On Golden Pond, Carlin Diamond, Joe Dowling

                                      Lips Together, Teeth Apart - set design by Bill Barksdale
 

JOURNAL

There’s No Business like?

Bill Barksdale, Columnist

Show business!  I remember years ago Mavis Bromaghim, “Grandma Mavis” to almost everyone, telling me about The Willits Players which was the ancestor of the Willits Community Theatre.  “We used to pull a flatbed truck up to a park and do plays off the back” she told me excitedly as she recalled her younger days.  A snippet of Willits’ cultural history. 

I remember seeing plays at the Grange when it was a musty relic, not the lovingly restored community treasure it is now, and the Willits United Methodist Church has been such a friend to the performing arts in our community.  Then in 1992 local theater aficionado, Brooks Darrow, called one day and asked me to look at a building he and some theater friends were considering converting into a permanent theater for Willits.  I walked into an abandon car repair garage at the intersection of West Van Lane and Muir Lane behind the Van Hotel. 

“What do you think?” Brooks inquired.  I couldn’t quite picture it although I’d seen less likely spaces in New York like the long, narrow Astor Place Theater that was more like a tunnel than a theater.  Brooks was a rare human.  His every breath was a creative exhalation.  Over the ensuing months a group of innovative, hardworking volunteers worked on the space.

Sometime later the Board Chair for the Willits Community Theatre invited me to see what they had done.  I was astonished, and I mean that, to walk into a jewel of a theater!  “We need someone to take this place for a test drive” Lanny Cotler said.  It was more of a request than a statement.  He knew I had a theater background.  “You can choose any play you want.  See what this place can do.”  I chose to direct the special-effects loaded gothic thriller The Haunting of Hill House, to open around Halloween. 

We installed a sound system.  Joe Dowling, who had been a lighting designer in San Francisco used every lighting instrument we could get our hands on to create eerie effects bringing Brooks’ magnificent haunted house set to life.  John Beatty spent a month recording and laying down tracks for the complicated sound effects.  We had a production crew of 27 people and a cast of 7 actors!  Collectively we spent literally thousands of hours to create the play.  As Director I worked on it for 10 months.  The Haunting of Hill House ran for a month to sold-out houses. 

Over the past 30 or so years WCT has produced many live performances, plays, music and dance.  Classes have been taught in all aspects of theater production including directing, technical training, acting, children’s theater – and many hundreds of locals have donated uncounted thousands of hours to bring live entertainment to Willits.  Thanks to a generous bequest from an early Managing Director of WCT, the late and beloved Donna Vaiano, the theater has managed so far to make it through the pandemic.  A dedicated Board of Directors and Producer Mike A’Dair have continued to work behind the scenes to keep things together. 

Why have a live theater?  Well, live entertainment is fun and from a purely financial aspect, Arts and Culture in 2017 accounted for $877.8 Billion dollars to our nation’s economy in 2017!  That’s 4.5% of U.S. gross domestic product – more than construction or transportation and warehousing, travel and tourism, mining, utilities and agriculture per the U.S. Department of Commerce.  Even in Willits a number of paying jobs are created by theater and the arts.  Also, when people go to the theater they often support other businesses like restaurants and local shops.  Everybody benefits.

In addition WCT and Willits Center for the Arts, a good friend to WCT, supplement the local school system with programs for students.  A number of Willits students have gone on to careers in the arts.  Theater teaches team-building, leadership skills, painting, music, technical skills, budgeting, sewing, construction, overcoming fear, even management skills.  Friendships that often last a lifetime begin at the theater.  People learn the nuts and bolts that spark creativity and problem solving.  One of the great, overlooked values of the arts is that they teach people how to think outside the box.  That’s a vital skill entrepreneurs require to innovate and create new businesses and jobs.  In California the arts are top job creators. 

You can help insure live entertainment and instruction survive in Willits by sending a donation in any amount to WCT, P.O Box 80, Willits CA 95490.  WCT’s website is at wctPerformingArtsCenter.org  where you can click on the Donate button.  For a season ticket subscription of just $7.00 / month you can see everything they do.  What a deal!  The theater is currently producing some online content, and when it’s safe it will once again provide live entertainment, education for children and adults, opportunities for volunteers behind the scenes and on stage, creativity, and the treasured friendships that result from working together.  Discover and support vibrant live theatre in our community.  As the most inclusive of all the arts there really is no business like show business.

