This Week in the Pacific Sun

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This Week in the Pacific Sun

This week in the Pacific Sun we’ve got a package of stories that contemplate the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—and the future of the #Metoo movement. Maia Boswell-Penc offers a poignant first-person account of her traumatic experiences with drunk frat boys; Nikki Silverstein reports on the lack of rape kits for victims in Marin County; Marc Levine talks about a couple of #Metoo-influenced bills just signed into law; and Stephanie Hiller throws down on Kavanaugh’s fealty to executive privilege. We’re super-pleased to have a cover illustration from 2018 Herblock Editorial Cartoon winner Ward Sutton to tie it all together. Elsewhere in our pages this week, look out for a report on the latest Parachute Days concert in Point Reyes Station, and a report on the controversial subject of . . . anchovies. All that and a whole lot more, courtesy of the Oldest Alternative Weekly in the United States of America! —Tom Gogola, News and Features Editor (and Lover of Anchovies).

Letters

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Letters

Antler Outrage

Photoshopped deer antlers—how childish and rude (“Horns of Plenty,” Oct. 3). Sort of a Brett Kavanaugh college prank. And calling the legislation an “elk bill” suggests that you didn’t read the bill. As Congressman Huffman says, the bill “reaffirms Congressional intent to continue authorizing working dairies and ranches on agricultural property within a portion of the Point Reyes National Seashore, consistent with the seashore’s historic, cultural, scenic and natural values.” That Congressional clarification has been long overdue.

—Burr Heneman, via Pacificsun.com

 

Huffman = Hypocrite?

Your article on the Point Reyes controversy was one-sided in favor of Rep. Huffman (“Riding Herd,” Sept. 12).

I’m sure he counts himself an “environmentalist”, but he’s no different from conservative Republican members of Congress in Utah, Wyoming, Montana, or Idaho who look out for their mining, ranching and hunting interests near national parks.

Point Reyes is one of the most beautiful seaside landscapes in the world and could be a large preserve for bear, elk, coyote, bobcat, mountain lion and other large mammals. Instead, we have industrial sized dairy operations in a county with thousands of acres outside Point Reyes already dedicated to dairy farming.

I visit Point Reyes more than 20 times per year, and often you can easily see barren muddy fields denuded by overgrazing, and very limited ground cover for wild animals and birds. Just like the Congressman in Idaho who supports hunting wolves and grizzlies, or the Congressman in Montana who supports coal mining and oil drilling near National Parks, Rep. Huffman can represent his constituents in West Marin by supporting the dairy farms on priceless outdoor real estate, but he can’t claim to be an “environmentalist” at the same time, or he’s being a hypocrite.

Environmental protection involves sacrifice and economic pain, and Rep. Huffman has decided that shouldn’t happen in Point Reyes. And I’m sure there are lots of “environmental” groups who will go along with it, while gladly inflicting economic pain on farmers and ranchers who want the same preferential treatment in other parts of the West.

—Murray Kenny, via PacificSun.com

Remembering Balin

Thanks for the reminder, Tom (“Count on Me,” Oct. 3). I too have loved that song “Coming Back to Me” and I’m looking at the album cover from “Surrealistic Pillow” now. That song was like a painting set to music and words. “Through an open window where no curtain hung . . . I saw you coming back to me.”

—Elizabeth Ray, via PacificSun.com

Oldest Bar in the County?

Doesn’t Smileys have the claim to fame? Established 1851—26 years before William Tell? (“Ted & Will,” Sept. 12)

—Chuck Sea, via PacificSun.com

 

Glorious Caesar

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Glorious Caesar

A couple of Friday nights ago I was unmotivated to cook anything and with a bare larder at home in any case. I headed to town, to the Coast Café, for my occasional go-to takeout order on Bolinas nights like this: The Coast’s Caesar salad. It’s a crunchy meal in itself and at $11 for the full size, doesn’t need any accompaniment.

From my humble and hungry perspective, you can’t call it a Caesar salad unless the salad arrives with a fine array of salty anchovies. I know, I know—it’s controversial. In reading up on the history of the salad, I do know that anchovies were not a part of the original Caesar conjured up by its inventor, Caesar Cardini—but they’ve evolved as an essential part of the dish.

I recognize that like, say, black licorice, anchovies are one of those foods that one either really loves or really hates. They’re sort of the King Crimson of foods, as in there’s not much middle ground there.

I feel the same way about croutons as many people feel about anchovies, and here they are, together at last, in the Caesar. I don’t understand croutons—they get mushy in the dressing. Why bother. Okay, I do like the zesty croutons on the Coast’s salad, before they get mushy. But I also like black licorice, just not on my Caesar salad.

