Robin Williams, the former Redwood High School student, Juilliard-trained and Oscar-winning actor, was found dead Aug. 11 at his home in Tiburon.
At a press conference held Aug. 12 at the Marin County’s Sheriff’s Office, Lt. Keith Boyd, assistant chief deputy coroner, said that according to the Aug. 12 autopsy results, the preliminary cause of death suggests that Williams died of asphyxiation due to hanging. Williams was 63.
Members of the press listen while Lt. Boyd gives his statement. Photo by Molly Oleson.
Authorities received a 911 call at around 11:55am on Aug. 11 from a “distraught” caller who reported a male adult unconscious and not breathing in Williams’ residence in Tiburon.
The Sheriff’s Office, Tiburon Fire Department and Southern Marin Fire Protection District responded to the incident and emergency personnel arrived on the scene at 12pm. Firefighters from the Tiburon Fire Department identified Williams and pronounced him dead at 12:02pm.
Preliminary information from the ongoing investigation revealed that Williams had been seeking treatment for depression.
According to Lt. Boyd’s statement, Williams was last seen alive at 10:30pm on Aug. 10 by his wife, Susan Schneider, when she retired for the evening. It is unknown at what time Williams retired to a separate room from Schneider. On Aug. 11 Schneider left the house around 10:30am, assuming Williams to still be asleep. Williams’ personal assistant became concerned at around 11:45am, when Williams failed to respond to knocks on his bedroom door.
The Marin County Sheriff’s Office released Lt. Boyd’s statement on their website. The statement reveals graphic details of Williams’ death and discusses evidence at the residence that requires scientific testing to evaluate its “investigative value.” When asked by the media if Williams had left behind a suicide note, Lt. Boyd said that the Sheriff’s Office would not discuss a note.
The autopsy was conducted at the Napa County Sheriff’s Office Morgue by the Coroner Division. Marin County Sheriff’s Office has an independent contract with Monte’s Chapel of the Hills to conduct autopsies in the county, but due to government regulations and for security reasons, the autopsy was conducted in Napa. The forensic examination was performed by Dr. Joseph Cohen, the Sheriff’s Office chief forensic pathologist. According to Dr. Cohen, there were no findings indicating that Williams had been in a struggle or a physical altercation prior to him being located and identified as deceased.
Lt. Boyd answering questions from the media at the Aug. 12 press conference. Photo by Molly Oleson.
Williams, a recovering alcoholic, had recently checked into rehab, according to news reports. He also had a heart valve operation in 2009. Information about his health and any chemical substances that may have been in his system prior to his death will be available after the toxicology report is completed within the next two to six weeks.
“Please note this is an active investigation into the cause, manner and circumstances of Mr. Williams’ death,” Lt. Boyd said. “The final cause and manner of death will not be certified until the conclusion of the investigation, which is several weeks away.” A second press conference will be held in the following weeks pending results of the toxicology testing.
Williams was born in Chicago and spent his formative years in Michigan until the family moved to Woodacre in Marin County. He graduated from Redwood High School in 1969 and attended College of Marin. He is survived by his wife Susan Schneider and his three children, Zachary Pym Williams, Zelda Rae Williams and Cody Allan Williams.
Mara Buxbaum, Williams’ publicist told the Hollywood Reporter in a statement on Aug. 11 that Williams had recently been battling depression. “This is a tragic and sudden loss. The family respectfully asks for their privacy as they grieve during this very difficult time.”
Why more Marinites are opting out of childhood vaccines-and what it means for the rest of us
by Jacob Shafer
First, a confession: When my editor asked if I wanted to write a story about vaccines, my initial reaction was, “Um … not really.”
Sure—it’s an interesting topic, hot button as they come. And it’s guaranteed to generate feedback, which is what we writers are supposed to covet. But when I thought about diving into this particular debate, I felt like a kid in oversized swimming trunks teetering on the edge of the deep end, staring at the swirling water below.
Last month I wrote a column in this paper about vaccine opt-outs. According to the California Department of Public Health, some 8 percent of school-age children in Marin don’t have all, or any, of their shots. That’s almost four times the state average and more than any other Bay Area county. The column was succinct and, I thought, not terribly inflammatory. The feedback, though, came fast and furious. Vaccine skeptics (anti-vaxxers, to use the pejorative) penned angry letters; a local pediatrician weighed in with a point-by-point defense. And, naturally, my editor inquired about a follow-up. So here I am, taking the plunge.
Both of my sons got all their shots. I have no regrets. They’re healthy, happy and free of vaccine-preventable illnesses. I believe in the science of inoculation. I say all this up front because I don’t want to be accused of concealing my stance, which aligns with the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and a host of peer-reviewed studies that confirm the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
And yet I know people—educated, well-intentioned people—who swear vaccines are unnecessary or, worse, ineffective and harmful. They ignore the advice of doctors and shrug off warnings that eradicated diseases could come roaring back. They’re doing what’s best for their children, they insist, and the law is on their side.
They aren’t wrong—but does that make them right?
In 2013, there were 173 Marin-based cases of whooping cough, a highly contagious respiratory illness that kills nearly 300,000 people every year worldwide. That’s about 68 cases for every 100,000 Marinites, the second-highest rate in California. Health officials draw a straight line between that and the county’s high vaccine opt-out rate, which makes sense … if you believe the whooping cough vaccine protects against whooping cough.
Not everyone does. Dr. Donald Harte, a Corte Madera chiropractor and outspoken vaccine critic, doesn’t mince words: “It’s biological common sense—you don’t put poisons in a human being, and you certainly don’t put poisons in a child, to get them healthy,” he says. “And the fact is there are poisons, specific neurotoxins, in every vaccine.”
Those neurotoxins, he argues, are responsible for a range of childhood maladies, from autism to allergies to Type 1 diabetes. Like other vaccine opponents, Dr. Harte insists that diseases like polio and measles would have simply gone away on their own as part of a natural cycle. “Vaccine lovers,” as he calls them, confuse correlation with causation. They’ve swallowed the poison along with the lie. “I call it the PMG complex—the Pharmaceutical, Medical, Governmental complex. They’re all playing with each other to garner more money and more power, and to hell with peoples’ health.”
Dr. Harte stops short of implicating individual doctors (though he does call pediatrics “the most dangerous of all the medical specialties”). “I think your average pediatrician or your average medical doctor is a good guy or gal, out there trying to do good,” he says. “I’m not saying they have any evil intent. I’m saying scientifically, they’re wrong.”
Ultimately, he argues, it’s a question of freedom. “I believe in liberty. I think people should have a right to do what they want with their kids, to have a choice.”
On the other side, some pediatricians are making a choice—the choice not to treat unvaccinated kids. Tamalpais Pediatrics, which has offices in Greenbrae and Novato, requires all patients age 2 and up to get the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine. “We have a responsibility to protect the health of all of the children in our practice, and decrease the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases,” Dr. Nelson Branco wrote in a blog post last year, explaining the policy. “We … feel strongly that vaccines save lives and that this policy protects our patients and our community from a preventable disease and all of its repercussions.”
It’s not only doctors who are worried. “I think it’s a public health emergency,” says Jeff Gizmek of San Anselmo, a father of two (fully vaccinated) daughters. Gizmek says he and his wife “were a little hesitant” with their first child and staggered the shots. By the time kid number two came around they had “wised up,” and switched to a vaccine-mandatory pediatrician. “When you are in a waiting room with six coughing children, it’s a great comfort to know that at least they are all [vaccinated] for pertussis,” he says.
Gizmek blames Marin’s high opt-out rate on the alternative medicine “woo-woo factor” and wealthy people “who think they are smarter than their own doctor” and send their children to private schools stocked with unvaccinated kids.
Specifically he mentions Sausalito’s New Village School, where only 5 percent of incoming kindergartners were fully vaccinated last year. (Contrast that with Novato’s Hamilton Elementary and its 97 percent vaccination rate.) Asked to comment, New Village emailed that vaccine opt-outs are “not a school theme.”
The concept of vaccination—using a small dose of a pathogen to kickstart the immune system and bolster its defenses—has been around for a long time. Crude forms of the smallpox vaccine were used in 17th century China, and there are references to inoculation dating back as far as 1000 B.C. French microbiologist Louis Pasteur refined the practice in the latter half of the 1800s, and in the next century vaccines would beat back an array of public health scourges: measles, smallpox, polio.
But, like the killer in a bad slasher movie, there’s no guarantee they’ll stay gone. For a vaccine to be effective, most people—usually about 85 percent of the population—have to get their shots. Some people can’t be vaccinated, either because of age or immune deficiency. Add a growing number of opt-outs and, health officials warn, we could be flirting with disaster.
Under California law, parents can refuse vaccines for their children, and send them to school, simply by signing a “personal beliefs” exemption form. A new rule requires the signature of a doctor who has “provided information to the parent or guardian regarding the benefits and risks of immunization.”
There are risks. Most side effects are mild, according to the CDC, and subside quickly. Cold and flu-like symptoms are common, while rarer, more serious reactions have been reported, including inflammation of the digestive tract, bloody urine and stool and pneumonia. (CDC says it’s unclear whether these were caused by the vaccines or not.)
What about autism? Proponents of the vaccine-autism link usually point to a 1998 study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. The study has since been retracted and was branded an “elaborate fraud” by the British Medical Journal in 2011. (At the time, Wakefield, who lost his license, told CNN he was the victim of a “ruthless, pragmatic attempt to crush any attempt to investigate valid vaccine safety concerns.”)
