionfruit, and almond that hums with warm spices like cinnamon, allspice, and ginger. Exceptionally light and clean, it’s lovely poured on its own over a single huge ice cube, perhaps with a splash of good tonic, but also really shines in a cocktail.
In his tasting room off of Swift Street, Venus shook up 1.5 ounces of Gin X Summer with .75 ounces of pineapple juice and .5 ounces of lime juice, poured it over ice and topped with ginger beer to create a tropical libation that almost begged for an umbrella, or at least to be sipped under one.
Gin X Summer was released to Venus Spirits’ Spirit Club at the end of June and will be available only at their tasting room until the 40-ish cases are gone. Gin X Spring sold out a few weeks ago, so there’s a good chance the Summer release will be gone before autumn, at which time we will have another seasonal shift to look forward to.
For many in California, wine is a cultural mainstay. But in the age where our culture is finally acknowledging that ingredients matter to our health and to the planet, the wine label falls short in its transparency.
Barring a small handful of exceptions, wine producers are not required to list ingredients or additives on their labels. If they were, some labels could be as long and difficult to pronounce as those slapped on processed foods; there are roughly 76 wine additives and treatment materials approved for use by the FDA.
Also known as “zero-zero” wine, the strictest definition of natural wine is one that is made from organic grapes and has had nothing added to it and nothing taken away. “This means native fermented [as opposed to fermented with the genetically modified yeast of commercial wines], not filtered, not fined, and with no additives of any kind, including sulfites,” says Margins Wine’s Megan Bell of the practice that is already well-established in Europe. But even while 50 or so California winemakers have begun to explore low-intervention and “natural” winemaking, the term is not recognized as a legal one by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), so it does not appear on any labels. At the same time, many producers making organic wine aren’t specifying it as such on the label, because of its reputation for not being the best tasting, says Bell.
At Margins, Bell—who focuses on low-intervention and 100-percent naturally fermented wines from organic vineyards, varietals and regions that are lesser known—adds a small amount of sulfites to most of her wines. Now in her third harvest season, she makes at least one natural wine each year (try her Chenin Blanc). Interestingly enough, she’s found that across the board, people often prefer her wine with sulfites added.
That sulfites are the worst or most dangerous additive in wine is perhaps the biggest myth to proliferate over the decades since its governmental warning, passed by teetotaller and then-Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1986, was affixed to labels not so much to inform but to frighten. Sulfites, which have been used to sterilize wine barrels since the ancient Romans, act as a preservative and are often added to wine, though they also occur naturally. They can cause asthmatic symptoms—not headaches—in those who are allergic to them. “There is a small amount of the population, about 1 percent, that is allergic to sulfites,” says Bell. “Every time someone tells me they get sulfite headaches, which is much higher than 1 percent of the people I pour wine for, I ask them if they eat dried fruit, which usually has at least four times the amount of sulfites as wine. They do eat dried fruit, and are fine.”
Indeed, many foods, including most canned foods, contain higher amounts of sulfites than wine—and are not required to include a warning label. The so-called “sulfite headache,” then, appears to be a misdiagnosis that is more probably linked to tannins—which occur naturally and can also be added in powder form—high amounts of sugar, high levels of alcohol, and any number of wine additives that do not require a label listing, much less a governmental warning.
“The wine industry wants you to believe that this is a natural healthy product, when in fact it’s filled with additives and poisons, and this is what’s making people feel bad,” says Todd White of the lab-tested, all-natural and health-quantified wine marketplace Dry Farmed Wines, in an informative recent interview on the podcast Healthy Moms.
Of the long list of additives approved by the FDA for use in winemaking, more than half are classified as GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe), which means there is no governmental oversight for their use. The additives range from sugar and sulfites to a more questionable territory that includes defoaming agents, ammonia phosphates, heavy metals like copper, the coloring agent MegaPurple (for which commercial wine’s purple-teeth side effect are a dead giveaway), and the powerful toxin dimethyl dicarbonate, marketed as Velcorin, a microbial control agent that is widely used as a food additive. Rats who consumed wine treated with dimethyl dicarbonate for 30 days showed no obvious signs of toxicity, and “slight but randomly distributed” differences in organ weights, according to the National Institute of Health. But the science behind wine additives and human health is scarce. For this reason, Bell doesn’t take a stance on additives and health, though she steers away from them all the same.
