Misc. Archives
And here's my profile of Mira Shelub, as it appeared in today's Chronicle:
"German police murdered Mira Shelub's mother during World War II; Mira, as a youth, lived two years in the Polish forest, fending off cold and lice and typhus and hunger until liberation by the Russians in 1945. These are not happy memories, and yet when Mira welcomes a visitor to her Stonestown neighborhood home to talk about them, she is bubbling with excitement.
Her face, with its tasteful eyeliner and fuchsia lipstick, remains squeezed in a bright smile; she strokes her interviewer's hand, calls her "dear" as they enter her immaculate living room with its shag carpet. Mira sits in a chartreuse armchair, her tiny 5-foot-1 frame leaning forward with eagerness. She looks like she can hardly keep from rising.
"I like to talk about my story, because it's the only time I can talk about my husband," she says in her exuberant accent, with its richly rolling r's and crisp t's. "And besides, I am proud of our story. Because we did not go to death without doing anything. We fought the Nazis for a better tomorrow. We were young and brave, and we put up a fight."
To Mira, her years with the Jewish partisan fighters are as much a tale of romance as a tale of survival and revenge. Mira met her future husband, Norman, a partisan leader who blew up trains and attacked German police stations, in the forest. They found a will to live, and to fight back, in each other.
It is not the kind of Harlequin novel love story young Mira Rostov would have imagined for herself when, in 1941, the Russian-German nonaggression pact collapsed. Mira's home in the small northeast Polish town of Zdczieciol (now part of Belarus) was located in the newly formed Jewish ghetto.
Mira's family had been six people living in four rooms; now four other families, 40 people, crowded in. By day, they and Mira were sent to work, for a while hauling rocks, then in a milk factory. Rumors of the Germans liquidating Jews in nearby towns began to circulate. "We told ourselves, 'All right, that is just over there because they don't work as hard as we do, but it could never happen here,' " Mira says. And yet her family built two hiding places, one behind a double wall in a chicken house. That's where Shelub and her younger sister fled one night when shots began to ring out."
Click here for the full story.
April 10, 2007 · 02:43 PM · Misc. · Comments (1)
And now for something very different . . . With Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, approaching this weekend, the Chronicle asked me to profile Holocaust survivors. We found two extraordinary Bay Area women to interview through the San Francisco-based Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. Both Sonia Orbuch and Mira Shelub fought alongside armed resistance fighters, or partisans, in the forests of Poland during World War II. Today Sonia's story appeared; tomorrow Mira's will run. Here's Sonia:
"Sonia Orbuch does not like weakness. But today, safe in her Corte Madera townhouse with its swag curtains in soothing shades of peach, Sonia is getting teary.
You might expect tears, given the story she's telling: how 16-year-old Sonia Shainwald fled impending slaughter in the Jewish ghetto of Luboml, Poland, and finally arrived in the forests to join the Soviet anti-German resistance. There she served as a doctor's assistant, treating the injuries of partisan fighters who embarked on regular missions to blow up Nazi trains and disrupt communications. The amputations were horrific. Her uncle was killed. But the partisan leaders imparted one key lesson: You are not allowed to cry.
And today, Sonia insists, she would not be crying were it not for her arm, recently broken in a fall and held in a sling. Sonia, 82, is dressed down in a brown velveteen tracksuit, her weight supported by a cane and her eyes less alert than usual.
"I'm a little more emotional now because of the pain medication," she says matter-of-factly in her faint Polish accent. She gestures to a box of See's candy. "Have a chocolate."
She wears her amber hair well coiffed and holds her regal nose high, and even with her eyes damp there's no mistaking the inborn strength that must have sustained her through those war years. Sonia was always one to face hard realities. When a teenager, hiding in a crawl space from the Germans for two days with 16 other Jews, Sonia realized that her mother would not live much longer, and matter-of-factly told her father that they would have to run, as Germans were beginning to liquidate the ghetto."
Click here for the full story, photos, and links to video clips at the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation web site.
