KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – Join the Ely Stage Stop & Country Museum docents and the California Old Time Fiddlers Association on Sunday, April 3, for the monthly Fiddlers’ Jam in the Ely barn. Musicians will jam round-robin style from noon until 2 p.m.

Spring has sprung on the museum property so make it a day. Bring a lunch and maybe some wine and picnic in the Oak Grove. View the stagecoach, chuck wagon, buckboard and other large display items on the grounds around the barn.

Celebrate local musicians and the American music heritage from the Ely Stage Stop Victorian Era. Take a ride up to the house on the hay wagon where you can enjoy the newest displays and learn about antique cookware.

Beverages and tasty treats will be provided by the docents in the barn. Donations made during the fiddling benefit both the Ely Stage Stop, helping to fund the blacksmith shop, and the Old Time Fiddlers Association, District 10, who uses it to partially fund their scholarship programs.

The stage stop, operated by the Lake County Historical Society, is located at 9921 Soda Bay Road (Highway 281) in Kelseyville. Current hours of operation are 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each Saturday and Sunday.

Visit www.elystagestop.org or www.lakecountyhistory.org , check out the stage stop on Facebook at www.facebook.com/elystagestop or call the museum at 707-533-9990.

Come join the Lake County Historical Society and become a volunteer at Ely or our sister museum, the Gibson Museum & Cultural Center in Middletown. Applications are always available.

MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – The Middletown Art Center is preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of its opening as it gets set to unveil its eighth exhibition.

The opening of the newest exhibition, “Subversive Biology,” takes place from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Saturday, March 26.

The exhibit runs through May 1 at the center, which is located in the heart of town at the junctions of highways 29 and 175.

Lake County residents and visitors are invited to enjoy artist’s interpretations of the combination two generally unrelated words: sub·ver·sive: “tending or intending to overthrow, destroy, or mutate an established or existing system” and, biology (bio): “A branch of knowledge that deals with living organisms and vital processes: the plant and animal life of a region or environment.”

Join them for an evening of art and community, meet the artists, enjoy refreshments and music by Tear Drop Trailer. Children are welcome.

The Middletown Art Center has a lot to celebrate. Founded in partnership with EcoArts of Lake County, the center provides a year-round arts and cultural presence in south Lake County where formerly there was none.

Team members transformed the old Middletown Gymnasium into a beautiful space for contemporary art, performance and events. 

The back portion of the building serves as a studio where classes in drawing, painting, ceramics, photography, drama and more, are offered for children, teens and adults.

The art center opened its doors on March 28, 2015, and has since presented eight extraordinary art exhibitions featuring work by local artists, including the 13th annual EcoArts Lake County Sculpture Walk.

The first year of operations of the Middletown Art Center was fruitful, but also dramatic. Nine of 10 MAC and EcoArts board members lost their homes to the Valley fire. Twenty-five affiliated professional artists lost their homes, studio or place of work.

But board leadership understood the pressing need to bring back a sense of normalcy to the Middletown area community, despite their own crises. The center immediately resumed classes following the fire, to encourage the public’s engagement in self-expression and healing through the arts.

The center has provided free, and continues to subsidize classes to those in greatest need. Its key goals are to inspire every child and adult to express themselves and grow through the arts and arts exposure, while bolstering the quality of life and sustainability of our community in support of a healthy local economy.

EcoArts and the Middletown Art Center have even more to celebrate thanks to #Lake County Rising - The Lake County Fire Relief Fund which is a joint project of the Lake County Wine Alliance, the Lake County Winery Association and the Lake County Winegrape Association. 

The Middletown Art Center and EcoArts received a major grant to support their continued growth and contributions to both community and economic development. Soon the community will be able to participate in the making of a mural and enjoy benches, shade structures, gardens and sculptures outdoors at the center.

More of the center's neighbors can benefit from engaging with the arts through expansion of our scholarship fund; the studio and gallery will have lighting improvements; center artist’s Web presence will grow, and outreach beyond the county to encourage visitors will increase.

The Middletown Art Center is an arts nonprofit made by community members for the community to enjoy.

