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1 month ago | 
mercurynews.com | Steve Palopoli
A story on the front page of the May 21, 2024, edition of the East Bay Times about the Schneider Electric energy-efficient project for Mt. Diablo Unified School District was unclear about the doubling of project costs from 2022 to 2023. The increased project costs approved by the school board in March 2023 were for a separate scope of work than the original work approved in May 2022.
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1 month ago | 
mercurynews.com | Carly Kay |Steve Palopoli
According to the UN Environment Programme, nearly 11 metric tons of plastic enter the oceans each year. These discarded plastics are killing marine animals including turtles, fish, and seabirds, who can die from entanglement or from eating plastics.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
sacbee.com | Steve Palopoli
There's something you don't know about Dickens' classic holiday story, “A Christmas Carol.”Everyone thinks they know the 1843 novella, of course, because they've seen the Muppets version or the Jim Carrey version or the old Albert Finney version or the new Will Ferrell version – which is told from the perspective of the ghosts. But you see, the Muppets lied to us. Bugs Bunny, Scrooge McDuck and Bill Murray all did, too.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
eastbaytimes.com | Steve Palopoli
Everything you thought you knew about Ebenezer Scrooge is ... wrong?? Apparently, the Muppets lied to us. Now, a new Santa Cruz Shakespeare production of the Dickens classic tells the tale.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Steve Palopoli
New production’s Scrooge on why the Muppets – and so many others – lied to us about Dickens’ classic character
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Steve Palopoli
Life in the foster care system can be hard. But life after it can be even harder. Breeaunna Lynn learned that as a nonbinary lesbian teen when after entering the system in the Bay Area at age 7 — and moving several times over the years — their homophobic foster mother kicked them out of her home on their 18th birthday. In California, more than 1 in 4 foster youth experience homelessness after they transition out of the system.
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Nov 17, 2024 | 
goodtimes.sc | Steve Palopoli
In Alecia Haselton’s video for the “Love You Madly” fire relief campaign on the santacruzfirerelief.org website, she’s sitting on a horse in a river, singing a cappella while she slaps her leg as musical accompaniment. The song, “Haulin’ 2 Horses,” is a recent one that she wrote while actually hauling horses out of the CZU Lightning Complex fire burn zone in her truck and trailer. It’s short—less than two minutes long—unusual, and moving.
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Nov 17, 2024 | 
goodtimes.sc | Steve Palopoli
There’s a certain zeitgeist-y quality to Actors’ Theatre’s long-running 10-minute play festival 8 Tens @ 8. What makes the format appealing for both writers and audiences is that it delivers a quick sketch of the human condition rather than a full-length work’s detailed portrait, and because of that these plays are often like flypaper for the mood of the moment.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
goodtimes.sc | Steve Palopoli
I’m standing in the parking lot of the Westside studio where Michèle Benson has been shooting her documentary about the history of the Santa Cruz music scene. We’re waiting for her next interviewee to arrive, and she’s telling me how this project has ballooned and sprawled in every direction, growing exponentially into something she couldn’t have imagined when she first got the idea that she should preserve a few local musicians’ stories for posterity.
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
goodtimes.sc | Steve Palopoli
One of my favorite live-music memories is a Rev. Billy C. Wirtz show at the Kuumbwa that I took my little sister to in the mid-’90s. Jessica was in high school at the time, and Wirtz was at the height of his “Hillbilly Love God” fever dream, riding a boogie-woogie piano from hell through albums like A Turn for the Wirtz, Pianist Envy and Songs of Faith and Inflammation. At 6-foot-5, his heavily tattooed body towered over the Kuumbwa stage—even when he was sitting at his piano, somehow.