Dr. Harte says there’s a simple explanation for the lack of credible studies linking autism and other illnesses with vaccines: Nobody will fund them. “These studies take millions and millions of dollars and institutions,” he says. “And the institutions are invested in what’s going on.”
Steve Lamb, a San Anselmo resident who says he was injured by vaccines as a child, credits Dr. Wakefield—and others who speak out against vaccines—with “great courage and tenacity.” And, he adds, while Marin may be more supportive of vaccine opt-outs than other places, “it still requires a high degree of commitment to withstand the strong social pressures to follow the crowd.”
Near the end of my interview with Dr. Harte, I tell him that I’ve spoken to people, some very close to me, who believe in the efficacy of vaccines but worry that we’re going overboard, administering too many shots too fast. This seems to be the middle ground, I say, between the mainstream medical community and the anti-vaccine crowd.
And, I wonder, are people like Dr. Harte—with claims of a poisoned generation and vast public health coverup—preventing a less sensational, perhaps important conversation from taking place?
“Do I prevent that conversation?” Dr. Harte asks. “No. And anybody that would think that, what they’re trying to do is shut me up, while the people on the other end saying that it’s absolutely essential and we need vaccines for every single thing in the book and other things we can’t even think of, they’re OK to talk.”
Ultimately, of course, Dr. Harte, Steve Lamb and the 8 percent of Marin parents who opt-out have every right to talk. And to not vaccinate. The question is, should they? Should they be allowed to endanger public safety, as most doctors and public health officials say they are, even if they claim to be doing just the opposite?
This is the place where personal freedom and the greater good—not to mention conflicting versions of reality—collide. Where the debate, inevitably, gets messy. Where I didn’t really want to write this story, but I’m mostly glad I did.
Vaccines By The Numbers
8 percent of school-age children in Marin are not fully vaccinated (nearly four times the state average)
95 percent of incoming kindergartners at Sausalito’s private New Village School were unvaccinated in the 2012-’13 school year
173 cases of whooping cough reported in Marin in 2013, the second-highest rate in California
295,000 annual deaths from whooping cough worldwide
Take a cheap shot at Jacob at ja************@***il.com.
Of course there’s an app for it—search the application store for “sleep” and at least 2,200 smartphone programs pop up, all promising to make that mysterious one-third of our lives even better. But is sleeping with a smartphone all that smart?
There are four basic functions of sleep apps:
• Monitoring sleep and recording “light” and “deep” sleep as well as time spent sleeping.
• Playing sounds to help you fall asleep and sounds to help you wake up.
• Recording the sounds you make during the night.
• Sounding alarms during the night when snoring is detected so that the snorer wakes up and is, supposedly, eventually “trained” to roll over and be quiet.
Neither of us felt we needed or wanted to try that last category, but here’s a sampling of some of the applications we did “test sleep.”
Sleep Cycle ($1.99) This app “senses” your sleep patterns by using the phone’s “accelerometer” to record movement. There are instructions on how to place the phone, face down, near the corner of the mattress. Then, during the night, according to the instructions, “you move differently in bed during the different sleep states.” The alarm goes off when it senses you are in a “light” sleep phase up to 30 minutes before your designated wake-up time, and you can choose from 15 different alarm sounds (from “Warm breeze” to “Metro mind”) or music already on your phone.
Clearly this is not a real scientific instrument. One night I was wide awake but kept very still—my phone recorded this as a “deep sleep” phase. It’s also unclear what the charts really mean; after five nights it gives you a “sleep quality” number, as a percent, but a percent of what? Are there people who get 100 percent? Are they dead? It also uses the phone’s camera to record your heart rate upon awakening (the app warns that this “is not an actual medical device”). And for only $9.99 a year all your sleep information can be uploaded to a secure server so you’ll never lose it, which seems something like saving fingernail clippings in a bank vault.
Still, it was amusing to see my sleep charts every morning and this app did make me a more mindful sleeper, if that’s not an oxymoron. Plus it was a far more pleasant way to wake up than the usual routine: with KCBS clicking on and announcing that 101 south is jammed from Rowland Boulevard to Central San Rafael.— JV
Sleep Time (Free): I was suspicious about Sleep Time. A giant analog clock that looked awfully like the clock already provided in my iPhone stared back. What will this alarm clock do for me? I set an alarm, put the phone face down under my pillow and drifted off. The next morning I woke to the soft sound of a xylophone slowly approaching (if xylophones had legs). I looked at the clock. It was 6:45—an entire 15 minutes before my alarm needed to go off. Normally I’d be disgruntled and feel bamboozled out of a well-deserved 15 minutes of extra sleep. But whether it was the xylophone, the fact that I charted 9 hours and 35 minutes of sleep or perhaps because I woke up at the most fitting time, my shift of consciousness seemed a bit easier. A quick click of the button over to the “Sleep Lab”—it broke my sleep down into percentages and three categories: light sleep, deep sleep and awake. The app and charts included did not help me gain sleep or guide me into it, but it created a burning interest in my sleeping patterns—and it was straightforward enough to operate while I was still a little groggy.—SP
24/7 Motion X (99 cents): This app does all of the standard alarm and monitoring sleep functions, but it also records “sleeping sounds” for you to listen to when you wake up. According to 24/7: “It’s fun, and very helpful.” Or horrifying. In several nights I heard mostly covers rustling and one brief stint of demure snoring. But there were also some very unladylike sounds (blame the vegetarian chili), and one stint of hard-core snoring (blame the dog?). The app encourages one to tweet or Facebook results (yeah, right). And 24/7 is also well named. In addition, during the day, it monitors step counts, calories burned, and tells you when the sun sets and rises. If you’re “not active” for an hour it tells you to get up and move. During a walk it will tell you how long you’ve gone and how fast. I fully expect future upgrades will remind you to call your mother and save more for retirement. It’s all too much and very draining, on the psyche as well as on the phone’s battery.—JV
SleepBot (Free): SleepBot analyzed everything I’d never contemplated about my sleep and myself. I set an alarm and woke during a light sleep phase—the best time to wake according to the app. The sound of the gradual alarm was soothing compared to the banging of bongos I normally use as my iPhone alarm setting. It even gave me the option to rate my own sleep and share my motion, nighttime noises and sleeping charts with my Facebook friends. (I declined.) If you’re a numbers type of person, this is an app with no shortage of charts from stem plots to bar graphs.
I must admit I’ve never been interested in the sounds I make while I sleep, but on the second night I let it record sound. When I woke, I was excited and somewhat frightened to hear the results. Rather than hearing bumps in the night or snoring, all I heard was the rustling of blankets. This portion of the app proved to be incredibly useless for me, however, if you want to prove that your partner snores, this is the app for you.—SP
Relax and Sleep Well with Glenn Harrold (Free): Self-improvement recordings have been around as long as there have been recordings. Glenn Harrold, who touts himself as “the UK’s best selling self-help audio author,” has a mini-empire on the app store, selling 58 separate audio recordings to help you lose weight, gain inner wisdom, be happy, experience spiritual healing and, of course, to get to sleep. The free version (the pay version is $6.99) is touted as a “high-quality hypnosis recording,” and the first time I listened to it the biggest barrier to sleep was to stop giggling. He never says “You are getting sleepy” but he comes damn close many times. It also took a while to figure out the accent—it’s British, but not posh. More like Eliza Dolittle’s father talking through basic breathing and relaxation techniques with echo effects. The first night I fell asleep pretty fast, but woke up feeling tired. Same on night two. The third night I stayed awake to listen to the whole 27 minute tape and was surprised to hear that at the end he brings the listener “out of trance” and declares that one is now fully awake. Huh? Now I have to get another smartphone to track if I wake up or not, and, if so, what I’m doing. Singing and dancing to “Get Me to the Church on Time”?—JV
Sleep Pillow (Free): I’m not one to count sheep and I like falling asleep to the sound of absolutely nothing. The forced croak of a toad in a creek or the forecast fakery that is an occasional bolt of thunder in a gentle “rain storm,” isn’t for me. Regardless, I decided to see what Sleep Pillow had to offer. Blending the best assets of social media, it lets you “like” your favorite sounds with a slideshow of Instagram-inspired pictures. You find your favorites from a buffet of sounds—it’s the Fresh Choice of sleep apps. I decided to go with the singing humpback whales and tinder gently burning in a fire. The two opposite elements blended rather nicely, and after I muffled the deep whale calls with a pillow, the subtle mixture served its purpose and I drifted off. If you’re looking for an app that will tune out snoring, kids or animals, Sleep Pillow has you covered. However, I think with or without the metaphorical whales and burning embers, I somehow would have found myself asleep just as easily.—SP
You may have heard their voices as an Orc or Uruk in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—or seen them basking under the rays of the San Francisco sun at Pier 39.
Perhaps the 1994 movie Andre, about a harbor seal turned family companion, captivated your heart and earned your devoted attention. Whether your first brush with one of these marine mammals took place through your television screen or out on a stroll along the California coast, its fair to say their reach is far, and their faces—adorable.
On the outskirts of Sausalito, the Baker-Barry Tunnel serves as a one-way shot out to the Pacific Ocean. On your way to the coast, the hilly roads are lined with abandoned U.S. Army barracks juxtaposed against the natural beauty of the Marin Headlands. Atop the hill, overlooking the California coast, resides the Marine Mammal Center, directly in the center of the former Nike missile site at Fort Cronkhite.
On an unseasonably warm autumn morning, Mammal Center founders Patricia Arrigoni, Lloyd Smalley and Paul Maxwell take a tour of the facility they helped bring into being.