The center offers a colorful palette of classes for children, teens and adults most days of the week. Aside from lively art openings every six weeks, the center hosts musical performances, open mic or hootenannys every other Friday.

The Middletown Art Center Theatre will soon be auditioning for its first production, “It was So Sudden I Wasn’t Prepared,” a live multimedia theater performance commemorating the Valley fire. They are seeking stories of residents and first responders who were impacted by the fire to be included; visit www.middletownartcenter.org to fill out a simple survey.

The gallery is open Friday to Saturday 12 to 6 p.m., or Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. (subject to seasonal changes). It will be closed on Friday, March 25, and will reopen on Saturday, March 26, at 6 p.m. for the opening.

Middletown Art Center offers an array of memberships with benefits, as well as tax deductible donation and volunteer opportunities. When you support MAC, you are supporting our local community and community development.

Find out more about MAC online at www.middletownartcenter.org , email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , call 707-809-8118 or visit at 21456 Highway 175.

THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY (Rated R)

No boundaries are apparently the operative words to describe the anarchic comedy of satirist Sacha Baron Cohen.

He’s jumped from faux-streetwise hip-hop personality-turned-talk show host Ali G to Kazakhstani journalist Borat on his first visit to America and to fame-seeking Austrian fashion icon Bruno.

Along the way, Baron Cohen has skewered a lot of targets, often to devastating effect. “The Brothers Grimsby” allows him to invent a wholly original creation, one that may have been inspired by spending too much time in a working class British pub during World Cup.

The Grimsby of the film’s title is a decaying seaport town that may have seen better days long ago. Now, it’s just a cesspool of rundown row houses and industrial rot, and fittingly, at least in the film, it is identified as the “Twin City of Chernobyl.”

Interesting to know (and you can Google this), the town of Grimsby has been frequently voted the worst city in which to live in Britain, according to some online websites and publications dedicated to revealing the underbelly of urban hellholes.

Baron Cohen’s Nobby Butcher, a lowlife subsisting on welfare, is a football hooligan fanatically devoted to the English national team.

He fits the stereotype of the booze-guzzling party animal when it comes to celebrating soccer matches with his pals at the local tavern.

Living with his plus-size girlfriend Dawn (Rebel Wilson), Nobby is a devoted family man given that he’s got nine (or maybe 11) kids, most of them looking like refugees from a punk rock band or candidates for reform school.

Nevertheless, the family is tight-knit, and Nobby has kept his long-missing younger brother’s childhood bedroom the way he left it 28 years ago when the brothers were separated after the death of their parents.

The more innocent humor comes from Nobby awkwardly carrying home a mattress on a city bus and from the names of his children, including Skeletor, Django Unchained, Tsunami and Gangnam Style. Luke gets his name from having a cancerous disease.

“The Brothers Grimsby” is a family reunion story, of sorts. Nobby stumbles upon the fact that his brother has returned to England and will be attending a special charity event to which he has somehow managed to get an invitation.

What Nobby does not realize is that his brother Sebastian (Mark Strong, playing the straight man) is a deep undercover MI6 agent on assignment to disrupt a terrorist plot.

Unfortunately, Nobby’s excitement at seeing his brother compromises the mission and results in tragedy.

Forced to go on the run, and being chased by deadly assassins, Nobby and Sebastian must use their wits to survive.

Of course, the problem is that Nobby is basically an idiot, so the challenge is for Sebastian to keep his older, clueless brother out of harm’s way.

The film’s plot, such as it is, puts the brothers in the crosshairs of the British government, which mistakenly believes that Sebastian is now a rogue agent, and at odds with a criminal cartel bent on a plot to release deadly toxins that are designed to reduce the world’s population to a more manageable and sustainable level.

Meanwhile, how does Penelope Cruz’s Rhonda George, the apparent target of an assassination attempt by shadowy forces, figure into overall plot given her leadership of World Cure, an international health organization that may or may not be the front for something sinister?

“The Brothers Grimsby” doesn’t much care about the details of coherent action, even though there are terrific sequences of the two brothers in shootouts and chase scenes that suddenly thrust Nobby into the realm of James Bond fantasyland heroics.

