The great irony of the Palisades Symphony is that it was founded by a non-Palisadian. ‘I never lived in Pacific Palisades,’ says Joel B. Lish, the Symphony’s founder, music director and conductor, and a Tarzana resident. ‘But I taught at Palisades High School for 30 years.’ Today, Lish, a working musician, teaches music three days a week at the Jewish Home for the Aging and performs with another group at University Synagogue. But it was back in 1966, while teaching music at PaliHi, that Lish saw a void. ‘PaliHi at that time had adult classes in French and other subjects, but not orchestral music,’ Lish, 74, recalls. ‘It was a place where adults could come for their continuing education. My goal was to have an orchestra that the community could participate in. ‘A lot of good players were playing in the community. I went to the principal and I said I had about 30 people who wanted to do adult education.’ And so, Lish created the Palisades Symphony as an adult education class. Lish wanted to share with the town his love and appreciation for classical music. Forty-two years later, his venerable orchestra performs seven concerts a year, including two with the Brentwood Palisades Chorale, a summer-concert version opera, and a Young Artists showcase concert recognizing local student talent. The orchestra rehearses every Tuesday evening, usually in Mercer Hall, and is supported by private contributions, and all concerts are free to the public. Lish, who received his master’s degree from the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, where he studied viola performance and conducting, heads the orchestra’s current featured line-up: Francis Gaskins (violin); Bruce Hayes (violin); Emily Senchuk (flute); and Amy Hill Shevitz (violin), and her husband, Dan Shevitz (percussion). ‘Joel definitely challenges us,’ Amy Shevitz says. ‘My favorite concerts come twice a year, when we do a concert with the Brentwood Chorale. We did Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ Bach’s ‘Christmas Oratorio.’ My father, who sings tenor, came all the way from Ohio to sing at those concerts. ‘Joel sometimes does all the Tchiakovsky concertos in a row across various concerts,’ Shevitz continues. ‘It’s an interesting approach that gets you deep into a composer.’ Lish notes that his players stay loyal to the band and its mission. ‘Orchestras are a living organism and they evolve,’ he explains. ‘The turnover is by attrition’either moving away or death. The group always seems to stay about 45 people.’ One of the Symphony’s erstwhile members was PaliHi graduate David Newman, who today composes soundtracks for motion pictures, with the upcoming comic-book adaptation, the Christmas-slated ‘The Spirit,’ among his credits. ‘David was concertmaster and assistant conductor in the 1970s,’ explains Lish, who adds that Newman met his wife while they both played in the orchestra. ‘He’s been extremely gracious to me and outstanding in his willingness to donate. This year, we needed more scholarship money and he gave us a check.’ Lish maintains that his challenge is ‘to keep the good players involved and pick musicians who are challenged and enjoy learning. And supporting local composers whenever possible.’ Eva Holberg, who, with husband Dieter, has been actively involved with the local performing arts scene for decades, heads the Palisades Symphony. ‘I started while I was in high school in Stralsund (on the Baltic Coast),’ Holberg told the Palisadian-Post in 2005. ‘The Russians had shot out the windows of the local church, and water had damaged the organ. The choir director organized the organ-building club, which I was a part of. We asked our parents, relatives, teachers to contribute a mark a month, or some such amount, for the repairs, and we went around the countryside playing on trains, on boats, in churches, everywhere we could.’ Holberg moved to the Palisades from New Mexico in 1966 and quickly found her path. Make that ‘Pathways.’ ‘I had run the Pathways to Music program at Mt. St. Mary’s,’ Holberg says, helping introduce 150 elementary children to classical music. ‘They had just taken music out of the schools. ‘My daughter Astrid had been playing violin in the Palisades Symphony and she got me very interested in the Symphony. I decided to get involved.’ The Symphony’s current Board of Directors consists of Joel Busch, Katherine Conn, Sigrid Hofer, Ingemar Hulthage, Melissa Leicester, Danna Schilling, Emily Sanchuk, Lish and Holberg. The privately funded Symphony relies on such patrons as the Pacific Palisades Junior Women’s Club through its annual grant. Until her death at age 95 in 2004, philanthropist Bernice Park supported the Symphony along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Symphony dedicated a performance of Beethoven’s ‘Missa Solemnis’ to her memory in May 2004. ‘She was a big patron and she was a great loss to us,’ Lish says. Holberg emphasizes that the Palisades Symphony gets by with minimal overhead. ‘The orchestra is run as an evening adult school class,’ Holberg says. ‘Joel gets paid through LAUSD as an evening adult school teacher. We pay soloists’everyone else plays for free. They do this for the love of music.’ ‘Eva works very hard,’ Amy Shevitz says. ‘And every week, she gives us coffee and cookies when we rehearse.’ Asked what her role is, Holberg teases, ‘What a president does is to make sure the children who play in the sandbox don’t throw sand at each other.’ Then she gets serious, discussing how she enjoys helping Lish decide on the musical programs, the choir director and soloists, and other creative decisions. ‘By now we’ve worked for so many years together making music. He’s brilliant at working with groups like this,’ Holberg says of Lish. ‘He has the necessary patience, the energy, and the orchestra likes him.’ The Palisades Symphony culls its talented group from all over the Westside. Dr. Judith Collas (flute and piccolo) has played with the orchestra since 1976. ‘I played in a youth orchestra and my college orchestra,’ says Collas, a Palisadian since 1968, who comes from a family of musicians. Her brother is Richard Woodhams, principal oboe in the Philadelphia Symphony. Another brother plays bassoon and her sister plays violin and piano with the La Jolla University Symphony. ‘My grandfather founded the Peninsula Symphony in Palo Alto,’ Collas adds, and her parents started the California Youth Symphony in San Francisco. ‘It was very important for me to find an outlet,’ Collas continues. ‘I had a young child. It wasn’t until 1976 that I had the freedom to join the orchestra.’ She has enjoyed many highlights over the years. ‘The most thrilling was when we did Verdi’s ‘Requiem. There’s a terrific piccolo part but I love the music as well.’ Venice resident Amy Shevitz joined in 2001. ‘I had played the violin since 10 and after college I belonged to community orchestras,’ says the Ohio native, who stopped playing when she moved to Boston in 1979. ‘I had a new baby. I didn’t play for a very long time. I’m also an amateur ballet dancer.’ As she grew older and could not dance the way she used to, ‘I realized that one of the great things about the dancing is the music,’ Amy says. She was literally at a crossroads, so to speak, when the Palisades Symphony entered her life. ‘I met Joel Lish through happenstance,’ she recalls. ‘I was trying to sell a viola because I was going to shift back to violin. I had posted a note at the Crossroads School, where he was teaching. When our paths crossed, he asked me to try out.’ Late last year, her husband Dan Shevitz, who by day is the rabbi of the Venice-based Mishkon Tephilo Conservative Synagogue, joined the band. ‘Dan is very musical but hasn’t had a lot of training,’ Amy says. ‘He has an amazing ear, almost perfect pitch. He’s a terrific doumbek (hand drum) player and played it in a small Jewish music band in college. He also plays accordion.’ ‘The boundaries of the orchestra are rather porous,’ Dan says. ‘If you show up, you’re in. They’re always looking for strings; most of the other sections are pretty much covered.’ Dan Shevitz works with a second percussionist, Laird Hadgiman, a Mar Vista resident who has been in the Symphony for 40 years. He likens his place in the orchestra to his rabbinical role at Mishkon Tephilo Conservative Synagogue in Venice, which he’s led since 1996. ‘The same function,’ he says. ‘I’m the salt in the stew. The orchestra can get along without percussion as a good congregation could without a rabbi, but we try to make it tastier.’ On Sunday, December 7, music-lovers can look forward to some fine entertainment as the Palisades Symphony joins the Brentwood Chorale for a program that will feature ‘Scenes From The Nutcracker Suite’ and ‘Hodie’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams. And the Symphony’s musicians cannot wait to perform. ‘We love doing it together,’ Dan Shevitz says, describing playing with wife Amy in the orchestra. ‘People are very loyal to the Symphony,’ Collas says. ‘The most impressive thing is that none of the orchestra members are paid. Most community orchestras bring in ringers, but in our case, we have professional musicians who play for nothing because they enjoy classical music. It’s truly a community orchestra.’

