By Trina Enriquez, Sunset copy editor

The Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle is hosting its last $5 Fridays event of the '08–'09 season this Friday, May 22, from 6 to 7 p.m. A dance preview orchestrated by PNB artistic director Peter Boal and put on in one of the Phelps Center's practice studios, the series features excerpts from the current program, except that dancers perform in practice gear and Boal precedes and follows up each excerpt with comments, then a Q&A. Very intimate, pretty informal, and über-cool for anyone who’s interested in the ballet but maybe a little intimidated by their lack of experience with or technical knowledge of it.

Artistic director Peter Boal and young audience members watch
PNB principal dancers Louise Nadeau and Jeffrey Stanton
at the PNB's $5 Friday Swan Lake studio rehearsal.
© Angela Sterling; photo courtesy of the Pacific Northwest Ballet.

This particular Friday's event is Director's Choice, featuring parts of Dances at a Gathering (with music by Chopin and choreography by Jerome Robbins) and After the Rain (a pas de deux choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon and set to Arvo Pärt's music). It’s a fun way to gain some insight on what goes into creating the slick, tricked-out performances onstage.

Order tix online or by phone (206/441-2424) to secure a spot in the general seating; otherwise you may nab tickets at the box office (301 Mercer St., Seattle). If you miss this $5 Friday, tune in later to the PNB's $5 Friday info page for more on the '09–'10 season.

Make a night (or a weekend) of it

Head for La Dolce Vita, about a mile away from the Phelps Center, after the show ends at 7 p.m. The cozy restaurant opens at 5 p.m., which would make it a tight squeeze for a pre-show bite, but it takes reservations until 10:30. One glance at the dinner menu will have your mouth watering: salsiccia e vongole (housemade sausage and fresh Manila clams in a tomato–white wine sauce) and tagliatelle alla Dolce Vita (fresh pasta with English peas, locally foraged spring mushrooms, pine nuts, and blue cheese), for starters. 

Photo courtesy of La Dolce Vita Ristorante Italiano.

For sleeps, look no further than the Alexis Hotel, featured in Sunset's March '09 issue. Sure, it's a little pricier than what you just spent at the ballet—but it is, as we billed it, "a downtown getaway that lets you curl up with a good book and get out exploring the city." Retrace the story and savor a weekend of culture and learning and eats and words.

Order the mushroom frittata or hot Dungeness crab on brioche
for brunch at the Alexis Hotel's Library Bistro & Bookstore Bar, and have books
within arm's reach while you wait. Photo by John Clark.

By Peter Fish, Sunset Editor-at-Large

Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore is to Salt Lake City what Powell’s is to Portland--essential, irreplaceable, wonderful. It’s been there a long time (since 1929) and has woven itself into the city’s history--enviro writer Terry Tempest Williams supposedly met her husband while both worked there. What I like about it most—along with its beautiful pressed tin ceilings—is that it has the books you know you want and also the books you don’t know you want until you see them. For me, that second kind of encounter usually occurs in Sam Weller’s big section of books about the West, where you find items like Uncle Sam’s Camels, the saga of the U.S. Army’s 19th century effort to replace Army mules with, well, Army camels in the desert southwest.   A relative newcomer is the Coffee Garden, the bookstore’s caffeinated corner where you can get lattes and muffins and sit reading what you’ve just bought.  Which could be In Style or Sports Illustrated but which was in my case Uncle Sam’s Camels. Here’s my equation: cappuccino + camels = pleasure.

By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large

This is Sunset’s week for blogging about the San Joaquin Valley (see MacKenzie Geidt’s cool valley train trip, below.)

I used to spend a fair amount of time in the San Joaquin and even though a lot of people find it a hard place to love I came to love it. I like the way the orange groves press the  foothills around Porterville, and the big valley oaks that shade Visalia.  I like the oil rigs around Coalinga and Hanford’s town square. I even came to like the valley’s climatic extremes: the clobbered-the-second-you get-out-of-the-car heat in July, the damp clasp of the Tule fog in January. 

Because April is National Poetry Month—you knew that, right, you’ve been up every night celebrating?—I want to recommend a poet who does the valley proud: Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. She’s not unknown—toward the end of her long life she gained some deserved fame—but I hadn’t read her until a couple of months ago.  And when I did I was stunned, the way you are when you step out of that car into the valley heat.

