Zach Hausner (right), age 8, won the inaugural pie-eating contest for kids at the Chamber of Commerce Village Fair on Sunday at Palisades High. On his right are Maximo Speiser, 8, and Maximo’s brother Sammy, 10. The boys all attend Palisades Elementary.    Rich Schmitt/Staff Photographer
By DANIELLE GILLESPIE A number of Pacific Palisades residents who live next to Will Rogers State Historic Park asked the Community Council last Thursday to help them resolve traffic issues along the winding, two-lane country road that leads to the park. At the meeting, resident Brian Temple explained that on the weekends, people park their vehicles along the narrow road and walk uphill to the park to avoid paying the $12 parking fee. Parking is prohibited on nearby residential streets, Villa Woods Drive and Villa View Drive. As a result, Temple, who lives on Villa View, said it creates a safety hazard. Visitors make sudden U-turns and stop traffic when backing into spaces. Families and friends mingle in the street while unloading picnic baskets and strollers. In addition, visitors tend to walk in the middle of the street because there are no sidewalks. ‘It shouldn’t have to take a catastrophic accident to change this,’ Temple said.   The situation was much worse on October 10, when the park hosted the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic. Attendees parked along both sides of the road from the bottom of Sunset Boulevard to the stop sign at Villa View, preventing residents from leaving or returning home. Many of these vehicles were parked illegally, but there was no enforcement.   Jill Eisfelder, who lives on Villa View, said the neighbors have complained for years. Eisfelder presented the Council with a letter signed by 45 residential families and a packet of photos, illustrating the issues such as foot traffic and unsafe U-turns.   To resolve the situation, the neighbors are asking that the city install clearly visible, unobstructed and understandable ‘No Parking At Any Time’ signs along both sides of the road from Sunset to the park.   They also want the city to paint a yellow centerline on the road and paint the curbs red on the curves, where parking is especially dangerous.   According to their letter, ‘Most of the road has no prohibition against parking ‘ most notably the two hairpin turns where parking creates an extraordinary hazard. There are a few ‘No Parking’ signs along the road, but they are confusing and ambiguous.’   There are 14 ‘No Parking’ signs on the west side of the road, and seven signs on the east side of the road between Villa View and the park entrance.   Jessyca Avalos, a field deputy for Councilman Bill Rosendahl, told the Palisadian-Post on Monday that she has submitted a request to the L.A. Department of Transportation for more ‘no parking’ signs. She said signs have been ordered, but she does not have an installation date.   She has also asked DOT to paint a yellow centerline, but DOT officials informed her that this action would completely prohibit parking on both sides of the street, which they did not think was necessary.   Lt. Jody Perez of L.A. Parking Enforcement, who attended Thursday’s meeting, said that her officers do not ticket drivers if they can’t see the ‘No Parking’ sign from their vehicle. Once the new signs are posted, Perez said her officers will have a greater ability to ticket.   ’If people get a $55 ticket for parking illegally, they quickly figure out that it’s cheaper to park in the Will Rogers parking lot,’ Perez said.   Council member Joyce Brunelle said she thinks if Will Rogers lowered its $12 fee, more people would park in the lot. Will Rogers Park has a total of 118 regular paved parking spaces in addition to six disabled spots and two bus parking spaces. The overflow dirt areas can accommodate an additional 100 vehicles.   Topanga Sector Superintendent Lynette Brody responded that the fee is $12 because for the past three years, the state legislature has threatened to close the park for budgetary reasons.   ’It costs more money to keep the park open even if we cut down on the fees,’ Brody said, noting that the Angeles District (from Point Mugu to Los Angeles State Historic Park) brings in between $2 to $3 million in day-use fees, but requires a $4.5 million budget to operate.   If voters had passed Proposition 21 in Tuesday’s election, California residents would have been able to park in the Will Rogers lot for free. The measure had proposed an $18 annual surcharge on all vehicles registered in the state in exchange for free day-use entry to all state parks.     Brody apologized to the neighbors for the additional traffic caused by the inaugural Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic. She explained that the park had received a permit for the event and was allowed to have 2,500 visitors; about 1,700 people attended.   Unfortunately, instead of taking the shuttle from Will Rogers State Beach, many attendees chose to park illegally on the road and walk up to the park, some of them wearing high-heels. Brody said she would work with the proper city agencies to alleviate this problem. Perez added that if she is notified in advance, she can have extra officers in the area to provide enforcement.   ’We will make sure that we address it for the next event,’ Brody said.