As 007 Fever Reaches ‘Quantum’ Levels, We Catch Up With the ‘Her Majesty’s’ Star

Agent 007 fans will forever argue over which James Bond rules. Some defend the original, Sean Connery. Another camp prefers the campier Roger Moore. Pierce Brosnan may be the best-looking Bond; Timothy Daltry, the most underrated. Others root for the latest licensed-to-kill lothario, ‘blond Bond’ Daniel Craig, whose second blockbuster, ‘Quantum of Solace,”grossed $70.4 million on November 14”the biggest Bond opening ever. Of all the films, this writer prefers the Alpine-themed thriller in which Bond gets married and tussles Telly Savalas’ Blofeld. Love it or hate it, Peter Hunt’s ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ is the least formulaic Bond escapade, and the 1969 film’s star was Lazenby. George Lazenby. Last week, as ‘Quantum’ topped the box office, the Palisadian-Post talked about Bond and beyond with Lazenby at the Australian actor’s Brentwood residence. The former male model played the British super-spy only once, with the unenviable task of following Connery after a five-movie run. But before discussing Bond, Lazenby, lethally good-looking at 69, evokes another pair of icons. ‘Jimi Hendrix was supposed to do the music for my movie [1971’s ‘Universal Soldier’]. Then he died,’ explains Lazenby, relaxing in his airy living room. ‘Bruce Lee was supposed to do a movie with me and then he died. ‘I hardly knew either of them,’ he continues, although he got to know Hendrix (who was dating a woman staying at Lazenby’s London abode) just prior to the guitar virtuoso’s death. Hendrix lived in England because ‘some gangsters were after him in New York. He kept a pair of scissors in his belt for protection.’ Lazenby, due to star opposite Lee, didn’t. The martial-arts legend complained of a headache at their July 1973 lunch meeting to discuss ‘Game of Death.’ The next day, Lee’s press agent called with the tragic news. If these celebrities make odd bedfellows, recall that early-’70s London was that hedonistic hippie-haven ‘Austin Powers’ lampooned. Which explains why Lazenby was cavalier about his Bond assignment. ‘It was Connery’s gig,’ says Lazenby, who, at 29, became the youngest 007 actor, was of the generation who felt that ‘Bond was pass’. I was wearing stove pipe pants, everyone was wearing bell bottoms. I had short hair, the hippies wore long hair. It wasn’t fashionable to kill people. Women were coming on to men.’ Contrary to Internet data, Lazenby was not discovered in a commercial. He was rooming with fellow Aussie male model, Ken Gaherity, who knew Maggie Abbott, a CMA (today ICM) agent. ‘The Beatles and the Stones were getting too famous to get out of the house without being mobbed,’ Abbott tells the Post from her Palm Springs home. ‘They couldn’t go to the pictures, so they asked, ‘Can you do some private screenings?” Bond producers Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman invited Abbott to one such screening. Abbott invited Gaherity, who instead sent Lazenby with her. Two weeks later, the producers phoned Abbott in despair. ‘They were looking for a James Bond and they were having a lot of difficulty and frustration,’ Abbott says. ‘They pleaded, ‘Oh, Maggie, come on! You’ve got to know someone! He doesn’t have to be famous, just someone who has the look, the confidence.” Abbott urged Lazenby, in Paris, to return to London to screen test for a feature she could not discuss by phone. That, of course, was ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.’ Lazenby showed up for an audition looking Bond-like in sharp threads, a Rolex, and short hair. But if you think Lazenby was self-conscious about filling Connery’s tux, guess again. ‘An actor would go into an audition for the role thinking of Connery, but I wasn’t an actor,’ Lazenby admits. ‘I was so arrogant, I had nothing to lose.’ ‘Cubby and Harry were watching George cross the road out of the first floor of their building,’ Abbott says, ‘They were impressed. He hadn’t even come to the office yet.’ Lazenby by-passed a receptionist to race upstairs and impress casting director Dyson Lovell. Inside Saltzman’s office, Lazenby acted defiant and indifferent, listed bogus foreign-feature credits, even demanded remuneration for his screen test (and received it). Lazenby’s aloofness won him the part, after which the model scrambled to find an acting coach. That same day, Lazenby landed manager Ronan O’Rahilly, tickled Lazenby had duped Bond’s producers. ‘Majesty’s’ director Hunt, Lazenby adds, enjoyed ‘a belly-laugh’ when informed Lazenby had never acted. But that was okay’Hunt had never directed (‘Majesty’s’ became Hunt’s only Bond flick). When ‘Majesty’s’ producers realized ‘he’s a clothes peg,’ Lazenby recalls, they balked. Hunt fought to keep him. Lazenby disputes rumors that Brigitte Bardot was up for the Tracy Bond part, ultimately played by Diana Rigg. Catherine Deneuve verbally agreed to do ‘Majesty’s,’ but pulled out upon hearing a novice had been cast. Unsurprisingly, Lazenby would have preferred Deneuve, as ‘Majesty’s’ shoot was fraught with tension, although the October 30 Paris Match claimed that, of all the Bonds, Lois Maxwell (amatory receptionist Moneypenny in 14 Bond films) became enamored with Lazenby. Rahilly convinced Lazenby to turn down a seven-film Bond contract”despite Saltzman offering Lazenby $1 million plus stock (Clint Eastwood earned $500,000 per picture)”because he thought Lazenby could make the money in two movies. Na’ve to the business, Lazenby listened to Rahilly, later regretting it. On mixed reviews, ‘Majesty’s’ fell short of Connery’s grosses. After ‘Majesty’s,’ Lazenby socialized with David Niven (who played Bond in the 1967 ‘Casino Royale’), Grace Kelly, and Peter Sellers, with whom he improvised a ‘gumboots and umbrellas’ London-fundraiser dance routine. Lazenby and Sellers were ‘temporarily friends’ until Sellers accused Lazenby, who had worked with his wife, of sleeping with her. Lazenby enjoyed cameos in such Bond-inspired ventures as ‘The Nude Bomb’ (1980’s ‘Get Smart’ feature). ‘Emmanuelle’ sequels followed. Semi-retired, Lazenby, to paraphrase a ‘Majesty’s’ line, now has all the time in the world’ So what does Bond No. 2 think of 007’s new direction? ‘I was quite impressed with Dan Craig’s acting,’ says Lazenby. ‘He didn’t look like a Bond. I saw him in the movie and he convinced me.’ But he finds the violence excessive. ‘Maybe I’m too old, but the guy is a cold-hearted murderer. I think I gave him some heart.’

