Of The Tweens, By The Tweens, For The Tweens

It had to happen: Now there's a blog called the Malia and Sasha Fan Club.
It was created by two sisters in Memphis, Tennessee, named Kailysia and Kaila, who are 10 and 8 respectively - about the same age as the Obama girls. And their grandma is their webmaster.
It's a blog by Tweens for other Tweens, and it reports every story from a Tween perspective. For instance, when the President and First Lady visited Buckingham Palace, the headline read, "Malia and Sasha's mom and dad meet the Queen."
Needless to say, they've been all over the Bo the Dog story from the very beginning. Even before he was chosen, they were conducting an online poll on what he should be named. ("Moose" was the favorite with 50 percent of the votes, followed by "Frank" and "other.")
Every time Malia or Sasha is spotted taking Bo for a walk, or another one of Bo's siblings pops up somewhere in the country, you'll read about it first at the Malia and Sasha Fan Club.
There's a dictionary icon you can click on to look up words you don't know. And if you're so young that you haven't learned to read yet, you can click on another icon to hear an audio version of the text. (That was Kaila and Kailysia's idea.)
There are also a lot of fun facts to learn and games to play, but when you click on the "Games" link you have to read a Bible verse first. (That was Grandma's idea.)
And there's another link you can click on to donate to Kailysia and Kaila's favorite charity, StandUp For Kids, which helps homeless children.
During March Madness they asked everyone to root for Memphis because, as they explained, "Our dad is going to have a fit if they don't win!" (Alas, the Tigers lost.)
Now, one of the nice things about being a newspaper columnist is that I have absolutely no hesitation about calling up perfect strangers.
So I called them when they were at Grandma's house. And they were a total delight: smart, sweet, enthusiastic and extremely polite - just like Malia and Sasha.
"The only reason we started the fan club was that we couldn't find a kid-based website on the Obama girls," said their grandma. "They were fascinated when I told them they could start their own fan club, where other kids could read about America's First Daughters."
The whole experience has been incredibly empowering, and it's had an unexpected bonus for Kaila, who previously disliked her birthday: July 4th.
"I could never get my friends to come over and celebrate with me because they were busy celebrating the holiday with their families," she explained.
Then, while doing research for the blog, she discovered that Malia's birthday is July 4th, too.
"It made me feel awesome! Now I LOVE being born on July 4th!"
Their fondest hope, of course, is to meet the Obama girls in person. But what will they say to them when they do?
"I'm just going to treat them like real people," said Kailysia. "A lot of people say, 'Oh gosh, you're the president's daughter!' But I'm going to treat them like we've been friends forever."
You can visit the Malia and Sasha Fan Club at http://kailysiakaila.blogspot.com/

No Greater Love

(Above: Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, as a 19-year-old serving with E Company of the 442nd RCT. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism.)

Did you know that no private monuments are allowed in the East Bay Regional Park District? It's been a strict rule ever since the district was founded 75 years ago.
But there's one exception: In Roberts Park there's a memorial to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Japanese American World War II unit that was awarded more medals, man for man, than any other unit in American history.
Their heroism is even more impressive when you remember that they were fighting and dying for our country at the same time that their families were imprisoned in detention camps back here.
Never mind that they were American citizens, or that there were no similar mass roundups of German Americans or Italian Americans.
If I had been in their position, I would have told Uncle Sam to take a hike. But the men of the 442nd were made of better stuff. They not only agreed to serve, they volunteered.
The longtime general manager of the park district, the late William Penn Mott, was so moved by the 442nd's patriotism, he waived the rule against private monuments.
That's why there's a plaque and memorial bench in Roberts Park, right beneath the historic Blossom Rock Navigation Trees, a pair of towering redwoods that ships sailing into San Francisco Bay used to get their bearings during the Gold Rush days.
And the best time to visit the monument is at noon onMay 16, when the men of the 442nd gather for their annual memorial service to honor their friends who made the ultimate sacrifice.
One of them was Sadao Munimori, a 22-year-old who was the first member of the 442nd to receive the Medal of Honor. He was killed when he threw himself on a live grenade to save his friends. The date: April 5, 1945.
When I first read that, it gave me a start, because that was the day I was born.
It brought home to me the fact that Munimori - and all the other 500,000 Americans who lost their lives - died so you and I could live. They gave up their futures so we could have ours.
All of Mott's successors as general manager, including the current incumbent, Pat O'Brien, have followed his tradition of treating the 442nd with honor. The park staffers knock themselves out each year to make the memorial service as easy as possible for these heroic veterans. They even waive the parking fees!
For years, the men of the 442nd have asked me to thank the park district for them, but for one reason or another I never got around to it. So let me correct that now: Thanks, Mr. O'Brien, to you and all your people. The men really appreciate it, and I know Mr. Mott would approve.
Over the years, the ceremony has been broadened to honor all World War II veterans. And the men of the 442nd cordially invite you to join them.
Roberts Park is located on Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. Just follow the signs for the Chabot Space & Science Center and look for the turnoff to Roberts Park, about a mile before you get to the observatory.
Drive through the first parking lot and park in the second lot behind it. You'll find the 442nd monument just past the picnic area.
I look forward to seeing you there.

