Cliff Lede not only makes wonderful wines, but they also have a gorgeous tasting room and outdoor patio area. It’s the ideal place for wine-tasting on a summer’s day.
We celebrated my husband’s birthday there with family several years ago, and enjoyed some splendid wines paired with an abundance of delicious food.
“Elegantly soft and lithe, the 2021 coaxes the taster with warm dark chocolate and luscious black cherry aromas,” says Director of Winemaking Christopher Tynan of this exceptional cab ($80). Dark fruit flavors of cassis, blackberry and blueberries abound—“tinged with floral notes of jasmine and violets.”
Cliff Lede Vineyards produces some incredible wines. One of their Cabs, the 2019 Poetry Cabernet Sauvignon, was awarded 100 points by Wine Advocate. And their 2023 Sauvignon Blanc ($38) is a succulent ride of lime flower, grapefruit, elderflower, kiwi and lychee.
Many different experiences are offered daily at the tasting room. Starting with a simple stand-up tasting at the bar, a morning walk in the vineyard, a library tasting, or with your own private group—Cliff Lede has it all.
My husband and I took a recent trip to Mt. Lassen Volcanic National Park, staying in a basic cabin with no electricity or water, and all our food kept in a bear-proof locker. A few cans of Safe Catch sardines and smoked trout fillets were ideal for handy snacks—perfect after a morning hike round Manzanita Lake. All Safe Catch fish is responsibly sourced, mercury tested and non-GMO. The company is based in Sausalito. Safecatch.com. We also took Steeped Coffee’s coffee bags, a great Santa Cruz company. All you do is pour water over a bag, and voila!—a marvelous brew! Steepedcoffee.com
For four years I was one of the partners in producing the Santa Cruz Blues Festival, a great local festival that ran for a quarter of a century, which I joined after being a grateful attendee. And, man, did I learn about the music business.
I was always reminded of something the blues singer Candye Kane told me. She was a porn actress and writer before she became a songstress. “Nothing in the porn industry prepared me for how dirty the music business is,” she said.
I think about that every time I see a local festival. I know how much promoters risk and how much they stand to lose and how much flak they get from performers, agents, managers, friends asking for freebies and competition from other promoters.
The old joke is: “How do you walk away with a million dollars in the concert biz? Start with $2 million.”
So when our writer DNA, who is a comedy promoter and music lover, came up with an article looking behind the scenes at our Roaring Camp music festivals, I was thrilled. I love to hear how others are making the decisions about which talent to hire and how they handle the risk.
I love the tale in his article about how String Cheese Incident is coming to play a much smaller venue than they could. Basically, the now internationally famous band—who headline Red Rocks and are doing a Halloween Festival in Florida with Bob Weir—played a local festival that got rained out and moved inside.
The band was so impressed with how the Santa Cruz promoter handled the situation that it now asks him if they can play again…and they are!
(One of the toughest decisions promoters have to face is whether they pay a fortune—$20K or more—for rain insurance or risk losing everything in the event of a storm. I still get nervous thinking about that one. What would you do?)
Other cool reads: Check Amy Smith’s column on Tantric Speed Dating. No, it’s not what you imagine, but the story is enlightening. Dating is rough in this town, right?
Former Good Times writer Matt Scott shares his experience after a near-fatal motorcycle crash and his blessed recovery. It’s a must-read.
Food writer Mark C. Anderson has an unexpected column, focusing not on restaurants but on fresh ingredients for your home cooking…and keeping you prepared for the apocalypse. Thanks, Mark.
Andrew Steingrube leads you to a new Capitola restaurant, keeping it fresh and novel.
Want poetry that sticks to your ribs? Christina Waters reviews Dion O’Reilly’s new book, saying “O’Reilly’s new poems persist long after the pages have been turned.”
And in an important Street Talk column, John Koenig hears from locals about their thoughts on the latest presidential candidate.
Thanks for reading.
Brad Kava | Editor
PHOTO CONTEST
SEE THAT GULL Seagull in Santa Cruz, Chillin’ Photograph by Sheri Levitre
GOOD IDEA
For the 15th year, the Santa Cruz County Office of Education and United Way of Santa Cruz County are teaming up to send local students back to school with the supplies they need to succeed as part of the Stuff the Bus supply drive 10am-1pm Saturday at Kaiser Permanente Arena.
Backpacks filled with essential supplies will be distributed to Santa Cruz County students experiencing homelessness and other significant hardships. After raising funds and supplies from generous donors, it’s time for a team of more than 100 volunteers to fill up the backpacks—and Stuff the Bus. For more information, visit https://www.unitedwaysc.org/stb.
GOOD WORK
For the first time, nearly all Santa Cruz County school districts are participating in a culinary training week to help them expand home-cooked meals in schools.
Since most schools are stuck mostly providing meals they purchase from large vendors, Santa Cruz County schools are training cooks on new large-scale recipes for fresher food from local farms.
Even cooks with a lot of culinary experience need training to manage large-scale recipes.
This week, cooks from Pajaro, Live Oak, San Lorenzo Valley, Soquel and Santa Cruz school districts will be training at the Live Oak central kitchen to boost the proportion of scratch-cooked meals across the county next school year.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The independence of science is being attacked across the board in this document.”
–Rachel Cleetus Union of Concerned Scientists, on Project 2025
Kamala Harris jailed more Black people and sentenced them to long prison times, more than was required for pot. THAT is the definition of authoritarian government in a nutshell. HER policies!
