LAKEPORT, Calif. – A nearly full house greeted the young performers at the concert of the CLPA Youth Orchestra on Sunday, June 9, at Lakeport’s Soper-Reese Community Theatre.

The concert opened with the efforts of a group of tiny violinists, and ended with the sophisticated music of their largely teenaged elders.

All age groups, though, won enthusiastic applause and deservedly so, since all of them had invested many hours in practice and rehearsals to make their moment in the sun possible.

Susan Condit, who serves as conductor of the youth orchestra also teaches string classes, and created programs suitable for each grade and experience level.

It’s obvious that she takes care in choosing music that the kids like to play and they responded with gusto. She also took the precaution of leading the way for the younger kids with her own violin

Clear Lake Performing Arts, which underwrites the Youth Orchestra, also sponsored violin classes, with generous support from a grant from the Lake County Wine Alliance, and these beginners (grades K-2) opened the show with the group singing an ascending scale to “Motorcycles Stopping on the D Ladder” followed by a 11-violin version of the tune.

The familiar “Hot Cross Buns” followed the same format, and the youngsters exited the stage to enthusiastic applause.

Group 1 from the next class then played three numbers “Mary had a little Lamb,” “Ode to Joy” and “Are you sleeping?” A house full of parents, grandparents and even total strangers loudly saluted their efforts.
         
The final group made up of students with current band instrument experience, presented the classical “Brandenburg Concerto No. 5” by Johann Sebastian Bach and the more complex rhythms of the contemporary composition “Terra Nova.” They were lent a helping hand by Youth Orchestra cellist Elliott Serena and violinist Rafael Contreras.

The members of the Youth Orchestra then took the stage, boys and girls alike garbed in black as befitting members of a sophisticated concert group – and sophisticated they were.

After a tune-up by Concertmaster Clayton Rudiger they launched into the brisk, up-tempo “M to the Third Power,” by Carold Nunez.

Next “Tango Expressivo” featured soloists Julianne Carter and Rafael Contreras on violin and also gave bassist Max Lehman a chance to show his stuff, which he did in grand fashion with the popular Latin American dance piece.

“Cloudburst” followed and drew a musical portrait featuring bass and cellos heralding the ominous approach of a storm, the musical cloudburst, and then the gradual retreat of the storm to the music’s finish. It was a notable example of disciplined playing.

“May it be,” the theme from “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” was next, with the first half of the concert ending with the country reel, fiddle sounds of “Galena Milwaukee Breakdown.”

As with their earlier work, this song demonstrated almost perfect bowing techniques by the violins, that would be a credit to any orchestra, anywhere,

Condit took the opportunity to thank her performers stating that “every time I raised the bar they met it.” She then presented a special recognition award to violinist and Assistant Music Director Eleanor Cook who had completed three years with the Youth Orchestra.

Thomas Ganong, who has administered the Allegro Scholarship Program for the last 12 years, then took the stand to present special Musical Achievement Awards to Rafael Contreras and Clayton Rudiger, as well as saluting Symphony Concertmaster Andi Skelton and Condit for their dedication to youth music activities in Lake County.

Symphony Conductor John Parkinson also congratulated all the participants and noted that Youth Orchestra members were playing music that would often be difficult even for his symphony members.

Parkinson’s granddaughter, Taylor, age 5, joined plenty of other little brothers and sisters who were on hand, sometimes under seats, at the concert.

According to Taylor’s grandmother Diane Parkinson, the little girl has already learned to identify the music of the various instruments of the orchestra, showing that it’s never to early to start kids in music programs.

Tamsen Serena, who is a volunteer coordinator for the Youth Orchestra, was master of ceremonies for the program, and thanked both CLPA for its support and the Soper-Reese Theatre which provided the venue free of charge.

The concert’s second half opened with the classical “Rondo Alla Turca” Mozart’s famed “Turkish March.”

Next on the program was the “Theme from Canon in D” written in the 17th century by Johann Pachelbel, whose familiar melody has been copied by many 21st century artists.

The canon is a composition device where different instruments playing the same music enter in sequence, and requires precision timing by the musicians.

The orchestra then returned to Mozart, with his Symphony No. 40 in D, one of only two ever written by Mozart in a minor key.

Then came one of the high points of the concert when darked-haired Edison Serena and blonde Clayton Rudiger rose to play a violin duet of Lindsey Stirling’s “Crystallize.” It was an extravagant show-piece which spotlighted the fingering talents of both musicians, with perfectly-harmonized tones covering every range that a violin can produce, and both performed the piece flawlessly, which won them rafter-ringing applause.