“I don’t know if it’s bad memories of inhaling Tang as a kid, but I have a resistance to adding powder to liquids I’m going to consume. None of these are necessarily bad, but they exist, and consumers should know they exist if they are in the products they’re buying,” says Bell of the industry’s number of approved powdered additives, like tartaric acid and genetically modified commercial yeast.
Animal products, including dairy products, are also approved for use—effective in removing undesirable flavors—and along with fish bladders, are often used in “fining,” a clarification process that binds and removes particles. Along with a long list of major food allergens, like shellfish and tree nuts, these animal products fall under the TTB’s “voluntary” wine labeling standards.
“My main reason for not fining or filtering my wine is that I do not care if the wine is clear. Is this wine blasphemy? Maybe. But I have never sipped a wine and thought, ‘Mmm, it’s so clear,’” says Bell,whose labels specify that “sediment is expected from wines made with minimal intervention.” She, of course, does not add any of the approved color agents, either. “Are they bad? I don’t know. Is it weird? I think yeah,” says Bell. “If we’re drinking beer and people had dyed it to be more yellow, it would just be worth knowing. But I feel like people aren’t obsessed with color in beer the way they are in wine.”
It’s a matter of education and reframing the consumer perception and demand, she says, recommending that people simply read some Wikipedia before wine tasting. “You really just need to learn what tannin is and what acidity is; then you’ll have a lot to talk about besides color and clarity. I think we’re heading toward a time when less wine consumers will be concerned with clarity. I hope I’m part of that push.”
While mass-produced commercial wine commonly found on the bottom shelf of grocery stores is much more likely to contain questionable additives, high sugar, and high alcohol—the perfect recipe for headaches, poor sleep and a wicked hangover, not to mention other unknown health consequences—as long as labels lack transparency, consumers lack certainty. Wine shops (ask the owners), the online natural wine marketplace Dry Farm Wines, and of course, marginswine.com, are all good sources for low-intervention and natural wines.
“The thing about natural winemaking is that we aren’t necessarily trying to make what winemakers would traditionally call ‘the best wine possible.’ It’s a different frame of mind,” says Bell. “We’re trying to make a statement, and we’re trying to start this new tradition and not follow all of the established rules. We want to make wine out of just grapes and nothing else. For us, that is the best wine possible.”
For more information and to get first access to Margins Wine’s upcoming releases, sign up for the mailing list at marginswine.com.
In an effort to save Monarch butterflies, Assemblymember Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley) has introduced Assembly Bill 2421—a $3 million piece of legislation to provide technical assistance and funding toward preserving and restoring the habitats of Monarch butterflies and other pollinators and across the state.
AB 2421 has so far received bipartisan support, having passed the state Assembly 64-7. It needs to go through the Senate before making its way to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk, which is expected to happen next month. Brown has already earmarked $3 million for the bill in the upcoming budget, and it could have a significant impact on Santa Cruz.
Soon public agencies, nonprofits, farmers, ranchers, and other private land trusts should be able to receive funding, technical assistance, and guidance about how to preserve and restore overwintering grounds and pollinator breeding habitats from the Monarch and Pollinator Rescue Program (MPRP), which the bill establishes as part of the Wildlife Conservation Board (WCB).
Many scientists agree that things will get worse for the Monarchs before they get better, although the feds have shown little interest in listing the butterfly as endangered. Experts say there is more than a 70 percent chance that Monarchs will go totally extinct within the next two decades, according to Stone’s bill.
The populations of Monarchs and other pollinators are dwindling at a rapid rate. “Monarchs are at risk of a total collapse,” says Stone. “There were once millions of them on the Central Coast. Now there are a few hundred thousand.”
Migrating Monarchs bring in tourist dollars to Santa Cruz County. “It’s something that makes the Central Coast unique,” he says.
Under the bill, state parks like Natural Bridges would be able to apply for grant money from the MPRP, as needed. Stone says a significant portion of AB 2421 funding will go toward maintaining overwintering habitat for Monarch butterflies.
