 |
|
|
|
|
||
| June 3, 2005
SUMMER FESTIVALS: San Rafael lives it up! The good times are happening here all summer long BY MATTHEW STAFFORD Every Thursday evening from May through September, five blocks of downtown San Rafael become a music-filled multicultural street fair fragrant with good vibes, balmy weather and an unmistakable urban buzz. Farmers from up and down the state are on hand with picked-that-morning flowers and produce. Merchants sell clothing and artifacts from around the globe. Blues bands, jazzmen, mariachis and belly dancers perform on five different stages. A dozen food vendors offer pizza, falafel, Thai food, barbecue and other melting-pot delicacies. Artisans and craftspeople display everything from jewelry to woodwork, and clowns, magicians and face painters provide their particular variants of interactive entertainment. The Fourth Street Farmers Market, in other words, is a fine excuse to experience that thronged-asphalt élan that’s made San Rafael the county’s urban nexus for almost two centuries. Further downtown frolics include the Italian Street Painting Festival June 11 and 12. Some 400 madonnari are drawn to Fifth and A streets each year to practice the Renaissance Italian art form of sidewalk adornment, and as transient by nature as these frescoes, murals and portraits are, the results are splendid and even awe-inspiring. While you’re watching the sidewalks come to individual and eclectic life, enjoy tasty treats prepared on-site by local Italian chefs, hands-on madonnari classes for the kiddies and live music from The House Jacks, Bella Ciao, the Marin School of the Arts Jazz Band and Il Banda Italiana di Marin performing Bellini, Rossini and Verdi. Another segment of the global community is represented at the Tivoli Festival, held at the Aldersly retirement home in mid-September. The home was founded in 1921 by a group of immigrant Danes concerned about the welfare of their elderly compatriots. The Danish royal family has paid Aldersly a visit, and cigar-smoking Christian Mortensen, the officially sanctioned oldest man on Earth, lived here for 20 years before his untimely death at the age of 116. The Tivoli Fest, a mere 59 years old this year, transforms the grounds into the famous Copenhagen amusement park complete with food, drink, music and dance from the Old Country. Then there’s China Camp. In the 1870s this eastern San Rafael state park was a thriving community of shops, markets and dwellings where 500 immigrant Cantonese caught and processed San Pablo Bay’s plentiful shrimp, most of it to be dried and shipped to Chinese settlements back home and across the United States. (The camp’s expat vibe is so enduringly authentic, the place stood in for a Chinese fishing village in the 1955 movie Blood Alley.) The China Camp Heritage Festival, held August 27, re-creates those lively days with traditional music and dance, fish-printed clothing and an appearance by a vintage junk or two. Yet another global gala, Ali Akbar College of Music’s second annual Indian Classical Music Festival, is an all-day-and-into-the-night panorama of sarodes, sitars and tablas, held this year in lovely Albert Park. An Instrument Petting Zoo is only one of the festival’s many attractions, among them henna painting, music demos, subcontinental food and crafts available for purchase and Ali Akbar Khan himself among the talented performers. A more homegrown celebratory option: Flag Day, celebrated at Northgate Mall June 14 with appropriate pomp and circumstance, including a simultaneous nationwide flag-raising conducted locally by VFW Quartermaster Post 72. A full program of the lively arts is an inevitable aspect of life in any city worth its box office, and San Rafael offers several examples this summer. The 29th annual Marin Home Show & Benefit Jazz Fest combines stellar sounds from Rex Allen’s Swing Express, Sinatraesque swinger Wayne Sutton and The Royal Society Jazz Orchestra with 300-plus exhibits of home improvement products, and why not? Domestic demos, a gardening and landscaping pavilion, a pulse-pounding baby-crawling contest and a swingin’ battle of the bands between jazz combos from Marin high schools are mesmerizing added attractions. There’s more outdoor artistry afoot at the Marin Art Festival, a garden party of an art show taking place June 18 and 19 at Marin Center’s Lagoon Park. Paintings, sculpture, prints, jewelry, ceramics and glassworks