It's still July....the Music Festival is terrific

Forgetting What You Didn’t See

One day last week I had two people say unintended funny things I’d never heard before.  Each one requires a brief story.

First, while volunteering in the Ford House (the visitor center in Mendocino) I got to talking with someone about Glass Beach, which is at the north end of Fort Bragg, the next major town north of Mendocino.  It seems that the site of Glass Beach was a nasty dump, but it was cleaned up a few decades ago.  The broken, sea polished glass is all that remains, and it makes the beach a destination.  We even have a book for sale at the Ford House that tells the story of the dump and how people finally did the right thing.  One interesting point mentioned in the book is that certain colors of the glass are more rare than others, especially blue and purple.  We speculated a bit on what might have been the source of such colors, and my co-conversationalist suggested incisively that blue was probably from the “milk of amnesia” bottles!  (Maybe that’s what you take when you just want forget about the intestinal distress?)

Later in the day I went out to take a look at the work being done to build a tent next to the Ford House for the upcoming Music Festival (see above).  The huge tent (16,000 square feet) was about complete, and on this day most of the work had been devoted to assembling the large stage.  As I looked down the inclined field toward the tent with the stage at the lower end, I really thought the stage was pitched toward me, but I wasn’t sure.  So I turned to ask one of the workers sitting at a picnic bench nearby about it.  “Is the stage level?” I asked.  He answered yes, it was.  I went on to say that it sure looked like it was pitched, but he said no, that it was really just an “optical delusion”!  Meaning you fooled yourself into seeing it?

It is possible that they really didn’t say what I heard, but this is way funnier I think!  Or are we just getting too old to know what in the world is going on.....

BTW – Yesterday we sat for a couple of hours in the big tent listening to a really good big band rehearse for their Music Festival performance, and we just loved it.  The really special treat was a young pianist, who we thought was just fantastic.  Turns out he is only 22, and the son of the band leader and the classical pianist who founded the festival.  His name is Julian Waterfall Pollack (his mom is Susan Waterfall), and he is making a splash (no pun intended) in the NYC jazz world.  He has a new album, Infinite Playground.  Check it out!

The Music Festival draws folks from all over the world - performers and attendees....some famous, some not......been going on for 23 years and there are, on average, 3 performances each day for 20 days - it's really amazing for this town of 900 residents!!! There is a theater, many art galleries, a wonderful art center and on and on...."unique" is not even in the running for a descriptive.

 Up dating the day-to-day....

We were in Reno, NV this past week getting a new license plate for our 2000 Honda and new drivers licenses - had to make this hurry-up trip as the bank wouldn't allow us to open an account, all of our addresses didn't match and we don't have any utility bills (whoops) - me thinks they were suspicious that we wanted to launder money.... when, really all we wanted to do was to launder our dirty clothes and that's another story - it's at least 8 miles to the closest laundromat.

Mendocino is super - foggy much of the time, but when the sun comes out the blue blue sky and the blue blue ocean become one...the trees are awesome, some the height of a 20 story building and more....and the green, the green makes you weep.