There are thousands upon thousands of people in this country, likely hundreds in this county alone, who live in darkness daily.
Whether it be on the streets, in ghettos, on a friend or relative’s couch or even on the search for low-income, affordable housing — for a person with no real place to call home, life can seem endlessly gloomy, like a lingering Northwest winter.
With a placeslike the Jazz House offering live music on Fridays and Saturdays on Pacific in Bremerton, and gatherings like the first annual 2007 Care To Jazz festival, which played through the rain at McCormick Woods Port Orchard earlier this summer, things are beginning to swing in Kitsap County.
Of all the many things that Seattle’s Pike Place Market could and should be celebrated for, one of its most endearing and important aspects, according to local historian and author Alice Shorett, is the people who have rallied around it and kept it alive for a century.
The market, which turned 100 Aug. 17, has been an incarnation of the American Dream, a tourist attraction, a platform for small business, entertainers and much more in its history.
If the Mountaineers Players put on a musical in the woods but no one was around to see it, would the show still go on?
There’s a good chance the Kitsap Forest Theatre company — which has been producing plays of all shapes and sizes in an amphitheater nestled in the Seabeck forest since 1923 — won’t run into that predicament anytime soon.
Upon entrance into “All Things Being Equal” — Ken Van der Does’ August exhibit at the Collective Visions Gallery in Bremerton — one is greeted by a big, bright yellow-backgrounded self portrait of the artist.
Beyond that greeting, there are semi-abstractly familiar Northwest/peninsula scenes — boats, boat houses, a street artist doing his thing on a sunny day downtown, a captain’s wheel.
Look at the breadth: where else will you get the chance to see an arena full of determined cowboys and cowgirls and fierce broncs and bulls followed by a stage full of nearly antique rock stars amidst a four-day cluster of hundreds of people enjoying the dog days of summer, carrying around mounds of cotton candy and 25 cent inflatable toys which they just spent upwards of $10 trying to win?
Bicyclists indulge: a new Northwest guide book has charted more than 1,500 miles of paved trail traveling through eight counties and 80 different communities, all accessible within an hour of Seattle.
The book provides a two-wheeled platform for discovery with each of its 50 rides. All you have to do is get on your bike and pedal.
With the plethora of summer arts fairs and festivals within an few hours’ travel from Kitsap, it’s quite feasible that a connoisseur could mark nearly every weekend from spring to fall with a different event.
In Kitsap alone you’ve got the Kitsap Arts and Crafts Fair in July, the Bainbridge Island Studio Tour and newly rendered Bainbridge Island Art Expo in August, the Blackberry Festival in September and an Art in the Woods Studio tour all the way into November.
Ahoy ye’ ole’ salts, scallywags and swashbucklers o’ Kitsap! Make yer way to thee Port o’ Gamble this weekend fer a whale-sized bounty o’ grog, an’ grub an’ ole’ time sea chanteys, arisin’ from Davy Jones’ Locker.
This Sunday, Port Gamble marks the spot for the Kitsap Peninsula’s second annual Maritime Music Festival which will harbor buccaneers, sailors and landlubbers alike — lest ye be the scurvy mate that’ll end up kissin’ thar gunner’s daughter or walkin’ ye plank!
With their latest idea turned exhibit, the Bainbridge Island Arts and Crafts curators could be considered either completely mundane, or completely brilliant.
The theme of the Gallery’s August exhibit is centered around an item so incredibly simple it could easily be construed as containing no artistic value whatsoever. Yet in what it contains, that item’s creative possibilities are almost infinite.
Living, although replicated, history; a movie star; a state dignitary and a Hawaiian chieftain will all be arriving as part of the same two ship crew when The Lady Washington and her companion tall ship the Hawaiian Chieftain dock at the Brownsville Marina this week.
Socially, meteorologically, idealistically and geographically it seems there are few things that could further divide the Emerald City from a Texas town called Frost with a population of 648. On the other hand, when you put the two together sonically, few things sound better.
Case in point: the sweet folkrock of Rocky Votolato.
In my last column I talked a little about some of the wonderful male characters that have followed in Harry Potter’s footsteps. When faced with this column and feeling a bit out of ideas for a new and fresh theme, I asked around the office what my co-workers felt I should cover next. North Kitsap Herald Poulsbo reporter Jennifer Morris said “Well, you’ve written about the guys, but what about the girls?”
It would be quite a trip if there were an office building portal that led to the inside of a working artist’s head. A journey through would likely yield colors of all kinds, light rays, reflections, nature, rock and roll and all sorts of crazy combinations of any number of interesting things.
When Gwendolyn Atwood came to Bremerton, she found the end of her quest for artistic freedom. She bought her first home there in 1998 thanks to a clever artists’ conference hosted by downtown gallery owner, artist Amy Burnett.
And ever since, she has lived, worked and created here.
“The Bremerton art community has always welcomed me in,” she said. “Bremerton has always been good to me.”
It’s time again to take a trip back to a time when grabbing one’s friends, getting in the car and taking a cruise down the city’s main drag was the thing to do on Friday nights.
Those days seem long since passed, at least en masse, as technology, gas prices and other factors funnel today’s youth in front of video game consoles or movie screens for fun. But once every summer in Port Orchard, the car-crazy generations of yesteryears, and those of today, still pay homage to The Cruz.
Beyond the Kitsap Mountaineer Players’ annual excursions into the woods each summer, outdoor theater in Kitsap — let alone free snippets of Shakespeare on the waterfront — is a touch hard to find.
Luckily this month, the latter will be relatively easy to seek out, so long as one knows how to get to Bremerton’s Evergreen Park (at the end of Pacific Ave. off of 11th Street).
On the national stage, the musical revue “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” won a 1995 Grammy while being nominated for seven different Tony Awards in the year of its premiere. And since its final performance in January 2000, it has held the title of the longest running musical revue in Broadway history.
This is it, “Touch of Evil” will be the final chance to catch a bit of summertime film noir.
Not that one wouldn’t be able to rent that or any other movie of the genre, take it home with them and feast on some of the foundations of modern film, this is just the final installment of a movie series that has brought folks together under cinema at the Port Orchard branch of the Kitsap Regional Library.
Lost in the cadence of the 27-year-old, still potent rock and roll masterpiece “Back in Black,” one might wonder whether there is any musical entity that could ever top the thumping back beat and ear-drum shaking guitar riffs of the great AC/DC.