April 09, 2007 · 12:24 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
To those who like to keep up with me, I'm sorry things have been slow on this site as of late. The good news is that my personal life is resettling (I am now happily ensconced on the north shore of Oakland's Lake Merritt) and that I've actually been getting a lot of writing done. The catch is that you can't see any of it yet. I've finished four short stories lately, and embarked on a longer project which I refuse to jinx by speaking much about, but which seems to have tremendous emotional energy. The important thing is that I see my writing improving hugely--and perhaps I'll be able to share some of what I've been working on someday.
In the meantime, the dance season is finally lurching ahead, and people are beginning to ask me for recommendations. I haven't seen anything spectacular in dance yet (you'll be seeing plenty of my dance reviews in the Chronicle over the coming months), but during this lull I was absolutely astonished by the Kronos Quartet's latest program at the Herbst Theater last Monday. My astute companion Allan Ulrich reviewed it for Britain's Financial Times:
"Five years to the day after the US first confronted its own vulnerability, the Kronos Quartet has begun its new season with a unique remembrance of that horrifying moment. Music, we already knew, stirs the memory, comforts and transcends the mundane. It can also express the inexpressible. Now this perennially daring artistic organisation has asked us to consider through the string quartet medium the world as a single community, riven by shared anxieties.
Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Fifth Anniversary of 9/11 ingeniously weaves 13 works from 12 countries into an unbroken, 100- minute sequence that alarms, terrifies, soothes and ultimately proposes a measure of hope. The Kronos journeys from traditional Muslim prayer calls (adroitly transcribed) to the solace of Aulis Sallinen’s Winter Was Hard (assisted by an ethereal children’s choir) and the premiere of a rescoring for strings of Vladimir Martynov’s spiritually drenched Beatitudes."
Unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to read the full review, and my non-music-critic report is far less sophisticated than Allan's: In short, the Martynov moved me to tears.
Also unfortunately, Michael Gordon's "The Sad Park," the piece I liked the least, is the one work from this program Kronos seems to be taking on the road. But for what it's worth, Martynov's music has also cropped up recently in the work of Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton, in the elegiac closing piece she created for the Baryshnikov Arts Center tour. His music--and Barton's dance--are both gorgeous.
Stay tuned for dance reviews in the Chronicle--and some dance writing elsewhere--beginning next week.
September 14, 2006 · 09:38 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
I'm just back from Phoenix, where I led a writing workshop at the Parents of Murdered Children Conference. The conference is a place for those who have lost someone to murder to gather with others who understand how isolating and stigmatizing a murder in the family can feel, who know that "closure" in the face of a violent and sudden death is a ludicrous concept, who don't ask "aren't you over that already?" The workshop turned out to be an amazing experience. I had no idea those of you who came would be so brave and open in putting your stories on the page, and sharing them aloud. I hope you found some release in the writing we did in class, and that you'll continue with it. Within the next two weeks, I'll be putting together a worksheet covering everything we went over in workshop, as many of you requested; if you'd like to receive it, be sure to send me an email at rachel at rachel howard dot com. You can also write to me there just to keep in touch and let me know how your writing progresses. I was thoroughly inspired by everyone's courage, and I'd love to hear from you.
This was the first time I'd attempted teaching a writing workshop for murder survivors; I proceeded only with the knowledge of how much writing had helped me and a gut certainty that it would do the same for others. I was blown away to watch many of your breakthroughs in class, and to hear afterwards that the workshop helped you channel the shock and grief of murder onto the page, so that it no longer has to feel so raw in your own mind. I'm so encouraged by your responses that I know I'll have to teach this workshop again, at another POMC conference or elsewhere. I wish you all a lot of peace.