The candidates running for a seat on the Palisades Charter High School board will share their goals for the school tonight from 6 to 7 p.m. in Room B-101 on campus.   There are seven open seats on the 11-member board, which comprises three community members, three parents, three teachers, one classified staff member and one administrator.   Lisa Kaas Boyle is running unopposed for the community seat, which will be voted on by PaliHi personnel, parents and students. Vicky Frances, Naomi Norwood and Robert Hayman are contending for the other community seat, which will be voted on by PaliHi personnel.   PaliHi parents will vote for their seats. Incumbent John Callas and Stephanie Inyama are vying for the traveling parent seat, while Carol Osborne, Ines Boechat, Allison Holdorff Polhill and Randi Levin are competing for the parent seat. A traveling parent resides in the communities represented by PaliHi’s Permit with Transportation, Public School Choice and Magnet programs.   The teachers and classified staff members will vote for their own representatives. Social studies teacher Chris Lee is running unopposed for one of the faculty seats, while special education teacher and incumbent James Paleno is running unopposed for the other seat. Julia O’Grady and Eleanor Rozell are seeking the classified staff position.   Voters have until Wednesday, November 10 to cast their ballot. The Palisadian-Post has interviewed those candidates who will be voted on by parents and students.
John Callas, a sales director for the Rovi Corporation, has served on the board for the past two years. Since his election, he has lobbied the board to write policies that clearly define the roles and responsibilities of the administrators and the board. He is now working on that vision as part of PaliHi’s Governance Policy Committee.   If re-elected, Callas wants to work on collective bargaining negotiations, and he thinks teachers should be graded on the basis of performance rather than tenure.   ’There are fantastic teachers at this school,’ said Callas, who has two children at PaliHi. ‘Some of the bad ones are holding back the community.’   In addition, Callas said he would like to ensure that the board clearly communicates to all stakeholders the hiring process for selecting a new principal/executive director and then adheres to that course of action.   ’I’m so in favor of the UCLA program to get our senior-level team,’ Callas said. The board hired consultants from the UCLA School Management Program for the 2010-11 school year to assist the school community with the selection of a new principal and/or executive director. Stephanie Inyama, who has a junior at the school, says she would ensure that the UCLA hiring process is timely, productive and cost-effective. She also wants to help develop a student transportation plan, with the goal of maintaining campus diversity and enrollment. This spring, LAUSD and PaliHi agreed to phase out busing students from around the city to the school by 2012-13 because of budget constraints.   In addition, Inyama said she wants to ‘help implement positive and sustainable improvements within the math department in order to produce better student outcomes and reduce the need for outside tutoring.’   Inyama thinks that her 10 years of experience as a community consultant will be beneficial to the board. She works with public and private agencies and foundations to enhance the lives of children and families.
