Providing health, nutritious, organic food to children in the Berkeley public schools is a noble and worthy goal, but it’s also a costly one, the school board was reminded this week. 

The Berkeley Unified School District’s food program will lose money this year, and the deficit is projected to increase next year, according to a report prepared by the Child Nutrition Services office. 

Based on current estimates, the district will lose more than $48,000 on the program, a sharp reversal from the $60,000 profit it made during the last school year. During the 2000-2001 school year, the food program is forecast to lose more than $130,000. 

The reason, says program director Elsie Lee-Szeto, is rather simple: Increased activity requires more staff and more supplies. 

The food program’s projected revenues for this year – almost $2.14 million – are more than $300,000 higher than last year. But the expenses have grown from $1.74 million to more than $2.18 million. 

This year, a number of new programs have been instituted around the district, including ones initiated by last year’s passage of a district-wide food policy. That policy generated national media attention because of its promotion of organic food, but it included a wide range of other substantive proposals and plans, including soup-salad bars at schools, nutritious after-school snacks and a move toward more recycling, reusing and composting efforts. 

Lee-Szeto told the school board that progress is being made in each of the goals outlined in the food policy. For example, Oxford School has established a weekly organic soup and organic salad bar, and participation is 40 percent to 60 percent higher than on regular meal days. A similar effort is in the works at Washington School. 

The district needs to look for other revenue sources to help offset the increased costs, but it also must look at its facilities. 

“At this stage, I think the Child Nutrition Services is realistically maxing out on what it can do with its currently facilities,” parent Eric Weaver, who was involved in the development of the district’s food policy, told the school board Wednesday night. 

The report and its recommendations will return to the board for action in the coming weeks.

Saturday, May 6 

Restore a Salt Marsh 

9:30 a.m. 

Meet on the south side of Buchanan Street, between freeway and Golden Gate Fields 

Join Friends of Five Creeks and the California Native Plant Society in clearing invasive ice plant from the salt marsh at the mouth of Codornices and Marin Creeks. 

510-848-9358; f5creeks@aol.com 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory open house 

10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

LBNL campus 

This is the first open house at the Lab since the fall of 1997. Free parking and shuttle service will be offered from the Downtown Berkeley BART station and from UC Berkeley campus parking lots along Hearst Avenue. The event is free. 

510-495-2222; www.lbl.gov/OpenHouse 

Berkeley Potters Guild Spring Show 

10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Jones and Fourth streets 

This show-and-sale highlights work by clay artists, Ikebana demonstrations. Event is free. 

510-524-7031 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market 

10 a.m.-3 p.m. 

Center Street between Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Milvia Street 

510-548-3333 

Jefferson School PTA Mayfair 

10 a.m.-2 p.m. 

Jefferson School, Rose and Sacramento streets 

The fair will feature a cakewalk, carnival games and other booths, a benefit drawing for a quilt and many other prizes, plants and used children’s books for sale, art activities, entertainment, food, and more. 510-528-8191 

John Muir School May Faire 

11 a.m.-4 p.m. 

John Muir School, 2955 Claremont Ave. 

This annual event will include food, games, a yard sale and craft activities. Highlight will be annual PTA quilt raffle. Tickets for Quilt Raffle are available for $1 each, or six tickets for $5. The proceeds will be spent on projects at the school. 

510-644-6410; 510-540-1028 

The New School International Family Fair 

11 a.m.-5 p.m. 

Bonita Street between Cedar and Virginia streets 

This block party will feature a handcrafts bazaar, games and activities for children, raffle, a Capoeira demonstration, Flamenco, African, and Philippine dance, Taiko drumming, Native American flute music, and more. The event is free. 

510-548-9165 

“The Rides of Spring” 

11 a.m. 

Meet at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center Street between Milvia and MLK 

The Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition is sponsoring this community bike ride – the actual “destinations” will be decided as the bikes travel. 

510-601-8124 

Cinco de Mayo Celebration, a family sing-along (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

11:30 a.m. 

Habitot Children’s Museum, 2230 Shattuck Ave. Children $6, Adults $3, FOF $5 & $2. 

Downtown Music Circus (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1-5 p.m. 

Hundreds of musicians of every tradition will gather on Shattuck Avenue between University Avenue and Haste Street, playing from streetside, stores, balconies, cafés. Anyone can bring an instrument and join in the fun. Sponsored by Downtown Berkeley Association and Amoeba Music. 

For Fun, Ning Ying (China/Hong Kong, 1995 - Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7 p.m. 

On the Beat, Ning Ying (China, 1995) 

9 p.m. 

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way 

Cal Performances: Merce Cunningham Dance Company 

8 p.m. 

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

“Summerspace” and the West Coast Premiere of Cunningham’s “Interscape,” set to music by John Cage. Tickets $20 to $40. 

510-642-9988 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 

Bach, B Minor Mass. Free. 

Liam Ensemble: Traditional Persian Music (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

Julia Morgan Theater, 2646 College Ave. $25. 

Celebration of Spring: A Benefit for the Crowden School (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. 

Turtle Island String Quartet. Tickets: 658-2799. 

California Bach Society Chorus and Orchestra 

8 p.m. 

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way 

Chorus and orchestra will perform J.S. Bach’s “Mass in A Major” and Cantata 21. Tickets $20 general; $15 seniors; $10 students. 

650-299-8616; www.calbach.org 

Berkeley New Music Project 

8 p.m. 

Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This free concert will feature new music by graduate student composers. 

Sunday, May 7 

Berkeley Potters Guild Spring Show 

10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Jones and Fourth streets 

This show-and-sale highlights work by clay artists, Ikebana demonstrations. Event is free. 

510-524-7031 

Berkeley’s Cinco de Mayo Celebration 

10:30 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Civic Center Park 

This free event will feature mariachis, salsa bands, Latin jazz and Tex-Mex music, dancers, clowns, face painters, a petting zoo, vendors of arts and crafts, and more. 

510-549-0192 

Jazz on Fourth Street (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

11 a.m.-4 p.m. 

A benefit for the Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble with Mingus Amongus, Charanga Tumbao y Cuerdos, Kemp Generation, Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble. 

Carefree Carfree Tour to Bernard Maybeck’s First Church of Christ-Scientist (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

11:30 a.m. 

Meet at Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Crowden School Community Music Day (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1-5 p.m. 

Crowden School, 1475 Rose St. 

A family affair with an instrument “petting zoo” for children of all ages. Performances by the Kairos Youth Choir, the Arethusa Woodwind Ensemble, and the Rose Street Players Musical Theater. Free. 

510-559-6910 

BAHA’s 25th Annual House Tour and Reception 

1-5 p.m. 

This year’s tour and reception will focus on the “Claremont Country Houses and their Gardens: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmstead and Duncan McDuffie.” Tickets are $25 for Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association members and guests, $32 for public. 

510-841-2242 

Kimi Kodani Hill Lecture on Berkeley’s Ethnic Diversity (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1 p.m. 

1931 Center St. 

Sponsored by the Berkeley Historical Society. Free. 

510-848-0181  

History/Storytelling Day 

1-4 p.m. 

People’s Park 

Share stories of the Park’s rich history of activism. Bring ideas for creating a People’s Park Archive. Sponsored by People’s Park Community Gardening Collective. 

510-601-8643 

Youth Arts Festival (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

2 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 

Washington School Student Concert and Dances from Sri Lanka. Free. 

Sketches on a Windy Afternoon 

3 p.m. 

Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Robert Calonico and Jonathan Elkus will conduct the UC Davis Concert Band and University Wind Ensemble in this performance. 

Three Tenors 

4:30 p.m. 

Jazzschool/La Note, 2377 Shattuck Ave. 

General admission $12; students/seniors $10; Jazzschool Students/Children under 13, $6. 

510-845-5373 

China: Fifty Years Inside the People’s Republic (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

4:30-6:30 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Museum Theater 

Slide Show and Panel Discussion: Other Views, with photographers Jeffrey Aaronson and Xing Danwen. 

Himalayan Fair Concert (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7 p.m. 

King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. 

Proceeds benefit grassroots projects in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Tibet. Tickets $15. 

510-848-6767; www.himalayanfair.net 

Cal Performances: The Kronos Quartet 

7 p.m. 

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Tickets $20 to $42. 

510-642-9988 

News from Native California Magazine presents ShadowLight Productions (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 p.m. 

Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

A free lecture/demonstration of California Indian stories. 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 p.m. 

2454 Telegraph Ave. 

Performance poet Sandy Diamond, Quraysh Ali Lansana. 

Works in the Works 2000 (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 p.m. 

Eighth St. Studio, 2525 Eighth St. $8, FOF $7.

Anyone strolling past a school playground roundabout lunchtime is quite familiar with the great debates that permeate early school life: 

• “Let’s play freeze tag!” “No – let’s play regular tag!” “No – let’s play TV tag!” 

• “No way am I gonna agree to that trade! I’ll offer my Pikachu for your Charmander...” 

• “Yeah, well Debussy could kick Schubert’s butt even if he was standing on Bach’s shoulders!” 

While variant strains of tag and the relative values of Pokemon cards could be the subject of a panel discussion at most any school, the classical music conundrum would probably be limited to just one – Berkeley’s own Crowden School. 

Now a thriving city institution, The Crowden School’s makeshift origins and subsequent ascent mirror a garage band-turned-supergroup. Founded back in 1983 by Scottish-born violinist Anne Crowden, the school was initially run out of a church basement and featured only 11 students in its debut class. 

“We’re a unique environment, no other middle school in the country offers this blend of intense musical education and academics,” says school associate director Benjamin Simon, Crowden’s handpicked successor to take up the reins following this academic year. “Music is very challenging and entertaining, particularly to young children. So they really are given an opportunity to explore doing something difficult and challenging, mastering a series of tasks, and watching their older peers do more difficult music and pieces that sort of lead them through.” 

Crowden and academic director Piero Mancini – who, intrigued by Crowden’s quest to start a musical school, moved his family from Italy to Berkeley – have watched their school grow from 11 students in grades six and seven to roughly 70 in grades four through nine. Two years ago, the school ascended from its longtime home in the basement of the University Christian Church to move into its current location, the old Jefferson School building on Rose Street. 

And while chamber music remains the crux of the institution, the students run the full gamut of academics from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. – following, of course, the 8-to-10 a.m. session under the watchful eye of Crowden, Simon (a violist) and a slew of other Bay Area musicians. 

“The aim is not to be a conservatory,” says Crowden, who was trained in her native Scotland and at London’s Royal Academy of Music before touring extensively in Europe and eventually immigrating to the United States in 1965. “It’s a wonderful background for the very talented students who do want to go on (to professional playing). For others, the love of music will be a lifelong hobby. The whole give and take of playing music together is a lesson they don’t learn any other field except perhaps on a very good sports team. 

“But then they’re not using this so much!” laughs Crowden while pointing at her head. 

Crowden’s analogy of team camaraderie is not ill-fitting. Many of the instructors and administrators are musicians themselves, and musical love and skill is a mutual bond for all the students. 

“At this school you have something in common with everyone,” says Karla Donehew, a ninth-grade violinist in her fourth year at The Crowden School. “You get a lot of different views from everyone, and you pick which one you’d like to take. In music, there’s not only one right way to do things. Getting all the different ideas from different teachers is really good.” 

And while The Crowden School has offered tomorrow’s musicians – and music lovers – a place to learn and grow, it is also more than just a small private institution. The school additionally runs the Crowden Community Music Center, reaching out to hundreds of Berkeley children (and possibly in the future, adults). 

“We’re helping make musical education available to the community,” says Michael Dalby, chair of the school’s board. “There are roughly 350 children who partake in the CCMC’s ensembles, beginning instruction, chorus, musical theater, guitar and woodwind (programs). That’s as much a part of our vision as running the day school during school hours.” 

In addition to the CCMC, The Crowden School also puts on numerous concerts, and sponsors many others (the classical-fusion Turtle Island String Quartet plays at St. John’s Church at 8 p.m. Saturday in a school-sponsored concert, and Crowden’s big spring show is on the 17th, also at St. John’s). 

The precision the young musicians demonstrate during their many concerts is something of a contrast to the frenzied everyday atmosphere greeting Benjamin Simon when he first walked through the school’s front door two years back. 

“There was chaos, controlled chaos, creative chaos,” says Simon, who has known Crowden since his early high school years. “Music was coming from under every door. Kids were running down the halls with works of art under one arm and instruments under the other.” 

While Crowden plans to hand the school director’s baton to Simon after this year, she still plans to teach at the 8-to-10 a.m. sessions of the school she founded 17 years back. 

“The thing that makes it all worthwhile is that it works,” says Crowden. “The children are happy and engaged; they support each other tremendously.” 

The Crowden School, located at 1475 Rose St., is having its Spring Open House on Sunday. For more information about the school, visit the web site at www.thecrowdenschool.org

The opinion piece by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) scientist Howard Matis (May 2) is not accurate regarding what occurred at the Alameda County Board of Education meeting (April 25) when they agreed to review their decision to advise parents and schools about the radioactive contamination at the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) museum. 

The children’s museum sits directly downwind from LBNL’s Tritium Labeling Facility, an assembly line industrial scale research facility which uses and loses large amounts of radioactive tritium in its most dangerous form – tritiated water. If as Mr. Matis stated the board had given the LHS a clean bill of health then they would have withdrawn both decisions they made at their 4/11 meeting. The board did rescind their decision for a moratorium on trips, which they never had authority to enforce. Because the levels of radioactive contamination in and around the museum were found high enough to qualify for Superfund Clean-up, and the overwhelming evidence and testimony presented by credible scientists the board voted 5-2-1 to recommend that parents investigate the information and make their own decision. Does this sound like a clean bill of health? 

Contrary to Mr. Matis’ claims LBNL presented no nationally known experts. What we got was LBNL’s standard slide show public relations team, the same two EPA reps with the same tired “acceptable risks” speech and LHS staff who under questioning admitted they get significant fees from the schools’ visits. The scientists critical of the contamination from the tritium facility made the following observations: 

(1) The LBNL scientists were liars; (2) They did their science backwards-formed a conclusion first and then found evidence to support it; (3) The tritium facility’s inventory records were a shambles with 23,000 curies of tritiated water unaccounted for and presumed dumped on the LHS; and (4) The tritium facility doesn’t have the equipment to gauge how much is returned through reclamation and just pick numbers out of the air which don’t even come close to those at Livermore Lab’s reclamation division. 

Also presented was evidence that there was hardly any tritium activity when the EPA took their air tests showing no danger to the public. The EPA refuses to test soil, groundwater plants and trees because that would show more accurately what was released when the facility was in high gear. Recently it has been discovered that there was hardly any tritium on site when the air tests were conducted. This is about as honest as having your car checked for smog with the engine off. 

Mr. Matis forgot to mention the usual platitudes about how much he cares about the safety of the children at the LHS. The truth is that he and his cohorts don’t care a whit about these kids, workers or neighbors especially when it hinders the operation of one of their nuclear gizmos. LBNL’s scientists actually do care about exposing themselves to tritium as shown by the elaborate venting system they built which takes the rad-waste hundreds of feet away. It then comes out a stack 20 feet from the fence where the visiting children play in the museum’s rear outside activity area. No wonder the Berkeley City Council has twice called for closure and cleanup of the tritium facility. Mr. Matis might want to reconsider broadcasting insults and innuendo and take a serious look at what this creepy tritium facility is doing to tarnish LBNL’s reputation from some of the great things they have accomplished. 

Mark McDonald is a member of Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission. He has been involved with radiation pollution issues for over 20 years and currently works with the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste.

The St. Mary’s High track team continued its leisurely stroll through the Alameda-Contra Costa Athletic League schedule on Thursday afternoon, taking first place in 10 of 14 events on both the boys’ and girls’ sides to win the respective meets, 123-43 and 128-53, over its closest competition, El Cerrito. The Panthers’ effort also yielded comfortable victories over Albany and Salesian at the quad-meet. 

Danielle Stokes keyed a diverse effort on the girls’ side, taking first in the 110m hurdles and long jump events, and picking up an additional five points with a third in the 100m. Representing the mid-distance contingent for St. Mary’s, Bridget Duffy took first in the 800m, outrunning her nearest competitor by a gaping 15 seconds. The Panthers also managed a one-woman sweep in the field events, as thrower Kamaiya Warren posted a 39-6.5 and 131-4 to win the shotput and discus, respectively. 

“We feel good about the way this team’s running,” St. Mary’s head coach Jay Lawson said. “With the training we’ve done recently, the kids are running better than we anticipated.” 

Though El Cerrito managed to kick off the boys events with a first place in the 100m by Joe Onyenegecha, St. Mary’s swept the Gauchos in every other track event, including the 4x100 – the meet’s only relay. Chris Dunbar and James Ross posted victories in the 400m and 1600m, while Solomon Welch and Trestin George completed a Panther 1-2 sweep in the long jump. St. Mary’s also dominated the hurdles, as Halihl Guy left his league-mates in the dust in both the 110m and 300m hurdles. 

“The competition was OK, but I’m just trying to get my time down,” said Guy, who won the 300m hurdles – his best event – by nearly three seconds. “I think (the team’s) getting closer.” 

“Now the focus is trying to look sharp, win our league,” the coach added. “The goal of this team is to win the NCS championship for both the boys and girls.” 

Though Thursday’s league win was hardly in question, considering the Panthers’ status as NCS championship contenders, this Saturday’s Meet of Champions in Sacramento promises to be a distinctly different experience. Featuring Northern California’s top track powers, the meet is designed to prepare the state’s most competitive squads for the postseason, beginning at the end of this month. 

“The Sacramento Meet of Champions is a good-quality track meet,” Lawson said. “It’s the best nine (in Northern California) in every event, so it should be a great tune-up.”

Rotarians will gather on the USS Hornet on Saturday night to do what they do best – raise money to help people around the world. 

The fund-raising party in Alameda will support Rotary International’s Polio-Plus Campaign, with a projected $30,000 being raised toward the eradication of polio in Ghana. 

Steve Holland, past president of the Rotary Club of Berkeley, said Polio Plus has been hugely successful in halting the disease, and Rotarians have donated $345 million to the campaign worldwide. 

Currently the campaign funds are paying for polio serum and for the publicity necessary to let people know they need to be inoculated. 

Holland, a past president of Berkeley Rotary, is one of the hosts this weekend for a conference attended by 330 Rotarians at the Berkeley Marina Radisson Hotel. 

The conference guests are members of 63 California Rotary Clubs in a district that stretches from Berkeley and Contra Costa County in the south, up to the Oregon border. 

Guest speakers at this year’s convention include Shirley S. Chater, Commissioner of the United States Social Security Administration; baseball analyst Joe Morgan, a former Cincinnati Reds second baseman; and baseball broadcaster Lon Simmons. 

Holland, an insurance executive and 12-year member of the club, said the last time the Berkeley hosted a district conference was 35 years ago. 

The local club was founded in 1916 and had more than 50 members by the end of its first year. Among its local activities, the Berkeley Rotary raised funds and built the Berkeley Art and Garden Center in 1965 for its 50th anniversary. 

Additionally, the club pledged more than $400,000 to fund a building drive in 1992 for the Berkeley YMCA. The club provides more than $25,000 annually to local community projects. 

On a district level the Berkeley Rotary Club is participating in an international service project that helps fund programs for young people in the Czech and Slovak Republics who have lost limbs. 

Holland said it is a $40,000 project in connection with another club. It involves the young people riding horses, a specialty program that otherwise would not exist in those countries. 

Having already addressed its void in the frontcourt with the spring signing of Gabriel Hughes and Saulius Kuzminskas, the Cal men’s basketball team went to work on the backcourt Friday, announcing the signing of Alhambra High guard Michael Lawson. 

The 6-foot-2 Bay Area native earned all-league honors all four years at Alhambra, posting an obscene 24.5 points and 8.5 rebounds per game as a senior in 1999-2000. Lawson also holds the all-time scoring record at AHS, with 2,104 career points. 

“We’re excited to have Michael join our program,” Cal head coach Ben Braun said about the team’s newest addition. “I like Michael’s versatility. He’s shown the ability to play both guard positions. 

“Michael had an outstanding high school career and comes to us with tremendous potential. He has shown a strong interest and commitment in our program and our university.”

An armed robbery was reported about 11 p.m. Thursday by a woman who was accosted by a gunman as she sat in her car in the 2300 block of Woolsey Street. 

She reported that she had just driven up to her boyfriend’s apartment and she saw a man standing on the corner. He immediately walked over to her car and asked her for the time. 

The woman looked at her purse as she was about to exit her car, and she saw the man pull out a gray steel handgun from his waistband. 

He saw her look at her purse and told her, “That’s what I want,” according to Capt. Bobby Miller of the Berkeley Police Department. 

The suspect took her purse and her car keys and as he left she screamed at him to give back her keys. He threw them back toward her car and walked, and she found them with a flashlight. 

The suspect is described as an African-American male in his 20s, 5 feet, 5 inches tall, 150 pounds, wearing a pink T-shirt, black sweatpants, and white tennis shoes. The victim lost her purse and identification cards and $15.

Berkeley High track and field coach Darrell Hampton couldn’t decide which was more important between today’s East Bay Athletic League qualifiers and the Sacramento Meet of Champions. So he’s bringing his ’Jackets to both. 

“We’re going to have to pull double-duty,” said Hampton, who admits the Sacramento meet is more prestigious, but did not want to give up on the EBAL – which the BHS girls are favored to win. “We’re looking to get everybody qualified for (next Saturday’s EBAL) finals, and improve on all our individual times.” 

Since placing eighth in the 4x100 and 4x400 events at last weekend’s Penn Relays, Berkeley’s nationally known girls relay team has been trying to smooth out their handoffs, in preparation for this weekend’s competition. On Tuesday, the ’Jackets were slated to run their final dual meet of the year, against California High, but a broken water main forced a cancellation. 

Hampton considers this weekend especially important, in light of a slow week of practice, at which the coach saw little improvement. According to Hampton, his top performers have become so accustomed to the spectacle of big meets, that their practice habits have suffered. 

“I’m not very confident (right now), even in practice, the relay times were terrible (this week),” the coach said. “They’ve turned into meet performers. We’re still shaky on our handoffs – we’ve got to work on that (Saturday).”

A bomb threat at 7:30 p.m. Thursday forced the occupants of a drug rehabilitation program on Scenic Avenue to evacuate the building they occupy. 

The person who received the threatening telephone call said the suspect said, “There’s a bomb in your building,” and then hung up. The person who received the threat said the caller spoke in a low raspy tone, disguising his voice. The man did not know if he knew the suspect or not. 

Berkeley Police Capt. Bobby Miller said the police searched the building and did not find a bomb. The police department has a three- or four-member bomb technician team with a supervisor. Miller said such threats usually are intended to aggravate and make people feel unsettled, and they achieve their purpose.

Scores of Berkeleyans will travel to Sacramento on Monday for a rally promoting an increase on state spending for public schools. 

The participants have chartered five buses for the trip, and several dozen cars also will be used for transportation, according to Mark Coplan, president of the Berkeley PTA Council, who has been spearheading the effort. 

Many of the participants are affiliated with a new organization called “Advocates for Public Schools,” a Berkeley-based group that was formed last month. The organization has created a petition that calls for the state to help provide “fair pay” for teachers, fund ongoing teacher training and parent involvement, finance academic support programs and allow districts greater flexibility in how they use certain portions of state-allocated funds. 

The endorsement list includes all five members of the BUSD School Board, representatives from the Berkeley Public Education Foundation, the Berkeley chapter of the League of Women Voters. and former UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien. 

Monday’s rally will be held two days before Gov. Gray Davis will release his revised state budget. Public education supporters have called on the governor to use the expected budget surplus to raise per-pupil spending levels so they’re more equitable with funding levels of other states. 

The rally, sponsored by the California Teachers Association, will be an ideal opportunity for the Berkeley group to share its message and seek more signatures for the petition, Coplan said. Berkeley parent Simone Young will be one of the speakers at the rally. Prior to that event, the Berkeley contingent will be meeting with state Sen. Don Perata, who already has signed the petition, and Coplan is still trying to arrange an appointment with a member of the governor’s staff to deliver the documents. 

