What more do you need?

I’m swinging my feet contentedly under my desk while reading a recent Kepler's best-seller list. There’s just something so refreshingly simple about the titles.

As of May 7, “Blue Shoes and Happiness” by Alexander McCall Smith topped the hardcover fiction category. The book is really about sleuths in Botswana, but to me the title conjures up a pleasure so basic you’re embarrassed to talk about it. Like new Keds, or the perfect Skippy-on-whole-wheat sandwich.

You know, I actually refuse to be embarrassed about the joy of peanut butter. I am proud.

Then there’s the super seller in hardcover nonfiction, presenting such pure, perfect logic in its title. “Eat, Drink, & Weigh Less” by Mollie Katzen. Well, duh.

(Except for peanut butter. Eat as much as you want.)

Hey, throw some other favorite book titles my way, dear reader. You can post a comment below.

You spin me right 'round, baby

Love museums. Hate the fact that you can't touch the art. So I had quite the guilty-pleasure time at last night's reception at Gallery House in Palo Alto. Not only can you touch the paintings, but you can spin them around. Here's some video I shot:

Painter Sydell Lewis decided to give folks more perspectives by adding rotating mechanisms on the back. Do you see a different Rorschach-style view with each turn?

Her paintings are on exhibit together with Pat Oyama's masks and other ceramic objects through May 27. Too bad blues guitarist John Cowan isn't there every night.

Swinging strings

When I interviewed him earlier this week for a Weekly story, cellist Stephen Harrison from Palo Alto's Ives Quartet impressed me with his drive to get string-quartet music to the masses. Especially the masses of a more tender age. (If we could get just one kid to turn down Nickelback on his iPod for one minute, what a lovelier place the world would be.)

So I'd like to do my part by bringing the string quartet to this newfangled invention called a blog. Here's a sample of the Ives Quartet playing William Kroll's "Magyar." It's a 45-second .mp3 file.

The quartet next performs May 11 at St. Mark's church in Palo Alto, taking on a new Roger Bourland composition called "Four Poets."

Comment dit-on "blog" en francais?

A petite update on my recent story about the French film series at Stanford: the festival now has its own blog.

You can pose questions to the organizers and critics, and also fire off a few to actress Elodie Bouchez, who's set to make an appearance at Stanford on May 9. If you're lucky, she'll answer your question at Cubberley Auditorium for all to hear.

Note that some of the screening dates have been changed; all the info is on the film series site. Also note that some of the blog is in French, which I thought was pretty cool. (Since I can't find anyone around here to speak Hungarian with, I'll work on my fractured francais.)

Behind (and in) the scenes

Can an actor on an empty stage summon up a whole world? Certainly. The best piece of theater I ever saw had a man and a woman in a tiny blank canvas of a Berkeley venue, doing a scene that took place on a pyramid in Egypt at night. To this day, the stars and the roughness of the ancient stone are still vivid in my mind.

So think how much more real the world becomes when you've got an amazing set.

Recently, I got a sneak peek of the set at the Palo Alto Players production of "Urinetown," which runs through May 14. Hammers and paintbrushes were still going, but I was impressed with the gritty intricacy of the set. It has huge dank pipes for the actors to scurry through and a richness of dark color that's perfect for the musical's gloomy world.

For the uninitiated, "Urinetown" is about a futuristic world in which there's a horrible drought and an evil corporation controls all the toilets. Pay to pee, or the cops will drag you off to the dreaded Urinetown.

Kuo-Hao Lo, Palo Alto Players' technical director and resident scenic designer, took a few moments in the midst of the sawdust to chat about how he dreamed up the "Urinetown" set. Ron Evans, a member of the cast, caught him on video. Check it out below.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, Monsieur Evans is my significant other. He also shoots a mean video, not that I'm biased.)

Got other ideas for audio and video files on the arts? Drop me an email at rwallace (at) paweekly.com.

We should be so lucky

I thought my birthday celebration last week was pretty spiffy: my favorite people around me, and my favorite double-stuffed potato at Max's Opera Cafe in Palo Alto. (What, you were expecting Spago? Even a food editor can admit to a more mainstream palate.)

My day, though, couldn't hold a candle -- or a hundred -- to Marianne Crowder, who just celebrated reaching the century mark. A birthday tea was held in her honor last Saturday at the Burgess rec center in Menlo Park, which was appropriate considering she taught about 57,000 girls to dance there over the years (perhaps a slight exaggeration).

Marianne started teaching dance in Menlo Park in 1949. In 1961, the city built her a dance room at the rec center. She taught at Stanford and led her "Forever Fit" class in Menlo Park for more than 50 years, until her daughter, Sue Chiappone, took over a few years ago. When I interviewed her in 2004, she was elegant, good-humored and remarkably graceful.

I heard Marianne's birthday party was packed with her former students, students who continued with Sue, and relatives including grandchildren and great-grandchildren. That might even beat out a double-stuffed potato.

Congratulations. My hat's off to you, Marianne.

Pictured: Marianne Crowder (right) and her daughter, Sue Chiappone

Austen on stage

My favorite quote from my recent interview with Los Angeles composer and writer Paul Gordon: "I didn't want to be the composer who always did the 19th-century novel with the woman's name in the title."

Hmm. Well, he did do the music for the 2000 Broadway musical version of "Jane Eyre" and is now taking on Jane Austen's "Emma." (Still kicking the kinks out, "Emma" gets its first staged reading soon in Mountain View, at TheatreWorks' Spring Festival of New Works.)

So why put on an "Emma" show? "It was too good a story to pass up," Gordon told me. "It's happy, it's positive, and it's got several love stories. It's just good musical theater fodder."

It's also less epic than "Jane Eyre," which affected how he worked. "With 'Jane Eyre' I made myself read the entire novel before I wrote a note," he said. "With 'Emma' I wrote it as I went along; I came up with my own way with each scene or each chapter."

"Emma" may be simpler, but when Gordon talked to me last week before going into rehearsals his creation had 22 songs. Yep, he was expecting to make a cut or two.

Gordon says his music is swayed both by Stephen Sondheim and by pop styles. "Period pieces tend to reflect the time, but I'm not married to the idiom," he says. You can hear threads of both in "Jane Eyre" -- give a listen to the samples on Amazon.

We'll see how many of the "Emma" songs escape the cutting-room floor, but they could include the ballad "Emma," which Mr. Knightley sings to his dear after she has swept into the ball. There's also an ensemble number while a group of aristocrats is out picking strawberries.

No, honey, I don't think it's called "Strawberry Fields Forever."