After serving as the community representative for one year, Carol Osborne became so impressed with PaliHi that she decided to send her daughter there rather than private school as a freshman. Therefore, she had to step down from her community-member seat a year early.   ’I did want to serve the two years that I committed to,’ Osborne said of why she decided to run for the parent seat. ‘I think we made a lot of progress this past year, and I like to think that I helped in that progress.’   Osborne, who works as a corporate lawyer and regularly advises boards of directors on governance issues, said that she thinks she helped the board better understand its role, which is to focus on policy, strategy and the mission of the school.   If re-elected, Osborne (the board’s current vice chair) wants to continue that work in addition to helping the board develop a budget strategy.   ’I think we need to be innovative about growing our revenue outside of what the state gives us,’ Osborne said, noting that, for example, the school could charge tuition for summer school. Ines Boechat, a UCLA professor of radiology and pediatrics for 30 years, said she thinks her 10 years of experience working on diversity issues in the UC system will be an asset to PaliHi’s board. She is currently a member of the UC President’s Advisory Committee on Climate, Culture and Inclusion.   ’Our state has a very diverse population, which is not well represented at the UC schools,’ Boechat said. ‘My goal is to work with [PaliHi] to improve what is called the ‘leaking pipeline’ and motivate students to go to college.’   Boechat, who has a daughter at PaliHi, also served on the University Senate Academic Council, so she is knowledgeable about the new requirements for admission, which will be implemented in 2013.   ’I believe my experience and skills would be helpful to the school and our community,’ Boechat said. Allison Polhill, an attorney, has spent the past 12 years volunteering her time at Pacific Palisades schools. She currently serves on PaliHi’s Governance Policy and Hiring committees. She volunteers as a volleyball team parent and fundraises for the marching band.   A mother of two PaliHi students, Polhill has also served on Palisades Elementary’s and Paul Revere Charter Middle School’s boards and charter writing committees. Because of this, she said she understands how boards and charter schools operate. She also emphasizes her ability to bring people together around a common issue.   ’I know how to diffuse conflict and not to take it personally,’ Polhill said. Randi Levin, who has two children at PaliHi, says she wants to make sure the lack of state funding for education has the least impact on students.   As part of her job as general manager and chief technology officer for the City of Los Angeles, she has saved the city more than $30 million in the past three years through a variety of mechanisms such as zero-based budgeting, which is also practiced at PaliHi, and combining and renegotiating contracts. She would like to employ similar methods at PaliHi.   Levin also wants PaliHi to explore the use of new technology such as online classes as a financial resource. Students who are unable to attend a public high school because of illness or work can still be enrolled through online classes, which means the school continues to receive state funding for them. The state pays schools on the basis of the number of students who attend on a regular basis. Pali officials are already working to start such a distance learning program.
Lisa Kaas Boyle, an environmental attorney and co-founder and policy director for the Plastic Pollution Coalition, has volunteered with the Independent School Alliance for the past two years helping to raise funds, so that students who do not have the financial resources can attend private schools.   The experience inspired her to run for the PaliHi board because she wanted to improve the entire public school system for all students.   ’It’s not enough to save a few,’ said Boyle, a 20-year Palisades resident. ‘We have to save them all. There has to be a public school system where every child has the opportunity to a great education.’   She noted that there is a growing gap between the rich and poor in this country and an increasing difference between what is offered at private schools compared to public schools. Her 15-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son attend Thacher School (a boarding school in Ojai) and Brentwood School, respectively.   ’I feel a personal responsibility to make the high school in my community the best it can be,’ Boyle said.