The other day I was out in front of the Bolinas Museum for an art opening and got to talking with a few people about the many joys, and occasional controversies, that attend a Caesar salad. Shari was the hardcore member of the group who loved to make a Caesar at home, but only if she was able to locally source the salad. It’s kind of ironic that locally sourced anchovies are hard to come by—unless there are massive schools of the fry swimming around in the Bolinas Lagoon. That’s quite a sight to behold, when the anchovies come in. Of course one can’t just net them and chuck them atop a pile of Romaine—the ’chovies ought to be cured, before they’ll cure what ails ya.

Shari swears by her house-made croutons as rendered from Parkside bread, baked fresh daily in Stinson Beach, and the featured bread at the Coast. She took a hard line on garlic: lots of it. The four of us stood around for a while trading our knowledge about Cardini, his restaurants in San Diego and Tijuana, how a trad Caesar is tossed tableside—and then everyone was hungry.

Before we went our separate ways, a consensus emerged that when ordering a Caesar salad, the default position should be that the anchovies are part of the dish, and if one doesn’t like anchovies, it’s up to you to say so.

But we’re not quite there yet as a society. One time I ordered the Caesar and got home only to find that sprouts had replaced anchovies as the centerpiece of the dish. Sprouts? Apparently if you don’t ask for the anchovies, I surmised, you get some sprouts instead. I chewed the sprouts like a sad cow. That will never happen again!

A fully-tricked out Caesar is, generally speaking, composed of Romaine lettuce, croutons, olive oil, anchovies, Parmesan cheese, black pepper, and/or Worcestershire sauce to replace the anchovies. Maybe there’s some raw egg, maybe not. Many places will offer a grilled chicken (or salmon) add-on, and who am I to object. Go for yours.

My palate is not nearly so refined as to be able to detect, necessarily, a splash of Worcestershire, but there’s no mistaking those luscious and pungent little fishes in the Coast Cafe take—in their dreadful absence, and in their blessed presence. If I were tweaking the salad, I’d throw a little more garlic into the mix—I’m with Shari on this point—but there’s no law that says you can’t shred a bulb at the homefront before digging in.

And anyway, the whole point of the Caesar salad, as originally configured, was as a sort of throw-it-all-in sort of deal designed to be a meal-in-one.

“Do you want anchovies on that?” the Coast Café bartender asked when I placed my order a few Fridays ago. She may as well have asked if I wanted whirled peace, a Gibson ES 335 in cherry red, and Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court instead of Flounder from Animal House.

Wasted Justice

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Wasted Justice

By Maia Boswell-Penc

During the Senate Judiciary hearing on Sept. 27, Amy Klobuchar asked Supreme Court nominee—and now Associate Justice—Brett Kavanaugh if he’d ever blacked out or experienced memory gaps due to alchohol use—his response says it all:

“I don’t know, have you?” He angrily shot back at the Minnesota senator.

Kavanaugh’s non-answer and attempted table-turn is the answer to the inconsistency between Ford’s testimony and Kavanaugh’s.

Really, this was not a “non-answer”—it was an admission that Kavanaugh does not know whether he has blacked out or had memory gaps. He does not know, because he does not remember. He does not remember, because one does not remember blackouts and lapses of memory due to overconsumption of alcohol. One simply realizes that there are “gaps.”

I know, because I have been there.

My first blackout occurred my freshman year in college. I had come from an elite, single-sex high school in Dallas that was very much like the ones attended by Ford and Kavanaugh. I was woefully naive and accepted the cup of “trash-can punch” when it was handed to me, early in my freshman year in 1982.

The frat boy “bartender” came from an elite background similar to Kavanaugh, and he had it all planned out, I later learned, as revenge on me for having chosen to talk with a closeted gay guy a couple of weeks earlier during a “date” with him to a football game. The message was clear: “Ditch me for a gay guy? Rape is your punishment!”

While American society has made much progress on the heterosexism front, the same can’t be said of sexism. Women continue to be disbelieved, mocked, grabbed in their pussies without consent, while the perpetrators often remain in positions of power.

Acts of sexual aggression are not about sexuality; they are about power.

Kavanaugh can testify that the event described in painstaking detail by Ford (who told the committee she had consumed only one beer) “never happened” because, in his mind, it didn’t. He was too drunk to remember it. He threw the question back at Klobuchar, as though she was the one being questioned.

