I feel the same way at sixty as I did at 16,” says the relentlessly perky Cathie Hetyonk. “It baffles me sometimes when I’m teaching that I can have that much energy. And the reason behind that is that music raises serotonin levels in the brain, as does exercise.”
Not to mention dancing, which we will do in a minute.
Ms. Hetyonk, along with her husband, J. Michael Alexander, head the Silver Follies, an over-55, all-dancing, all-singing review that started small but is getting bigger each year. And this coming Wednesday until the following Saturday, their annual holiday show, “Christmas at the Stage Door Cabaret,” proves it.
Have you gone out to find a Christmas tree yet? Even if you haven’t, you can probably smell the pine needles in the nose as you hunt for the perfect one for your front room. That fresh green aroma influenced this week’s cocktail, created by Matt Pickett over at the Wine Cask. Mr. Pickett has been making cocktails at the restaurant for three months, having spent time before at Olio Pizzeria, also in Santa Barbara, and other cities to the north. At Wine Cask, he’s been able to get his hands on a number of intriguing alcohols, which lead him to Oregon’s Clear Creek Distillery. They make an Eau de Vie of Douglas Fir, created by steeping fresh pine needles into a grappa-like alcohol. And according to Mr. Pickett, they do this in the forest to keep it all fresh. How crazy is that?
Add to this some of Clear Creek’s apple brandy and a mix of vanilla bean and cinnamon simple syrups, as well as orange, cranberry and lemon juices, and you have this wintry cocktail with a slight hint of forest and a full nose of vanilla. But don’t stop there: Garnish this with candied apple peel and your guests will think this came straight out of the woods.
JamesBlairphoto Susan Claassen as Edith Head in the Center State Theater production of “A Conversation with Edith Head” James Blair photo
When I was a kid I had the movie poster for Steve Martin’s “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” in my room — Mr. Martin was my favorite comedian at the time — and I memorized all the names on that poster, including a certain Edith Head, who had designed all the costumes. As I grew up watching old movies, I noticed Edith’s name popping up everywhere. I also didn’t know that the Steve Martin film would be her last, as she died just after the film wrapped, at age 83. She left behind a filmography of 1,131 films as costumer, with 35 Oscar nominations and 8 wins.
“A Conversation with Edith Head,” which opens tonight at Center Stage Theater and runs through Sunday only, brings to life the woman who dressed Betty Davis in “All About Eve,” and Robert Redford and Paul Newman in “The Sting.” This one-woman show, co-written by and starring Suzanne Claassen, has earned rave reviews since it opened in 2002. Performed as a chatty conversation between Ms. Head and the audience, it takes in Ms. Head’s 60 years in the business and even opens up the floor to questions at the end, answered just as Ms. Head would do herself.
Clockwise from top, Leonard Kelly-Young,Thomas Vincent Kelly, Susan Ruttan, Mattie Hawkinson and Zachary Ford David Bazemore photos
It’s time for the Ensemble Theater Company to put on its big holiday show, and what can be more seasonal than… witches? With “Bell, Book and Candle,” opening tonight, you can have both yuletide fun and the casting of spells. This 1950 Broadway play from John Van Druten later got made into a Hollywood film starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, their only other on-screen team-up apart from in “Vertigo,” along with Jack Lemmon and Ernie Kovacks. Its mixture of romantic comedy and witchcraft influenced the show “Bewitched” six years later, and its domestic nature still gets played out in shows like “Charmed.”
The setting is Manhattan, circa 1950, and it’s Christmas time. Gillian (Mattie Hawkinson) is the young woman who is working her charms on her upstairs neighbor Shepherd (Thomas Vincent Kelly, last seen here in “Opus”). And “charms” is right: she’s a witch, and he doesn’t know it yet. But there’s also a rule — perhaps it’s in the back of a book of spells, who knows — that if a witch falls in love, she could lose all her powers. Gillian has two relatives to help her through this troubling time: Aunt Queenie (Susan Ruttan), also a witch, and Gillian’s brother Nicky (Zachary Ford). Also on hand is Sidney (Leonard Kelly-Young) a crazy writer who is working on a book about witchcraft. Guest director Brian Shnipper is set to work this all up into a magical holiday brew.