Although Monarchs areiconic and grab big headlines, Stone says other species of pollinators would benefit from AB 2421, too. Bees, for instance, are in trouble around the world, under siege from parasites and insecticides.
“We want to protect all pollinators,” says Stone. “They’re good for our agriculture, good for our entire ecosystem, and important to sustain human communities. Without pollinators, crops suffer because they cannot reproduce and grow.”
The MPRP will be in charge of doling out money, and providing other forms of assistance and support. Stone hopes that private money will enter the fund, too, to supplement the effort.
In a theater company named after the most famous dead white male in Western literature, perfect gender equality may never be attainable. But that’s not stopping Santa Cruz Shakespeare from getting as close as possible.
Of all of artistic director Mike Ryan’s seemingly superhuman contributions to his company—reviving it from the ashes of the defunct Shakespeare Santa Cruz, developing a new funding model, establishing a picturesque new home—his policy of gender equity in his acting troupe may be the most radical.
Mandating an equal balance between men and women in his casts is about more than giving female actors opportunities that wouldn’t exist otherwise. It also means re-imagining male roles for women, which requires doing something Ryan’s predecessors considered taboo: changing Shakespeare’s text, even if it’s only pronouns.
Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s fifth season, which starts this week, can best be described as an exploration of the eternal dance between “he” and “she.” It features the world’s most famous doomed romance Romeo and Juliet, the often-overlooked rom-com Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the season’s non-Shakespearean offering, David Ives’s explosive two-person (yep, one man and one woman) drama Venus in Fur.
Each play confronts the dynamics of male and female desire; where those two implacable forces mesh, and where they clash. Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s best-known work, and maybe the world’s most famous story of untamable love breaking through tribal hatred. Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy about four guys renouncing love in favor of study until they meet four gals who put their vow to the test. And Venus is an intimate battle between a man and a woman that pits male expectations against female vulnerability.
Ryan says the theme of the 2018 season is the “undeniability of desire,” and he relates it to the drama that played out five years ago when UCSC extinguished the debt-ridden Shakespeare Santa Cruz, prompting the creation of the newly independent Santa Cruz Shakespeare. The season’s theme, says Ryan, “also celebrates the fact that this community refused to be denied its desire for its Shakespeare festival.”
HEREFORE ART THOU Left to right: Isabel Pask (Juliet) and Taha Mandviwala (Romeo) in rehearsal with director Laura Gordon. PHOTO: KEANA PARKER
This summer’s festival goes into September to allow for a new education program, in which back-in-session schools can bring students to the festival’s grounds at the Grove at DeLaveaga Park for reduced-price (and, in some cases, free) tickets. “Our ultimate goal with this program is to ensure that every student who graduates high school in Santa Cruz County has the opportunity to see a live performance of Shakespeare,” says Ryan.
What those students (and everyone else) will see is an equal number of men and women on stage. That necessarily means that several roles that Shakespeare envisioned as men are going to be “re-gendered” as women. In Romeo and Juliet, those include Juliet’s hot-headed cousin Tybalt, and Romeo’s would-be peacekeeper cousin Benvolio. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the French lord Boyet and the schoolmaster Holofernes will both be women.
Michael Warren is SCS’s textual consultant and head of dramaturgy, a role he’s filled since 1982—the original company’s first season. He was part of the company’s brain trust when the idea of changing Shakespeare’s text was unthinkable. Now, he’s helping the festival’s directors tweak the text to conform to the new policy.
“In the last 10 years,” says Warren, “we’ve moved into a much more flexible approach. There are a lot more signs of adaptations going on now. The scholar in me, the historian in me, wants to see something that is a representation of the Shakespearean original. At the same time, I accept that theater artists are interested in doing something that renders the work in immediate engagement with social conditions in the 21st century. In that regard, I see exactly what the theater is trying to do. It’s seeing it as a mode of revitalization and fresh thinking not only about the particular play, but about theater’s role in the community and in political life.”
