Columns

My amazing, wonderful, and adorable mother-in-law turns 80 this week.

Opening on April 7

Cows, pecans and oil: that’s what put food on the table when I was a child. That’s what placed basketball shoes on my feet as a youth, and that’s also what helped purchase my first car.

Vegas, Baby!

As new people move to Sonoma County, and I travel far and wide visiting family and friends, I’m asked more frequently how to choose a good wine. It’s a circumstantial question, and of course the answer depends upon many variables. For instance, last night...

With Astronauts gracing the covers of LIFE and Look and other weekly magazines, the American space program was big news in the '60s. These brave test pilots were presented as the epitome of American maleness, and the only females we saw who were part of the space program were the women who quilted the multiple layers of fabric for each custom-fitted space suit! Fifty years later, Theodore Melfi’s perfectly named film Hidden Figures brings the unsung heroes of the space program out from the shadows—and we finally discover that several of the mathematical geniuses who made the program a success were female African Americans! In this retelling of the quintessential American fable, those dashing spacemen are little more than passengers aboard a heaving, clunking, fuel-spewing chunk of hardware. The real heroes are the genius “slide-rule-jockey’s-of-color” (beautifully portrayed by Viola Davis, Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae), who figured out how to loosen gravity’s inexorable hold on we frail human beings. It’s nice to have a film where the audience cheers for the underlying decency and determined humanity epitomized by the three women combating the solidly built wall of racism, sexism and chauvinism that were signatures for that time and place.

Leave it alone

The holiday shopping season is here, and the best gift you can give merchants is to shop in Healdsburg.