New book about the Marine Mammal Center
The story of the center’s founding is back in the spotlight this year, as Pat Arrigoni’s latest book, The Marine Mammal Center: How It All Began, brings renewed interest to one of the leading marine mammal research and education centers in the world.
Arrigoni published her book last March and spent the remainder of the year attending book signings at the center and around Marin.
The book came to being thanks in part to the author’s penchant for immaculate record keeping—in 2009, while preparing for the opening of the MMC’s new $33 million facility, Smalley and Maxwell joined Arrigoni in combing through her vast trove of mammal center history. And that’s when the trio realized the significance of their story and the need to share it.
“We went through it and said, ‘Wow this is really an interesting story about people, history and the evolution of an environmental organization that took hold over a 39-year period,'” Maxwell, says. “[It] developed into something very respectable. It was even more amazing when we thought about how it developed with the people—people sort of came out of the woodwork when [we] needed them. And [they were] usually multi-talented [i.e. a lawyer who was also a biologist].
“And if they weren’t,” laughs Maxwell, “they would be by the end of it.”
•••••
Maxwell, Arrigoni and Smalley first joined forces back in the 1960s while working together at the Louise A. Boyd Natural Science Museum in San Rafael, now known as WildCare. While the Boyd Science Museum was not an animal rescue/rehabilitation center, as WildCare is today, people would occasionally send injured or orphaned animals to the museum for care. In 1969, a young California sea lion was shipped to the museum; she was dubbed Alice Parsons by Smalley, who took the name from a shipping document mistakenly given to him by the airport clerk (for the human remains of one Alice Parsons). Alice was an instant hit at the museum; a charismatic favorite to staff and visitors. But it was Alice’s short life that earned the attention of Maxwell, Arrigoni and Smalley. The seemingly healthy sea lion died quite unexpectedly—and left everyone questioning the cause. It was not uncommon for young marine animals to die at an early age in captivity. Yet, other sea lions had lived for up to 20 years at some institutions. At the time, there was no baseline of information collected on marine mammals in captivity—no studies on the variables that resulted in either early death or long life. Alice’s demise remained a mystery, and precipitated an interest in research at the museum. The museum members reached out to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which had just published a book called Behavior and Physiology of Pinnipeds.
After their encounter with Alice (and thanks to a collaboration with SRI) research began to build up and early versions of rescue teams began to form at the Boyd Museum. Many more marine mammals passed through the doors—and Arrigoni, Smalley and Maxwell’s knowledge and admiration of the warm-blooded sea creatures grew.
Time passed. Maxwell went on to work at the San Francisco Zoo; Arrigoni pursued a career in journalism; Smalley left the museum as well, looking for his next adventure.
But in the years following Smalley couldn’t suppress his fascination with marine mammals. He recalls one day in the early ’70s, while reminiscing about his fondest memories at the Boyd Museum, he confided in his wife that what he missed most was working with the marine mammals. She looked straight at him and said, “Well then, start your own center.”
And that’s just what he did.
Smalley drafted a proposal to create a “cooperative wildlife rehabilitation center” and called Maxwell and Arrigoni to set up a team to bring this dream to life. After years of proposal writing, letters to county supervisors, congressional representatives and senators, and seeking grants and donations—the Marine Mammal Center opened in 1975.
Today, the Marine Mammal Center (MMC) is a nonprofit that serves as a central location for the rescue, rehabilitation and release of sick or injured marine mammals. It established a stranding network over 600 miles along the California coast from San Luis Obispo up into Sonoma County. The MMC is a hospital facility, not a home. The goal of the center is to return the animals to their original habitats. The center was one of the first places to record and develop a baseline of research for understanding marine mammals. It has over 24 years of deep-freeze tissue samples that scientists from all around the world utilize. Over their 39 years, Arrigoni estimates 15,000 volunteers have donated time and efforts to the center. Some volunteers have remained at the center for decades. Current Executive Director Jeff Boehm first walked through the building as a volunteer while still in high school.
“It’s about the only place [where] people who seriously enjoy animals can go and actually work with seals, sea lions and scientists. [They can work] without getting a four-year degree and having to come in as an intern,” Maxwell says. “There are an incredible number of people who’ve gone onto careers who started as volunteers. One of the fascinating parts about [the Marine Mammal Center] is the people—and the other fascinating part about it is where it is.”
The center sits on a piece of land just opposite of the Pacific Ocean with direct access to the coastline, an ideal location for rescue and release runs. Maxwell saw the site early on while still at the Boyd Museum, during preliminary marine mammal rescue and releases.
“When we were out here, we got to know the U.S. Army people really well, and they were a big help,” Maxwell says. “We didn’t think much about it as the Nike missile site, [but more as] the perfect set up: it’s structurally sound, it’s got a lot of cement [already available] and it’s right next to the ocean to turn the animals loose. We just assumed we could go in and do it.
“And when I think about it now,” Maxwell laughs…
“Nobody could ever pull it off now!” Arrigoni interrupts.
•••••
In 2009, the Marine Mammal Center reopened with a new facility. The renovation was a four-year long and $32 million project that has gave the center the capacity to care for over 1,700 animals in its first year. It’s a staggering increase compared to the six animals it cared for during its first year open in 1975.
A mass stranding in 2009 contributed to the heightened increase of animal intake (compared to the yearly average of about 500-600 animals), and also emphasized the need for a Marine Mammal Center.
This month, the center is preparing to open a sister facility in Kona, Hawaii. The center teamed up with the Hawaii Wildlife Fund to raise $3.2 million to build Ke Kai Ola (“The Healing Sea”) a Hawaiian monk seal healthcare facility. The seal population in Hawaii has dwindled, with only 1,100 remaining in the wild. The population continues to decline at a 4 percent rate each year.
‘Scoggins’ was admitted to the Marine Mammal Center on Dec. 26; the 165 pound male is suffering from domoic acid toxicity—which occurs when sea lions eat small fish containing toxic levels of algae. Photo by Julie Vader.
“[At this point] literally every individual animal counts,” Jim Oswald, former communications manager at the MMC said recently. “This facility is the next arm of the Marine Mammal Center-it’s really a dream ultimately of [our] mission, which is to help all animals whether they’re threatened, endangered or not.”
Although the Marine Mammal Center doesn’t have direct experience with the Hawaiian monk seal, its physiology is very similar to that of the elephant seal, an animal the center has an extensive background working with complete with complied research. Oswald indicated that MMC’s history with the elephant seal allows the center a promising success rate while working with the Hawaiian monk seal.
With the Hawaii hospital’s funding all in place, they are hoping to complete construction by the end of January. Ke Kai Ola already took in its first patient in early October (a Hawaiian monk seal who playfully nipped at some tri-athletes). The center rescued and relocated the animal to the outer southwest region of Kauai.
Education remains a heavy focus for the center across the Pacific Ocean at its new facility. The center hopes to create “community engagement” and understanding like it has in its California branch. “This is an endangered mammal that has nowhere else to go. So, [community understanding and educating] will be a huge focus as we move forward,” Oswald says.
In addition to the grand opening of the Hawaii hospital, MMC just refreshed its long-range plan.
MMC Director Boehm says the center is “well poised” for the 21st century.
“We have our range, 600 miles in California, treating animals here,” says Boehm. “But now, with the water just started running in our facility on the Big Island over in Kona, we’ve got a new fresh strategy in our education division—it’s a main focus.”
Boehm also says a refocus on its funding streams is on the horizon.
“As a nonprofit, we are seriously looking at how we bring revenue into our operation,” he says. “Eighty-five percent is classic fundraising; we are exploring how to bring that [number] down, to decrease the reliance on funding.”
Would a Marine Mammal Center have flourished anywhere but Marin? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Boehm cites the majority of Marin’s residents with a natural inclination to be “good stewards of the environment.” And Arrigoni, Maxwell and Smalley, meanwhile, continue to visit the site regularly—attending fundraisers and retelling their story to the next generation of MMC volunteers.
“It’s amazing how long [volunteers] last,” says Maxwell, who himself has returned on occasion as a volunteer docent. “That’s the thing—you just get hooked on it.”
“I don’t want to see that you can cry on cue—I just want to know that you can look like a person checking into a fucking hotel.” Ann Brebner laughs as she describes the gravest mistake nascent actors commit during auditions.
To label Brebner an instrumental force in Marin’s film and theater scene is to undermine the breadth of her work. Soft-spoken with a warm New Zealand accent and a backing of innumerable accomplishments, it’s hard to avoid hanging onto each word Brebner delivers.
On a Monday afternoon in early November Brebner agrees to meet for tea and, after selecting a noncaffeinated option, we sit in front of the fire and she asks, “So what are we talking about today?”
Fair enough. Perhaps we are talking about Ann’s first entirely original play Dead Girl— she dropped the “The” from its title that very morning—or maybe her provincial and illustrious work at San Francisco’s Brebner Agency as a casting agent, where she commanded the local movie scene in the early ’60s and ’70s. Or we could have gathered to talk about her influential role in the acquisition and reopening, in 1999, of the historic art-deco era Rafael Theater—now known as the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center—where the popular Mill Valley Film Festival takes place. Maybe the topic of discussion is her 1961 contribution to the local theater scene with the establishment of the Marin Shakespeare Festival (planting the seeds of the Marin Shakespeare Company). But, really, the reason I’m sipping warm tea with the modest Ann on a chilly fall afternoon is to discuss all of the aforementioned milestones and more, that led to her recently being named the recipient of the Pacific Sun‘s Heroes of Marin Art and Culture Award. Clearly, she’s an overqualified recipient.
