Theater: Holiday Cheer

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Theater: Holiday Cheer

In case you haven’t noticed, or have gone into hibernation to evade the fallout from the multiple disasters (political and otherwise) occurring in this country and abroad, we’re in the midst of what is now called the “holiday season.” Beginning a few days before Thanksgiving and terminating a week or so after New Year’s Day, its length and emphasis on food, drink and other material pleasures rivals, or surpasses, the great pagan festivals of ancient Greece and Rome.

Christmas, its centerpiece, once had at least some religious content in the U.S., given that we’re nominally a Christian nation and many of our pilgrim ancestors came here precisely because they wanted to freely celebrate the birth of Christ. That motivation is gone, probably forever. Our increasing secularization is clearly evident in the “holiday shows” mounted by local theaters. Sometimes, moral issues replace the religious themes, as in staged versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi and the popular film It’s a Wonderful Life. Sometimes they simply aim to lift our spirits by looking on the good side of things for a change—especially when it comes to family relations.

A Christmas Story: The Musical, currently running at the San Francisco Playhouse, is a great example of the latter. It has no religious or overt moral content. What it does have is an endearing all-American tale of a young boy’s dream of receiving a special Christmas gift, and the series of disappointments he encounters.  

The plot is based on the 1983 movie, with elements that were derived from semi-autobiographical scripts written by radio personality Jean Shepherd. Twenty years later, it became a musical with a book by Joseph Robinette; music and lyrics are the work of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the team behind the recent hit movie La La Land. Playhouse co-founder Susi Damilano directs, ably assisted by music director Dave Dobrusky and choreographer Kimberly Richards.

As in the radio broadcasts, the adult Jean Shepherd (played here by Christopher Reber) is the narrator. He recalls a Northern Indiana Christmas in 1940, an era immortalized by Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers extolling America’s idealized families. Like most 9-year-olds (myself included), his fictional son Ralphie (Jonah Broscow) dreads receiving “practical” gifts like clothing, when what he urgently wants is a genuine carbine action, 200-shot Red Ryder BB gun. To achieve this goal, he hounds his parents during the month leading up to the big day, but is rebuffed by his father (Ryan Drummond, known as the The Old Man) with the excuse that he might accidentally shoot his eye out, a warning repeated by his mother (Abby Haug), his teacher (Katrina Lauren McGraw) and even the Santa (Ken Brill) he visits at a neighborhood department store.

Ralphie’s campaign for the BB gun is not helped by a number of incidents in which, despite good intentions, he gets into trouble. These include joining a group of schoolyard bullies when they use a “triple dare’ to persuade another boy to lick a metal pole in freezing weather, which (to their vast amusement) leaves the boy’s tongue attached. He also has the bad judgment to use a forbidden profanity, something his father does daily with carefree abandon.                 

Eventually, though, the big day arrives, presents are opened and just when all hope appears to be lost—voila!—The Old Man hands him a long rectangular package.  

There is also a subplot involving delivery of a lamp in the form of a fishnet-stockinged, high-heeled female leg that The Old Man won in a mail-in contest and now insists on displaying in the living room window. Like the main plot, it is really only part of a framework for the song and dance numbers that are the heart of the show. While most are well-executed, taken separately they are not particularly memorable. Taken together, however, they combine to make A Christmas Story: The Musical, enjoyable holiday entertainment.

NOW PLAYING: A Christmas Story: The Musical runs through January 13 at the San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St. (2nd floor of the Kensington Park Hotel), San Francisco; 415/677-9596; sfplayhouse.org.

Talking Pictures: Clear Motivations

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Talking Pictures: Clear Motivations

To Margot Robbie, Tonya Harding was a pit bull.

That’s not just a metaphor. It’s how the fast-rising Australian actor (Suicide Squad, Goodbye, Christopher Robin) elected to play the real-life figure skater in the just-released movie I, Tonya.

The film, which is already appearing on many end-of-year top 10 lists, screened on December 2 at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, in a special event featuring Robbie onstage with co-star Allison Janney, the film’s director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) and the screenwriter, Steven Rogers (Hope Floats, Stepmom). In answer to a question posed during the post-screening conversation between the guests and moderator Zoe Elton, Robbie revealed that she often uses an acting technique in which she identifies her characters as a particular animal.

Tonya Harding, Robbie admitted, was definitely a pit bull.

I, Tonya is an aggressively unconventional biopic. Interspersed with recreations of taped interviews with various characters who populate the story, the film offers clashing viewpoints, explanations, excuses and context.

Harding is the notorious athlete who fell from grace—and the pinnacle of world champion skating competitors—after being implicated, fairly or not, in the brutal kneecapping of rival skater Nancy Kerrigan, in 1993. Harding’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), eventually did jail time for the attack, along with his bizarre conspiracy-theorist buddy Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser). Harding was banned for life from professional skating, but has always claimed that she never knew about plans for the assault on Kerrigan, a view the film’s script mostly seems to agree with.

