A California Online Magazine with Local Focus and Global Appeal
Autumn in the San Joaquin Valley. The weather is trying to get cooler. The leaves are trying to turn color and fall. The fog is getting ready to come in “on little cat feet”…or land like a giant pancake. Best of all, there is a hint of turkey in the air. Of course, we will try to wait patiently for Turkey Day, but you can warm up with these sandwich findings from the Great Food Search.
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He and She can’t stand each other. However, the two of them have been writing to each other for a long time. They have fallen in love with each other, but they don’t know it.
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Clue—the board game was developed in 1943 by Anthony E. Pratt in England, where it was known as Cluedo, and first marketed in 1949. The murder mystery game challenged the players to deduce the weapon, location, and killer.
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In Haunted Rails: Tales of Ghost Trains, Phantom Conductors, and other Railroad Spirits, Matthew L. Swayne offers three-score tales of hauntings at train museums, stations, tunnels, bridges, and accident sites. The bibliography lists twice as many sources. This slim-ish volume is exhaustively researched, bringing together story as well as tales of hauntings from across the United States (even Hawaii gets a paranormal mention) and Canada.
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George Mc Arthur does strange things: fire-eating, sword swallowing, pounding large nails up his nostrils—but when you stand 7’3” and are known as George the Giant, you can get away with things like that. The strangest thing he ever did was open a pop-up museum of unusual things, in October of 2018.
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If you have an “Impossible Dream” (and even if you don’t), you should go to Roger Rocka’s Dinner Theatre to see the Good Company Players’ production of Man of La Mancha.
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I’ve written about this place, before: twice in articles on places where I eat during the Fresno Rogue Festival, once as a special mention in a piece on ice cream places.
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All the world’s a stage…To be, or not to be…a pound of flesh…Lord, what fools these mortals be!
William Shakespeare, right?
If nobody remembered his work, it would be like if nobody remembered…the music of the Beatles (Hmmm, isn’t there a movie…?)
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I missed Carrow’s. It was at 2100 Clovis Avenue, just south of Shaw, sort of an upper-scale Denny’s, but it closed. I was sad, but I’m not anymore. The old Carrow’s is now a new Huckleberry’s! For convenience, it’s across the parking lot from the new Costco building, so you can eat before you go to buy 100 rolls of toilet paper.
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Daphne du Maurier wrote moody, atmospheric fiction, sometimes paranormal, with love entwined—”romance noir,” where characters with a happy ending aren’t really that happy. Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, The Birds, Frenchman’s Creek…and My Cousin Rachel. The Good Company Players’ 2nd Space Theatre currently presents a tense, breathtaking adaptation through October 13.
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In the matter of CenterStage Clovis vs. Legally Blonde: The Musical, both parties came out the winner. An exuberant cast cheerfully brings the story of the 2001 Reese Witherspoon comedy (based on Amanda Brown’s novel) to tuneful life on the Mercedes Edwards Theatre stage. It’s funny, brisk, and there are a few delightful casting surprises.
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After stuffing myself with ice cream in June, I turned the Great Food Search toward a more healthy highway of food—salads. Some people look down on salads as that green stuff they have to chomp through before they can really eat something, but the dishes I am about to introduce to you are more than a mouthful—this is FOOD!
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Seven years ago, the Good Company Players presented Calamity Jane, based on the Doris Day musical film, at Roger Rocka’s. Instead of using all local talent, the starring role was played by Louise Mandrell, country singer and part of the Mandrell Sisters. She was really, really good.
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If someone comes off as a really nice person, but suddenly turns mean and nasty, we call him a “Jekyll and Hyde,” all because of Robert Louis Stevenson and a bad dream. That dream, of a man physically turning from good to evil, became the 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Over the last 133 years, the story has appeared on stage, on movie screens, and on television countless times (I actually wrote script and lyrics for a musical comedy version presented when I was in high school in 1969), and in varying degrees of adaptation (Remember Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971)?).
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