Jul/Aug 2020
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Letter from the Editor
On a recent Sunday, my daughters and I had a lazy day at home making art. We sat outside in the shade of our deck, sifted through magazines, cut and pasted words and images, and wound up with collages that captured both our love of dessert and this moment of upheaval and change. For weeks…
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Ice Cream Saves The Day
Salvador Cruz opened Fru-ta after losing everything. Resilience, entrepreneurship, and family bonds have transformed one store into a chain of successes. On the first day of June, when I speak with Salvador Cruz, the owner of four Fru-ta ice cream shops in Sonoma County, he has a lot going on. An 8pm curfew was announced…
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Plant Power
Cozy Plum Serves Vegan Comfort Food “Can I bring you a healthy vegan meal?” Charles White asked his long-lost junior high friend, Lisa La Donne, who was hospitalized with a ruptured spleen. She said yes, and that was the first flutter of Cozy Plum Bistro, Santa Rosa’s first 100 percent plant-based eatery, which opened their…
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Dwindling Dairies
How local farms adapt and persevere during tough times Nestled in a valley where vineyards and redwoods give way to green rolling hills is the tiny town of Freestone. While the world may know Sonoma County as “wine country,” out here, grass reigns supreme. Most mornings, a thick fog descends, replaced in the afternoon by…
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Drink Deliveries in the Time of Revolution
In “The Before,” one of the things I most looked forward to was a weekly (or twice-weekly) happy hour meet-up with my friends. Since shelter-in-place went into effect in mid-March my friends and I started meeting on Zoom, which is great for folks who want to drink without putting on a pesky pair of pants.…
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A Rill Runs Through It
Communal Living in the Time of Climate Change When you walk around Monan’s Rill, a 440-acre intentional community in the Mayacamas Mountains in east Santa Rosa, you are surrounded by trees—various oaks in every stage of grandeur, the rich red limbs of manzanita, and fairy-tale conifers that make it easy to see why they named…
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Space to Create
33Arts residents reckon with the survival of art during pandemic Outside of Bataeff’s junkyard is a 4’x4’ bucket of brass cast-offs that have been subjected to the elements ever since they were delivered 10 years ago. “I have spent hours combing through it looking for shapes and sizes that appeal to me,” says assemblage artist…
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Savorbang!
Haughty Cuisine Certain places are bigot-magnets: newspaper comment sections, neighborhood-themed social media sites, and uber-fancy restaurants. I called one up to get the 411 on their grub. I’ll go by the name Customer to protect my dignity . . . Customer: . . . what if I’m not super hungry? Can I just order an…
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Locavox
Name: Dr. George Sellu Occupation: Professor of Agriculture Workplace: Santa Rosa Junior College Dr. George Sellu is an agriculture professor at Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC), where he teaches plant science and coordinates the hemp agriculture and agribusiness programs. George led the SRJC efforts in developing the first hemp agriculture program in California. He graduated…