The “new” characters open up unforeseen possibilities in otherwise well-known Shakespearean plays. “I’ve made a joke about this, but it’s true,” says Romeo and Juliet director Laura Gordon about the female conversion of Tybalt and Benvolio. “When we were trying to figure out what world we would set this in, the main motivating questions were: What weapons would they fight with? And what will Tybalt as a woman wear to the party?”
‘All are punished’
With the possible exception of Hamlet, there is no more familiar play in the Shakespearean canon than Romeo and Juliet. The tragedy of the two star-crossed young lovers in Verona has been told in countless versions and from countless perspectives. But, says Gordon, the play is a classic because it is so masterful.
“The more you get into it, you see it’s just a brilliant play,” she says. “It’s so incredibly well-written. The poetry is unbelievably beautiful. The psychology of the characters and the compressed time frame of the story—it all happens in three or four days—is so well done.”
“It’s a dazzling piece of work,” says Warren. “It’s very tightly plotted. The verse is extraordinarily inventive. Shakespeare was moving around various kinds of human speech within it. It’s immensely dynamic.”
Gordon’s gender-balanced 16-member cast (which includes Mike Ryan as Friar Laurence) will be costumed by SCS’s redoubtable veteran B. Modern. The setting of the new production tries to thread the needle between the past and the present. The look and costuming style will be, says Gordon, “inspired by the Italian Renaissance,” which doesn’t mean it will be a period piece. Gordon says that she was influenced by Renaissance-style fashions by designers Alexander McQueen and Alberta Ferretti, looks that evoke the Renaissance while still maintaining contemporary aesthetics.
“We’re trying to allow the story to speak to both its own time and to reach us in ours,” she says.
Ryan points to the play’s setting of Verona, paralyzed by a blood feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, as an uncomfortable allusion to current political divisions.
“We’ve never lived in a more polarizing time, at least not in my lifetime. And that seems very much a parallel with Shakespeare’s Verona, which is a town completely polarized. There are also deep parallels between the play and the contemporary slaughter of children by children we see in these school shootings. In this play, all the young people die, killing each other or themselves.”
“I wasn’t interested in having a very contemporary setting,” says Gordon, who also directed SCS’s Much Ado About Nothing in 2015, “where all the Montagues are Republicans and all the Capulets are Democrats, or vice versa, and try to make it super specific. Because I lose the Shakespeare in that.”
At the same time, she says, the Renaissance vibe also allows her to avoid one chilling reflection of modern times: “I really wanted us to fight with rapier and dagger, so we wouldn’t have to deal with guns.”
‘Love is a Devil’
In any contemporary ranking of Shakespeare’s comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost would likely rank well behind a number of other touchstones like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night. But that, says Michael Warren, is an injustice.
“It’s an incredibly funny play,” he says. “The plot is not very elaborate, but there is a lot of wit in it.”
Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, written some time in the mid 1590s when Shakespeare was around 30. It is centered on a king and three lords who have all devoted themselves to three years of study and contemplation without the company of women. Those vows face a trial when the king’s camp is visited by the beautiful Princess of France and her three ladies. The men are hopelessly smitten, but don’t want to let on to one another that they have broken their oath.
‘FUR’ SURE Director Raelle Myrick-Hodges (right) works with leads Brian Ibsen and María Gabriela Rosado González on ‘Venus in Fur.’ PHOTO: KEANA PARKER
“Shakespeare did this amazing thing with this play,” says the production’s director Paul Mullins, in his fourth season at SCS. “He made it about language. It’s an explosion of language and poetry and the ways we communicate, especially when it comes to love and desire. There’s a great deal of rhyming in it, a great deal of sonneting in it. Some of it might be difficult for our modern ear to take. But it’s a wonderful and exuberant story about love and how, when you try to deny it, it will out.”
Mullins says that the play will be set in 1915, “without a lot of modern things, like telephones. We liked the way that looked.”
‘I Shall Deny Myself Nothing’
The third play of the season, Venus in Fur by David Ives, dates back only to 2010. But it alludes to source material that is much older, Venus in Furs (note the plural), a 19th century novel by Austrian Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (whose surname gave us the word “masochism.”)