Tracie Carole Christensen, a resident of Pacific Palisades, died Wednesday, October 20, in Santa Monica after a long and courageous battle with cancer. She was 46. Born in Glendale, California, to Carole and Charles Deack on November 14, 1963, Tracie was raised in Alhambra and attended Marguerita Elementary School with her younger brother, Scott. Tracie loved to dance and perform as a child, and pursued her passion by becoming both a junior varsity and varsity cheerleader at Alhambra High School. She also excelled academically, graduating with honors, and was named to the National Society of Distinguished High School Students. Tracie earned her bachelor’s degree in communications at UC Santa Barbara, and made the dean’s list before graduating in 1985. She was a member of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority, where she met sisters who would become her lifelong friends. Tracie’s career path led her to UCLA, where she headed the development program for the College of Letters and Science while concurrently directing the Women and Philanthropy program. In 2008, she was selected from a national pool of candidates for the job of associate vice chancellor for development. At UCLA, Tracie was known as ‘a talented leader with an impeccable strength of character and fierce conviction’who consistently forged dynamic and loyal teams marked by an esprit de corps and a dedication to having fun in pursuit of unwavering success.’ Tracie married Robert (Rob) Christensen in 1993, and settled in Pacific Palisades. Together they enjoyed windsurfing, traveling to Hawaii, Aruba, Japan and many other destinations. After their son Cade was born in 1998, Tracie became a devoted mother who treasured her family and rarely missed Cade’s baseball, soccer, football and basketball games, along with the many school activities. Always with a smile on her face, Tracie was a shining light to her family, a dedicated friend and an inspiration to her colleagues. In addition to Rob and Cade Christensen, Tracie is survived by her parents, Carole and Charles Deack; her brother Scott; sister-in-law Denise; and two nephews, Ryan and Trevor. Services were held on November 1 at St. Matthew’s Church in Pacific Palisades, followed by burial services at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica. An additional tribute to Tracie Christensen will be held at UCLA on November 7 at 1 p.m. at Royce Hall. All interested community members are encouraged to attend. In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be made to the ‘Cade Robert Christensen Scholarship Trust,’ c/o Keenan Behrle, 9665 Wilshire Blvd., Suite M-10, Beverly Hills, CA 90212, or the UCLA Sarcoma Program at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
John Arthur Buck, a former resident of Pacific Palisades, died on June 22 in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was 56. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 23, 1953, John moved with his family to the Huntington Palisades in 1955. After graduating from Palisades High, he received a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University. While at BYU, he went on a two-year mission to Belgium; he spoke fluent French and had a wonderful experience there. After working for Bank of America for many years, John tried to be an entrepreneur. He was working for a casino in Las Vegas as a reservations clerk before he died. ’In 2007, my brother invited me on a trip to the Turks and Caicos Islands for a week,’ said his sister Catherine. ‘He was generous that way.’ John was predeceased by his parents, Varge and Olive, his younger brother Roger, and his twin brother, Don Paul Buck. Survivors include his sister, Catherine Buck Maddox of Waco, Texas. A service will be held Friday, November 5, at Westwood Memorial Mortuary in Westwood.
Roberta Beagles Herr, a native of Pacific Palisades, passed away on October 30 at the age of 52, after a three-week fight with ‘poorly differentiated small cell cancer occurring in the liver.” Born at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica in 1958, Roberta lived her childhood on the Castellammare mesa. She had a congenital hearing loss, but with great determination became an extremely good lip-reader. She attended Marquez Elementary, Paul Revere Junior High and graduated from Palisades High in 1975. She attended UC Irvine and San Jose State University, where she earned a degree in occupational therapy. Roberta married Norman Herr in 1981 at Palisades Presbyterian Church, and enjoyed 29 wonderful years of marriage.’ During the early years of her marriage, Roberta worked as an occupational therapist at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, but gave it up to be an at-home mom, the job she enjoyed most in life. She was active with her family at Valley Presbyterian Church in North Hills, where she was involved in children’s ministries for the past 25 years. ‘ Roberta was a quiet servant and friend who blessed many, many lives. She enjoyed time with her husband, children and friends, and she spent many days camping and hiking with her family throughout national parks and wilderness areas in the United States and Canada. Recently, she had acquired a great interest in European travel because her son-in-law is from the Netherlands. ‘ Roberta is survived by her loving husband, Norman Herr, a professor at Cal State Northridge; her mother, Alice Beagles, a long-time resident of Pacific Palisades; her sister, Jessica Roos, a former school board member in Culver City;’her daughter, Christiana Naaktgeboren, who with her husband Marten serve in Uganda with Water Missions, a’Christian engineering organization serving the water and sanitation needs of people in developing countries and disaster areas; her son Stephen, a recent graduate of UC Santa Barbara; and her youngest son, John, a sophomore engineering student at UC Santa Barbara. Memorial services will be held on Saturday, November 6, at 2 p.m. at Valley Presbyterian Church, 9200 Haskell Ave., North Hills.’Memorial donations may be made to the Reformed University Fellowship (UCSB chapter), or Water Missions International.
