Music, photo and a wine-powered car
The Sonoma Music Festival starts Friday night with the band America, followed by headliner Chicago. It’s the event’s debut at the Field of Dreams on First Street West in Sonoma, which is right across the street from Arnold Field, where Sonoma Valley High School will be playing two games that night. Not the best bit of planning. But the way the Dragons are playing, you’ll see more hits at the concert.
Driving through Marin, you may recognize the poster dude for Marin General Hospital’s outdoor advertising campaign. Sonoma photographer Adrian Hyman didn’t take the photo, he’s the subject of it — part of the hospital’s “Healing Stories” campaign. Two years ago, Hyman was fatigued and weakened to the point he couldn’t work with a camera. Dr. Brian Su diagnosed a condition where some of the neck vertebrae compress and fuse into one bony block. As the compression continued to worsen, Hyman would be progressively paralyzed. The ensuing surgery fixed the problem. Hyman feels great, and looks good, too, as a portrait of success. A model patient, one might say.
The latest on the biofuel front comes from England, where a bus fuelled by cow manure broke the land speed record for a public service bus. Now comes word that Prince Charles himself had his 1964 Aston Martin DB5 tweaked to run on bioethanol derived almost entirely from wine. Seems a huge glut of surplus wine on the European market has folks thinking outside the barrel. Still, the price – a princely sum — isn’t yet feasible for us peasants… By the way, the DB5 is the car James Bond drove in “Goldfinger.” So where does Charles go for fill-ups? Her Majesty’s Secret Service Station, of course.
A showcase of singing killers has got to be one of the weirder ideas for a hit Broadway show, but Stephen Sondheim pulled it off. The local production of his “Assassins” wraps up this weekend. Vicki Stollmeyer loved it, calling it one of Sonoma’s all-time best productions. As for the odd plot, “It’s like ‘Cabaret’ meets Lee Harvey Oswald.”
— Val Robichaud
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