That is how it goes in a culture of rape. When the questioning begins, the victim gets grilled. As someone who is a survivor of rape—yes, on the night of the trash-can punch—and sexual assault, and as someone who has experienced blackouts and memory gaps from drinking, I understand completely how both Ford and Kavanaugh can be telling the truth.

That I was raped in the fall of my freshman year, 1982, the same year Christine Blasey-Ford endured her event, and that my experience occurred at the hands of a privileged frat boy from an elite family—I can still see in my memory his chunky gold Rolex watch—has served to bring back the terror, the anguish, the shame and bewilderment in vivid detail.

This is the case for countless women all over the country, as one out of every four women is a victim of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault. Bear in mind, only 2 percent of perpetrators are ever brought to justice. Though I am certain that the event that happened to me was instigated by grain alcohol—and though I do have memory lapses from that night—I also know with 100 percent certainty the name and face of my perpetrator. Harrowing events are often accompanied by memory impairment brought on by the trauma. Even if the victim’s memory is further impaired by drugs or alcohol, the parts that are remembered are key. We tend to remember some things in vivid detail while forgetting other things.

Trauma memories are very different from blackout memories. Trauma renders some pieces of an event in vivid detail, and allows others to fall away. It does not cloud our memories of the key details. Blacking out from drinking can do that. I know, because after being raped, my coping strategy at difficult times was to drink.

Ford may not have remembered how she got to the party, or how she got home from it. But she remembers with absolute certainty that Kavanaugh was the person who groped her, who ground his body into her, who laughed at her powerlessness, and who attempted to rape her. Her recollection of the cruel laughter of Kavanaugh and Mark Judge after the assault makes the point that this episode was all about power, and remains so.

In the midst of a presidency that is all about lies, deception, indecency and aggression toward women, a presidency that cozies up to powerful elites and strongmen, this is important. In the midst of a presidency that lacks integrity, courage, human decency and honor, that abandons allies, abandons innocent children and scars them for the rest of their lives by separating them from their parents, this is important.

The #MeToo movement is in full swing and the backlash continues to rear its ugly head, most notably in the face of an angry, spitting Lindsey Graham, who clearly finds this all too close to home. And in the face of an angry, accusing Brett Kavanaugh, dredging up partisan politics in an attempt to muddy the waters, to hide his shameful, drunken aggression toward women, and to claim his innocence.

Women very often do not come forward after a rape or attempted sexual assault, or even sexual misconduct, because they know the pattern that will ensue. It’s as much a patriarchal society today as it was when Anita Hill testified in 1991 before an almost all-male group about her treatment at the hands of her former boss, Clarence Thomas.

Anita Hill was attacked, accused of lying and told that her story had no credibility. And that’s exactly what Lindsey Graham, Brett Kavanaugh, Trump and others said about Dr. Ford’s story.

Who would dare come forward in the face of an angry, mocking president who, in a shocking display—even for him—made fun of a woman’s heartfelt testimony about a traumatic experience; a woman who feared she would be raped or killed. Women (and male victims, too) learn to stay in line, to keep their pain and anguish quiet. They learn to internalize the terror and the shame and the bewilderment. No more.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein noted that in 1991, Republicans belittled Professor Hill’s experience and said her testimony wouldn’t make a bit of difference in the outcome. They were right. And now history is repeating itself: “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close,” Graham said.

Senators who wanted to make Ford look like a tool of the Democratic Party probed her about where the money came from to pay her lawyer. But did they think for a second about where the money comes from to pay the therapists, the social workers, the pharmaceutical companies and anyone else who has helped her get through each day?

A recent reporter’s group discussion on Kavanaugh in The New York Times featured a few reporters talking about the hearings and what, if anything, was the disqualifying aspect of his testimony. One reporter said that “people could overlook excessive drinking, maybe some crass comments,” but then things changed. When the hearings ended, the focus shifted to “the truth”—not his college behavior. Said another reporter: “[W]hat bothers people is the degree to which [Kavanaugh] is not representing himself accurately, not the behavior itself. When this all started, the question was, ‘Did Brett Kavanaugh commit the alleged act of sexual assault?’ Now the question is ‘Did Kavanaugh knowingly mislead and deceive’” the public and the Senate? The original allegations were characterized, in comparison to the lies, as “smaller matters.”

I value truth-telling, particularly under oath, and particularly in our Supreme Court judges, but it’s outrageous that accusations of sexual assault, of laughing boisterously as one attempts to rape a young woman, of putting a hand over her mouth to silence her screams, gets portrayed as a “smaller matter.”

It’s no small matter—and especially now that Kavanaugh is on the court.