Mostly, the action, whether it involves the gritty streets and back alleys of England or the African plains, is just an excuse for Sacha Baron Cohen to dream up the most egregious scenarios for gross-out humor and bizarrely vulgar jokes.

There are things happening in this film that can’t be described or explained in proper company. Let’s just say there are some outlandish setups involving bodily fluids and body parts, both the humankind and those engaged by elephants during mating season.

The humor in “The Brothers Grimsby” is often mind-numbingly stupid and grotesque, but a lot of it very funny and you could find yourself feeling guilty or maybe even a bit ashamed for laughing.

As the brothers, Sacha Baron Cohen and Mark Strong have a great chemistry, with the latter, often irritably frustrated by his dimwitted sibling, nicely positioned as the comic foil. These brothers are indeed the yin and yang of comedy for “The Brothers Grimsby.”

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

Patrick Warburton has an unmistakable voice, one that is often heard in voiceovers and commercials.

Yet, his monotone, deep voice, conveying a nonchalant attitude has served him well in TV comedies, whether it was the “Seinfeld” show or the many years of “Rules of Engagement.”

All you really need to do is to turn Warburton loose as his deadpan self, punching one-liners with brutal efficiency in his muted baritone.

NBC evidently thought the same when casting him as the family patriarch in the new comedy series “Crowded.”

In the role of Mike Moore, Warburton is like many sitcom dads. For instance, after watching the first two shows I have no idea or don’t recall what he does for a living, but his life, and that of his wife Martina (Carrie Preston), is thrust into domestic turmoil.

The basic premise of “Crowded” is that college-grad daughters Shea (Miranda Cosgrove) and Stella (Mia Serafino) suddenly move back into the family home, considering the job market is unable to sustain a frustrated astrophysicist and an aspiring actress, respectively.

To make matters worse, Mike’s father Bob (Stacy Keach) and stepmother Alice (Carlease Burke) decide to put a retirement move to Florida on hold and instead create an unwanted extended family arrangement in the Moore household.

Mike and Martina are just beginning to enjoy the empty nest when the kids come home to roost, and well, everyday living just becomes crowded. Naturally, the daughters bring some baggage with them, mostly in the form of endless complaints and an errant doltish boyfriend.

The odd conceit of “Crowded” is that Mike and Martina talk about and seek to act upon sexual desires to a much greater extent than you might expect for a long-married middle-aged couple.

So the humor supposedly comes from the parental figures trying to have sex while their young adult offspring have taken over the family home, thus precluding trysts in the kitchen or family room, or just about anywhere else.

For that matter, both Shea and Stella have sex on the mind, with former too uptight and socially awkward and the latter just a tad promiscuous, so that by the second episode her hairstyle has changed and she’s had a sleepover lesbian pal.

“Crowded” was a show I wanted to like, but really only because Patrick Warburton could read the telephone book and make it sound funny. But there’s not much he can do here to rescue a sitcom mired in predictable circumstances that won’t deliver comedy gold.

TCM Classic Film Festival update

It’s getting close to that time of year again for the TCM Classic Film Festival, scheduled for April 28th through May 1st in the heart of Hollywood, using iconic venues like the Chinese Theatre and Egyptian Theatre to unspool classic films.

This year’s theme of the seventh annual event if “Moving Pictures,” noting the magic of movies isn’t just motion, it’s emotion. “Moving Pictures” are the ones that bring us to tears, rouse us to action, inspire us, and even project us to a higher plane.

There will be a 40th anniversary screening of “All the President’s Men,” the tense political thriller about the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigation of the Watergate break-in that eventually led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

A tribute to screen legend director-writer Carl Reiner will feature a screening of the Steve Martin comedy “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” a spoof of the private eye genre. Reiner will be on hand for an extended conversation with the audience.

Another tribute will be for Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, featuring screenings of her Golden Globe nominated “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell” (1968) and “Trapeze” (1956). Nearing 90 years old, she remains an unforgettable screen legend.

The festival will have an anticipated showing of Charles Chaplin’s “The Kid” (1921), his first feature as star, director and writer of a story that drew on his childhood experiences to create the story of a tramp who adopts an abandoned child.