The concert ended with selections from the popular Broadway hit and movie “Les Miserables” supported by images on the movie screen behind the orchestra.

They also were supported by guest symphony members Andi Skelton, Marta Fuller, Jeff Ives, Jerry Mundel, Austin Ison and Patricia Jekel, with Anne Barquist assisting on piano.

When it ended the entire audience was on its feet, saluting what is probably one of the finest youth orchestras in the north counties if not the state.

Here’s a poem by Robin Chapman, from Wisconsin, that needs no introduction, because we’ve all known an elderly person who’s much like this one.

Time

My neighbor, 87, rings the doorbell to ask
if I might have seen her clipping shears
that went missing a decade ago,
with a little red paint on their shaft,
or the iron turkey bank and the porcelain
coffee cup that disappeared a while back
when her friend, now dead, called the police
to break in to see if she were ill, and have we
had trouble with our phone line, hers
is dead and her car and driver’s license
are missing though she can drive perfectly
well, just memory problems, and her son
is coming this morning to take her up
to Sheboygan, where she was born
and where the family has its burial lots,
to wait on assisted living space, and she
just wanted to say we’d been good neighbors
all these how many? years, and how lucky
I am to have found such a nice man
and could she borrow a screwdriver,
the door lock to her house is jammed.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2012 by Robin Chapman, whose most recent book of poems is the eelgrass meadow, Tebot Bach, 2011. Poem reprinted from the Alaska Quarterly Review, Volume 28, nos. 1&2 (Spring/Summer 2011) by permission of Robin Chapman and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

COBB, Calif. – Join the Cobb Mountain Artists on Saturday, June 22, and Sunday, June 23, for their annual open studios, featuring the work of many fine artists who live and work in the incredibly beautiful Cobb area, along with invited guest artist.

Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days.

Featured this year will be functional and art pottery, painting, handmade books, glass art jewelry, ceramic sculpture, photography, stone jewelry and Zen calligraphy, wooden cutting boards, fabric clothing, and new this year, Italian illustrated cookbooks.

All artwork is original, handmade by the artist.

Maps to each studio will be available at Mountain High Coffee in Cobb and Hidden Valley, the Artisan Realm on Highway 175 in Cobb and the Loch Lomond Store.

For more information, call Gregg Lindsley at 707-490-7168, or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . 

LAKEPORT, Calif. – If you missed the Main Street Gallery’s First Friday Fling on June 7, you missed an exceptional showing of art by 16 accomplished artists.

The artists showed creations in a variety of mediums from pastels to oil, watercolor, mixed media, finely turned wood vases and bowls, beautiful hot glass functional art bowls, a superb collection of fine jewelry and delicately crafted French beaded flowers.
 
The Linda Carpenter Student Gallery featured work by Nancy Johnson’s second grade students from the Instilling Goodness Boys School in Ukiah. The show was coordinated by well known artist and instructor Jacquie Farley.
 
Thorn Hill Wines were featured at the reception, while the Carmon Brittan Family livened up the evening with toe-tapping music on a variety of uniquely crafted instruments which included a washtub guitar, mellow flute and further enhanced by Eric Brittan’s pleasing voice and fine guitar playing.

Join the Main Street Gallery, 325 N. Main St. in Lakeport, from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, July 5, as they welcome four new artists, savor the fine wines of Rosa De Oro and enjoy music by the popular Kevin Village Stone and Lindy Day.

THE INTERNSHIP (Rated PG-13)

It’s hard to believe that until now the comedy team of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, fantastic cut-ups in “Wedding Crashers,” has not reunited since 2005. Fittingly, I had to look that up on Google. Or maybe it was Bing.

According to “The Internship,” Google, depicted as a Disneyland-style workplace for geeks and nerds, may be the happiest employment place. After all, the Silicon Valley headquarters comes complete with a beach volleyball court, an indoor slide and free food in the cafeteria.

The movie’s high concept is to take two borderline middle-aged Luddites and stick them smack into the middle of the high-tech corporate culture of Google, where smug young techies toil away at the latest app.

Billy (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson) are salesmen of high-end wristwatches, but their crusty boss (John Goodman) informs them that they are “dinosaurs” for trying to sell watches in the age of smartphones.

Suddenly out of work and with no prospects, Billy and Nick flounder on their separate ways. Nick flails at efforts to sell mattresses for his sister’s obnoxious boyfriend (Will Farrell in a cameo role).