The second time I was raped in college, by another frat-boy elite, I kept quiet again. I kept quiet despite the bruising on my arms that went from my elbows to my shoulders. I kept quiet despite all the small bruises around my pelvic area where my drunken perpetrator had been sloppily attempting to hit his target.

I did not say anything because I knew if I were to speak up, I would be raked over the coals. Interrogated. Ridiculed. Called a “slut,” a “whore,” a “bitch”—much like Renate Schroeder, the girl Kavanaugh and his friends mocked in their Georgetown Prep yearbooks.

I kept silent, and three weeks later, another girl was raped by this same person.

She talked. She went to the authorities and was demonized, attacked, called a “slut” and a “whore” and a “bitch. Traumatized all over again for heroically coming forward, she left college.

Her perpetrator remained.

Parachute Pop

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Parachute Pop

West Marin party pop outfit El Radio Fantastique has been suspiciously radio silent in the last few months. The band, led by multi-faceted songwriter Giovanni Di Morente, is known for bombastic baroque rock and marching band aesthetics; yet they’ve been off the stage while producing and recording a new EP, Outside of Space and Time.

The group releases the new EP on vinyl and returns to the spotlight this weekend for a headlining appearance at Parachute Days on Saturday, Oct. 13, at Love Field in Point Reyes Station. The family-friendly festival also features Marin acts the Asteroid No. 4, PSDSP and others.

“We’ve been retooling our music naturally,” says Di Morente. “Just following where our creativity goes. You know, I’ve had the band for quite awhile, so to keep things interesting I’ve had to change things up.”

Di Morente, a Point Reyes Station native, formed El Radio Fantastique’s original incarnation in New Orleans in 2002, after a musical career in Los Angeles. Di Morente found success in the Big Easy before Hurricane Katrina forced him out in 2006 and he decided to return to the North Bay.

After relocating to West Marin, El Radio Fantastique evolved into a seven-piece ensemble with a complete horn section and more, though in the last two years, Di Morente has begun stripping back the musical layers to rediscover the group’s core sound.

“I was forcing myself to write for horns, and they’re amazing players and I love horns, but you can’t keep doing that over and over all the time,” says Di Morente.

Now the bandleader says he’s focusing on fixing pop music. “I’ve always tried to make catchy songs dressed up in some interesting way,” he says. “I love bubblegum pop, but I want to write bubblegum pop with dark, important lyrics.”

On the five tracks of Outside of Space and Time, El Radio Fantastique keeps the horns to a minimum while incorporating new elements like distorted keyboards, fuzzed-out guitars and psychedelic flourishes that Di Morente describes as “nihilistic pop.”

Part of an ongoing series of EP releases, Outside of Space and Time features the group’s previous EP, Shine, on the B-side for the special vinyl release, which will be available when the band plays under an actual giant parachute at Parachute Days this weekend.

“We’re looking forward to vinyl,” says Di Morente. “The digital sounds fine, but we listened to this new album on the record [player] and there’s a big difference.”

Parachute Days happens on Saturday, Oct. 13, at Love Field, 11191 Sir Francis Drake Blvd, Point Reyes Station. 3pm. $10-$35. parachutedays.com.

High on Voting

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High on Voting

Pack a bowl and head to the polls—election day is right around the corner. And in a sign of the power that the pot industry is wielding these days, local pot powerhouse biz CannaCraft has announced a partnership with HeadCount called the Cannabis Voter Project.

HeadCount’s been around since 2004, and is a steady nonprofit voter-registration presence at jam-band concerts. Now they’re joined by CannaCraft on a national tour underway that’s bringing the registration push to pot-illegal states like Michigan, Illinois, South Carolina, Missouri and Arizona.

Based in Santa Rosa, CannaCraft lays claim as the state’s largest manufacturer of delicious and medicinal edibles, tinctures, topicals, flowers and vaping products.

Emerald Update

The 15th annual Emerald Cup is taking place at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds on the weekend of Dec. 15–16 and organizers have just added a bunch of musical acts to the itinerary. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band from New Orleans will blare out the pro-pot tuba-pumping second-line music; American funk band the Funky Meters will get . . . funky—and they’ll be joined by electronic musicians STS9, Rising Appalachia, Los Angeles soulsters the Elevators, Brooklyn Afro-beaters Antibalas, and others.

The Emerald Cup is anchored by its annual competition of the best of the best when it comes to flowers, concentrates, edibles, CO2 cartridges, topicals, and all sorts of CBD products. The contest kicks off on Oct.15, when contestants can offer their product to the judges; the contest intake continues through Nov. 18. The theme this year, say event organizers, is “a celebration of the new ways of thinking and living within the cannabis culture.” The Nugget’s judgement: that is a worthy and timely theme.

