Editor’s note: In this week’s Poetry Corner, we feature the work of Douglas McClellan, who received his master of fine arts degree in Visual Arts in 1950.  He taught art for 37 years at art institutes, colleges and UC Santa Cruz. His art has been widely exhibited including solo shows in Northern and Southern California, and group exhibitions on the East and West Coasts, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.  He started writing poetry seriously at age 70 and has published six slender volumes. He currently alternates between digital collage and poetry. To learn more, visit dougstudio.com. The following poems are from the collection, “Exit Lines (semi official last words from the famous and otherwise).”

Local bands sound off at new music festival to support AIDS Ride
When Keith Petrocelli was 8 years old, he was pulled aside and told that his estranged father died of AIDS. It was 1983, he was a Brooklyn kid living in Arizona, and he’d never met his dad. Because of AIDS, he never would. Suddenly he was thrust into a cause he wasn’t even old enough to fully wrap his head around.

The second annual Ethnic Dance Festival brings rhythms from around the globe to Santa Cruz
Other than American Indians, the United States really doesn’t have much of a history in the world of ethnic dancing. Immigrants from abroad brought the rhythm and music from their native lands to our shores and created myriad hybrids that Americans claim as their own—but truth be told, they are merely the coalescence of ethnic dances from across the globe. For this reason, many people choose to adopt the dance of an ethnicity other than their own in a fervid attempt to gain connection to a movement larger than themselves.

FashionART Santa Cruz Runway Show may be the most enchanting fashion spectacle in town
The style conscious among us have just spent the last few days reveling in the razzle-dazzle of the New York Fashion Week runway shows that stream oh so glamorously across the Internet. We have been accosted with everything from Derek Lam’s ’60s-inspired minimalism to Charlotte Ronson’s ladylike grunge, the likes of which have been touted as the new staples we simply must possess in our closets come spring 2011. But as the ostentatious hullabaloo of New York Fashion Week dies down, what is a fashion-minded girl to do without the prospect of another runway show until the London Fashion Week commences in mid-October? Local fashionistas need not resort to a three-week period of melancholy because Santa Cruz has a chic extravaganza of its own to fill the gap.

First-time business owner opens hippie chic boutique
It was March, Terra Lynn’s birthday, and she and a friend were perusing their Chinese astrological signs on an iPhone app. Lynn discovered she was a “water dog,” and one of her descriptive features was that she was also a “wallflower.”“I’m a one-on-one kind of person … I don’t like being the center of attention,” she says.

So when she opened up her own hippie chic boutique at the south end of Pacific Avenue this summer, and decided to name it Wallflower, she was choosing a very non-wallflower sort of lifestyle. As a person who doesn’t like to be the center of attention, she just thrust herself into it.

Editor’s note: This week’s Poetry Corner features the work of J. P. Dancing Bear, the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently, “Inner Cities of Gulls” and “Conflicted Light” (Salmon Poetry, 2010 and 2008). His poems have been published in Mississippi Review, DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, Third Coast, Natural Bridge, Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, Verse Daily and many other publications. He is editor for the American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press. Bear also hosts the weekly hour-long poetry show, Out of Our Minds, on public station, KKUP.