Category: Uncategorized

by CJ Verburg

OK, gotta go to London in September.

I thought I’d dodged the bullet when I seized the very last ticket to the National Theatre Live’s November San Francisco broadcast of Hamlet–an all-time all-star cast, with Benedict Cumberbatch as the prince, Anastasia Hille as Gertrude, and Ciaran Hinds as Claudius. (Who knew both Hinds and Hille have played Lady Macbeth?)

Now here comes Anthony Horowitz over the horizon with both barrels loaded.

London’s Menier Chocolate Factory will debut his new play Dinner with Saddam on Sept. 10:

“Saddam, fearful of assassination attempts, was known to move regularly from private home to private home. Even before the war, he declined to spend nights in one of his palaces.” USA Today, 20th April 2003

So what happens when Saddam Hussein turns up on your doorstep and announces he is staying for dinner?

And if that’s not enough, Horowitz has incorporated material by Ian Fleming into a new James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, due out Sept. 5.  We’re promised “a thrilling tour de force” which “recreates the golden age of Bond, packed with speed, danger, strong women and fiendish villains.”

Rumor has it Pussy Galore (Goldfinger) will make a reappearance. That’s a relief. I just noticed a closed accordion gate yesterday on her sister’s jewelry shop in Chinatown, Jade Galore.

How soon can we expect the movie? Dare we hope for a cameo by Honor Blackman?–maybe sipping a poolside drink with Sean Connery?

Another pair who’d make a terrific Gertrude and Claudius.

 

Thanks to author and blogger Kim Cox for showcasing CJ Verburg’s five-star noir cozy SILENT NIGHT VIOLENT NIGHT: a Cory Goodwin Mystery in her blog post of Thursday, July 9!

Kim is an author of Romantic Suspense, Mystery, Suspense, and Paranormal fiction. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with her chainsaw-artist husband, their West Highland White Terriers, Scooter and Harley, and a Yorkie mix, Candi. A mother and grandmother, Kim has published novels, short stories, and articles. To sign up for her newsletter and receive exclusive information, new releases, contests, giveaways, and free books, click here.

by CJ Verburg

Did you know San Francisco has more historical monuments and landmarks than Rome? (Pls RT)

Its strong Italian roots are one reason San Francisco’s North Beach is such a pleasure to explore. Known for its artists as well as its pasta, this northeastern corner of the city takes in a bit of the Financial District, Nob Hill, and Chinatown, half of Russian Hill, and most of Telegraph Hill and Fisherman’s Wharf. Stand in the middle of its main thoroughfare, Columbus Avenue, and (if you’re not hit by a giant white Google bus) you’ll see the Transamerica Pyramid at the south end, like the Arc de Triomphe. This distinctive spire replaced what was once the largest and most important building west of the Mississippi, the Montgomery Block (Montgomery between Washington and Clay), the city’s center of commerce in the 19th century.

A block north is the wonderful bronze-and-glass tower now owned by the neighborhood’s most famous filmmaker (Columbus & Kearny). High above the red awning of Cafe Zoetrope is what I like to think of as the Francis Ford Cupola. To see artifacts from The Godfather and other Coppola films, visit beautiful old Inglenook Vineyard (briefly renamed Niebaum-Coppola) in Napa County. Francis Ford Coppola is also the founder of North Beach Citizens, where homeless neighbors can get help with housing, food, clothes, even books and furniture.

The intersection of Columbus with Broadway is also where North Beach intersects with Grant Avenue and Chinatown. This is the densest part of the city in residents, tourists, and tourist attractions, from strip joints and comedy clubs to cathedrals. Restaurants include not just Italian and Chinese but Thai, Japanese, Basque, Istrian, and Irish/Indian, among others. It’s hard to find a bad one–they can’t afford the astronomical rent (see below). The Chinatown-North Beach border is most visible in the mural that covers a building on the corner of Broadway, Columbus, and Grant.  The Italian wrap-around side was recently restored; the Chinese side awaits funding. An aerial sculpture of flying books lights up at night to honor North Beach’s literary side.