“That script was like nothing I’d ever read before,” Robbie said, when asked about her decision to take on the role of such a universally despised character. “It seemed to break every rule a screenplay is supposed to follow, and I loved that—and I didn’t even know, at first, that it was a true story! I’d never heard of Tonya Harding. And the story was so outrageous I just assumed it had to be fictional.”

In the film, Janney plays Harding’s mother LaVona, who easily ranks as one of the worst mothers in the history of motion pictures.

“I couldn’t play her like that, of course,” Janney said. “To LaVona, she was just doing what she had to do to keep her daughter tough. It was quite a process, though, playing someone who’s that willfully mean all the time. It was fun, because an actor always loves to dig into meaty roles, but it was hard.”

Back to Robbie and the pit bull, an animal, it seems, was the key to a remarkable performance.

“Doing the pit bull thing weirdly helped me find a sense of Tonya, to connect with where she was emotionally,” Robbie explained. “When you are distilling a character down to her clearest motivations, adding a sense of who that person would be as an animal really does help you narrow things down. It’s a weird kind of acting technique, I know, but sometimes it really works, and it definitely worked with Tonya.”

Robbie picked a pit bull because the loved-and-hated dogs are strong, muscular and intimidating. That certainly describes the real-life Harding, one of the only female skaters to ever successfully land a triple axel during a professional competitive skating program. In the film, Robbie re-enacts Harding’s pre-Olympics training regimen, which involved running uphill while pulling heavy wooden logs. In the sequence, Harding’s coach (Julianne Nicholson), breaks the fourth wall, turning to the camera to say, “She actually did this.”

“I held myself like a pit bull, sort of slightly hunched and low to the ground, ready for a fight if anybody picks one,” Robbie said. “I even did that underbite thing that pit bulls do, with their mouths, just a little bit.”

The only time she dropped the pit bull “identity” while filming, she added, was in doing the figure skating scenes, for which she trained several months previous to shooting.

“For the skating scenes,” Robbie said, “I imagined Tonya as a stallion, running wild, finding a grace and freedom on the ice that she never felt anywhere else in her life.”

“That’s such a fantastic idea,” Janney said in response. “I can’t wait to try that myself.”

Food & Drink: Dual Purpose

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Food & Drink: Dual Purpose

With increased awareness around humanely raised livestock, it’s not surprising that pioneer David Evans of Marin Sun Farms is once again ahead of the curve in his industry. Last year he merged with Claire Herminjard’s Mindful Meats to offer a certified organic, non-GMO verified line of pasture-raised beef that is made exclusively from dairy cows.

Though life has improved dramatically for cows that are raised by organic dairy producers, many, like factory cows, face the same fate—they are sold cheaply and mixed in with commodity meats. With their “dual purpose animal agriculture” philosophy, Mindful Meats aims to change this practice. Instead of sending off cows to large-scale processors, the company sources cows at the end of their dairy-producing lives (mostly Holsteins and Jerseys) from select, organic Sonoma and Marin county dairies.  

“I like to call it upcycling,” says Marin Sun Farms’ Marketing and Livestock Supply Manager Alessa Palmer, who describes the meat as darker, more robust, rich and marbled. “It’s a different eating experience,” but one that restaurant chefs are embracing. A handful of San Francisco and Marin restaurants are buying the meat, and Spanish chef José Andrés is a supporter and fan.

As homesteading and sustainable living practices become more mainstream, this approach to butchery is resonating for many. Before the days of industrialized meat production, when a dairy cow no longer produced milk, she was slaughtered and eaten. She remained on the same farm her entire life, and even at the end—she was not shipped off to parts unknown, but rather stayed in the same region where she was born and raised. If that is not the definition of humane, I’m not sure what is.

Mindful Meats can be found at Good Earth Natural Foods stores in Fairfax and Mill Valley; marinsunfarms.com; mindfulmeats.com.

Upfront: Screw Blue

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Upfront: Screw Blue

Cynthia Murray was admittedly in a bad mood around a month ago when the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a controversial tax “reform” bill that may deliver a uniquely regional measure of pain to Marin County.

Murray, who formerly served on the Marin County Board of Supervisors, is a Petaluma resident and President and Chief Executive Officer of the North Bay Leadership Council. She addressed an audience in San Rafael during a Marin Communications Forum event in early December and laced into the Republican Party for its tax package, which is now in the reconciliation phase of negotiations as the Senate and House work to send a bill to President Donald J. Trump’s desk by Christmas.