By Stephen Motika Palisadian-Post Contributor Susan Suntree, a Santa Monica resident, is a poet, performer and teacher deeply engaged with Los Angeles’s prehistoric past. Her new book, ‘Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California,’ (University of Nebraska Press) culminates a more than 25-year effort to transform her understanding of the region’s dynamic geological and early human history into a unique poetic account. She’ll be reading from the book at Village Books at 7:30 p.m on Monday, November 8, and giving a slide talk derived from her research at the Santa Monica Public Library on Wednesday, December 8. Suntree’s 300-page book has been described by the writer Carolyn See as an ‘absolutely unique work of art,’ and a ‘symphonic epic in verse’ by UCLA professor Peter Nabokov. Yet, it’s also an important gathering of the natural history and myths and songs of the indigenous people of Southern California. Although it has some of the trademarks of a scholarly book, with an introduction by anthropologist Lowell John Bean, a large section of notes and an extensive bibliography, Suntree’s rich and expansive account of the restless land and the ancient singers defines the heart of this book. The project began simply enough, in the mid 1980s, when Suntree hoped to answer a question that was nagging her: ‘Where am I?’ A recent transplant to Los Angeles, she was shocked by the city after living in the Sierra Nevada foothills for the previous five years. ‘In Northern California,’ she told the Palisadian-Post, it was not uncommon for people to have knowledge of the geography and the indigenous culture. Here, no one knows where they are.’ Suntree, who studied folklore and English at the University of Arizona and theater at the University of Kent, had been working in performance, so she applied for funding by the newly created Santa Monica Art Commission. Inspired by her friend, poet Gary Snyder’s experience in Kyoto, Japan, where he visited the sacred Shinto sites in order to be acquainted with the area, she proposed the creation of a performance titled ‘Sacred Sites/Santa Monica.’ She received the grant and proceeded to write a script for a group of actors who performed the piece in schools and theatres in the region. After that, the show went dormant until 1992, when Cal Sate L.A. commissioned a ‘Sacred Sites/Los Angeles.’ The next iteration included a one-woman show, enlivened by different masks, which Suntree wears while performing, and development of a tour to prehistoric sites that she gave to classes and other interested groups. She took the show to Australia and, through the support of the 18th Street Art Center, to Utrecht, Holland. People began to ask if she was working on a book. The project ‘was burning a hole in my filing cabinet, and I had to make a decision about whether to do the book or not,’ Suntree explained. We either needed to break up or get together. I decided to do it.’ But writing the book involved filling in gaps in her understanding of geological and Native American oral history that didn’t even exist in books. Suntree spent hours interviewing all manner of paleo-scientists, from archeologists and ethnographers to botanists and geologists. She visited many archives, including that of Constance Goddard DuBois, a late 19th-century bluestocking, lesbian novelist from New England who came to Southern California after reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘Ramona.’ ’DuBois became an amateur anthropologist, collecting objects, but even more importantly, the oral tradition of Luise’o Indians,’ said Suntree, who believes that without DuBois’s work, we wouldn’t have valuable songs and stories of the local tribes. For the Native people of Southern California, Suntree added, ‘The songs are the core of the cultural contract. The history of your family is in a song. The myths are sung.’ Suntree also canvassed key Native American and geologic sites. She was taken around by people like Chester King, the foremost archeologist of the Southern Chumash and Northern Tongva, the two tribes that lived in the Santa Monica Mountains. Other locations included the site where the San Andreas Fault is exposed in the Palmdale road cut of the Antelope Valley Freeway. She recalled witnessing ‘the dramatic twist and turn of the fault, a ribbon of breakage of this absolutely dramatic piece of fault. To stand there and really contemplate it was amazing, as though seeing one coil of the primordial snake.’ Joined by a Native American leader, her visit to Juitgait, known to us as Mt. Baldy, and one of the peaks in the ring of Seven Sacred Mountains that surround the greater Los Angeles area made a powerful impact. Each of the peaks is important in the Native people’s vision of the world. The valley between Frazier Mountain and Mount Pinos ‘is the arena of the center of the world,’ Suntree said. ‘Castle Peak in the Simi Hills means ‘Place of the tongue’ and is particularly charged with energy.’ The Santa Monica Mountains are rich with petroglyphs and village sites. Suntree noted that you can find cemeteries and places for doctoring, where ‘human beings enacted their connections with the rest of the universe,’ throughout the range. There were large Tongva villages at Topanga, which means ‘village in the mountains that run to the sea,’ in Malibu creek, and in Temescal Canyon. A key Tongva village stood where University High School is today. Called Koruuvanga, which means ‘place where we are in the sun,’ it sits on the Santa Monica-Malibu fault line, where a separation in the bedrock causes a line of fresh water springs. Suntree said: ‘It was a perfect location for a village, with fresh water, a wetland area that attracted birds, an upland going up to the Santa Monica mountains, and right on the old Indian trail.’ It’s where Cabrillo camped on the Feast of Saint Monica in 1769 and gave the bay and region its name. Today, several acres are preserved and maintained by the Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation. Suntree explained that one of the most difficult things for her to understand was the rotation of the tectonic plates, from east to west. ‘The plasticity and motion of landscape is constant. All this land came twirling up from Mexico.’ She added with a laugh, ‘We’re heading to our demise in the Aleutian trench.’ In the book, Suntree starts her narrative well before the Earth was formed, going back more than 14 billion years, before space and time, and takes us up to the arrival of the Spaniards. She found the act of converting her performance scripts into the book manuscript to be a natural transition and believes that the long poem reflects the musicality of the performance piece. She wanted to score the poem so that the reader would get a sense of the rhythm of language and promote her readers’ inner ear, so that ‘they think there’s a storyteller in their head. I didn’t want people to be able to read this in blocks (like prose), but experience a landscape on the page, like a topographical map.’ The book includes 29 photographs by Juergen Nogai, the architectural photographer and a neighbor Suntree hopes to work with on a coffee-table book of photos of the sacred sites. ‘I think his architectural eye, and eye for structure, brought another way to seeing to the text, and added contrast to the writing.’ She is amazed how differently people look at sites once they know how rich the places are; knowing something happened there before gets them to ‘crack open the concrete’ and visualize a very rich history. After experiencing many rejection letters, Suntree caught a break when she showed the manuscript to William Deverell, the Los Angeles historian and USC professor. He thought the University of Nebraska Press editor Matt Bokovoy might like it. He was right. In advance of publication, Suntree’s manuscript was carefully vetted by a historian, a Native American scholar, and a paleontologist, who ‘went through it with a flea comb,’ Suntree said. ‘While the paleontologist found errors, he also said that he had learned a few things he didn’t know.’ Suntree takes satisfaction in correctly representing the science and myths, but also hopes that she has written a book that will ‘elevate the story and carry it forward.’