So how is it that a native New Zealander—who studied theater at the prestigious Old Vic in London—settles in Marin? We have her spontaneity to thank for that—and maybe her intuition, which she credits when deciding how to select the next step in any situation. And, of course, love.
Ann fell in love at the Old Vic with one of her professors, John Brebner, who had just spent a year studying at Stanford and had fallen in love with Sausalito during his time in the states. In 1952 they moved to Marin. “I knew no one in the country at all except for one man to whom I’d been married for a week!” Brebner recalls.
Risk-taking is something that’s worked for her and Marin’s art and culture has certainly swelled thanks to her decision to call Marin home. With a stream of credits behind her, don’t expect Brebner to slow down anytime soon. To the concerned folks who question her pace of work and ask when she’ll find the time to retire she replies, “Huh? Why?”
Yes, there is still more Brebner hopes to tackle. She is currently writing her second entirely original play—which, like Dead Girl, stems from a dream she had. The four-generational play’s current working title is Shoes (that’s subject to change she stresses). As for roles, Brebner’s tried them all. From screenwriting, directing and acting (she was the lead in an adaptation of The Curious Savage) to casting George Lucas’ first two films, discovering Danny Glover and earning a degree in abnormal psychology—there are few creative hats which Brebner hasn’t donned. So what does she like best?
“I think I like directing best,” Brebner muses. “Well, for one thing I know how to do it!”
Brebner enjoys the ability to create “a circumstance and feeling” for each individual audience. “Performances are repeated, but they are each slightly different because of the audience,” Brebner explains. “Their pressure points are different and their hearts have been assaulted by different things.”
And she’s responsible for bringing a whole lot more of those feelings to Marin audiences through the medium of film with the CFI’s purchase of the Rafael Theater, now an independent film mecca for the avid movie buff.
“It is very much the image that Mark [Fishkin] and I had,” Brebner says. “[The Rafael Film Center] is very much fulfilling that, and one of the best things for me is to sit there and hear people say, ‘This is our theater or this is my theater.’ And the other big thing about it is: It is easier to fund a film than it is to get it shown in a theater,” Ann explains.
“There are a hell of a lot of good films out there that are not being shown,” she says, pointing out that one of the hardest things for a burgeoning filmmaker is to find a venue for their work. “And we wanted to create a place where emerging filmmakers could get their work shown under ideal conditions. And that’s part of the program. It has now taken on its own life, and it is ours.”
Brebner celebrated her 90th birthday this August at Skywalker Ranch. With more than 180 guests in attendance, Brebner described the occasion as an event that was “one of a kind, one I will never, ever forget every detail of.” As she stares into the distance hugging her mug for warmth, her reflections are nearly tangible.
“It’s been a really interesting life. And the interesting thing about 90 is—somebody asked me what it felt like—and I didn’t answer, I said, ‘I have no idea what it feels like,'” Brebner explains. “But when I wrote to George [Lucas] saying thank you I said, ‘it feels sort of like kindergarten—you have no idea what the fuck is going to happen—none…'”
Brebner laughs and adds, “I mean you may die tomorrow, [or] you may be writing five more plays—and what encourages this is a secret of all creative work, which is being present in the moment because it may be all we have.
“It’s sort of intriguing—it’s very freeing. I don’t feel bound by anything much at all. And I’m lucky I continue to do what I want to do.”
Hero FYI
• Brebner is a senior peer counselor in the HOPE Program. Each week she visits clients who have fallen through the cracks or with no family left.
• The first film she cast was George Seaton’s The Pleasure of His Company starring Fred Astaire, Debbie Reynolds and Tab Hunter.
• Brebner received her acceptance letter for the Old Vic in London and to medical school on the same day. She chose the Old Vic, disappointing her father.
• Brebner is getting ready to start directing Riverbride, which came out of the AlterTheater’s writers’ lab. It will open at the end of January.
• The Brebner Agency cast hits like Bullit, Harold and Maude, THX-1138 and American Grafitti.
• Brebner helped sway the City of San Rafael to sell the Rafael Theater to the California Film Institute for $1.
After serving six years on the board of the North Coast Railroad Authority, Bernie Meyers has decided to end his tenure on the board. Meyers, a longtime critic of NCRA and its arrangement with the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, presented North Coast board members with a strongly worded 4,400-word position statement outlining his thoughts about the past, present and future direction at the rail agency.
After serving six years on the board of the North Coast Railroad Authority, Bernie Meyers has decided to end his tenure on the board.
Meyers, a longtime critic of NCRA and its arrangement with the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, presented North Coast board members with a strongly worded 4,400-word position statement outlining his thoughts about the past, present and future direction at the rail agency.
He also presented an extensive question-and-answer statement to board members that delineates his thoughts, mostly critical, on issues he says the rail agency has stumbled over in the past as well as faces in the future.
Meyers, a veteran of the Novato City Council who served as mayor of that town in 1995 and 2005, appeared before the Marin County Board of Supervisors this week, where he submitted copies of the position statement and the question-and-answer statement. The board acknowledged Meyers service on the rail agency with a commendation that states in part, “For six years Bernie carefully and thoroughly went through all aspects of NCRA’s budget looking out for taxpayers’ money and insisting on public review.”
That’s an understatement. It’s not unfair to characterize Meyers as a thorn in the side of the rail agency. His tenure on the board, especially in his last few years, was marked by strong criticism of the rail agency and its lease with Northwestern Pacific, an arrangement he has called “a sweetheart deal” with insufficient benefit to the public.
The supervisors will appoint another Marin resident to take Meyers’ seat on the rail agency board. Jerry Peters will remain on the board of the nine-member organization; he’s the second board member from Marin.
The California Legislature formed the North Coast Railroad Authority in 1989 as part of an effort to ensure continued viability of railroad transportation in the state. A companion bill passed both houses of the Legislature and would have provided funds to create rail transit on the proposed line, but Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed the legislation, leaving North Coast Railroad Authority as an unfunded mandate. It also left the NCRA with an idea for a railroad but no actual railroad. That didn’t make it easy to attract an operator to run actual freight.
After looking for a railroad operator, NCRA cut a deal with Northwestern Pacific in 2006. North Coast Railroad Authority agreed to a 25-year lease with Northwestern Pacific (NWP) that allows NWP to renew for up to 100 years. Meyers has called attention to the terms of the lease for years, especially the section covering payments to the rail agency: “NWP shall make annual lease payments in the amount of 20 percent of its net income, commencing the first year after NWP has generated positive net income in excess of $5 million.” Meyers says the lease arrangement lacks any meaningful oversight.
Meyers has continually called attention to the lease, which he says is lopsided in favor of Northwestern Pacific. He also points a questioning finger at the relationship between Northwestern Pacific and NCRA Executive Director Mitch Stogner. Meyers isn’t the only one who questions the relationship between the railroad authority and NWP. To start with, John Williams, the CEO of Northwestern Pacific, is a former executive director of NCRA. Doug Bosco, former congressman representing the North Coast, joined Williams as an investor and NWP legal counsel. Stogner worked for Bosco as an aide when Bosco was in Congress. No wrongdoing has been documented. But critics of the lease between NCRA and Northwestern Pacific still question whether the deal should have merited oversight.
Then there’s the AP story: Critics cite a 2001 piece that recounts how Gray Davis was in the governor’s office when the state funneled $60 million to reopen the Northwestern Pacific line. Shortly after the state decided to pour money into the effort, shippers, who stood the most to gain, contributed more than $60,000 to Davis’ campaign fund. Perhaps not wrongdoing—but critics say it’s an example of how influence works.
Critics also point out that in exchange for that $60 million, the rail guys agreed to produce an environmental report. Later, after two environmental groups sued, saying the EIR was inadequate, NCRA and NWP said they really didn’t have to produce an environmental report. Federal law regulates trains, they said, and trumps state environmental requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act. That case, after winding its way through the courts, is still active. A Marin Superior Court ruled in May that the two environmental groups, Friends of the Eel River and Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, have no standing on which to sue. The court also affirmed the doctrine that federal law supersedes state law when it comes to trains. The environmental groups have appealed.
The suit could have a major impact on the long-term success of Northwestern Pacific. The railroad currently runs a modest number of rail cars on 62 miles of track between Windsor and Napa County.
Northwestern Pacific says it wants to run from Samoa, near Arcata in the north part of the state, down through Marin and Novato and on to Schellville, where the line connects with the national freight rail system. The rail line serves mostly ranchers now, but critics say the real money is at Island Mountain in Trinity County. Between 1914 and 1930 substantial amounts of copper, silver and gold were mined there, and the area still has untold tons of valuable aggregate. Trains could haul that aggregate to market. Northwestern Pacific says it has no immediate intentions of extending its tracks north to tap Island Mountain riches, but critics just don’t believe the pronouncement. The environmental groups worry because the rail agency and NWP completed an EIR that investigated only the southern section of rail line and rehabilitating track and running trains to the north, to Island Mountain, would do severe environmental damage.
In leaving the board with his parting communications, Meyers criticized the way the North Coast Railroad Authority interacts with board members—or fails to interact. “The NCRA is run by two members of its staff, and they play their cards pretty close to their vests. The board has very little time in which to make a decision and insufficient input on which to make a decision.” As with many joint-powers agencies, the NCRA board has members that come and go. That leads to a staggered institutional memory. “As I leave the board, there are only three of us that have been there the six years that I have been there. One person on the board has been there only a few months. When I joined the board, what did I receive? A packet telling me everything that went on? No. I received the environmental consent decree [between the state and NCRA], and I received the lease. That’s it.” Meyers says an insufficient institutional memory at NCRA is a big reason why he produced the lengthy position statement as well as the question-and-answer statement.