There’s lots of tweaking going on and it’s unclear what will make the final cut of the tax bill, but the basic drift is that it’s a giant giveaway to American corporations which will see their tax rate plunge from 38 percent to as low as 20 percent. In the meantime, there are struggling families everywhere. An oft-repeated Republican talking point on the tax bill is that tax cuts are generally wasted on poor people because they spend all their money, as Utah Senator Chuck Grassley put it, “on booze, women or movies.”

Murray took umbrage with the characterization in her opening remarks.

“How many people intend to do that?” Murray asked the crowd gathered in an Embassy Suites conference room. “Raise your hands. Talk about out of touch,” she said, as she semi-apologized to the crowd for her entertainingly sour mood. Nobody seemed to mind.

Murray rattled off some recent real estate listings in Marin—a $900,000 property, another listed for $42 million and another that listed at a reasonable $285,000. “That must be someone’s garden shed,” Murray quipped.

There’s good reason for Murray’s miffed mindset and for any prospective homeowners in Marin County to be worried about the GOP tax bill that’s currently being rushed through Congress.

Some of the measures targeted at homeowners or potential buyers have been singled out by state and national realtors’ organizations that typically support Republicans, as being not a very wise homeownership-encouraging policy from their perspective.

The tax package sets out to double the standard exemption for most filers, while also eliminating tax breaks and deductions that encourage home ownership. And the GOP plan would allow homeowners to write off the interest on their mortgage payment from the federal government for the first $500,000 in borrowed money. Another proposal would negatively impact homeowners, who would no longer be able to write off the first $10,000 in property taxes paid to localities.

Under current tax law, the mortgage-loan interest can be written off on loans up to $1,000,000. (GOP Senate leaders said Tuesday afternoon that they were thinking about splitting the difference and setting the new write-off limit at $750,000.)

This proposed change in tax law has, and continues to be, supported by progressive organizations such as the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), which for years has pushed for the $500,000 threshold (on the grounds that the $1 million threshold is unfairly generous to the wealthy) and use the additional revenue to create a low-income housing trust fund.

The so-called “California problem” is one of relativity: $500,000 doesn’t have the buying power in Marin as it has in Maine. It doesn’t have the buying power in GOP strongholds like Orange County, either.

And the problem for the Bay Area in general, now writ large across a state that’s perpetually in flames, is a severe housing shortage that has just gotten worse because of the North Bay wildfires, which destroyed 6 percent of the regional housing stock. And according to the real estate researchers at HomeLight, the fires almost immediately triggered a $100,000 spike in average regional home prices (HomeLight’s business model matches realtors to home-buyers; the company has offices in San Francisco and Arizona).

According to the NLIHC data, while 95 percent of all home-mortgage loans written annually in the United States are for less than $500,000—20 percent of all loans written in coastal blue state California are for more than $500,000. And, the 20 percent figure is driven mostly by the Bay Area and Marin County—one of the most expensive counties in the United States—and Republican strongholds to the south (i.e., Orange County). In Marin, where the pre-fire median price of home-ownership is a cool $1.2 million, nearly half of all mortgage loans are for more than $500,000, according to the NLIHC data.

All of the well-traveled Marin County quality-of-life headaches are driven by the housing shortage here, said Murray, to say nothing of the general unaffordability and inaccessibility of ownership to average people. Highway 101 is forever congested with workers who labor in Marin but can’t afford to live here (60 percent of all workers in Marin commute from other places), she noted and the solution is pretty simple, at least on paper: “More housing is the solution.” But tell that to George Lucas.

Murray highlighted that the Marin County open space mandate to maintain and protect massive tracts of land from developers (approximately 85 percent of the county is undeveloped), has not been met with the other part of the implied quality-of-life deal: High-density development along the Highway 101 corridor has not happened. Demand has outpaced supply, and the supply just took a huge hit.

The North Bay fires just destroyed 6,000 houses in the region. And it was just a few years ago that Marin County told Lucas to stick to making movies and lay off the affordable housing ambitions. An inexplicably short-sighted moment of infamy for a county with a severe housing crisis, as Murray noted. “And it just got worse with this damn tax bill they just passed.”

Robert Eyler, an economics professor and a member of the Marin Economic Forum, also keyed-in on the Republican tax bill and its potential for deleterious impacts on Marin, during the early December forum in San Rafael.

Eyler noted that the region has done pretty well in the post-2008 economic recovery and that the big question being asked these days by economists is not so much about creating jobs—but in creating jobs that “let people live where they work,” which is not happening at the moment in much of Marin County.

According to Eyler, even as 60 percent of the workforce leaves every day, 60 percent of the workforce commutes into the county every day, and the former earns three times what the latter does: The outbound commuters are highly paid (the median Marin income is $90,000); the inbound commuters typically are not. Eyler highlighted that home-ownership ought to be prioritized in the county, which starts with actually building some housing, given the stabilizing and wealth-building benefits that buying a house can provide. But the GOP bill as it stands creates a raft of disincentives to first-time homeownership, even if as Eyler emphasized, “It is way better to own than to rent.”

