At first blush, one wonders why Nicki Bair, a Pacific Palisades artist who bursts like soap bubbles with creative ideas, chose the meditative nature of weaving over the quicksilver of watercolor. In her case, technique and texture trump time. The art of weaving and tapestry is a rediscovery for many artists, who are attracted by many aspects of fiber art. Bair and fellow weaver Merna Strauch, a Palisades Highlands resident, recently received top honors in the Fiber Open II, a national juried exhibition, held early this month at the Studio Channel Islands Art Center. Bair won the Handweavers Guild of America Award for outstanding creativity and craftsmanship for her three-dimensional woven sculpture, ‘My Tapestry Spiral.’ Strauch took first place for her wedge-weave tapestry, ‘Echoes.’ Both women became friends through their participation in several of the many local and national weaving associations that provide training and camaraderie to like-minded artists. Although Nicki’s mother was a weaver, it wasn’t until her death in 2002 when Nicki inherited her mom’s black four-harness loom that had stood in her kitchen, that she discovered her mother’s joy. Merna took up weaving in the 1970s, after taking a course at the Smithsonian when she and her husband Ralph lived in Washington, D. C. ‘I started out using a picture frame, but then in the late ’70s I bought loom.’ As with many specialty arts, there are accoutrements to accompany weaving. When Nicki’s mother died, Nicki’s sister announced that ‘all the art stuff goes to Nicki.’ So she inherited the loom, books and boxes of yarn. In the ensuing years, she has collected four more looms, each of which is in service, which explains how she can develop so many ideas simultaneously. A vertical loom, one of three in her living room, is used for tapestry, another horizontal loom equipped with eight different shafts is for complex patterns. She uses her mother’s loom for sentimental reasons, and as a source of inspiration. While enjoying traditional weaving’the interlacing of two distinct sets of yarn, the warp and weft’Nicki and Merna are also drawn to the creative possibilities found in tapestry. In this form of textile art, all the warp threads are hidden in the complete work. ‘In tapestry you can do whatever you want, using the tactile quality of your yarn,’ Merna says. ‘The other distinction with tapestry is that the weft is discontinuous. You don’t have to go from one side to the other, which allows you to interlace each colored weft back and forth in its own small pattern area.’ Nicki and Merna also share a similar background in math. Merna majored in math at UCLA and was employed as a math technician at the aerospace firm AirResearch, where she assisted on the first Project Mercury. Later, she worked as a public health statistician. She is amused that her jobs were made redundant by the advent of computers. At that point, she retired to weave and to do volunteer work. ‘I was a potter before I was a weaver,’ Merna says. ‘I remember when the children were little, I would wait until my husband came home from work to do my ceramics. But when I discovered weaving, it was much less messy and not breakable like clay, so the choice was easy.’ She does prefer to work on small pieces, not only for space considerations, but for time. Nicki enjoyed a career as a financial executive with Transamerica Services in Los Angeles. She liked the challenge of building things, like mutual fund products, but not so much running them. So, five years ago, she retired, no longer challenged. ‘I had this thought of what I’d do when I retired,’ she recalls. ‘I’d either start a financial planning business or perhaps become an artist. My friends thought I was crazy to want to do art, so I did.’ Nicki rises early and sits down at one of her looms to work the morning through. On one loom, she is weaving a piece with sewing thread, which glows like spider’s silk. On the horizontal loom in the living room, she is developing her latest idea: a murder mystery. ‘I am writing the story in words and weaving in weft. Each character will have its own identifying pattern, as will the mood of the drama: scary, confusing, calm.’ Every four inches, Nicki has slipped in a court reporter’s erasing tape with words printed on it, which she describes as ‘the words not used.’ If this weren’t enough, Nicki imagines this ‘book’ made into a kimono, lined with pieced silk that will have a stencil of the front and back covers of the book. She expects to enter this in a contest and plans to have the material completed by October. For the intricate pieces, Nicki uses a pattern. Merna laughs, pointing to Nicki’s pattern for one of her beetle series that, as appropriate to her mathematical background, was created on an Excel spreadsheet. Weaving provides not only an artistic outlet, but also a sanctuary, the friends explain. In her recent award-winning piece, Merna explored the frontiers of the tapestry medium. For a number of years, she included small areas of wedge weave in her tapestries. This distorts the edge of the piece, producing a scalloped effect. The other side of the piece had the traditional straight selvedge. Her challenge? What happens when the distorted area on one side meets the traditional tapestry woven area? The answer came in the monochromatic ‘Edges’ series. ‘Echoes’ is the fifth piece in the series. Nicki’s winning piece came out looking like 17 yards of fusilli, she says, pointing to its spiral shape. There is a growing population of weavers, the women agree. ‘I think it comes from an interest in knitting,’ Merna says. ‘Now there are smaller looms aimed at knitters. They are portable so you can carry them around and can be practical if you live in a small apartment.’ As an avenue to friendship, both women feel deep loyalty to the Seaside Weavers, a Westside group, that Merna has been affiliated with for 30 years. ‘We have been thinking about writing a book about traveling together,’ says Merna, recalling the many life stories the members have shared over the decades. For more information, contact The Weaving Diva nicki@nickibair.com

‘I’d long dreamed of moving into food writing,’ Denise Roig explains in ‘Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School’ (Signature), which documents the rigors of wrestling with flour and butter, the temperaments of teachers and her fellow students’any or all of which could explode and often did in the heat of a baker’s kitchen. Roig, who grew up in Pacific Palisades and graduated from Palisades High in 1965, will talk about her book on Friday, July 31 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. When at age 56 Roig signed up for a professional program at The Pearson School of Culinary Arts, she did it almost breathlessly, not because of her passion for French pastry, but to escape the monotony that had set in after years of teaching writing to university students, who had a lackadaisical attitude. The school was located just blocks from her home in Montreal; she passed it every day on her way to and from work at Concordia University. It wasn’t as if any school would have inspired her, Roig was interested in baking and thought herself a pretty good p’tissier. She had been a serious baker at 17, having learned at the side of her mother, Jacky, ‘a baker without equal.’ Feeling awkward and conspicuous because she was the oldest in the program and the only American, Roig elected at the start not to reveal her intention of writing a book. She wanted to blend in, be a student among students,’ she told her husband Ray ‘Beauch’ Beauchemin.   The school offers the only government-supported pastry-making program in English in Montreal, and is considered to be as professional and competitive as the more expensive and ‘snootier’ male-dominated French counterpart: the ITHQ (l’Institut de tourism et l’h’telerie du Qu’bec). There were 23 women and one man, Qiang, in Roig’s program that year, 2003.   Roig’s intention was to write a journal of sorts with each chapter punctuated by a recipe, and she received a $10,000 Canada Council Grant to help with the cost of not working for a year. ‘I pitched the book a month into pastry school,’ Roig says during an interview at her parents’ house in the Palisades. ‘I saw this as an exploration of how we learn to master something, observing myself and my classmates. How do we get perfect at something?’ Her efforts at hiding her book plans were soon revealed, but by that time, she was integrated with her classmates, who were encouraging. ‘I filled up five notebooks,’ she says. ‘I took notes on everything: paper towels, books, my official textbook and even in the margins of my recipe cards.’   In the first year of the project, Roig asked members of her woman’s fiction group to read the first three chapters and was surprised by their unanimous response. ‘They said, ‘We want to know about Denise as a character.’ Now I had five people urging me to write the ‘B’ role’the other part of the story.’ Roig reworked the manuscript, splicing her own thoughts, feelings, fears, and triumphs into the narrative. She describes the classroom, the Lab as it is called, the rotating oven, the blast freezer, and the giant Hobart mixers. Her uniform, a white, high-necked chef’s jacket and houndstooth-check pants, must be worn every day. No jewelry, not even a wedding ring, is permitted; fingernails must be kept short and unpolished, and students must wear a hairnet at all times.   Readers learn about her teachers and Roig’s assessment of each one, along with recipes and technique. She appreciates Claudette’s high expectations and hyperorganization, and Ardis’s food science and know-how and womanly warmth. But she loves and so appreciates the humanness of Alfred, a short, bald, teddy-bear of a chef, who is the teacher for the biggest module of the year”Creams, Fillings and Glazes.’   ’With Alfred, we laugh, we learn, and we come out better people,’ she writes. The year is tough as Roig must balance the eight-hour, highly intense school days while laboring under her own self-doubts’her track record of quitting (the Juilliard dance program), memories of her haunting eating disorder’and maintaining a home life with Beauch and their daughter, Georgia, a special needs child. She makes friends, especially with Jen, who sits on the other side of her in class. She’s 18, but they become pals and are often are paired together for class assignments. ‘There is an evenness about her,’ Roig says. ‘I watched her grow up that year and although she grew up making Duncan Hines, she was talented right away.’ Roig came to appreciate her school, a working-class school, which she learned was more what the real world of professional cooking resembles. ‘Our teachers told us that we were going to be apprentice chefs for a long time, we were not going to be creating masterpieces right away. This first year was not a year to be creative. It was all about repetition, repetition and following what the chef tells you. Qui, Chef!’ In the end, Roig realized that, for the first time, she was part of a team. She had bonded with these people. ‘Even with the pressure, the laundry, the fights, I’m part of something here,’ she writes. ‘I’m a girl again, a girl among girls (plus Qiang, whom we treat as one of the girls), giggling about boobs and boys while we learn something new. I’m learning the real, non-corporate, non-buzz-word meaning of teamwork. This is my team.’ Since last September, Roig and her family have been living in the wealthy United Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi, where Beauch was hired as deputy foreign editor of the National, an English-language newspaper owned by the royal family. While living in an Arab state more than 6,000 miles from Montreal has required some adjustments, Roig has baked a tremendous amount. ‘It is comforting for me and a connection to my neighbors. You have to reach out to people, so we have invited many people to our home for breakfast or dinner.’

Julius Caesar was one of the first of Shakespeare’s plays I studied. My eighth-grade teacher favored having little groups of us act out certain scenes in the play. A good pedagogy, for, lo, these many decades later, I recaptured not only the narrative line but also the memorable passages of poised and skillful rhetoric embedded in Theatricum Botanicum’s production. The tragedy unwinds as the inexorable result of Caesar’s unchecked ambition. And while the play is named for Caesar, it pivots on the character of Brutus, whose integrity and gentility make his decision to join the conspirators to assassinate the arrogant and megalomanaical Caesar his moral dilemma. Mike Peebler’s Brutus is a Stoic, serious in nature, but he also displays tenderness, as seen in the touching picture of his wife’s love and his affection for her, and for his young servant, Lucius. The scene between the visibly pregnant Portia (Susan Angelo) and Brutus is one of the play’s most moving moments. To serve the plot, Caesar must show an outsized ego, giving little hint of the attributes that made him one of the world’s great leaders. In this production, Carl Palmer still manages to portray a flesh-and-blood Caesar, who is at once a boisterous ‘good ol’ boy’ and a deferential husband to his wife, Calpurnia (D.J. Harner). Speaking of boisterous, Aaron Hendry’s Marc Antony displays equal parts of frolicsome sexuality, military prowess, and astute political purpose. Geer’s decision to cast Melora Marshall in the important role of Cassius was a misstep. Not even this highly gifted actor was able to present Cassius as more than a sullen, mordant Roman. He is the man, after all, who is the dynamic personality among the rebels, and who convinces Brutus to join the conspirators. Yet in this interpretation, he doesn’t resemble that man whom Caesar estimates as having a sharp intelligence who ‘looks quite through the deeds of men.’ A woman in the role, played straight with no hint of irony, doesn’t convince us of this powerful military man who had once fought against Caesar. Director Ellen Geer offers a straightforward reading of the text ably interpreted by the cast. While the theme is all too familiar to modern audiences, she avoids coloring the action for dramatic effect. The events themselves provide more than enough action, particularly as choreographed on and around the expansive outdoor stage at the Theatricum. In the end, the marvel of ‘Julius Caesar’ is Shakespeare’s blank verse, with its characteristic heightening of imagination and language. So many great speeches: Brutus’ soliloquy rationalizing the need for killing Caesar; Antony’s speech over Caesar’s body, and the orations of Brutus and Antony at Caesar’s funeral. ‘Julius Caesar’ plays Sundays in August at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, August 29 at 4 p.m., with additional shows in September. For tickets, call 310-455-3723 or visit www.theatricum.com.

