"I think I'm an interesting person," says Elizabeth Campbell, with intriguing certainty. Who would say such a thing about herself? Campbell was born in Seattle on July 25, 1952, the first of Marilyn and Verne Redman's six children. Though busy at home, Marilyn found time to volunteer for the school district and to participate in local historic preservation.Verne has worked in the warehouse at Abbey Party Rents for 45 years. In his 70s now, he still does. When he started, the company also rented out medical equipment for home use - hospital beds, oxygen tanks and such. Campbell remembers careening around the warehouse in wheelchairs with her siblings.Elizabeth grew up on Queen Anne. She attended John Hay Elementary School, was in the first entering class at McClure Junior High School and graduated from Queen Anne High School in 1970.Queen Anne has changed since she was growing up.
It's no secret that yoga tones the body, calms the mind and may even lead to enlightenment, but did you know that yoga actually alleviates pain in pregnant women and helps during the birthing process?"Yoga isn't just the stretching," explains Elizabeth Sumption, a yoga practitioner for more than eight years and teacher of the new prenatal yoga series at Yogalife on top of Queen Anne. "It is so much more than that. Yoga is finding your true self."And what better time to do that then when you're pregnant?This afternoon there are yoga mats on the floor, Tibetan chants in the air and a roomful of women with that special "glow" and a bump on their belly. It is the second day of prenatal yoga classes at the facility above Orrapin restaurant, and the mothers-to-be are preparing to stretch.Sumption, who trained with Seattle-based prenatal yoga expert Collette Crawford, guides the women in an emotional and physical check-in. She works to create a sense of community for pregnant women taking yoga and currently teaches yoga to women on bed rest at the University of Washington Medical Center, as well as prenatal classes to women in all stages of pregnancy.
Was it just one loud cough, as R.M. Campbell claims in his Seattle Post-Intelligencer review, which drove Andras Schiff to leave the stage at his concert Wednesday night at Meany Hall? I was sitting in the balcony, where all the sounds drift so clearly in that hall, and I can assure you that there was more than one cough.I continue to be amazed at the resounding chorus of hacking coughs from Seattle audiences. The concert halls sound like tuberculosis wards. The coughing is incessant, jarring and seemingly unstoppable.
MOSUL, Iraq - We walked into the polling site and the guards, both Iraqi army and police, waved us in. Ibon, a journalist with Reuters, asked in Arabic if we could hang out for the next hour. It was 7:45 a.m. and the polling site still wasn't open. The line outside was growing more restless.I was anxious to see this vote happen because a few months ago, during the Jan. 30 election, this was impossible for me to see up close. What would happen in the next few days would be even more important.The run-up to the referendum was plagued with calls from Sunni Arabs to boycott, calls from Shias and Kurds to vote and everyone saying Iraq's constitution would pass no matter what.Well, the constitution would pass, and the Sunnis did vote despite the threats against them from other Sunnis if they did.I dropped off my body armor and took my cameras outside to the long lines. I watched at first to gauge the people's reaction.
I have a friend who has lived young his entire, 40-year-old life. But suddenly, in the two years since he passed that milestone - four decades aboveground - he has started notic-ing some troubling signs.He's losing a little hair. Not enough for a comb-over yet, but still.He's also getting a little paunch. He's never been into exercise, but it has never mattered before. Now is another matter, and fear is circling around behind his eyes.His girlfriend is in her 20s, like all his previous girlfriends, but lately this cat, who has never married, has been talking about the current younger woman being the last one."I don't know what to do," my Peter Pan-ish friend said.I feel his pain from quite a bit farther down the road.We live in a youth-oriented culture.
We strongly support the monorail and are voting for Proposition 1 on Nov. 8. No one in the city of Seattle understands the need for rapid, mass transit more than the residents of Queen Anne. Our specific geographic challenges make getting onto and off of the hill difficult at times. Queen Anne needs access to an integrated transit system that connects with Sound Transit and Metro to form a citywide transportation network linking this neigh-borhood to our downtown core and beyond. Safe, high-speed and environmentally sensitive monorail technology is the answer. The citizens of Seattle have voted four times for the Green Line Monorail because they want an alternative to congested city streets. Seattle voters are right; we need the monorail.The proposed Green Line Monorail will serve Queen Anne residents with stations on the west side and south side of the hill from Interbay to Seattle Center. The good news is that, right now, the Seattle Monorail Project is ready to go.
's election season in the Emerald City, and here are our recommendations for mayor, city council seats and the latest monorail initiative.The race for mayor is a no-brainer - which is a shame.Incumbent Greg Nickels has much to recommend him; he was able to corral many of the country's mayors into supporting the Kyoto agreement, for instance, and he's been able to cut down on Seattle's much-loved and time-consuming focus on process. That's especially true at the Department of Planning and Development.But Nickels has changed the political landscape with a top-down management style that has alienated neighborhood activists and the city council, which has been purposely kept out of the decision-making loop in far too many instances. Then there's the mayor's cozy relationship with business interests such as Paul Allen, who has never seen a tax break he didn't like - or get.
NANCY GAGLIANO"How annoying people are with their dogs."NIKKI BRYANT"The fact that fashion here is stuck in the 1980s."BRITTA KALLEVANY"I think that the Space Needle is funny. How do the locals feel about it? Are they proud of it? Do they hate it because it is so touristy? It is an enigma, and I find it amusing."