Music at St. Matthew’s 2010 – 2011 season continues on Friday, November 12, at 8 p.m. with chamber music by Beethoven, Mozart and Strauss.’Tickets are $35 at the door; $10 for students. The program will bring together principal players from the critically acclaimed Chamber Orchestra at St. Matthew’s for performances of Beethoven’s Septet (Opus 20), Mozart’s Oboe Quartet and an arrangement of Richard Strauss’s tone poem, ‘Til Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.’ ’World Class Music Close to Home’ is the Music Guild’s slogan and well describes the quality of programs offered by St. Matthew’s in the acoustically and visually brilliant space by architect Charles Moore.’ For details about future Friday night programs, visit MusicGuildOnline.org. For additional information, call (310) 573-7422. ‘
Will Rogers State Historical Park is hosting the Will Rogers’ Dust Bowl Birthday Party on Sunday, November 7, from noon to 3 p.m. at the park in Pacific Palisades. (Rogers was born on November 4, 1879.) Dutch Newman and the Musical Melodians will perform 1920’s and 1930’s music from noon to 2 p.m., while ranch house tours and kids’ activities are also offered. Period-attired guests will add to the Dust Bowl theme. ‘Newman, influenced by Duke Ellington, Ted Weems, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson and the California Ramblers, finds inspiration from silent and classic-era films and by listening to his collection of 78-rpm records on his portable Victrola. A regular performer in the Los Angeles area since 2002, Newman and his band incorporate the sounds of ukulele, stand-up bass, piano, clarinet, trombone and other horns as well as guitar and violin to fully realize that special sound.’ Chanteuse Mikal Sandoval, also a Will Rogers park ranger, is a veritable encyclopedia of songs from that era. With her trained voice, dance skills and the art of costume, Sandoval provides the finishing touch. The new Will Rogers Ranch Foundation gift shop will also offer a 10-percent discount to celebrate Will’s birthday. In honor of Will Rogers’ legacy of philanthropy, a canned food and fund drive to benefit the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank is ongoing through Sunday. Non-perishable food and personal hygiene items are gratefully accepted at the ranger’s office at the park. All monetary contributions are tax-deductible. Guests who donate five or more items will receive a complimentary ‘Will Rogers Cookbook.’ Contact: (310) 454-8212, ext. 6.
Storytime for children ages 3 and up, 4 p.m. in the Palisades Branch Library community room, 861 Alma Real. Amy Lee Coy discusses and signs ‘From Death Do I Part: How I Freed Myself From Addiction,’ 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. The book is an intimate exposure of Amy Lee Coy’s courageous journey through recovery from over 20 years of substance abuse’without the aid of conventional methods such as AA, psychiatry or medication.
Jeff Sherratt reads and signs ‘Detour to Murder,’ a film noir mystery, 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. Opening night of Theatre Palisades’ ‘Putting It Together,’ a musical revue showcasing the songs of Stephen Sondheim, 8 p.m. at Pierson Playhouse, 941 Temescal Canyon Rd. Performances are Friday and Saturday nights and a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m., through December 15. For tickets ($18-$22) call 310-454-1970.
Friends of the Library book sale, 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Palisades Branch Library parking lot, 861 Alma Real.
Will Rogers State Historical Park hosts a Dust Bowl Birthday Party in honor of Will Rogers, noon to 3 p.m. (See story, page 14.)
Sunrise Assisted Living hosts a free Alzheimer’s support group on the second Monday and fourth Wednesday of each month, 6:30 p.m. at 15441 Sunset. Please RSVP by calling the front desk at (310) 573-9545. Dean Pasch and Susan Suntree are featured at Moonday, a monthly Westside poetry reading, 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. (See story, page 13.)
The Palisades Woman’s Club presents The Ceora Winds, 11:45 a.m. at the clubhouse, 901 Haverford. The program is free. For lunch ($15) call (310) 454-7144. Monthly meeting of the Santa Monica Canyon Civic Association, 7:30 p.m. at Rustic Canyon Park. The public is invited.
Coldwell Banker realtor Michael Edlen will be guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Palisades AARP chapter, 2 p.m. at the Woman’s Club, 901 Haverford. The public is invited. Refreshments will be served. Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock will speak about art installations they have created for German and U.S. museums, 8 p.m. at Villa Aurora, 520 Paseo Miramar. For tickets ($10) call (310) 573-3603.
Diane Lefer and Hector Aristizabal discuss ‘The Blessing Next to the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism and Transformation,’ about a torture survivor from Colombia who has dedicated his life to healing the pains of others.