Feature: Olema, Olema

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Feature: Olema, Olema

There’s a pennant on the back wall at the newly opened Sea to See retail space in unincorporated Olema with a one-word message: Hustle.

Yup. That’s just what shop owner and West Marin resident Maggie Wolfe plans to do to find success in this tiny town at the crossroads of Highway One and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.

Wolfe had been open for all of five days when the Pacific Sun stopped in on a recent afternoon for a greeting and to check out the wares, which come from various makers, crafters and artisans from around the Bay Area. In that sense the idea here is similar to that which animated the previous business here, known only as The Shop: Showcase really cool stuff that’s made locally.  

There’s stuff for kids and adults, and if my nieces and nephews hadn’t all gone and grown up while I wasn’t looking, those soft-ball-shooting slingshots would’ve been in everyone’s stocking this year.

Olema’s a funny little place that’s sort of neither here nor there and yet everywhere all at once. I recently went on a late-night adventure, fueled by curiosity and the local cannabis, which took me to Olema and back.

It was an online adventure, and an epic one. Embarkation point: YouTube. I was listening to some old Youngbloods tunes (and who doesn’t love the Youngbloods?), when the obscure track “Hippie From Olema” popped up in the playlist. A kind of corn-pone country classic issued from the computer speakers. It sounded familiar, for a reason.

What? What is this?!!?  

Well I’m proud to be a hippie from Olema

Where we’re friendly to the squares and all the straights

We still take in strangers if they’re ragged

We can’t think of anyone to hate.  

Despite its many charms and attractions, Olema’s “downtown” is a place to drive through when you’re going somewhere else, usually, and it goes by in a blur. The town is roughly framed to the north by the Olema campground, and to the south by the Hindu Vedanta Society of Northern California retreat center, a gem of a place for seekers of spiritual guidance, marked only by a simple roadside sign.  

Unfortunately, despite the Youngbloods’ lyric that says otherwise, they don’t necessarily take in strangers if they are ragged these days in Olema. San Francisco glampers with a pocketful of ayahuasca and a jones for the local oysters—no problem.

There are a few pricey inns and bed-and-breakfast options to choose between out here. The campground is on the upscale end of the spectrum, and one of the great draws of the place generally is its proximity to the Point Reyes National Seashore Bear Valley Visitor Center.

As a crossroads town, Olema is also an attractive option for anyone who is seeking to sell their soul to the devil in exchange for rock ’n’ roll infamy …  

C’mon people, smile at your brother …

We all know that Youngbloods tune. The big hit, written by Dino Valenti.

Another draw: For seekers of a ride to San Rafael or parts north, Olema jumps out as sort of a reliable spot for hitchhikers with a thumb out. It’s also where the Sir and Star restaurant is located, with its pleasantly non-punitive price point for menu items that include the roasting of your neighbor’s quail and eating it. If there’s a destination-location in Olema, it’s the Sir and Star.

The West Marin outpost of the nonprofit Marin Convention and Visitors Bureau is located in the same strip of old buildings that houses Sea to See, and Jude Vasconcellos behind the desk admits that hers is without question the coolest job in West Marin.

Vasconcellos, a Marshall resident and bronze-art sculptor, has worked here for years and the first thing visitors to the visitor’s center encounter are Mardi Gras-type love-beads in the opening to the door. Then there’s a big fake horse in the center, which is loaded down with all sorts of printed material for tourists. The visitor’s center is a destination in itself—a vast space with free Wi-Fi and tons of room to get cozy and kick back and appreciate the Olema ethic as described by the Youngbloods:

We don’t throw our beer cans on the highway

We don’t slight a man because he’s black

We don’t spill our oil out in the ocean

’Cause we love birds and fish too much for that  

Things do happen, in Olema, population 74, and according to Wikipedia, the town takes its name from a Miwok word,  Olema-loke, which means “little coyote.” There are coyotes here, and the delightful Olema Creek meanders about. And every so often a Marin County Sheriff’s deputy will perch his cruiser in a little nook at the intersection and nab speeders and blowers of the stop sign. People walk their horses down Highway One sometimes. Last year, a tree fell and I had to sleep in my car for a few hours since I couldn’t drive any further south than Olema. Good times.

I feel for Olema the way I’m always pulling for the underdog, the also-ran, the person who’s been kicked around in life. Don’t trash on Olema! And so I’ve been having this rolling anthromorphic moment of empathy for this sleepy village in competition with a bunch of funky downtowns and lots of walkability for tourists, shoppers and diners with a burning hole in their pockets and a holiday to-buy list: Stinson Beach, Bolinas, Point Reyes Station and even the diminutively vibrant Marshall are themselves destination spots—but who goes to Olema just for the heck of it?