Shakespeare In The Park

Children's Fairyland will echo to the words of the Bard this weekend when the Young Actors Workshop presents Shakespeare's "Love's Labor's Lost."
Director Amanda Ditmore, a senior at Maybeck High School in Berkeley, says the young thespians chose this play because of its uncanny parallel with their own lives.
"It's about a group of young people who, at the end of the play, find themselves heading off into the world. It's the end of their adolescence, and that's very meaningful to us," she said.
"Many of us have been together since middle school, and now we're seniors going off to college. This play is one last time for us to get together and have some fun and put a fitting close to our friendship and hard work for the last six years."
This is the first production by an outside group in Fairyland's new Aesop's Playhouse, a 200-seat amphitheater that is also the venue for Fairyland's own performance troupe, the Children's Theater.
"And they've already found ways to use it that never occurred to us," said C.J. Hirschfield, Fairyland's executive director, "such as opening the doors at the back of the stage and using the vista beyond as a backdrop. I'm thrilled."
Sooz Worthing, who directs the Young Actors Workshop, returns the compliment.
"It's a very whimsical space. I love the fact that there are all these doors, which give us great opportunities for all kinds of fun stage business, with everyone running around and making entrances and exits like a Keystone Kops movie."
She and Amanda have set the play in Europe during the ominous years leading up to World War II, which gives the actors the chance to wear some great period costumes, makeup and hairstyles.
The Young Actors Workshop, an after-school enrichment program at Park Day School in Oakland, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The actors, ages 11 to 18, come from middle and high schools throughout the Bay Area.
From the start, they have run the show.
"Amanda is not my assistant," said Worthing. "She really is the co-director. She did most of the cutting and staging, and she was really great working with the actors. She's very intuitive and patient, and she knows how to get the best work out of them."
Amanda, who is looking forward to studying at Emerson College in Boston next year, is already a prize winner, having won the Gerald A. Larson award for excellence in directing at this year's Lenaea Festival at Cal State Sacramento.
But, like the characters in the play, she's finding that parting is such sweet sorrow.
"I know it's a cliché, but I feel like I'm saying goodbye to my family. These are some of my closest friends."

If You Go:
What: "Love's Labor's Lost" by William Shakespeare, performed by the Young Actors Workshop. Suitable for children 10 and older.
Where: Aesop's Playhouse at Children's Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Avenue in Oakland
When: May 8 and 9 at 7 p.m. May 10 at 5 p.m.
Tickets: $13 for adults, $9 for students and seniors. Available at the door.
Info: 510-923-0505 x102

What Might Have Been

(Above: Bret)

Over the last few weeks it's been my great pleasure to write about three teenaged prodigies - classical pianist Audrey Vardanega and jazz virtuosos Samora and Elena Pinderhuges.
It's exhilarating to behold so much talent in someone so young, especially when they're such nice kids, as all three are. And it's so much fun to imagine what wonderful things they're going to accomplish as they wend their way through life.
But that's why it's also so painful when a young person with such promise gets cut off before he or she has barely had a chance to begin. You're forever left wondering: What might have been?
That's how I've felt since March 21, 2005, when Bret Harte was killed by a hit-and-run driver on Highway 680 near Concord. He was only 25.
Bret - no relation to the 19th century author - was a theatrical wunderkind who had already directed several local productions, including "Inherit The Wind" and "The Man Who Came To Dinner."
"He was destined to be one of the great theatrical directors of his generation, said Davis Robinson, his theater professor at Bowdoin College in Maine.
Campbell Hunter, his history teacher at Miramonte High School in Orinda (where he graduated in 1998 with a straight-A average), went even further: "If I had a son, I'd want him to grow up to be just like Bret."
Bret's death devastated his parents, Dennis and Juanita Harte, two of the nicest people I've ever met. He was their only child, and they had a wonderfully warm, loving relationship. All their hopes and dreams were wrapped up in him.
Since then, they have tried to keep his spirit alive by founding an internship for up-and-coming young directors at Berkeley Rep, where Bret worked as a stagehand after college.
And their friends have rallied around them. Led by Greg Walker and Lee Bressette, whose daughter was one of Bret's closest friends, they hold annual plant sales to augment the internship fund.
This year's plant sale is taking place this weekend at 73 Coral Drive in Orinda, from 9 to 3 on Saturday and 10 to 2 on Sunday.
"We've never had such a diversity or quantity of plants," says Lee. "They are all looking their best and ready to go to new homes."
The plants include herbs, veggies, orchids, perennials, exotics, drought-resistant landscape plants and catnip, which I intend to pick up for my cat, Phoebe.
And it couldn't be for a better cause. There have already been two Bret Harte Directing Interns at Berkeley Rep - Marissa Wolf, now the artistic director of the Crowded Fire Theater Company in San Francisco, and the current incumbent, Mina Morita.
"I never met Bret; I only know what his friends here at Berkeley Rep have told me about him," said Mina. "There's an extreme sense of loss here, even now. He was well loved by everyone on the staff. It's really an honor to carry on his name in this way. I'll try to live up to it."
If you can't get to the plant sale, you can still contribute by sending a check to the Bret C. Harte Young Directors Fund, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley CA 94704.