Ives’s play is a two-person back-and-forth set during the end of a long day of unsuccessful auditioning for a demanding theater director. Just as he is finishing up his day, a woman bursts in, soaking wet, apologizing for being late, and begging for a chance to audition. The woman is obviously all wrong for what the director has in mind, but slowly her position of powerlessness becomes an asset in her struggle to change his mind.
“This play has nothing to do with theater,” says director Raelle Myrick-Hodges, a SCS first-timer. “It has to do with what it’s like to be afraid of failing, and it has to do with what it means to be perceived solely as an object.”
Myrick-Hodges says that Venus will particularly resonate with women who have to navigate a world of unrealistic expectations from privileged men in positions of influence.
“The play is about male fantasy and female reality,” she says. “The perception of how this cisgender straight male looks at the female is based on something that isn’t real. She’s a real woman. He thinks the ideal woman is a 24-year-old saint/sinner fantasy girl. And she’s just an actress trying to get a job.”
Mike Ryan saw the play at ACT and realized that unlike a lot of other two-person plays, it had the power to fill the outdoor space at the Grove. “It starts out with the most unbalanced power dynamic you can imagine. I mean, it doesn’t get any more lopsided than that. With the #MeToo stuff going on, this play is particularly timely.”
As artistic director, Ryan knows that his selection of plays is what sells a season. But he’s also eager to point to other new considerations: a more comprehensive shade structure for those hot summer days at DeLaveaga, and a new license to sell beer and wine.
Mostly though, Ryan wants live theater fans to settle in for a season where the drama is mostly on stage, and not in the struggle for the company to survive. “In the early days, there were a lot of questions about us: Can they make it work? Is it going to last? Will they have a new home? Thank goodness for the amazing donors who stuck with us. But I’m hopeful now that some of the people who took a wait-and-see approach will go ‘OK, those guys have figured it out. Let’s do this.’”
BOX:
Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2018 Season
Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Venus in Fur by David Ives
July 10 through Sept. 2. Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Sunday at 7 p.m. Weekend matinees, Saturdays at 2 p.m. and Sundays at 1 p.m.
The Grove at DeLaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Road, Santa Cruz. $20 to $56.www.santacruzshakespeare.org. Box office: 460-6399.
If all of modern society were a board game, Maria Cadenas thinks it would be a game of Monopoly. But play time, she says, is over.
“Somebody has all the cash, and the accumulation of wealth is totally decided and others are completely left out, and we’re losing the middle,” says Cadenas, the executive director for Santa Cruz Community Ventures. “Those wealth gaps are the results of policies—how the system has been working. So we need to change the system, change the game.”
To fix all this, Cadenas wants to create a local impact investment fund and help finance a more even playing field.
Impact investing has been among the business world’s hottest buzz phrases in recent years. Over time, it’s gone from a vague concept to a way for investors and everyday people to make a difference. Essentially, it’s the practice of putting cash into assets that an investor can feel good about—anything from the environment to journalism in developing countries. These investors typically accept smaller returns than they would on Wall Street or somewhere else.
Although Santa Cruz Community Ventures has not yet finalized its approach, Cadenas’ pitch is to launch a fund that wouldhelp local businesses switch to worker-owned models. With the Silver Tsunami now underway, baby boomers will be retiring. For many, that means selling their businesses.
To help frame the region’s biggest needs, Community Ventures, which is funded by donations, recently collaborated on two economic analyses—one that the group is now getting ready to share, and another with UCSC’s Blum Center that it’s just now finalizing.
Cadenas wants anyone to be able to invest in the fund, for as little as $25. Implementing and scaling this strategy would take time, but she sees that impact investing—combined with what she hopes will be a boom in employee-owned businesses—as the best way to give the county’s economy an even-keeled boost.
“If we don’t address the perpetual generational poverty from one side of the county to the other, we’re gonna be hurting, because most of the county is gonna be poor,” she says. “What does that mean for social structures? What does that mean for transportation? What does that mean for county government funds that are already limited? What does that mean for housing plans? If you don’t address income and wealth gaps, we’re not going to be able to solve the problems jeopardizing our future. If people can’t understand love, I hope they understand numbers.”
DOLLAR BACK
At a recent Monterey Bay Economic Partnership summit, financial adviser Morgan Simon dove into the thinking behind the concept of impact investing, as well as its significance. In the early days, many of the investors were foundations targeting inequality.