Meyers says the time has come to leave the board after trying to make a concerted effort to produce change. “I think the NCRA should be a viable organization in charge of the shortline railroad. My being on the board didn’t seem to achieve that in the six years I was there, and certainly not in the last year or two or three. I can’t understand why another two years [the term of board members] in that position would get me any further.”
There’s always been tension between Marin and the counties to the north about differing methods of running a railroad agency and a railroad. The city of Novato sued over what it said was the inadequate environmental report because the report failed to take into account effects of running trains through town on the way to Napa County. The city and the rail guys settled after an agreement was reached about quiet zones.
The North Coast Railroad Authority needs a healthy dose of transparency, according to Meyers, a prescription not evident at the moment. In Meyers’ estimation, a poor NCRA attitude affects the public’s right to know in Marin about what happens at the rail agency. The board is supposed to hold rotating meetings in the four counties it represents. “It hasn’t met in Marin all year,” says Meyers, which shows you the disdain the board has for Marin County.”
In leaving the board, Meyers plants a suggestion of how to ensure that the arrangement between the railroad authority and Northwestern Pacific Railroad truly benefits the public—rather than just the rail guys as well as ranchers along the line who get their freight hauled. He calls on the NCRA board to ask a member of the Legislature, possibly and notably Marc Levine (who represents Marin) to ask the state Joint Legislative Audit Committee to look at NCRA and NWP and the rail line to determine if anything should change to better the public’s benefit.
An alternative, says Meyers, would be to ask for an outside independent and unbiased study “to tell [the board] if what they have set up here is fiscally prudent and whether it will redound to the public benefit or not.”
The questions-and-answer statement Meyers presented to the NCRA board and to Marin supervisors includes many other issues. Needless to say, other board members and officials at the railroad authority and NPW have views divergent from those of Meyers. Here’s a sampling of Meyers’ Q&A:
How do the lease terms compare with similar leases between state railroad entities and private operators?
Not favorably. Generally, others are for terms of between five and 20 years, with possible renewals if conditions are met. For example, a 2007 Ohio lease provides for 5-year renewals if various conditions are met, including a review of shipper satisfaction, safety, car loadings, track maintenance and financials. Then there are best practice provisions, energy efficiency provisions, and conflict-of-interest provisions.
Did NWP make some payments to NCRA besides those required by the lease?
Yes. In a side agreement to the lease, NWP agreed to pay $20,000 a month until such time as it would have to pay trackage fees under the lease, and NWP would get credit for these side agreement payments when it later was to make trackage payments. But NWP changed the agreement to end the monthly payments earlier. Later it turned the side agreement payments it had previously made into a receivable owed to it by NCRA. So over the last six years, NWP has paid about $30,000 in trackage fees to NCRA and is not paying anything now.
Was the line recently repaired?
Partially. It was rehabilitated from Lombard to Windsor, just north of Santa Rosa, about 62 miles. The work started in 2007 and was completed in 2010 (per NCRA) or 2011 (per NWP).
How much was paid for the rehab?
NCRA says it cost $68 million taxpayer dollars. Another $3 million was spent by NWP but most of that has been reimbursed with taxpayer funds.
Was the NWP money spent to cover work done after a public bidding process?
No. NWP was given a no-bid contract.
Was the NWP work completed in accordance with the initial contract price and timeframe?
No. The final cost was about three times the initial amount and instead of three months it took over a year.
Did the board audit the billing?
No. It is a sorry story. Don’t get me started.
Was that the last no-bid contract awarded to NWP?
No. NWP has been awarded a no-bid contract for the cleanup of toxics at the Ukiah Depot.
Is NCRA financially stable?
Looking at its finances, it appears to be near bankruptcy. The current budget can only be balanced by assuming that significant obligations will not be paid. Prior years’ budgets showed expenses well in excess of revenues. It has a long list of creditors with claims well in excess of NCRA’s yearly revenues.
Along the Miracle Mile in San Anselmo, there is a building glazed in bright white with redwoods etched into a stained-glass window that reaches nearly as high as its structured arches. Don’t let its lofty appearance deceive you. Although it may be one of the oldest businesses still operating in San Anselmo today, it is certainly not a business that draws in eager clients.
Monte’s Chapel of the Hills was established in 1932 on Bank Street. From there, Dominic Frank Monte and his family opened and operated the mortuary—which was in the bottom level of their home for its first five years—until it moved to its current location on Red Hill Avenue in 1937. A graduate of San Rafael High, Monte was one community minded mortician, serving as mayor and city councilman in San Anselmo while fronting his family’s business, where son Charlie and wife Alice pitched in.
The passing of Dominic in 1965 ushered in the next family-bred businessman—when the Montes’ son, 19-year old Charlie, took over. Today Monte’s Chapel of the Hills remains the only independent family-owned and operated mortuary in Marin. In Charlie’s time at the chapel, he arranged funerals for thousands of people—including a service for Grateful Dead lead singer Jerry Garcia, complete with such all-star attendees as Bob Dylan and Ken Kesey.
Charlie and his wife, Dee Dee, ran things until 2009 when they sold the business to longtime employee Edward J. Leon. (Charlie still owns the building and leases the property to Leon.)
The transition of ownership isn’t the only notable change Chapel of the Hills has seen in recent decades. The most prominent changes Leon has experienced during the past two decades are the differences in industry trends and his client’s wishes.
“Oh my God, I mean just cremations, we’re 90 percent in Marin,” says Leon. “We still do a lot of traditional work, but people’s wishes are different. People like party planning now, so we’re more like event coordinators. You have to go with the times and offer what people want.”
The new wave of ceremonies tends to focus on celebrations of life including videos, sea scatterings and party planning—complete with food, balloons and poster boards. Leon also attributes another major change in the business to the mobility of clients. “Marin is very transitional—we’re dealing with a lot of people who are new to Marin,” he says. “We’ve had our base clients who were born and raised here and never left. But now, we’re doing a lot of shipping, we’ll ship people to other states.”
Chapel of the Hills has picked up another new project: The sherriff runs the coroner’s office out of its location. The division is complete with a storage facility that can hold up to 32 people and a designated autopsy room. Leon reported about “80 percent of their case load” remains on site and eventually become clients for Chapel of the Hills.
In June, Richard Ramirez, “The Night Stalker,” was stored on site after the serial-killing San Quentin inmate died from complication from lymphoma at Marin General. The storing brought some unexpected attention to the Chapel.
“It was kind of hush-hush. We had people calling and some weird people showed up at the office here looking for him. Some of his prison pen pals,” said Leon.
With over two decades invested into this Marin homegrown business, Leon is eager to continue growth for Chapel of the Hills. His hopes for the future are to complete some renovations, eventually purchase the land from the Monte family and possibly open up a second location that would specialize as the first pet cremation service in the county.
Leon maintains the family-owned business atmosphere by remaining accessible to the community. But if you see Leon around town, don’t ask him the usual question: “Do the bodies stink?”
Leon will tell you what he tells everybody. “Live people stink too.”
Olivia X was shopping at a Mill Valley clothing store to escape the late-June heat when she ran into an acquaintance she hadn’t seen in a long time.
Her old friend gushed over her appearance and was eager to catch up. After commenting on how well “put together” Olivia seemed, her friend—we’ll call her Madam Z—soon steered the conversation in a perplexing direction. In hushed tones Madam Z told Olivia, “There’s this thing I’d like to invite you to; it’s like an elite group of women.”
High off the abundance of streaming compliments, Olivia was flattered and intrigued. She and Madam Z traveled in similar circles—a community of creative, “feather-leather” Burning Man-type folk. She decided to give her friend the benefit of the doubt and meet up a few days later for a chat.
Initially there was no mention of money. The chat focused on sisterhood, abundance and the empowerment of women. But this was no informal “chat.” Olivia and Madam Z were joined on a conference call with a woman in Australia who appeared to hold a venerated position in the “elite group”or “Women’s Wisdom Circle,” as it was called. The woman on the other end of the line was known in Circle as “the Dessert.” After carefully listening and choosing her words wisely, Olivia X thanked the Dessert for her time and her friend for the invitation, and went home to read the documents she was given following the meeting—Women’s Wisdom Circle “guidelines” that outlined Circle in its entirety.
“Don’t invite anyone else [to join the group] right nowyou’ll probably be excited, but just wait,” Olivia was told as she and Madam Z parted ways.
After diving into research on the Internet, phoning friends and re-reading Circle’s guidelines, Olivia’s suspicions grew and eventually she reached out to the Pacific Sun with her concerns that the Circle may not be shaping up as it purports to be—in fact, Olivia wondered if a more descriptive form was that of a pyramid.
To some, the gifting circle is as abundant as a blooming lotus—to others it’s a bird’s-eye view to a pyramid.
Women’s “gifting” circles have surfaced recently throughout Marin and beyond. They consist of women who have “gifted” $5,000 to gain entrance into what members describe as a rewarding world of sisterhood and abundance. There is a hierarchy of members in each circle, with each level named for a serving in a four-course meal. At the top is the Dessert, below her are two Entrees, below them are four Salads and at the bottom are the eight newest members—the Appetizers. It is the Appetizers who are expected to bring $5,000 to the gifting circle dinner party. Once all eight Appetizers pony up, the Dessert receives the $40,000—she has, in theory, worked her way up from being herself an Appetizer, full of patience, and is ready to receive her gift.
Once a circle is complete, meaning the Dessert has received her gift, the group splits and the two Entrees elevate to become the Dessert of their respective groupsand to await the bounty of eight new Appetizers.