But local involvement in the rally has touched a nerve with the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, currently in mediation with the school district over increased salaries for teachers. On several occasions in recent weeks, the union has warned the district not to use the Sacramento rally as a way of distracting attention from local contract issues. 

“Yes, this is Sacramento’s fault,” BFT President Barry Fike told the school board Wednesday night, referring to low wages for teachers throughout the state. “But this isn’t the type of competitiveness we’re asking of you, the Berkeley school board. What we’re asking of you is to simply commit to make Berkeley salaries competitive with other teachers’ salaries in the area. 

“Your continued refusal to make this commitment and your attempts to blame this on Sacramento means that the BFT is unable to devote the full energy and attention on Sacramento that we would like to.” 

Coplan said he understands the tension between the union and the district surrounding the contract negotiations, but he believes next week’s rally can be a unified for the community. 

“I’ve seen division in this district, and it’s horrendous, and I’ve seen what it does to us,” he told the school board. 

“I’ve also seen the power of the people. But, I think what the people can do when their efforts are combined, can be even greater. Once place where we can get to that point is at the rally in Sacramento.”

Friday, May 5 

Historical Institutionalism Seminar 

Noon 

119 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Paul Pierson from Harvard University will be the featured speaker. 

U.K. Seminar 

Noon 

201 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Robert Peirce, counsellor, Political and Public Affairs for the British Embassy, in Washington, D.C., will discuss “Modern Britain: An Examination of Devolution and the Revitalization of Britain’s External Relationships - Europe, U.S. and the Commonwealth.” 

Opera: Queen of Spades, Part One 

1 p.m. 

North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

510-644-6107 

Carefree Carfree Tour to KALA Art Institute (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1:30 p.m. 

Meet at Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Family Reading Night 

6:30 p.m. 

Rosa Parks Elementary School, 920 Allston Way 

The Berkeley PTA Council is sponsoring this event to encourage reading by all members of local families. The free event will include a reading workshop, a reading pledge a free dinner and treats. A prize drawing will be held, and prizes will include 11 computers. 

510-647-5219; 510-849-2683; 510-644-6618 

Mr. Zhao, Lu Yue (China, 1998; Bay Area Premiere - Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 & 9:30 p.m. 

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way 

Buses No. 7, 51, 64  

The Sounds of Berkeley: A Vibrating Experience (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Helen Holt, Sherry Burke, Debra Dooling-Sherman, Dress, Aidan McIntyre, Art Peterson, Waldir Sachs, Robert Sherman, Steven Strauss, John Zalabak. $5, FOF (Friends of Festival) free. 

Trinity Chamber Concerts 

8 p.m. 

Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. 

UC Berkeley’s Collegium Musicum, conducted by Anthony Martin, and the University Chamber Chorus, conducted by Marika Kuzma, will perform Venetian music from St. Mark’s for violins, recorders and voices. Tickets $10 general; $8 seniors and students. 

510-549-3864 

Cal Performances: Merce Cunningham Dance Company 

8 p.m. 

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This program will feature Cunningham’s “Summerspace” and the West Coast Premiere of Cunningham’s “Interscape,” set to music by John Cage. Tickets $20 to $40. 

510-642-9988 

Marcus Shelby Orchestra, big band, Ellington-inspired jazz (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8:30 p.m. 

La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. $10, FOF $8. 

Bus No. 43  

Saturday, May 6 

Restore a Salt Marsh 

9:30 a.m. 

Meet on the south side of Buchanan Street, between the freeway and Golden Gate Fields 

Join Friends of Five Creeks and the California Native Plant Society in clearing invasive ice plant from the salt marsh at the mouth of Codornices and Marin Creeks. Bring work gloves if you have them. 

510-848-9358; f5creeks@aol.com 

Berkeley Potters Guild Spring Show 

10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Jones and Fourth streets 

This show-and-sale highlights work by clay artists, Ikebana demonstrations, one-of-a-kind bargains throughout the complex of art studios, and more. The event is free. 

510-524-7031 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market 

10 a.m.-3 p.m. 

Center Street between Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Milvia Street 

510-548-3333 

Jefferson School PTA Mayfair 

10 a.m.-2 p.m. 

Jefferson School, Rose and Sacramento streets 

The fair will feature a cakewalk, carnival games and other booths, a benefit drawing for a quilt and many other prizes, plants and used children’s books for sale, art activities, entertainment, food, and more. Free admission and reasonable prices. 

510-528-8191 

John Muir School May Faire 

11 a.m.-4 p.m. 

John Muir School, 2955 Claremont Ave. 

This annual event will include food, games, a yard sale and craft activities. The highlight of this year’s May Faire will be the annual PTA quilt raffle. The May Faire is free; tickets for the Quilt Raffle are available for $1 each, or six tickets for $5. The proceeds will be spent on projects at the school. 

510-644-6410; 510-540-1028 

The New School International Family Fair 

11 a.m.-5 p.m. 

Bonita Street between Cedar and Virginia streets 

This block party will feature a handcrafts bazaar, games and activities for children, raffle, a Capoeira demonstration, Flamenco, African, and Philippine dance, Taiko drumming, Native American flute music, and more. The event is free. 

510-548-9165 

“The Rides of Spring” 

11 a.m. 

Meet at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center Street between Milvia and MLK 

The Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition is sponsoring this community bike ride, which may visit the Berkeley Marina, Cesar Chavez Park, the Ohlone Greenway, Cedar-Rose Park - the actual “destinations” will be decided as the bikes travel. The group expects to be back downtown between 2 and 3 p.m., in time to participate in the Berkeley Music Circus Festival. 

510-601-8124 

Cinco de Mayo Celebration, a family sing-along (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

11:30 a.m. 

Habitot Children’s Museum, 2230 Shattuck Ave. Children $6, Adults $3, FOF $5 & $2. 

Downtown Music Circus (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1-5 p.m. 

Hundreds of musicians of every tradition will gather on Shattuck Avenue between University Avenue and Haste Street, playing from streetside, stores, balconies, cafés, and a piano situated on the divider at Center St. You, too, can bring an instrument and join in the fun. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association and Amoeba Music. 

For Fun, Ning Ying (China/Hong Kong, 1995 - Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7 p.m. 

On the Beat, Ning Ying (China, 1995) 

9 p.m. 

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way 

Bus No. 7, 51, 64 

Cal Performances: Merce Cunningham Dance Company 

8 p.m. 

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This program will feature Cunningham’s “Summerspace” and the West Coast Premiere of Cunningham’s “Interscape,” set to music by John Cage. Tickets $20 to $40. 

510-642-9988 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 

Bach, B Minor Mass. Free. 

Bus No. 51 

Liam Ensemble: Traditional Persian Music (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

Julia Morgan Theater, 2646 College Ave. $25. 

Bus No. 51  

Celebration of Spring: A Benefit for the Crowden School (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. 

Turtle Island String Quartet. Tickets: 658-2799. 

Bus No. 51 

California Bach Society Chorus and Orchestra 

8 p.m. 

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way 

Warren Stewart will conduct the chorus and orchestra in their performance of J.S. Bach’s “Mass in A Major” and Cantata 21. Tickets $20 general; $15 seniors; $10 students. 

650-299-8616; www.calbach.org 

Berkeley New Music Project 

8 p.m. 

Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This concert will feature new music by graduate student composers. The concert is free. 

Sunday, May 7 

Berkeley Potters Guild Spring Show 

10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Jones and Fourth streets 

This show-and-sale highlights work by clay artists, Ikebana demonstrations, one-of-a-kind bargains throughout the complex of art studios, and more. The event is free. 

510-524-7031 

Berkeley’s Cinco de Mayo Celebration 

10:30 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Civic Center Park 

This free event will feature mariachis, salsa bands, Latin jazz and Tex-Mex music, dancers, clowns, face painters, a petting zoo, vendors of arts and crafts, and more. 

510-549-0192 

Jazz on Fourth Street (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

11 a.m.-4 p.m. 

A benefit for the Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble with Mingus Amongus, Charanga Tumbao y Cuerdos, Kemp Generation, Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble. 

Bus No. 51 

Carefree Carfree Tour to Bernard Maybeck’s First Church of Christ-Scientist (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

11:30 a.m. 

Meet at Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Crowden School Community Music Day (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1-5 p.m. 

Crowden School, 1475 Rose St. 

A family affair with an instrument “petting zoo” for children of all ages. Performances by the Kairos Youth Choir, the Arethusa Woodwind Ensemble, and the Rose Street Players Musical Theater. Free. 

510-559-6910 

Bus No. 67 

Kimi Kodani Hill Lecture on Berkeley’s Ethnic Diversity (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1 p.m. 

1931 Center St. 

Sponsored by the Berkeley Historical Society. Free. 

510-848-0181  

History/Storytelling Day 

1-4 p.m. 

People’s Park 

Come, and share your stories of the Park’s rich history of activism. Bring ideas for creating a People’s Park Archive. This event is sponsored by the People’s Park Community Gardening Collective. 

510-601-8643 

Youth Arts Festival (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

2 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 

Washington School Student Concert and Dances from Sri Lanka. Free. 

Sketches on a Windy Afternoon 

3 p.m. 

Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Robert Calonico and Jonathan Elkus will conduct the UC Davis Concert Band and University Wind Ensemble in this performance of works by Sousa, Holst, Jerome Rosen, Franz Von Suppe, Bach, Percy Grainger and Fisher Tull. 

Three Tenors 

4:30 p.m. 

Jazzschool/La Note, 2377 Shattuck Ave. 

Tenor saxophonists Tony Corman, Dave Tidball and Jim Norton will be joined by Matt Clark, piano, Jeff Massinari, guitar, Fred Randolph, bass, and Phil Hawkins, drums. General admission $12; students/seniors $10; Jazzschool Students/Children under 13, $6. Limited seating; reservations recommended. 

510-845-5373 

China: Fifty Years Inside the People’s Republic (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

4:30-6:30 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Museum Theater 

Slide Show and Panel Discussion: Other Views, with photographers Jeffrey Aaronson and Xing Danwen, moderated by Robert Templer. 

Himalayan Fair Concert (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7 p.m. 

King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. 

This concert will feature Ali Khan, Ancient Future, Stephen Kent and Eda Maxym, Viviana Guzman, Techung and Jeff Greenwald. Proceeds benefit grassroots projects in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Tibet. Tickets $15. 

510-848-6767, ext. 609; www.himalayanfair.net 

Buses No. 15, 67 

Cal Performances: The Kronos Quartet 

7 p.m. 

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

The quarter will be joined by soprano Dawn Upshaw in a program of 20th century music. Tickets $20 to $42. 

510-642-9988 

News from Native California Magazine presents ShadowLight Productions (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 p.m. 

Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Tales from Native California, a lecture/demonstration of California Indian stories. Free. 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 p.m. 

2454 Telegraph Ave. 

Performance poet Sandy Diamond, Quraysh Ali Lansana. 

Buses No. 40, 64 

Works in the Works 2000 (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 p.m. 

Eighth St. Studio, 2525 Eighth St. $8, FOF $7. 

Bus No. 65

It’s Wednesday and I’ve already put in about 30-35 hours at my job, since Monday. I don’t have a union to protect me. Or to set my hours. Or negotiate on my behalf against seemingly unjust labor practices. 

So I’d like to address the current situation between the Berkeley Federation of Teachers (BFT) and the school district. Specifically, I’d like to respond to the fabricated environment of discontent during the Board meeting on Wednesday, May 3. 

I own a modest home in North Berkeley. A significant portion of my tax dollars go to paying the Berkeley teachers. I wish they were paid more. But I wouldn’t like to see the beneficial but expensive social programs that the district runs get shut down. Unfortunately, the school districts in California have suffered greatly from vindictive leadership in Sacramento. Traditionally, every school dollar comes with a string attached. Most school dollars are so bound up in state politics that it’s impossible to discern the real intent behind the allocation. 

Unions are a good thing. But they become disruptive when they turn communities against themselves; in particular when they fight against their local school districts instead of mustering the courage to fight against the real enemy, which is Sacramento. I’m glad to see that at least the Berkeley PTA is taking up the challenge. 

I would like to challenge the protesters who were in attendance May 3 to tell taxpayers what the school district is offering the Berkeley Federation of Teachers for a settlement, and why it is so egregiously bad that the leadership of the BFT has had to initiate the divisive preliminaries for a strike. The agreements that have been put on the table have been sealed to the public. So how do they know what they’re fighting for? Sounds like union rhetoric to me. I challenge the protesters to ask BFT leaders what the truth really is. I spoke to an otherwise well informed, sign-toting parent outside who didn’t have a clue. 

Meanwhile, protesters, do a little bit of homework about where the real struggle lies instead of ignorantly giving in to the manufactured battle of the BFT leadership, who think this is still the ‘60s and that partnership and collaboration are the enemies of rational people. 

When good, unions are a good thing. Unfortunately the BFT has chosen to upend the city by turning district administrators into the enemy, at the expense of our teachers, and at the expense – like always – of our students. 

Jeffrey M. Hannan, a Berkeley resident, is an independent Web consultant.

SAN FRANCISCO – As part of its “Absurdist Season 2000,” San Francisco’s iconoclastic Exit Theater, located in the heart of the Tenderloin, opened the world premiere Tuesday of East Bay playwright/actor Dan Carbone’s energetic but disappointing farce “Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals in the Heaven on Top of Heaven.” 

In “Talks to the Animals,” Spanish painter Salvador Dali (Carbone) is brought back to life during a television talk show. The play then careens through an eccentric, disorderly and subjective retelling of Dali’s life, as filtered through Carbone’s offbeat satiric imagination. 

Director John Sowle and an energetic cast give the performance everything they’ve got, but no amount of broad acting, sight gags and silly antics can compensate for a script that is basically a not-very-funny, two-hour, episodic, sketch comedy segment. 

In “Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals,” following the bizarre talk show segment, we visit Dali at home with his dysfunctional family, transposed somehow into a television sit com complete with laugh track. There his oversexed oedipal daughter (Marin Van Young) eats breakfast cereal out of her brother’s (Russell Pachman) underwear. 

Soon a cow (John Baumann) who was traumatized during the television talk show flees to Africa to become a tourist guide. There he’s joined by Dali’s family where he tells them, in the form of a puppet show, a traumatic dream from his childhood. 

At one point, Dali gives a lecture to the audience on the history of art, complete with slides, identifying where he fits in. Later, his wife Gala has sex with a stranger in a cab. 

The highlight of the evening is a scatological poem about a dog who eats tinsel off the Christmas tree, and the outcome of that. 

But “Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals” contains no real thesis or story. It’s a series of episodic skits. The play is surreal, but not funny. The jokes are often labored. 

The characters, even Dali, who holds center stage for much of the evening, are cartoon characters. Carbone’s Dali is a caricature who talks about himself in the third person in grand, exaggerated phrases. Two hours of that starts to wear thin. 

The stock satirical situations, such as the dysfunctional nuclear family, are often familiar and recognizable. 

As far as the writing goes, the opening moment of each segment is usually the strongest moment. Then, typically, the “scenelet” meanders for a while, before stopping. A little story structure would have helped this piece. A crazy fantasy doesn’t necessarily make a play. 

Director John Sowle has done his best to breathe life into the piece. Everyone tries hard to be funny. Carbone performs Dali with lots of grimacing and a squeaky Spanish accent. He’s sort of a half-way-there Father Guido Sarducci. Berkeleyan and Shotgun Players regular Marin Van Young, who is a skillful actor, turns in some of the show’s strongest work as Dali’s sexual daughter Twinkle Ann, and later as a trendy guest at a party thrown by Spanish King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia. Paul Gerrior has nice moments as talk show host Zachary Strayhorn. 

Carbone won a Best of the Fringe award for his piece “Up from the Ground” at last year’s San Francisco Fringe Festival, but this long and complicated journey through the life of Salvador Dali asks for a lot of indulgence from an audience. 

“Salvador Dali Talks to the Animals in the Heaven on Top of Heaven” plays Tuesday and Wednesday, 7 p.m., through May 24, at Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy St. (at Taylor), San Francisco. For tickets and information, call 415-931-2699.

OK, so maybe predicting a win over league punching bag Granada doesn’t exactly make Berkeley High boys volleyball coach Justin Caraway Nostradamus. But after seeing the way his ’Jackets dominated the Matadors in a four-game victory at Donahue Gym on Thursday, the coach’s more presumptuous prophecy of picking up a postseason bid is beginning to look less and less crazy. 

Determined to win their 2000 home finale, the senior-intensive BHS squad opened a quick two-game advantage on the winless Matadors, before finally showing weakness in game three. With the ’Jackets in a temporary funk, Granada managed to string enough points together to take the game, but Berkeley responded with a big effort in game four to preserve the 17-15, 15-5, 6-15, 15-2 victory. 

“In that third game, it was the same thing as always. They got tentative and started making passing mistakes,” Caraway said after the game. “But we outplayed them for the most of the game. We were clearly the better team. We weren’t going to come in here and lose to a team that we haven’t lost two in two years.” 

“We could have been a little more crisp, but we’re definitely where we want to be,” added BHS senior Luis Ramirez, who posted two aces to lead all servers.  

Keeping with tradition, Caraway worked all seven seniors into the lineup in the final home game. As usual, the BHS victory was keyed by the play of the senior leaders, with D.Q. Li and Mason Chin combining for 25 kills and 26 digs. Another fourth-year athlete, Jacob Kardon, left his mark on the home court, scoring eight kills, 10 digs and a team-high five blocks. 

“This team is very talented - one of the most talented I’ve ever played on,” said Ramirez, who transferred to Berkeley High after playing for a high school in Denver last season. “I could tell when I first walked into the gym that this team could go to the playoffs.” 

Though Berkeley has cleared its first hurdle in its hunt for the postseason, the most difficult obstacle, first-place Foothill, remains in the team’s path. The ‘Jackets and Falcons face off next Tuesday in San Ramon in a game that would figure to be Berkeley’s most convincing argument for NCS, if it can finally stop its undefeated league mates. Still, the BHS coach admits that beating Foothill is a far cry from beating Granada. 

“If we play with this type of emotion, Foothill’s going to kill us,” Caraway said after Thursday’s win. “We’ve got to come out prepared to play. Foothill keeps the ball in play. Just being prepared is really the strategy.” 

“...The window is busted, and the landlord ain’t home/And Butch joined the army, yeah that’s where he’s been/And the jackhammer’s diggin’ up the sidewalks again...” 

– Tom Waits, “In the Neighborhood” 

While noise, vandalism and discomfort form the holy trinity of all too many neighborhoods, a Berkeley block has mounted an effort to preserve its sanctity from a perceived threat. 

Residents of Peralta Street just off Solano have waged a yearlong war against Pacific Bell’s installation of a second telephone switching box (those metallic objects on the roadside resembling a small tool shed and containing a mass of brightly colored wires and sockets). 

“Sometimes they come twice a day, sometimes three times a day,” says 30-year area resident Nel Watkins of Pac Bell employees coming to work on the new box. “Because of the narrowness of the street, I can hear the music from their radios, their conversations, the trucks backing up. It’s quite an intrusion.” 

Watkins and other residents of Peralta Street claim the large Pac Bell trucks clog up an already precariously narrow street, leading to the occasional fender bender. The box has also been characterized as extremely unsightly, a target for graffiti, and potential cover for a mugger to hide behind. 

“In essence, it creates a permanent construction site in front of our house,” said Joseph Nichols, who estimates the new box is roughly 10 feet from his front door. “Usually they send out just one truck to work on that box, but sometimes it’s two or three trucks.” 

When the new box – which Pac Bell claims will replace the old box, not serve in addition to it – was installed roughly a year back, concerned neighbors held meetings with city and Pac Bell officials. Following the meeting, Mayor Shirley Dean wrote a recommendation for a moratorium on any new or rebuilt “telephone service pedestals, switching boxes or hubs” until the implementation of a master plan for telecommunications. The City Council passed the recommendation in its March 21 session, passing the matter to the City Manager’s office for an ongoing study of the legal and political ramifications of such a moratorium. 

At the heart of Peralta neighborhood’s objection is a feeling of “Why here? Why on such a narrow, residential block?” Pacific Bell’s answer mirrors the words of the mountaineer’s motto: “Because it’s there.” 

“We have to replace and upgrade the present (box). All the facilities are there (by the old box),” says Mindy Ahluwalia, Pac Bell’s design engineer for the Albany/El Cerrito area. “If we went further on, we’d have to trench it. We went the city and mayor and they asked how much it would cost to relocate, to go around the corner to the little park next to Solano and Peralta. It came out to be very expensive ($44,000). They said no, no, we cannot pay.” 

Ahluwalia emphasized that once the new box is up and running – and it has stood dormant during this yearlong controversy – the old one will be removed. He added that replacements such as this are necessary due to a need to double existing phone service to keep up with consumer demand. 

“Now almost every person has a minimum of three lines,” says Ahluwalia. “The facilities are exhausted. We have to double (the number of lines). In a business area, maybe more. Maybe four or five times. 

“I don’t know what they mean by ‘moratorium,’” continues the engineer. “If we’re not allowed to put in any more boxes and upgrade boxes, we can’t meet the requirements of the people. We’re already a year behind (on Peralta). We’re short facilities in that area.” 

Meanwhile, the analysis of the proposed moratorium may be reaching its conclusion. Chris Mead, Berkeley’s information systems manager, says the city attorney’s office may have an answer on the legal quandaries of a moratorium as soon as next week, while the policy analysts could require several more weeks. 

“I think the City Council felt a lot more policy needed to be developed regarding these issues,” says Mead. “There’s an enormous rush to deploy lots of telecommunication services, and all the cities in the Bay Area are really struggling on how to administrate this.” 

But whatever the result of the potential moratorium, it looks like the box on Peralta Street may be here to stay, much to the chagrin of its neighbors. 

“Every time I look at that box and see they put it that close to the entrance of somebody’s home, I get angry,” says Watkins. “It really is a most unacceptable thing.” 

Albert Lau’s letter in your May 4th edition misses the point. TransAction proposes to construct a new development, which will contain not only much needed housing for downtown, but also replacement of the existing parking, plus additional parking. We are very aware that the interim disruption is a major inconvenience for downtown visitors, and are working hard to put programs in place to mitigate the inconvenience. The existing structure is incapable of supporting additional weight load. We cannot simply build apartments on top of the existing structure, but rather must build a new structure as a platform for new housing. The city and DBA (Downtown Berkeley Association) were very concerned about the county’s courthouse plan, because that plan did not provide for a re-creation of the existing parking. TransAction’s proposal does provide for the recreation of the existing parking. Thus, but for the temporary, but very real, inconvenience, the downtown and the city will be better off with the new development. 

John H. DeClercq 

Senior Vice President 

TransAction Financial Corporation 

Berkeley High pitcher Lillia Bermeo allowed just two hits and one earned run in five innings in a fantastic outing against East Bay Athletic League rival Monte Vista on Thursday. But thanks to her own squad’s offense, she couldn’t have pitched a complete game if she wanted to. 

After setting the tone with a seven-run first inning, highlighted by a Bermeo triple, the ’Jackets continued to take batting practice off the Mustang starter, building an embarrassing 12-run lead by the fifth inning. At that point, the officials put the Mustangs out of their misery, declaring the game a 14-2 Yellowjacket win, by “slaughter rule.” 

“Lilli hit that triple, and everyone started hitting (in the first inning),” BHS coach Elena Bermeo said after the game. “It was a chain reaction. We just moved through the lineup.” 

Berkeley’s Caitlin Drulis helped lead the offensive onslaught, going 3-for-3 with a triple and three runs scored. Jasmine Jew also joined the three-hit club, batting 3-for-4 with two runs and three RBIs. Bermeo contributed a home run, in addition to the first-inning triple, to help her own cause. 

“They all stepped up. We had a lot of confidence going into the game,” the BHS coach said. “There was cheering on the bench, and everyone was psyched the whole game.” 

The win was just the second of the year for Berkeley, which hopes to improve that tally next Tuesday against Livermore, another EBAL opponent.  

