Annual Santa Cruz Pride Parade returns—with a twist

When the Diversity Center of Santa Cruz was thinking about a slogan for this year’s Pride Parade and Festival, its organizers immediately thought of Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign and the Gay Straight Alliance’s “Make it Better” campaign. “We wanted to riff on that theme,” says Jim Brown, executive director at the Diversity Center. “Some teens can’t wait for life to get better—they need to do something now.”

Upcoming exhibit features inspired collaborations between scientists and local artists

It’s not hard to find art that makes you think. It’s much less common to find art that actually requires scientific collaboration—a seemingly counterintuitive pairing. But, the upcoming show “earth • science • art / sixteen collaborative explorations,” at the R. Blitzer Gallery, does just that.

Featuring the work of 16 artists from the Central Coast and the greater San Francisco Bay Area working in collaboration with 16 research scientists from the Santa Cruz-based U.S. Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, the exhibit opens on June 1, with two evening panel discussions on June 7 and 14.

Middle school art students make colorful mark on the city

When Kathleen Crocetti’s Mission Hill Middle School art students installed mosaics on the Water Street Bridge last year, the City of Santa Cruz helped pay for the art supplies. But this year, when she approached the City with a plan to place 93 mosaics depicting the agricultural products of Santa Cruz County onto the Soquel Avenue Bridge, she learned the chances for funding were slim.

“I wrote to the art commission, a proposal for doing the Soquel bridge, and they said, ‘Yes, yes, we love it, we want to do it—if we have funding,’” says Crocetti. “Well, of course, the redevelopment agency closed and everything is a mess financially in our state. And so I could see the writing on the wall that the City wasn’t going to be able to pay for this, but I’m sort of driven and I really wanted it to happen anyway.”

Tannery Arts Center announces Grand Opening of new art studios complex

In phase two of the Tannery Arts Center’s three-part project, the City of Santa Cruz is close to becoming a model living-working-performing artistic community.

“I call this phase the ‘open the Tannery to the public phase,’” says Rachel Anne Goodman, Tannery Arts Center executive director, about the unveiling of the Tannery’s new Digital Media and Creative Arts Center. More than 70 working artists currently rent space in this 25,000-square-foot art studios complex, where the public can take classes, purchase art, and watch masters at work.

New play re-imagines the lives of famed Siamese twins Chang and Eng

Growing up, renowned Bay Area playwright Philip Kan Gotanda remembers hearing the term “Siamese twins.” But it wasn’t until he was an adult that he came across a blurb written about the men for which the term was coined: Chang and Eng Bunker. Born in 1811 to Chinese parents living in Thailand (formerly known to Westerners as Siam), the twins came into the world conjoined by a band of cartilage at their chest.

Irene van der Zande spreads the word about personal safety in ‘The Kidpower Book’

Anxiety does not make children safer,” says Irene van der Zande. “Fear does not make them safer, and neither does worry. What makes them safer is knowledge and skills.”

That message is at the heart of van der Zande’s new book, “The Kidpower Book for Caring Adults: Personal Safety, Self-Protection, Confidence and Advocacy For Young People.” An expert in personal safety, with more than two decades of experience, and the founder of Kidpower Teenpower Fullpower International—a local nonprofit dedicated to teaching people how “to use their power to stay safe, act wisely and believe in themselves”—van der Zande’s book is directed toward parents, teachers, and all adults interested in promoting the safety of children.

Pat Simmons hits the Blues Fest. In a GT interview, The Doobie Brothers’ guitarist/vocalist waxes nostalgic about Santa Cruz, opens up about the band’s origins and ponders the road ahead.

Who knew that the Santa Cruz Blues Festival, which began in 1993 as a one-day Chicago and Texas blues celebration in Aptos Village Park, would be alive and kicking 20 years later? And who could have predicted that the festival would boast a list of past performers that includes B.B. King, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Joe Cocker, Etta James, Bonnie Raitt, Buddy Guy, Bobby “Blues” Bland and Albert Collins?

Documentary about local nonprofit challenges stereotypes concerning the disabled and surf culture

Special education teacher/videographer Julie Pollack, remembers filming from West Cliff in 2000 as one of her students, Brandon Arthur, went surfing for the first time.

“He was a little guy in a wheelchair, not able to sit up on his own, talk, or really hold himself up in the water,” she says. “His parents told me about this woman who wanted to take him surfing, so I held my breath from the cliff and watched them paddle this little guy out on the water. We all kind of got hooked on it from there because you could tell he was just so thrilled.”

On brink of closing, Capitola Book Café launches campaign to save store

When Capitola Book Café employees Wendy Mayer-Lochtefeld, Melinda Powers, Janet Leimeister, and Richard Lange became co-owners of the shop in 2007, the four booklovers had an inkling of the rough road ahead.

“The book business was already in decline at that point, but the decline sharpened deeply about a year after we took over, and then in 2008, the bottom fell out of the economy,” says Mayer-Lochtefeld. “So, our timing was not terrific. … [but] we were still in a good position to weather that storm until it sort of turned from a storm into a hurricane.”

Flamboyant seniors help redefine beauty in Walter Matteson’s documentary ‘Pretty Old’

Walter Matteson was in Copenhagen, Denmark to visit his then-girlfriend (and now wife) when he first saw the photograph that sparked it all. The photo, hanging at the 2007 World Press Photo Exhibit, displayed three senior women in a backstage setting. “I had just seen sports photography and war photography, and I was like, ‘What in the world is that?’” remembers Matteson. “It almost looked something like a David Lynch painting to me; it was a large print—it was giant—that I saw from across the room and it didn’t look real.” The caption was simple: “Ms. Senior Sweetheart Beauty Pageant, Fall River, Massachusetts.”