Oh, let’s go to Olema just for the heck of it!

After all, it’s not like anyone ever wrote a song that you’ve actually heard or can find on YouTube, about Stinson Beach or Bolinas or Point Reyes Station.

But there is a song about Olema, written and recorded in 1967 by the Youngbloods. The song feels familiar because it was written as a response to the Merle Haggard hit, “Okie From Muskogee,” the anti-hippie country classic wherein certain residents of Oklahoma don’t smoke marijuana, have orgies or grow their hair long. In response, the Youngbloods sang:  

We don’t watch commercials in Olema

We don’t buy the plastic crap they sell

We still wear our hair long like folks used to

And we bathe often, therefore we don’t smell

Wolfe, who does not appear to carry any plastic crap in her store (and who has long hair and a pleasant aroma about her), says she’ll be keeping hours at Sea to See, Wednesday through Sunday 11am to 7pm, and just in time for the holiday season with its mad rushes to consume or be consumed.  

We’re in the thick of it now, the spending season, the season of high cheer and holiday hoo-ha and it’s a kind of make-or-break time for local artists and craftspeople who rely on stores such as Sea to See to feature their wares in a retail setting which would otherwise be out of the range of affordability.  

The hustle is on and the local artisans are trying to make bank over the next couple of weeks so they too can have a happy holiday. And ho-ho-ho, there are big craft fairs busting out all over between now and Christmas. A couple of weekends ago saw the Point Reyes event, and this weekend was Bolinas’ turn; the annual Bolinas Winter Faire at the Bolinas Community Center (where I am, full disclosure, an occasional part-time employee), featured all sorts of local makers and bakers deploying their home-grown goodies.  

I asked a few vendors and strollers-through over the weekend fair to share their thoughts about Olema and mostly folks just shrugged or told me that there used to be a DJ on KWMR who used the Youngbloods tune as his intro song. Nice town, was the general consensus. Not too much going on there, but good luck to anyone who wants to give it a go.

And I’m proud to be a hippie from Olema

Where we’re friendly to the squares and all the straights

We still take in strangers if they’re Haggard

In Olema, California, planet earth

Free Will Astrology

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Free Will Astrology

ARIES (March 21-April 19): You may get richer quicker in 2018, Aries—especially if you refuse to sell out. You may accumulate more clout—especially if you treat everyone as your equal and always wield your power responsibly. I bet you will also experience deeper, richer emotions—especially if you avoid people who have low levels of emotional intelligence. Finally, I predict that you will get the best sex of your life in the next 12 months—especially if you cultivate the kind of peace of mind in which you’ll feel fine about yourself if you don’t get any sex at all. P.S. You’d be wise to start working on these projects immediately.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The members of the fungus family, like mushrooms and molds, lack chlorophyll, so they can’t make food from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. To get the energy they need, they “eat” plants. That’s lucky for us. The fungi keep the earth fresh. Without them to decompose fallen leaves, piles of compost would continue to accumulate forever. Some forests would be so choked with dead matter that they couldn’t thrive. I invite you to take your inspiration from the heroic fungi, Taurus. Expedite the decay and dissolution of the worn-out and obsolete parts of your life.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I’m guessing that you have been hungrier than usual. At times you may have felt voracious, even insatiable. What’s going on? I don’t think this intense yearning is simply about food, although it’s possible that your body is trying to compensate for a nutritional deficiency. At the very least, you’re also experiencing a heightened desire to be understood and appreciated. You may be aching for a particular quality of love that you haven’t been able to give or get. Here’s my theory: Your soul is famished for experiences that your ego doesn’t sufficiently value or seek out. If I’m correct, you should meditate on what your soul craves but isn’t getting enough of.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): The brightly colored birds known as bee-eaters are especially fond of eating bees and wasps. How do they avoid getting stung? They snatch their prey in mid-air and then knock them repeatedly against a tree branch until the stinger falls off and the venom is flushed out. In the coming weeks, Cancerian, you could perhaps draw inspiration from the bee-eaters’ determination to get what they want. How might you be able to draw nourishment from sources that aren’t entirely benign? How could you extract value from influences that you have to be careful with?

