by The AVA
CRIME IS DOWN in Mendocino County in the winter months so the cops and the state’s apparently underworked Department of Alcohol Beverage Control go out and commit some, as they did on a bustling late afternoon at Anderson Valley Market when the combined forces of law and order dispatched a young babe who looked like [...]
“What we need to start doing,” somebody recently told me, “is start getting back to a bartering system. Get away from dependence on the dollar bill.”
“Yeah,” I said, several times, finally picking up a baseball and doing a partial wind-up, firing a pitch at an imaginary strike zone on a pile of wood chips the [...]
So again with the dazzling dancing. Again with the breath taking feats of aerial daring do. Again with the eye-popping pyrotechnics. And again with the inspired singing, fancy picking, strumming, bowing and blowing. One could say that after nineteen years the Anderson Valley Solar Powered Grange Annual Variety Show is in kind of a rut. [...]
by Steve Sparks
As the rain came pouring down I drove to the outskirts of Boonville and met with June at her home on Ornbaun Road. She graciously offered me either a tuna or ham sandwich for lunch but I settled on some delicious homemade cookies along with a hot cup of coffee and we sat down to [...]
Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. Well, once again I attended both evenings of the annual Variety Show and, although I assume another roving reporter from the AVA will be giving an extended review of events, I thought I’d offer some opinions from a ‘bird’s eye view,’ particularly [...]
Sunday afternoon was another perfect day for possibly accomplishing something, but I spent most of the afternoon mentally and physically preparing for a trial run for our farm’s upcoming Variety Show act. Scores of people were involved. It was going to be the biggest thing since the launching of the Apollo. We had engineers, architects, [...]
by Steve Sparks
I drove above Ornbaun Road to meet with Bill at the house he and wife Eva have called home since 1976. We sat down with some coffee and a plate of Oreo cookies and began our chat.
Bill was born in 1933 in the very small west Texas town of Rule, about 150 miles [...]
Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. Let’s start with the Public Service Announcements. #131. I am told that Variety Show tickets are available at Lemons’ Market in Philo and All that Good Stuff in Boonville, as well as on the night at the door at the Grange. Get [...]
by The AVA
MORGAN BAYNHAM reminds us all that the Anderson Valley Grange Variety Show is this Friday and Saturday. Tickets are available at the Philo Mar ket and All That Good Stuff, Boonville. “Buy your tickets NOW for an easy entry into the show. Come early and join the parking lot tailgate crowd, or be entertained by all [...]
by Steve Sparks
Wallen Summers becomes our third guest from the Valley who was born outside the US. He ‘arrived’ in Shanghai, China, in 1932, the second child of Sarci Chen and his American wife, Ann Summers. “My father was a sophisticated, modern guy of the 1920s who had been educated at Worcester Tech in Massachusetts and upon his return to China he became an electrical engineer with his own business. My older sister and I grew up in a middle class household and we were very close. She is a retired psychiatrist in San Francisco who has hung on to her Chinese roots far more than I have. She even changed her name from June back to Mai Long and to this day continues to have very negative feelings towards the Japanese after our experiences in the Second World War, perhaps because she is four years older than me and was a teenager at that time.”