It is early, it is Monday and the city is draped in stay-in-bed, don't-want-to-go-to-work fog. Yet there is laughter coming out of The Grinder - a coffee spot on Dravus just off Nickerson, next door to the original Zeek's Pizza - and for many on this misty day there is no place that they would rather be."I always feel like I start my day with a special lift," says a regular customer describing Kristin Wilhite, owner and operator of The Grinder, and the reason that she consistently comes here for her morning coffee. "She is always gracious and warm when I come in."Most, if not all, of Wilhite's customers share those sentiments, and it's no wonder that on Tuesday, Nov. 1, Wilhite celebrates 10 years of brightening people's days with caffeine and a kind smile. In honor of her anniversary, this Tuesday, from 1 to 4 p.m., Wilhite will do drawings for gift baskets, free coffee, mugs, sample-size syrups and a few surprises.
They build our homes, landscape our yards and harvest the produce we find in our grocery store aisles. Migrant labor fuels our economy, in Seattle and across the nation, and yet these 13 million workers - the majority traveling from Latin America - remain largely a statistic.Anyone who has traveled the back roads of rural Mexico will feel an immediate affinity for CASA Latina's work site, a small triangle of hillside property sitting one block north of the Bell Street onramp to Highway 99 in downtown Seattle. The modest compound, makeshift but neat, features a gravel courtyard bound on its north side by two office trailers and a small, covered patio holding a pair of portable bathrooms and a faucet. A long, thin community room sits to the east with a squat classroom and storage building running along the western edge. Above the classroom flies a wind worn Mexican flag, and fencing surrounds the compound. Its business end opens out onto the slow passing traffic on Western Avenue. A taco wagon fronts the street.
University of Washington music-history professor, pianist and Queen Anne resident George Bozarth is a stickler for detail.That's why the co-founder and co-artistic director of Gallery Concerts prefers to use replicas or originals of the all-wood pianos on which 19th- and 18th-century music was played in its own time, and on which he and a stable of musicians have performed since 1989.The sound is better, explains Tamara Friedman, Bozarth's wife and a fellow pianist who sometimes performs in the Gallery Concert series. "They're just not as brassy and bright as modern instruments," she said.Friedman and Bozarth should know. They have five period pianos, a clavichord and a modern piano in the crowded living room of their Queen Anne home.
In the wake of the million-plus people displaced by Hurricane Katrina and its successors, Intiman's stage adaptation of John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning saga "The Grapes of Wrath" strikes a chord. The powerless struggling against the powerful to hold onto the shards of human dignity.Adapted for the theater in 1988 by Frank Galati for Chicago's revered Steppenwolf Company, Steinbeck's novel was pared down to bare-bone simplicity with the aim of focusing on his characters and their tragic saga. But in Intiman's production, Steinbeck's message sometimes gets diluted.
On any short list I'd create of movers and shakers in Fremont, Mike Peck's name would appear. Ditto for the short list of quality landlords - those concerned and involved - in Fremont. Now Mike's name has landed on my short list of artists I respect, even though his Nov. 4 art show will be the first one of his I've attended.Mike started Fremont Architectural Pottery in 1974. "Fremont was the closest venue that had a storefront I wanted." Mike recalls that time - cheap rent and empty storefronts - without romantic patina. He salvaged windows from a glass recycler - "high class dumpster diving" he calls it - to replace broken ones. He filled them with pieces of art "so it looked like something was there."As Fremont Architectural Pottery he created beautiful art sinks. Marketed to architects and builders, Mike worked the home shows and quickly saw all his time dedicated to filling orders rather than creating art. A few pieces got out. He created the "Slug Cup" and the "Chamber Pot of Commerce" in 1986 as prizes for the Fremont Chamber Briefcase Relay Race - and winners still compete for them today.
On Oct. 28 the Seattle Times criticized in an editorial the conduct of the war in Iraq. That editorial was, for all of its well-placed thrusts, emblematic of the whole sorry mess.Where was the Times' percipience before the war? The same could be asked of rest of the nation's media and politicians.In February 2003, during the infamous "run-up" to the war, while weapons inspectors were in Iraq doing their job and due process was being exercised, the Times proclaimed the coming war as "just."At the same time more than 70 percent of the nation favored invading Iraq.Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have seen what fear, and fear mongering, can do in a democracy. The news is not good.Now the President's approval ratings are at an all-time low with unease over Iraq at the center of the disquiet. So let's ask ourselves: What do we know about Iraq now that we didn't know a year ago at election time?Nothing, except that it's a year later, and our attention span is discomfited.The go-along to get-along mentality that got us into Iraq will not get us out. In fact, this Administration has created a situation where we can't stay and we can't leave.
For hundreds of years, stories have circulated about a mysterious creature inhabiting the waters of Seattle.Now filmmaker and Shoreline resident Oliver Tuthill will bring them to light with his newest film, "Willatuk: The Legend of Seattle's Sea Serpent."Narrated by Academy Award-nominated actor Graham Greene, the film tells the story of a creature Tuthill names "Willatuk," or "God of Ocean," that is unique to the Greater Seattle area. Several scenes were filmed at Matthews Beach and other North Seattle locations, including Shoreline and Lake City. The film also touches on race relations with Native Americans.