“The idea of impact investing,” Simon said at May’s Regional Economic Summit, “was that you could really bridge that gap, that you could have a social and environmental return alongside your foundation return.”
Simon, the author of the new book Real Impact, got her first exposure to some big-picture financial issues at a young age, when she visited Sierra Leone as a USAID worker. While there, she bought a can of tuna at a roadside stand from a woman who had no interest in eating fish out of a can. Simon calculated that the $1 that she had paid the vendor was enough for the woman to buy a few full meals for her family; not only that, but the can brought far more economic value to the shippers along the supply chain, from Japan to Africa, than it did to the woman it was supposed to help.
The interaction illustrated an important lesson—that making a difference involves more than having philanthropic organizations write big checks. Donors have to be invested in how their checks are getting cashed.
Simon—whose sister Nina is executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History—said there are a number of ways for people to get involved with their money. They could bank locally to keep their money in the community. She highlighted the work of her brother-in-law Sibley Simon, who’s created an impactinvestment fund to spur workforce housing development. She also lauded Cadenas for helping kick-start a local movement of worker-owned businesses.
“Watch your assets,” Simon said. “The point is, it’s your money. When we put our money in the bank or we hand it to the financial adviser, we treat it like it’s not ours anymore. And other people are making decisions about what our money is doing in society, but we’re still responsible for those decisions.”
SELLING POINT
Cadenas knows how big some of her ideas sound. She realizes that will take more than a couple worker-owned businesses to create a more balanced economy, but she says we have to think about building a new ecosystem when it comes to impact investing.
“We have to plan for 50 years in the future,” she says. “The idea that you’re looking for a return on investment in one year and you’re gonna capitalize on it, that’s the idea of the current model. You’re going to go in and extract all the value from the community or a resource, benefit from it and go. That’s the model. What we’re saying is, ‘No, that doesn’t work.’ We’re not looking to extract the value. We’re looking to build the value in the community where people are going to live. That means we’re not looking to build billionaires.”
Most people, Cadenas says, simply want to be able to afford going to the occasional movie or have the time to visit their regional park.
Cadenas says the first phase of Community Ventures’ plan involves supporting the switch to more worker-owned businesses. Local groupCo-Op SC formed earlier this year to help business owners explore these issues. Cadenas says Community Ventures plans to offer technical assistance, providing access to accountants, lawyers and consultants. The next step would involve crowdfunding, which is just taking off in California as a way for businesses to seek funding from their communities. The final piece, Cadenas says, will be the impact investment fund, to fill in the gaps.
She says that in order to address income gaps, the Community Ventures prioritizes women and Latino families. Those are also the groups that the nonprofit will target as potential employee owners of local businesses.
Cadenas envisions this new model being able to scale from Santa Cruz County and the Monterey Bay to the Central Coast—and eventually even beyond that.
“We have the political will and the history—and, I think, the guts—to try it,” she says. “If there’s any place where we can pilot this and build it up, it’s Santa Cruz. We’re the right size. We’re the right people, and it’s the right time to do it. There’s no reason to hold up. We’ve just got to be willing to take it and build on it.”
Santa Cruz residents will get an up-close look at the region’s evolving array of renewable energy offerings at the first-annual Community Power Festival this weekend.
The free event, to be held Saturday, July 14, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. at San Lorenzo Park, is organized by nascent nonprofit energy provider Monterey Bay Community Power. The government-backed agency—tasked with transitioning 16 cities in Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties to 100 percent carbon-free energy—planned the festival to offer attractions like live music along with education from purveyors of solar panels, electric bikes and other green alternatives.
“We wanted to have a celebration in Santa Cruz, where everything started,” says Shelly Whitworth, media and communications coordinator for Monterey Bay Community Power.
The effort to create a local clean power authority started five years ago, when former state legislator and current Santa Cruz County Supervisor Bruce McPherson expanded a vision for a countywide program to a broader regional effort.