According to the coach, Thursday’s offensive breakthrough sparked a new feeling of confidence at the plate that could carry over into next weeks matchup with the Cowboys. Picking up where they left off vs. the Mustangs may prove tricky on Tuesday, however, as Livermore is likely to start First-team All-league pitcher Jen Graves. 

“Everyone’s swinging the bat in the second half of the season,” Elena Bermeo said. “We were talking about Livermore on the bus ride home, and that’s the team to beat. We beat Monte Vista before, and now we think we can beat Livermore.” 

Tuesday’s game begins at 3:45 p.m. at James Kinney Park in Berkeley.

A 22-year-old Oakland man was arrested Monday evening in connection with a strong-arm robbery on Prospect Avenue at Dwight Way. 

According to Berkeley police reports, the man and a female companion approached the victim about 9:15 p.m. The victim said that as the suspect swept past him he grabbed him in a headlock and took him down to the ground, said Capt. Bobby Miller of the Berkeley Police Department. 

The suspect repeated commands to the victim to stay down, “I’ve got a gun, give me your money” he told the victim, who then complied. 

The suspect and his companion rifled through the victim’s pocket, and they took a green lighter, the digital watch he was wearing and $7, and left him there. 

When the police apprehended the suspect – Anthony Joseph Martinez – a few minutes later at Prospect Avenue and Channing Way, he did not possess a gun, but he had a lighter and the victim’s watch in his pocket. 

The woman, who was not arrested, is described as a white teen-ager about 5 feet, 6 inches tall, with a “chubby build” wearing a dark top with a hood. 

Yesterday afternoon (Tuesday), our neighborhood experienced a crisis when one of my neighbors could not find his 6-year-old child who had been playing in the backyard of their home. The incident ended on a happy note when, an hour and a half later, the child returned from a trip to the grocery store with his mother. It turned out to have been a matter of missed communications between the parents. Nonetheless, the response of the police in that hour and a half made me proud to live in a city like Berkeley that can call on the incredible professionalism of its police force in an emergency. 

Within minutes of receiving the 911 call from the distraught father, the police had arrived in force (there were five patrol cars on the corner when I drove up to my house), searched the neighbor’s house and yard and begun to spread out in a controlled way to search the neighborhood. As time went on, reinforcements were called in from the traffic division (I had never before thought of meter maids as potential resources in a crisis), and the city’s crisis team. It seemed as if every move had been thought out and rehearsed, everyone knew what to do and did it, at the same time remaining sensitive to the emotional state of the parent and the increasingly concerned neighbors. I can’t say enough positive things about every city employee who played a part – THANK YOU!! And to Berkeley residents – be grateful for our extremely professional, well-trained police force! 

Mary Ann McCamant 

Berkeley

Three weeks after hiring Santa Clara’s Caren Horstmeyer to replace Marianne Stanley as head coach, the Cal women’s basketball program has named two assistant coaches for the 2000-2001 season. 

Sue Phillips-Chargin, who coached San Francisco’s Archbishop Mitty High to the NorCal finals in 1999-2000, enters the Cal program with eight years of prep coaching experience and an impeccable 224-31 lifetime record.  

The other new hire, Shaunice Warr, coached under Horstmeyer at Santa Clara, and was selected for her intensity and recruiting skills. 

“I am excited to hire two outstanding individuals to help build the Cal program,” Horstmeyer said on Thursday. “Sue brings a winning mentality to the team. She’s a good communicator and an extremely hard worker. Her ties to high school basketball in California will be an asset to our recruiting efforts. 

“Shaunice knows the system I run, having worked with me for three years at Santa Clara. She’s extremely competitive, and is an excellent recruiter. The two of them also are solid teachers of the game.” 

The Cal head coach still plans to hire one more assistant, and expects to make the decision in the coming weeks.

Bayer Corporation’s Berkeley site is the first in North America to meet one of the most rigorous international environmental standards in the world, company officials announced this week. 

Bayer’s Worldwide Biotechnology Center and Biological Products manufacturing facility has been certified as meeting the ISO 14001 standard, a comprehensive set of policies designed to ensure both a high level of environmental sensitivity now, and an ongoing process of continuous improvement. 

“Meeting the ISO standard was a true team effort,” Thomas Malott, principal environmental specialist at Bayer Berkeley, said in a news release. “When we made the decision to pursue this standard, we put together a team to assess our environmental management system and make the necessary changes.” 

After an initial audit last October, a list of observations was made and all of those were addressed in the final audit. 

The ISO 14001 certification means that the company can compete with other biotechnology companies in Europe, where it is expected that the ISO standard will be required. 

ISO, or International Organization for Standardization, is a non-government federation of standards groups from more than 130 countries. All standards developed by ISO are voluntary and rigorous. The purpose of the Environmental Management Standard is to ensure that companies operating under the standard not only meet current regulations, but have a process in place by which systems are continuously evaluated and improved. 

Bayer’s Berkeley site manufactures Kogenate, Prolastin and Thrombate III. It is also the Worldwide Biotechnology Center, responsible for the discovery, development, and process development of recombinant protein drugs and gene-based therapies. Both are part of Bayer Corporation’s Pharmaceutical Division, headquartered in West Haven, Conn. Bayer Corporation, with headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a member of the worldwide Bayer Group, a $29 billion international life sciences, polymers and specialty chemicals group based in Leverkusen, Germany.

As part of Berkeley’s Earth Day events, hundreds of people joined the pledge to take specific steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These pledges now total more than 2 million pounds of carbon dioxide and other gases that will be taken out of our atmosphere. That was a good beginning, but we all have a way to go. Greenhouse gases are causing the earth to warm. As the earth warms unusual climate events happen, as evidenced by massive flooding and devastating mudslides in some parts of the world and severe droughts and raging fires in others. The rain forests are in distress and island nations, existing as they do at sea level, watch in horror as the oceans warm and rise a little more each year. Severe climatic changes represent a real threat to our way of life and to the world’s water and food supplies. 

The City of Berkeley has joined together with towns all over the world in pledging to reduce these harmful gases. For example, we have purchased alternative fuel vehicles and are poised to buy our electricity from renewable energy sources. We are asking households, your readers, to join in. 

Most of the greenhouse gases come from the pollution we in the developed nations cause in the simple course of our daily lives: the cars we drive, the energy we consume. Note that a single Sport Utility Vehicle typically emits more than 20,000 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere per year – an astonishing amount (see www.fueleconomy.gov). Every person’s actions, or inactions, count. People have pledged to drive smaller cars, carpool, take public transit, compost, use more efficient light bulbs, insulate and weatherstrip, and buy green power from renewable sources. Go ahead and take the pledge at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/housing/energy/pledge.html. Or call 665-3486 to get a pledge card and for information. We will add up the pledges as they come in and continue to announce to the world the total pounds Berkeley has pledged to remove from the earth’s atmosphere. Take the pledge. Be a partner in protecting our climate. 

Linda Maio 

Berkeley City Council

A 10-year-old boy allegedly brandished a pocket knife at a 9-year-old girl in the hallway of LeConte Elementary School on April 26. The girl’s mother reported the incident on Tuesday of this week. 

The girl said the suspect came to school late and another person questioned his reason for his being late, according to Berkeley Police Capt. Bobby Miler. The suspect mistakenly thought the girl made the remark, and he walked up to her, pulled out a red and silver pocket knife and pointed it at her stomach. Then he asked her what she said about being late, and the girl ran away from him and into a restroom. 

Later, she left the restroom and told her teacher about the brandishing. The teacher took the knife away from the boy and they all went to the principal’s office. The victim said the suspect did not touch her with the knife. Miller said the incident apparently was handled in the school’s disciplinary process. 

The Berkeley-Albany YMCA will host its 60th Annual Community Prayer Breakfast on Tuesday morning at H’s Lordships Restaurant at the Berkeley Marina. 

Since 1941, the Community Prayer Breakfast, formerly known as the Lenten Breakfast, has brought people together to celebrate common values and a shared sense of community. 

This year’s breakfast, which begins at 7 a.m., will feature Kenneth Barnes, Senior Pastor at Arlington Community Church. A choir from Longfellow Middle School in Berkeley will provide a special musical number. 

Tickets for the Community Prayer Breakfast are $12 and are still available. There is a special breakfast sponsorship for $84, which includes eight breakfast tickets, and a table reserved in your name or your company’s name. 

For more information on how to purchase tickets for the YMCA’s Community Prayer Breakfast call Vicki Bargagliotti

The sculpture of an eagle, worth $800 according to its owner, was stolen from the front yard of a home in the 2800 block of Webster Street. 

The sculpture is about three and one half feet tall and has a wingspan of 40 inches. It is made of metal with rust over black, said Police Capt. Bobby Miller, and it weighs 140 pounds. 

The owner saw it Sunday afternoon and on Monday morning he noticed the eagle was gone. Miller said there are as yet no leads.

It had been a month since the last school board meeting, which meant it had been a month since parents and teachers had their last opportunity to demand that the board reach a contract agreement with the teachers union. 

As they did on April 5, parents, teachers and students crowded into the board’s chambers in Old City Hall on Wednesday night. For over an hour, speakers blasted the school board for the situation and called on the district to provide more equitable wages for its teachers. 

“Increase our salaries now,” one teacher said, “put us at the top priority of the budget, and then, if we find some more money, we can pay administrators to shuffle papers around their offices, and we can fund the things in the Berkeley school district that are not as essential as teachers.” 

But Director Shirley Issel bristled at the implication – and open assertion – that the board doesn’t care about teachers. 

“I think there is a disturbing amount of anger and contempt toward the board and the administration,” she said. “People have the idea that we do not understand the consequences of low teacher pay.” 

In early March, the district and the union reached an impasse in contract negotiations, particularly over the issue of increasing teachers’ salaries through a multiyear agreement. Teachers have a contract that continues through 2001, but the deal allows such issues as compensation to be reopened each year. The current negotiations began more than a year ago. 

According to information provided by the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, which came from state reports for the 1998-99 school year, only one Alameda County school district with more than 500 students has a lower salary range for new teachers. 

Some speakers warned the board that if a contract agreement is not reached soon, it could come back to haunt them in the fall, when President Joaquin Rivera and Director Pamela Doolan are up for re-election. One speaker threatened a recall of the whole board. 

“We’ve heard about your commitments, your wishes, your intents,” said parent Lincoln Malek. “Unfortunately, that’s all meaningless rhetoric. It’s meaningless because it doesn’t put food on the table. What puts food on the table is a paycheck, and paychecks are determined by contract language.” 

But after the public comment period, Rivera made his most expansive comments to date on the contract standoff. He said that after next Tuesday’s mediation session between the BUSD and the BFT, it is possible that the two sides will release more information on the negotiations, including information on the deals both sides are offering. 

After leaving the meeting, BFT President Barry Fike told supporters, “Don’t hold your breath.” He said the union has been willing to release much of that information for some time. 

A group of parents is calling for students to be kept at home on May 31 because of the contract impasse. 

Thursday, May 4 

Jazzschool BART Plaza Concert (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

Noon 

The Advanced Jazz Workshop, under the direction of Mike Zilber, will perform. Sponsored by  

Downtown Berkeley Association, Amoeba Music, BART, Berkeley Daily Planet. 

Harris Seminar 

Noon 

119 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Rod Gould, city manager of San Rafael and the Stone &Youngberg California Local Executive-in-Residence, will speak on “Semi-RationalExuberance: The Outlook of a City Manager Facing the New Century.” 

UC Students Poetry Reading (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

12:10-12:50 p.m. 

Morrison Room, Doe Library, UC Campus. Free. 

Buses No. 7, 51, 64  

Free computer class for seniors 

1-4 p.m. 

South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. 

This free course offers basic instruction in keyboarding, Microsoft Word, Windows 95, Excel and Internet access. Space is limited; the class is offered Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Call ahead for a reservation. 

510-644-6109 

Movie: “Notting Hill” 

1 p.m. 

North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

510-644-6107 

Draft Southside Plan: Public Safety 

7 p.m. 

Trinity United Methodist Church, 2362 Bancroft Way 

This will be a discussion on the public safety element of the Southside Plan. 

Youth Arts Festival (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 

Poetry with Rita Davies & Katie Johnson Oxford Elementary School students read their original poems. Free. 

“Best Bay Area Day Hikes” 

7 p.m. 

REI Berkeley, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 

Author Ann Marie Brown gives a slide presentation from her book “101 Great Hikes of the San Francisco Bay Area.” 

510-527-4140 

Residential Street Sweeping Meeting 

7:30-9:30 p.m. 

St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. 

The city is considering changes in its residential street-sweeping program. The public will have a chance to give input to the changes at the meetings. 

510-665-3440 

Friday, May 5 

Historical Institutionalism Seminar 

Noon 

119 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Paul Pierson from Harvard University will be the featured speaker. 

U.K. Seminar 

Noon 

201 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Robert Peirce, counsellor, Political and Public Affairs for the British Embassy, in Washington, D.C., will discuss “Modern Britain: An Examination of Devolution and the Revitalization of Britain’s External Relationships - Europe, U.S. and the Commonwealth.” 

Opera: Queen of Spades, Part One 

1 p.m. 

North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

510-644-6107 

Carefree Carfree Tour to KALA Art Institute (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1:30 p.m. 

Meet at Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Family Reading Night 

6:30 p.m. 

Rosa Parks Elementary School, 920 Allston Way 

The Berkeley PTA Council is sponsoring this event to encourage reading by all members of local families. The free event will include a reading workshop, a reading pledge a free dinner and treats. A prize drawing will be held, and prizes will include 11 computers. 

510-647-5219; 510-849-2683; 510-644-6618 

Mr. Zhao, Lu Yue (China, 1998; Bay Area Premiere - Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 & 9:30 p.m. 

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way 

Buses No. 7, 51, 64  

The Sounds of Berkeley: A Vibrating Experience (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Helen Holt, Sherry Burke, Debra Dooling-Sherman, Dress, Aidan McIntyre, Art Peterson, Waldir Sachs, Robert Sherman, Steven Strauss, John Zalabak. $5, FOF (Friends of Festival) free. 

Trinity Chamber Concerts 

8 p.m. 

Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. 

UC Berkeley’s Collegium Musicum, conducted by Anthony Martin, and the University Chamber Chorus, conducted by Marika Kuzma, will perform Venetian music from St. Mark’s for violins, recorders and voices. Tickets $10 general; $8 seniors and students. 

510-549-3864 

Cal Performances: Merce Cunningham Dance Company 

8 p.m. 

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This program will feature Cunningham’s “Summerspace” and the West Coast Premiere of Cunningham’s “Interscape,” set to music by John Cage. Tickets $20 to $40. 

510-642-9988 

Marcus Shelby Orchestra, big band, Ellington-inspired jazz (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8:30 p.m. 

La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. $10, FOF $8. 

Bus No. 43  

Saturday, May 6 

Restore a Salt Marsh 

9:30 a.m. 

Meet on the south side of Buchanan Street, between the freeway and Golden Gate Fields 

Join Friends of Five Creeks and the California Native Plant Society in clearing invasive ice plant from the salt marsh at the mouth of Codornices and Marin Creeks. Bring work gloves if you have them. 

510-848-9358; f5creeks@aol.com 

Berkeley Potters Guild Spring Show 

10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Jones and Fourth streets 

This show-and-sale highlights work by clay artists, Ikebana demonstrations, one-of-a-kind bargains throughout the complex of art studios, and more. The event is free. 

510-524-7031 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market 

10 a.m.-3 p.m. 

Center Street between Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Milvia Street 

510-548-3333 

Jefferson School PTA Mayfair 

10 a.m.-2 p.m. 

Jefferson School, Rose and Sacramento streets 

The fair will feature a cakewalk, carnival games and other booths, a benefit drawing for a quilt and many other prizes, plants and used children’s books for sale, art activities, entertainment, food, and more. Free admission and reasonable prices. 

510-528-8191 

John Muir School May Faire 

11 a.m.-4 p.m. 

John Muir School, 2955 Claremont Ave. 

This annual event will include food, games, a yard sale and craft activities. The highlight of this year’s May Faire will be the annual PTA quilt raffle. The May Faire is free; tickets for the Quilt Raffle are available for $1 each, or six tickets for $5. The proceeds will be spent on projects at the school. 

510-644-6410; 510-540-1028 

The New School International Family Fair 

11 a.m.-5 p.m. 

Bonita Street between Cedar and Virginia streets 

This block party will feature a handcrafts bazaar, games and activities for children, raffle, a Capoeira demonstration, Flamenco, African, and Philippine dance, Taiko drumming, Native American flute music, and more. The event is free. 

510-548-9165 

“The Rides of Spring” 

11 a.m. 

Meet at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center Street between Milvia and MLK 

The Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition is sponsoring this community bike ride, which may visit the Berkeley Marina, Cesar Chavez Park, the Ohlone Greenway, Cedar-Rose Park - the actual “destinations” will be decided as the bikes travel. The group expects to be back downtown in time to participate in the Berkeley Music Circus Festival. 

510-601-8124 

Cinco de Mayo Celebration, a family sing-along (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

11:30 a.m. 

Habitot Children’s Museum, 2230 Shattuck Ave. Children $6, Adults $3, FOF $5 & $2. 

Downtown Music Circus (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1-5 p.m. 

Hundreds of musicians of every tradition will gather on Shattuck Avenue between University Avenue and Haste Street, playing from streetside, stores, balconies, cafés, and a piano situated on the divider at Center St. You, too, can bring an instrument and join in the fun. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association and Amoeba Music. 

For Fun, Ning Ying (China/Hong Kong, 1995 - Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7 p.m. 

On the Beat, Ning Ying (China, 1995) 

9 p.m. 

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way 

Bus No. 7, 51, 64 

Cal Performances: Merce Cunningham Dance Company 

8 p.m. 

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This program will feature Cunningham’s “Summerspace” and the West Coast Premiere of Cunningham’s “Interscape,” set to music by John Cage. Tickets $20 to $40. 

510-642-9988 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 

Bach, B Minor Mass. Free. 

Bus No. 51 

Liam Ensemble: Traditional Persian Music (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

Julia Morgan Theater, 2646 College Ave. $25. 

Celebration of Spring: A Benefit for the Crowden School (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. 

Turtle Island String Quartet. Tickets: 658-2799. 

California Bach Society Chorus and Orchestra 

8 p.m. 

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way 

Warren Stewart will conduct the chorus and orchestra in their performance of J.S. Bach’s “Mass in A Major” and Cantata 21. Tickets $20 general; $15 seniors; $10 students. 

650-299-8616; www.calbach.org

The recent resolution passed by the Alameda County Board of Education seems to have caught Lawrence Hall of Science and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab officials off-guard, in its straightforward, no-nonsense advisory to Alameda County schools to suspend field trips to the Lawrence Hall of Science. Children could be put in danger, the Board of Education advised, by radiation releases in the form of tritium from the stack of the National Tritium Labeling Facility, located adjacent to the Hall of Science. 

Last week’s amended version of that resolution by the Board of Education softens but does not completely rescind the warning issued to parents, teachers and students. We are told in the amended resolution passed Tuesday, April 25, that the Alameda County Board of Education “notes the differences of opinion regarding the possibility of hazards associated with visits to the Lawrence Hall of Science, and recommends that educators, students and parents independently assess the possibility of risk and make individual decisions regarding the visits to the Lawrence Hall of Science.” 

Sounds good on paper, but how do we get this information, and how do we get it from unbiased sources, or at the very least, from a balance of sources, in order to come to some sort of meaningful conclusions on whether all field trips to the LHS are off? Do we proceeds to the Hall only when clad in full radiation protection gear and respirators; or do we declare all this a false alarm, and merrily frolic with abandon amongst the tritium-infused eucalyptus pods? 

And, what about those worrisome reports of yet another source of radiation release from the Lab, involving neutron bombardment of neighborhoods around the Lab’s accelerator? These are the questions and puzzlements confronting the community of parents, faced with a barrage of media coverage, some proclaiming this all to be no more than hoopla, some saying any radiation is harmful, some saying the jury is really out at this point. 

Then, of course, we have Lab representatives pointing out that radiation levels are well below regulatory standards, while citizen advocacy groups argue that such statements by the Lab distort reality. The Lab, the City, regulatory agencies and the citizen activist groups have been at this for a long time. But, it is only now that this issue (primarily due to intense media coverage of the Alameda County Board of Education resolution) has risen into the visual field of the public at large, and particularly, of parents with children who frequent the Lawrence Hall of Science. 

What to do? Well, fortunately one thing is working in the citizens’ and parents’ favor here: The City of Berkeley has hired an independent consultant, Berndt Franke, a person with a very positive track record with the public, to perform an independent analysis of potential risks. Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, in turn, was wise enough to contract with Dr. Owen Hoffman of SENES Oak Ridge, who is known to many members of the public and scientific communities at sites of radiation releases as a very straight shooter, with high integrity, someone who tells it like it is. 

So, we are off to a good start with regard to the “experts” to be involved in helping to analyze the true risk presented. The Lab plans a series of meetings with parents to answer questions and safety concerns, and those questions and safety concerns are rolling in, perhaps faster and in much greater quantities than the Lab had anticipated or hoped. 

Because the two of us, as parents of Berkeley students, are also both people (“Hanford downwinders”) who were exposed as children to offsite radiation emissions from the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in southeastern Washington State, we are understandably both a bit wary of blanket safety assurances by operators of federal facilities handling radioactive materials. After all, our parents were reassured by the operators of the Hanford facility that it was perfectly safe to live downwind from the plant. And the result? Both of us know have severe thyroid disease from the radioactive iodine we inhaled and ingested as infants and children from Hanford’s releases. We have parents and other relatives who have died far before their time from aggressive forms of cancer. 

We realize that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Hanford are two distinct radiation release scenarios, but safety reassurances made by the Lab cause in us a certain hesitation to believe without proof. We are ready to listen and to learn, like the parents who have spoken to us, but our fears are not readily put to rest by Lab officials saying not to worry. 

SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco’s unusual and innovative Word for Word theater company takes classic and contemporary works of fiction – not drama – and performs them on stage as theater pieces. 

The group’s device is to stay exactly with the precise text of a piece of fiction in performance, but to find new power in a story from the immediacy of its characters on stage, and from the speaking of non-dialogue narrative by characters in the story. 

This approach works very well. 

Word for Word’s latest effort is a world premiere co-production with A Traveling Jewish Theater’s (ATJT) of two short stories by American Jewish writers – “Goodbye and Good Luck” by Grace Paley, and “The Jewbird” by Bernard Malamud. This very successful collaboration opened Monday at ATJT’s theater space at Project Artaud in San Francisco. 

Paley’s funny and ironic 1930’s New York story “Goodbye and Good Luck” is an unusual take on love and marriage. Unmarried Rose Leiber (Patricia Silver), describing herself as “fat and fifty” and “lonesome in bed,” chats with her niece (Sheila Balter), and gives an elder’s advice. 

Rose looks back on her life, and tells of the choices she made in romance. Her youthful job as a box office cashier at a Jewish Russian theater on Second Avenue led to a romance with the theater’s married leading man (Corey Fischer), and a life in which Rose sacrificed her own conjugal fulfillment to be “the other woman” in someone else’s life. 

This funny and delightful story ends with a happy and unexpected twist. 

Director Wendy Radford’s crisp and vigorous production manages to get the smooth, humorous and quick-paced feel of a 1930s screwball comedy. It is well performed by a cast of four, two of whom play multiple roles. Fisher stands out as the arrogant, charming, philandering, smooth-taking Yiddish theater actor. 

In Malamud’s sweet, funny, magical story “The Jewbird,” a scraggly-looking crow (Corey Fischer) flies in the window of the Cohen family’s Lower East Side apartment, talking Jewish, and claiming to be a “jewbird,” who is fleeing anti-Semites. 

The mother (Jeri Lynn Cohen) and her son (Sheila Balter) love the creature and his unexpected arrival, but frozen food salesman father (Albert Greenberg) hates the bird. 

When the jewbird, who says his name is Schwartz, tutors the son, the son’s grades in school improve. But the bird is fussy about his food, and conflict in the household grows. 

Under David Dower’s direction, Fischer again finds a wonderfully funny and melancholy performance as Schwartz the bird, effectively capturing the abrupt, comic movements of a crow. 