This Day in Time

 

JOURNAL

This Day in Time

Bill Barksdale, Columnist

The alarm goes off.  It’s early.  My old cat is curled up at the bend of my knees.  He stretches lazily not sure if he really wants to get up or not.  I reach down and give him a scratch and a tickle.  He looks at me and yawns.  As I tuck my legs up to not disturb him he finally jumps off the bed to walk right in front of me knowing I’m on the way to the kitchen to dish out his scoop of canned food laced with his med.  I brush and floss my teeth then chug down a big glass of water like every morning.  It’s time to get ready for my yoga class.

I switch on the radio.  A bad idea as it turns out because the news story is about an angry, violent woman on an airplane who punches the flight attendant that asked her to please put her Covid mask on, knocking out the attendant’s teeth.  Since I have to fly in a couple of days myself to visit my 100 year old mother, I’m uncomfortable, even angry as the news story goes on to talk about crazy people attacking flight attendants.  What if some looney loses it on my flight?

I decide to walk to yoga.  It’s a beautiful day.  A light, balmy breeze.  Lots of birds tweeting and flying around.  Watching a bird fly always amazes me.  To fly, what a miracle.  I’ve always hated to see a bird in a cage.  I pass by a fence wrapped in fragrant vines of star jasmine blooms.  This is a good year for roses too.  Every yard seems to have magnificent roses of peach, yellow, deep red, pure white, some with that sweet perfume that only roses have.  I stop and sniff the ones closest to the sidewalk for a scent.  The sky is that delicious blue that stretches to infinity. 

As I step into the yoga space with its high ceilings, door and windows open - friends I’ve done yoga with for years, all vaccinated and spaced well apart, are slowly warming up their muscles, relaxing into a morning of stretching and letting go.  The old wooden floor seems welcoming.  My usual spot is already warmed from the sun streaming in the window.  I twist slowly then reach up toward the ceiling as far as I can and bend over to touch my toes, and my back lets go of some tightness. 

After class, a few of us walk to a nearby cafe’ with its outdoor tables shaded by large umbrellas flapping in the Spring breeze, the trickling of water from Morgan’s fanciful fountains are the music as we begin to laugh at the stories we share of the past week.  A cup of morning coffee.  Our breakfast stretches from an hour into two.  Finally the lunch crowd begins to drift in so we decide it’s time to move on to our days. 

I should vacuum when I get home, but decide the garden needs some weeding.  The tomatoes need their newest vines placed carefully up into their cages so they give each other room to space out and make lots of fruit for later in the summer.  The garden is a lot smaller this year to conserve water but I love those home-grown tomatoes.  I rarely buy tomatoes.  They can’t compare to the fruity, juicy ones I grow myself.  I always have some to share with friends.  There’s hardly a better gift for most people I know.  I look forward to those sandwiches with a big slice of my sweet treasures. 

My compost pile is filled with potatoes growing from last season’s peelings.  I decide to let them grow.  Looks like we’ll have a good crop.  My friends Steve & Fawn already have a huge crop of potatoes springing up.  Steve is so proud of his peaches.  He’s offered me a small peach tree in a pot that he grew from seed but I just don’t have room for any more trees in my yard which already has apples and plums readying for a Fall harvest.  I gathered my jars and lids early this year so I’ll be ready for canning time.

Off in the distance I hear the whistle of the Skunk Train.  I love that sound.  When I lived in New York City & San Francisco many years ago that was a sound I never heard.  The vacuuming can wait a while longer.  My neighbor, Bill, pops his head over the fence to ask how my day is going.  “Great”, I blurt out perhaps too enthusiastically.  I have the greatest neighbors.  What a blessing. 

It’s time to sit down and write for a while.  I can hardly get through a day without writing for half-an-hour or so.  Don’t know why.  Although I’ve written in a journal from time-to-time since I was in high school, I was never much of a writer, but now I don’t feel like my day is complete if I don’t write for a bit.  Just one of those habits I acquired as I’ve gotten older. 

Suddenly I get it into my head to play Electric Light Orchestra’s rapturous anthem All Over the World.  “Everybody all around the world, gotta tell you what I just heard.  There’s gonna be a party all over the world!”  I start rockin’ out and dancing.  It’s turning out to be a really fine day.  I grab the vacuum as I sing along and, almost like dancing, I’m shaking my booty and swooping around the house.  I wasn’t the first one to say it but, always try to reach for the thought that feels better!  Might get a clean house out of it.

LIQUID GOLD

 

Journal

LIQUID GOLD

Bill Barksdale, Columnist

Like life itself, Richard Wagner’s epic operas known as The Ring Cycle beings in the water.  The Rhinemaidens guard a magical lump of gold.  Anyone who forms the gold into ring and puts it on while renouncing love will have unlimited powers.  The characters in Wagner’s operas and Scandinavian myth are the sources of every Marvel adventure movie character.  Water symbolically represents, among other things, creativity as in birth.   What is arguably the primary purpose of NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover?  To find evidence of water on Earth’s neighboring planet. 