She has proven to be a rage-filled demon in her office where scores of her employees confided what a rage queen and tyrant she really is. In front of the camera a different story of a woman acting like she is running for Miss America fake smiles to hide her evil. Get your story straight!
My question to you is this, can you give three examples of how President Trump ran an Authoritarian Government?
Awaiting your reply with bated breath. Only facts please, no propaganda Trump bashing allowed.
J Hansen
UNHAPPY WITH DEMS
The essence of the modern Democratic Party is revealed by the Biden Affair. Questions as to health and competency arose not as to the well being of the country and Mr. Biden but only when it became doubtful that Mr. Biden could win. In failing to resign Mr. Biden replicated the same inclination. A political party whose primary aim is not the well being of the country, but its continuation in power represents a political party that has no qualms about lording it over the People.
Joseph Henry Moless Jr.
ONLINE COMMENTS
RE: BANNING FILTERED CIGARETTES
The claim that cigarette filters make smoking safer is a joke. Smokers will never clean up after themselves.
Dr. Robert Vincelette Jr. | goodtimes.sc
RE: PROJECT PUSHBACK
The public and its representatives are united in that it’s time to clean up unhealthy, unserviced campsites and protect residents, as they also work to reduce the root causes of homelessness, vagrancy, and criminal behavior.
Lowell Hurst | goodtimes.sc
RE: IN THE HEIGHTS REVIEW
Sooooooo great!
My only critique is that the voice mics on the actors seemed really low. Hard to hear. Hard to understand the jokes unless you knew they were coming.
AMAZING CAST AND sets and music! Had a wonderful time last night!
A frontier aesthetic powers Dion O’Reilly’s second book of poems, Sadness of the Apex Predator. (Her first, Ghost Dogs, was published in 2020.) In Apex we enter a wild west that exists in the poet’s showdown with a brutal past. So much to chew on. O’Reilly’s new poems persist long after the pages have been turned.
Sadness perfumes this collection’s four sections. And while it might be helpful to characterize O’Reilly as a nature poet, or an autobiographical one, her free-range foraging defies an easy brand.
Raised on ranchlands, O’Reilly brings a maverick’s voice to her lore of wasted love and calculated risk. She knows how to relish the pain she endured from those who loved her. Crossing genres with ease, uncensored and raw, her memory roams the corridors of visceral intimacy. I sense the wry voice of Dickinson swung through the ecstasy of Whitman, salted with Neil Young.
Part One explores ancestry, evolution, the cyclical nature of hunger, predation, cruelty and satiation. Both predator and prey sit side by side and talk to us. O’Reilly believes, with Eliot, that nature’s cycles are brutal and inevitable:
the biggest lie about the past/is that it’s past.
The book’s second suite revisits a life-altering encounter with fire, and the poet’s slow recovery from serious burns as an analogue for the grotesque cruelty of her mother. Reinforced by feisty wit, O’Reilly here imbeds small explosions of scorn, landmines of shock to puzzle her reader.
Clinical, yet gleaming with sudden humor, these pieces probe the emotional silence of her family during the trauma she endured, and a year spent as a teenager in a burn unit. “My older sister’s body was made of men,” O’Reilly notes of a sibling whose vicious beauty mocked her own disfigurement.
As forensic poet, O’Reilly shifts gears when we least expect it. No eulogies for lost beauty. She is a flawed girl of the golden west who’s seen a thing or two—hot pain, hot fun—echoing the Eagles’ “Desperado”—“these things that are pleasin’ you can hurt you somehow.”
Spare and unsparing, perhaps more dramatic than her influential contemporary Dorianne Laux, resisting the redemptive optimism of close colleague Danusha Lameris, O’Reilly blazes an erratic path. She refuses to package her urgent life into relatable anecdotes.
In “Defects” she insists,
some memories never wash out. They travel/ through generations like sickle-cell, hemophilia,/ blood-blemish, stigmata.
Splitting open the hard fruit of experience, O’Reilly extracts kernels of brutal beauty. This book is a miniature epic of the West Coast poetic genre. It belongs with Stroud, Jeffers, Laux and Addonizio. However, O’Reilly still has more layers to excavate, and this reader looks forward to her unraveling darker mysteries, the ones that lead to Seuss territory.
Memories and loneliness—the true themes of this collection—gather in the final section’s poems, scented by the wildness just outside her Santa Cruz Mountains doorstep. In “Wolf,” O’Reilly confesses, “I’m trying to forget a man/I don’t want to forget.” Patsy Cline blowing kisses to Bob Dylan. Men, the ones she wanted, the ones who left, are met on the trails she recalls, always outrunning the childhood cruelty she can’t help but savor.
In “Mariana” she asks,
Why do I drift on memories?
Conjure what I lost, repeat
the loss again and again?
How many times have I returned
to a mother who savaged me?
Searched for her again and again
in the bodies of men—their eyes
burnished like hers as she beat me—
blood prick of a needle, then bliss
as I recut memory’s diamond.
O’Reilly’s eccentric music is potent. Open any page in The Sadness of the Apex Predator and I’ll bet you can hum along.
Lit Chat with Dion O’Reilly takes place Friday, August 2, 6-7:30pm, at Tannery Arts Center, 1050 River St., Studio 118, Santa Cruz. catamaranliteraryreader.com. O’Reilly’s new book can be purchased at Bookshop Santa Cruz, Two Birds in Capitola and online.
