The Kirkland Boys & Girls Club offers a wide variety of spring leagues, spring camps and summer day camps (listed in next month's Courier) for kids ages 4 to 14. Spring and summer camps run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with an early drop-off at 7:30 a.m. and late pick-up at 6 p.m. for an additional charge. In addition, Kirkland Parks hosts a rock-climbing camp.
Members of the Oakland A's line up in close knit form on March 19, the day of the Kirkland American Little League Parade and the season kickoff.
As part of the year-long Centennial celebration, the Howard/Mandville Gallery will host a "Love of the Land, Invitational Landscape Show." More than 100 contemporary landscape paintings will be featured in this special exhibit. Opening May 6 from 5:30 to 8 p.m., the 34 artists from across the United States and Canada in the show include many of the gallery's regular artists and invited guest artists.
The final production of the StoryBook Theater season at Kirkland Performance Center will be a brand new production of Beauty and the Beast, opening April 23. This musical adaptation, designed for children from age 3-9, features a beast that is anything but beastly.
Local businesses and members of the community can permanently sponsor seats in the auditorium at Kirkland Performance Center throughout 2005. KPC is reviving its highly successful Seats of Honor Campaign that generated close to $1 million as part of the capital campaign to fund the building's construction in 1998.Here are the schedules:
Recently, they changed the sign in front of the only church in downtown Fremont. For three years we've called it Fremont Community Church - a name appropriate to our use of this institution. Beyond a place of worship, it also serves as meeting space, school, polling place and theater for various community groups of any denomination, and has done so for decades.However, the church that began here in 1892, has always been and will henceforward be Fremont Baptist Church. Its new pastor, the Rev. Judy Gay, explained that across the region - beyond Fremont - the name never changed.Others simply failed to learn the name and simply know it as "that church with all the 12-step programs." The Rev. Judy counted 15 groups that currently conduct meetings there.
A clear-eyed assessment of the legacy of Pope John Paul II will provide plenty of fodder for future scholars. In the meantime, the world mourns the passing of a great man.The death of the pontiff on Saturday concluded one of history's most influential and beloved papacies.With the news of the pope's death, St. James Cathedral draped its western portal in black and white and purple bunting. The cathedral bells tolled 84 times to mark the years of the man who had been pope since 1978.And the world media, long prepared, sprang into action. Much of the memorializing has focused on John Paul's more obvious sources of appeal: his linguistic agility, his more than 100 international journeys, his reaching out to other faiths and his role in the fall of communist Poland. Beneath John Paul's gift for globe-trotting theater his stand on issues of substance made him a paradoxical figure.
These days, in the northern hemisphere, we are surrounded by the tender and tentative beauty of renewal. The soft haze of chartreuse buds fills the horizon lines while great jolts of color are filling in the groundplanes. We sense the return of light, of growth, of regeneration. People living in the southern hemisphere are moving towards darkness, barrenness in their landscapes, the sense of shutting down. With this major difference, despite all the talk of globalization making everything the same worldwide, how are the people in the different hemispheres responding to the very public deaths during this past week?
The snooty restaurant review has always amused and bored me. My advice to any affronted reviewer who was not properly greeted or did not receive an appetizer along with the main course? Get over it. Drop the angst-ridden clichés and be happy you're not responsible for the tab. Who needs all of this pretentious nonsense anyway? When I ask a friend if a restaurant is good, I usually receive a concise "yes" or "no," with possibly a recommended dish or a caveat about slow service. This is all the information I've ever needed, and I consider myself a healthy, well-adjusted eater of food. Reviews would be much more entertaining if the critic was responsible for footing the bill. Maybe this would bring some perspective. After all, food usually isn't nearly as bad as the culinary élitists would lead us to believe. I can remember only a handful of truly bad meals in my entire life, and none were consumed at restaurants, only school cafeterias. To demonstrate how superfluous the bulk of reviews are, I wrote one about a neighborhood haunt:
Strolling through Seattle's parks and neighborhoods at this time of year, the air laden with the pungent, warm odors of tree buds bursting into pink and white flowers and green shoots rising from damp, dark soils, always fires me with a deep urge to ramble. In my household the feeling is known as "Springer Fever," as in Springer Mountain, Ga. This low peak holds the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,200-mile path winding through 14 states to Mount Katahdin, Maine. Back in 1999 my wife and I joined the seasonal, nomadic community of backpackers determined to walk the trail's entire length in one go. While we never considered ourselves homeless with the woods as our domain, we were ... when you compare our situation with the typical city dweller. During our seven-month trek we kept in touch with friends, family and a significant portion of our food supply through various post offices in the towns and cities peppering the trail's route. Each week we'd visit a neighborhood post office at any time during their regular business hours to pick up mail and food supplies sent in our names care of general delivery. Without such a link to the urban world our successful completion of this challenging journey would have been doubtful.Here in the neighborhood concrete jungles of the Emerald City exists a different group of nomads depending on the same postal link to the world of family ties, employment opportunities and fiscal responsibility: the urban homeless.