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The coming months will be a ripe time to revise and rework your past—to reconfigure the consequences that emerged from what happened once upon a time. I’ll trust you to make the ultimate decisions about the best ways to do that, but here are some suggestions: 1. Revisit a memory that has haunted you, and do a ritual that resolves it and brings you peace. 2. Go back and finally do a crucial duty you left unfinished. 3. Return to a dream you wandered away from prematurely, and either recommit yourself to it, or else put it to rest for good.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The astrological omens suggest that now is a favorable time to deepen your roots, bolster your foundations and revitalize traditions that have nourished you. Oddly enough, the current planetary rhythms are also conducive to you and your family and friends playing soccer in the living room with a ball made from rolled-up socks, pretending to be fortune-telling psychics and giving each other past-life readings and gathering around the kitchen table to formulate a conspiracy to achieve world domination. And no, the two sets of advice I just gave you are not contradictory.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In accordance with the long-term astrological omens, I invite you to make five long-term promises to yourself. They were formulated by the teacher Shannen Davis. Say them aloud a few times to get a feel for them: 1. “I will make myself eminently teachable through the cultivation of openness and humility.” 2. “I won’t wait around hoping that people will give me what I can give myself.” 3. “I’ll be a good sport about the consequences of my actions, whether they’re good, bad or misunderstood.” 4. “As I walk out of a room where there are many people who know me, I won’t worry about what anyone will say about me.” 5. “I will only pray for the things I’m willing to be the answer to.”

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): To discuss a problem is not the same as doing something practical to correct it. Many people don’t seem to realize this. They devote a great deal of energy to describing and analyzing their difficulties, and may even imagine possible solutions, but then neglect to follow through. And so nothing changes. The sad or bad situation persists. Of all the signs in the zodiac, you Scorpios are among the least prone to this disability. You specialize in taking action to fulfill your proposed fixes. Just this once, however, I urge you to engage in more inquiry and conversation than usual. Just talking about the problem could cure it.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): As far back as ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece, people staged ceremonies to mark the embarkation of a new ship. The intention was to bestow a blessing for the maiden voyage and ever thereafter. Good luck! Safe travels! Beginning in 18th century Britain and America, such rituals often featured the smashing of a wine bottle on the ship’s bow. Later, a glass container of champagne became standard. In accordance with the current astrological indicators, I suggest that you come up with your own version of this celebratory gesture. It will soon be time for your launch.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): You may feel quite sure that you’ve gotten as tall as you’re ever going to be. But that may not be true. If you were ever going to add another half-inch or more to your height, the near future would be the time for it. You are in the midst of what we in the consciousness industry call a “growth spurt.” The blooming and ripening could occur in other ways, as well. Your hair and fingernails may become longer faster than usual, and even your breasts or penis might undergo spontaneous augmentation. There’s no doubt that new brain cells will propagate at a higher rate, and so will the white blood cells that guard your physical health. Four weeks from now, I bet you’ll be noticeably smarter, wiser and more robust.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): You come into a delicatessen where you have to take a numbered ticket in order to get waited on. Oops. You draw 37 and the counter clerk has just called out number 17. That means 20 more people will have their turns before you. Damn! You settle in for a tedious vigil, putting down your bag and crossing your arms across your chest. But then what’s this? Two minutes later, the clerk calls out 37. That’s you! You go up to the counter and hand in your number, and amazingly enough, the clerk writes down your order. A few minutes later, you’ve got your food. Maybe it was a mistake, but who cares? All that matters is that your opportunity came earlier than you thought it would. Now apply this vignette as a metaphor for your life in the coming days.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): It’s one of those bizarre times when what feels really good is in close alignment with what’s really good for you, and when taking the course of action that benefits you personally is probably what’s best for everyone else, too. I realize the onslaught of this strange grace may be difficult to believe. But it’s real and true, so don’t waste time questioning it. Relish and indulge in the freedom it offers you. Use it to shush the meddling voice in your head that informs you about what you supposedly SHOULD be doing instead of what you’re actually doing.

Homework: In your imagination, visit the person you’ll be in four years. What key messages do you have to convey? Testify at Freewillastrology.com.

Advice Goddess

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Advice Goddess

Q: I saw this gorgeous girl at the coffeehouse at the mall two months ago. It was totally love at first sight. I keep hanging out there hoping to see her again. Am I nuts, or does love at first sight really exist?—Smitten

A: It’s so special when a man tells a woman that he’s deeply in love with her—except when her response is, “Excuse me, but have we met?”

Love at first sight sounds so romantic. There are those couples who claim they had it—causing mass nausea at dinner parties when they look into each other’s eyes and announce, “From the moment we saw each other, we just KNEW.” Uh, or did they? A Swiss psychology grad student, Florian Zsok, ran some experiments to see what love at first sight is actually made of.

Zsok and his colleagues were looking for the three elements that psychologist Robert Sternberg theorizes interact to produce love: Intimacy, commitment and passion. They surveyed participants online and in a lab setting—asking them how they felt about people in photographs—and in three dating events, getting their reactions to people they’d just met. Of the 396 participants, love at first sight “was indicated 49 times by 32 different individuals.” And here’s a shocker: “None of the instances of (love at first sight) was reciprocal.”  