by over 250 juried artists are exhibited against a lovely backdrop of hillsides, waterscapes and Frank Lloyd Wright’s innovative Civic Center. When you’ve worked up a culturally inspired appetite, there are delectable treats and fine wines to be enjoyed in an elegant tented pavilion while local jazz ensembles provide a hot and cool sonic backdrop. Alfresco adventures of a cinematic sort are in store when Film Night in the Park brings the under-the-stars moviegoing experience to Albert Park. On June 11 it’s the family-friendly adventures of an ogre and his in-laws, Shrek 2; on August 6, purple horses, green witches and a lion with a Brooklyn accent star in The Wizard of Oz; and on October 1, James Dean is photogenically misunderstood in Nick Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. Music and a raffle precede the screenings at dusk; bring blankets, pillows and backrests. (Popcorn, candy and sodas are available for purchase.) Alfresco show biz of a more theatrical variety is offered up by the Marin Shakespeare Company, celebrating its 16th season this year. Every summer this acclaimed troupe brings a little bit of Stratford-Upon-Avon to Dominican University’s lovely Forest Meadows Amphitheater for three months of Bardly brilliance beneath the stars. This sylvan setting (towering trees, reflecting pool, stage constructed to frame the rising of the full moon) is the ideal venue for such frolicsome fare as Two Gentlemen of Verona (July 8-August 14), a romantic comedy of unparalleled intricacy, as well as that über-tragic tale of star-crossed springtime romance, Romeo and Juliet (August 26-September 25). The Knight of the Burning Pestle (July 15-August 14), a madcap comedy based on Cervantes’s Don Quixote by Shakespeare collaborator John Fletcher, fills out the season. San Rafael’s summertime centerpiece, though, is the Marin County Fair, celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. For five days the Marin Center Fairgrounds hosts an unending cornucopia of film festivals, corn dogs, petting zoos, pig races, stilt theater, mariachi music, bonsai cultivation, an American Rhythm & Roots Festival with Junior Brown, Angela Strehli and others, break dancing contests, anamorphic gizmos, cotton candy, Huey Lewis & The News, nightly fireworks, carnival rides, salsa dancing, the Rawhide Express choo-choo train, Pablo Cruise, a pinewood go-cart derby, a no-holds-barred poetry slam, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and just about every other manifestation of human endeavor you can imagine. How urban can you get? SUMMER FESTIVALS BY CITY Corte Madera |
|
Marin Home Show & Benefit Jazz Fest, Saturday, June 4 from 10am-7pm and Sunday, June 5 from 10am-6pm. Marin Center Exhibit Hall and Fairgrounds. $7 general, $6 seniors and disabled, kids 14 and under free. Info: 415/472-3500. Italian Street Painting Festival, Saturday, June 11 and Sunday, June 12 from 9am-7pm. Fifth and A streets. Free. Info: 415/457-4878. Film Night in the Park, Saturdays, June 11, August 6 and October 1. Dusk at Albert Park, B Street and Albert Park Lane. $5 adults, $3 children. Info: 415/453-4333. Flag Day, Tuesday, June 14; 10am at Northgate Mall’s center court. Free. Info: 415/472-3212. Marin Art Festival, Saturday, June 18 and Sunday, June 19; 10am-6pm at Lagoon Park, Marin Civic Center. $8 (children under 15 free). Info: 415/388-0151. Marin County Fair, Thursday, June 30 through Monday, July 4; 11am-11pm at Marin Civic Center. $12 adults, $10 seniors and children, free for children under 4. Info: 415/499-6800. Marin Shakespeare Company, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from July 8-September 25 (no performances August 19-21). Season tickets, $30-$52; single tickets, $15-$26. (Pay What You Will performances July 10, July 24 and August 28.) Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings at 8pm, Sunday matinees at 4pm, September 9, 16 and 23 student matinees at 11am. Forest Meadows Amphitheater, Dominican University. Box Office: 415/499-4488. Indian Classical Music Festival, Sunday, July 17; 1-8pm at Albert Park, B Street and Albert Park Lane. Free. Info: 454-6264. China Camp Heritage Festival, Saturday, August 27. China Camp State Park, off N. San Pedro Rd. Free. Info: 415/456-0766. Tivoli Festival, mid-September. Aldersly Retirement Center, 326 Mission Ave. Info: 415/453-7425. SUMMER FESTIVALS BY CITY Corte Madera |
||||
|
||||||
 |
|