At dawn, at Roaring Camp, up yonder in the mountains of Felton, the foggy mist swirls around the wooden railroad tracks and vintage trains. The fabricated Old West town arises like a ghost, catching glints of a new day, making it appear as if it is the late 1800s.
Early visitors feel like time travelers, walking down Main Street with an active print shop and general store. There’s an air of magic. First on the scene, and last to leave, for over a decade, is operations manager Tyler Armstrong—the only thing missing is his spurs and a sheriff’s badge. Behind the scenes of three of Santa Cruz’s premier festivals—the Redwood Mountain Faire, the Locomotion Festival and Santa Cruz Mountain Sol Festival—Armstrong keeps the peace.
If you attend a music festival and have a fantastic, revelatory time, little thought goes into the mechanics behind the experience. Or the hundreds of hours of human power needed to make it happen. From an audience member’s vantage point, festival bands come on stage, play and leave; then another band starts playing. It looks so easy. What isn’t seen is the army of people who have been working for a week straight to create the illusion. The legion of riggers, vendors, stage hands, food preppers, sound technicians, security, volunteers and dreamers who manifested the original idea.
Easier Than Learning Your ABC’s
From his perched office at Roaring Camp, Armstrong explains how the Redwood Mountain Faire (which most recently took place June 1-2) comes into existence. Armstrong and Hallie Greene, director of the Redwood Mountain Faire Steering Committee, start off on Monday and Tuesday before the weekend event, “walking the grounds and talking it out. Some of the stage guys will start dropping off platforms and risers on Wednesday at 7am, and all of a sudden, just like that, the festival begins to take shape,” he says.
“The stages get built, the sound gets installed and the tents are put up. This is before volunteers or anyone else is here,” Armstrong continues. “There are probably 10 people on site, but with those 10 people we can set up the bones of the whole event.”
When Redwood Mountain Faire started more than 30 years ago, at Highland Park in Ben Lomond, it soon expanded beyond that park’s boundaries. Since 2010, the new Redwood Mountain Faire has evolved into a multi-day event with over a dozen bands and thousands of attendees.
Santa Cruz Mountain Sol Festival arrives August 24 and 25
Green, who joined in 2014, is vocal about the crucial relationship between Redwood Mountain Faire, Armstrong and Roaring Camp. “The actual planning of the event and all operations run through a committee,” says Green, who is already working on next year’s event. “The Steering Committee is just a group of five volunteers. So, I pulled Tyler in a couple of years ago. He was there all the time anyway, so now he’s part of the planning of the event. He knows everything about Roaring Camp, and it’s great to have him there alongside us.”
For Green, and everyone involved in Roaring Camp festivals, it’s about building community.
Co-director Traci-lin Burgess Buntz, agrees that unity is one of the committee’s goals.
“I believe that what makes the Redwood Mountain Faire so special is the sense of community,” Buntz says. “You can put up a stage and tents, but ultimately it’s the people who make our event so special. We are celebrating our community and the beautiful place where we live and all of the local talented artists and bands, while also raising money for some very important causes.”
This year, Redwood Mountain Faire raised $60,000 for 15 nonprofits. But everyone agrees it’s also, primarily, about the music. “My favorite moment of the 2024 fest is a tough call. I would say it was the final set of the event on Sunday night with Melvin Seals and the China Cats. Melvin and the band all looked so happy up there, smiling and playing their hearts out. I looked out from the stage and saw everyone smiling and twirling and dancing together as the sun was setting on the redwoods. And I was thinking, ‘This is what it’s all about. This is what makes it all worth it.’ Our community and the kindness never cease to amaze me,” Buntz says.
A Brand New Dance
The Locomotion Festival, occurring Aug. 2–4, is the new kid on the block. This brand-new festival is an expansion from the minds of beloved Pulse Productions, which also puts on Mountain Sol (Aug. 24-25). Pulse Productions, of course, are hardcore Santa Cruz producers Michael Horne (Palookaville) and Steve Wyman (Boulder Creek Brewery).
“It takes us eight to 11 months to plan Mountain Sol, so we figured time to add another festival,” Horne says with laughter. But it’s true: What only lasts a few days for festival fans takes a year to plan.
So without further ado, remember to keep your hands inside at all times, and hold onto your hats. Fresh out of the train terminal, on its first run around the tracks, it’s the first Locomotion Festival.
REVVED UP Among the 10 bands playing at Roaring Camp this week for the Locomotion Festival is Brokedown in Bakersfield, a side project of Tim Bluhm of Mother Hips along with Nicki Bluhm, Scott Law and members of ALO (which is also on the bill). Photo: Contributed
Among the 10 bands playing at Locomotion—including the String Cheese Incident, Railroad Earth and Dirtwire—is the band Brokedown in Bakersfield. Back in 2011, Brokedown began as a side project of Tim Bluhm (Mother Hips), Nicki Bluhm (the Gramblers), telecaster gunslinger Scott Law, and most of ALO with Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz, Dave Brogan and Steve Adams. Now, with everyone living in separate states, the band has only made a few rare appearances during the last decade.
Brokedown is the perfect country soundtrack to an Old West town, because the band can bang out an authentic heartfelt twang, and the dynamics between Nicki and Tim, who are no longer married, are still electric.
