Tina Martin San Francisco Vistas: Willie Brown Needs to Connect the Dots for a Saner Diet

Tina Martin San Francisco Vistas: Willie Brown Needs to Connect the Dots for a Saner Diet

Going Back to My Week in NYC, September 2-9

 I saw 7 plays while I was in New York:  Come from Away, Katie, Miss Saigon, Annie (in Westchester outside of NYC),   Prince of Broadway, Dear Evan Hansen and Groundhog Day.  I enjoyed all of them.

I've already talked about "Katie" in a separate blogspot.

Seeing Annie was special because an actor I met on the Camino de Santiago  last September was playing President FDR in the show.  He invited me to join him and other actors in the van to Westchester and got me a free ticket and lunch.   It was the nicest dinner theater I'd ever been to although the dinner was lunch!  The play was also the best production I've ever seen of Annie.   John-Charles made a great FDR!

Before Jonathan and I saw Dear Evan Hansen, a friend of his invited me to go behind the stage, where she works getting actors' clothes ready for each performance.  (The actor in Dear Evan Hansen really cries every night, and there's evidence of this on the sleeve of his shirt, so that's one item she deals with.)

Here are some photos of my stay in NY!  

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/upl135l8ficrn0v/AABcOr2YaVi-FSQ6RNPk0eJBa?dl=0

Among the people you'll see are my nephew Karl, whose July birthday we celebrated at Blossom on Columbus.  When he lived in SF, he loved the fog, so I brought him an article explaining that the fog has been named Karl!

Sunday morning it was raining, so I borrowed Jonathan's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center umbrella.  Unfortunately, I left it in the theater, and when I went back for it, it hadn't been turned in.

On Sunday Jonathan and I had lunch with Jim Canning (who was in the original cast ofGrease) and his wife at Saju's, a French restaurant near the Schoenfeld Theater, where we saw Come from Away.    We then ate at Mother of Pearl with Jonathan's girlfriend Diana and their friend Daniel, who live in Brooklyn.  The food was beautiful and all plant-based--delicious and kind to animals and the environment.  

You can see Diana and Daniel showing their surprise at finding a pay telephone on the street!

Then on Monday Jonathan and I went to Book Culture, near his apartment, and then met Diana and had lunch at Sweetgreen before taking a walk from 72nd Street to 106 to the Conservatory Garden--English, Italian, and French!  We stopped at the Shakespeare Garden as well as at Turtle Pond. 

I learned that the lamp posts let us know what street we're near in case we get lost in the park!

I'd read about Seneca,  the village of black property owners that was destroyed to build Central Park, so that sign interested me.  I also like the subway signs like the one you see here--and the menus!  Here were are at By Chloe.  

That was before the 9:00 PM performance of "Katie," where Jonathan, Isabelle, Thomas, and I saw Miguel, watched his engrossing play, and participated in the talk-back.  

Then you see the actor I first met a year ago and his husband, who's both acted in plays and directed them.  They have a show-filled home!  

You see the actors all lined up to be picked up for the 45 min. ride to Winchester, a dinner theater.  (It turns out that Bill and Hillary Clinton were there the week before I was.)  The guy you see in the van is the actor who played a major part in Annie; I thought it was great that he was also driving us!  

In the last two pictures you see me in the subway near Jonathan's apartment, where I'm holding the programs from the past week.

I was caught in the rain one day and decided that if I had to buy an umbrella, I'd get a New York one, however tacky.  I thought I was buying one that said, "I LOVE NEW YORK."  Instead it said, "NEW YORK LOVES ME."  I was embarrassed, but a man I met on the street assured me, "Yes, New York does love you," so I was relieved to find it was mutual.  

Willie Brown Needs to Connect the Dots for a Saner Diet

In yesterday's SF Chronicle, Willie Brown failed to connect the dots between a vegan diet and the environment.

https://www.pressreader.com/usa/san-francisco-chronicle/20170917/282020442466466

In response, I got this off to the SF Chronicle this morning (Monday, September 18, 2017)   around 8:05 am.

(The require a short bio:  Before retiring as an instructor at CCSF in 2014, I taught and trained teachers on five continents--Oceana, Asia, North America, Africa, and Europe.  I recently did a vegan plate-to-plate pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago and in Madrid, Paris, and NYC.)

I enjoy reading Willie Brown's column, but he needs to connect the dots.  In Willie's World September 17, he's gleeful about Bill Clinton's weight gain, suspecting that "he has ditched the vegan diet that he took up after his heart troubles and is now back to the cheeseburgers that made him great."  Then he extols Governor Jerry Brown as "the nation's leading voice on climate change" but ignores what Governor Brown said in 2015 about the impact of our diet on the environment :  "I think you should all be eating veggie burgers."

The Notion that "A Mother Knows" Presented by the Actress-Mother of "Katie"

 Jonathan turned down the chance to see several of the plays I was seeing, but he immediately said yes to Katie,  the play by Javier's son Miguel Toruno.  It was fortunate that one of the nights it was playing was Dark Monday, so I didn't have to give up any of the tickets I had for other nights.  (I would have given one up if it had been necessary.)

We were thrilled to see Miguel both before and after the play.  (I'd like a tee-shirt like his, and I'll bet Javier would too--even though he never wears a tee-shirt.)

The play itself was/is very engaging and thought-provoking as you can tell by the talk back here:

 http://pennytempletonstudio.com/katie-directed-penny-templeton-opens-tonight-theater-new-city/

For now I'm going to comment on only one remark that was made:  Alixx Schottland, who played the mother,  said, in reference to her "reading" of her daughter's wish to have sex with her male care-taker, "A mother knows."  

I am also a mother, and I had a mother, and I know that a mother doesn't always know.  But this theme interested me very much in terms of  plays I was familiar with before I saw Katie:

The mother in The Glass Menagerie knows that her daughter needs a gentleman caller who will eventually marry her and take care of her and the family in a way that her son Tom wants to escape.

The mother in The Light in the Piazza knows that her developmentally disabled daughter can find happiness in a normal life if she doesn't reveal her daughter's mental age  to the Italian man in love with her.  

After seeing  Katie and participating in the talk-back afterwards, my son and I saw   Miss Saigon, and Dear Even Hansen.   At the end of the week, we discussed the notion that a mother knows.

In Miss Saigon, the mother knows she would give her life for her son, and when she's convinced that her child's only chance at a good life is being adopted by his father and his wife, she kills herself so that she will not be an obstacle in the way of the adoption.

In Dear Even Hansen neither mother knows what's going on in the life of her son.  Of course, they don't spend almost every  moment of every day with their sons either!

To be continued...

Some French from the Broadway Musical "Subways Are for Sleeping," 1961

This doesn't really fit into the theme of SF Vistas, but I keep hoping "Subways Are for Sleeping" will come to 42nd Street Moon, as I think it was once going to.  (Or am I thinking of "Skyscraper"?)

This morning, Samba and I used the first part of our French hour to write down the words, which I had trouble understanding:

Allons enfants, le jour de gloire est arrive.  Bebe Suivez.  Chaque jour n'arrive qu'une fois dans la vie
Sur le pony
Pont d'Aligon on y danse
Yet commence.
Chaque jour n'arrive qu'une fois dans la vie.
Maintenant, demain c'est un mot qui n'existe pas
Embrasse-moi, Mama
Et ne pensez plus on temps perdu
Allons enfants
Vous etes comme honkytonky et wow
Une fois on voit le soleil qui brille
Une fois on a la cle de la ville
Une fois on peut crier "A ba la Bastille!"
Amour, toujours right now!