Soroptimist President Debbie Staehlin introduced Joyce Sobel, who chaired the Soroptimist Club selection committee (which also comprised Nancy DeVaux and Lenore Bayuk), March 18. Sobel presented a certificate, flowers and a check for $750 to Charlotte Guard. The Friday Harbor High School senior was selected winner of the annual community service award, which is named for the president of the first Soroptimist Club in 1921, Violet Richardson.
I had my skeptic’s guard up Tuesday when I attended the San Juan Lions Club meeting, where Beth Williams-Gieger, superintendent and clinic administrator of San Juan County Public Hospital District No. 1, was scheduled to speak about the proposed integrated medical center. Williams-Gieger was impressive enough to make a believer out of me.
If you don’t make it to the San Juan Community Theatre Thursday, Friday or Saturday nights at 7:30, or Sunday at 2, you will miss a meaningful experience that no islander should miss. It’s not just the fact that it’s one of the crowning events of the Friday Harbor Centennial Celebration, nor that a cast of 24 of our talented friends and neighbors have put in long hard hours of rehearsal these recent months to bring it off.
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One thing you can count on after a general election: most of the speakers at this San Juan County Republican Party gathering like to face things as they are. That certainly was the case down the line Saturday at the San Juan Island Grange,
The production of five wonderful examples of Ernest Pugh’s playwright talents at the San Juan Community Theatre was a well-deserved tribute, Jan. 16-17. It takes a keen eye and sharp ear to have such talent. And, of course, an equally talented cast and crew to bring the playwright’s drama to powerful life.
When I first came to the islands, I lived across the road from Ross and B.J. Miner and next door to Jim and Bea Hitch. These two fine couples guided us as to the ways of the island. “There’s nothin’ to do in here in January,” said Ross, “except freeze.” I thought of that last weekend, after all the holidays including Epiphany, when Helen and I spent a quiet January Saturday that ran us ragged.
WSF is an iconic symbol of our home and charm to visitors. In fact, it could be one of the principal reasons to live here if it were improved and reliable. And a reason why the value of our homes would be secure, rather than shaky.
I love my Broadway — but oh, you C.A.T.S.! Coming back from a two-week sojourn with family in Poughkeepsie, Hudson Valley and The Big Apple for Thanksgiving, we wondered if we might feel like Little Appleseeds. Occasionally, we’ve heard comments that we go overboard comparing our local theater talent to the greats of the Great White Way.
What do you do when you are a creative retailer, wife and mother with two children? You work around the clock, you hire clerks for the times when the children need you and pay babysitters when you are at the store. That might work when sales are brisk during tourist season, but might be marginal at other times. Michelle Waldron and Megan Van Hamerssfeld have solved that dilemma by combining their two shops — Daisy Bloom and Creme Brulee — into one at 165 Spring St.
Let’s take a good look at what we can get locally before buying gifts elsewhere. Maybe we should have a “Blue Heron” poster and badges made, like in the 1930s, to show we believe that prosperity, as well as charity, starts at home.
It seems like only yesterday when I was a kid in Omaha working at the Omaha theater as an usher for the first time and Jimmy Hall, a star halfback on our football team, came in with his mother. I greeted him warmly and the doorman came over when they started forward. “Kindly take the stairway to your right, please,” he said gently. They nodded and started upstairs. The doorman turned to me and said: “Don’t ever forget those words when Negroes come in.”
Every once in a while, I see someone shaking their heads in disapproval when they see the weird costumes on the kids at the Homecoming Parade and game. “We didn’t do that sort of thing when I went to school,” they grumble. They probably think they didn’t, but it’s only because their memory bank doesn’t go back that far.
Some things in this life can be disappointing. The market. The weather. Your aching back. Forget it. If you go to a performance of a play directed by Andrew McLaglen, written by Neil Simon and performed by our local thespians at our beautiful theater, you can be sure you won’t have a gloomy thought.