Hemp Day

Gov. Brown signed into law SB 1409 earlier this month, which legalizes hemp farming in the state. Vote Hemp, a national hemp-advocacy group, says in a statement that the new law will be a big boon to California farmers—it creates a pilot program within the California Department of Food and Agriculture that’s compliant with current federal law around hemp, and strikes “outdated state statute provisions that conflicted with the expanded definition of hemp that includes extracts and derivatives from the non-psychoactive flowers and leaves.” The U.S. Senate is also considering a hemp-freedom provision in the Farm Bill currently under negotiation in Washington.

 

 

Peak Performances

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Peak Performances

There’s been a shakeup on Mount Tamalpais.

You might not have felt the tremors, but some major organizational shifts have taken place in the back office of the venerable Mountain Play Association, the ambitious nonprofit that annually turns the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre—near the summit of Mount Tamalpais—into one of the largest and best-attended theater spaces in the country.

After 12 years at the helm of Marin County’s most unique theater company, Sara Pearson is stepping down as executive director of the Mountain Play, which marked its 105th year of Mount Tam productions this year with Mamma Mia!

Pearson is no longer executive director, but remains on staff as the newly formed director of leadership and development. She’ll focus on fundraising, board development and long-term strategy. Longtime associate producer Eileen Grady takes over as executive director.

“Eileen Grady has been my thought partner for nearly a decade, and has been an active participant in every Mountain Play strategic decision during that time,” Pearson says. “There is no one with more dedication, knowledge and readiness to step up to lead this organization into the next adventure.”

“I’m absolutely honored and thrilled to be given this opportunity and responsibility,”  says Grady. “There’s no greater space in the world to create theater than on Mount Tam. Outdoor theater is always a challenge, and with the Mountain Play, we’ve got this amazing, living and breathing venue that is like another talented but impulsive cast member. The Mountain Play is a crossroads where art and nature meet. When there are thousands of people up there watching a show, the immersive communal experience of the Mountain Play just can’t be topped.”

Grady has lots of experience producing and directing theatrical productions. She received her BA business administration with a minor in humanities degree from Dominican University and has worked with numerous nonprofit companies staging plays, musicals and operas. A musician too, she’s also the guitarist of the Matt Kaiser Band.

“I became affiliated with the Mountain Play when I started creating and directing the fall fundraiser revues in 2006,” says Grady, who grew up in Marin County, and was raised to appreciate theater and music, and treated to annual excursions up Mount Tam to watch the Mountain Play. “There’s just something about the mountain, combined with the art of the musical, that really just captured my imagination from the beginning.”

Pearson has worked at the company for 12 years and joined the staff during the build-up to the 2007 production of the musical Hair. She took on The Wizard of Oz the following year, then guided the organization through one of its most uncertain and rocky periods, which included weathering the Great Recession, to say nothing of the retirement of longtime artistic director James Dunn in 2013. Dunn saved the Mountain Play 30 years earlier when he started to direct large-scale musicals atop the mountain. He put live horses and cows in shows like Fiddler on the Roof. He placed trucks onstage and fielded actual airplanes in the sky in South Pacific. He transformed the event from a sparsely attended novelty into a popular, calendar-anchoring annual extravaganza.

And 2019 promises yet another must-see moment, when the Mountain Play presents the beloved 1950s-era musical Grease, which Grady counts among her favorite musicals. She’s honoring the tried-and-true formula— for now.  Audiences, she says, can expect to see new “Foothill productions” —smaller shows staged off the mountain in collaboration with other local theater companies.

 

On the Marc

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On the Marc

Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 2055, a bill sponsored by Marin Assemblyman Marc Levine that mandates sexual harassment training for lobbyists in Sacramento.

The bill passed with overwhelming support from elected officials—and with eventual buy-in from the Institute of Governmental Advocates, which is essentially the lobbyist for the lobbyists of Sacramento.

The organization pushed to have language scrubbed from the bill that would have let the California Fair Political Practices Commission revoke lobbying licenses for anyone found guilty of inappropriate sexual behavior, harassment or intimidation.

The revocation language was removed to save the bill as it wended through committee. “It would have had too much opposition, and [the revocation language] did not make it through,” Levine says.

Levine says it’s still a strong and tough law that puts lobbyists on notice, and goes into effect on Jan. 1.

