Cityscape: Drought requires 20% water conservation
It’s as dry as a bone out there. Our region has received less than one-third the normal amount of rainfall to date – 13 inches of rain compared to an average of 38 inches. As a result, on April 21, the day before Earth Day, the State of California declared a drought emergency in the Russian River watershed, which spans Sonoma and Mendocino counties.
Who’s the baby?
My wife Bonnie and I recently went to the de Young Museum to see the Vermeer (1632 - 1675) exhibit on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The Exhibit is called “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” after what is perhaps Vermeer’s best known work. The girl turns to look at us over her left shoulder and as she turns our gaze is drawn to the single pearl on the lobe of her lovely ear. A text describes the painting as the Dutch “Mona Lisa.” The exhibit reveals a world of mostly prosperous looking men and women. Self assured, Protestant, one might even say secular. They are a class of people absent from earlier times, the early Renaissance and the Middle Ages. They are neither prelates (there is one painting of a preacher in the exhibit), nor princes, and they are certainly not peasants. They are burghers and their families, men of commerce, trade and industry; and they read and write. There is a charming, domestic scene of a woman, seated comfortably at a desk in her own home. She is writing, maybe a personal letter, maybe household accounts, but the point is she is writing, something that a few hundred years earlier few other than clergy were able to do.
Show up and win
We know it is true that fewer and fewer people vote these days and just stay home. And we also know that more and more of these same people let their apathy and ignorance ruin their dreams for happier days, healthier children, strong communities or a greater America. That is sad news.
Arts & Entertainment
Things to do in Healdsburg, July 2-10
Little Shop of Horrors is the musical adaptation of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie with, remade and brought to the stage by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken at the Raven Theater.