McDaniel was part of the world John Steinbeck wrote about in Grapes of Wrath, except that she lived it first-hand.  She came to California from Oklahoma at age 18 in 1936.   And for the next decades she worked, hard, as a farm worker, sometimes as a maid, scribbling poetry on grain sacks and scraps of paper, not able to publish anything until she was in her 50s. But by the end of her life—she died last year at age 88—she had published 25 small books of verse. You find her work in anthologies like Dana Gioia’s California Poetry. Or, better yet, get one of her own books—say Borrowed Coats or The Last Dust Storm—from her publisher, Hanging Loose Press. 

McDaniel’s poems are the ideal thing to read if you think that contemporary poetry is obscure, pallid, and self-absorbed. They’re the ideal thing to read if you don’t think about contemporary poetry at all.  McDaniel’s poems shimmer with heartbreak and tragedy and a lot of deadpan fun, and the valley is there, flat and broad and unforgettable, on every page.  Reading her is like listening to a favorite aunt at a family picnic, the one who knows all the good stories the other grown-ups won’t tell.

Here’s one of my favorites, possibly the best poem ever written about a pancake house:

WATCHING TRUCK DRIVERS AT PANCAKE HOUSE
Boys
I always order pancakes
he told his buddies
slathered butter on them
poured syrup
like thick maple rain
Nothing much a cook
can do to ruin a pancake
if the stove don’t blow up

By Peter Fish, editor-at-large, Sunset Magazine

For his fans—and there are a lot of them, even 15 years after his death—Wallace Stegner was the West. In biographies like Beyond the Hundredth Meridian and novels like Angle of Repose, Stegner showed how our past inspired and haunted our present. In more polemical works (mostly magazine and newspaper pieces) he condemned the way the West’s wasteful use of its resources threatened both its natural beauty and, ultimately, its future.

This month is a bonanza for Stegner readers. (And, if you aren’t one, it may provide reasons to join the crew.)  Up in Marin County, the estimable Point Reyes Books and the equally estimable Marin Agricultural Land Trust (which has preserved some 40,000 acres of farmland over the last 28 years) is sponsoring The Geography of Hope, a three-day conference on Stegner’s life and work. Guests include Stegner’s novelist son Page, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Haas, and a number of other noted Western writers. The setting—the green hills around Point Reyes Station—is the living embodiment of the conference’s title, which is taken from one of Stegner’s most famous descriptions of his home region.

The roster of conference speakers also includes author Philip Fradkin, whose new Stegner biography—Wallace Stegner and the American West—is out this month. Fradkin, who has written fine books on the West's volatile natural history— A River No More, about the Colorado River,   Wildest Alaska  and The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906—takes on a seemingly more sedentary subject here. Biographies of writers are notoriously problematic, because what writers mainly do is write, think about writing, and distract themselves from writing.  Sometimes the “distract themselves from writing” periods can include forays into alcoholism and adultery, and these  can spice up the pages for awhile. But eventually, it’s back to the Smith-Corona, or, now, the iMac, and the reader longs to read about, say, Bonnie and Clyde or Paris Hilton.

Luckily for Fradkin, Stegner had a long and eventful life.  As any reader of his memoir, Wolf Willow, or his autobiographical novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, knows, his childhood was hardscrabble, rootless, and shadowed by a ne’er-do-well father, all of which makes for good reading. If Fradkin’s accounts of rivalries within the Stanford English Department, where Stegner taught for years, are probably only interesting to people who spent time around the Quad (Ok, I admit, I’m one of them), the analyses of Stegner’s conservation battles make the issues seem urgent even today. As, indeed, most of them are.

So buy the biography. And, this weekend, consider heading up to Marin County to hear some of the West’s best contemporary writers discuss one of the West’s best writers of all time.   

You'd think this list would be long (especially considering the train commutes a couple of us have). But we were looking to recommend books that specifically recall the West or were written in the West. We'll do more reading and less daydreaming from now on ...

The Assassination of Jesse James, Coward Robert Ford. Just made into a Brad Pitt movie, this is a great modern take on a classic story.

Red Rover, Deirdre McNamer. Two brothers raised on the Montana prairie, one becomes a pilot in WWII, the other an FBI agent who becomes embroiled in Post WWII anti-communist paranoia, with fatal results.

Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides. A very readable account of Kit Carson, Santa Fe/Taos history, and the story of the displacement of the Navajo from their native lands.

Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan. Since it’s now out in paperback, easy to carry. Really brilliant, and funny. This book will make you hungry for more and, as luck would have it, In Defense of Food will be out soon.

What Came Before He Shot Her, Elizabeth George. A psychological thriller that makes long plane rides fly by written by a mystery writer who lives in Washington state.