Lobbying ethics courses will now include information on policies in place in the state Senate and Assembly. Lobbyists will be trained to recognize inappropriate sexual behavior and how to report, and empowers victims of sexual harassment to come forward so that “no one engaged in lawmaking should ever feel intimidated by that behavior.”

The legislation was sparked by a letter written by a Sacramento lobbyist earlier this year, and signed by 140 women in the capital community. The letter details how the woman who wrote it was sexually harassed at an event by another lobbyist, says Levine. “It sparked a lot of review of behavior,” says Levine.

“I thought it was time to address how to make the capital community safer from sexual harassment. Nobody should be harassed in the workplace, and when we’re talking about public policy that affects all Californians, we need to make sure that any sexual intimidation or assault—there is zero tolerance for that.”

Levine also credits the #MeToo movement for getting another bill of his signed into law by Brown. He first introduced his Talent Protection Act in 2015, he says, “and got a lot of ribbing for it. It was pre-#MeToo.” This year, AB 2236 was signed into law. “#MeToo put wind in the sails,” says Levine.

The law sets out to make sure that talent agencies provide information to their clients about sexual abuse and nutrition, and that parents of child models or actors get training in identifying sexual harassment. Levine was motivated to write the bill, he says, because of body-image issues with girls.

“A lot of the focus was on the health of models,” he says. “Lots of girls want to lose weight because of what they see in magazines. We should care about the health of people in the fashion industry.”

In 2015, the only people who knew that Harvey Weinstein was a horrible person were the victims of his alleged sex crimes and their friends and families. The politics around sexual assault by powerful men has shifted dramatically in the ensuing years—and so too has the ferocious backlash now afoot.

“This isn’t going away,” says Levine. “I think the Kavanaugh experience is an example of how some people just don’t get it.”

One of those people happens to be Donald Trump. “The president’s remarks this week ripping on Dr. Ford were wholly inappropriate,” he says. “You should never talk about a victim of sexual assault in such a demeaning way.”

 

 

 

 

News Briefs

Moving Violation: Marin County policy of outsourcing rape kits under fire

As we’ve learned from the #MeToo movement—and the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing—the stigma and fear surrounding reporting rape to the authorities precludes many survivors from dialing 911. For those that report in Marin, their nightmarish journey is just beginning—literally. Instead of going to nearby Marin General Hospital for a rape kit, rape victims in Marin County are required to travel about an hour to a Kaiser hospital in Vallejo.

Why is that? It’s because the regional Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) office is based in Napa County. A specially trained registered nurse from SANE conducts a comprehensive forensic sexual assault exam of the victim, which usually takes hours. It includes a full body examination and the collection of forensic samples from the mouth, vagina, anus, blood, urine, body surface areas and hair.

After the prolonged, humiliating exam, the traumatized victim spends yet another hour going back home to Marin. The nurse leaves Solano County and goes back to Napa.

Why are rape victims forced to travel on what is likely the worst day of their lives?

The situation is the result of actions taken by outgoing Marin County District Attorney Ed Berberian, and supported by the Marin County Board of Supervisors. Up until seven years ago, sexual assault victims were treated locally at Marin General. Then the county said the hospital lacked the SANEs to perform the sexual assault exams—it did—and it was cheaper to outsource the service. Marin County has the lowest per-capita number of rape cases of any county in the North Bay, according to a 2016 report from the Marin County Civil Grand Jury.

Marin District attorney candidate Anna Pletcher cries foul over the county’s move and says if she’s elected to replace Berberian, there will again be SANE nurses in Marin. “The best practice is for victims to have access to rape kit exams at local hospitals. I have been advocating for the nurse examiners to come to Marin, instead of sending victims to Vallejo,” says Pletcher.

She also says the county is simply wrong about cost as an issue. “Each examination costs approximately $2,000 whether the nurses meet the victims in Vallejo or in Marin.” On-duty Marin police officers typically drive the victims to Vallejo, she argues, which adds costs when factoring in the officers’ pay.

“We have seen sexism on display in Washington this week, but the truth is that it’s here, too,” says Pletcher. “Sexism underlies this policy to outsource the rape-kit exams. It is outrageous that we put this extra burden on victims when they have already experienced such trauma.” —Nikki Silverstein

Jerry Brown: Pro-Life Hero?

Now here’s a subject line in an email you don’t see every day: ‘CA Governor Jerry  Brown becomes newest hero of the pro-life movement.’

The Alexandria, Virginia–based organization Americans United for Life applauded Brown for his veto of a bill that “would have required public universities in California to offer abortion bills on campus,” said the organization in a statement.