Mozart for Majors and Minors

(Above: Audrey playing at the Crowden School in Berkeley, where she is in the 8th grade. Photo by David Weiland.)

Last spring, Maestro George Cleve, founder and musical director of the annual Midsummer Mozart Festival, got a brilliant idea.
"I was coaching some very young musicians, and it reminded me how much I enjoy working with young people. But I don't get a chance to do it often enough."
So he decided to create the Mozart Youth Camerata, a chamber orchestra that pairs professional musicians from the Midsummer Mozart Festival orchestra with some amazingly talented teenagers, playing side-by-side.
The youth camerata will premiere May 9 at the El Cerrito Community Center, performing a concert titled "Mozart for Minors and Majors."
The concert includes selections from the sparkling "Eine Kleine Nachtmusic" and the gorgeous Symfonia Concertante in E flat, featuring soloits Robin Hansen, first violin with the Midsummer Mozart Festival, and Victor Romasevich, first violin with the San Francisco Symphony.
But the highlight will be the Piano Concerto #21 in C, starring an astounding 13-year-old prodigy, Audrey Vardanega of Oakland, an 8th grader at the Crowden School in Berkeley.
"It's hard to believe she's so young because she plays with an astonishing beauty and maturity beyond her years," Cleve raves. "She's really an extraordinary talent and a genuinely nice kid, absolutely unspoiled."
The occasion calls for a really first-rate piano; so Cleve turned to Jim Callahan, owner of the Piedmont Piano Company in north Oakland, thinking to rent a Steinway or maybe a Bechstein or Bosendorfer.
He was floored by Callahan's reply: "How about a Fazioli?"
Faziolis are known as the Ferraris of the piano world. Concert pianists get misty-eyed talking about them, like middle-aged baseball buffs talking about Willie Mays.
Faziolis are handmade in a factory near Venice, Italy, and only a half-dozen are turned out each year. The Piedmont Piano Company is the only place in this country west of the Mississippi where you can get one.
No stone is unturned to make each piano as close to perfect as humanly possible, including making the sounding boards with wood from the same trees that Antonio Stradivari used to make the sounding boards for his violins.
Cleve immediately called Audrey and told her the good news. Within 15 minutes, she and her mom were at the Piedmont Piano Company, and Audrey sat down to play.
"You should have seen the look on her face," says Cleve. "She was in ecstasy, and so were we, listening to her."
Everyone in the store, sales clerks and customers alike, stopped dead in their tracks and stood, open-mouthed, for the next hour and a half as melody after exquisite melody poured from Audrey's fingertips.
"I was only going to play for a couple of minutes, but I just couldn't stop," she says. "All the subtleties I practice every day, every scale, every note, came out pristine and clear and exactly how I imagined them in my mind."
But Faziolis don't come cheap. The piano Audrey will be playing on May 9 sells for $129,000. But Callahan isn't even charging her rent; he's generously letting her use it for free.
You can hear her playing this amazing instrument from 11 a.m. to noon. The El Cerrito Community Center is at 7007 Moeser Lane. Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for children. All proceeds will go to the El Cerrito Recreation Program's scholarship fund and the Midsummer Mozart Festival.
(You can see Audrey playing Bach's F minor concerto at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgXjDUgpBJM)

The Real Lou Grant

(Above: the Tribune Tower in its heyday)