“The Jewbird” seems to be about how individuals have larger connections to the world than they may realize and, conversely, how things that appear alien in the world may be closer to us than we think. 

Malamud is the author of the surreal baseball novel “The Natural,” which Robert Redford made into a movie. “The Jewbird” contains some of the same effective mix of reality and supernatural. 

Set designer Melpomene Katakolos deserves a mention. Her vivid New York kitchen, which could define either the 1930s or the 1950s, and which serves as a background for most of the action in both plays, is a strong contributor to the evening’s wonderful feel – almost a character in its own right. 

Although Word for Word maintains a perfect fidelity to a fiction author’s written text, the directors of these plays find all sorts of insights, humor, irony, conflict, or perspective by the by the way the lines are assigned to different actors, and how the actors play off each other. 

This technique brings a powerful new life to the art of story telling. 

“Goodbye and Good Luck” and “The Jewbird” play Thursday through Sunday, through June 4, at A Traveling Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida St. (at 17th Street), San Francisco. For tickets or information, call 415-399-1809.

The St. Mary’s baseball team has been hearing the stories about Piedmont High pitcher Matt Shartsis all year, but until Wednesday afternoon, it was all second-hand information.  

Though Shartsis came through with a solid effort for the Highlanders, it was perhaps the intimidating lefty’s reputation that hurt the Panthers most. As St. Mary’s starting pitcher Jeremiah Fielder admitted after the game, the Panther offense hesitated to assert itself amidst the buzz about Shartsis’ dominance. And by the time they figured out he wasn’t so tough, it was too late. 

“We fell into the hype a little bit, seeing the scouts with (radar) guns,” said Fielder about the hubbub surrounding the opposing pitcher, who is bound for Arizona State on a full ride next season. “We had read about (Piedmont) in the paper, and now we’ve seen them for real.  

“(Shartsis) pitched a good game, but we saw we could play with them.” 

Fielder managed to turn the opening innings into a bona-fide pitcher’s duel, allowing just three runs in the first five innings to keep the Panthers within a run. The Highlanders managed to break the game open in the sixth, however, stringing together four runs, and prompting a pitching change. Though Joe Storno closed out the Highlanders with minimal damage, St. Mary’s couldn’t capitalize on a bases-loaded situation in the seventh, and ultimately dropped the league game, 9-4. 

“They were definitely the real deal,” St. Mary’s coach Andy Shimabukuro said after the game. “Shartsis pitched a good game, got outs when he needed to. I give credit to him, because we’ve been strong on offense all year. There’s nothing we could have done today.” 

The Piedmont starter pitched six strong innings, allowing just five hits and two earned runs to the usually productive Panther offense. Fielder and Storno registered the only two extra-base hits for St. Mary’s – both picking up doubles.  

“We faced (Encinal star) Dontrelle (Willis), and we figured (Shartsis) was on that same level,” Fielder said. “We can play with good pitchers, (the hits) just didn’t fall our way today.” 

Currently occupying second place in the Alameda-Contra Costa Athletic League, St. Mary’s has four league games to play before the conclusion of the 2000 campaign. With a strong regular-season finish and a complementary performance at the ACCAL tournament, the Panthers could contend for a North Coast Section playoff bid. 

“We’ll take (the Piedmont loss) in stride,” Fielder said about his team’s resilience. “Now we know we can play with them.” 

“We’ve got four league games left, and we’re going into all of them expecting to win,” Shimabukuro added.

On South Shattuck Avenue signs of renewal and growth are banishing the has-been image of the commercial corridor that has endured years of neglect. 

“We have been kind of the forgotten part of Berkeley,” said Suzan Steinberg, owner of Stonemountain & Daughter Fabrics, at 2518 Shattuck. 

She is the fourth-generation operator of the “old-fashioned fabric store” that serves the neighborhood as well as the region and is a destination for regional customers. 

Steinberg believes the commitment of the merchants and the neighborhood organizations and the efforts of the city have created the revitalization. She said the longtime merchants such as herself and General Appliance have a working relationship with the surrounding community and count the neighbors as regular customers. 

Stonemountain is at the north end of what is considered to be South Shattuck, the stretch from Haste Street to Ashby Avenue, but signs of revitalization appear even further south. 

Recently the city’s manager of economic development, Bill Lambert, pinpointed 15 locations on South Shattuck Avenue and Adeline Street where new businesses or other organizations are in place or on the drawing board. 

Lambert drew a picture as far south as the BART Station parking lot on Ashby to illustrate the emerging strength of the corridor. 

The Ed Roberts Campus intends to buy part of the parking lot at the Ashby BART station and the city’s air rights over the BART Station to build an 80,000-square-foot office building alongside the station. 

Lambert said the city, BART and Ed Roberts Campus have a conceptual agreement and the project is now in the fund-raising stage. The structure will house disabled rights and independent living activist group in a setting easily accessible by public transportation. 

A distinguishing aspect of the project would include an international conference center. Lambert envisions traffic via BART from the San Francisco Airport that will bring international visitors to Berkeley. 

He recently accepted an award for the city from the California Association for Local Economic Development for his department’s efforts in helping the Berkeley Bowl move into the site of the former Safeway supermarket. 

It took more than four years for the produce giant to finally land in the 42,000-square-foot space at 2020 Oregon St. 

“If it weren’t for Tom Myers and Dave Fogarty (economic development staffers), we wouldn’t have done it,” said Glenn Yasuda, owner of the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace. 

He said the city was instrumental in his being able to purchase the property across the street from the smaller store he operated for 20 years - which itself was a re-use of a former bowling alley. 

He said the city also waived some fees and expedited the permit process so he could open the anchor full-service supermarket as soon as possible. Yasuda has been in the new space for about one year. 

The neighbors provided the original impetus for getting a full-service supermarket, said Max Anderson, a member of the Alcatraz Avenue Neighborhood Association. 

“We had to fight back the attempt to put a McFrugal store,’’ he said of the discount merchandiser. “It would have retarded the economic life of that corridor. 

“We held out for something that would better serve seniors who had come to depend on the Safeway.” 

Anderson said the Adeline corridor is the last commercial strip to receive attention from the city. He said Solano, College and University avenues have benefited from city resources, and now it’s Adeline Street’s turn to receive formal planning. 

The points on Lambert’s map with entrances on Adeline Street include a new Walgreen’s Drug Store. Lambert said Walgreen’s plans to spend $1million to renovate the former Rite-Aid space. 

Further south at Ashby and Adeline, the Cooperative Federal Credit Union will remodel the building vacated by the Bank of America. Lambert noted that several banks have left the area in the last 20 years. 

The city applied to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and received an award of $1 million for pedestrian oriented improvement on Adeline between Shattuck and the Oakland border. The city will add another $200,000 making it a $1.2 million project, he said. 

In the city’s “South Shattuck Strategic Plan,” published in 1998, the planning process was identified as originating with three neighborhood groups. 

The Community Committee for a Full-Service Supermarket, Ward Street Neighbors and South Shattuck Neighbors joined with the LeConte Neighborhood Association and the United Neighborhood Watch to request a formal planning process for the corridor. 

One of their concerns was the 1995 city-approved bid of a Hollywood Video Store to open an outlet at Derby Street, which eventually became the site of Reel Video. 

Rob Wrenn, now chair of the Planning Commission, said neighbors feared the impact of traffic that Hollywood Video intended to reach the site from Derby. Concerns also were expressed about having a corporate store in the neighborhood. 

Hollywood Video backed out of the deal fearing a boycott, he said. Reel Video agreed to provide access on the Shattuck side. 

“It was a real effort by the neighborhood to shape development of a site compatible with the neighborhood and Reel Video has been very successful,” said Wrenn. 

He said the neighbors have pushed for improvements because they’re repelled by blight and they’re concerned about what kind of development comes in. 

Like Suzan Steinberg’s assessment of Shattuck revitalization, Wrenn said neighbors want the kind of businesses they can patronize. 

He said a big box office supply store wanted to move into the space vacated by the Berkeley Bowl but the neighbors opposed it, and Any Mountain, an outdoors outfitter, now occupies the space. 

In the South Shattuck Strategic Plan the city’s economic development aim is to encourage neighborhood-serving businesses, mixed-use buildings with retail stores on the first floor, and housing above, and to join with business owners and residents in the process. 

Another goal is to address the problem of seriously blighted properties in the South Shattuck area with code enforcement and assistance to property owners. 

One building on the block between Parker and Carleton remains an eyesore, but the owner of the building, Reza Valiyee of Leaders Universal Industries, said he wants to be part of the revitalization process but the opposition from neighbors and difficulty in obtaining permits has stymied him. 

He said he has owned the building on that block for l5 years and that it needs only cosmetic changes. He had it seismically refitted before the practice became fashionable, he said. 

But he praised the city for its help in turning the Jim Doten Honda property at 2600 Shattuck that he owns “into a place that everyone says is beautiful.” 

Lambert said Leaders Universal has ongoing code violations and that the city currently is working with Valiyee to try to rectify some of them, and to bring in development assistance on the property between Parker and Carleton. 

In providing economic assistance retailers and property owners, the city has provided $25,000 for a façade facelift for the 2500 block containing Stonemountain & Daughter. 

Steinberg said the work is mostly painting, but also includes working with an architect and obtaining three-dimensional signage that will give the entire block an identity. 

A $60,000 grant from the city will provide tree grates and planters in front of stores on Shattuck between Dwight Way and Ward Street. 

John Gordon of Gordon Commercial Real Estate Services, owns two properties at 2567 and at 2450 Shattuck. 

He said the 2567 building was known as the Berkeley Free Market in 1906. In renovating it, he said he tried to stay as close to the original materials as possible but the terra cotta front was removed in the 1940s. 

He received support in learning about the structure’s history from the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association and the building is slated to become a Berkeley city landmark. 

The building is mixed use, which is what the strategic plan requests. It has two spaces available for lease on the ground floor and 13 artists who rent the top floor for day studios. 

The other location was formerly the Penny Saver Market and the renovation work is almost completed, he said. It will become the home of Aaron Brothers Framing and Art Supplies. 

“We feel that South Shattuck is an area that has underutilized buildings and we feel that it

Your March 27 article “Downtown Apartments in the Works (by Marilyn Claessens) illustrated perfectly greed exhibited by a developer and lack of thorough consideration by Berkeley’s city government. 

Hinks/Kittredge Garage currently offers the largest off-street parking spaces in the downtown Berkeley area. 

Previously, the city attempted to seize this site, on basis of “eminent domain,” for construction of a new county courthouse. It became moot when Alameda County declared no funds available for such undertaking, and after county supervisors’ decision to downgrade Berkeley court for handling small claims plus traffic cases only. 

Now, here is this new development proposal (J. DeClercq of Transaction Companies) calling for demolition of Hinks Garage, without any clear idea on provision for interim replacement parking. Presently, curbside parking in the downtown area is already problematic, due to multiple construction projects occurring in the vicinity. 

Earlier, both the Downtown Berkeley Association and Berkeley Public Library have expressed strong opposition to demolishing Hinks Garage, for good reasons. People come to the downtown area to work, shop, dine out, go to the library and attend shows. Not everyone has convenient access to public transportation. 

The city appears to focus mainly on potential increase in property tax revenues with private developers’ proposals, just as its previous emphasis on increase county funding with a new courthouse. There is no thorough consideration/planning on environmental impact, traffic/parking, provisions for out-of-area visitors who work/do business/shop (thus providing retail base and boost sales tax revenues) in the downtown Berkeley area. 

The Berkeley High boys volleyball team kicks off a three-game season of sorts this evening, hosting East Bay Athletic League rival Granada in its 2000 home finale at Donahue Gym. The 5 p.m. showdown marks the first of three must-win game for the Yellowjackets, who hope to contend for an at-large berth at North Coast Section, if they can win at least two out of the next three, against the Matadors, Foothill and California High. 

In their last meeting with winless Granada, on April 4, the ’Jackets came away with the road victory, taking five games to vanquish the feisty Matadors. Though BHS coach Justin Caraway acknowledges Granada’s ability to overachieve, he does not expect his team to have much trouble, if it approaches the matchup with the right attitude. 

“We didn’t do a good job of controlling their two hitters (last time), and they had a field day,” Caraway said. “We always want to win, that’s not a concern. They’re winless in league, and (my players) don’t want to be the ones to lose to them.” 

Having defeated Monte Vista in a home game last Thursday, Berkeley enters today’s showdown hungry to foster a substantial winning streak – something that has eluded it thus far in 2000. Though undefeated Foothill and second-place San Ramon Valley look to be in position to get the EBAL’s top two NCS spots, Caraway believes his squad still has a chance to be considered as an at-large selection, in light of its recent play. 

“We’re on the border for North Coast. The win over Monte Vista was big for us, and we’re playing pretty well,” the coach said. “I believe we need to win two of our next three to have a chance.” 

As part of BHS tradition, today’s home finale has been deemed “senior day” for the squad, which features nine graduating seniors, all of whom Caraway expects to take the court at some point this evening. The special occasion, coupled with the fact that Berkeley has not lost to Granada in two years, figures to be plenty of incentive for a victory today. 

“(The seniors) really want to win their last match at home,” Caraway said. “We don’t need any special motivation.” 

The Yellowjackets close out the regular season next week with a pair of road games. On Tuesday, BHS travels to Pleasanton to battle first-place Foothill, before heading to San Ramon to play Cal High on Thursday. NCS playoffs begin May 16.

The public will get the opportunity to walk around Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory this weekend during the site’s first open house since the fall of 1997. 

The event runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Lab, located on the hillside about the UC Berkeley campus. 

“Kids are our primary focus for the open house,” said Lab spokesperson Ron Kolb. “This is a great way for them to learn about the different scientific activities at the Lab, but it can also be a way of encouraging them to consider science careers.” 

The open house is being crafted around four theme areas: To Your Health – Shedding Light on Life’s Mysteries; The Universe in Your Pocket – Exploring Particles and Matter; The World at Your Fingertips – Exploring by Computer; and Home and Environment – Protecting Our Planet. 

Visitors will receive a program highlighting the various buildings and exhibits that relate to each theme. For example, someone interested in the “Home and Environment” theme could visit the Lighting Laboratory, the rock-fluid imaging lab, the firehouse or the hazardous waste handling facility. 

Special events during the day will include a ceremony honoring Bay Area math and science teachers at 12:15 p.m., and a 2 p.m. showing of the feature-length documentary “Me & Isaac Newton,” which includes the story of Berkeley Lab scientist Ashok Gagdil. 

Kolb said around 5,000 people attended each of the two previous open houses, held in 1995 and 1997. About half the people had a direct link to the Lab – a friend or family member of an employee – while the other half were members of the public. 

And the Lab anticipates that as in previous years, protesters will visit to distribute information highlighting their concerns about activities at the Lab, particularly with the National Tritium Labeling Facility. 

Last week, the Daily Planet was invited to take a tour of the Lab along with a group of Richmond educators who may be bringing students to this weekend’s event. The tour visited several of the sites that will be open to the public on Saturday, including the 88-inch Cyclotron, the Advanced Lighting Source, the Lighting Laboratory and the fruit fly genome center. 

Each stop featured a short presentation by scientists and staff members working on specific projects, including attempts in the Cyclotron to reconfirm the discovery of “superheavy” Element 118, which was reported at the Lab last June. 

Other presentations were made on the development of energy-efficient compact fluorescent torchiere lamps and the ongoing “mapping” project of fruit fly genes. 

Reed George, a former Motorola executive who is now working with the Lab on the mapping effort, said his current work often feels more rewarding than working with “a plastic box that beeps.” 

“Well, all of our students have your pagers,” replied one of the teachers, “so maybe they can pick up some of your science, too.” 

No public parking will be available Saturday at the Lab, but free parking and shuttle service will be offered from the Downtown Berkeley BART station and from UC Berkeley campus parking lots along Hearst Avenue. For more information, visit the Lab’s web site (www.lbl.gov/OpenHouse) or call 510-495-2222. 

It has come to my attention that the Berkeley school board is about to consider the placing of a maintenance parcel tax on the fall ballot. Meanwhile, our teachers are campaigning for an equitable salary schedule, our parents and students are supporting well-developed programs to prevent retentions, and our high school campus seems to be under siege. All of these issues are of immediate concern to our community. It seems that they must first be solved before we embark on other less significant projects. 

Additionally, the rumor around South Berkeley is that the parcel tax will be used to fund street closures and the building of a baseball field, projects that the majority of us in South Berkeley oppose. It has even been mentioned that the school board is willing to pay $65,000 for a new study regarding such an issue. If this is true, then you can be sure that South Berkeley will be in the forefront of resisting such efforts to sit in opposition to the will of our neighborhoods, both now and in the fall elections. Let’s get back to the most important concerns facing us and stop wasting time with peripheral “distractions.”

The Commission on the Status of Women honored seven individuals Wednesday night as “Outstanding Berkeley Women.” 

The honorees, chosen from nominations from the community, have made exceptional contributions to the community in any of a number of fields, including politics, science, education, labor, peace, the arts, volunteer services, and the environment. 

The women honored during the 12th annual awards ceremony were: Nancy Carleton, neighborhood activist; Barbara Hammer, homeless advocate; Nancy Hormachea, advocate against domestic violence; Jeanie Rucker, civil rights and education advocate; Carol Schemmerling, urban environment activist; Enid Schreibman, community safety advocate; and Ursual Sherman, human rights activist. 

“The commission really intends to honor people who ordinarily would not be recognized,” said Ruby Primus, a management analyst for the Department of Health and Human Services, who doubles as the commission staff. Primus compiled brief biographies of the award recipients. 

Carleton works for the environmental issues, gender equality and neighborhood organization and improvement. 

She is a founding member and past president of Berkeley Partners for Parks. She also was a vice-chair of the Parks and Recreation Commission. Additionally, she is a past member of the Board of Directors of the East Bay Lesbian/Gay Democratic Club and has worked on the language for the city’s Domestic Partners Ordinance. 

Hammer is chair of the Mayor’s Independent Task Force on Homelessness and serves on the board of the Homeless Action Center in Berkeley, as well as in other volunteer positions. 

Primus said Hammer “has managed to do all of this work while being homeless and suffering from multiple disabilities.” 

Hormachea is an immigration attorney, and half of her clientele are people seeking political asylum in the United States. On a pro bono basis she helps women who are victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse. 

“I work closely with Narika,” she said, referring to the organization that primarily assists Asian women who are immigrants and victims of domestic violence. 

Mainstream women’s organizations aren’t usually prepared to deal with the unique cultural, language and religious orientations of these women, she said. 

Rucker, a lifelong Berkeley resident, has played a significant role in initiating changes in politics and education in the Berkeley area. 

In her work for school PTAs and as president of the Berkeley school board, she said she tracked students in honors and gifted programs. 

“It was as I suspected,” Rucker said. “Minority children were in the program for the disadvantaged and underrepresented in the gifted program. There was a tremendous gap between kids of color and the white and Asian students.” 

She also was regional director of the NAACP and campaign coordinator for former Congressman Ronald Dellums. 

Schemmerling is a longtime member and chairman of the Park and Recreation Commission. She is Bay Area coordinator for the Urban Creeks Council. 

In another venue she volunteers at the Suicide Prevention Clinic and for the Berkeley Resolution Services. 

Schreibman has been a community organizer active in the Elmwood for 30 years. She also was a founder of the Bay Area Women Against Rape in 1972, and she helped organize block captains in her neighborhood for public safety. 

She was a citizen diplomat in the Cold War, leading trips to the former Soviet Union and hosting visitors from that country. She was instrumental in forming sister city relationships between two cities in Russia and Berkeley. 

Sherman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was one of the organizers of the Hillel Streetwork project, which became Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency. 

She also was a founder of the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, and she is chair of the Jewish Music Festival, now in its l5th year. The festival devotes a week in March to presenting Jewish music that is ethnic, classical, liturgical and multicultural. 

I still protest the oversized antenna tower in McKinley Street. 

In Berkeley, to build a tall ugly structure, you need a building permit. I have four questions: 

1. Which person approved the building permit for the McKinley Street tower? 

2. Which person approved payment for the tower? 

3. Is there any indemnity in place for errors like this? 

4. What is the refund, resale or salvage value of the structure as it now is? 

A federal appeals court in San Francisco has upheld a lower court ruling that allowed the merger of Alta Bates and Summit medical centers. 

Summit Medical Center in Oakland was acquired last year by Sutter Health, the parent company of Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley. The merger was completed immediately in December after U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney denied an injunction sought by state Attorney General Bill Lockyer. 

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Chesney’s ruling Tuesday, saying she had used the proper legal standard and had not made “clearly erroneous” factual findings. 

The court said it defers to judges’ decisions on injunctions unless they are clearly mistaken on the facts or the law that governs the case. The 3-0 ruling was issued by Judges Alex Kozinski, Pamela Rymer and Raymond Fisher. 

Lockyer spokeswoman Sandra Michioku told the Daily Planet that the office was “reviewing our options.” She declined to discuss what those options might be or to offer any further comment on Tuesday’s ruling. 

If no further appeals are filed, the case will return to Chesney for a final ruling on the legality of the merger. 

“We’re extremely pleased that this decision has been reached,” Irwin Hansen, president and CEO of the merged hospitals, said in a statement. “We can now devote all our resources and energy into doing what we do best, providing care to our patients.” 

The new entity is governed by a local 23-member board of directors. Medical, surgical, critical care, birthing, and 24-hour emergency services continue to be provided in Berkeley and Oakland, hospital officials noted in their statement. 

Sacramento-based Sutter Health, which owns Alta Bates and 25 other hospitals in California, contended the East Bay hospitals could thrive only by combining and eliminating duplicate costs.  

The two hospitals reported $19.1 million in total losses in the last fiscal year. Summit also reported a $100 million debt and said it could not survive on its own. 

But Lockyer’s office said Chesney disregarded evidence that the combined hospitals would dominate the market in the area accessible to Oakland and Berkeley residents and gain the power to raise health care prices. 

Chesney “missed the real-world result of primary importance to a patient with medical needs, a busy physician making rounds, or a family member visiting a loved one, that it is almost always quicker and easier – substantially so – for someone in the inner East Bay to go to a hospital inside the market than to one outside the market,” Deputy Attorney General John Donhoff said in papers filed with the appeals court.

I want to thank you for your excellent coverage of the Berkeley Arts Festival and to respond to Polly Armstrong’s May 1 Perspective piece. I, too, question the attack on the manager’s report. It is the report that should be scrutinized not the kind of paper it is printed on.  

Unlike our councilmember, I think poking fun at ourselves and a little gossip are good sport and should be encouraged. We provide you with a rich source for amusing your readers, I would like to see Ms. Scherr refine her skills in that department. 

As for the “petty backbiting” Councilmember Armstrong deplores, is there any better example of how annoying it can be than a Berkeley City Council meeting? Don’t they listen to themselves?

The big new traveling exhibition now at UC’s Berkeley Art Museum, “China: Fifty Years inside the People’s Republic,” is in the first place a sweeping range of documentation, and is co-sponsored by the School of Journalism, where the dean is Orville Schell, a China specialist. But it is displayed in an art museum and the photographs are mostly grouped by the individual photographers, so we are invited to consider them as works of art, as visual expressions that go beyond normal reportage. 

Not all do, but there is some remarkable work here, especially by relatively young Chinese-American photographers in search of their ancestral roots. Reagan Louie, born in Sacramento in 1951 and named for a minor movie actor his immigrant father admired, studied art at Yale and first went to China in 1980, then returned repeatedly. He is represented here by five large-format color photographs taken in 1987, each carefully composed. 

Louie works slowly but he has a knack for catching exactly the right instantaneous expression. His “Cadre and portrait of Lenin, Yaboli” depicts the local Communist Party official sitting in front of his desk, impassively looking into the camera. Back in the corner of this dimly lit room an assistant watches, smoking a cigarette. On the back wall, perpendicular to our line of vision, is a large painting, a copy of an icon of Soviet history, which depicts Lenin the night before the revolutionary seizure of St. Petersburg in 1917, writing his statement for the Congress of Soviets the next day. Louie’s photograph is a profoundly insightful characterization of the bureaucratic inertia and foreign ideology that has afflicted China in our time. 