SB 320 was first proposed (and written) by students at UC Berkeley and has been debated over the past year, after a 2017 bill was introduced by Inland Empire Democrat State Sen. Connie Leyva.

A late-August story in the Berkeley student newspaper the Daily Californian, argued that “for thousands of students enrolled in California public universities who could face unwanted pregnancies, SB 320 could be the difference between finishing college and dropping out.” It highlighted the challenges for college students seeking an abortion and argued that the on-campus medical-abortion option would ease access to for students seeking their constitutionally protected right to have an abortion.

According to votesmart.com, Brown has been a lifetime champion of reproductive-choice rights for women and has a 100 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Now he’s a pro-life hero in the eyes of AUL President and CEO Catherine Glenn Foster, who says in a statement that “Governor Brown recognized that in a state where Medicaid already pays for elective abortions, there is no issue of access, since, as he said, ‘the average distance to abortion providers in campus communities varies from 5 to 7 miles, not an unreasonable distance.’

Foster also argued that “college health clinics are not equipped to handle the very serious risks of chemical abortion drugs, which, as AUL testimony against the bill pointed out, the FDA warns can cause life-threatening hemorrhaging of blood and bacterial infection.”

Leyva told the Daily Californian, “I’m so incredibly disappointed in the Governor, and I think it’s yet just another example of old white guys thinking they know what women need. “For him to say he doesn’t think [the commute is] inconvenient, he just completely missed the whole point of the bill.”

She vowed to reintroduce the bill again next year, when Brown is no longer governor. Following Brown’s veto, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this week signaled support for SB 320. GOP candidate John Cox is opposed. —Tom Gogola

Double Jeopardy: Kavanaugh confirmation paves way for Trump to pardon himself

There were many sound political reasons for objecting to the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the position of Supreme Court justice. Reproductive rights? The Affordable Care Act? Equality for indigenous people? Immigrant rights? The independence of the judicial system? Protection of endangered species? The end of democracy itself?

On truthout.org, Marjorie Cohn, professor of law at Columbia University outlined five reasons for the GOP’s rush to confirm Trump’s selection. Calling double jeopardy “potentially [the] most consequential” she referred to the case of Gamble v. U.S. in which “the justices will decide whether prosecuting a person in both state and federal courts for the same crime violates the double-jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment.”

The Kavanaugh confirmation could enable President Trump to pardon himself, with no recourse to charges by any individual state. As Kavanaugh was being confirmed, state attorneys general, especially in New York, were investigating Trump across a span of purported misdeeds.

How Donald Trump ever became the president of this country is a question that may never be resolved. The Kavanaugh confirmation means he may continue to evade justice, given the judge’s well-documented support of executive branch privilege.

Once Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony was introduced to the Senate Judiciary Committee, key issues were submerged in the swamp of Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior as a privileged prep school boy charged with molesting a young woman. One can only imagine how many men seated in that hearing room writhed in recollection of their own past sins that could one day bring them to the grueling examination faced by their crony.

That Kavanaugh was once (and perhaps still is?) a slobbering brute is not irrelevant. Rape has always been a weapon of conquest in the pursuit of territory and power. Even more shocking in a society that claims to exist by the rule of law was the sacrifice of the essential requisite for justice.

Judge Kavanaugh obfuscated, lied and finally collapsed into that disturbed and obviously guilty young man. He attacked and lambasted Ford’s allegations as a “calculated and orchestrated political hit” by the Democratic party and the Clintons.

Sen. Susan Collins from Maine, the deciding vote along with Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, echoed Kavanaugh in calling the hearing a circus. Then she voted to confirm Kavanaugh and said that while she believed Blasey-Ford had been the victim of a sexual assault, she didn’t believe Kavanaugh was the one who assaulted her.

In the end, it was a woman whose cool-headed, relentless questioning that showed Kavanaugh’s ability to evade and deceive. Sen. Kamala Harris could not get a straight answer. On the question of his belief in double jeopardy, he refused to answer  “yes” or “no” more than ten times.

Despite a letter signed by 2,500 lawyers attesting that Kavanaugh was not qualified to be a Supreme Court justice, and another from mental-health professionals concerned about his addiction to alcohol, despite disapproval from the editors of The Washington Post and The New York Times, despite hundreds of protestors, the Republican senators, with the exception of Lisa Murkowski, lined up in tacit obedience to approve this confirmation.

Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik highlighted the sleight of hand at work in this appointment. “Kavanaugh is an instrument of Trumpism, an insurance policy that the con man is writing for himself.” —Stephanie Hiller

 

 

Rocket’s Red Glare

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Rocket’s Red Glare

In First Man, Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash) compresses seven years in the astronaut Neil Armstrong’s life, from testing the hypersonic aircraft X-15 to the actual moment of setting foot on the lunar dust.