“Nicki and I hadn’t seen each other in many years,” says Bluhm from his recording studio in SF. “Our first gig back was last year up at Mount Tam’s festival, Sound Summit. I wasn’t able to make the rehearsal. I hadn’t seen Nicki in all that time. And we just sort of walked out on stage together individually and started singing those duets, and it just sounded great right off the bat. It felt really good and perfect, at least for me.”
You Gotta Swing Your Hips Now
It’s heartwarming to see the connections and community that occurs between band members and the interplay between musicians. Lebo, who plays pedal steel guitar in Brokedown, is doing double duty at Locomotion, and is also playing with his band ALO (Animal Liberation Orchestra).
Growing up in Saratoga, he and future bandmates Steve Adams and Zach Gill were a young, ragtag group of seekers who found music wherever they could. “When we were growing up, Saratoga was just a mountain kind of orchard town,” Lebo recalls. “It had a real farm vibe to it. We would go to a little restaurant in Big Basin called Country Store Café, who had live music five to six nights a week. We didn’t know who the bands were. They were mostly from Santa Cruz and San Jose. We didn’t care. We would get a bowl of soup and sit there for four hours.”
Bringing people together to celebrate our similarities and cherish our differences is a theme that runs through all of the Roaring Camp festivals. There’s a strong counterculture vibe in the choice of lineups, with Grateful Dead songs often getting the loudest cheers from the crowd.
Lebo was lucky to have parents that took him to his first Grateful Dead concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View. “Zach and I were in seventh grade,” Lebo says. “That was my introduction to it. But in any cultural movement, kids tend to turn to different things than their parents. I was 13 and didn’t really understand what all these mostly older men were doing. But later on, I started coming back to that sound. At a certain point I realized it’s like the angle of the sun. The way the angle of the sun hits planet Earth created the music of the Grateful Dead. And that’s the same angle of the sun that I grew up under.
“You know what I mean?” he asks. “ It’s the music of the land that I love. It feels like home.” Lebo is now part of the Grateful Dead extended family, often playing with Dead bassist Phil Lesh. “It feels so comfortable to me.”
Do The Locomotion With Me
The Locomotion Festival’s biggest draw is three nights of Colorado’s String Cheese Incident. Expect the mighty redwoods to be inundated with tie-dyes of every hue, along with twisters, twirlers and trance dancers. Armstrong says that the festivals are just 8% of his total workload at Roaring Camp, and frequently the most rewarding. But the festivals are also the most taxing in terms of physical labor, dealing with attendees’ boundary issues, and trying to excel in mountain hospitality for all the visiting artists and bands.
The Locomotion Festival’s biggest draw is Colorado’s String Cheese Incident. Expect the mighty redwoods to be inundated with tie-dyes of every hue, along with twisters, twirlers and trance dancers. PHOTO: Michael Pegram
“A few years back, we were supposed to have String Cheese Incident outdoors, but a hurricane swept through the mountain. Last minute we’re setting up inside Bret Harte Hall (next to the General Store) and String Cheese had the most killer inspired sets that I’ve ever seen. And that’s the only reason they’re coming back. The band has far outgrown Roaring Camp (they regularly sell out venues ten times as large), but they saw us grind, in the dumping rain, to create a space they could find magic in. They called us about playing again.”
At the end of the festivals, even before the last attendee finds the exit, bands will be packing up and walkie-talkies will be squawking Armstrong’s name. It will have been a long week, but Armstrong will be smiling, as he was at the end of June’s Redwood Mountain Faire. Even though he knows all the tricks about festivals—how everything is put together, and what musicians are like offstage—Armstrong is a music fan first. Looking around the empty field that just had several thousand humans celebrating humanity and community, Armstrong is quick to describe the whole scene with one word and admit that, in fact, it is “magic.”
Born into an aristocratic Irish family, flamboyant poet/playwright Oscar Wilde was a model of elegance and style. But that didn’t stop him from busting the vacuous veneer of Victorian society, where one had to have beauty or a guaranteed income. Plus a townhouse in the city and a manor in the country.
In The Importance of Being Earnest he gave us one of the most celebrated comedies of manners ever devised. And as we found out last week at Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s production, this wicked satire plays as delightfully today as it did 140 years ago.
Under the consummate comedic instincts of director Paul Mullins, this disarming cascade of wit romps along smartly. Michael Schweikardt’s pleasing set design—one appointed with opulent armchairs and tea service, even a grand piano!; the other a garden setting in the countryside—lays the visual groundwork for Wilde’s brilliant scenario.
Two young gentlemen, Algernon and Jack, lead double lives through an invented surrogate called Earnest, which they use when they need an excuse to leave a tiresome situation and escape to either the city or the country as needed.
However, as “Earnest,” each becomes entangled with pampered young ladies—in Jack’s case Gwendolen, and in Algy’s, Cecily. Turns out that each young woman adores that their beloved’s name is Earnest. Only it isn’t!
The play revolves around the calamities created by this deceit, little eddies of absurd mischief, delicious wordplay and hilarious situations. “I hope you have not been leading a double life pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”
As the play opens, Algy’s aunt Lady Bracknell (Saundra McClain) is coming to tea, bringing along her daughter Gwendolen (Brianna Miller). Jack shows up, proposes to Gwendolen (who thinks his name is Earnest), but is rejected by her upwardly mobile mother.