Working rapidly with a miniature camera, Mark Leong, born in Sunnyvale in 1966, a Harvard graduate, achieves remarkable intimacy in interpreting his ancestral village. Working in the same way, Richard Yee has a quick eye for recording the people of Yunnan Province (a mountainous region bordering Burma, Laos, and Vietnam). 

Among foreign photojournalists David Butow (formerly working in Los Angeles) has a good sense of composition and a shrewd eye for selecting a telling scene to characterize both old and new China. The Czech Antonin Kratochvil was very successful in suggesting the atmosphere of life in town and countryside in Guangdong Province in 1978. 

But the renowned photojournalist Sebastião Salgado is a bit disappointing in his record of contemporary Shanghai; his general views are mostly routine though he has a couple of good street photographs. His two best and most interpretive photographs are strangely relegated to an appendix in the basement of the Museum (off to your left if you enter from Durant Avenue). 

The Chinese photographers are generally competent but less interesting, and trouble comes when they try to be clever. Zhang Hai-er creates parodies of trendy western photography. 

There is also some art photography in this exhibition. The late Eliot Porter, better known for his Sierra Club books, is represented by seven beautifully atmospheric and timeless landscapes taken in color in 1980-81; they are welcome, if irrelevant to documentation. Lois Connor, on the other hand, attempted to make photographs in the manner of Chinese scroll paintings and one is reminded of Dr. Johnson’s remark about a dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well but we are surprised to find it done at all. Her other landscapes are good work, but not special. Robert Glenn Ketchum is better at interpreting the cityscape of China, old and new. 

The issue of documentation is awkwardly handled here. The exhibition opens with an excellent photograph of the leaders of the Communist Party in 1937, taken by Owen Lattimore, the renowned American Sinologist who was later one of Senator McCarthy’s principal targets and therefore moved his career to England. But it is blown up to poster size and strangely cropped, not treated as the work of art it is, and Mao and Zhou Enlai are wrongly identified on the label. Then there are four 1938 photographs by the great Robert Capa shown without the captions they would have had in a magazine at the time (is this a refugee train? A Nazi flag to indicate neutrality?). Some of the recent photographs also require more information, not just an artist’s generalizing statements, to serve their purpose as documentation. 

This is a packaged exhibition organized by the Aperture Foundation, a celebrated photography publisher, and the corresponding book ($35 in paperback, $50 hardcover) includes an excellent essay by Rae Yang, born in 1950 to a successful Beijing family; it records her attitude as a Red Guard from 1966 to 1976, her subsequent awakenings, her coming to America in 1982, and her many return visits since 1992. She remarks on a few of these photographs, but basically Aperture takes an arty attitude toward photographs: they should speak for themselves. The labels are deliberately too small to read at comfortable viewing distance. 

The basic documentary function of this exhibition is thus poorly served and made worse by the Museum’s decision to put half of it in the stairwell and basement corridor and to send fourteen photographs to exile in Northgate Hall (including a couple of very good ones). They are impossible to study there because they face windows and you see mostly the reflection of the courtyard and your own shadow. 

For perspective we should go back to the great Cartier-Bresson’s book “From One China to Another,” the product of his 10 months in China during the Communists’ final conquest of 1948-9. It is a masterpiece of photojournalism, with good explanatory captions, and considered as works of art the range of his photographs is fully the equal of what is in this exhibition.

ACTORS ENSEMBLE OF BERKELEY 

“Rough Crossing” by Tom Stoppard, April 7 through May 6. The writers of a Broadway musical are simultaneously trying to finish and rehearse a play while crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner. 

$10. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; May 4, 8 p.m. Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. (510) 528-5620. 

AURORA THEATRE 

“The Homecoming” by Harold Pinter, April 6 through May 7. A dark comedy about a philosophy professor who brings his wife home to meet his all-male family. 

$25 to $28. Wednesday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., Berkeley. (510) 843-4822. 

BERKELEY REPERTORY THEATRE 

“Let My Enemy Live Long!” by Tanya Shaffer, April 19 through May 12. The story of an ill-advised boat ride up West Africa's Niger River to Timbuktu. 

$19 to $48.50. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m.; Wednesday, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.; April 19, 8 p.m.; 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. (510) 845-4700 or (888) 4BRTTIX. 

You could say that the Berkeley High softball team got a “victry” against Amador Valley on Tuesday afternoon. That is, the ’Jackets may well have scored a victory, if they hadn’t been missing an “o.” 

The much-maligned Yellowjacket offense managed to scatter some baserunners, but couldn’t manufacture them into runs, and the Dons broke the 0-0 deadlock with a four-run surge in the eighth inning. With the defeat, Berkeley dropped to 1-8 on the league season. 

“It was our first time in league going extra innings. The whole game was close,” Berkeley High coach Elena Bermeo said. “Two costly errors ended up being the difference – we had solid defense through the seventh inning.” 

Lillia Bermeo started the game for Berkeley, and pitched seven innings of shutout ball before allowing four runs – only two earned – in the top half of the eighth. Amador Valley’s first batter of the inning reached on an error to start the rally, and a double, a triple and another error broke the score wide open. Though Jessica Kline got BHS started in the bottom of the inning with a double, she would ultimately be stranded on second.  

The BHS starter finished the game with eight strikeouts – six more than her Amador Valley counterpart. Bermeo’s battery-mate, Alice Brugger, had an outstanding game behind the plate, throwing out an Amador baserunner at second and picking another off first. 

“Everyone came in concentrated on the game,” Brugger said. “We wanted to win, and we knew we could. I think it was mental. We could have picked it up a little more.” 

“We had a lot of girls on base, but somehow we couldn’t get them in,” Elena Bermeo added. “It was definitely a better effort than last time (against the Dons) because we actually got on base. I don’t mind the loss, as much, because we did hold them.” 

Tuesday’s game marked the first date in Berkeley’s second round of East Bay Athletic League play. The Yellowjackets continue the league season this Thursday against Monte Vista – the one EBAL team they have already defeated this season. According to the BHS coach, the matchup with the Mustangs is a golden opportunity for her squad to gain some confidence going into the final stretch of the 2000 campaign. 

“Hopefully, (the Amador Valley game) is behind us,” she said. “We talked about it after the game, and I told them we can still pull out .500 if we can win these games.” 

Today’s first pitch is slated for 3:45 p.m. at the Mustangs’ home field.

Wednesday, May 3 

New Music at Berkeley (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

Noon 

Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This free concert will feature music from the graduate composition seminar of Cindy Cox. 

Cinco de Mayo and Birthday Party Celebration 

1:15 p.m. 

North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

510-644-6107 

Carefree, Carfree Tour to MusicSources (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1:30 p.m. 

Meet at Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

A tour/demonstration by founder Laurette Goldberg of the early music resource center.  

Lecture/demonstration by German composer Georg Graewe (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

2 p.m. 

UC Center for New Music & Audio Technologies (CNMAT), 1750 Arch St. Free. 

Buses No. 8, 65  

Youth Arts Festival (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

3 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 

Youth Jamboree! Led by Greg Gomez, two school bands run the gamut from cool chamber music to hot jazz. Free. 

“MAS 2000 Climbing School” 

6 p.m. 

REI Berkeley, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 

Mountain Adventure Seminars offers an introductory rock climbing school with instruction on equipment, fundamental climbing techniques, basic anchoring and safety procedures. Registration required. Cost is $110. Wednesday’s in-store session will be followed by an outdoors session on Saturday morning. 

209-753-6556 

Quartet+1: 5 Berkeley artists in various media (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

6-7:30 p.m. 

Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

This is a reception for the artists participating in an exhibit at the festival’s headquarters. The artists work in a variety of ideas and medium. The artists – Carol Brighton, Corrine Innis, Mary Laird, Sylvia Sussman, and Audrey Wallace Taylor – cover a lot of territory in range of expression and representation. The scenes range from paintings of seascapes by Sussman and Wallace Taylor, to the mysterious rooms of the stupas of Tibet in Laird’s pastels. Brighton’s images of imaginary maps and mandalas in handmade paper and Innis’ expressive faces expand the range of media and image making in the show. 

Transportation Demand Management Study public workshop 

7 p.m. 

Trinity United Methodist Church, 2362 Bancroft Way 

This is Workshop #2 for the Transportation Demand Management Study being done by the City of Berkeley and the University of California. The study area includes Downtown Berkeley, the Southside, and the University. The meeting is accessible by AC Transit lines F, 7, 40, 51, 52, and 64, and UC Perimeter Shuttle. Parking on-site and in nearby garages (including Sather Gate). 

510-705-8136 

BUSD school board meeting 

7:30 p.m. 

Board/council chambers, Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way 

Poetry Flash (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 p.m. 

Cody’s Books, 2454 Telegraph Ave. 

The featured poets this week will Norman Fischer and D. Nurkse. 

510-845-7852; 510-525-5476 

“Canterbury Tales: Saints and Sinners” 

8 p.m. 

St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, 2837 Claremont Blvd. 

This performance of Geoffrey Chaucer’s work will feature cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. Included are the tales of the Second Nun, the Canon’s Yeoman, and the Manciple. The Second Nun draws us into the story of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, whose faith is tested to the extreme by idolatrous authorities. Tickets are $20 general; $15 seniors; $10 students. 

877-4CHAUCE; 510-601-TWEB 

Senior Recital 

8 p.m. 

Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This free concert will feature performances by 2000 graduating class audition winners. 

Thursday, May 4 

Jazzschool BART Plaza Concert (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

Noon 

The Advanced Jazz Workshop, under the direction of Mike Zilber, will perform. Sponsored by  

Downtown Berkeley Association, Amoeba Music, BART, Berkeley Daily Planet. 

Harris Seminar 

Noon 

119 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Rod Gould, city manager of San Rafael and the Stone &Youngberg California Local Executive-in-Residence, will speak on “Semi-RationalExuberance: The Outlook of a City Manager Facing the New Century.” 

UC Students Poetry Reading (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

12:10-12:50 p.m. 

Morrison Room, Doe Library, UC Campus. Free. 

Buses No. 7, 51, 64  

Free computer class for seniors 

1-4 p.m. 

South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. 

This free course offers basic instruction in keyboarding, Microsoft Word, Windows 95, Excel and Internet access. Space is limited; the class is offered Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Call ahead for a reservation. 

510-644-6109 

Movie: “Notting Hill” 

1 p.m. 

North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

510-644-6107 

Draft Southside Plan: Public Safety 

7 p.m. 

Trinity United Methodist Church, 2362 Bancroft Way 

This will be a discussion on the public safety element of the Southside Plan. 

Youth Arts Festival (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 

Poetry with Rita Davies & Katie Johnson Oxford Elementary School students read their original poems. Free. 

“Best Bay Area Day Hikes” 

7 p.m. 

REI Berkeley, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 

Author Ann Marie Brown gives a slide presentation from her book “101 Great Hikes of the San Francisco Bay Area.” 

510-527-4140 

Residential Street Sweeping Meeting 

7:30-9:30 p.m. 

St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. 

The city is considering changes in its residential street-sweeping program. The public will have a chance to give input to the changes at the meetings. 

510-665-3440 

Friday, May 5 

Historical Institutionalism Seminar 

Noon 

119 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Paul Pierson from Harvard University will be the featured speaker. 

U.K. Seminar 

Noon 

201 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Robert Peirce, counsellor, Political and Public Affairs for the British Embassy, in Washington, D.C., will discuss “Modern Britain: An Examination of Devolution and the Revitalization of Britain’s External Relationships – Europe, U.S. and the Commonwealth.” 

Opera: Queen of Spades, Part One 

1 p.m. 

North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

510-644-6107 

Carefree Carfree Tour to KALA Art Institute (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

1:30 p.m. 

Meet at Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Mr. Zhao, Lu Yue (China, 1998; Bay Area Premiere – Berkeley Arts Festival) 

7:30 & 9:30 p.m. 

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way 

Buses No. 7, 51, 64  

The Sounds of Berkeley: A Vibrating Experience (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8 p.m. 

Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Helen Holt, Sherry Burke, Debra Dooling-Sherman, Dress, Aidan McIntyre, Art Peterson, Waldir Sachs, Robert Sherman, Steven Strauss, John Zalabak. $5, FOF (Friends of Festival) free. 

Trinity Chamber Concerts 

8 p.m. 

Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. 

UC Berkeley’s Collegium Musicum, conducted by Anthony Martin, and the University Chamber Chorus, conducted by Marika Kuzma, will perform Venetian music from St. Mark’s for violins, recorders and voices. Tickets $10 general; $8 seniors and students. 

510-549-3864 

Cal Performances: Merce Cunningham Dance Company 

8 p.m. 

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This program will feature Cunningham’s “Summerspace” and the West Coast Premiere of Cunningham’s “Interscape,” set to music by John Cage. Tickets $20 to $40. 

510-642-9988 

Marcus Shelby Orchestra, big band, Ellington-inspired jazz (Berkeley Arts Festival) 

8:30 p.m. 

La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. $10, FOF $8. 

Bus No. 43 

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To publicize an upcoming event, please submit information to the Daily Planet via fax (841-5695), e-mail (calendar@berkeleydailyplanet.com) or traditional mail (2076 University Avenue, 94704). Calendar items should be submitted at least four days in advance. Please include a daytime telephone number in case we need to clarify any information.

Plans by the historic Claremont Hotel to add 90 additional guest rooms have ignited a reaction from neighborhood groups concerned about increased traffic. 

“The Berkeley neighbors and Claremont-Elmwood Neighborhood Association are going to come out strong about any projects that will impact the traffic patterns in this area,” said Elizabeth Kibbey, a Claremont resident. 

Doris Willingham, president of the Claremont-Elmwood Neighborhood Association, said she has received e-mails from “total strangers who are greatly upset” by the plans. 

She said timeshare residences at the hotel and a parking garage, discussed during a recent meeting held in the hotel, would result in additional density and traffic in the area around the Claremont, an area which already is congested. 

“The basic problem we have is that the hotel is in Oakland and the impact is being felt in Berkeley,” said Willingham. 

The hotel’s plans are “very preliminary,” said Vice President and General Manager Ted Axe, who invited community leaders to the hotel last week to discuss those plans. 

He said the 279-room Claremont Resort and Spa has not yet filed for a permit, or initiated an environmental impact report, or received full permission for the expansion from the hotel’s owner, KSL Recreation Corporation. 

“Before we move forward,” he said, “it’s important we get feedback from the community.” 

He added that such a dialogue would allow neighborhood concerns to be incorporated into the design. 

Axe said the hotel expansion of 90 rooms would be tucked into the hillside in front of the terrace bar, “but we want to preserve any views of neighbors as well as guests.” 

He said the hotel also is considering a future addition of 75 units that could be time share residences. The hotel plans to build a garage, but he said the size is as yet undetermined. 

“It could substantially improve the parking conditions in the whole area,” he said. 

Joan Collignon, legislative aide to Berkeley City Councilmember Polly Armstrong, said the impact is felt more in Berkeley because the section of Tunnel Road between Domingo and the hotel is in Berkeley, as well as the part of Claremont between Tunnel Road and Stonewall Road. 

Jane Brunner, North Oakland’s city councilmember, said the impact will be felt by both cities. During Brunner’s monthly town meeting Saturday morning at Peralta Elementary School on Alcatraz Avenue, Axe will be present to answer questions, and Berkeley residents may attend. 

She said issues of the hotel’s design plan and the parking arrangements must be considered. 

“I have to see a study,” Brunner said. “How many cars? What times of day? Are we talking 35 cars over an eight-hour period or 150 cars? We need some concrete information, and we’ll take a very close study.” 

Brunner anticipates the traffic will come up Ashby, down Tunnel and up Claremont, and if most of the traffic is headed in the same direction it could be a significant problem. 

At the planning department of the City of Oakland, Major Planner Claudia Cappio said the hotel has talked to her department. The hotel, she said, discussed utilizing the space that holds the existing parking lot near the health club off of Claremont Avenue, and the hotel would build a structure and do a level of parking using the structure’s roof for a new tennis court. 

Cappio said the area where the tennis courts are now located would become another area – the future 75 units – for expansion of up to three buildings. 

“These would be called time share units designed for people who stay a little bit longer, “she said. “But if they’re unoccupied by those people they would be used by hotel guests.” 

She cautioned that the hotel’s plan is conceptual now, that feasibility is what they’re seeking at the present time. 

“A neighborhood response is very important to them,” Cappio said.

I was disheartened to read Monday’s opinion article, “Affordable Housing Projects Threatening to Metastasize.” Mr. Walter Wood’s misrepresentation of affordable housing development is based on uninformed assumptions. 

Rather than a “detriment to local neighbors and businesses,” affordable housing developments are a far greater use of space, opportunity and resources than the underutilized spaces they replace. In fact, 20 years of decreasing funding has limited developments to those that best serve their communities. 

Today’s affordable housing developments are required to integrate into neighborhood architecture. The “high-density projects” that Mr. Wood opposes are only permitted in high-density neighborhoods. High-density development houses more people near more jobs. This makes sense, especially in Berkeley where dense subdivision and infrastructure already exist. 

Affordable housing developments house the elderly, the poor, the disabled and the battered. But they also prevent the relocation of working families to the urban fringe, where greenfields are consumed and commutes are hours long. Affordable housing developments reinvigorate communities with mixed-use buildings, adequate facilities for residents who want to live there, landlords who will not evict residents to raise rents, and the pride derived from local cooperation in creating the project. 

Perhaps with greater cooperation and attempting to resolve housing problems, rather than wage war against the solutions, Mr. Wood and others could be a part of that community identity. Incorporating affordable housing into a shared vision is our only hope to maintain local vitality and cure the true ills of our social welfare: homelessness and the lack of affordable housing.  

ASHKENAZ 

Gator Beat, May 3, 9 p.m. $8. 

Wadi Gad, DJ Ashanti Hi-Fi, May 4, 9:30 p.m. $8. 

MoodSwing Orchestra, May 5, 9:30 p.m. $11. 

Tango No. 9, May 7, 8 p.m. $8. 

1317 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley. (510) 525-5099 or www.ashkenaz.com 

BLAKES 

Pseudopod, A Sleeping Bee, May 5. $6. 

For age 18 and older. Music at 9:30 p.m. 2367 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley. (510) 848-0886. 

FREIGHT AND SALVAGE 

Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley, May 3. $14.50 to $15.50. 

Kevin Burke, May 4. $15.50 to $16.50. 

Jennifer Berezan, May 5. $14.50 to $15.50. 

Music at 8 p.m. 1111 Addison St., Berkeley. (510) 548-1761 or (510) 762-BASS. 

LA PEÑA CULTURAL CENTER 

Greg Winter in Concert, May 4, 8 p.m. $8. 

The Marcus Shelby Orchestra, May 5, 8 p.m. $10. 

“Hip Hop,” May 6, 9 p.m. $10.  

3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. (510) 849-2568 or www.lapena.org 

924 GILMAN ST. 

Code 13, Abstain, United Super Villains, Godstomper, Vulgar Pigeons, May 5. 

$5. Music at 8 p.m. unless otherwise noted. 924 Gilman St., Berkeley. (510) 525-9926. 

THE STARRY PLOUGH PUB 

The Peter Kowald Quartet, May 3. $5 to $10. 

Blood Roses, Forever Goldrush, Belleville, May 4. $5. 

Soultree, Susan Z, May 5. $6. 

For age 21 and over. Wednesday, 8 p.m.; Thursday, 9:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 9:45 p.m. unless otherwise noted. 3101 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. (510) 841-2082.

Alameda-Contra Costa Athletic League golf powerhouse Alameda already had the league’s lone North Coast Section team berth secured going into Monday’s ACCAL championship tournament at the Chuck Corica Golf Complex. But with three at-large individual berths up for grabs, the afternoon was hardly meaningless for the second-place St. Mary’s boys golf team. 

Panther sophomores Brian Haller and Ian Saulsbury made the most of their opportunities to advance, shooting 73 and 79, respectively, over the 18-hole course to place second and seventh. Because both scores made the top three among non-Alameda golfers, the duo was granted the ticket to NCS. The trip will be the second for Haller – who qualified as a freshman – and the first for Saulsbury. 

“They both played well all year, so I wasn’t surprised at all,” said St. Mary’s coach Phil Doran, who led the Panthers to a 13-3 record in the ACCAL this season. “They both had very good years as freshmen, and expected a lot of big things from themselves this year. They didn’t disappoint.” 

The Panther pair’s advancement highlighted a solid day of team competition for St. Mary’s, which combined to shoot 402 – good enough for second place behind Alameda. The score was slightly inflated by the absence of No. 1 golfer Chris Weidinger, who injured his shoulder last week, though Chris Yaris shot an 81 in Weidinger’s place to earn all-league recognition.  

With the 2000 season over for all but Haller and Saulsbury, Doran hopes to concentrate on improving those two scores in practice. While the coach expects his qualifiers to be plenty competitive at NCS this year, he is quick to point out that both are sophomores, and will have two more years to make progress in the postseason. 

“I just want them to do their best, whatever that is,” Doran said.

Rick Young has been doing some long-term parking – without the benefit of an automobile. 

The second-year law student at Boalt Hall stationed himself in the Underhill parking lot on Sunday at noon, and says he won’t budge until UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl agrees to negotiate in good faith. 

“I don’t have a special vision. For this block I want to see more housing and less parking than the current university plan,” said Young, who faxed a five-point letter to the Chancellor calling for “discussions in good faith” on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and emphasizing Southside housing over parking. “It’s amazing how many people agree the university plan is not good. Nearly every student I’ve talked to thinks the current university plan is not good.” 

University spokesperson Marie Felde acknowledged that the chancellor did indeed 

receive Young’s letter, and will respond to it. 

“The chancellor’s office will respond to it. They always try to be prompt,” said Felde. “Everyone has the right and is encouraged to present their views on the Environmental Impact Report process. The comment period is open until June 9.” 

Now a 400-plus space sunken lot, the Underhill block – bordered by College Avenue, Channing Way, Bowdtich Street and Haste Street – used to house a multi-level parking structure topped by a gargantuan Astroturf playfield. Following the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, the upper levels of the structure were demolished, leaving the resultant parking pit. Under the current plan, the university is aiming to rebuild the multi-tiered structure, increasing the lot’s capacity from around 400 to over 1,000 (or up to 1,450 with attendant parking). 

Berdahl was quoted in the April 17 edition of the Daily Planet as stating the university has lost roughly 1,000 parking spaces over the past decade “mostly due to the loss of Underhill.” 

Young, who has been compiling statistics over the past year for Students for a Livable Southside, claims that the university actually lost only 64 spots between 1988 and 1999 (a reduction from 7,450 to 7,386). 

“Parking statistics, I’ve found are A. Incredibly difficult to get and; B. When you do get the information, as a law student I’ve gotten good at understanding Legalese and gobbledygook, and whoever was writing some of these parking reports was obviously a master,” said Young, a graduate of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. “It seems it almost has to be intentional obfuscation.” 

While Young has been committed to the study of Southside housing and parking for some time, the idea of staging a sit-in is something relatively new. 

“The idea came up as kind of a joke,” said Young, a member of both the environmental group Kyoto Now! and the newly formed People Against Lots of Parking and For Plenty of Housing on Underhill Block (the fun-to-say acronym PALPFPHUB). “But I got more serious late Saturday night, I decided to do it.” 

Young claims to be receiving overwhelming support from the Boalt Hall community, passers-by and local representatives. Councilmember Kriss Worthington donated a cell phone to the effort, and the pastor of a local Lutheran church also offered to help with supplies (Young is re-stocked by “three or four” close friends, and, to answer the big question, he relieves himself in the Underhill’s many outhouses). 

Young says he has even had a positive experience dealing with the UCPD. 

“I’ve been talking to the UC Berkeley police, and, with a few exceptions, they’ve been very processional,” said Young, who, with finals upcoming on Monday says he’ll “cross that bridge when he comes to it.” “The police have told me that I cannot sleep in the lot, so as you can imagine, I’m pretty tired.” 

