Arts & Events

TUESDAY, DEC. 23 -more-

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Berkeley resident Michael Chabon will join San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, “an East Bay local,” for an evening of conversation to benefit the academic and financial aid programs at Park Day School in North Oakland, 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 5 at Berkeley Rep. -more-

Don’t waste your money on the romantic-epic film Australia, but rush out and buy Berkeley writer Celeste Lipow MacLeod’s Multiethnic Australia. Conn Hallinan has written in these pages of the country’s increasing cooperation with the United States, from sending troops to Iraq, allowing the U.S. to build a military base on Australia’s west coast, and agreeing to let the country become the world’s nuclear waste dump with its reward: joining a nuclear-technology information clearing house. -more-

Holiday music, usually canned, has become the audible public hallmark of the season, with all the homogenized commercialism this time of year. -more-

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TUESDAY, DEC. 23 -more-

THURSDAY, DEC. 18 -more-

More than two years ago (April 25, 2006) the Daily Planet published my profile of Margot Blum Schevill. In that piece I emphasized Margot’s successful, even smooth, transition from one creative phase to another. A well-known singer when I first knew her over thirty years ago, Margot had completed a degree in anthropology and had become an authority on the Maya textiles of Guatemala, both as art and as history of a culture. -more-

Mz. Dee’s Medicine Show, a new musical variety TV series, hosted by lifelong local jazz and R&B singer Mz. Dee, will be cable- and web-cast live on BETV Channel 28 and BETV.org, 2 p.m., this Saturday, from the Berkeley Community Media studio. -more-

Teen Playreaders, which meets weekly at the Berkeley Public Library to read aloud from plays and monologues, have invited the whole community to their free show of Bizarre Shorts, featuring short plays, musical numbers and monologues (some original), “something for everybody, from Shakespeare to Sondheim to Stoppard,” 7:30 p.m., this Saturday at the Willard Middle School Metal Shop Theater, 2425 Stuart St. (off Telegraph). -more-

From the staged, stylized Gospel story of the door-to-door search for shelter and the adoration of the wise men in a stable in Bethlehem to the full-out testifying, choral singing and social pageantry of the African-American church, Lorraine Hansberry theater company’s Black Nativity: A Gospel Celebration of Christmas, now in its 10th year (and Hansberry’s 28th), is playing through Dec. 28 at San Francisco’s PG&E Auditorium. -more-

Thornton Wilder created a substantial body of work but there seems little doubt that his lasting fame depends on Our Town. Since its opening on Broadway 70 years ago this extraordinary play has never really been off the stage. New productions of it open somewhere in the world almost every month. -more-

I recently received a letter from a reader (Let’s call him PR) about his experiences with a local contractor and his illegal help. His concern, which is to be commended, is in regards to the pay and working conditions afforded his helper, whom he pseudonymously called Gem (presumably his feelings about the worker, which he effused copiously in a letter which is too long to include herein). -more-

THURSDAY, DEC. 18 -more-