August 14, 2006 · 10:44 AM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Grotto Works Rocks
The first-ever Grotto Works celebration was hot--literally--thanks to the 300 or so guests who packed our sweltering, surprisingly under-air conditioned offices on a warm Saturday night. Everyone crowded in to the conference room for two rounds of reading--first at eight with Christopher Cook, David Ewing Duncan, Melanie Gideon, and Kaui Hart Hemmings; and then at nine with Caroline Paul, Peter Orner, yours truly, and Jason Roberts. Our emcee, SF Chronicle book review editor Oscar Villalon, kept the evening rolling with his usual charisma, and everyone partook amply of the wine.
Thanks to everyone who came, to Oscar, and to A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, on hand with the goods. As I noted mournfully during the readings, Clean Well-Lighted's much-loved store on Opera Plaza is closing. Apparently, they've got a few more weeks of business, and could use help closing out their inventory. If you'd like to say your goodbyes to this store whose great readings series has done so much to get the word out for good books, drop by during the next week and pick up that novel or poetry collection or biography you keep meaning to buy.
UPDATE: Leah Garchik reports in Wednesday's Chronicle that locally owned Books Inc will take over Clean Well-Lighted's space at Opera Plaza, with management looking forward to hosting more and bigger readings than they've been able to in Books Inc's smaller stores. So stop by Opera Plaza now to say goodbye, and again in mid-September to say hello.
June 26, 2006 · 05:14 PM · Misc. · Comments (1)
When a friend of mine who edits San Francisco State's alumni magazine asked me to interview the Photorealist painter Robert Bechtle, I couldn't resist. By coincidence, I had just seen the mesmerizing Bechtle retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and I knew it would be an honor to talk to him. The resulting story isn't my most stylish writing, but it was wonderful to stretch myself beyond dance, and apparently Bechtle approved. Here's the top:
"On a rainy March afternoon, Robert Bechtle stands in the basement studio of his Potrero Hill home, impatiently considering a canvas. Just months ago, Bechtle's name flew on banners around Union Square, and thousands had visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to see the first large-scale exhibition of his work. But for Bechtle, who taught painting at SFSU for more than 30 years, the buzz of celebration has been replaced by the frustration of getting back to work.
On the canvas, brown lines sketch a row of suburban homes. "This is revisiting an earlier painting, which is something I'm interested in doing, because it will come out totally different," he says in a soft voice, touching his wiry white beard.
He doesn't just mean that the trees are now taller, and that a blue car is now parked on the street. The differences will be both more nuanced and more personal. After all, Bechtle does not draw and paint freehand, but projects his photographs onto canvases before meticulously filling in the details -- a process that, when he first adopted it four decades ago, struck him as "slightly naughty." He is the leading figure of the Photorealist school of painting, one of the most noted art movements of the late '60s and '70s. But while his works entrancingly re-create the look of an old family snapshot, the photograph is just a starting point for his art, opening up myriad choices about color and proportion, texture, and what Bechtle calls "a certain amount of fakery that is just technique."
His subjects are as distinct as his methods -- placid streetscapes and '60s-era cars, backyard barbecues and other outtakes from middle-class family life, all awash in pale California sunlight and suffused with a subtly sad nostalgia. The paintings impart a strange feeling of loss, but they began as an attempt to avoid emotionality."
Click here for the rest, and more gorgeous paintings.
June 08, 2006 · 02:58 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Welcome! You’ve arrived at the website of author, arts journalist, book reviewer, and dance critic Rachel Howard (that’s me on the right at eight, in the poufy tutu). Once a steady blog on dance and writing, this website is changing in nature as I focus the rest of this year on finishing a draft of a novel. I’ll be using the site to post more occasional notices on my readings and other events, updates on writing projects, and perhaps some random links to things I like.
Meanwhile, if you’ve come here looking for “The Lost Night,” my memoir about the emotional aftermath of my father’s unsolved murder, you can read the great reviews here, dip into an excerpt here, see what all the people in the book look like in real life here, and check out the readings scheduled for this summer’s paperback release here. And you can always write to me at rachel at rachelhoward dot com.
If you’re a dance fan, you can look through hundreds of reviews and articles I’ve written about dozens of dance companies by using the search box over on the navigation bar. If you’re looking for a Bay Area company, the odds are high I’ve written about them.