While Young’s main focus is on emphasizing housing over parking, the Underhill plan has met opposition from several Berkeley groups. Longtime bicycle activist Jason Meggs claims that the proposal will add more cars to an already overflowing Southside, creating additional danger for pedestrians and bike riders. 

“I really support what he’s doing, and I may be joining him,” said Meggs of Young. “If this issue is not resolved by next semester, you may see a big campout here.”

Sometimes the “field” part of track and field can be overlooked in favor of the more glamorous sprint and hurdles events. But without star thrower Kamaiya Warren, who virtually guarantees the Panthers two first-place finishes in every dual meet, St. Mary’s High’s ultra-successful girls track team would not be the same high-scoring threat to the NCS title it figures to be later this month.  

Warren put in yet another fantastic performance over the weekend, this time against elevated competition, taking second in the shotput and first in the discus at Saturday’s James Logan Top-8 Invitational. Her 40-4 and 137-1 throws in the respective events earned Warren accolades as Female Field Event Athlete of the Meet. 

The Logan effort came on the heels of a third-place finish in both events at May 22’s Vallejo Invitational. Warren’s personal best throw of 42-2.75 ranks among the top 10 in the state, while her discus mark ranks seventh.

The Berkeley Unified School District should examine an alternative option for the East Campus playing fields project. 

That’s the recommendation district staff will make to the school board during tonight’s meeting. 

The newest option emerged in March, when a group of residents who support constructing a regulation-size baseball field at the site began looking for ways to achieve that goal without forcing the Berkeley Farmers’ Market to make a permanent move. 

In January 1999, the city and school district began the environmental review process on the project at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Derby Street, where the BUSD’s East Campus – renamed Berkeley Alternative High School – is located. 

Two options came out of that process. One called for the closure of Derby and the construction of a regulation-size baseball field, which could double as a soccer field. The other option would leave the street open, and only a softball field would be built. That ground also could be used for soccer. 

Supporters of the Berkeley High athletic program pushed for the first option because the baseball team currently uses the inadequate facilities at San Pablo Park. But many neighbors and customers of the Tuesday farmers’ market advocated the second option. Neighbors said the first option would create traffic and parking problems on their streets, and market customers said there was no viable place to move the market. 

The option being presented to the board tonight seeks to provide a compromise: close Derby but create space for the Berkeley Farmers’ Market to remain at the site. The school board is being asked to front $65,000 for the study of that third option. The city has made most of the environmental review costs so far, states the report being presented to the board. 

Funding for the actual project remains an outstanding issue. The BUSD, which is facing tight finances in its upcoming budget, likely will seek a bond or parcel tax in November to pay for the East Campus project, as well as other work around the district. 

The school board meeting is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m. and will be held in Board/Council Chambers in Old City Hall at 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

The meeting is scheduled to be broadcast on 89.3-FM, KPFB, and Cable Channel 25, B-TV. 

Before tonight’s meeting, a group of parents is scheduled to rally outside Old City Hall calling on the district to raise teachers’ salaries.

Representatives from the city, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Shorebird Nature Center broke ground Saturday on an energy-efficient, straw-bale, 860-square-foot building. 

The new structure will combine innovative environmentally friendly straw bale construction, recycled materials, and solar energy for classrooms and a visitor center for the nature center, located at the Berkeley Marina. 

The Berkeley Marina Experience Program staff is raising money to build the environmentally sensitive building out of straw bales and recycled and salvaged materials. The primary building material for this project will be rice straw bales, a waste byproduct of the agricultural industry. 

The bottom bales will be enclosed in a water-resistant sheath. Steel rods will be pounded through the bales to reinforce the walls and stucco will be sprayed over the entire structure, inside and out. 

The Shorebird Nature Center’s new building will be a showcase for waste reducing practices and recycled content materials, officials say. Straw bale buildings are durable, project coordinators noted in a recent news release. Houses in Nebraska are still standing 90 years after construction. They say the building will be fire resistant and will provide exceptional insulation, saving heating and cooling costs throughout the year. Recycled or salvaged material will be used for foundations, framing, roofing, doors, and cabinetry. 

A team of professionals will work together on the building design and construction. Current Nature Center staff will develop plans for the interior design and public use of the building. 

Staff from the Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division reviewed the building’s design so that it will use energy efficiently, and maximize daylighting. The Lab has also purchased the building’s temperature and humidity data logger that will be embedded in the straw bales. This instrumentation, which measures the integrity and dryness of the straw bales, will give staff and visitors data to perform anaylses of periodic, relative temperature and humidity within the walls and interior building space. 

Finally, the Lab has contributed recycled materials and participated in beach clean-ups of glass, from which the composite window sills and interior countertops will be made.

A major earthquake along the Hayward Fault could force the closure of UC Berkeley for a year, resulting in the loss of 8,900 jobs, $680 million in personal income and $861 million in sales during that period. 

Those are some of the findings reported in a new study commissioned by the university and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, released to the media on Monday. 

“This report makes clear that the efforts we have underway to protect life safety on our campus are exceptional, but that there is more to be done,” Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl said in a statement. “The future of the university and the well- being of the local and state economy require that UC Berkeley not only survive a sizeable earthquake, but that we are prepared to emerge from one ready to resume teaching and research without major delay.” 

The $750,000 study – the Disaster Resistant University Initiative – was designed to help research universities that may face a natural disaster to find ways to protect their research, facilities and human life. The research team was led by UC Berkeley professors Mary Comerio, John Quigley and Vitelmo Bertero. 

The worst-case scenario at UC Berkeley, closure of the university for a year, could happen if a very rare 7.25 quake occurred along the Hayward Fault. The most significant financial impacts would be felt in Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties. Even a less significant earthquake would still create a major impact on the region’s economy, the report states. 

The study also points out that the damage estimates are based on the conditions of campus structures today. Currently, six major building retrofits are in progress, and four more are scheduled for completion between 2001 and 2006. The Hayward Fault passes next to or under several UC Berkeley structures. The university has launched a $1 billion retrofitting effort, dubbed SAFER (Seismic Action for Facilities Enhancement and Renewal) Plan in an attempt to make the campus more resilient and resistant. 

UC Berkeley officials note that their campus is not alone in either its vulnerability to a natural disaster or in its need for preparation and planning. Tulane University, the University of Miami, California State University-Northridge and the University of North Dakota are among those universities hit by natural disasters during the last decade. 

The Disaster Resistant University Initiative aims to develop disaster recovery and business resumption plans first for UC Berkeley, which is serving as the nation’s model, and then for other universities facing the threat of natural disasters including earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. 

To produce the report, the researchers assessed financial, physical and operational damage likely to result from earthquakes of three different magnitudes.  

For example, they found that the campus, home to more than 40,000 students, faculty and staff in more than 100 academic departments and research units, has the highest number of science and engineering graduate students of all institutions surveyed by the National Science Foundation.  

Since many of these students remain in Northern California, including the Silicon Valley, after graduation, “the next Silicon Valley” could be lost to another state or region if the campus does not prepare for a major quake, the report warned. 

After much sound and fury, the Alameda County Education Board saw through the tactics of the “Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste” and gave the Lawrence Hall of Science a clean bill of health. The Superintendent of Public Schools announced on the county web page that she will send her son to the Hall during the summer. 

At last week’s hearing, the County Board heard from nationally known experts who are trained in the field of environmental science. These experts have based their careers and reputations on correctly evaluating health risks. They are responsible for protecting many people’s lives. I rely on their judgements when I do experiments. These experts categorically state the Lawrence Hall of Science is safe. 

As any skilled lawyer knows that you can always find opposing “experts,” the “Committee” found its own sages. The committee introduced these “sages” as distinguished scientists who worked at Berkeley Lab, Los Alamos and Livermore and from that experience they are therefore experts in radiation. It did not matter to the committee that they were not radiation scientists. It did not matter that only one of four was a practicing scientist. 

The first person, who was introduced as a Berkeley Lab scientist, proudly implied that he led several projects. He ranted about conspiracies and cover-ups and how he knew that the radiation measurements were incorrect. He did not mention that he was a minor mechanical engineer at Berkeley Lab with little project management leadership. I worked with this “expert” for about 10 years. He made minimal contributions to these projects. Never once did I observe any knowledge, expertise or discussion on radiation matters. From working with him, I would find it more useful to consult a podiatrist about an impending brain surgery than him about radiation. 

The committee presented another so-called expert to the Board. This scientist mentioned that he left his previous jobs because of concerns for his health and toxic dangers that threatened his health. He mentioned enough conspiracies and cover-ups to make several Hollywood movies. The scientist said he quit his lucrative job and now makes about $500 a month because he could not face the danger. Later, I overheard a conversation between this distinguished scientist and a reporter. When the reporter asked him how he felt about he Alameda County Board’s decision, he confessed ignorance to what had just happened. This is astounding! He was listening to a public hearing and could not figure out what happened. This expert could not even understand simple spoken English. Maybe that is why he switched jobs. 

In fact listening to these experts, I find the argument that Al Gore invented the Internet more plausible than the statement that these people are experts on radiation. 

Let me mention another thing about the Committee. For several years, I have been interested in hearing their views. I want to hear their side. I often have called them on the phone and asked them in person for a chance to attend one of their meetings. This esteemed and vocal committee has never once let me attend one of their gatherings. What are they hiding? Why do they not hold public meetings? What is their secret? 

The committee is very concerned about the possibility of radiation getting into Strawberry Creek. When I mentioned to them that raw sewage from the neighboring homes is polluting the creek, they were unconcerned. They simple did not care. What is the real agenda of the committee? Why are they not interested in the real toxic dangers to Berkeley? 

The Committee is excellent in sprouting rumors, innuendoes, misstatements and wasting governments’ time and money. They have already wasted more than $100,000 of taxpayers’ money on these insignificant risks. They regularly occupy huge blocks of local government meeting time preventing our elected officials from doing their real jobs. Because of the excessive amount of time that they demanded from the Alameda County Board, the Board did not fully hear from the parents of a charter school that was being terminated. I am sure the parents of the children who saw their school being closed would have liked to say more. The Committee’s action prevented it. 

I have several questions that I do not know. What are the Committee’s real concerns? Why do they not tell the truth at public hearings? Why do they constantly mislead the public in their literature? Why do local governments spend so much time with the Committee? When will local governments realize that working with this Committee is an utter waste of time? 

Nuclear physicist Howard Matis, Ph.D., is a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Nuclear Science Division; vice president for Nuclear Physics, Contemporary Physics Education Project; and member, Home Page Committee, Division of Nuclear Physics. He notes that this opinion does not necessarily reflect the opinion of any of the organizations to which he belongs.

Berkeley’s Shotgun Players opened an intriguing and often mystifying production of English feminist playwright Caryl Churchill’s dark, dense, difficult, and at times gruesome play “The Skriker” Saturday at Julia Morgan Theater. 

“The Skriker” is a very bizarre play, and it’s not easy to say exactly what it is about. Many people leaving the theater after Sunday’s performance seemed uncertain as to what they had just seen. 

“The Skriker” is set in the context of an ancient and mythic world of “dark fairies,” spirits who are hundreds of years old, and who interact surreptitiously and malevolently in the lives of present-day humans. 

These dark fairies take over the lives of humans in order to nourish themselves, so in a general sense, “The Skriker” is a vampire story. 

Playwright Churchill describes the central character of her play, the Skriker (Gillian Chadsey), as a “shape shifter and death portent, ancient and damaged.” 

Director Patrick Dooley, choreographer Andrea Weber and the rest of Shotgun’s talented production team have created a fluid, symbolic, and often non-linear staging, where traditional theater scenes alternate with shorter impressionistic tableaus. 

Churchill, who is not known as a realistic playwright, is most famous for her play “Cloud Nine,” a cross-gender send-up of English colonial politics and its relationship to present-day dysfunctional London family politics. 

“The Skriker” runs about 100 minutes with no intermission. Employing a cast of more than 15 actors, many of them playing multiple roles, it follows a series of 30 or 40 loosely structured scenes in which the dark fairy and her cohorts invest and haunt the lives of two young working class English women, Josie (Jennifer Taggart) and Lily (Beth Donohue). 

The Skriker causes Lily to vomit coins. Josie has recently given birth, and something bad seems to have happened. Lily also is about to give birth. Since dark fairies steal human babies to nurse their spirits, these children are at risk. 

In fact, a malevolent theme of childbirth and infancy runs through the play. In part, “The Skriker” seems to be about the violent, painful and tragic karmic implications of a child being born – an event that is usually romanticized as beautiful. 

Churchill also appears to be interested in negative and destructive female forces of nature, in pointed contrast to forces of female spirituality which are seen traditionally as positive. 

As a character, the Skriker takes many forms. She is a fairy, then a blonde American with a Texas accent, then an old woman, or a child playing hopscotch, or a smooth operating romantic lesbian hustler.  

At one point she is the hostess at a dinner party in hell, or wherever it is that platters of food are served up containing a baby’s head and other human organs. 

Near the end of the play, the Skriker’s assault on the two human women takes the form of a malignant love story. On one level, the play can be seen as a long seduction of Lily and Josie by the Skriker. 

The acting in this production is very good. Chadsey’s Skriker is multi-faceted and quite impressive. Beth Donohue is fascinating as an alternately trusting and frightened, and not too bright Lily. Jennifer Taggart’s tough, angry Josie is a wake-up call. 

Lighting designer Alex Lopez has created a variety of distinct spaces on the stage with the use of minimal lighting instruments. Sound designer Jake Rodriguez’s appropriately jarring musical tracks effectively punctuate scene transitions. 

Take fair warning: This complex, esoteric and flat-out weird story is a difficult and demanding evening of theater, and not for everyone. You will very likely leave the theater feeling there were parts of the play you didn’t understand. 

After opening weekend at Julia Morgan, the show now moves to San Francisco for five weeks. 

“The Skriker,” presented by Shotgun Players, now runs Friday-Sunday at the Warehouse Performance Space, 1850 Cesar Chavez, San Francisco. 

For reservations and information, call 510-655-0813, or check out Shotgun’s web site (www.shotgunplayers.com).

Tuesday, May 2  

The American Tapestry  

7:30 p.m.  

Fine Arts Cinema, 2451 Shattuck Ave.  

Directed by Gregory Nava, El Norte Productions, with original score by composer John Adams, this film traces the lives through the generations of immigrant families, from Poland, China, Africa, Ireland and Mexico. $8. 

Bus No. 65 

First Stage Children’s Theater  

7:30 p.m. 

Julia Morgan Theater, 2646 College Ave. $4. 

Bus No. 51  

Wednesday, May 3  

New Music at UC Berkeley  

Noon 

Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley Campus 

Work by graduate student composers.  

Buses No. 7, 51, 64 

Carefree, Carfree Tour to MusicSources  

1:30 p.m. 

Meet at Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

A tour/demonstration by founder Laurette Goldberg of the early music resource center.  

Lecture/demonstration by German composer Georg Graewe 

2 p.m. 

UC Center for New Music & Audio Technologies (CNMAT), 1750 Arch St. Free. 

Buses No. 8, 65  

Youth Arts Festival  

3 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 

Youth Jamboree! Led by Greg Gomez, two school bands run the gamut from cool chamber music to hot jazz. Free. 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s 

7:30 p.m. 

2454 Telegraph Ave. 

D. Nurske, Norman Fischer. 

Bus No. 40  

Thursday, May 4  

Jazzschool BART Plaza Concert 

Noon 

The Advanced Jazz Workshop, under the direction of Mike Zilber, will perform. Sponsored by  

Downtown Berkeley Association, Amoeba Music, BART, Berkeley Daily Planet. 

UC Students Poetry Reading 

12:10-12:50 p.m. 

Morrison Room, Doe Library, UC Campus. Free. 

Buses No. 7, 51, 64  

Youth Arts Festival  

7 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 

Poetry with Rita Davies & Katie Johnson Oxford Elementary School students read their original poems. Free. 

Friday, May 5  

Carefree Carfree Tour to KALA Art Institute 

1:30 p.m. 

Meet at Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Mr. Zhao, Lu Yue (China, 1998; Bay Area Premiere)  

7:30 & 9:30 p.m. 

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way 

Buses No. 7, 51, 64  

The Sounds of Berkeley: A Vibrating Experience 

8 p.m. 

Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Helen Holt, Sherry Burke, Debra Dooling-Sherman, Dress, Aidan McIntyre, Art Peterson, Waldir Sachs, Robert Sherman, Steven Strauss, John Zalabak. $5, FOF (Friends of Festival) free. 

Marcus Shelby Orchestra, big band, Ellington-inspired jazz 

8:30 p.m. 

La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. $10, FOF $8. 

Bus No. 43  

Saturday, May 6  

Cinco de Mayo Celebration, a family sing-along 

11:30 a.m. 

Habitot Children’s Museum, 2230 Shattuck Ave. Children $6, Adults $3, FOF $5 & $2. 

Downtown Music Circus 

1-5 p.m. 

Hundreds of musicians of every tradition will gather on Shattuck Avenue between University Avenue and Haste Street, playing from streetside, stores, balconies, cafés, and a piano situated on the divider at Center St. You, too, can bring an instrument and join in the fun. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association and Amoeba Music. 

For Fun, Ning Ying (China/Hong Kong, 1995) 

7 p.m. 

On the Beat, Ning Ying (China, 1995) 

9 p.m. 

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way 

Bus No. 7, 51, 64 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra 

8 p.m. 

St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 

Bach, B Minor Mass. Free. 

Bus No. 51 

Liam Ensemble: Traditional Persian Music 

8 p.m. 

Julia Morgan Theater, 2646 College Ave. $25. 

Bus No. 51  

Celebration of Spring: A Benefit for the Crowden School 

8 p.m. 

St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. 

Turtle Island String Quartet. Tickets: 658-2799. 

Bus No. 51 

Sunday, May 7  

Jazz on Fourth Street 

11 a.m.-4 p.m. 

A benefit for the Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble with Mingus Amongus, Charanga Tumbao y Cuerdos, Kemp Generation, Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble. 

Bus No. 51 

Carefree Carfree Tour to Bernard Maybeck’s First Church of Christ-Scientist 

11:30 a.m. 

Meet at Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Crowden School Community Music Day 

1-5 p.m. 

Crowden School, 1475 Rose St. 

A family affair with an instrument “petting zoo” for children of all ages. Performances by the Kairos Youth Choir, the Arethusa Woodwind Ensemble, and the Rose Street Players Musical Theater. Free. 

510-559-6910 

Bus No. 67 

Kimi Kodani Hill Lecture on Berkeley’s Ethnic Diversity 

1 p.m. 

1931 Center St. 

Sponsored by the Berkeley Historical Society. Free. 

510-848-0181  

Youth Arts Festival 

2 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 

Washington School Student Concert and Dances from Sri Lanka. Free. 

Jazzschool Concert: Brazilian Rhythms 

4:30 p.m. 

La Note, 2375 Shattuck Ave. $12, FOF $10. 

Bus No. 43, 7, 51 

China: Fifty Years Inside the People’s Republic 

4:30-6:30 p.m. 

Berkeley Art Museum Theater 

Slide Show and Panel Discussion: Other Views, with photographers Jeffrey Aaronson and Xing Danwen, moderated by Robert Templer. 

Himalayan Fair Concert 

7 p.m. 

King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. 

510-848-6767, ext. 609 

Buses No. 15, 67 

News from Native California Magazine presents ShadowLight Productions 

7:30 p.m. 

Festival Gallery, 2216 Shattuck Ave. 

Tales from Native California, a lecture/demonstration of California Indian stories. Free. 

Poetry Flash at Cody’s 

7:30 p.m. 

2454 Telegraph Ave. 

Performance poet Sandy Diamond, Quraysh Ali Lansana. 

Buses No. 40, 64 

Works in the Works 2000 

7:30 p.m. 

Eighth St. Studio, 2525 Eighth St. $8, FOF $7. 

Bus No. 65

The Berkeley High girls sprint relay team’s weekend trip to Philadelphia for the prestigious Penn Relays was plenty educational. But even in the heart of American Revolutionary history, with the city’s abundance of historical landmarks, it was the actual track meet that proved to be most enlightening. 

Thus far unchallenged in California, the BHS girls 4x100 and 4x400 teams expected the competition at Penn to be fierce. But with some 40,000 screaming fans in attendance, the meet would be somewhat of a rude awakening, even for the road-reputed ’Jackets.  

“It was a learning experience – definitely the best meet I’ve ever been to, as far as competition,” BHS coach Darrell Hampton said about the nationally recognized meet. “(Our girls) got a chance to see what the East Coast has to offer. I can’t see them being intimidated by a state meet anymore.” 

Doomed by dropped batons in both relay races, the BHS girls went from first to eighth place in both events – to the disappointment of Hampton, who expected to compete for the top spot with clean handoffs. Aisha Margain, Raqueta Margain, T’carra Penick and Katrina Keith posted a 3:50.23 time in the 4x400, while Aisha Margain, Penick, Keith and Simone Brooks combined for a 47.42 in the 4x100. Both races were won by Jamaican teams, with St. Jago taking the 400 crown with a 3:42.37, and Vere Tech pacing the 100 event at 45.44. 

Among the distractions affecting the BHS squads was the “Whoop-whoop Bird,” a traditional Penn Relays crowd chant used to mockingly alert a runner that she is being passed. The chant, which features thousands of people yelling “Whoop-whoop” in unison, was just one of the many intimidating aspects, according to the BHS coach.  

“There were 42,000 in the stands – the intimacy of the stadium just grabs you,” Hampton said. “We really gave the events away. We were the top U.S. team, easy, and we were running with the Jamaicans.” 

Because both relay times were slowed by handoffs to Keith, Hampton expects to change her position from third to first for future races, so she will not be required to receive a handoff. This weekend, both relay teams are slated to participate either in the East Bay Athletic League Championships, hosted by Foothill, or at the Sacramento Meet of Champions – a more prestigious, non-league event. Whichever the squad chooses, Hampton contends that the weekend will be important in fine-tuning the races for the state trials, later this month.  

“As soon as we got off the plane, we started thinking about (this weekend),” Hampton said. “I know we’re going to have to work through some things before the state trials, We’ll just get through as fast as possible.” 

The Track Panthers 

While the ’Jackets were enjoying the City of Brotherly Love, the St. Mary’s boys’ and girls’ track teams were pulling double-duty – traveling to Lafayette’s Acalanes Invitational on Friday before competing in the Top-8 Invitational, hosted by James Logan High, on Saturday.  

Kamaiya Warren and Bridget Duffy anchored a brilliant performance by the Panthers’ girls squad at Logan, with Warren winning the discus and taking second in the shotput, and Duffy taking the 800m crown. Warren, whose throws rank among the state’s best in both events, was named Female Field Event Athlete of the Meet. 

Rounding out the girls’ highlights were Danielle Stokes’ second-place finish in the 100m hurdles (14.58) and Tiffany Johnson’s third-place marks in the 100m and 200m sprints. Johnson also combined with Parras Vega, Shamika Savage and Kristen Broady to post an impressive 3:59.83 time in the 4x400 – good enough for second place, behind host James Logan. 

“We feel very good about the way this team’s running,” St. Mary’s head coach Jay Lawson said after the meet. “With the training we’ve done recently, the kids are running better than we’d anticipated.” 

The Panther boys echoed their female counterparts on Saturday, placing several athletes among the top finishers. Basketball crossover Ebon Glenn, who jumped a personal-best 6-feet, 10-inches in the high jump to win Friday’s Acalanes meet, had no trouble repeating as meet champion at Logan, clearing 6-feet, 8-inches. Fellow jumper Solomon Welch also had an impressive outing, winning the triple jump at 46-11, and taking third in the long jump at 22-4.5. Trestin George, also a star running back for the Panthers’ football team, edged his teammate in the long jump, leaping 22-9.5 to grab second. 

The Panthers’ only other first-place finishes came in the sprint events, with Chris Dunbar pacing the 400m field at 49.65, and the St. Mary’s 4x100 team recording a season-best 42.14 to win that event. In the hurdles, state qualifier Halihl Guy ran a 38.63 to place second in the 300m hurdles. 

“We’re doing pretty well. We knew we’d be a little tired after Mt. SAC, Arcadia and Vallejo,” Lawson said. “Now the focus is trying to look sharp, win our league. The goal for this team is to win the NCS championship for both boys’ and girls’.” 

Lawson plans to bring a large proportion of his team to the Sacramento Meet of Champions this weekend, hoping the elevated level of competition will begin to condition the Panthers for the rigorous postseason. On Thursday, St. Mary’s closes out the 2000 league season with a tri-meet vs. El Cerrito and Richmond, starting at 3:30 p.m. 

\\\Tuesday, May 2\\ 

California Senior Legislature, North County run-off elections 

8 a.m.-5 p.m. 

North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

The California Senior Legislature, created in 1981, consists of persons aged 60 and over who advocate for inclusion of their concerns in the state Legislature’s proposals. Every two years, 120 Senior Senators and Assembly members are elected by their peers. People can vote in the election if they live in Alameda, Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland or Piedmont. They must be registered to vote in California and 60 years of age or older. 

510-549-2970 

=== 

Harris Seminar 

Noon 

119 Moses Hall 

Gus di Zerega, Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Governmental Studies, will speak on “Democracy as a Self-Organizing System.” 

“Liberal Politics as Play: An Experiment in Postmodern Political Philosophy” 

12:10-1:15 p.m. 

Center for the Study of Law and Society, 2240 Piedmont Ave., Seminar Room (near I-House) 

Professor Lief Carter, the featured speaker, is the McHugh Family Distinguished Professor at The Colorado College. He holds a J.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley, where Sandy Muir was his major professor. 

=== 

Free computer class for seniors 

1-4 p.m. 

South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. 

This free course offers basic instruction in keyboarding, Microsoft Word, Windows 95, Excel and Internet access. Space is limited; the class is offered Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Call ahead for a reservation. 

510-644-6109 

=== 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market 

2-7 p.m. 

Derby Street between Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Milvia Street 

510-548-3333 

=== 

Berkeley Camera Club 

7:30 p.m. 

Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda 

Share your slides and prints with other photographers. Critiques by qualified judges. Monthly field trips. 

510-531-8664 

=== 

“Wilderness Medicine: No Single Formula” 

7:30 p.m. 

Any Mountain Berkeley, 2777 Shattuck Ave. 

Buck Tilton will present a comprehensive slide show and presentation about the world of wilderness medicine. He will describe the application of recognized medical principles in challenging environments and cover specific cases that require additional training beyond normal first-aid knowledge. Tilton is Director of Curriculum and Development for the Wilderness Medicine Institute of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and author of 21 books and over 800 magazine articles. 

510-665-3939 

=== 

\\\Wednesday, May 3\\ 

New Music at Berkeley 

Noon 

Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This free concert will feature music from the graduate composition seminar of Cindy Cox. 

=== 

Cinco de Mayo and Birthday Party Celebration 

1:15 p.m. 

North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

510-644-6107 

=== 

“MAS 2000 Climbing School” 

6 p.m. 

REI Berkeley, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 

Mountain Adventure Seminars offers an introductory rock climbing school with instruction on equipment, fundamental climbing techniques, basic anchoring and safety procedures. Registration required. Cost is $110. Wednesday’s in-store session will be followed by an outdoors session on Saturday morning. 

209-753-6556 

=== 

Transportation Demand Management Study public workshop 

7 p.m. 

Trinity United Methodist Church, 2362 Bancroft Way 

This is Workshop #2 for the Transportation Demand Management Study being done by the City of Berkeley and the University of California. The study area includes Downtown Berkeley, the Southside, and the University. The meeting is accessible by AC Transit lines F, 7, 40, 51, 52, and 64, and UC Perimeter Shuttle. Parking on-site and in nearby garages (including Sather Gate). 

510-705-8136 

=== 

Northern California Unique Backpacking Destinations 

7:30 p.m. 

In this slide show presentation, Ari Derfel of Outdoors Unlimited will spotlight Northern California backpacking destinations including the Lost Coast, the Redwood National Park, Big Sur, Henry Coe State Park and the Tahoe National Forest (Grouse Ridge). He will discuss ideal planning times as well as share highlights on travel distance, trails, flora and fauna and provide information for more resources. 

510-665-3939 

=== 

BUSD school board meeting 

7:30 p.m. 

Board/council chambers, Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way 

=== 

Poetry Flash 

7:30 p.m. 

Cody’s Books, 2454 Telegraph Ave. 

The featured poets this week will Norman Fischer and D. Nurkse. 

510-845-7852; 510-525-5476 

=== 

“Canterbury Tales: Saints and Sinners” 

8 p.m. 

St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, 2837 Claremont Blvd. 

This performance of Geoffrey Chaucer’s work will feature cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. Included are the tales of the Second Nun, the Canon’s Yeoman, and the Manciple. The Second Nun draws us into the story of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, whose faith is tested to the extreme by idolatrous authorities. Tickets are $20 general; $15 seniors; $10 students. 

877-4CHAUCE; 510-601-TWEB 

=== 

Senior Recital 

8 p.m. 

Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

This free concert will feature performances by 2000 graduating class audition winners. 

=== 

\\\Thursday, May 4\\ 

Harris Seminar 

Noon 

119 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley campus 

Rod Gould, city manager of San Rafael and the Stone &Youngberg California Local Executive-in-Residence, will speak on “Semi-RationalExuberance: The Outlook of a City Manager Facing the New Century.” 

=== 

Free computer class for seniors 

1-4 p.m. 

South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. 

This free course offers basic instruction in keyboarding, Microsoft Word, Windows 95, Excel and Internet access. Space is limited; the class is offered Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Call ahead for a reservation. 

510-644-6109 

=== 

Movie: “Notting Hill” 

1 p.m. 

North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

510-644-6107 

=== 

Draft Southside Plan: Public Safety 

7 p.m. 

Trinity United Methodist Church, 2362 Bancroft Way 

This will be a discussion on the public safety element of the Southside Plan. 

=== 

“Best Bay Area Day Hikes” 

7 p.m. 

REI Berkeley, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 

Author Ann Marie Brown gives a slide presentation from her book “101 Great Hikes of the San Francisco Bay Area.” 

510-527-4140 

=== 

Residential Street Sweeping Meeting 

7:30-9:30 p.m. 

St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. 

The city is considering changes in its residential street-sweeping program. The public will have a chance to give input to the changes at the meetings. 

510-665-3440

He’s the pet at Fire Station No. 5 and the firefighters love him, but he’s a lot more than a cheery pal who rides the truck with his buddies. Dylan is a disaster search dog, trained to find people trapped under rubble. 

The 5-year-old German Shepherd is one of 50 such dogs in the country certified at his level, said his trainer Darren Bobrosky, an apparatus operator at the station. 

Dylan’s prepared to find living victims of earthquakes, landslides, or bomb blasts whose only hope my be the finely tuned nose and digging skill of dogs like Dylan. 

“He would lead me. I stand back and observe,” said Bobrosky. “He pinpoints, barks and digs. All of his training leads to finding a victim popping out of a hole and playing tug-of-war with him.” 

Calm and friendly, the 70-pound shepherd is smaller than other males of his breed, who typically log in at about 95 pounds. His smaller size makes it easier for him to get into tight spaces and jump around and less likely that his activity will cause a secondary collapse, said his trainer. 

“He is what you would want in a rescue dog. He is calm an well-behaved, friendly and full of energy, with lots and lots of drive when he needs it,” said Bobrosky. 

Dylan plays tug-of-war all the time with Bobrosky, who removes the pull toy soon enough to make it interesting for the next time. Then Dylan gets his “that’s a good dog” compliment and a stroke on his neck. 

For Dylan’s disaster training, Bobrosky takes him to concrete and wood recycling plants and to sites and they work with other trainers and disaster dogs in the region. 

“We always keep our eyes open for demolition contractors and we work after hours in the rubble,” he said. 

The rescue dog “hits on any human scent” but through countless repetitions of trial and error, said Bobrosky, he looks for the “hidden scent.” 

His trainer said 20 people could be standing in an area, even though trainers try to clear it as much as possible, but Dylan knows the visible people are not his targets. 

Certified by FEMA and the California Office of Emergency Services Dylan has reached a high level of functioning now, said Bobrosky. 

Fire Chief Reginald Garcia considers Dylan to be a prime asset of the department because he’s ready to go in the event of an earthquake. 

Bobrosky keeps a pickup truck loaded with gear and food for 10 days to ride anywhere in the United States for that time period to rescue people with his dog. 

Dylan’s disaster training began simply with Bobrosky showing him a toy and then running and hiding from him. Now Dylan anticipates that someone is hiding from him. 

When Bobrosky got Dylan, the dog was 2-and-a-half years old and he was partially trained by Annie St. John in Petaluma. Bobrosky has worked with him for the same amount of time. 

In his view an older dog is a better bet for training. It’s a big investment of time because it takes two years to prepare a dog for full certification, he said. 

If a trainer is going to spend that much time, he or she wants to be sure the dog has strong hips and elbows and the right temperament which is hard to tell until the dog is one year old, he said. 

Bobrosky, who has been with the Berkeley Fire Department for 15 years, trains other dogs as well. He and wife have four Rottweilers in addition to Dylan, who lives with them when he’s not bunking at Station 5. 

The couple does obedience training and they enter their dogs in shows. Bobrosky said he had a champion Rottweiler who qualified for the Westminster Kennel Club show but the dog died of cancer at the age of 3. 

He and his wife take their dogs, who act as emotional therapists, to visit shut-ins and nursing home residents, and the dogs visit patients at John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek. 

Bobrosky said Dylan lets loose and is “more wild” at home with his Rottweiler pals to play with, and he loves retrieving balls. 

The rescue dog has about five years of rescue fitness remaining in his career, and with good luck he won’t be pressed into service. 

More than five years ago I was approached by the first director of a proposed “Berkeley Free Folk Festival” and asked to recommend potential workshop spaces for the event, which I was happy to do. I explained the necessity of using fully accessible locations, since the event was to be partially funded by public money, to a self-appointed director whose initial response was, “People in wheelchairs don’t play the guitar.” 

Her response was typical. Most people think that if you can shoehorn a wheelchair into a space, whether by means of a rickety ramp or by hauling the chair up a flight of stairs manually, that you’ve covered your Americans With Disabilities Act bases and can slap a little wheelchair stick figure on the poster and be done with it. Most people think all disabled people use wheelchairs. Most people think if someone who does use a wheelchair attends an event, then that event must an accessible event because, after all, someone in a wheelchair was there. 

I opened my newspaper this week and found to my disappointment that several of the Arts Festival events are being held in theater spaces which I know to be completely inaccessible. The Arts Festival receives public money and, of course, would like to receive more. The Berkeley Free Folk Festival was held for the last four years in an inaccessible venue, and when last year that venue’s governing board refused to host this year’s festival because of accessibility issues, the director moved the event— to another inaccessible venue. 

I’ve tried contacting members of the City Council, the City Manager, the Commission on Disabilities, the Arts Commission, the festival directors. I’ve done copious research on alternative, fully accessible locations, which become more numerous every year thanks to the hard-working people who make continuous efforts to bring existing venues into compliance. It would cost nothing to relocate events to places which the whole of the Berkeley community could attend together safely, as is required by both California and federal law.  

But somehow, despite Berkeley’s professed philosophy of inclusion and anti-discrimination, the systematic discrimination against the disabled continues. Those who raise the moral issue on the basis of justice, or the practical issue of hoping the city would have an interest in avoiding lawsuits, are dismissed or discredited as cranks, or worse, as anti-arts. Somehow in this strange and wonderful city with so many Ph.D.’s and so much higher consciousness, the equal rights of taxpayers with disabilities are considered too superficial to matter. Somehow in Berkeley, perhaps due to a political myopia which is its own serious disability, you can’t get there from here. 

Carol Denney is a Berkeley resident.

For 83 percent of the Berkeley High boys golf team, the 2000 season ended with Monday’s eight-place finish at the East Bay Athletic League championship tournament at Oakridge Golf Course.  

But for the other 17 percent, namely Ivan Holmes, there is at least one match remaining – May 15’s North Coast Section tournament at Bridges Golf Course, the home links of Berkeley’s league rival, California High. Holmes shot a 75 to lead all Yellowjackets on Monday, and was named to the prestigious all-league team, after averaging 3.2 strokes above par for the season. With an overachieving performance at NCS, Holmes could qualify for the NorCal regional tourney, to be held May 22. 

“(NorCals) is what he’s pointing toward,” BHS coach Matt Bremer said about his No. 1 golfer’s postseason goals. “He’ll have to shoot a real low number to get there, but he can do it. The Bridges (golf course) suits his game, but he’s got to play the course smart.” 

Berkeley High finished with a combined 452 over the hilly 18-hole course, coming in 21 strokes over seventh-place Granada – a team it defeated on April 11 – and 24 strokes away from sixth-place Livermore. Though the BHS squad expected to compete with the Matadors for seventh, Bremer was content with the team’s final effort, given the difficulty of the course. Curran Kennedy carded the Yellowjackets’ second-best score, coming in at 86, while Adam Breckler and Walker Koppelman-Brown carded 87 and 91, respectively. Freshman Matt Wickett failed to finish, after struggling on the front nine, and Ronald Quintero’s 113 thus rounded out the BHS scoring. 

“I was proud of the guys, it was a good team effort,” Bremer said. “I think spring break (last week) made a difference – late in the week we had a bad tournament. Things seemed like they never gelled after spring break. We peaked right before that.” 

Despite the higher-than-expected mark at EBALs, Bremer feels that the strides the team has made in 2000 will carry over into next year – when the coach expects an onslaught of freshman talent. And with another year of experience under their belts and a pending league change, the ’Jackets expect to be considerably more competitive next season. 

“A couple freshmen are coming in next year – they might even move into the No. 1 or 2,” the coach said. “Our whole team is improving. Everybody is getting more serious.”

A 63-year-old man was attacked and beaten on the street around 8 p.m. Sunday in the 1300 block of Channing Way. 

In what was probably attempted robbery, three males about 18 years old approached the victim who started running across the street. Berkeley Police Capt. Bobby Miller said the three followed him and knocked him down and pummeled and kicked him. Miller said he as severely beaten and kicked and police officer at the scene “a pool of blood on the street near the gutter.” 

The three youths fled when the passing driver of a van witnessed the beating and tried the chase the suspects, but they evaded him by running through backyards. Another witness heard the noise and looked out the window and called police. 

The victim, who was unable to recall what happened to him right after the beating, was taken to a hospital.

It was a most unusual day indeed. 

In front of a small crowd of arts supporters, Mayor Shirley Dean and Councilmember Kriss Worthington – not exactly known as the best of friends – joined with other community leaders in a moderately rousing rendition of “It’s a Most Unusual Day” at the kickoff event for the Berkeley Arts Festival. 

“I do believe that this is what makes this a very special place,” the mayor said in brief remarks Monday before the ensemble sang. “Our commitment to the arts really sets this community apart.” 

The third annual festival will feature 14 days of various artistic events, from musicians performing on downtown streets to a multi-genre program for toddlers. 

“This is a great way to spotlight what a city full of talent this place is,” said Festival Director Bonnie Hughes. “We have so many different genres of art, and they’re often isolated from each other. This gives people a chance to meet each other, find out what other artists are doing, and perhaps even find ways to collaborate together on projects.” Last year’s festival ran for a month, but organizers decide to cut back the event to two weeks this year – May 1-14 – to make it a little less exhausting on the participants and coordinators. 

A unique feature of the 2000 festival will be the “Carefree Carfree Tours.” These tours will be an opportunity for visitors to explore the worlds of art and AC Transit. Visits are planned to such venues as the Berkeley Art Center, the Maybeck-designed First Church of Christ-Scientist, MusicSources, the Judah L. Magnes Museum and the KALA Art Institute. 

Hughes noted that other festival highlights will include the Downtown Music Circus on Saturday, the BART Plaza jazz concerts on Thursday and May 11, the “Tiny Feet and Baby Shoes” program for toddlers on May 13, and the festival finale “Satirathon” on May 14. That event will feature a wide range of humorists and satirists in a “free speech fiesta.” 

A complete list of Berkeley Arts Festival can be found online (www.berkeleyartsfestival.com), and daily updates are available by calling 510-841-1982. A list of this week’s events appears in today’s edition of the Daily Planet

Resident stops burglar 

A resident foiled a “hot prowl” burglar around 1 a.m. Saturday in an apartment building in the 2200 block of Cedar Street. 

The resident had opened his bedroom window about 15 minutes before the burglar appeared. Before he went to sleep he heard the window open wider and saw someone stick his arm through the window and try to enter. The resident jumped up and yelled, said Police Capt. Bobby Miller. The prowler left immediately. He was wearing a dark blue jacket. 

Knife wielding alleged 

An Oakland man allegedly brandished a folding knife in a movie theater in the 2200 block of Shattuck Avenue on Friday night. 

The incident happened around 6:30 p.m. According to Berkeley Police Capt. Bobby Miller, the man was arguing with a security guard, and then pulled out the knife with a red handle and waved it at the guard. Another person called the police and the suspect and a friend tried to walk out of the theater and onto the street. Police officers stopped them and ordered the man wielding the knife to give it up several times before he complied, said Miller, who described the men as “very drunk and very belligerent.” 

Police arrested 31-year-old Damont Richardson, who allegedly wielded the knife, and Byron Smith, 35, also of Oakland. 

Thief steals purse 

A thief who got out of the passenger side of the car about 5:30 p.m. Friday in the 1500 block of Posen Avenue, snatched the purse of an 82-year-old woman who was in her driveway. 

The woman was waiting for a friend to drive her when the suspect’s car approached and parked about three houses away from her. She walked up her driveway to close a gate and did not notice the suspect walking toward her in the shadow of the trees, said Police Capt. Bobby Miller. Then she felt the strap of her purse being yanked off her shoulder, and she turned around and he ran to his car without seeing the thief clearly. She thought he was about 5 feet, 8 inches tall and wore dark clothing. She lost a small amount of cash, and her driver license and credit cards. 

Items stolen from store 

A burglar smashed the plate glass window in the front of Paper Heaven at 2018 Shattuck Ave. about 4:30 a.m. Sunday. 

The burglar reached inside and took five T-shirts and a foam display pole. A witness heard the glass breaking and then saw a white male about 6 feet tall in his 30s wearing a burgundy-colored overcoat walking south on Shattuck carrying a long pole and T-shirts under his arm. 

Man arrested for assault 

A 33-year-old man was arrested for allegedly attacking his mother’s friend at his mother’s home on King Street early Sunday morning. 

Police Capt. Bobby Miller describes the suspect, Mark Braddy, as being “very drunk” and entering a bedroom where his mother and her friend were asleep. The suspect had no explanation for why he hit the victim with his fists and a blunt object. The victim said the son was holding a statue and he believes the son hit him with it. The victim had cuts and abrasions and his friend took him to see a doctor. 

– Daily Planet Staff

Residents, merchants and shoppers and people commuting via College Avenue are due for big changes next month as the street’s repaving project enters an expected three-month construction period. 

The long-awaited and dreaded repaving of the 1.1 miles from Dwight Way to the Oakland border will take place in segments of two to four blocks at a time. One side of the street always will remain open for southbound traffic. 

Low-impact work will be completed first, within a month or less. That includes selected removal and replacement of sidewalks, curbs and gutters, wheelchair ramps and bus pads. Traffic and parking will be maintained at this time. 

For the high-impact excavation work, no parking will be allowed on either side of College Avenue near the construction zone. Northbound traffic will detour. 

Phase One, a two-week period, is scheduled for the east side of College from Dwight Way to Russell Avenue, excluding the Dwight Way intersection. There are eight phases planned, with paving of the entire mile to take place in four days. 

Glen Carloss, project engineer for the city, said the AC Transit No. 51 bus line on College Avenue will be reconfigured. A test run for a detour is scheduled for this week. 

The result will be the replacement of the pock-marked asphalt on the heavily traveled thoroughfare that is lined with residences and the upscale Elmwood shops and restaurants. 

The $2.14 million rehabilitation project will be funded entirely by the Federal Highway Administration. Construction bids are to be submitted to the city May 9 and the work is anticipated to begin at the end of May. 

Carloss said crews will excavate 12 inches to the existing subgrade with grinders, and he admitted the work will be noisy. But he believes the new pavement will be worth the limited disruption. 

He said the current deteriorated paving dates to 1947 when it was reconstructed, and that was overlaid in the 1960s. The other projects on the street are more recent. 

College Avenue was “trenched” by the East Bay Municipal Utility District in 1998, he said, when the utility upgraded its system to install a 16-inch water main. In 1994 street lighting was improved there, also by digging up the street to install underground wires. 

“A lot of merchants think the project could have been coordinated between East Bay and the city,” said Councilmember Kriss Worthington, whose district includes the west side of College Avenue. 

One Elmwood store owner, Virginia Carter, a pharmacist at the Elmwood Pharmacy at the corner of Russell Street and College, agreed. “It just seems that it should all be coordinated to do it at the same time.” 

The city applied for the federal grant to repave College Avenue in November, 1998, after the utility dug trenches there for its 16-inch pipe. 

The permanent traffic barrier on Russell Street near the parking lot behind College Avenue stores will modified during the construction period to permit vehicles, especially in the event of emergency, to access College from Benvenue Avenue. 

John Huffman, owner of Videots, a video store at 2988 College Ave., and president of the Elmwood Merchants Association, said the merchants have been meeting almost monthly with the city since October. 

He said neighbors have attended meetings as well and the communication lines are open. “There is nothing we can do but mitigate.” 

Stepping up to the plate, the city is providing a grant of $10,000 for pamphlets and advertisements to let customers know that the Elmwood is still in business during construction. 

Huffman said many of the 85 businesses that comprise the Elmwood shopping district lost about 20 to 30 percent of their business during the EBMUD construction. One of them closed: Burnaford’s, a produce store. 

Claudia Moudry, owner of Your Basic Bird, a combination aviary and pet store, said the biggest concern of merchants is that “the Elmwood doesn’t become an area that is not available because of construction.” 

She was pleased that the city plans to repave the Elmwood section between Russell and Webster at the end of the project and swiftly. 

The streets that are peripheral to College Avenue should be kept open, she said, suggesting that fines for traffic violations be doubled and 15-mile speed zones be applied. 

Strict enforcement of traffic control signage, speed limits and weight limitations on streets is on the police department agenda. People are encouraged to walk, carpool or bike in the area. 

After the repaving is completed, the city’s five-year moratorium prevents any work on newly paved streets except for life safety, emergency or property damage, said Virginia Vafa from the Public Works Department. 

The project is scheduled to coincide with the end of the school year, when fewer commuters will be taking College Avenue to and from the Cal campus. The city estimates southbound traffic during construction to be 10,000 vehicles daily and the estimated 7,000 vehicles northbound will detour to three alternative routes. They include heavy use of Telegraph and Claremont avenues. 

A left turn signal at the intersection of Ashby and Claremont is to be installed for easing northbound traffic on Claremont making left turns to westbound Ashby Avenue. 

Reh-Lin Chen, acting traffic engineer, said members of the Transportation Commission want a traffic calming solution, possibly a circle, for the busy three-way intersection of Claremont Boulevard, Garber Street and Belrose Avenue. 

During construction, Chen said his department recommends pedestrian safety improvements at that intersection and two other intersections of Claremont, at Russell Street and Avalon Avenue. They include striping and pedestrian warning signs.

Residents and merchants in the neighborhood near 1719 University Avenue (the former Kelley Moore Paint store) are seeking a cure for the latest in an unprecedented wave of high-density housing projects. 

Already the most densely populated city in the East Bay, Berkeley is threatened by growing numbers of subsidized projects. The latest battle is over the Affordable Housing Associates proposed “Flamingo Homes,” which many believe would result in severe detriment to local neighbors and businesses. Aside from the obvious concerns about the effects of such a project on neighborhood density, parking, traffic, crime, and quality of life, there are other unanswered questions about the developer’s business practices. Although the executive director of Affordable Housing Associates writes in his application for Housing Trust Funds “we have tried to closely incorporate the wishes and concerns of the neighbors” many neighbors do not agree. This same executive director said to the Housing Advisory Commission “we have the support of the merchants on University Avenue” – less than candid. Although the neighboring American Automobile Association business was assured initially that they will continue to be able to lease affordable parking from the proposed site, now they are told there will not be parking for nearby businesses. Although neighbors were assured at one meeting that the project would be two stories high with one story residential, now they are being told it may be three or even more stories, the exact plans seem to change from moment to moment. 