McClain’s pitch-perfect Lady Bracknell lays it on as thick as clotted cream, forcing the young ones to devise some desperate plots.
Moving to the countryside, we meet Jack’s ward, lovely Cecily (a pert, decibel-intensive Allie Pratt), who upon meeting Jack’s friend Algy/Earnest, confesses a hysterically romantic attachment for him. Cecily’s housekeeper, Miss Prism (an excellent Marion Adler), has caught the eye of the local parson (an over-the-top Mike Ryan), but that’s not all. Miss Prism holds the key to the accelerating plot, which will once again require the presence of Lady Bracknell and her daughter.
“Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever,” Lady Bracknell observes. “If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes.”
It’s as good as farce gets, loaded with observations about marriage as a destroyer of romance, and women’s tendencies to form incomprehensible attachments to each other.
Expert direction and crisp performances make this a production a complete delight. DeJesus and Block as the two young gentlemen are utterly convincing. So comfortable are they with the set, the words and the motivations that we believe completely in their friendship.
As the reliable butler, and there must be a butler to perform the daily tasks of the idle rich, Kurt Meeker is the soul of discretion. So, a few of the British accents slip now and then. But the chance to watch Mike Ryan as an Anglican minister is priceless.
Everybody’s a dream and the entire production had last weekend’s audience laughing through the entire second half—on a weekend when we all needed uplifting! But highest praise for Will Block as the naughty, mercurial, muffin-loving Algernon. His nimble performance was everything Oscar Wilde had in mind when he penned this clever send-up of social pretense. Kudos to all, and an extra muffin for Block!
Shakespeare’s rom-com classic As You Like It filled the Grove with the sounds of merriment, silliness and slapstick at the Santa Cruz Shakespeare opening night. Playing for laughs, this production is spun as a crowd pleaser showcasing sit-com, vaudeville, and an interior gloss on Cyrano performed by a dazzlingly diverse company.
Somewhere in all of this there is the tale of a bold young noblewoman, Rosalind (an adroit Charlotte Munson), exiled from her royal home and dressed as a man, discovering confidence and freedom denied to women of her time. In the guise of a youth accompanied by the court fool Touchstone (Patty Gallagher), and her adoring friend Celia (a vivacious Anna Takayo), Rosalind finds herself free to make her own decisions. Elizabethan audiences must have swooned.
As You Like It is one of those Shakespearean entertainments involving noble brothers, a good Duke and an evil one (both played effectively by Raphael Nash Thompson), warring offspring and cross-dressing lovers. In the end there are lots of weddings and jolly singing and dancing. And to be sure we are entertained. Usually at the expense of poetry and insight.
It is both painful and hilarious to watch the intelligent woman Shakespeare created transform herself into a lovesick suitor of a similarly lovesick object. That object is the good Duke’s son Orlando (an effective Elliot Sagay).
Rosalind and Orlando fell in love back in court, but Orlando too escapes to the forest fleeing his evil brother (a smart turn by Charles Pasternak) and now meets Rosalind in her disguise as a man. Even if he doesn’t yet realize her true identity, Rosalind has a plan. She will teach him courtship that doesn’t rely on Hallmark clichés and stodgy social protocols. It will be hands-on, so to speak.
Both of them, in different ways are playing at (rehearsing?) lovemaking. But without more subtle staging there was no way to tell whether Rosalind remains a giddy girl or something more liberated and hence the sophisticated duplicity of her character gets lost. Some speeches however—clever, swift, and engagingly delivered—reveal cross-gendered Rosalind’s genius, and here is where Munson catches fire.
Santa Cruz Shakespeare performers Jomar Tagatac, Chelsea Rose, Patty Gallagher and Elliot Sagay bring “As You Like It” to life at the Audrey Stanley Grove. PHOTO: Shmuel Thaler
Opening night’s cast knew their lines but often delivered them as if they forgot they had headset amplification and felt the need to use 19th-century vocal techniques. Shakespeare’s ingenious words and colorful insights were underscored by panto gestures and elaborate burlesque, just in case we in the audience didn’t understand. For example, melancholy Jaques wrapping up his coat into a bundle, a visual cartoon of an infant in swaddling blanket, the first age of man as in the “all the world’s a stage” soliloquy.
Paige Lindsey White as Jaques, an exiled noble living in the Forest of Arden, adopts a persona somewhere between David Bowie and Basil Fawlty. Even though her delivery of this famous speech is odd, she is hard to resist. The impeccably confident White struts through her role making non sequitur pronouncements in the cynical tone diametrically opposite of Touchstone’s “motley mocker.”
Jaques provides bits of gravitas, often apropos of nothing, in the way that Touchstone provides comic relief. Exactly as Shakespeare intended, and yet at this point both the play itself, and some of the players, seemed to belong in a different sectors of the galaxy. (At this point I began to suspect that some players were unclear as to their characters.)
High praise for the brilliant music designer/performer David Coulter, whose bag of tricks—ranging from a shimmering musical saw to various pipes, whistles, drums, mouth harps, guitars, et al.—brought a magical sense of continuity and narrative to every scene.
Also contemporizing this production was the onstage presence of large racks of costumes and other stage props, as if to suggest that we were watching the play rehearse itself. But the sketchily equipped set was never explained. Two dress forms graffitied with Rosalind’s name and lines of love poetry were intended to portray the trees of Arden upon which Orlando carves his declarations of love for Rosalind. In key scenes intelligibility seemed sacrificed for novelty. But the endless clowning of genius clown Patty Gallagher kept the crowd in stitches. Lots of stitches.