Some people deserve their names - for example, Gray Davis and Michael Savage.
Roy Grimm, on the other hand, was anything but. Behind his no-nonsense persona and his ever-billowing pipe was a truly kind human being with a delightfully impish sense of humor.
Roy, the longtime managing editor of the Oakland Tribute, died on April 11 at age 83. Even though it's been 20 years since he retired, everyone who had the privilege of working for him still remembers him as the epitome of what a journalist should be.
"Underneath his often gruff, terse exterior beat a big heart," says Andy Jokelson, whom Roy hired as a nightside reporter in 1969. "He let his staff do their jobs, had faith in them and stood by them. He also went out of his way to privately thank and encourage people."
Andy covered the assassination of Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster in the early 70s', which often kept him working into the wee small hours of the morning.
" I remember waiting for the elevator at about 3 a.m. outside the Tribune city room as I headed home. Roy came out to the elevator to thank me for the night's work, and I still appreciate it."
Cliff Pletschet, the Trib's longtime business columnist, agrees.
"He didn't toss compliments around; so when Roy Grimm told you that you did a good job on a story, you can believe that you did."
Under Roy's leadership, the Tribune was the last of the old-time newsrooms. Whether you realize it or not, you've probablly seen that newsroom many times on TV. The set of the show, "Lou Grant," was an exact replica.
The series pilot was written by a former Trib columnist named Al Martinez, who went down to L.A. to write for the Los Angeles Times.
On the side, he wrote screenplays for MTM, which produced "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and its spinoff, "Lou Grant." And he modeled his fictional newspaper on the Trib, even calling it the Los Angeles Tribune.
Many of the show's characters were modeled after real people, including Lou Grant, who was modeled on Roy himself. Martinez even named him "Roy Grimm," but the producers objected that nobody would believe in a kindly curmudgeon named Grimm. It just sounded too pat.
"No problem," shrugged Martinez. So he named the character after the Trib's longtime editorial cartoonist, Lou Grant, instead.
For the record, Roy always insisted that he wasn't the model for Lou Grant, claiming it was actually a former city editor named Al Reck. But, of course, that's exactly the same kind of self-deprecating remark Lou Grant would make.
It seems sadly appropriate that Roy's death comes at a time when newspapers themselves are struggling to survive.
Their disappearance would leave the field to broadcast and Internet news outlets, which are devolving from reportage to advocacy, with Fox News for conservatives and MSNBC for liberals.
We need more old-school journalists like Roy, who had three strict but simple rules: Get the facts right, don't play favorites, and don't cut any corners.
But he would have cringed at my using a pretentious word like "journalist" to describe him. He preferred the more down-to-earth, working-class term, "reporter."
I miss him already.

Kitties And Fiddlers

Three weeks ago, a woman heard some faint crying coming from a dumpster on the Embarcadero in Oakland.
She looked inside and found tiny four kittens in a plastic bag that was sealed with duct tape. If she hadn't come along when she did, they would have suffocated.
The kittens were so young - only three or four days old - their umbilical cords were still attached.
One was already dead, and another died soon after. She took the two survivors home, but she soon realized they required more care than she knew how to provide. So she called Island Cat Resources and Adoption (formerly known as Island Cat Rescue) in Alameda.
ICRA volunteers bottle-fed the little kittens every two hours around the clock, and they thrived. In a few weeks they'll be old enough to be placed in new homes. And you couldn't ask for nicer, sweeter, more affectionate kitties because all that bottle-feeding has made them extremely people-oriented.
And ICRA has more than 350 success stories like that every year. Its mission is to reduce the feral cat population of Alameda, Oakland and Emeryville by humanely trapping them and taking them to local veterinarians for spay/neuter surgery and whatever other medical attention is needed.
Those that are tame enough to be adopted are put in temporary foster homes, where they learn to trust humans, then placed in permanent homes.
Those that are too wild to be adopted are returned to their feral cat colonies, where they live out their lives under the watchful eyes of ICRA volunteers, who feed them and monitor their wellbeing. And, most importantly, they don't produce any more kittens.
ICRA is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, and it's celebrating with a gala fund-raiser April 25 at the Elks Lodge in Alameda. Gift certificates, art, fine jewelry, overnight trips, pet goodies, sports memorabilia and more will be auctioned; and all proceeds will go to the kitties.
For more information about ICRA and the auction, call 510-869-2584 or visit www.icraeastbay.org.
Meanwhile, do you know the difference between a violin and a fiddle?
"Violin music is for listening; fiddle music is for dancing," says Pate Thomson of Berkeley. And he ought to know because he plays some of the most danceable music there is: Scottish fiddle tunes, with titles like "Miss Grace Hay's Delight" and "Miss Oswald of Auchincruive's Favorite Reel."
By day, Thomson is a cardiologist. But at night he puts down his stethoscope and picks up his fiddle, and he and his wife Judy make music with other members of the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers. In large groups and small, they get together and fiddle to their hearts' delight until the wee small hours.
Once a year, the Scottish Fiddlers don their formal kilts and present a series of boisterous public concerts when, as the group's leader, Alisdair Fraser, puts it, "spontaneous things break out and anything's likely to happen."
This year they will appear locally on April 24 at the Valley Center for the Performing Arts at Holy Names University in Oakland. For more information or tickets, call 800-838-3006 or visit www.brownpapertickets.com.
Dancing in the aisles is not only permitted, it's practically mandatory. Periodically, Fraser will turn to the audience and proclaim in a thick Scottish burr, "Get up and fling yourselves about in an ethnic manner!"
I can't think of anything that's more fun. Enjoy!