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As part of Indelible Ink's monthly fourth-Tuesday show at Pop on Union Street in Old Pas, Indian dancer Anupama Aranaprasad performed last night. She was joined by South Pas poet Ron Koertge, L.A. poet Wanda Coleman, Utah Poet Laureate Katharine Coles and singer Corrine May. It was another extraordinary evening of fine art and fun. Come on down May 31 and join in. Info: www.indelibleink.net.
This small jewel box of a cottage, a Henry Greene, created after brother Charles had decamped for Carmel in the early 1920s, after Greene & Greene's heyday,* is almost entirely unknown and in an almost entirely unknown Altadena neighborhood called Wild Wood, near the intersection of Holliston and Palm.
The heavily wooded area surrounding the Rubio Canyon wash is so secret because it's on private roads and driveways.
* An update. I've since learned that I got this wrong. Henry did the cottages down below, but the jewel box is the work of George Webster, a draftsman in the Greene & Greene office in Pasadena. That makes more sense -- it's a great little bungalow, but it's rough-hewn compared with the expensive, more finely carpentered works of the Greenes themselves.
Yet you can check it all out -- two Craftsman bungalows, an Italianate mansion, a ranch house that is more of a real ranch house than a ranchburger -- at the 60th annual home tour of the Altadena Guild of Huntington Memorial Hospital benefiting HMRI on Sunday, May 1 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Info and tix: www.altadenaguild.org.
For voters in Altadena, Pasadena and Sierra Madre today, this is the way the editorial board advocates marking your ballot. It's going to be a crazily small turnout -- just after 9 this morning, only a dozen citizens had done their duty at the Linda Vista fire station -- so your vote counts, more than ever. Cast it.
If you walk around the campus at UC Berkeley early on a Sunday morning, you never know what you'll run into. These wizards, for instance, were filming something for a local public-access television show, and even though they handed us a flier purporting to explain what it was about -- something to do with the sword of Excalibur coming up out of a toilet -- I still couldn't tell you.
Pasadena Red Cross head honcho Ben Green likes to open up a visit to the group's Craven Estate HQ like this: "Back in 1926, when my dad built this place ..."
Ben's Midwest boyhood was actually far from Madeleine Drive, but the estate has never looked better since its heyday, thanks to its being the Showcase House last year. So it was a pleasant place to gather for a breakfast this morning honoring RC national President and CEO Gail McGovern, pictured above, a most impressive executive who has turned around the organization over the last several years, taking one of the nation's favorite charities from deep in the red, as it were, into the black at the same time it dealt with earthquakes in Haiti and Japan and disasters across our land.
Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard and Green announced at the breakfast the formation of a local Leadership Cabinet including the heads of Huntington Hospital, Parsons, Caltech, the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership and Avery Dennison; some of the organizations are represented in the photo below.
You could practically hear the eerie Angelo Badalamenti music playing last Thursday as Steve Scauzillo, the opinion page editor, and I approached Crystal Lake. Creepy's not the half of it! David Lynch has got to be inquiring about a weekend getaway cabin ...
We were just 26 miles from SGVN world headquarters in West Covina as the Cooper flies. But we were a mile high in the San Gabriels, in a crazily thick spring fogbank, after lots of hail on the way up the newly reopened Highway 39.
It was also 39 degrees out when we got out of the car -- not hailing, but misting. I had never been there, to the only natural lake in our mountains, and one of the few in Southern California. Owner Adam was very welcoming inside, once we made it through the scary doors, and, a professionally trained chef, he made us bowls of chili that are way better than they need to be, so far from civilization.
We then walked down to the lake itself, and found two guys from Monrovia and La Canada fishing 'cause they'd read the story in our paper about how this great trout lake had been unavailable to anglers for a decade and they figured the rainbows would be biting like crazy. No such luck. Nary a tug.
Look forward to the campground being opened one of these days ...
Patti Eisenberg and many others at the Pasadena Playhouse put together a mammoth party Friday night in the South El Molino Avenue theater itself, with guests entering through the stage door off the alley to find the stage itself extended all the way over the seats for dining and drinking and schmoozing. The celebration was about the simple fact that not only has the Playhouse emerged from bankruptcy: it has a new subscriber season hitting the boards over the next year.
Check it out: www.pasadenaplayhouse.org.
Below: Exec Direct Stephen Eich, welcoming all at the stage door:
