New Year 2018

Happy New Year 2018.  This year in Tacoma we can anticipate further change at the Yacht Club area near Point Defiance.  At Facebook I earlier shared a clipping on which my mom Linnea Jensen indicated where her father's fishing boat was kept at the yacht club, she marked the location on an photo from 1936 reproduced in the newspaper. 

Boxing Day - And Time Before New Years

Tuesday on a walk at Point Defiance Park

Remarkable difference in the number of blog entries since March when The New Computer Room at the building where I live got three computers.  My resolutions from 2018 include make sure you can enter your blog from the New Computer Room.  So often my internet situation is not prepared for my entry from difference Computer Centers at Different Libraries. 

Electronovision and 1964 Church Choir Participation

 

1964-1965 I was in the choir at First Lutheran Church.   My father was working evenings at the drug store.  He bought me an Olivetti Underwood portable typewriter to use for typing practice.   Everyone at the high school summer school typing class was a stranger to me, and the building was only five years old.   All the afternoons I could walk home,  not much more than a mile.  In my first year, my sophomore year at high school, a lot of things were different.  Once school began, my mother wanted me to get tickets and take the bus.  My mother wanted me to go to choir practice with her Thursday nights, and to sing in the choir from the choir loft on Sunday mornings.  So Autumn 1964 through Spring 1965 I was in the choir at First Lutheran Church.  

My view of why this happened was always that my mother wanted me to be around other people when my sister had individuated to University.  Possibly  she really did not want me to spend time alone at the house.  My mother also wanted me to ride with her when she needed to drive to Lakewood to see my grandmother at the rest home.  She did not want to ride all that way alone in the car.  She sometimes wanted me to just wait for her and do homework.  Sometimes she wanted me to go in with her and see my grandmother.

Auditions were just singing a little beside the piano for Mrs. Weiss, the choir director.  The only anthem I remember was Oh, Holy Night.  We sang that with the other Christmas music on the Christmas Program.  In the spring.  There was an outreach performance at Western State Hospital.  I can remember that we were given a short tour of the grounds and performed for inmates in a large room, lit with daylight from a wall with many windows.

This was not a clean break from the friends I had at the junior high school.  The ticket I had from the September 1964 Electronovision production of Hamlet, with Richard Burton, was for the evening, so it was not a field trip, and very likely it was time spent with the friends who always were focused on drama.  Electronovision never became popular.  I watched You Tube clips from the copy that survived and I have retained a remembrance of seeing Richard Burton perform in this simple dark costume.  I looked up the advertisements for this on microfilm and found an article the Sunday before about a Thursday dinner celebrating the 80^th anniversary of the Swedish Order of Valhalla.  Their organization was older than their 1905 hall.  My grandfather's brother was to be honored.

I had to reflect that the honor for my grandfather's brother was from a letter he wrote them.  He went back to Sweden in 1957.  And wrote letters to everyone. 

So it was a week in 1964 in which I can find myself, at the Temple Theater in Tacoma and starting the year of choir rehearsals and anthem performances. 

An Earlier Time - Paint Samples at the Scottish Rites Cathedral

The Scottish Rites Cathedral is now during the tear down.  During these last years the paint has been a lovely positive element of the scene in the Stadium District. Their paint choices had worked so well with the view from near the grocery. 

An old photo shows paint samples during the decorating project. 

Hunger, by Roxane Gay, Tacoma Reads Together

This morning on the way to the volunteer job I attended the coffee shop office hours of one of my elected officials, Laurie Jinkins.  She co-moderated with Mayor Marilyn Strickland the book discussion last week at Wheelock Library; the large circle at the meeting room in the old McCormick Library section filled the whole floor area.  Many participants spoke about Hunger by Roxane Gay, the choice for Tacoma Reads Together by Marilyn Strickland.  

Office hours, relocated from an ice cream place to Connie's Donuts.  After a little walk I got in line and spoke to Laurie Jinkins.  I mentioned my comment at the book discussion, that I had read A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway when I was a page at McCormick Library so long ago, and from some characteristics of the writing in Hunger, I wondered if Roxane Gay was influenced by the work of Gertrude Stein.  

Ann Dasch, Leg. Assistant, Laurie Jinkins

Laurie Jinkins had not remembered my comment, and said she wished she had been able to ask
about influences at the reading last night at Lincoln High School. I had not been able to register until the seats had all been taken.  Laurie Jinkins said the event went very well, all the seats had been taken, only a few were left.  The response to the author and her perfomance was wonderful, and it was a good event.  

Another citizen awaited at the small round tables, and across the street my bus arrived almost as soon as I reached the stop.  On to the volunteer job at PLU Archives.

This Year And Last Year's Art Show At the Building

During many months at the building I live in, residents have become more portable tenants to prepare for building remodel plans, and everyone has boxed things up.  As July came near, I found the building’s gathering area cleared of things, only to await redecoration for a time.  Others joined in with me to also seize the day and use the space as an art studio.  Although their other plans took priority, the small Fourth of July Art Show materialized.  So, yesterday I set up the Art Show ahead of the festivity of its opening morning today...  That was my blog entry for the First Annual Art Show at the building where I live, held last year on the Fourth of July. 

This year half a dozen people participated in the Second Annual Art Show.  I brought photographs again.  This year there were quilts, paintings, wood craft, painted ceramics and more.    

Cascadia Poetry Festival This Weekend

Yesterday, Wednesday the 11^th, after I had a flu shot at my building, I walked for about an hour, I think it is wise to have the flu shot distributed everywhere in your system, and the best way would be to exercise to get circulating.  At a Little Free Library I saw a book I noticed on the supermarket book sales stands:  the new Lisabet Salander novel written by a different author from the original series.  I looked inside and read just a little, in places.  And it was quite interesting.  I have a reserve on the book at the Tacoma Public Library.  But I decided to just leave the brand new book inside the sidewalk book library because I will attend the Cascadia Poetry Festival this weekend and cannot expect to be free to read any of the Salander story.  Someone else probably has found the book by now.