Currently celebrating its 60th birthday is City Lights Books, cofounded by local poet and legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti has said he doesn’t think of himself as a Beat poet, but others tend to, if only because he’s the last man standing from the Ginsberg-Kerouac era.

Across the intersection, where the other neighborhood bookstore used to be, is the Beat Museum. Decades ago, when I worked a block down the hill at Canfield Press, this corner of Broadway was my bus stop, under a bright larger-than-life sign depicting another local legend, stripper Carol Doda. Now in her late 70s, Doda has a line of lingerie and occasionally makes personal reappearances. I hope she kept the sign.

A block farther, beside the Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, is the Nuova Porziuncola. Former mayoral daughter and city supervisor Angela Alioto–now the National Director of the Knights of St. Francis–spearheaded the transformation of the erstwhile monks’ basketball court into a replica of the “tumbled down chapel in the woods” where a poor Umbrian wanderer became St. Francis of Assisi. (How did he get hold of all that marble and gilt?) She’s now working on the Poets’ Plaza, AKA Piazza St. Francis, proposed for the block of Vallejo St. in front of the Shrine.

A few more long, colorful blocks north is Washington Square Park. This is the neighborhood’s common, where Chinese tai chi exercisers dance around a boom-box every morning like graceful worshipers, homeless people and coffee-breakers share benches, and babies, dogs, pigeons, and techies frolic on the grass. In a grove of poplar trees stands a statue of that most San Franciscan founding father, Benjamin Franklin. The Mime Troupe still performs here every summer.

Looking north down Columbus, you can almost see to the end of the cable-car lines at North Point (Powell Street line: disembark here for CostPlus, Ross, and Trader Joe’s) and Aquatic Park (Hyde Street line: Fisherman’s Wharf and–ta da!–our own little North beach).

 

 

 

 

 

by CJ Verburg

I live in a festival-prone neighborhood. Every few weeks, you walk out the door and there they are: the festive white tents, metal railings, and rows of porta-potties that mean Party Time.

North Beach is San Francisco’s Italian district, and along with Chinatown its densest residential area. The neighborhood’s cafes, architecture, parks, and people make it a sweet place to live, and also a hot tourist destination. From its hillsides (Telegraph, Russian, and Nob) you can feast on landmarks: the Transamerica Pyramid, Lombard Street, Coit Tower, Fishermen’s Wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge. In its restaurants you can feast on Italian food, or your choice of Greek, Thai, Indian, Japanese, Mexican, French, Istrian, or traditional American.

Survival is as precarious in North Beach for a restaurant or boutique as for a resident. Rents are astronomical and rising; turnover is high. If you’re not outstanding, you’re out. Festivals draw crowds of recreation-seekers, many of whom are happy to pick up a few souvenirs and then kick back in one of the local eateries or drinkeries.

With chain stores banned from North Beach, every shop or restaurant is distinctive. Every festival, however, is the same. February’s annual Chinese New Year celebration was bordered with dragon-twined street lamps and hung with lanterns, but almost identical in contents and shape to today’s annual North Beach Festival.  Columbus and Grant avenues are blocked off to car traffic from Broadway to Union Street, filled down the middle with food tents, boutique tents, and entertainment tents. Since North Beach is also the Home of the Beats, I passed one tent featuring a soi-disant poet declaiming amplified cliches about sex, and one sign in an art gallery advertising a service I didn’t see offered for Chinese New Year.

 

While fog and wind continue to blast the streets, indoors the crops are thriving on graywater and afternoon sun.This was harvest week for the first two bedroom tomatoes (Marmande, from Flat Earth Farm). The Brown Turkish fig tree (Sloat Garden Center) in the living room, whose foliage has flourished since a winter pruning, finally shifted some of that magical botanical energy into fruit.

Figs thrill me. As somebody who grew up thinking of figs as the seedy tasteless paste inside fig newtons, I was staggered to learn that a fig plucked off a tree is as surprising and wonderful as a kumquat. (My fifteen-year-old Chinatown kumquat tree, banished to the outdoors, remains sadly barren.) Even the way a fig tree makes figs is miraculous. They start as a tiny bump at a leaf node. Over weeks, each one will grow to the size of a small chicken’s egg, until it ripens and softens into a green-brown package of pink deliciousness.