The term “circle” shies away from the striking visual associated with pyramid schemes, but whether its shape is similar or not, critics of gifting circles say they share more in common with pyramids than simply meets the eye.
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Gifting circles like the one Olivia encountered are shrouded in secrecy and target a very Marin-type demographic—the young New Age community. Circle “meetings” are often conducted with a 21st century slant: All gatherings are held via a weekly conference call. While a majority of initial “invitations” occur through personal meetings, other members of the circle may be located across continents—and conference calls allow for much-desired anonymity within the groups. While such concepts as “sisterhood” are promoted to new members, the weekly conference calls can be more businesslike—focusing on members’ progress in finding new members. Conference calls may also focus on how the circle is “moving forward” and when the dessert will receive her gifts of abundance—all 40,000 of them. Sometimes a tarot card is drawn and the woman who draws the card will discuss her feelings around it and how it relates to other members.
The first rule of Circle is: you do not talk about Circle. The second rule of Circle is: you DO NOT talk about Circle. Many variations of Circle guidelines exist. One particular set of guidelines—which was forwarded last month to the Pacific Sun—stresses that prospective members honor its privacy: “We ask that they not talk about the circles to anyone, until they have come into the circle and received training about how to invite people to the circle. This is because there is a general misunderstanding about the legality of the circles, and we want to avoid people’s judgments and projections. It is also because there are certain words we can use in talking about the circles that keep them legal, and most people without training will use words that might make the circles illegal.”
The exclusivity of a circle fuels its foundation and its female-only structure attracts eager women hungry for spiritual growth, abundance, sisterhood and, well, money. Circle’s shaky legality is handled by calling it a “gifting circle,” where each member “gifts” $5,000 to the top dog in order to enter and participate.
But any situation in which large sums of money are being funneled up an increasingly narrow social hierarchy is going to have to deal with questions of legality.
Defenders of Circle’s pyramid of prosperity say there’s nothing shady about it. They say the sisterhood the women gain through the process is priceless and considered the real reward; the $40,000 at the end—if you make it to Dessert—is just an added “gift.”
But Circle can be a tight-knit community. More than ready to protect the money they’ve already invested, very few Salads, Entrees and Desserts have come forward to discuss the secrecy around Circle.
****
What Olivia X found most disturbing is that Circle comes couched in New Age terminology.
“I had a woman tell me that the reason I didn’t want to be involved [in Circle] is because I wasn’t ready to receive that much abundance in my life and that I had issues and I had trust issues,” says Olivia. “It’s just sucking in a lot of people who are more naive than I am for one reason or another.” Olivia says she came forward to warn women—especially Marin women—who may be particularly susceptible to Circle’s promises of money, friendship and New Age fulfillment.
According to the Women’s Wisdom Circle guidelines that Olivia was given, the gifting process is legal due to a gifting statement each “participant” must fill out and sign in order to join. The gifting statement clarifies intentions and protects the Dessert from the possibility of a quick change of heart “I waive any and all rights to civil or criminal remedies against the recipient of my gift,” the statement declares. In addition to the required gifting statement, other subjects outlined in Circle’s documentation include: privacy guidelines, who to invite, who not to invite, responding to standard questions (i.e.: legality) and “magic words.”
Some of the specific “words” that the guidelines say put Circle on shaky legal ground when members use them include: investment, payment, recruit, signup, profits, dividends, return, assured, guarantee and payout.
The guidelines instead encourage more proactive-sounding words such as: receive, financial empowerment, participation, opportunity, support and sponsor.
Also, Appetizers must never send their “gift” through the U.S. mail.
The guidelines provide Appetizers with recommendations for fundraising the initial $5,000 gift: Have a garage sale and part with heirlooms, sell your car (“remember, in a relatively short period of time it can be replaced by a new one!”), ask your parents for an advance on your inheritance, apply for a credit card, find an “angel” to gift you the money, ask five friends to lend you $1,000, get a second job, paint your neighbor’s house, tutor your neighbors’ kids and lastly—meditate and pray.
Oh, and if you run into any troubles along the way—Circle sisters don’t want to hear about it. “During this living workshop we will all experience our blocks, issues, fears, patterns, etc.,” say the guidelines. “When you discover that you have a fear or issue, it is your responsibility to work on that outside of the circle. You can share about your process, as long as it is in a positive light.”
Alexis Neely says that for some women ‘whether or not they receive back their investment—it’s worth it.’
Alexis Neely is a Colorado lawyer who counts herself among the New Age community and is very familiar with gifting circles, though she herself is not a member. She expresses skepticism about the outlining diction of this particular Marin circle’s guidelines.
“That does not sound right,” Neely says about the guidelines Olivia was given. “My understanding is that you work on it in the Circle with the women. The women I have talked to who have benefited from it have worked through some clear issues. I can see shifts in them. These are women who had massive abundance issues, massive scarcity issues. And its not because they’d received any money, they had not yet received any money. But they had tapped into and opened a portal, which I talk about [in my blog] happening when you make the gift, but beyond that they had received the emotional support necessary.”
Circle frames women as being part of a western culture that leaves them disenfranchised. “Giving, supporting and nurturing are all qualities expressed through feminine nature,” say the guidelines. “In the history of our culture, women often find themselves giving far more than they receive in every day life.”
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The “gifting” structure’s odds of sustainability are slim. The math boils down to this: Eighty-eight percent of women who participate by gifting the $5,000 will never receive anything as a Dessert. The odds look even more dismal when one considers that the difficulties of finding eight new women grows exponentially with each new circle. After the 10th generation, the model’s number of supposed “participants” soars past Earth’s population.
A well-known member in the Bay Area New Age community, who desires to remain anonymous and who we’ll call “Orion,” describes Circle as a “social virus” and says its sustainability is already at a tipping point.
“Soon enough it’s going to collapse, it’s already collapsing,” says Orion. “Were already reaching a critical mass of the community. People are being asked [to join] three to four times a week. As a result, these circles are going to stagnate or infect other communities. But what’s going to happen next? There are groups of people who’ve started to think about that and how to help the community heal from this drain and epidemic and the social impact it’s had.”
Orion elaborates on what he sees as Circle’s target audience: “These Circles target neo-pagan tribal-hippies. The spiritual revival, the burner culture. What I’ve heard, they are generally much younger.”
He seems to recall a similar “epidemic” going around Marin about eight years ago.
“There is a resurgence every eight to 10 years because every eight to 10 years there is a whole new crop of women with more disposable income and they are going to these [Burning Man style] festivals.”
He says the circles attract women who are transient.
“They are very gypsy-like; they don’t stay [in one place], they can make a fair amount of money by trimming [marijuana] in the fall and doing odd jobs and they don’t spend a lot. They are staying at this place or that place. All they need to do is eat, essentially.”
Orion says the largest “gift” he’s heard of someone walking away with is $80,000. But the Circle doesn’t end with the gift, Orion explains, hierarchies within the Circle and community are apparent. “There are definitely cliques, absolutely. When people tell stories [about Circle] that’s one of the main recurring themes.”
He describes New Age gatherings where the attendees congregate on different sides of the room-based on who’s in a Circle and who isn’t. He says his criticism doesn’t stem from a personal vendetta, but from concerns about the New Age community as a whole.
“Mainly my stake in [gifting circles] is wanting the [New Age] community to survive and what I’m seeing is that the very structure of the Circle—well, they’re not really like circles they are more like pyramids—the very structure of these pyramids is causing a great deal of harm, mostly it’s a social impact. It’s the kind of impact you don’t really see when you’re in the Circle. In the Circle you see that you’re with all these wonderful women and you’re creating abundance with each other, but no one is asking the question: At what cost?”
The fate of women’s gifting circles in Marin remains uncertain. In the meantime, how does it continue? Orion explains:
“The women who speak highly of the Circle—slash pyramid—they find that they get really good coaching, a lot about money. As soon as she has any kind of issue around losing her gift, she’s right to be coached about it. It provides for a perfect reason to give money and not want it back—and if anyone wants it back, she is coached around her attachment toward money.”
Orion describes it as the perfect plan—or, rather, “the perfect scam.”
“Here give $5,000, it’s a gift and if you start complaining that you won’t get the $5,000 back then you obviously need to grow a little bit so you’re no longer attached to this money,” he says, about the circular logic of the groups.
Facebook debates about gifting circles have been anything but placid. Olivia X recalls a conversation streaming on Orion’s wall for weeks in which a man who wanted to alert the authorities about gifting circles was bombarded by circle defenders with all sorts of threats—including going to the police and falsely accusing him of child abuse.
“That is so heartbreaking, I started crying when I saw that,” says Olivia. “That’s when I decided to be anonymous. And, that’s when I decided to go to a newspaper, this is ridiculous—this is out of control.”
****
Margo Rohrbacher, public information officer for the San Rafael Police Department, says she hasn’t heard any reports of women’s gifting circles going on in Marin and said she couldn’t comment on where one might stand legally without specifics to a case. Last week a U.S. district judge had another kind of “gift” for two women from Guilford, Conn., who were convicted for leading their own Appetizer-through-Dessert “gifting table.” Donna Bello, 57, was sentenced to six years in prison and her accomplice, Jill Platt, 65, to four years on felonies of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the IRS and filing false tax returns.
The questions around gifting circles’ legality, however, are almost secondary among criticisms levied within New Age groups, where the concern has more to do with the effect the circles are having on the community itself.
One former Entrée to speak out about her experience in a circle is blogger Lindsey Vona, who wrote:
“This article is in no way meant to create separation or cause harm to any groups or individuals. I am not in any way against acts of true giving or circles of sisterhood. The purpose of this post is to provide education to the public on the currently unsustainable structure of this particular ‘Gifting Culture,’ so that people can feel supported in making informed decisions.