Thanks for visiting, and thanks for your patience as I take time out to try some new things with my writing.
May 23, 2006 · 01:26 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Welcome! You’ve arrived at the website of author, arts journalist, book reviewer, and dance critic Rachel Howard (that’s me on the right at eight, in the poufy tutu). Once a steady blog on dance and writing, this website is changing in nature as I focus the rest of this year on finishing a draft of a novel. I’ll be using the site to post more occasional notices on my readings and other events, updates on writing projects, and perhaps some random links to things I like.
Meanwhile, if you’ve come here looking for “The Lost Night,” my memoir about the emotional aftermath of my father’s unsolved murder, you can read the great reviews here, dip into an excerpt here, see what all the people in the book look like in real life here, and check out the readings scheduled for this summer’s paperback release here. And you can always write to me at rachel at rachelhoward dot com.
If you’re a dance fan, you can look through hundreds of reviews and articles I’ve written about dozens of dance companies by using the search box over on the navigation bar. If you’re looking for a Bay Area company, the odds are high I’ve written about them.
Thanks for visiting, and thanks for your patience as I take time out to try some new things with my writing.
May 02, 2006 · 04:53 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Greetings
If you've alighted on this site thanks to my A-Z dance guide (and editor Joe Brown's generous plug) in the SF Chronicle, welcome! My website Footnotes went live in July 2004. I use this blog to fill out my coverage of the booming Bay Area dance scene, linking to my Chronicle reviews, writing about casts or performances I don't cover for the Chronicle, recommending upcoming shows, and pointing out provocative or especially well-written dance stories from other publications. If you like what I do for the Chronicle, you can find more of it, every week, on this site.
In my other life, I write fiction and memoir, and I use this site to shamelessly promote my first book, "The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder." You can check out the critical praise for "The Lost Night" here or read an excerpt here. I feel fortunate to live in a city with a busy dance scene and a lively literary world, and I also blog about books and the writing life.
Thanks for visiting. Feel free to leave a comment, or drop me a line at rachel at rachelhoward dot com. You can also join my mailing list by entering your email address in the "subscribe" box to the right.
January 29, 2006 · 12:07 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
I came down with a nasty flu Wednesday, am still suffering it today, hope to be well by Monday, and am sure glad I finished several Chronicle assignments well before deadline last week, though I've now lost two days I had hoped would be devoted entirely to my fiction writing.
January 13, 2006 · 11:13 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
The New Yorker recently ran a "Talk of the Town" item on the woman who would not rest until Rod Stewart had his Walk of Fame star:
"In October, when Rod Stewart made an appearance on Hollywood Boulevard to unveil his star on the Walk of Fame, perhaps no one was prouder than Marcy Braunstein, a fifty-two-year-old woman from Pittsburgh. Braunstein is the ultimate Rod Stewart fan. This becomes evident to anyone who visits her house and stumbles upon her Rod Room—a cramped space that contains more memorabilia than one might find in a modest Presidential library. These mementos include a framed dress shirt that Rod once wore and a water glass that Rod sipped from on the set of “Oprah.”
“I like to joke that if my husband and I ever had kids my Rod Room would be a nursery,” Braunstein said recently. “But it’s not. It’s a Rod Room instead.” "
My dad, a fellow Rod Stewart fanatic, would have been pleased.
January 10, 2006 · 10:29 AM · Misc. · Comments (1)
An Office of My Own
I’ve started the new year off with a new space by joining the SF Writers Grotto. It’s a collective of all kinds of freelance writers—journalists, novelists, poets, screenwriters—who rent office space together in order to counterbalance the solitary nature of writing, build community, and offer each other moral support. They also throw some kick-ass readings and parties, which—if you’re familiar with the group—you may have attended at their former Civic Center digs in a converted Cat and Dog Hospital.