‘Annie Jr.,’ presented by Theatre Palisades Youth, is a perfectly delightful offering. One can’t go wrong listening to children with great voices, watching a Palisadian Labrador retriever make its acting debut, paying for reasonably priced tickets at a local theater, and enjoying a snack bar filled with Krispy Kreme doughnuts and candy.   All of this is available at Pierson Playhouse at 941 Temescal Canyon Rd. tonight through Sunday in the youth’s annual summer production.   The musical is based on the old comic strip, ‘Little Orphan Annie,’ and has music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Martin Charnin and book by Thomas Meehan. The musical opened on Broadway in 1977 and ran for nearly six years. I saw it on two occasions, once with my stepdaughter, a second time with my younger sister. They both loved it, but we were seated so far up in the balcony that both my younger guests wondered how they could get seats closer. At the Pierson every seat is near the stage and at the production last Saturday night there were few vacant seats.   I had forgotten how fun the songs are, including ‘Hard-Knock Life,’ ‘Little Girls,’ ‘You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile,’ and ‘Easy Street.’ Of course ‘Tomorrow’ is the song that instantly comes to mind, but it has been sung so often by children screeching it that I dreaded hearing it again. I was pleasantly surprised by the sweetness in Elizabeth Ryan’s voice as she sang, making the song totally enjoyable. As Annie, Ryan has a great deal of stage presence, which seems to come naturally.   She is one of many kids who live in the orphanage, run by Miss Hannigan (Veronica Ellis) who doesn’t like the little girls and spends most of her time threatening them. Played by Ellis with great aplomb, it is hard to image that this actress is only 12. Vocally, she handled her solo, ‘Little Girls,’ with maturity, and when singing with Jake Spivak (Rooster) and Megan Wheeler (Lily), the number was first-rate, with exactly the right balance.   Bryson Rawn plays Daddy Warbucks, the billionaire who decides to take in an orphan over Christmas. Annie is chosen and the interaction between the two leads is sweet’which seems to be true of this entire production. Katie Reinhold (Grace) is Warbucks’ secretary, and is lovely as well.   Trouble arises when Annie wants to find her real parents and Warbucks, in an effort to help the child, promises a $50,000 reward. This is an open invitation for all sorts of unscrupulous characters to try and win the money, including Rooster, Hannigan’s brother.   Director Dorothy Dillingham Blue has taken a cast of 32 young actors, ages 7 to 14, and given them all a chance to be seen and showcased, never easy on a small stage. The costuming on this show is spectacular’from the orphans’ ragged clothes to Grace’s tailored outfits to Warbucks’ staff. The set is nice, and includes a fully-lit Christmas tree.   A special nod has to go to the ‘littlest’ orphan, Stella Smyth (Molly), who with her exuberance and voice fills the stage. Topping off the grand evening, Sandy, the dog (Sandy Verrone) whose three owners Marianne, Teddy and Patric were all part of the production, slipped off the stage looking for ‘treats.’   Shows are July 30, 31 and August 1 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, August 2, at 2 p.m. For tickets ($12) call (310) 454-1970.