Not surprisingly, none of the participants who said they’d felt love at first sight had the elements of intimacy or commitment as part of their experience. The one element they did have? Passion—in the form of “physical attraction.” Basically, the researchers empirically confirmed what some of us intuitively understand: “Love at first sight” is just a classier way of expressing the sentiment yelled from passing cars: “Hey, miniskirt! You’re late for your visit to My Penis Avenue!”

As for couples who insist that they had love at first sight, the researchers believe that they could be retrospectively repainting their first meeting to make their relationship feel more special. The reality: “We just knew” is “we just got lucky.”

Reminding yourself that you just have the plain old hots for this girl is probably the best way for you to do what needs to be done—shift to some other activity when the impulse strikes to stake out Coffeeland. Getting stuck on a total stranger this way probably makes it impossible to behave normally in their presence—or want to look closely enough to see who they really are. As alluring a concept as love at first sight is, in practice it tends to work out best with inanimate objects—something that doesn’t take so long to text you back that you buy it a burial plot.

Q: My family enjoys your weekly column, but we’re wondering why you can’t give advice without launching into evolutionary explanations. We aren’t always instinct-driven animals like elk or migrating salmon.—Evolutionary Overkill

A: It isn’t so bad being a salmon. Salmon just wake up one day and swim like mad upstream. There’s no existential fretting, “What does it all mean? What will I do with myself after grad school? Am I a bad fish if I sometimes long to put grain alcohol in the sippy cup of that brat screaming on the beach?”

Meanwhile, back in humanland, research in cognitive neuroscience (by Michael Gazzaniga, among others) and in social science finds that we humans aren’t the highly rational independent thinkers we like to believe we are.

In fact, as evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, “our modern skulls house a stone age mind”—adapted to solve hunter-gatherer mating and survival problems. This 10-million-year-old psychology, still driving us right now, today, is often a mismatch with our modern environment. Take our sugar lust, for example. This made sense in an ancestral environment, where eating a couple of berries might have helped prevent malnutrition. Today, however, we can drive to Costco and have some guy load a pallet of doughnuts into our SUV while we burn .0003 of a calorie watching him.

Understanding the origins of our motivation is not “evolutionary overkill,” but our best shot for possibly controlling our behavior—or at least forgiving ourselves when we fail miserably. As my First Amendment lawyer friend Ken White (@Popehat) tweeted about S’mores Girl Scout Cookies: “I thought they were kind of meh at first but by the third box I ate in the garage they were growing on me.”

Hero & Zero: Fire Relief & A Senior Swindle

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Hero: We can’t stop praising our heroic firefighters. Last month, they delivered around 900 donated bikes to families affected by the North Bay wildfires. With financial support from a grant, firefighters from the Marin County Fire Department, Mill Valley Fire Department and Southern Marin Fire Protection District are at it again, this time giving out 210 new bicycles. “Even though the fires are out, the fire service family is not done supporting the relief efforts,” said Battalion Chief Bret McTigue of Marin County Fire. You can help by dropping off a bike at any Marin County, Mill Valley or Southern Marin Fire station. To donate dollars, visit:gofundme.com/raise-funds/CAfirerelief. The fundraiser is off to a great start with a $5,000 matching pledge from Benjamin Franklin Plumbing in Novato.

Zero: An elderly gentleman entered the UPS Store in Sausalito and asked for his package. The clerk found none addressed to him. Ditto for an envelope. The man called someone on his mobile phone, which was on speaker, allowing everyone in the store to overhear the conversation between our fellow and an impatient-sounding man with a foreign accent. The item sent to the store was an email, which would prove that the man had won $1 million from Publishers Clearing House. The clerk and other customers reviewed the email and explained to him that it was a scam. “I play that game though,” he said, sounding uncertain. They advised him not to send money to claim the fake prize. Swindlers targeting seniors almost deserve waterboarding.

This Week in the Pacific Sun

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This Week in the Pacific Sun

This week in the Pacific Sun, our Shop Local issue cover story, ‘Holiday Charm,’ highlights two designers—Rebecca Sheppard, in Larkspur, and Lesley Evers, in Corte Madera. On top of that, we’ve got a piece on road woes on the Drake, a roundup of holiday food & drink happenings, a review of Marin Theatre Company’s ‘Shakespeare in Love‘ and an interview with the husband-and-wife team behind 20-year-old Gypsy Soul. All that and more on stands and online today!

Film: Green Poetry

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Film: Green Poetry

Remember that folk belief that you could put a book under your pillow and the learning would percolate up into your brain? Imagine what dreams would come if your apartment were directly above one of the old movie palaces. In the splendid The Shape of Water, the mute heroine, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a Baltimore scrubwoman of 1963—has lodgings above the auditorium of a red-velvet-lined theater.

