LUCERNE, Calif. – The Lucerne Alpine Senior Center is hosting its monthly Open Mic Lucerne on Saturday, May 17, from 6 to 11 p.m.

The third Saturday of the month marks this month’s fun event with talent from all venues.  

A variety of performers are on stage after the house band FOGG starts out the evening with classic, heavy metal rock and roll with original numbers and covers of your favorites. FOGG and other entertainers will wrap up the evening by 11 p.m.

Bands and individuals are already signing up for May. The last three months events saw full venues, so sign up early. Call 707-245-4612 or 707-274-8779 for your reserved time or come and sign-up beginning at 5 p.m. Saturday night. Don’t miss this chance to showcase your talent.

Lake County abounds with experienced and new talent. Come hear the exciting performances. Being audience is great fun and free. If you are a performer, this is a great free opportunity to show off your talent.

Music, comedy, mime, readings and any other activity that is family-oriented will be appreciated.

Room also is available for dancing and relaxing. There is no charge for attending or performing.

This is a child friendly event, so bring the whole family. For those wishing an inexpensive meal, there will be a traditional spaghetti feed available for $5. Also some desserts will be served starting at $2 per plate.  

All proceeds benefit the Lucerne Alpine Senior Center, 3985 Country Club Drive, a nonprofit serving Northshore senior populations with onsite lunches, Meals on Wheels and personal advocacy.

For more information about services or Open Mic Lucerne, call Lucerne Alpine Senior Center at 707-274-8779.

Parents and children. Sometimes it seems that’s all there is to life. In this poem Donna Spector, from New York state, gives us a ride that many of us may have taken, hanging on for dear life.

On the Way to the Airport

You’re speeding me down the Ventura freeway
in your battered Scout, patched since your angry
crash into the drunken pole that swerved into your road.
We’ve got no seat belts, no top, bald tires,
so I clutch any metal that seems as though it might
be firm, belie its rusted rattling. Under my
August burn I’m fainting white, but I’m trying
to give you what you want: an easy mother.

For the last two days you’ve been plugged
into your guitar, earphones on, door closed. I spoiled
our holiday with warnings about your accidental
life, said this time I wouldn’t rescue you, knowing
you’d hate me, knowing I’d make myself sick. We’re
speaking now, the airport is so near, New York closer
than my birthday tomorrow, close as bearded death
whose Porsche just cut us off in the fast lane.

When you were three, you asked if God lived
under the street. I said I didn’t know, although
a world opened under my feet walking with you
over strange angels, busy arranging our fate. Soon,
if we make it, I’ll be in the air, where people say God lives,
the line between you and me stretched thinner,
thinner but tight enough still to bind us,
choke us both with love. Your Scout, putty-colored
as L.A. mornings, protests loudly but hangs on.

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. Poem copyright 2013 by Donna Spector, whose most recent book of poems is The Woman Who Married Herself, Evening Street Press, 2010. Poem reprinted from Rattle, Vol. 19, no. 3, by permission of Donna Spector and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2014 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. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

MENDOCINO, Calif. – Mendocino Chamber Opera presents Donizetti’s rollicking comedy, “Don Pasquale” Friday, May 16, to Sunday, May 18, in the restored, repainted, and sparkling clean Crown Hall on Ukiah Street in Mendocino.

The cast includes two stars who were big hits in last year’s Redwood Opera Workshop: Arizona soprano Gabriella Carrillo and San Francisco tenor David Chavez.

Also in the cast are baritone Jary Stavely playing the role of Dr. Malatesta, and bass-baritone Richard Goodman as Don Pasquale.

Performances will take place at 8 p.m. May 16 and May 17, and 2 p.m. May 18.

Tickets cost $20 for the opera and $50 for the “dinner opera” on May 17.

They are available at Harvest Market in Fort Bragg, from Out of this World in Mendocino or by mail from Fort Bragg Center for the Arts at 13110 Pomo Lane, Mendocino, CA 95460.

CLEARLAKE, Calif. – “Bidder 70” is Second Sunday Cinema's featured film this Sunday, May 11.

The film starts at 6 p.m. at Clearlake United Methodist Church, 14521 Pearl Ave. in Clearlake.

The heart and soul of this inspiring documentary is “Bidder 70,” a young man who placed “protest bids” on an unlawful federal oil and gas lease in the midst of western lands of extraordinary beauty. Think red and pink rock carved by eons of wind and water.  

In 2006 Tim DeChristopher, University of Utah economics student and environmental activist, won millions of dollars in bids to drill on land he had no intention of drilling on and no ability to pay for.  

He paid dearly for his act of outstanding creativity and courage. But because it was clearly unlawful to lease that land, he protected a huge number of acres from devastation.  

He also sparked a focused high-energy environmental group and movement, Peaceful Uprisings.

DeChristopher's five-year struggle within the US Justice Department is over. But, he says, the battle for a livable future continues.

For more information about Second Sunday Cinema call 707-889-7355.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Several Lake County fiddlers from the Konocti Fiddle Club represented Lake County at the California State sponsored Fiddle Contest in Cloverdale recently.

Rafael Contreras from Lower Lake, placed first in his class for the third year in a row. He is a member of the LCSA Youth Orchestra and the Konocti Fiddle Club.

Other fiddle club members placing well in the competition were Maya Leonard from Cobb in the Pee Wee class, Jillian and Evan Johnsen from Kelseyville in the Jr-Jr class, and Lake County Symphony members Sue Condit in the Waltz Division and Andi Skelton winning the Twin Fiddle class and the Waltz Division.

The following day there was an urgent call for fiddlers to perform at Ely Stage Stop in Kelseyville.

These young fiddlers and a few more from the fiddle club answered the call to represent District 10 of the California State Old Time Fiddlers Association which encompasses three Northern California counties.

They performed there for a large crowd for two hours and helped raise funds for District 10 music scholarships.

After that, they hurried on to a long rehearsal of the Konocti Fiddle Club to finish up a very busy weekend of fiddling.

Those of us who live on the arid Great Plains love to hear rain on the roof. Not hail, but rain. William Jolliff, a poet from Oregon, where it rains all the time, has done a fine job here of capturing that sound.

Rain on a Barn South of Tawas

It may be as close as an old man in Michigan
comes to the sound of the sea. Call it thunder
if you want, but it’s not thunder, not at all.
It’s more like the rush of semis on a freeway

somewhere between Bay City and Flint,
the road a son will take when he learns,
sometime around the last taste of a strap,
that the life he was born to is nothing

at all like a life he’d ever bother to live.
There’s an anger in it, a tin-edged constancy
that has no rhythm, quite, something more
like white noise that still won’t let you sleep.

Think of some man, needing to get a crop in,
but the fields are sop, so he’s trying to find
something to fix, something to keep his hands
working, something to weld, something to pound,

something to wrap his calloused palms around
that might do less damage than a lead-rope
knotted and tossed over the limb of a tree.
If you ever decide to lose your years

by working this land, you might think again,
about the barn you build, or roofing it with tin.

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. Poem copyright 2012 by William Jolliff, whose most recent book of poems is Searching for a White Crow, Pudding House Publications, 2009. Poem reprinted from the Blue Collar Review, Winter 2012-13, by permission of William Jolliff and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2014 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. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.