Along with fishermen, this Cape-tip town is a magnet for theatre and other artists, from Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams to Catharine Huntington, Ray Marten Wells, and Edward Gorey.

by CJ Verburg

In the summer of 1990, the Provincetown Theatre Company presented the first of three annual “entertainments” written, directed, and designed by Cape Cod artist and author Edward Gorey. Useful Urns was performed by a cast of four women, four men, and assorted hand puppets in a former bowling alley by the sea. Our stage was a small wooden platform; our set was a stationary backboard and six portable giant urns painted on styrofoam slabs. Edward had pieced together a script from his short pieces, some published as books, some written for the stage. As the show’s instigator and producer, and the board president of PAPA [Provincetown Center for the Performing Arts]/PTC, I vowed always to work in theaters where, when things got tense, you could go outside and watch the ocean.

What had brought me and then Edward here from the mid-Cape was the Theatre Workshop. In 1987, artist Ray Marten Wells and aspiring playwright Michael Ferraro decided to boost the town’s tradition of home-grown theater with weekly gatherings of playwrights and directors. I joined at the very first meeting. The directors ran the first half, the writers the second half. Afterwards we’d walk “downtown” for drinks at the Governor Bradford, dinner at Gallerani’s or Napi’s, or beer and chili at Fat Jack’s.

The story was that Ray Wells (who died in 2011 at the age of 103) stayed on when her friend Catharine Huntington and the rest of their Provincetown theater crowd left for Boston or New York. I suspect that what sparked Ray to start our workshop was Huntington’s death (1987, age 100). A longtime champion of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, she had owned and run the Provincetown Playhouse on the Wharf, which replaced the ramshackle home of the town’s previous theatre workshop.

The legendary Provincetown Players “began when a group of writers and artists who were vacationing in Provincetown, MA presented their plays July 15, 1915 on the veranda of Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce’s rented ocean-view cottage. . . . Back in Greenwich Village, New York City, where most of the group lived, [George Cram] Cook stirred up enthusiasm that fall and winter such that an even greater number of writers and artists made their way to Provincetown the next summer of 1916 [including] journalist and poet John Reed, writer Louise Bryant, painter Marsden Hartley, artists William and Marguerite Zorach, the famed “Hobo Poet” Harry Kemp, editor of The Masses Max Eastman, his wife Ida Rauh, Floyd Dell, and Eugene O’Neill.” The first plays O’Neill proposed were rejected, but when they read Bound East for Cardiff, a play set at sea, playwright Susan Glaspell wrote that the group ‘knew what they were for’.”

This being the 100th anniversary of the Players’ seminal summer, the Provincetown Theater is celebrating. Starting on July 2, the present-day company will reprise some of those early plays by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, George Cram Cook, and Neith Boyce. Actor and arts commentator Stuard M. Derrick–another immigrant to Provincetown from New York–notes: “The Eugene O’Neill Society and the Susan Glaspell Society are coming . . . and there are panel discussions, galas, and lectures scheduled . . . already gearing up for the big O’Neill centenary next year.”

Stuard adds: “Provincetown has really stepped up its game to attract some major celebrities,” including the Broadway @ Town Hall series, hosted by SiriusXM radio’s Seth Rudetsky and featuring stars including Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker. “There is also a major Motherwell centennial going on right now . . . But to my mind, and in the opinion of many others who have seen it, undoubtedly one of the best shows of the summer has already opened: the phenomenal Jay Critchley retrospective at the Art Association — it’s just incredible in its scope and brilliantly curated and installed.”

So if you’re going to Cape Cod, be sure to see “From Aesop to Updike,” the 2015 book-cover art show at the Edward Gorey House, and allow plenty of time for the artistic feast in Provincetown.

If you want to know more about Edward Gorey’s theatrical contributions, click CJ Verburg’s Books & Bio above for Edward Gorey On Stage: Playwright, Director, Designer, Performer: a Multimedia Memoir (full-color print and e-book).