The Grotto lost that space late last year and has just moved to a second floor suite at Bryant and 2nd, just outside South Park. The new environs are not as quaint, but they’re awfully accommodating, with individual offices for 32 writers, a full kitchen, and a palatial conference room where the Grotto plans to hold events and classes. I’ve taken a smallish room with a window, and painted the walls a fretfully chosen blue-green that reminds me of a baby blanket in some moods, and a convalescent hospital in others. I’ve got a bookcase full of my old journals and favorite books, a bulletin board soon to be covered in dance posters, and a couch for cat naps.
I’m hoping it will be a productive place for me to not only knock out my dance freelancing, but plunge ahead with my fiction. I’ve been here three days now, during which I’ve completed one assignment for the Chronicle and nearly finished a second draft of a short story. I like the sound of distant voices in the halls, the friendly visits from other procrastinating writers, the solitude of closing my door and getting down to business. I like knowing that no matter what happens, I have a place to write. Virginia Woolf would surely approve.
To visit the Grotto’s website (in need of updating), click here.
January 03, 2006 · 02:10 PM · Misc. · Comments (2)
It's time for year-end lists, and my memoir "The Lost Night" has thus far made two, named a best book of 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Rocky Mountain News.
In dance matters, my list of most memorable dance moments in 2005 will run in the Chronicle's pink section this Sunday. Meanwhile, Allan Ulrich offers his highlights at Voice of Dance.
December 21, 2005 · 04:56 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Spotted recently on the marquee of a Tenderloin porn shop:
INFLATABLE DOLL
LOVE SOMEONE WHO LOVES YOU BACK
There's a poem in there, if only I were a poet.
December 15, 2005 · 03:48 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
The writing is going well. Lots of revising, lots of deepening, a little bit of pushing forward. So you won't be hearing from me much this week. Apologies.
November 21, 2005 · 10:16 AM · Misc. · Comments (0)
A Chronicle assignment to preview the new Cirque du Soleil show provided a perfect opportunity to plug Grace Cathedral, where I am a member:
"Daniele Finzi Pasca has never been to Grace Cathedral, at the top of Nob Hill, but he knows one of its most resonant symbols well.
In the courtyard outside the church, and also replicated inside beneath the soaring arches of its main nave, is a circle that looks like a maze. The difference is, there are no wrong turns. You wind along the curving path, letting your mind settle as you turn; you reach the center and meditate; you follow the road back out, certain that it cannot lead you astray.
The circle is a labyrinth, an exact copy of one installed in France's Chartres Cathedral in the 13th century. And now, thanks to Pasca, it is the heart of Cirque du Soleil's newest show, "Corteo," which opens in San Francisco on Friday.
"It is important not to explain too much," said Pasca, who as the creator and director of Cirque's latest spectacle insisted that the labyrinth be reproduced faithfully beneath the big top. "You can have an outward structural form and an inward secret beauty. If someone wants to examine it up close, they'll look deeper."
The spiritual mystery of the labyrinth permeates "Corteo," which marks a striking departure for Montreal's successful cirque nouveau franchise. "Corteo" means "cortege," or "joyous procession," and the show tells the story of a dead clown who watches his own funeral parade through his imagination.
This is not the fantasyland of Cirque's 14 previous shows (four in residence in Las Vegas), but more like an intensified reality. Instead of the surreal, Technicolor forest of, say, Cirque's "Varekai," "Corteo" has the shabby-chic decor of an Anthropologie catalog. Instead of exotic lizards and nymphs, the characters are real people. "
The show got a good review today in the Chron. Click here to read my full piece.
November 14, 2005 · 09:18 AM · Misc. · Comments (1)
Dr. Gong's Memorial
Quite a few visitors coming to this site are looking for writing about Dr. Gong, and I hope they will scroll to the entry below and leave their own memories if they wish. For those who would like to attend his memorial, this is the information printed in today's Chronicle:
"A memorial for David Gong, a dentist who was shot to death last week near his office, will be held Thursday at 11 a.m. in San Francisco.
Dr. Gong, 56, was shot and killed at Jackson at Polk streets in San Francisco, a half block from his office, by a former patient who shot himself to death moments later.