Horticulturalist Steve Williams could be talking about any number of home gardening issues at the Palisades Garden Club meeting on Monday, December 1 at 7:30 p.m. in the Woman’s Club, 901 Haverford Ave. But for this session, with the holidays coming up, Williams will be demonstrating the myriad possibilities of making wreaths from natural materials, including evergreen branches and cones, berries and unusual seed pods and edibles. Williams, who has a degree in horticultural science from Mt. San Antonio College, brings not only plant knowledge but also design expertise to the task. He spent many years at Descanso Gardens in the education department and plant propagation nursery, and worked with plant propagation at the Huntington Gardens. ‘While at Descanso, we used to make wreaths annually using the greenery from the grounds,’ Williams says. For the Garden Club demonstration, he will bring trimmings, cones and a variety of berries from the Mt. Sac campus, plus wire frames to build the wreaths. A Master Gardener, William also teaches five classes in the home gardening program at the college and submits a demonstration garden to the L.A. County Fair every year. The ornamental horticultural program at Mt. Sac is one of the largest in the state and includes course work in a variety of specialties from nursery management and landscaping to pest control and floral design.

Palisades High School drama students are opening this season’s theater program with Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night, Or What You Will,’ the debut production of the new drama teacher, Lisa Kraus Morford. Performances are set for Friday and Saturday, December 5 and 6 and December 12 and 13 at 7 p.m. in Mercer Hall. Noted as one of Shakespeare’s most studied and best-loved plays, the twin-based comedy of cross-dressing and mistaken identity is accessible to even novice Shakespeare readers. ‘With that knowledge and wanting to select a play that allows for a larger number of actors, I selected one of the most accessible and enjoyable of Shakespeare’s comedies,’ Murford says. ‘It is written with many lead and supporting actors, and that has allowed all of the students to embrace the text. We are shifting the time period to the 1970s, but the text will remain the original’with cuts, of course, to keep it manageable for actors and audience.’ The actual Elizabethan festival of Twelfth Night involved the antics of a Lord of Misrule, who before leaving his temporary position of authority, calls for entertainment; the play has been regarded as preserving this festive atmosphere. This leads to the general inversion of the order of things, most notably gender roles. Morford, originally from southern Idaho, received a B.A. from Seattle Pacific University in English, and an M.A. in theater production from Central Washington University. ‘PaliHi has a longstanding theater tradition, and with my first show here, I wanted to continue that tradition as well as bring my own strengths to play,’ Morford says. ‘I enjoy Shakespeare, and Pali has long participated in the DTASC festival, which in the spring is always based on his works. ‘The students have been rehearsing for many weeks, and the show will be a lot of fun. We hope the community will come and support the advanced work that Pali students are committed to achieving.’ The cast includes Alex Caan (Duke Orsino); Mia Canter (Olivia); Sarah Etaat (Orsino’s Court); Lauren Hansen (Feste the Fool); Katie Lantz (Curio); Elena Loper (Maria); Negar Mahmoodi (Officer); Natasha Milner ( Orsino’s Court); Maddie Packer (Orsino’s Court); Sean Pinto (Malvolio); Katy Pool (Olivia’s attendant); Mariel Redlin (Sir Andrew Aguecheek); Katrina Rochlin (Officer); Carmen Rosales (Understudy/Member of the Court); Jesse Roth (Valentine); Julian Schwartzman (Sir Toby Belch); Eli Shavalian (Captain/Priest); Tasha Solomita (Orsino & Olivia’s Court); Alec Strasmore (Sebastian); Alessandra Varsano (Fabian); Olivia Walker (Antonio); Chloe Wilson (Viola) and Abby Yarger (Olivia’s attendant).