It’s tremendously exciting filmmaking. Here, Chazelle is more of a disciple of Steven Soderbergh than Ron Howard. Rather than taking in the vastness of space, Chazelle’s focus narrows to the view through a space-capsule window, like the visor in a knight’s helmet. He makes it all frightening: the glow of hot metal, the rows of toggle switches, the seams of the capsule that look thin enough to split. Chazelle recreates the excitement of breaching the atmosphere after a bone-shaking ride and finally emerging into stillness. It’s all caught with little gestures: the snatching of a floating pencil in zero gravity, or the slap of a bare hand against the window, as a terrific spin almost whirls the Gemini capsule into oblivion.

The casting of Ryan Gosling as Armstrong turns out to be inspired. Here his minimalism is used perfectly to portray a man who could certainly be remote. The well-worn key Chazelle uses to open Armstrong is perhaps too easy—the idea that the astronaut had an impregnable hurt locker in which he keeps the sorrow of the death of his baby daughter. Claire Foy, as Armstrong’s wife Janet, indicates that their marriage could also be a rocky ride. Most married men wouldn’t go to the Moon without their wife’s blessing, and Janet has grounds for her simmering anger as her husband walls himself off.

Foy takes what’s usually the dullest kind of role—the wife who waits—and makes this Janet strong and fascinating. Her share of bravery is depicted against evocative recreations of suburban ’60s America, with an attention to detail usually reserved only for Ang Lee films.

What’s at stake may be obvious, but Chazelle makes it subtle, with the figures at Mission Control (including Kyle Chandler’s excellent Deke Slayton) poring over the recently declassified statements that were meant to be read to the public if the first Moon voyagers were killed or stranded. There was a protocol: “The president will first call the widows-to-be. . . .” That chilling phrase offers a fresh imagining of what could have been.

First Man isn’t a session of hero worship, but it does help one understand the otherness of Neil Armstrong that still exemplifies bravery.

‘First Man’ opens Oct. 12 in wide release.

 

 

Fools Rush In

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Fools Rush In

Around in one form or another since 1930, the Ross Valley Players have long been entertaining local audiences with a mixture of world-renowned classics, Broadway hits and contemporary plays. Notably missing from their decades-long season’s lists has been anything written by William Shakespeare. The opening production of their 89th season rectifies that.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a tale of twins (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) separated by a shipwreck surrounded with elements of impersonation, mistaken identity, unrequited love and trickery. After the ship on which she and her brother are traveling sinks, Viola (Robyn Grahn) finds herself washed up on the shore of Illyria. To better survive in the foreign, patriarchal land, she disguises herself as a lad named Cesario and finds employ with Duke Orsino (Jackson Currier).

The duke is madly in love with the perpetually brother-mourning Olivia (Melanie Bandera-Hess) and sends Cesario to represent him. Olivia falls in love with Cesario, Cesario falls in love with the duke, and chaos ensues when Viola’s supposedly drowned twin brother, Sebastian (Ian Wilcox), shows up. Adding to the mayhem is a plot by Olivia’s perpetually soused uncle, Sir Toby Belch (Steve Price), and several of the house staff to make a fool of Olivia’s pompous steward Malvolio (Malcolm Rodgers) by making him believe that Olivia has fallen in love with him.

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s most accessible plays, and its success is usually dependent on a director finding the right balance between the love stories and the comic subplots. Director Jennifer LeBlanc’s uneven production leans heavily toward the subplot side to the point of overwhelming the lovers’ story.

It may simply be a case of casting as the actors filling the “secondary” character roles are so strong and funny in their characterizations they they steal the show. Steve Price’s hilarious Sir Toby is a marvel of inebriated unctuousness, constantly teetering on the precipice of collapse yet able to participate in the takedown of the haughty Malvolio. Malvolio’s transformation from stuffed shirt to yellow-gartered buffoon to wounded victim is well played by Rodgers.

Michel Benton Harris does the almost impossible as Toby’s patsy Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Often played as an annoyingly foppish idiot, Harris manages to underplay the role and makes the teddy-bear-carrying character cute and almost lovable.

The energy provided by these characters almost compensates for the blandness of most others. Still, it’s a noble first go-round for the Players and the Bard.

 

‘Twelfth Night’ runs Thursday–Sunday through Oct. 21 at the Barn Theatre in the Marin Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross. $10–$27. 415.883.4498. rossvalleyplayers.com.

 

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