The director opted to make Shakespeare’s broad silliness even broader, to the extent that Patty Gallagher ends up (I won’t tell you where) barking orders to her ditsy paramour Audrey (Jomar Tagatac in baby doll drag). Major crowd pleaser.
Praise to the warring odd couple, starry-eyed Phoebe (Chelsea Rose) who loves Orlando, and her eager suitor Silvius (Justin Joung). These two worked their way through a brisk comedy of errors, wooing and arguing and knowing exactly who their characters were and what they wanted. Costuming here offered mega-optics reminiscent of a Billie Eilish concert. Kudos to costumer Pamela Rodriguez-Montero.
A trip to the Grove, watching vivacious players working through some prime wordplay, is always a pleasure: “Sell when you can, you are not for all markets,” Rosalind advises one feckless character. She also proclaims the play’s subtext: “Love is merely a madness.” Phrases in use today were invented here 400 years ago—“too much of a good thing,” “forever and a day” and “newfangled.”
The uncanny and inventive sound design of Coulter, a musician who has performed and produced with Tom Waits, Kronos Quartet, Yoko Ono and Wes Anderson, is one of the big reasons why you need to see this production. A full moon and a stageful of action heroes—comic and romantic—are a few more.
There’s plenty of time for the needed fine-tuning since As You Like It runs through Sept. 1 in the Audrey Stanley Grove, Santa Cruz. santacruzshakespeare.org
If we had not gotten lost, we would have never found ourselves looking down on Aptos High School from the mountain above. Seeing the sprawling school from the mountain side made me understand what a huge pillar of this community the high school is, huge in size and community support. Sometimes you just don’t know what you will find until you get lost.
Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul. —John Muir
Freedom Boulevard is my road home. I have driven by Aptos High School five hundred times, and I never gave the school a thought. “Not my place, not for me.”
Except for an occasional morning or afternoon traffic jam at the entrance to the school on Freedom, the arches emblazoned with Aptos High School in blue and white letters, towering over the entrance to the region’s high school, never entered my mind. And if we had not of gotten lost on the mountain above the school, we never would have gotten to see this amazing school.
Rebels Without a Compass
Indigenous tribes for centuries cultivated and maintained intricate trail networks before federal agencies claimed them. I don’t know who created or owns the trails behind Aptos High School, but you can get sensational panoramic views of the school from trails up on the mountain.
We find a path up the mountain out of the church parking lot, next to the Highway Patrol Office on Soquel Avenue. My compadres have their dogs on leashes to keep them from frolicking in the poison oak, which is everywhere. We notice there is no trail signage, none. The path is obviously used by lots of people, horses and even dirt bikes, but this surely is not a government-maintained path.
We are undeterred, we are rebels without a compass. We claim hiking days for our rebellion against structure and rules. We do give a wide berth around homes, we respect people’s privacy, but out on a trail there is no barrier we will not climb, no fence we will not hop, and no double negative we won’t use. Our favorite verse from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”:
Was a high wall there that tried to stop me A sign was painted said: Private Property But on the back side it didn’t say nothing This land was made for you and me
Our point man takes a steep animal path up the hill, and I scramble up the incline after my compadres on all fours. Once we make it to the ridge there is a well-worn, level, human path through a beautiful multi-treed forest that reminds me of the flora in Bonny Doon. We walk silently, not at odds, but the climb up the steep hill to the ridge has winded us and we focus on the next step, the next breath.
We come upon a rope swing, impossibly tied to an oak tree limb high over a steep ravine. This swing over the canyon is the first inkling I get that we might be near where young people congregate. Who would climb out this oak limb to attach the rope so far above the ravine floor? Images of myself as a teenage boy seep out of my reptilian memory, and I picture a young person inching his way out the limb. We don’t understand yet that we are lost but I’m wondering if Aptos High School is closer than we think.
What kind of person would scale this oak tree to tie the rope swing so high up and so far out over the ravine? Maybe we’re closer to the high school than we had imagined.
We originally had a destination—the Aptos water tower—but as we continue up the ridge trail, our point man says that we missed the turnoff to the water tower and we are now lost. We no longer have any idea where we’re going. We continue on the ridge trail, now wonderfully lost. For a few moments we are set free, untethered, on a path to nowhere.
Getting lost may be the last frontier. Maybe the only one. If you know where you are, if you clutch your map that says “You Are Here,” everything is prescribed, you’re just passing through a predetermined experience. There is no adventure; it all is just theater, where everything gets reviewed, everything gets Yelped. It’s the triumph of metaphor over reality. Getting lost may be our last hope.
“I wish I didn’t have to perform Iron Man every night.” —Ozzy Osbourne
The next clue that we were on a trail above the high school is when we found the gnome in the tree. I’m thinking, “Here’s a gnome in a tree, and gnomes and knights are all the rage on TikTok. Feels like high school students must be close.”
Another clue that we were approaching the high school.
Indeed, a few steps further and we find Tee 3 of the Aptos High Disc Golf Course. The course rocked for years but closed down during the pandemic.
