Fall Record

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

This weekend starts 2.5 weeks of vacation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida over the December holidays. Our fall has been very busy as shown by the sparse posting. Here is a quick recap of some of the activities since our month in Scotland back in August.

Trips:

SEP: Long weekend trip to Ashland Oregon where we saw 6 excellent plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. While there we participated in Ashland’s First Friday Art Walk. Ran into my college roommate and his wife and had dinner with them and the producing director of the Marin Theatre Company.

Jeff Pevar on right

The surprise of the weekend was visiting a local dive bar and enjoying an incredible evening of music performed by several session musicians. The best known of the group was Jeff Pevar. He has recorded and/or toured with Crosby, Stills and Nash, Donald Fagen, James Taylor, Marc Cohn, Ray Charles, Joe Cocker, Jimmy Webb, Rickie Lee Jones, Dr. John, Carly Simon, Kenny Loggins, Meat Loaf, Phil Collins, Richie Havens, Odetta and many others.

mother and son

NOV: Weekend trip to Tennessee to visit E’s family in Paris, TN. Saw the musical “Memphis” on it’s national tour in Nashville.  And we spent a day antiquing in Hazel, KY with E’s mother.

Glendeven Inn, Mendocino, CA

NOV: We spent a long restful (at least for us) Thanksgiving weekend in Mendocino, California at the lovely, gay-owned bed-and-breakfast, Glendeven Inn, We hiked for 3 hours along the scenic coast in an area called Spring Ranch on Thanksgiving day. We then had a delicious 5-course dinner at nearby Little River Inn. On Friday we met friends in town to celebrate one of their birthdays. Saturday we did a 10-mile hike in the Van Damme State Park & Pygmy Forest. In the evening we attend a play at the local community theatre, Mendocino Theatre Company.

Other Activities:

In September we did the San Francisco Architecture Walking Tour with our 2 youngest kids. We also visited the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to see: Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris; Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection; and The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy.
In October we visited the Contemporary Jewish Museum to see: Houdini: Art and Magic. Check out my earlier tribute to Harry Houdini.

SantaCom in San Francisco

And by accident we found ourselves in the middle of the SantaCon celebration in San Francisco at the beginning of December. It is a mass gathering of people dressed in Santa Claus costumes parading publicly on streets and in bars in the North Beach area of San Francisco.

We attended several fundraising dinners: Horizons Foundation's Gala Dinner and Casino Party (guest speaker George Takei, and the SF Gay Men’s Chorus; San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus' fundraising gala: Crescendo 
and the BayLands FrontRunners anniversary dinner.

We also did a day hike in Arastradero Preserve/Foothill Park with friends on one of our few weekend days.

San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus

Much of December was busy with E’s rehearsals and performances with San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. Their holiday show was called Joyous, Jolly Jingles and E performed it in Santa Rosa, San Francisco and Lafayette, CA before we left for our Florida trip.

All of this was in addition to our theatre schedule. We saw 11 plays and operas in September. 12 plays and operas in October and another 9 in November. By the time December is over, we will have seen another 8 performances.