Neighbors concerned about parking are reassured by various platitudes from the developer that people with special needs will not need much parking, never mind omission of any plans for larger parking stalls for wheelchair accommodating vans and paratransit vehicles which will need space to load, unload, turn around, and enter traffic on busy University Avenue. The list of problems with the proposed project goes on, but the reader must get the idea. 

If you are concerned that developments like this are getting too large, too dense, too detrimental, too numerous, and that the developers cannot be trusted to keep their promises, please get involved. After taking appropriate anti-emetic medications, attend the meeting of the City Council Tuesday, May 9, to voice opposition to the AHA “Flamingo Homes.” Sign petitions, write to the City Clerk describing your concerns and ask that a copy of your letter go the Mayor, the Council, the City Manager, the Zoning Adjustments Board, the Zoning Department, the Planning Commission, the Housing Advisory Commission, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Let them hear from the residents of Berkeley. 

Walter Wood is a Berkeley Way resident.

THEATER 

ACTORS ENSEMBLE OF BERKELEY 

“Rough Crossing” by Tom Stoppard, April 7 through May 6. The writers of a Broadway musical are simultaneously trying to finish and rehearse a play while crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner. 

$10. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; May 4, 8 p.m. Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. (510) 528-5620. 

AURORA THEATRE 

“The Homecoming” by Harold Pinter, April 6 through May 7. A dark comedy about a philosophy professor who brings his wife home to meet his all-male family. 

$25 to $28. Wednesday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., Berkeley. (510) 843-4822. 

BERKELEY REPERTORY THEATRE 

“Let My Enemy Live Long!” by Tanya Shaffer, April 19 through May 12. The story of an ill-advised boat ride up West Africa's Niger River to Timbuktu. 

$19 to $48.50. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m.; Wednesday, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.; April 19, 8 p.m.; 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. (510) 845-4700 or (888) 4BRTTIX. 

MUSIC VENUES 

ASHKENAZ 

Brassworks, May 2, 8 p.m. An evening of swing music and waltzes. $8. 

Gator Beat, May 3, 9 p.m. $8. 

Wadi Gad, DJ Ashanti Hi-Fi, May 4, 9:30 p.m. $8. 

MoodSwing Orchestra, May 5, 9:30 p.m. $11. 

Kotoja, May 6, 9:30 p.m. $11. 

Tango No. 9, May 7, 8 p.m. $8. 

1317 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley. (510) 525-5099 or www.ashkenaz.com 

BLAKES 

Pseudopod, A Sleeping Bee, May 5. $6. 

Five Point Plan, Molasses, May 6. $5. 

Black Bay, Terra Cotta Troup, May 7. $3. 

Tracy Nelson with Robert Cray's Band, May 8. $10. 

For age 18 and older. Music at 9:30 p.m. 2367 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley. (510) 848-0886. 

FREIGHT AND SALVAGE 

Casey Neill, May 1. $13.50 to $14.50. 

Jacqui McShee's Pentangle, May 2. $15.50 to $16.50. 

Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley, May 3. $14.50 to $15.50. 

Kevin Burke, May 4. $15.50 to $16.50. 

Jennifer Berezan, May 5. $14.50 to $15.50. 

Si Kahn, May 6. $15.50 to $16.50. 

Karen Savoca with Pete Heitzman, May 7. $13.50 to $14.50. 

Music at 8 p.m. 1111 Addison St., Berkeley. (510) 548-1761 or (510) 762-BASS. 

LA PEÑA CULTURAL CENTER 

Greg Winter in Concert, May 4, 8 p.m. $8. 

The Marcus Shelby Orchestra, May 5, 8 p.m. $10. 

“Hip Hop,” May 6, 9 p.m. $10.  

3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. (510) 849-2568 or www.lapena.org 

924 GILMAN ST. 

Code 13, Abstain, United Super Villains, Godstomper, Vulgar Pigeons, May 5. 

Hellbillies, Strychnine, The Enemies, The Trots, Fracas, May 6. 

$5. Music at 8 p.m. unless otherwise noted. 924 Gilman St., Berkeley. (510) 525-9926. 

THE STARRY PLOUGH PUB 

The Peter Kowald Quartet, May 3. $5 to $10. 

Blood Roses, Forever Goldrush, Belleville, May 4. $5. 

Soultree, Susan Z, May 5. $6. 

Persephone's Bees, The Chantigs, Jim Gree and the Pandemonium, May 6. $6. 

For age 21 and over. Wednesday, 8 p.m.; Thursday, 9:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 9:45 p.m. unless otherwise noted. 3101 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. (510) 841-2082. 

MUSEUMS 

UC BERKELEY ART 

MUSEUM 

“Anne Chu/MATRIX 184 Untitled,” April 16 through June 18. 

“China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic,” through June 18. The work of 25 Chinese and Western photographers explores half a century of social and political upheaval in this unusual exhibit. 

“Autour de Rodin: Auguste Rodin and His Contemporaries,” through August. An exhibit of 11 bronze maquettes on loan from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation in Los Angeles. 

$6 general; $4 seniors and students ages 12 to 18; free children age 12 and under; free Thursday, 1 1 a.m. to noon and 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. (510) 642-0808. 

HALL OF HEALTH  

2230 Shattuck Ave. (lower level), Berkeley 

A hands-on community health education museum and science center sponsored by Children's Hospital Oakland and Alta Bates Medical Center. 

Free. For children ages 3 to 12 and their parents. 

(510) 549-1564 

LAWRENCE HALL 

OF SCIENCE 

“Dinosaurs 2000,” through June 4. An exhibit featuring 16 lifelike robotic creatures, fossils, activities to compare yourself to a dinosaur, and daily live demonstrations. 

“The News About Dinosaurs,” through June 4. Learn more about the “Dinosaurs 2000” exhibit with live demonstrations exploring recent paleontological discoveries and how scientists know what they do about prehistoric creatures. Monday through Friday, 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, noon, 1 p.m., 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. 

$6 general; $4 seniors, students and children ages 7 to 18; $2 children ages 3 to 6; free children under age 3. Daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Centennial Drive, University of California, Berkeley. (510) 642-5132 or www.lhs.berkeley.edu 

PHOEBE HEARST MUSEUM 

Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley 

“Modern Treasures from Ancient Iran,” through Oct. 29. This exhibit explores nomadic and town life in ancient and modern Iran as illustrated in bronze and pottery vessels, and textiles. 

“Pana O’ahu: Sacred Stones – Sacred Places,” through July 16. An exhibit of photographs by Jan Becket and Joseph Singer. 

Wednesday through Sunday 10 am -4:30 pm; Thursday until 9 pm (Sept-May) 

(510) 643-7648 

HABITOT CHILDREN’S MUSEUM 

Kittredge Street and Shattuck Avenue 

A museum especially for children age 7 and younger. Highlights include “WaterWorks,” an area with some unusual water toys, an Infant Tree for babies, a garden especially for toddlers, a child-scale grocery store and cafe, and a costume shop and stage for junior thespians. The museum also features a toy lending library. 

Admission is $4 for adults; $6 child age 7 and under; $3 for each additional child.  

Hours: Monday and Wednesday, 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Tuesday and Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (510) 647-1111 

JUDAH L. MAGNES 

MUSEUM 

2911 Russell St., Berkeley 

“Chagall: Master Prints and Posters, Selections from the Magnes Museum Collection.” Accompanying the exhibition is “Exploring Chagall and His Use of the Elements of Art,” a child-friendly Interactive Educational Room with five work-stations and a central activities space. 

Free. Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

(510) 549-6950. 

To publicize an upcoming event, please submit information to the Daily Planet via fax (841-5695), e-mail (calendar@berkeleydailyplanet.com) or traditional mail (2076 University Avenue, 94704). Calendar items should be submitted at least one week before the opening of a new exhibit or performance. Please include a daytime telephone number in case we need to clarify any information.

The Berkeley High girls lacrosse team secured third place and a berth in the league tournament on Saturday afternoon, playing a strong game in all aspects to defeat Acalanes, 10-8 in Lafayette.  

The victorious effort came on the heels of a disappointing loss to league rival Davis last Wednesday, in which the Yellowjackets struggled with ball movement and passing. The squad came out on Saturday determined to redeem themselves for the defeat, and with the possibility of being knocked out of the playoff hunt with another loss, there was plenty of motivation. 

“I think the Davis game pushed us over the edge, with the combination of the (hot) weather and the great performance by the Davis players,” said BHS coach Lia Farley, who hoped the loss would be a wake-up call for the Acalanes game. “The Acalanes team was very tenacious, but we led throughout the game. I think people rallied (on Saturday).” 

Berkeley High attacker Alana Perley put forth an explosive effort, netting four goals in four attempts to lead all scorers. Jamie Lee also posted a hat trick of her own, while Dani Ganes compiled two goals and three assists to fuel the offensive outburst. Elena Krieger chimed in with one goal. 

“(Perley’s surge) was definitely something we’ve been waiting for,” Farley said after the game. “It’s been on her plate, and she was able to produce.” 

In the shadow of Berkeley’s offensive effort was a strong defensive game that, according to the coach, was much better than the final tally suggests. Kristen Braasch and Joanna Hoch, Berkeley’s platooning goalkeepers, held their own in net throughout the game, with Braasch allowing just two goals in the entire first half of play. Though Hoch struggled at the outset of the second half, allowing quick scores to Acalanes, her game leveled out, and she was able to preserve the BHS victory. 

“Kristen had a really awesome game, and I had a pretty bad start, but by the end, I was stopping them,” Hoch said. “I think we came into this game knowing we needed to play our best.” 

“The goalkeeping was much improved,” agreed Farley, who also felt the midfield play was significantly better against Acalanes. “(The midfielders) were double-teaming, picking up grounders, and the defensive had an incredible game.” 

With league playoffs beginning in two weeks, the ’Jackets plan to use the next 10 days of practice to address the weaker aspects of their game. Though the league season is over, Berkeley will participate in one more regular-season game, when it hosts Robert Louis Stevenson in a non-league battle this Saturday.  

As the league’s third seed, Berkeley High will meet No. 2 seed Monte Vista – a team that swept the ’Jackets in the 2000 series – in the first round of the postseason. Despite the two losses in the regular season, the Yellowjackets have little doubt they can contend with the Mustangs on their best day, especially considering the fact that they’ve defeated Monte Vista in the first round of league playoffs the last two years.  

“Our past two games (against the Mustangs) haven’t been very good. They’re really quick, and really aggressive,” Farley said. “But we definitely feel like we have a chance against them.” 

“I think, on a good day, we can take anybody,” Hoch added. “We’ll try to play our best, and that should be enough.” 

Classes weren’t in session, but the halls were buzzing all day Saturday at the City of Franklin Microsociety Magnet School. 

The campus at San Pablo Avenue and Virginia Street was one of 55 sites in the Berkeley area that benefited this weekend from the annual Christmas in April volunteer day. More than 2,000 volunteers around the area put charitable thoughts into action, painting walls, building benches, planting flowers, helping the needy. And along the way, most of them discovered – or discovered – that volunteering can be, well, fun. 

“It’s a really good way to get to know people outside of work,” said Lynn Benton, who works in the fermentation and media department at Bayer Corp., which sponsored the City of Franklin project. “It makes it easier to network back at work, but it’s also good to get involved in the community.” 

Organizers estimate that this year’s volunteers in the four communities – Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville and North Oakland – provided more than $650,000 in repair work. Nationally, around 231,000 volunteers contributed the equivalent of an estimated $78 million in repairs in 720 communities. 

Since 1991, volunteers with the Albany-Berkeley-Emeryville branch of Christmas in April have rehabilitated 256 homes, most of which belonged to low-income seniors or disabled residents. The program targeted about 40 homes this year and was joined by the North Oakland branch. 

But volunteers also have participated in repair projects at 54 community facilities, including schools and community centers. 

On Saturday, in addition to the City of Franklin site, volunteers worked at more than a dozen such facilities, including Rosa Parks Elementary School, Berkeley Youth Alternatives, East Bay Community Law Center and the Over 60 Health Care Center. 

City of Franklin may not have been the only Berkeley school chosen for the renovation and repair effort, but it was certainly the one most in need of help. The school’s facility was built in 1952 and was expanded 12 years later. Franklin School was closed in 1983, but the district was forced to reopen it in 1990 to serve as the temporary home for Cragmont Elementary School – that school’s site in the Berkeley Hills had been damaged in the Loma Prieta quake in October 1989. 

Unlike other school sites in the Berkeley Unified School District, major improvements have not been made at Franklin. Instead, the campus was the temporary home for other schools whose facilities were being rebuilt. Columbus (now Rosa Parks) Elementary was housed there for a period of time, as was Cragmont. Thousand Oaks Elementary currently shares the building with City of Franklin, but TO will move this summer into its new, rebuilt facility. 

And with the BUSD facing financial difficulties, many maintenance programs have been cut back to the bare bones. 

That left City of Franklin, which opened just last fall, as an ideal candidate for some volunteer support. 

“I just believe that it takes a whole community – you know the saying, that it takes a village to raise a child – and I’m glad to see that the community is willing to come in and support us this way,” said City of Franklin Principal Barbara Penny-James. 

Bayer had more than 120 volunteers at the school Saturday, with participants from a few other local companies also joining in. This was the ninth consecutive year that Bayer has participated, and the number of volunteers has grown each time, noted Laura Rohde, communications manager. 

Anyone who doubted that volunteer work can be fun only needed to follow around a trio of paper-towel installers in the afternoon – Richard Furuzawa, April Loui and Henry Wu. As the threesome wandered from room to room, installing new dispensers, they provided entertainment for each other, for this reporter and for the painters they encountered, who, more often than not, just kind of chuckled and went back to work. 

Thanks to Christmas in April, the school got those new paper-towel dispensers; repainted restrooms, picnic tables and exterior walls along the multipurpose building; new benches and a storage shed; new flowers and plants; and a pledge to return next year to help again. 

Prior to Saturday’s workday, many volunteers had visited the homes or community facilities earlier this month to begin prep work. 

And on Sunday, local synagogues completed three repair projects as part of the “Sukkot in April” workday.

It was with considerable disappointment that I read Daily Planet reporter Judith Scherr’s gossip column in Tuesday’s paper (April 25). I and many others had hoped that the Daily Planet was going to be a real paper with serious, objective reporting about the myriad activities going on in Berkeley. You had such a promising beginning with mature reports, which really served to inform. Lately it has seemed that the paper has developed a point of view which is that things are rotten in Berkeley and everyone is trying to get away with something. A report on an interesting and exciting UC-sponsored panel of thoughtful, intelligent people who get things done in Berkeley, discussing their hopes and concerns for Berkeley’s future, was reported in a denigrating and derogatory way. An attempt on the part of the city staff to inform Berkeley residents about many interesting things going on in Berkeley, through an annual report mailed to every address in town, was dismissed as costing $30,000 to create and mail city-wide, and as having a few typographical errors. (I noticed that the distasteful gossip column had many such errors itself.) What about the content of the report and how about interviewing some of the “non-regulars” about what they thought of the report? 

My surveys show that few Berkeley residents feel they know enough about what’s happening in their town and I would like to know how they felt about the Annual Report, wouldn’t you? Over and over I hear from constituents and friends that they won’t get involved in Berkeley because of the mean-spirited and hostile environment they meet in public meetings and committees. I think this is a shame, because we have so many talented people who are sitting on the sidelines. Another paper with a sneering, dismissive attitude only adds to the problem. 

I am well aware that it isn’t a newspaper’s job to act as a cheerleader for the city. I think, however, it is a paper’s job to cover all kinds of real stories, not just internecine battles, and reach out to a varied group of people to get reactions and information, not just a standard group of folks with predictable negative responses. At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader myself, I think Berkeley is a great city that’s getting better all the time. I know firsthand that there are a lot of hardworking people making these improvements. Inevitably there will be tension and division as we move ahead, but a paper which wants to serve its community will focus on real issues, not petty backbiting, and I would certainly hope a real paper would not print scurrilous gossip as amusing filler. There are real people affected by these hateful, anonymous charges and there is no need to provide a wider venue for their pain. 

The Planet, as it begins its second year, can continue to become a mouthpiece for the well-known chronically angry and disenchanted few, following up on their conspiracies and complaints. Or it can try to take the more difficult route of reflecting a varied population which understands that it takes a lot of work to create a vibrant city and that most people are trying to pull together to get things done ... even though they may disagree along the way. 

Councilmember Polly Armstrong represents District 8.

With running back Joe Igber on the bench, Saturday’s final spring football scrimmage didn’t figure to be an exhibition in ground gains for the Bears. But the Cal offense proved that Igber isn’t the only dangerous Joe in the backfield, as sophomore Joseph Echema picked up an astounding 119 yards on 13 attempts. 

Echema, competing with the Blue side at the intrasquad scrimmage at Oakmont Polo Fields in Santa Rosa, also scored a touchdown to give his side a 43-21 victory over the opposing Gold team, which was made up of Cal’s second-string offense and first-string defense.  

“Our running game looked good today,” said Cal head coach Tom Holmoe, who has seen Echema blossom throughout spring workouts after getting only 10 carries as a freshman in 1999. “It was obvious that the offensive line was opening a few holes and Echema looked real good. He’s a slasher, and he’s big and fast. We have superior depth at the tailback position.” 

Echema’s afternoon included 45- and 25-yard breakaways that were especially impressive against the notably solid Cal first-team defensive line, which features such athletes as Andre Carter, Jacob Waasdorp and Daniel Nwangwu. Chris Hanks, another sophomore, complemented Echema’s impressive outing with 67 yards of his own, on 12 carries. 

Though quarterback Kyle Boller threw just 11 passes, his 88 total yards and two touchdowns were enough to encourage the Cal coaching staff. Tight end Brian Surgener and wideout Sean Currin each found themselves on the 

receiving end of mid-length TD passes from Boller. 

“I think we finished up the spring very strongly,” Holmoe said after the game. “Our team is in great shape, physically. We’re healthy and strong.” 

Igber was kept out of the game due to a knee sprain suffered during Cal’s last scrimmage, two weeks ago. According to the coaches, the injury is minor, and the running back will be rehabilitated well before the start of fall practice.  

Fall camp begins Aug. 17 at CSU Stanislaus in the Central Valley.

Berkeley residents and city departments have vowed to cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than 2 million pounds as part of an Earth Day pledge to help the environment. 

But city leaders want residents to do even more. 

“There is no reason not to stop,” said Councilmember Linda Maio. “We will continue asking people to take additional steps, over and above what we are doing now, to protect the climate.” 

The city, led by the Berkeley Energy Commission and the Community Environmental Advisory Commission, called on residents to pledge to take actions that will reduce negative effects on the environment. Those actions include carpooling or reducing car travel by at least 15 percent, installing low-flow showerheads, using compact fluorescent light bulbs in at least four fixtures, and promising that the next car they purchase will be 30 percent more fuel-efficient than their current vehicle. 

When the first tally was made, for Earth Day on April 22, pledges came to 1.6 million pounds of carbon dioxide. By late last week, that figured had passed the 2 million pound mark. So far, 357 households have made pledges. The most popular action was the pledge to make the next vehicle more fuel-efficient. 

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about 6.6 tons of greenhouse gases are released every year, per person – that’s almost 15,000 pounds for each of us. Emissions increased about 3.4 percent between 1990 and 1997, the EPA says. About 82 percent of these emissions come from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and power cars. 

Neal De Snoo, the city’s energy officer, previously told the Daily Planet that city departments have made their own pledges to reduce total emissions by 15 percent. The city’s action plan focuses on four areas: reduced transportation fuels, reduced energy use in city-owned buildings, reduced levels of solid waste materials that generate methane as they decompose, and increased planting of trees. 

The city has expanded its fleet of electric vehicles, and has installed a recharging station downtown that can be used by city-owned and private vehicles. The recently adopted Bike Boulevard Plan is another beneficial step, De Snoo said. 

Energy-efficient bulbs can reduce the amount of electricity used in homes and business, he said, noting that about 30 major businesses have pledged to reduce energy use in this category. 

Methane emissions are worse for the environment than carbon dioxide emissions are, De Snoo said. The decomposition process in landfills is a significant contributor. As a carbon-based material decomposes, it produces methane if there is no oxygen present. That’s why composting is encouraged: The process incorporates oxygen into the mixture of food, dirt and green waste, and the end product can be used in a garden. 

Pledges are still being accepted online (www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/housing/energy/pledge.html) or by mail. Call 510-665-3486 for a pledge card, which can then be mailed back to the city. 

Berkeley High rugger Joanna Hoch scored all three tries for the BHS/Piedmont contingent in Saturday’s match at Fielding Field in Berkeley, but the more experienced Oakridge squad had the offensive consistency to prevail, 25-15.  

The losing effort went down as one of the best all season for the BHS/Piedmont squad, which is currently in its first-ever year of competition. According to the BHS players, the passing and defense have improved exponentially over the past weeks, and the narrow loss to Oakridge – a team with four years of experience – was something of a moral victory. 

“I think this was our best game. The coach came up to us after the game and said it was one of the most well-matched (all season),” Hoch said. “They’ve been in existence for four years, and we were at their level. Our team’s improvement is really obvious.” 

The squad travels north to Roseville this weekend to participate in a tournament featuring Granite Bay and Elsie Allen. BHS/Piedmont is guaranteed at least three games, and could win its way into a fourth.

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If it were up to the Zoning Adjustment Board, Kragen Auto Parts would shut its doors forever at California Street and University Avenue. 

With Board members Nancy Carleton and David Freeman absent, the ZAB voted 5-2 Thursday evening to revoke the use permit of the business, which has been at war with its neighbors for at least five years. 

Board members Rose Marie Pietras and James Peterson opposed the revocation. 

Kragen attorney Bill Segesta says the company has no intention of shutting down the 12-year-old store without a fight. It will challenge the Zoning Board’s decision at the City Council level. 

Kragen’s neighbors have lodged numerous complaints with city officials about spare parts left about, people working on cars outside the establishment and resultant oil and other contaminants caked on the street. They went to mediation with the business, and in 1998, the ZAB attached formal conditions to Kragen’s use permit. 

In its vote, the board majority agreed with the zoning officer’s conclusions that Kragen violated the conditions imposed on it. 

The staff findings asserted that Kragen: 

• Failed to pick up litter and sweep around the establishment. 

• Did not perform adequate professional surface cleaning of oil and other contaminants around the establishment. 

• Allowed its customers to work on their vehicles outside the establishment. 

Two ZAB members argued on the side of the business, however. Pietras said she noticed “remarkable improvement” when she went by the business recently. 

And Peterson agreed, saying the business has been responsive to the city’s demands. Moreover he argued that Kragen provided employment to “minorities and poor whites.” 

“I am not prepared to vote to revoke the permit to put these people out of work,” he said. 

But most of the board members said the business had a pattern of complying when the city turned up the heat, then becoming lax later on. 

“There’s a certain cyclical aspect to this,” ZAB member Gene Poshman said. “We’ve got neighbors who have to live with this thing.”

Two burglaries Wednesday took place in small cottages here in Berkeley. 

One of them happened in the 2300 block of Oregon Street. It was reported about 6 p.m. when the victim, a student at UC Berkeley, returned home. The burglar somehow gained entry to the rear cottage through a fenced yard with a padlocked gate. Police Capt. Bobby Miller said the burglar either scaled the fence or climbed through blackberry bushes and a gap in the fence. The victim lost a portable Aiwa stereo, a comforter and a blue duffel bag with CAL printed on it. 

The other burglary was in the 3000 block of Hillegass Avenue where the cottage, partially hidden by trees, has a loft with two wood frame windows that swing out. Miller said the burglar entered the cottage through one of those windows next to the front door. The burglar apparently took a laundry basket and loaded it with approximately 200 compact disks valued at about $3,000. The victim was out of town when the crime occurred. 

– Daily Planet Staff