The weird, wild, wonderful world of holiday pageants
As I sat through my 7-year-old’s recent winter concert I found myself pondering the fact that when the holiday season rolls around, people seem to lose all grasp of reality, especially when there are kids and performances involved. Of all the strange memories one has of their childhood, I’d be willing to bet at least one of them involved some sort of Christmas performance. Maybe it was your school play, maybe it was your church’s nativity, maybe it was something else.
Mainstreet: Resistance
In my last column, I wrote of my intent to resist the reign of Trump “tooth and claw” and the primary response I received was: “OK, sounds good. How?”
Country Roads: Dogs of All Sorts
Christmas Day only hours away; year’s end in its last gasp – a mixture of joy and pain which is life, is it not? When we look around us, lucky us, we see the faces of family and friends, relatively safe, hopefully well fed and well loved. We’ve got to feel gratitude. So many others in the world are neither safe nor fed and if the world loves them, it certainly isn’t obvious. We thoughtful and caring folk, from the safety of our warm homes and full cupboards may give monthly to Doctors Without Borders, providing a bandage here and there to a victim who has just been blown apart. It’s on the nightly news, nagging at our conscience and disturbing an otherwise comfortable evening by the fire.
We’re still listening
“We are the newspaper that listens,” was the title and message of our first editorial written in 1996 under our current ownership of Sonoma West Publishers. That message and mission has not changed, but just about everything else in the newspaper business has.
Arts & Entertainment
$20k split 3 ways in Arts for All grants
The recent reveal of Jake Messing’s River Dreams mural at Russian Riverkeeper was one of three projects from the city’s Arts & Culture Commission...



