Other classics in the tradition of premiering restorations include Jennifer Jones turn as the peasant girl with visions of the Virgin Mary in “The Song of Bernadette” (1943) and Gregory Peck’s “The Keys of the Kingdom” (1944).

Eva Marie Saint will be on hand to introduce a screening of the political comedy “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” (1966), while director John Singleton presents a 25th anniversary screening of his coming-of-age classic “Boyz N The Hood” (1991).

Stacy Keach, now starring in the TV series “Crowded,” may be used to better effect when he discusses John Huston’s gritty look at the world of small-time boxing in “Fat City” (1972).

Given that the TCM Classic Film Festival is still more than a month away, there’s still time to plan that trip to the heart of Hollywood, hanging out at the fabled Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the classic theaters, to enjoy a festival tailor-made for those who enjoy classic films.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

When I was a boy, because of the song, I thought there really was an Easter parade, but the Easters came and went without one.

But here's a glimpse of just a little piece of a parade by Kim Dower, who lives in Los Angeles. Her forthcoming book is Last Train to the Missing Planet, Red Hen Press, 2016.

I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom,

breezy, floral, dancing with color
soft, silky, flows as I walk
Easter Sunday and you always liked

to get dressed, go for brunch, "maybe
there's a good movie playing somewhere?"
Wrong religion, we were not church-goers,

but New Yorkers who understood the value
of a parade down 5th Avenue, bonnets
in lavender, powder blues, pinks, hues

of spring, the hope it would bring.
We had no religion but we did have
noodle kugel, grandparents, dads

who could fix fans, reach the china
on the top shelf, carve the turkey.
That time has passed. You were the last

to go, mom, and I still feel bad I never
got dressed up for you like you wanted me to.
I had things, things to do. But today in L.A.—

hot the way you liked it—those little birds
you loved to see flitting from tree to tree—
just saw one, a twig in its mouth, preparing

a bed for its baby—might still be an egg,
I wish you were here. I've got a closet filled
with dresses I need to show you.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They do not accept unsolicited submissions. Poem copyright ©2015 by Kim Dower, “I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom,” from Rattle, (No. 48, Summer, 2015). Poem reprinted by permission of Kim Dower and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

Artists are invited to submit their original artwork to the 2016-2017 California Duck Stamp Art Contest.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) will accept submissions May 13 through June 13.

The contest is open to U.S. residents who are 18 years of age or older as of March 14, 2016. Entrants need not reside in California.

The winning artwork will be reproduced on the 2016-2017 California Duck Stamp. The top submissions will also be showcased at the Pacific Flyway Decoy Association's art show in July.

The artwork must depict the species selected by the California Fish and Game Commission, which for the 2016-2017 hunting season is the lesser snow goose.

The design is to be in full color and in the medium (or combination of mediums) of the artist's choosing, except that no photographic process, digital art, metallic paints or fluorescent paints may be used in the finished design.

Photographs, computer-generated art, art produced from a computer printer or other computer/mechanical output device (air brush method excepted) are not eligible to be entered into the contest and will be disqualified.

The design must be the contestant's original hand-drawn creation. The entry design may not be copied or duplicated from previously published art, including photographs, or from images in any format published on the Internet.

All entries must be accompanied by a completed participation agreement and entry form. These forms and the official rules are available online at www.wildlife.ca.gov/duck-stamp/contest .
 
Entries will be judged at a public event to be held in June. The judges' panel, which will consist of experts in the fields of ornithology, conservation, and art and printing, will choose first, second and third-place winners, and an honorable mention.

Since 1971, CDFW's annual contest has attracted top wildlife artists from around the country. All proceeds generated from stamp sales go directly to waterfowl conservation projects throughout California.

In past years, hunters were required to purchase and affix the stamp to their hunting license. Now California has moved to an automated licensing system and hunters are no longer required to carry the physical stamps in the field (proof of purchase prints directly onto the license).

However, CDFW will still produce the stamps, which can be requested online at www.wildlife.ca.gov/licensing/collector-stamps .