I’m sorry to have missed the water tower up the mountain behind the Highway Patrol Office on Freedom and Soquel, but we wandered lost, were set free, to feel our relationship with the entire mountain, not just the 18 inches wide path in front of us. And we wandered lost until we stumbled upon the disc golf course markers and then Aptos High School below us.
Aptos High has approximately 1,500 students, but it looks like a small college. It has a performing arts center, two gyms, a football stadium and a baseball park. The place shines with affluence.
How to get there, or not: There was no signage, so I suggest you do this only as your personal sense of adventure allows, but there are paths off Mockingbird Ridge Road, as well as from the Soquel Avenue church parking lot, that go up the ridge of the Aptos mountain and drop you on a trail that runs along behind Aptos High School. You can also walk from the high school entrance road up onto the mountain to find trails with stunning views of the school. Again, we were headed elsewhere, got lost, that’s my alibi and I’m sticking to it, but the trail up on the mountain behind the school shows a panorama of the beautiful campus. My buddies and I end up sitting on a bench at the entrance to Aptos High School. One says, “This is how I want to go to high school. When it’s closed.”
My dad, Bobby Magnante, he’s a tattoo artist. I love traditional tattoo art, like Japanese style. That’s what I grew up with.
Freya Magnante, 19, Student
MAXIMILLIAN
Robert Morris the minimalist sculptor. And Richard Serra too. New York paid him a lot of money to create Tilted Arc, a sculpture in a public plaza. It was a big, brown, rusty, curved steel wall. It disrupted the flow of people walking and they all hated it. They said, it’s ugly, it’s in my way! And they made him take it down.
Maximillian Murray, 20, Art History/Physics Student
MAYA
I like Frida Kahlo. I like her art about feminism, and care on the body. My favorite artist is my mom, Luz Howse.
Maya Howse, 15, Student
ORIEN
I like Jackson Pollock. People try his splatter thing, and nobody pulls it off. There’s a substance to it that nobody can figure out—and they’re huge. When I saw them, it really inspired me. I’ve had dreams of being in a Pollock studio in the brick pillar of a bridge with giant canvases. I keep having the same weird dream about him—it’s like I’m him.
Orien Boisvert, 41, Artist
LYNNE
I love Théophile Steinlen. I love his cats and critters, like his Le Chat Noir. They’re very stylized poster art, I would say Art Nouveau, from that era. I love the simpleness of it. My eyes naturally track curves; I’m not a straight-line person.
Lynne Achterberg, 75, Professional Volunteer for Animal Rescue
DANIEL
Andy Warhol. I like his rich imagination and the colorful preservation of that time and history. I really think he changed the world of art.
Residents of a Watsonville neighborhood are pushing back against a proposed housing project meant to help homeless individuals staying along the Pajaro River levee. They say that local officials have ignored their concerns over crime and safety and are moving ahead without addressing complaints connected to the encampment.
City and county officials say that the community should stand behind efforts to address homelessness in the area, which leaves neighbors feeling their voice is being drowned out.
The “Recurso de Fuerza” (Resource of Strength) tiny home micro village was first proposed in 2023 as a joint effort between the counties of Santa Cruz and Monterey to address homelessness along the Pajaro riverbed. For years, unhoused people have camped in the levee area at the border of Watsonville and Pajaro and are particularly vulnerable during events like the Pajaro flood in 2023.
Additionally, the Pajaro River Flood Risk Management Project, which will construct levees and improvements along the lower Pajaro River and its tributaries, is slated to begin in 2024. This means that the encampment would have to be moved at some point in the near future.
In late 2022, Monterey County officials surveyed the enclave of around 50 people to determine the problems they faced. Occupants of the camp cited immigration and citizenship assistance, job development, mental health services and substance abuse intervention as prerequisites for housing stability.
Monterey County received in 2023 an $8 million Encampment Resolution Funding grant from the State of California, which will be used to create Recurso de Fuerza. The management of the 34-unit facility would be a collaboration between Monterey County’s Homelessness Services Program, Santa Cruz County’s Health and Human Services department and the City of Watsonville.
In April 2024, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors approved a $5 million agreement with San Francisco-based nonprofit DignityMoves for the development of the facility, and $2.5 million to manage the village and provide services for the first two years. DignityMoves has experience running similar projects throughout California.
Originally set for a June 2024 groundbreaking, the project has stalled and is expected to begin later this year.
A rear lot on the premises of the Westview Presbyterian Church in downtown Watsonville was selected as the site for Recurso de Fuerza, which is located off the Highway 129 thoroughfare. It is roughly a half mile from the Pajaro levee campsite and was chosen in order to ease the transition for future residents and maintain an access corridor.
But residents of a mobile home complex on the 100 block of West Front Street have begun to voice their opposition to the project. The complex runs up against the levee area where the encampment is situated, and neighbors say they have been subjected to increasing crime and harassment by people connected to the encampment. Numerous residents are now saying that city and county officials failed to adequately inform them of their plans for the micro village, and that the move will create a corridor of crime and unsafe conditions for both residents and the encampment dwellers.
What About Us?
Enedina Rodriguez has lived in this mobile home complex for 25 years. Lopez, like many other residents, is a working-class Mexican immigrant who made Watsonville her home. But she currently feels endangered by the encampment just yards from her dwelling. Rodriguez sits in her living room accompanied by five other neighbors. They have gathered here to share some of their alarming experiences.
Rodriguez recalls an incident in which a person from the encampment began ransacking the garbage bins on the curb in front of the complex. When Rodriguez asked her to stop, the woman reacted aggressively, threatening her with bodily harm.