“Because much of the language around this is either shrouded in secrecy or New Age thought, this post may come off as one-sided; however it is intended to cut through the conditioning and get right to the heart of what is happening.” (Vona declined an interview with the Sun, but you can read more of Vona’s firsthand experience at www.realitysandwich.com/womens_circle_pyramid.)
According to the Marin Women’s Circle guidelines, Circle first saw the light of day nearly three decades ago, launched by a small group of women in Canada in the early 1980s. As for Circle hitting Marin’s scene, it appears it made its debut about a year to a year and half ago. In addition to Marin, gifting circles have been reported in Colorado, Arizona, Santa Cruz and other parts of northern California.
Alexis Neely is no stranger to Circle etiquette. Despite her roots in law, Neely is a vibrant part of the Colorado New Age community and has herself been invited multiple times to join Circle. Many have sought her help and advice due to her legal background and she decided to offer her viewpoints though a blog post. Neely says her goal is to provide an outline of information that allows women to make an informed choice if Circle is right for them.
After interviewing members of Circle for her blog post she noted, “What I’m experiencing when I speak to them is that there is a real opportunity for them to find a gift in the decision they make. And to shift from the victim perspective to a place of real empowered choice. And when they do, whether or not they receive back their investment—it’s worth it.
“Some of the circles are pure money plays and they’re Ponzi schemes and they’re pyramids—they’re nothing more than what people say about them.”
After seeing both sides of Circle’s outcome, however, Neely offers her blog as a place for women to consult “a balanced view and to help women identify if it is right for them.” Despite multiple invitations Alexis has declined all invitations into Circle as she does not feel it’s the right fit for her.
With the concept of abundance at its core, Neely defined her take on it: “I don’t know what abundance means to everybody, but to me it means knowing without a shadow of a doubt that there is enough for everyone. There is no lack or limitation. The underlying feeling that there is enough.”
Whether the New Age community has seen enough Circle, however, isn’t yet abundantly clear.
The countdown always started at 7pm. That was when I had an hour until closing and then T-minus 30 minutes until I locked the doors and went on my way home. The holidays had just ended and the last rays of daylight were fading, leaving my co-worker and me in a darkened ghost town of retail space at the Village for the next 90 minutes.
We spent the remaining time dividing up the tables and eliminating any outliers—making sure to fluff and touch each stack jeans and tops. We saw maybe four people pass by our doors in those 40 minutes, all of whom were mall employees, cherishing each step toward their cars—and freedom. We were in the home stretch, so I decided to shut down one of our registers.
It’s 7:50pm. Who needs pants at 7:50pm? A woman wanders in and my sales associate quickly greets her, but continues folding the zone I assigned her. As I’m counting the nickels in my register my mind starts to stray: Is she seriously getting that sweater from the bottom of that pile? Is she going for a denim wall? Crap. I leave my count behind and make a beeline toward the customer. She now has two styles of jeans in her hand in two different sizes—clearly a newb. I ask to start her a fitting room and she obliges kindly and smiles.
At this point in the evening, I start to become a human again. I can feel the comfort of the leather seat of my car, the warmth of my brand new sherpa-lined blanket and the fruity varietal taste of my cabernet sauvignon eagerly awaiting the arrival of my droughty palate. It’s five till eight and the only way you can convince me to care that you need pants is by running into my store pantless whilst screaming. I combat my selfish compulsion to focus on my wind-down and keep a strong game face.
She’s been in there a while. I’ve already locked the door and hit the music. I see my sales associate check in on her and remove some styles of jeans from her room. I approach her fitting room in hopes to politely usher her out and get what we both need from this experience—her: pants; me: a ticket home. “How are you doing in there? Do you need any other sizes? Is there anything I can clear out of there for you?”
She opens the curtain with an unassuming grin. “I’m doing all right. I don’t think any of the styles worked for me,” she says.
Catch me on my A game and I’m a denim god. I can fit any person, any time—and I will find you pants that you dream about all night and can’t wait to wake up and put on in the morning. Catch me five minutes after closing: “Aw that’s too bad. Did you want help finding a certain style?”
“No, no,” she reassures me.
Thank God, I think.
“It’s just one of those days. What’s your name by the way?” she asks.
The blood rushes to my head and I know what’s happening. All I can think is: Crap. I already took off my name tag. My mind starts going down the list: Did we greet her? Yes. Did we ask her name? No. Did we use open-ended questions? No. Did we give our names? Nope. Did we offer her multiple leg openings? Not a chance. Did we bring at least three items, including accessories to the fitting room? No way.
It’s now or never and I’ve got to salvage what I can.
“My name’s Stephanie, what’s your name?” I ask.
Her name was etched into my mind for the next 30 days, but then was effectively forgotten: She was a secret shopper. We’ll call her Sally.
“My name is Sally,” she says.
I smile and carefully examine her fitting room while she’s speaking. I switch gears, “OH MY GOSH! You tried on the new skinnies and didn’t love them?? How is that even possible, you’ve got to see them with this brand new wedge we just got in—it will change you life.”
Before she can speak, I strut over to the shoe display and demand her size. I send my associate to grab her size and give her the look. She’s confused and wants to go home, but not me, we’ve got T-minus 30 minutes to save our asses.
Sally and I banter back and forth about how to wear different types of denim while I hand her all of my favorite belts from our belt bar. We discuss where she wants to wear her new pair of jeans, her body type, struggles she’s faced in the past when finding a pair of pants and where she works—her day-to-day job.
From what I can tell, Sally is eating it up. While I ushered her back into the fitting room, I whisper Sally’s true identity to my sales associate. We double-team her, shower her in jewels and compliments. We show her five different ways to wear a scarf. Our two favorite tops. She even tries to recruit us as sellers for her employer. By the end of our last-minute uphill battle, Sally is covered in jewelry, holding belts and donning our latest heels. She thanks us for our help and commends us on how helpful we are at styling and on our extensive breadth of product knowledge.
Although Sally decided not to make a purchase (duh, she’s a secret shopper) I felt great about the turn-around and happily went home to my well-deserved glass of wine and fuzzy sherpa blanket.
•••••
It didn’t even take 24 hours before I heard about Sally. I opened the next morning at 9am. Just as I turned off the alarm and set my keys down on the desk, the telephone rings. It’s my district manager.
“Hi Steph, how was last night?” she coyly asks.
I tell her all about our perfect close, that we made our store goal for the day and the sweet tale of Sally, a “customer” who we gave some confidence to after helping her find a fit she was planning on coming back to purchase. I even joke about how she tried to recruit us.
My district manager’s voice doesn’t change, “Yes, I heard.” Pause. In fact, it’s the longest pause in history. “We sent Sally in, she was a secret shopper. You guys got secret shopped last night.”
Um, duh I’m aware—I wasn’t born yesterday. I’d been working at this establishment for over half a decade, but the eerie disdain in her voice left me starting to feel queasy and I started to regret only drinking coffee for breakfast. My nerves started to race as she went on to explain that although Sally raved about us, my associate and I failed to hit the marks at the correct times on the checklist.
Here it comes.
Sally was the worst kind of secret shopper. She wasn’t sent in by a third party and she certainly wasn’t a stranger. Sally was a covert confidant of my boss’ boss’ boss. She had been interviewing with the company and was considering taking a position with corporate. She came into our store to observe our service and familiarize with our product firsthand.
Everyone in the break room heard about Sally—incidents like this led to a new companywide policy: Shortly after World War Sally, the company began regularly utilizing secret shoppers.
I certainly wasn’t the first person to fail a secret shop and I won’t be the last. Sally left smiling (though she never took the job) and I stayed—with my shot at that year’s 10-cent pay raise surely trampled and gone.
Share your secrets with Stephanie at sp*****@********un.com.
Cyra McFadden’s ‘The Serial,’ which originally ran in the Pacific Sun, is out in e-form—but Kate and Harvey still haven’t found their mojo…
The Serial
Once, ten years ago, Marin County had been something they could regard with a mixture of wistfulness and detachment through the haze of smoke at the Buena Vista on Sunday mornings while they drank aquavit and decided where to go for dim sum.
Now they lived in Mill Valley. Not in the house they had in mind when they moved, though: the old canyon house with the view of Mount Tam, the leaded windows, the decks and the immutable Marin ambiance—a sunny blend of affluence, redwoods, bohemianism and the golden oak furniture bought for a song on McAllisterStreet…
And so begins Cyra McFadden’s New York Times best-seller The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County, the saga of Kate and Harvey Holroyd and their quest for the perfectly mellow, perfectly hip, perfectly go-with-the-flow life in Marin, circa 1976.
The novel, originally published that year as a weekly, serialized column in the Pacific Sun, follows the Holroyds through disastrous attempts at an open relationship, consciousness-raising groups, primal therapy and even through drama over an asparagus steamer. Insert the words “Pilates,” “kombucha,” “Prius” and “BOB jogging stroller” and the novel could be a contemporary satire of the affluent self-improvement community that Marin was, is and likely will be into the future.
It’s this timeless aspect of the book—and Marin—that British e-book publishing company Apostrophe Books is counting on. Late last year, Apostrophe marked the 35th anniversary of The Serial by releasing the quintessential ‘70s book in the quintessential 21st century book format. And, yes, the e-edition still features the immortal illustrations of former Pacific Sun artistic director Tom Cervenak.
Apostrophe is banking on the idea that reading about bourgeois egocentric Americans never goes out of style.