A number of years ago we were at a neighborhood holiday party when one of the toddlers' moms first mentioned the notion of The 10-Second Rule."Little Jason," Susie related to me, "was out in the kitchen with me yesterday afternoon. He was eating an apple that I had sliced up in pieces for him, and he dropped an apple wedge.""Quick," Susie related that she'd yelled at Jason, "you've got 10 seconds! Pick it up - you can still eat it.""What?" I asked incredulously."Haven't you ever heard of the 10-second rule?" she asked me with a look of almost total amazement. "We were raised on it. I thought everybody knew about the 10-second rule. It's sure a good thing that you don't have any kids - you'd never survive.""Just what are you talking about?" I queried.
Two issues, one national and one local, have caught my eye lately as I perused the daily newspapers.Both of these issues seem to need a little more explaining than the dailies have had time for. I'm here to help.First, a new study published this week confirms the suspicion lately flaunted by alleged conservatives that college campuses in the United States are peopled with liberals, and worse, at the professorial level. (For those lip readers among you who angrily follow my scrawlings, liberal and conservative are not capitalized when used this way, unless you are writing a furious screed to the editor about this column. Then it is Liberal, Conservative, Commie, Homosexyual and Vegan.)According to the most recent study, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal, and a mere 15 percent are conservative.Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study, told the Washington Post: "What's striking is how few conservatives there are in any field.... There is no field we studied where there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats." (The only field where it was even close was - no surprise here - business school, where liberals led 49 percent to 39 percent.)
A clear-eyed assessment of the legacy of Pope John Paul II will provide plenty of fodder for future scholars. In the meantime the world mourns the passing of a great man.The death of the pontiff on Saturday concluded one of history's most influential and beloved papacies.With the news of the pope's death, St. James Cathedral draped its western portal in black and white and purple bunting; the cathedral bells tolled 84 times to mark the years of the man who had been pope since 1978.And the world media, long prepared, sprang into action. Much of the memorializing has focused on John Paul's more obvious sources of appeal: his linguistic agility, his more than 100 international journeys, his reaching out to other faiths and his role in the fall of communist Poland. Beneath John Paul's gift for globetrotting theater, his stand on issues of substance made him a paradoxical figure.
This response addresses the confusion of my original statement to Seattle's Preservation Board ('Park chapel nominated for landmark status'; Nov. 10, Magnolia News).To my knowledge, Bob Kildall was not in the room when I presented it to the board. Some who were present have asked me to send you a copy of the statement so that the record could be set straight. The following is my original testimony in its entirety:
Strolling through Seattle's parks and neighborhoods at this time of year, the air laden with the odors of tree buds bursting and green shoots rising from damp, dark soils, always fires me with a deep urge to ramble.In my household the feeling is know as "Springer fever," as in Springer Mountain, Ga. This low peak holds the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,200-mile path winding through 14 states to Mount Katahdin, Maine.Back in 1999 my wife and I joined the seasonal, nomadic community of backpackers determined to walk the trail's entire length in one go. While we never considered ourselves homeless with the woods as our domain, we were... when you compare our situation with the typical city dweller. During our seven-month trek we kept in touch with friends, family and a significant portion of our food supply through various post offices in the towns and cities peppering the trail's route. Each week we'd visit a neighborhood post office at any time during their regular business hours to pick up mail and food supplies sent in our names care of general delivery. Without such a link to the urban world our successful completion of this challenging journey would have been doubtful.Here in the concrete jungles of the Emerald City exists a different group of nomads depending on the same postal link to the world of family ties, employment opportunities and fiscal responsibility: the urban homeless.