Life on Earth and water are inseparable.  There can be no life without water.  Clean water is more valuable than gold.  One can live without gold but not without water.  60% of the human body is made up of water.  Given the choice, which is the real treasure?   

The eventual cooling of ancient Earth and formation of water enabled life to gestate on this planet.  Thus water becomes not only a symbol of life but quite literally the environment in which birth itself is nurtured.  The human womb is an environment of amniotic fluid, water-based, in which the fetus grows until the mother’s water breaks signaling the beginning of the birth of a child.  Water is essential to life.

Earth is protected from the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation by its stratosphere, one important layer of which is ozone which absorbs much of the Sun’s radiation thus protecting Earth from overheating and becoming hostile to life.  This stratosphere holds air in Earth’s atmosphere in addition to its UV filtering properties.  Too much UV exposure is why you get a sunburn, a major cause of skin cancer and other immune system damage.  Widespread use by humans of hydrofluorocarbons and fossil fuel have done widespread damage to the ozone layer exposing Earth’s life to more harmful UV exposure and warming the atmosphere which, among other things, disrupts the cycle of rain which is how Nature distributes clean water over the planet.

The average American uses, depending on what source you look at, between 80 to 178 gallons of water per day.  The city of Portland OR claims to use around 47 GPD per person.  In a small town like Willits with population of approximately 5,000 people, if each person averaged 50 gallons per day (GPD), Willits would require about 250,000 GPD.  A football field 1 foot deep in water would be about 430,848 gallons of water.  Just two days of Willits water use would fill that football field with close to 2 feet of water.  That’s a lot of water.  Clean potable water is a finite resource and it costs a lot of money to purify it for human use.

If you still have an old fashion toilet that uses about 3.5 gallons per flush or more, instead of a modern low-flush toilet that uses 1.28 – 1.6 gallons per flush, you are spending more than twice as much for toilet flushing water with the old toilet.  Replace it and save money & water.  Toilets are cheap.  Water isn’t.  A shower with a low-flow head uses about 2 GPM (gallons per minute).  I’ve gotten my showers down to about 3 gallons of water.  An 8 minute shower uses about 16-17 gallons. A low-flow shower head costs a few dollars.  If you are using a high-flow head, change it.   A bath, 30-50 gallons. 

Dishwashers normally use less water than hand washing, about ¼ to ½ the amount of water.  If you’re washing by hand use a small tub and rinse quickly.  A top-loading clothes washer uses about 20-40 gallons of water per load.  A front-loader uses about 14 gallons per load. 

Although outdated health regulations sometimes make it difficult, you should be using graywater for outdoor landscape watering – shower & bathtub water only.  Government agencies are waking up to the valuable resource of graywater.  A simple valve on your shower drain can switch drainage to an outdoor spigot in the dry season and back to the sewer line in the wet season.  A plumber can easily do this.  Washing machine water often has detergents and bleach that can be harmful to plants.  Never water animals with graywater.  Toilet water is dangerous and is never used for landscape watering.  It should always go into the sewer or septic system. 

We need to be looking at ways to replenish our ground water during our drought-ridden times, not keep extracting it.  The geology of Mendocino County requires rain to fill it up again.  The Franciscan geology of most of Mendocino County   depends on underground pits of fractured rock that get filled each year with rainfall for ground water.  Springs are simply areas that are lower than one or more water-filled natural pits so the water “springs” out of the ground.  The Valley has its own limited underground waterways that are also replenished with rain fall and snow melt.  No well or spring is limitless without enough yearly rainfall. 

Pumping out of creeks and rivers is destroying our fish populations, many of which are already endangered species.  Large agriculture operations in which chemical fertilizers, nitrate contamination and manures are used, run off to pollute and kill the fish while draining the waterways at the same time.  Poorly designed grading and road building and poor logging practices silt up the waterways destroying essential fish habitat.  Over-pumping of wells draws sewage water and unwanted minerals like boron and iron, which naturally occur in the geologic structure, into existing wells. 

Outdated statistic models that depend on “October rain” are foolish and unrealistic.  It hasn’t rained regularly in October in Northern Cal for 50 years.  We need to make water conservation and replenishment a #1 priority if we expect to have our liquid gold here for the future.  As in Wagner’s mythical tale, the evil chunk of gold – greed – doesn’t support life.