One of them hits upon the idea of enrolling in an online university so they can become college students qualified to enter the summer internship competition program at the Google campus.

This inspired thought is fraught with peril since neither Billy nor Nick has any real knowledge of computers, particularly how to write code or design applications. I feel their pain.

They commandeer a public computer away from school kids at the public library to do an online interview with the Google staff. Speaking loudly and mugging for the camera, they come across ridiculously funny.

It appears that a “diversity” program at Google includes the enlistment of clueless white guys who spend much of their time making 1980’s pop cultural references, often to “Flashdance.”

Once they arrive at the Google headquarters, Billy and Nick discover that they need to join a team of fellow interns in order to enter competitions that will determine the recipients of full-time positions.

Billy and Nick, though affable characters, prove to be about as popular with the interns half their age as lecherous old men at a beach party hosted by hot college girls.

Fortunately for them, a few of the interns are such social outcasts that even fellow geeks and nerds have avoided them. Reluctantly, Billy and Nick are accepted by default into a small group.

The de facto leader, if you will, is Lyle (Josh Brener) who desperately tries to fit in by uttering ill-fitting slang words. Then there’s Stuart (Dylan O’Brien), the sullen loner openly contemptuous of the old guys.

The token Asian is Yo-Yo (Tobit Raphael), a guy so rattled by his domineering mother that he plucks his eyebrows as a form of punishment for his self-diagnosed failures.

The only female in the group is Neha (Tiya Sircar), a bright, intelligent beauty who overcomes her social awkwardness and sexual insecurity with helpful platonic advice from Nick.

As a team, these disparate characters have about as much chance of winning a competition as a one-legged man in a potato sack race. Initially, the college kids all feel that Billy and Nick are holding them back.

Things start to turn around after a Quidditch match goes badly in the first half. With Billy and Nick inspiring the group with a pop culture pep talk, they nearly score an upset victory.

We’ve seen this before in films like “Revenge of the Nerds.” Here, the outcast kids are taunted by the snotty British jerk Graham (Max Minghella), who claims to be both physically and mental superior to his classmates.

Billy and Nick are subjected to pranks as well, such as being tricked into looking for Professor Xavier and finding a wheelchair-bound lookalike at Stanford who takes great offense to their insensitivity to his resemblance to a fictional “X-Men” character.

While Billy and Nick bumble through most of the tech assignments, their worldly experience and charming ability to sell things prove to be a saving grace. This should come as no surprise.

The two middle-aged guys have some creative ways to loosen up their socially discomfited and gawky teammates, including a side trip to a San Francisco disco/strip club in Chinatown.

The humor, though, is mostly at the expense of Billy and Nick. Billy insists on developing a program for “on the line” instead of online. Nick clumsily works a charm offensive on a pretty mid-level manager (Rose Byrne).

“The Internship” doesn’t capture the manic lunacy of “Wedding Crashers,” but it makes good use of the affable charms of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.

The film may seem like an unnecessary, even perhaps unwarranted love letter to Google, but there are things about this tech world culture that seem oddly amusing.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

CLEARLAKE, Calif. – Second Sunday Cinema will feature the documentary “Who Bombed Judi Bari?” on June 9.

The film will be shown at the Clearlake United Methodist Church at 14521 Pearl Ave in Clearlake.  

Doors open at 5:30 p.m., with the film beginning at 6 p.m.

This excellent documentary revisits The Headwaters Summer of 1990, when Earth First! co-founders Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney found their nonviolent activism to save redwoods transformed when they were bombed in their car.  

The pipe bomb under Bari's seat nearly killed her and injured Cherney. Almost immediately, the FBI and Oakland Police Department arrived and arrested them for "transporting explosives,"  and accused them of planning violent acts.  

That case had to be dropped for lack of evidence – but the question remains: Who planted that bomb?  

The FBI has apparently given up and wants to destroy all the evidence. The filmmakers have not given up, and are offering $50,000 to anyone whose information leads to the conviction of the real bomber.

This film's archival footage takes viewers back to the uplifting music and the dedication and raw courage of those who worked to successfully save this gorgeous grove.  

The film offers the chance to meet Bari as she makes her legal deposition a very few weeks before her death from cancer in 1997.

Donations to the filmmakers, including Cherney, the producer, are very welcome.

This struggle is far from over. The chair of the Redwood Chapter of the Sierra Club, Victoria Brandon, will talk after the film on how we can work together to save the beautiful redwood forests of our Northern California coast.

For more information, call Shannon Tolson at 707-889-7355.