Of Film Festivals and Homophobia

We find ourselves in Sweden. A gay couple is on the waiting list to adopt a baby. They have been approved as parents. They receive a letter. A boy, age 1.5, is arriving. The men are ecstatic, although one of them is still a bit apprehensive about this whole adoption idea. They outfit a nursery.  The “baby” arrives on a Friday afternoon. He is 15,  a troubled teen released from a reformatory, and to say that he is homophobic is to put it mildly.

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Tightening of the Santa Cruz Greenbelt

Cathy Puccinelli (right) would like to build her daughter and grandkids a place but can't.  (Photo by Curtis Cartier)

IN THE CRISP light of a spring day, Cathy Puccinelli stands quietly, her eyes taking in the land that has been in her family for more than 100 years. The echo of flowing water from the adjacent Pogonip Creek is a perfect backdrop for the sprawling seven-acre property, made up of a cottagelike farmhouse with a well-kept yard and a large organic farming field.
Puccinelli says the land hasn’t changed much since her Italian immigrant grandparents bought it in 1900 to farm. “But no one wanted it then,” she says. “It was right next to the tannery, so it smelled of blood and hide.” (With slide show)

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Behind the Scenes at Santa Cruz’s Festival for New Music

The Cabrillo Festival Orchestra at practice. Photo by R.R. Jones

It’s early Sunday evening and musicians are trickling in to the Civic—musicians in flip flops, musicians in blue jeans, musicians in stylish haircuts. Slowly the orchestra comes awake in a chaos of indelicate morning noises: bleeps and sour yawns and fragments of melody abandoned before they’ve started make sense. Tuning up, the two harpists strain to hear the bell-like tones of their instruments, then fall to chatting.

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