The film is about the passion Elisa develops while working the midnight shift at a government lab. One steel-lined tank of water contains a prisoner (Doug Jones) hauled up from Amazonia; he has webbed hands, blue terrapin stripes on his head, transparent eyelids like a frog and a quite kissable mouth.   

The military wants this amphibian humanoid vivisected pronto, while the scientist on watch, Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) tries to stall them. Guillermo del Toro, of Pan’s Labyrinth, and co-writer Vanessa Taylor show the familiar conflict between the army and the scientists—between destroying the enemy or letting it live long enough to study it—that’s been seen in hundreds of 1950s monster movies.

On her late-night shifts, Elisa uses sign language to communicate with this creature, a being so “beautiful and intricate,” as Hoffstetler judges it. At last Elisa decides to free the frogman, with the help of her gay artist neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins) and her friend and co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer).

The Shape of Water’s visual scheme is hypnotic. But to use the phrase from the Bible’s Book of Ruth, the movie approaches alien corn when the monster starts to show its magic powers as if he were E.T. And yet The Shape of Water has its own visual poetry in a story of love and violence. Hawkins, topping even her remarkable performance in Maudie, is captivating, sad and sensual.

Theater: Holiday Cheer

In case you haven’t noticed, or have gone into hibernation to evade the fallout from the multiple disasters (political and otherwise) occurring in this country and abroad, we’re in the midst of what is now called the “holiday season.” Beginning a few days before Thanksgiving and terminating a week or so after New Year’s Day, its length and emphasis...
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Talking Pictures: Clear Motivations

To Margot Robbie, Tonya Harding was a pit bull. That’s not just a metaphor. It’s how the fast-rising Australian actor (Suicide Squad, Goodbye, Christopher Robin) elected to play the real-life figure skater in the just-released movie I, Tonya. The film, which is already appearing on many end-of-year top 10 lists, screened on December 2 at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael...
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Food & Drink: Dual Purpose

With increased awareness around humanely raised livestock, it’s not surprising that pioneer David Evans of Marin Sun Farms is once again ahead of the curve in his industry. Last year he merged with Claire Herminjard’s Mindful Meats to offer a certified organic, non-GMO verified line of pasture-raised beef that is made exclusively from dairy cows. Though life has improved dramatically...
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Upfront: Screw Blue

Cynthia Murray was admittedly in a bad mood around a month ago when the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a controversial tax “reform” bill that may deliver a uniquely regional measure of pain to Marin County. Murray, who formerly served on the Marin County Board of Supervisors, is a Petaluma resident and President and Chief Executive Officer of the...
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Feature: Olema, Olema

There’s a pennant on the back wall at the newly opened Sea to See retail space in unincorporated Olema with a one-word message: Hustle. Yup. That’s just what shop owner and West Marin resident Maggie Wolfe plans to do to find success in this tiny town at the crossroads of Highway One and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Wolfe had been open...
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Free Will Astrology

ARIES (March 21-April 19): You may get richer quicker in 2018, Aries—especially if you refuse to sell out. You may accumulate more clout—especially if you treat everyone as your equal and always wield your power responsibly. I bet you will also experience deeper, richer emotions—especially if you avoid people who have low levels of emotional intelligence. Finally, I predict...
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Advice Goddess

advice goddess
Q: I saw this gorgeous girl at the coffeehouse at the mall two months ago. It was totally love at first sight. I keep hanging out there hoping to see her again. Am I nuts, or does love at first sight really exist?—Smitten A: It’s so special when a man tells a woman that he’s deeply in love with her—except...
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Hero & Zero: Fire Relief & A Senior Swindle

Hero: We can’t stop praising our heroic firefighters. Last month, they delivered around 900 donated bikes to families affected by the North Bay wildfires. With financial support from a grant, firefighters from the Marin County Fire Department, Mill Valley Fire Department and Southern Marin Fire Protection District are at it again, this time giving out 210 new bicycles. “Even...
Read more

This Week in the Pacific Sun

This week in the Pacific Sun, our Shop Local issue cover story, 'Holiday Charm,' highlights two designers—Rebecca Sheppard, in Larkspur, and Lesley Evers, in Corte Madera. On top of that, we've got a piece on road woes on the Drake, a roundup of holiday food & drink happenings, a review of Marin Theatre Company's 'Shakespeare in Love' and an...
Read more

Film: Green Poetry

Remember that folk belief that you could put a book under your pillow and the learning would percolate up into your brain? Imagine what dreams would come if your apartment were directly above one of the old movie palaces. In the splendid The Shape of Water, the mute heroine, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a Baltimore scrubwoman of 1963—has lodgings above...
Read more
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