In the process, Santa Cruz joined a fast-evolving national conversation about community choice energy (CCE) programs, which allow local or regional agencies pursuing more aggressive emissions-reduction goals to take over electricity generation from existing utility providers. A 2002 state measure, AB 117, laid the groundwork for CCEs after California suffered a wave of brownouts and complications with energy deregulation, allowing local agencies to accelerate renewable energy investment by buying in bulk.
Earlier this year, the Monterey Bay region’s roughly 37,500 commercial electricity customers started automatic enrollment in community power. Sign-up for the roughly 235,000 residential accounts in the three-county area started this month. With service up and running, Monterey Bay Community Power joins nine CCEs already offering emissions-free electricity across the country, including nearby Marin and San Mateo counties.
Among the factors differentiating the Monterey Bay CCE is the geographic and demographic diversity of the service area, says Benjamin Eichert, director of the Greenpower program at interfaith advocacy group the Romero Institute.
“Some of the other programs have expanded to later encompass low-income communities, but for the most part they launched in affluent communities,” Eichert says. “You can see the breadth of the program when it includes Carmel, Santa Cruz, but also Hollister, Gonzales.”
Though many environmental groups and policymakers in Santa Cruz have long been outspoken advocates of environmental conservation and climate action, community choice energy isn’t without its critics. Environmental justice groups sometimes contend that business models don’t go far enough to improve access for low-income ratepayers, and climate advocates often disagree about the shades of green that color different carbon-free power sources. Hydropower, for instance, notoriously attracts water conservation concerns.
Locally, PG&E will still oversee transmission, distribution, customer service and billing for all electricity. By the end of this year, however, all commercial and residential users in Monterey Bay Community Power’s service region will begin receiving power from the agency’s portfolio of hydroelectric, solar and wind energy, with the exception of those who decide to opt out of the program and stick with PG&E. The utility’s power mix also includes fossil fuels, natural gas and nuclear power, among other sources.
Of the commercial customers who started the rollover to Monterey Bay Community Power earlier this year, 3 percent have opted out of the new service. Just 1 percent of residential customers have opted out since enrollment started July 1, says Monterey Bay Community Power Director of Communications J.R. Killigrew. Thanks in large part to high anticipated enrollment, the agency is projected to generate $136 million in revenue this year, and $262 million during the first full year of operation in 2019.
Killigrew, a veteran of Marin’s CCE program, says those who opt out are often skeptical of government-controlled power or “just like the status quo.” Costs, Killigrew adds, were designed to be an incentive, rather than a barrier.
“We’re the first community choice program that has an annual rebate program for residential customers, a biannual model for commercial users and a quarterly rebate for large industrial users,” Killigrew says.
To counter concerns about volatile renewable energy prices, Monterey Bay Community Power promises that a 3 percent rebate from PG&E’s rates will be tacked onto customer bills once, twice or four times per year based on power consumption. The program also allows customers to forgo their rebate to help fund local sustainability projects.
Among the biggest questions is how the agency will reinvest funds collected from customers. Since Monterey Bay Community Power is authorized to procure power throughout the Western U.S., customers can pay a higher rate for energy generated in California. Funding local clean power projects is a priority for groups like Eichert’s Greenpower—and the agency did recently release a “Go Local” request for offers to support 20 megawatts of new solar installations in the region—but large-scale projects in cheaper states often come with lower wholesale rates.
“They will be getting renewable energy from a variety of places,” Eichert says. “We want as much as possible of it to be local.”
At least 2 percent of annual revenue will also be dedicated to programs to encourage broader adoption of green technologies—and “not just for your brand-new Tesla,” Whitworth says. Among the programs the agency has considered are making it easier to buy used electric cars or preventing customers behind on their electricity bill from having their power shut off.
Events like this weekend’s festival, Killigrew says, are designed to bring new technologies to life.
“It’s probably one of the fastest-growing revolutions people have seen in a long time,” he says.
The Community Power Festival will be 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Saturday, July 14 at San Lorenzo Park, celebrating the launch of Monterey Bay Community Power, which has been enrolling customers from Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey counties. There will be interactive booths, local vendors, community organizations, food and live music.
Live music highlights for the week of July 11, 2018.