Yet prior to the release of McFadden’s original, such a genre had been relatively untapped.
So in the I’m OK—You’re OK days of the Me Decade, the book provided, for many, an early look into the burgeoning culture of privileged Marinites and their idiosyncratic lifestyles—a glimpse through the peacock feathers at a decadence that many flaunted openly and self-righteously.
And was ripe for biting satire.As it often happens in the book world, McFadden happened to be the right kind of writer, living in the right place at the right time.
“It wasn’t so much my friends or the events in my friends’ lives that I made notes about or that seeped into The Serial, it was more bits of overheard conversation. I eavesdrop a lot,” says McFadden at a downtown San Rafael cafe. “I didn’t use it in the book but I remember I heard someone say earnestly to someone else at the next table: ‘You’ve just gotta be you because if you’re not gonna be you, who is going to be?’ And I was just stunned—that kind of vaporous language was floating around Marin all over the place.
“The eye-rolling Marin-speak of the day certainly influenced the content of The Serial, but it was young San Francisco writer Armistead Maupin who first penned “The Serial” in the Pacific Sun’s short-lived S.F. edition—a fictionalized saga of Marina-neighborhood hipsters, which would soon open the door for McFadden’s Marin skewering. After impressing Sun editors with a few humor pieces, the Mill Valley mom was approached to fill the void left when the Sun pulled out of San Francisco and Maupin moved his short-lived narrative to the San Francisco Chronicle (where it would go on to fame as Tales of the City).
McFadden agreed to write a single installment, covering “A Week in the Life of Marin County,” to test the waters. It was an overnight success and “The Serial” continued throughout the year—until a publishing house came calling and her Sun column was novelized as The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County.
Of course no column can exist without content and McFadden was sitting on a velvet-lined gold mine when it came to available material for a send-up of Marin. The entire human potential movement of 1970s Marin could have been a novel in itself. Add to that Rolfing sessions, EST forums, macrame, waterbeds, New-Age commitment ceremonies inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and the works of Federico García Lorca—the comic possibilities were practically endless. (“I remember Heliotrope University, which had courses like participatory salad making,” recalls McFadden.)
••••THOUGH THE BOOK was well received around the country and abroad (the book has been translated into Dutch and rumored to be bootlegged into Japanese), The Serial was no laughing matter for many in Marin. McFadden was the target of resentment and harassment from locals who felt that the column poked too much fun at their attempts to shape a new existence in the post-Vietnam era.
At one point, McFadden unlisted her telephone number because of threatening calls. Her home was pelted with eggs. She was even “banned” from local businesses and received scores of letters admonishing her for her scathing “value judgments.” Today McFadden, 75, has a sense of self-reflective humor about her Serial days—though she admits that the animosity was difficult to cope with at the time.
“Rightly, they felt that I was poking fun at something they took very seriously and that was very important to them,” says McFadden, who returned to Marin 15 years ago after leaving Mill Valley for stints in San Francisco, New York and London. “I should have anticipated that reaction. I was so new and green, really, as a writer. I had some publication credits, but I’d never stuck my thumb into the waters locally quite like that and—oh man! It was just astonishing!”
The column, says McFadden, caused Marin to step back and deeply reflect upon, well, itself.
“The IJ ran a big series about ‘what Marin means to me,’” says McFadden. “And people wrote about picnics on the beach with their little rosy-cheeked children.”
There was a lot of “love it or leave it,” she says.
“My biggest disappointment was that, at one point, Mill Valley was building a new sewage treatment plant and somebody wrote a letter to the Mill Valley Record suggesting that it be named for me,” McFadden says. “I would have loved that!”
A movie version of The Serial (starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld!) and a 1978 NBC documentary about Marin did little to keep McFadden’s critics at bay. The NBC film—titled I Want It All Now—featured an interview with McFadden and portrayed Marin residents as wealthy, self-obsessed, overly indulgent narcissists. In perhaps the documentary’s most infamous segment, a woman lies on a table while a pair of nude Adonises massages her with peacock feathers (“How could I be so lucky?” she wonders aloud.)
“I want to go on record, yet again, that there were no peacock feathers in The Serial. People chased me around with peacock feathers for years,” she says. “Every place I went, people waved peacock feathers.”
It was that type of furor, she says, that helped the column get the recognition she needed to hit the radar at Alfred A. Knopf and land a book deal. “It worked to my advantage eventually,” she says.
McFadden went on to have a second book published—Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir, which was a Pulitzer finalist in 1986—and later wrote a column for the San Francisco Examiner.
Peacock feathers and all, McFadden says there is little she would do differently as a writer, though looking back, penning under a pseudonym might have been a good idea. Still, the book has continued to find an audience, with several editions published both in the United States and England, where it’s retained its notoriety through the years, which is why Apostrophe Books approached her about a digital edition.
“One of Apostrophe’s missions is to republish brilliant books that deserve new life, and The Serial was always top of my wish list,” says Martyn Forrester, who launched Apostrophe Books in February of last year. “I was in my 20s when the book first came out to rave reviews, and I can remember buying a copy straight after I saw Newsweek describe it as ‘one of the most delicious acts of cultural sabotage since Mark Twain.’ That was a bold statement, because I loved Mark Twain, but it turned out to be true. The Serial is that good—it’s iconic, right up there with Catch-22, Dr Strangelove and Huckleberry Finn.
“In preparing the e-edition, Apostrophe tracked down Tom Cervenak (via a call for his current whereabouts in the Pacific Sun‘s letters page), who illustrated a new piece of artwork for the edition, and readers have been busy downloading The Serial—complete with McFadden’s new intro—since it first became available in late December.
“It’s tough to write consistently good satire, but Cyra McFadden is a master. She satirizes an entire self-obsessed age, page after page—polarity balancing, Zen jogging, pet psychiatry, she skewers the lot,” says Forrester.
“The Serial is also as relevant today as it ever was because human basics haven’t changed that much. All of us know a Kate and Harvey Holroyd.”
“I knew why they liked it so much,” says McFadden, of her British fan base. “Because it confirmed their conviction that [Americans] were all materialistic airheads!”
Today, McFadden enjoys a relatively low-profile life in Sausalito, where she works as a book editor and has been “noodling” with a new novel. Marin is her home, a place she refers to as beautiful and full of people who have “mellowed out.” McFadden looks back at the past 35 years with gratitude, and only one major regret.
“Anyone can get the National Book Award…but a sewage treatment plant? I would have been unique in the universe!”
The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin CountyThe book is available for download for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks and other e-readers at apostrophebooks.com ($5.99).
by Stephanie Powell
Robin Williams, the former Redwood High School student, Juilliard-trained and Oscar-winning actor, was found dead Aug. 11 at his home in Tiburon.
At a press conference held Aug. 12 at the Marin County’s Sheriff’s Office, Lt. Keith Boyd, assistant chief deputy coroner, said that according to the Aug. 12 autopsy results, the preliminary cause of death suggests that...
Why more Marinites are opting out of childhood vaccines-and what it means for the rest of us
by Jacob Shafer
First, a confession: When my editor asked if I wanted to write a story about vaccines, my initial reaction was, “Um ... not really.”
Sure—it’s an interesting topic, hot button as they come. And it’s guaranteed to generate feedback, which is...
by Stephanie Powell and Julie Vader
Of course there’s an app for it—search the application store for “sleep” and at least 2,200 smartphone programs pop up, all promising to make that mysterious one-third of our lives even better. But is sleeping with a smartphone all that smart?
There are four basic functions of sleep apps:
• Monitoring sleep and recording “light” and “deep”...
by Stephanie Powell
You may have heard their voices as an Orc or Uruk in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy—or seen them basking under the rays of the San Francisco sun at Pier 39.
Perhaps the 1994 movie Andre, about a harbor seal turned family companion, captivated your heart and earned your devoted attention. Whether your first brush with...
by Stephanie Powell
"I don't want to see that you can cry on cue—I just want to know that you can look like a person checking into a fucking hotel." Ann Brebner laughs as she describes the gravest mistake nascent actors commit during auditions.
To label Brebner an instrumental force in Marin's film and theater scene is to undermine the breadth...
By Peter Seidman
After serving six years on the board of the North Coast Railroad Authority, Bernie Meyers has decided to end his tenure on the board. Meyers, a longtime critic of NCRA and its arrangement with the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, presented North Coast board members with a strongly worded 4,400-word position statement outlining his thoughts about the past, present and...
by Stephanie Powell
Along the Miracle Mile in San Anselmo, there is a building glazed in bright white with redwoods etched into a stained-glass window that reaches nearly as high as its structured arches. Don't let its lofty appearance deceive you. Although it may be one of the oldest businesses still operating in San Anselmo today, it is certainly not...
by Stephanie Powell
Olivia X was shopping at a Mill Valley clothing store to escape the late-June heat when she ran into an acquaintance she hadn't seen in a long time.
Her old friend gushed over her appearance and was eager to catch up. After commenting on how well "put together" Olivia seemed, her friend—we'll call her Madam Z—soon steered the...
by Stephanie Powell
The countdown always started at 7pm. That was when I had an hour until closing and then T-minus 30 minutes until I locked the doors and went on my way home. The holidays had just ended and the last rays of daylight were fading, leaving my co-worker and me in a darkened ghost town of retail space...
Cyra McFadden’s ‘The Serial,’ which originally ran in the Pacific Sun, is out in e-form—but Kate and Harvey still haven't found their mojo...
The Serial
Once, ten years ago, Marin County had been something they could regard with a mixture of wistfulness and detachment through the haze of smoke at the Buena Vista on Sunday mornings while they drank aquavit and...
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