“She began chasing me, wielding a shovel,” Rodriguez says in Spanish. “Then she threatened to slit my niece’s throat with a machete. We called the police and they took her away.”
Other neighbors complain of car break-ins and vandalism in their front yards and say that they feel like they are under siege in their own homes.
“Some of them don’t do harm, but others do. They are not well from their senses; one day they could be good and another they are doing bad. And in one of those [bad days] they could take our life,” Rodriguez says.
The police get called constantly, according to residents, but the issues persist in an area that they say is neglected by their representatives due to its socio-economic demography. While the neighborhood is just minutes from city hall, it is in an isolated industrial area with little through traffic.
Lorena Vasquez lives at the end of Walker Street, across from the mobile home complex. She runs a daycare out of her home during the day and works nights as a caregiver. Over the last several months, Vasquez says she has been “terrorized” by a man she believes has connections to the encampment.
In April 2024, a man began camping out in his car in front of Vasquez’s home for days on end, even trying to peep inside her house. Initially, Vasquez assumed it was an unhoused person needing a place to park and did not call the police. But things took a turn when the man tried to break into her home. Vasquez then called police and he was picked up for trespassing, according to arrest records.
That’s when Vasquez learned that the man—Daniel Zavala Zavala—had previously been arrested for shooting a gun into an occupied dwelling in February 2022. After learning this, Vasquez quickly filed for a temporary restraining order in April of this year.
But one night when she was out to dinner, she saw through her doorbell camera that Zavala had returned and was intent on breaking in.
“He was going all around the outside of the house trying to get in. He was holding a machete. That’s when I called the police and I told them that Daniel Zavala was back,” Vasquez says in Spanish.
He was arrested again and was still in custody as of July 22.
Watsonville Police spokesperson Michelle Pulido says that there have not been an] unusually high number of calls for service coming from the neighborhood in the last months. She did say, however, that the department has heard concerns from residents about crime in the area and has engaged with the public on the matter.
In late June, a community meeting was held for residents in the greater downtown area and Pulido says that crime concerns were brought up. Also in attendance was Watsonville District 1 Councilmember Eduardo Montesino, who represents residents of West Front and Walker.
Montesino says that the city has been turning a blind eye to the issue of homelessness and is fully behind the Recurso de Fuerza project. As for concerns over safety, he disagrees that the project will increase crime.
“What [residents] are experiencing is the few people that are on the streets that are causing havoc, but they’re not seeing the vision that we also got to do something about the homeless population. They’re our neighbors, and people just are not seeing where there’s the potential to see something different and help people out of that situation,” Montesino says in a phone interview.
But there is also pushback to the project within the council itself, with one member concerned that the city and county are getting in over their heads.
‘Service Desert’
Watsonville District 5 council member Casey Clark says that the first time he heard about the Recurso de Fuerza project in June 2023, he felt it had already been decided without input from Watsonville city officials. One of his main issues is the site selection, which he says he has brought up to county officials.
“I see it going somewhere more appropriate and I have suggested two sites to the County of Santa Cruz, which I just get told ‘No,’” Clark says in a phone interview.
Clark argues that the Westside Presbyterian Church site is a “service desert” and says that other sites are more suitable for the project. The facility will include an indoor and outdoor dining area, showers, lockers and a housing navigation center.
A key detail is that the micro village is meant as temporary, transitional housing for a period of six months. Enrollment in the program is voluntary and there is already a waitlist for the units, according to Monterey County officials.
Clark says that the organization tapped to manage the facility is not equipped for the task. Earlier this year, Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County (CAB) was chosen to contract with Monterey County as operators for Recurso de Fuerza.
Emily Watson, interim director for Homelessness Prevention and Intervention Services, says that CAB is uniquely positioned to take on the management of the project and has extensive experience working with unhoused populations. CAB is planning to staff 10 to 15 workers at the site, including case managers for the residents.
The neighbors on West Front Street say that the encampment occupants’ rights are being held in higher regard than their own.
“Why is our voice not being heard?” asks Catalina Torres, who is a spokesperson for the group and has attended multiple city council meetings to bring the issue forth.
“They need to stop this [project] and take the time to find the right place for it outside the city. They have rights, but what about our rights?” Torres says in Spanish.
Councilmember Montesino says it’s not up to the council to say yes or no on the micro village, as it controlled by the county and state. He wants the West Front Street residents to keep an open mind.
“I just want people to realize and to listen to what the actual project is. I want people to be open,” Montesino says.
Santa Cruz County District 4 Supervisor Felipe Hernandez, who represents Watsonville, says he is in favor of the project. According to Torres, she and other residents have reached out to his office to raise their concerns. Hernandez categorically denies that they have made any attempts to reach him. But even if they had, Hernandez won’t budge on his support for Recurso de Fuerza unless there is a consensus from Watsonville officials to halt it.
“So, I’m fully onboard for the project and indifferent to the opposition until there’s some alignment [amongst the council],” Hernandez says in a text message.
Cliff Lede not only makes wonderful wines, but they also have a gorgeous tasting room and outdoor patio area. It’s the ideal place for wine-tasting on a summer’s day.
If you attend a music festival and have a fantastic, revelatory time, little thought goes into the mechanics behind the experience. Or the hundreds of hours of human power needed to make it happen.