WEDNESDAY 7/11
AMERICANA
WILD & BLUE
Back in 1991, local singer-songwriter Steve Bennett wrote a song about his then 18-month old daughter April (“I never knew about love/till I held you in my arms.”) It’s a heartwarming song he still plays sometimes and gets emotional about. But nowadays he has a musical project with April called Wild & Blue. It’s a powerful father-daughter project. He picks the acoustic guitar, she sings. You can really see Steve’s great songwriting still in action. There’s some twang there, but just a touch. April’s melancholy vocal hooks bring the songs to life. AARON CARNES
If you missed their performance at last week’s High Sierra Music Festival, then make sure not to miss this enchanted evening of jazzy tunes at Moe’s Alley. Both Nathan Moore and Magic in the Other will be playing their repertoire of unique jazzy and jam hits. Nathan Moore delivers singer-songwriter tunes that are one part folk, one part ragtime and all traveling troubadour. No Magic in the Other features members of Phil Lesh & friends, ALO and Mercury Falls for a funk infused jazz fest that’s as cool as the snazzy suits they perform in. MAT WEIR
2018 has been a stressful year. Guess what, it’s halfway over so it’s time to celebrate with an evening of dancing. I know what you’re thinking—should I go dance to soul music or ska? The correct answer is both. Lucky for you, local northern soul all-stars the Inciters are pairing up with longtime San Jose ska band Monkey to bring you an evening you’ll be unable to sit still for. Northern soul is a high energy (extra-dancey) style of soul music. Monkey, as you likely know, plays straight up ska without all the slam-dancing-pitting action that some of the other punky-ska bands play. AC
INFO: 8:30 p.m. Michael’s on Main, 2591 Main St., Soquel. $10. 479-9777.
FRIDAY 7/13
PUNK
WEIRDOS
This Los Angeles group originally formed in 1975, complete with short haircuts, strange clothes and fast music played at extreme levels. While they tried to stray from the “punk” labeling for as long as they could—opting for the preferred nomenclature “art rock”—music fans couldn’t help but see the comparisons. Just listen to their early recordings, and you’ll understand why. MW
Nzuri Soul is a multi-faceted Bay Area gem that can heat things up with an Aretha cover, get the dance floor shaking with funky horns and deep grooves, and slow things down with a smoothed-out love jam. Comprising Lamar Green on keyboards, Eddie Wroten on bass, Chris Brochard on guitar, Mike McCoy on percussion, the captivating Kimberli Stafford on lead vocals, and the Carter Sisters on background vocals, Nzuri Soul blends soul, gospel and R&B in all the right ways. CAT JOHNSON
On a mission to “preserve and continue a traditional culture in a modern age,” Celtic group Runa weaves the music of Ireland and Scotland with jazz, folk and more. The result is something timeless and forward-thinking. Members of the band have roots in the U.S., Canada and Ireland and are now based in Philadelphia, Nashville and Chicago. Collectively, they’ve established themselves as one of the most engaging and innovative contemporary Celtic groups around. CJ
The most award-winning bluegrass band of all time, the Del McCoury Band has been holding it down since the late-’60s. Performing traditional bluegrass, McCoury and company also take an open-minded approach to bluegrass and have grown a fan base that includes Americana enthusiasts, jam band festival attendees and traditionalists alike. For 50-plus years, McCoury has been at the front of the bluegrass wave and has paved the way for countless artists to follow his lead. As resonator guitar standout Jerry Douglas put it, “You can finally make a living playing bluegrass, and a large part of it is because of Del McCoury.” CJ
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $40/gen, $55/gold. 423-8209.
TUESDAY 7/17
AMERICANA
DAROL ANGER & THE FURIES
Over the last 30 years, Darol Anger has changed the way we view the fiddle by mixing his favorite influences from around the world. If his name doesn’t ring a bell at first, you’ve probably heard him playing in the David Grisman Quintet, Psychograss, or the Turtle Island String Quartet, to name a few of his projects. His latest band, the Furies, is an all-star cast of stringed wonders, hand-picked by the man himself. If you’re a fan of the old-timey jams with a modern twist, don’t miss this one-night experience. MW
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Michael’s on Main, 2591 S Main St., Soquel. $17/adv, $20/door. 479-9777.
