"Skin is a very honest part of the body," says Mary Napolitano, 45-year-old knockout and owner of Napolitano Day Spa Salon on top of Queen Anne. "It responds to practically everything that we put into it and expose it to."Skin, our largest and most visible organ, is a powerful gauge of how we are doing from the inside out. It allows us to touch and feel, and can reveal our internal values in a very external way."I think that there is an energy to beauty that cannot just be taken off a flat picture," says Napolitano, a woman who incorporates silliness and a sense of humor into her beauty regime. "Beauty is something that you can feel and see; there is an aliveness to it."
The sky was blue and the air crisp last Wednesday afternoon as a battery of skills evaluations kicked off the early season for Magnolia Little League. The local league draws nearly 600 kids between the ages of 5 and 16 - all the way from T-ball to the serious business of competing in the Little League World Series.A gaggle of parents, coaches, league board members and volunteers stood with clipboards in hand as boys age 10-12 were evaluated on such fundamental baseball skills as batting, fielding, throwing and running. For many, it was the first time swinging a bat since last summer.
Things go bump in the night at the ACT. And then they squeak. And moan. And sigh. And scream!The screaming came mostly from the audience at "The Woman in Black," all of whom were having a fine, frightening time at the theater. As part of ACT's Winter Thrills series, this 1987 ghost play allows two terrific Seattle actors, David Pichette and Mark Anders, to scare the bejeezus out of their fans."The Woman in Black" is a tip of the hat to the 19th-century ghost story, back when gothic meant creaky mansion doors and a dog howling alone in the night as the hairs rise slowly on the back of the narrator's neck.
China is in a state of metamorphosis. Mao is gone. Western goods and ideas are flooding the marketplace. Consumerism reigns, and nowhere is change more evident than in the cities. Gone are the narrow-laned communities of low-lying residences. Gone are the traditional social networks that drew people together. Now towering skyscrapers dominate the landscape, and millions of displaced residents have been relocated from inner city to its outer ring. It's an environment that breeds alienation and encourages creativity. You can see evidence of both in "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China," now at the Seattle Art Museum.
Last Tuesday about 400 people packed the Mount Baker Community Club to hear about Casa Latina's plans to relocate from their current site in Belltown to the vacant Chubby & Tubby store on Rainier Avenue. The opposition was large and rambunctious, and I was reminded of our light rail controversy a few years back. There was shouting and name-calling on both sides. Casa Latina made the mistake of placing too much faith in the good that their projects promise the community. They didn't foresee the ferocity of the opposition. The process of side taking seems to be characteristic of the way we deal with conflict in this community. There are ways that we could work together more effectively. One method is expressed in Stephen Covey's "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." Perhaps our community would function more effectively if we tried to cultivate three of his habits: seek first to understand, then to be understood; think win-win; and synergize.
Taking a stroll during a late-winter sunny day with my wife and 6 month old son this past weekend I came across a stiff poster tacked to a pine stick and jammed into a rock-wall garden sprouting purple crocuses and soft green tulip shoots. The placard's gleaming white background held - in bold, black contrast - an image of Martin Luther King Jr. "Speak truth to power" framed the civil rights leader's picture in stoplight red lettering.Now, I've seen the sign and heard the slogan before, but spotting it proudly displayed in an early spring garden out in front of someone's neatly kept house gave me pause. I wondered why, throughout the year, we don't see more prominent and powerful reminders of the gutsy, life-risking pioneers that fought to abolish our society's government-sanctioned mechanisms of oppression.
Does the Motion Picture Academy know that movies can be art? They kept that option open back when they started giving awards.
How many films were judged best of the year at the first Academy Awards? Actually, two. The award for Best Motion Picture went to "Wings," William A. Wellman's World War I flyboy epic, and that's the correct answer if anyone asks you, "What was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?" But there was also an award that split year of 1927-28 for "most artistic quality of production," which went to the stunning American debut of celebrated German director F.W. Murnau, "Sunrise."Both were good calls. "Wings" typifies the kind of movie experience that is still considered likely Oscar fodder (though the term "Oscar" wasn't coined till the mid-'30s): a simple, sturdy premise, plenty of state-of-the-art spectacle, hot young starpower (Clara Bow, Richard Arlen, Buddy Rogers and a film-stealing one-scene appearance by Gary Cooper) and a big-budget risk that paid off. "Sunrise" is something else again: a visionary rendering of a universal allegory of love, betrayal and redemption in which a nameless couple (the subtitle is "A Song of Two Humans") leave their rural village on a day-trip to the phantasmagorical City, are wrenched asunder, then symbolically remarried, then separated again by a twist of fate. Murnau himself married the German tradition of building the most elaborate dream realities in the studio to the superior technical resources of Hollywood, creating a technical and stylistic milestone that would inspire American filmmakers for the next decade and beyond. The film proved to be a box-office disappointment, but "most artistic quality of production" - no contest.