The memorial will be held at Kelly's Mission Rock restaurant, 817 Terry Francois Blvd. in San Francisco.
Dr. Gong is survived by his wife of 20 years, Erika Delacorte, and by children Steven and Kate, all of San Francisco.
Memorial donations may be sent to the California Academy of Sciences, 875 Howard St., San Francisco, CA 94103."
November 02, 2005 · 09:20 AM · Misc. · Comments (0)
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Got home to San Francisco yesterday for one of the hottest days of the year and . . . a ski-jump competition. In the middle of my neighborhood. Tons of shaved ice paved down that roller-coaster-worthy slope of Fillmore Street between Broadway and Vallejo, thousands of people playing hooky to watch snowboarders launch themselves in the air with the Golden Gate Bridge as backdrop. It was spectacular. Apparently the more upper-crusty of my neighbors weren't pleased, but I hope they bring this thing back every year.
September 30, 2005 · 10:28 AM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Not Here
It’s Labor Day, and I am happily laboring on writing—but not, as you may have noticed lately, on much writing for this site. I can’t say how long this state will continue. I’ve been working on my novel, and on short stories, and on a personal essay—a little bit of everything because I have so much, at the moment, to teach myself.
The novel, which I’ve been working on intermittently for the last year and a half, has grown more ambitious than intended. So in the same way that I spent four years reading and analyzing dozens of memoirs to teach myself how to write one, I must now get deeper into the nitty-gritty of studying fiction craft and technique. For instance, it would have been a lot easier to try writing a novel in the first person point of view, or at least in the third person aligned with just one character. But no, I’ve taken on third person through three separate characters’ points of view, which means I’ve been working on developing a narrative voice that is convincingly within each of these characters’ heads. One character is coming through very clear to me at the moment, and it’s the character who is least like me in every way, and that’s not at all what I expected. And of course, the sections of story that each character tells overlap. Which means I’m working a lot on grouping events into coherent chapters, so that the tellings bump against each other like tectonic plates.
I take some encouragement in the fact that I’ve recently written some short stories that I think show a good deal of advancement. Two months ago I wrote a particular short story because I wanted to practice/experiment with an omniscient narration that moves fluidly back and forth between two very different characters’ thoughts. It’s a lot more difficult than you might think, and it took a lot of revisiting Flannery O’Connor and Joy Williams to pull it off. I also wrote that piece for the fanciful reason that I wanted to set a short story in a water slide park. I finished revisions two weeks ago and I’m feeling pleased with it.
Between all this and Chronicle assignments, I’ve tended to want to invest whatever writing energy I have left into my personal journal, which is my lifeline to sanity. So I’m sorry I haven’t been around here much. But I’m feeling really torn between journalism and my private (i.e., as-yet-unpaid) writing endeavors, and I’m wanting to horde time to myself.
I can’t promise I’ll post here much in the coming months. I can promise that I’ve got lots of Chronicle articles on the horizon as the fall dance season launches. I’ve got one or two pieces for the Chronicle’s Datebook section each week for the next month, and of course I’ll link to them all here as soon as they’re up.
I’m also heading to New York for a few days at the end of next week, and looking forward to some thought-provoking dance there, including Noemie Lafrance’s newest site-specific work. I’ll write about it here, of course.
So I’m writing. I’m just not feeling chained to the blog. Which I think is a damn healthy thing. Blog-mania, for me, has been like dot com déjà vu. I remember when I moved to San Francisco in 2000 and all anyone could talk about was e-commerce, and it felt as though if you were a writer and you weren’t becoming some kind of “content provider” or making inroads with Salon, you were going the way of the Dodo bird. It was ludicrous, of course, and so is this pressure floating in cyberspace—don’t tell me, if you’re a writer, that you haven’t felt it—that if you don’t blog every other day you might as well cease to exist. E-commerce is a tool, a wonderful tool, but it wasn’t about to replace physical stores. And a blog is a publishing tool, a wonderfully useful publishing tool, nothing more or less. It’s changing the way we share information and publish and write, no doubt. That doesn’t mean we have to continue talking about it ad nauseum, and so it’s been a relief to me to see blogs become more integrated with traditional media, to watch them become as normal as the notion of buying stuff on the internet, to notice the blog-frenzy hitting a tableau.
