You can't go home again

Palo Alto as a stand-in for Wisconsin? Now that's movie magic.

Today, a movie crew is in our neck of the woods, shooting an independent feature film at a home in downtown Palo Alto. "Presque Isle" is set in the Rhinelander, Wisconsin childhood home of director Rob Nilsson.

Here's the cool collaborative piece of the story: Nilsson, who nabbed the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1987 for "Heat and Sunlight," is working together with students from the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking, which is just over a year old. It's all to give the students hands-on experience in making a high-def digital movie -- this is the school's first feature-film project.

And what more do we know about "Presque Isle"? Well, Nilsson says the story covers "themes of memory, human suffering, family reconciliation, and also a portrait of a land much neglected by American cinema." Much of it is also being shot in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Pictured: Nilsson hard at work. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking.

Tiffany tale ends happily

As I so humbly predicted on June 14, the special promotional brochure that TheatreWorks mailed out to a random patron -- it was good for one Tiffany necklace -- never surfaced. Oh, the misty murk of our postal system.

But the tale ends happily. The TheatreWorks folks instead drew a name at random from theatergoers at the June 24 opening night of "Vanities." Debbie Appel of La Honda went home with a 12-strand pearl necklace.

Good for her. See? It pays to go to the theater.

The quilt is mightier than the sword

Can you catch more flies with quilting than shouting? OK, so I mixed my metaphors just a tad, but my question is apt when looking at the work of Los Altos artist Linda Gass. She's an avid outdoorswoman who makes beautiful, lush statements about the environment through her art quilts and other works.

I'm especially taken with her quilt "South Bay" (above). It depicts the southern part of San Francisco Bay in remarkable detail, including the salt ponds that stand out so jarringly against the landscape.

With the quilt, Gass's hope is to educate people about the need for restoring wetlands. It's a compelling yet gentle way to do so.

Gass, a Stanford graduate who was in software development before making the move to a fiber artist's life 11 years ago, has a personal record this summer. Her work is being shown in four exhibits miles apart: in France, Washington, North Carolina and Santa Monica.

Apropos for an artist who shows such curiosity about the world.

Pictured: "South Bay," a quilt by Linda Gass. Photo by James Dewrance.

Dream a little dream

A hot, drowsy Friday afternoon: how can I work when I want to snooze under my desk with the AP stylebook as a pillow?

I blame my relaxation on the Stanford Jazz Festival. Whilst typing, I'm tooling around the Internet listening to clips of some of the musicians playing there this summer. Smoooooth.

Check out their sites:
* Cyrus Chestnut (performing at Stanford Jazz on June 24)
* Anton Schwartz (July 17)
* Taylor Eigsti (July 23)

But I thought it was a Fry's ad

I know one little Tiffany's necklace who's feeling mighty lonely.

See, the folks at TheatreWorks decided to try a glittery promotion. A few weeks ago they mailed out 20,000 season brochures -- one had a gold sticker on it. If you get that brochure, you win a necklace designed by Paloma Picasso, with 12 strands of pearls and sterling silver clasps. The bauble is scheduled to be presented on stage June 24 during a production of "Vanities."

But, um, no one has claimed the prize. And the special brochure was randomly placed in a pile of mailers before the address labels got popped on, so there aren't any clues about who the winner is.

I throw out piles of junk mail every week. Doesn't everyone? Do you now kinda wish you hadn't?

Unfortunately, with the amount of dreck clogging our mailboxes, I would be very surprised if the golden ticket ever saw the light of day. (In case I'm wrong, I'll be out back shuffling through the recycle bin.)

Photo by Clara Natoli

The show must...aw, you know the rest

Sometimes the best way to achieve immortality on the stage is to fall off the stage. Honestly, who are you going to remember: the fiery performance, or the actor who accidentally set his leading lady on fire?

Nothing makes me laugh like a good theater catastrophe, assuming no one was wounded in the line of duty. When writing my Weekly cover story on the 75-year history of the Palo Alto Players, I heard a few doozies, like the one about a pizza mistakenly being delivered on stage (see the aforementioned cover story).

I particularly loved the quaint ones I found in “1001 First Nights,” a little book the Players published in 1956 for their 25th anniversary. There was the actress who created a putty nose so convincing that she had to go to the hospital to get it removed.

Then there was the 1946 production of “Chicken Every Sunday,” in which the script called for the actors to talk so many times about an offstage bathroom that one leg-crossing lady came up out of the audience and onstage in search of the toilet.

And, a few more:

“There was that (1939) occurrence in ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’ when an elderly actress, in a complete lapse of memory, got out of costume at the end of Act II, and went home. Which left Garrett Starmer doing a soliloquy in the closing scene of Act III.”

Lastly, actor Tony Morse became a real-life hero during a love scene with Florence Brill in 1934’s “Mary Rose.” According to the book: “Ardor and passion glowed with the intensity of the stage set’s real wall candles -- flames from which slowly started to lick the canvas flat. Without a break in the dialogue, Morse quietly walked over and put out the fire with his hands, after which he returned to his fair lady, placed her back on his knee, and continued his love scene.”

Sunday jazz in the air

I recently got a tour of the Community School of Music and Arts, the remarkable school-slash-concert hall-slash-museum on San Antonio Circle in Mountain View. It was the kind of afternoon that makes you want to drop everything and learn how to play the bugle.

The fruits of piano lessons trickled out of practice rooms, children happily swirled glops of paint in art classes, and the classy 200-seat Tateuchi Hall was just waiting for a concert or a lecture. I managed to restrain myself from jumping on stage and belting out "Not A Day Goes By."

(No, not the Lonestar version. Geez. Go to your room, Junior.)

For a brief time, I wasn’t caught up in the mechanics of covering the arts: deciding which story to put on the cover, which call to return first, how to shorten one writer’s story and rewrite my own…

It just felt good to be in a building dedicated to arts of all kinds. Creative energy everywhere. Music in the air.

There should be plenty of good music at CSMA this Sunday, when the Alan Broadbent Trio brings jazz to that very stage at Tateuchi Hall at 3 p.m. Besides touring and recording, Broadbent is the musical director for Diana Krall and won a Grammy in 1997 for his arrangement of “When I Fall in Love” for Natalie Cole.

Pictured: Putter Smith, who plays bass for the Alan Broadbent Trio (I liked his picture better than Broadbent’s).