Although it may be difficult to imagine the need to become a caregiver for a loved one, advance planning will make the transition easier, if the perceived need arises. While caregiving is most often associated with the elderly, examples of what a family might face also include a mother's deteriorating health, a father's slow recovery from a heart attack, a grown son paralyzed in a car accident, or a daughter with developmental disabilities. With such scenarios in mind, Washington's Department of Social and Health Services has compiled a brief bunch of tips on how families can prepare for caregiving and share responsibilities:
As an only child growing up in Yonkers, New York, Hanifah Walidah amused herself by creating her own world of music and acting. Overcoming stage freight by performing, she found liberation and release in becoming someone else. In her recent production "Black Folks Guide to Black Folks: A Play About Homophobia in the Black Community," she takes on nine characters. The comedy-drama production runs at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 24-26 at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, 104 17th Ave. S. at Yesler Way in Seattle.The production features straight, gay and transgendered characters that live in Around-the-Way, USA. It's a neighborhood of people linked together through love and life lessons all played by Walidah, who says she made a concerted effort to primarily focus on reaching black audiences with her show and that the piece is not written for white people, though white people (and those of other races) have enjoyed the production.
The Seattle School District appears to have reversed its stance on unionized bus drivers. Three years ago, the district dumped longtime, unionized school-bus company Laidlaw in a contentious decision to go with cheaper, non-union providers. Non-union Durham School Services and First Student Inc. got the nod, and the school district saved $1.2 million a year, according to district spokeswoman Patti Spencer.That was then. Now the school board has decided in a unanimous vote to re-bid the five-year contracts two years ahead of schedule and to include a "Labor Peace/Labor Harmony" section that protects drivers' rights to unionize, she said. The decision to put the contracts out for bid early goes against thinking at the district staff level, Spencer added. Overall, the district's transportation manager has been pleased with the performance of both companies, she said. "Based on that, the recommendation was to continue with the contracts."
Music Inner City, a show that reaches out to inner city youth through urban music, is entering its 15th year on television and recently began a trial period with Comcast's 24-hour On Demand service.The show's creator, South End resident Gordon Curvey, ends every episode with a positive message about staying in school, a routine that exemplifies his activism in the Seattle community."He's trying to show kids that there's more to it than just the inner city life here," said Raymond Fernandez, the show's regular cameraman.
Every now and then, a local theater borrows an old Hollywood trick: stunt casting. Right now, the 5th Avenue Theatre is pouring water on local celebrities and members of their board during "Singin' in the Rain." They've also switched the racial background of one character. One stunt works, in so far as it doesn't detract from the musical, and one, very unfortunately, doesn't.On Wednesday, Feb. 23, Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske will play the policeman who appears at the end of Act 1 during the musical's signature splash dance. And the 5th doesn't stint on the water - it's falling from the ceiling and running along the floor, so expect Kerlikowske to be well wrapped up against the elements as he takes his stroll across the stage. On opening night, it was former Seafirst Bank chairman William M. Jenkins who took the stroll with the nightstick.In another bit of twist casting, the 5th decided to give the role of the ultimate dumb blonde, Lina Lamont, to African-American actress Lisa Estridge. While it's always good to see more opportunities for all actors of color, the race switch doesn't work because the 5th seems unable to think out the ramifications and make the needed tweaks to the script.
Jim Morris is a take-charge kind of guy. That might explain why he became president of the Fred Lind Manor resident council within a year of moving there in March 1995. The position is clearly a good fit:: He is now serving his 10th consecutive term as council president."I love it here because they do everything for me and I have been able, in my own small way, to make quite a change in the environment here," he said.Morris said that prior to his arrival at Fred Lind there was an adversarial tension between the council and the administration for the retirement home. Also, Morris, a dyed-in-the-wool Irishman who loves a joke, brought a light-hearted, positive attitude with him when he first walked through the door.
There's a Help Wanted ad that needs to be posted in every newspaper in Seattle. That ad would read something like this: Help Wanted: Someone with name familiarity, lots of dollars or ability to raise them, and proven leadership experience, willing to take on Greg Nickels for Mayor in 2005. A large coalition of community leaders seeks strong leader who will give first priority to our neighborhoods and small businesses, with the goal of ensuring equity, jobs, and affordable housing for low income people, communities of color, and others now marginalized by the policies of our current Mayor. The successful candidate will in the past have distinguished herself or himself as a strong advocate for these values central to the well-being and soul of our city. During the four-year tenure of Greg Nickels, these core city values have been pushed aside in favor of an agenda that overtly favors downtown and large corporate interests like no other time in this city's history. Mayor Nickels has slashed programs for the poor and failed to even begin to address the nearly $1 billion backlog of transportation and other basic infrastructure needs in our neighborhoods.