How do you define success? Is it that gold watch? Is it holding that golden statuette? Is it standing on the podium as confetti cascades down? Is it the roar of the crowd? Or a quiet moment? And what is success anyway? Something that takes decades to achieve? Or a year? What about a week?
These are questions the art duo Jeff Foye and Gordon Winiemko, also known as JEFF & GORDON (and sometimes, to confuse NASCAR fans, Jeff Gordon), have been mulling over. They are also questions they want you to ask yourself as part of their interactive art piece, “Moment of Glory.” This free event takes place this coming First Thursday at the always boundary-pushing Contemporary Arts Forum.
A day after our walk-n-talk interview on the rainy streets of Santa Barbara, street photographer and rabble-rouser Ricky Powell sends me a thank-you note. His email signature is longer than the message, all separated with slashes like a telegram: Ricky P. / The Lazy Hustler / Funky Uncle / Horny Dog Walker / KooL Substitute Teacher / Bummy Sophisticate / Illy Funkster. All these titles he’s bestowed upon himself, but perhaps Lazy Hustler fits the best.
A very brief selection of Mr. Powell’s work now hangs at Akomplice/Fuzion on State Street through the rest of the year, documenting how Mr. Powell was at the right place at the right time when hip-hop exploded in the mid-’80s.
Thanksgiving is over, but we are not in any way done with cranberries. For some, they are tied to the holiday, but for us in the Drink of the Week camp, cranberry means cosmopolitans!
Joe Andrieu, one half of Repeal Day Santa Barbara (yes, it’s a blatant plug! Check page D1 for more shameless self-promotion), arrived at a recent holiday party bearing a small tub of cranberry granita (an Italian variation on sorbet). Giving props to Alton Brown, who first introduced the idea to him (by website), Joe made us cosmopolitans consisting of nothing but granita, lime juice and vodka. The granita, being straight from the freezer, provided the chill of ice without the ice. The resulting cocktail was thick with cranberry flavor, way more than any “cranberry cocktail”-filled cosmo we’ve had. Needless to say, many of these were ordered at the party, and poor Joe never left the kitchen, having no assistant available to give him a break.
Karen McCullah, Matt Ryan and Kirsten Smith COURTESY PHOTO
Ah, now here’s the life. When Karen McCullah sits down with her long-time writing partner Kirsten Smith to work on a script, they usually do it poolside at Karen’s Hollywood house, sipping on mimosas. (Unless they’re working on the plot of a movie, then the mimosas usually wait. Champagne is good for writing dialog.) That working environment was well-earned: Ms. McCullah and Ms. Smith wrote some of the best loved comedies of the last decade, from their breakthrough hit “10 Things I Hate About You,” the hilarious “Legally Blonde” (now a Broadway musical!), and “The House Bunny,” which showed off Anna Faris’ comedic chops.
The two will return to UCSB this Thursday for their second sit-down chat at the Pollock Theater for the Carsey-Wolf sponsored “Script to Screen” event, hosted by Matt Ryan. Their last trip to UCSB featured a screening of “Legally Blonde.” This time they return with “10 Things I Hate About You,” their high school rewrite of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” starring a young and still unknown Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They will screen the film, then talk about the making of the script, their first successful collaboration and the start of a beautiful friendship.
Warning to parents with impressionable children: Good Ol’ Saint Nick will not be appearing in “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus,” at least not embodied in human form. Now, the spirit of what Santa Claus means, that’s another matter.
This special Christmas show, a collaboration between Ojai ACT and the Ojai Performing Arts Theater Foundation (OPAT), brings a holiday tale about finding the Christmas Spirit in a hardscrabble existence.
PERSIMMON TO COME ABOARD nik blaskovich / news-press
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I have a weird thing with persimmons. I’ve been taught to eat them when they’re crunchy. But I never do that. By the time I get around to it, they’ve gone soft. Well, softer than soft. What’s the word for it? Gross, that’s the word.
There is a happy medium, though. The perfect fall fruit, persimmons are sturdy and willing to unlock their secrets if you keep an eye on them. Patrick Reynolds, who by now should be a familiar face in this column, likes them too, and so has made up a nice little fall cocktail for you, based on his love of coming home to a warm house filled with family, friends and the smells of the kitchen.