But then I’ve always hated trend-watching. It makes me feel so temporal and mortal.
And I’ve gone on longer than intended here, and with less coherence than I ought to employ. And a night of wrestling with the novel, with a piece of writing that gives anything but instant gratification, that will take years to be ready for publication, if it ever is—God willing!—awaits.
September 05, 2005 · 05:55 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
If you haven't seen this yet, Arts Journal has swiftly assembled an informative page on Hurricane Katrina and the Arts, including how you can help. Click here.
September 02, 2005 · 06:21 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Want to know what it's like to lead the glamorous life of the freelance writer? Read this and weep.
Via Old Hag.
August 31, 2005 · 09:59 AM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Invisible Improvements
I haven't posted much lately, but I've been working a bit on this site (or rather, having the ever-efficient and surprisingly affordable Stacy from Sekimori design do some work for me). Most of the changes you can't see. But--drumroll please--you can now leave comments again, thanks to a nifty spam-blocking program. So please, comment away on anything you see here.
June 09, 2005 · 09:25 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Having a Ball
And now for something totally different. The Chronicle's Sunday Pink Section asked me to go behind the scenes with preparations for the San Francisco Symphony's Black and White Ball. I'm not a society kind of gal by any stretch, so I was relieved to find that ball chair Patricia Sprincin was not your stereotypical socialite:
"It seems to be a typical morning at the San Francisco Symphony's volunteer offices. Patricia Sprincin is dressed, as always, in crisp black and white.
"When do you envision beach balls?" she says, leaning across a map of Civic Center. To her right sits a giant martini glass holding a prototype of the inflatable party favor in question. But this is hardly a day at the beach.
We're talking 5,000 beach balls, designed to flood Polk Street this Saturday at the opening of the Symphony's biannual Black & White Ball. And deciding when to drop them is just the beginning. When do you blow them up? Where? How? Who?
Across the conference table, Mark Guelfi types a note on his laptop. He's president of Hartmann Studios, the Ball's producer, and an old hand at logistics. "We'll go to Costco and buy air mattress power pumps," he says. "We'll start blowing them up at 9 a.m."
Sprincin tucks a lock of her chic blond bob behind her ear. "How do we know they'll stay inflated?"
Guelfi looks stumped. "We'll have to test that," he says.
Add another item to the list. Planning a party for 10,000 people is all in the details -- and as chair of this year's Black & White Ball, Sprincin is responsible for them all. Tall and composed, she inspires confidence. Far from the stereotype of a poodle-toting socialite, she's a down-to-earth mother with a throaty laugh and blue eyes that twinkle when she pronounces "Stymie and the Pimp Jones Luv Orchestra," one of 27 music acts that will play at the Ball's five venues.
"With a name like that, I'm sure the tickets will sell," Sprincin says with a wink."
Click here for the full piece. As a tiny side note, my lead as I composed it read "It's a typical weekday morning at the San Francisco Symphony's volunteer offices, where Patricia Sprincin is dressed, as always, in crisp black and white." I'm still partial to it, though neither the original nor the edited version is spectacular, in my opinion.
June 05, 2005 · 04:42 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
A quick technical note: The "comments" feature on this site is currently not functioning. But I am always excited to hear from readers. My email is rachel at rachelhoward dot com.
May 30, 2005 · 03:43 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Technical Matters
A good number of visitors have been trying to leave legitimate comments here lately, and finding out the frustrating way that I've had to disable them. Alas, due to spam, the "comments" feature isn't functional. But I'd love to hear your reactions to anything you see here. So keep in mind you can always drop me a line at rachel at rachelhoward.com. Thanks.
April 12, 2005 · 04:13 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
