Bob Benton, who has been in business on Swarthmore for 23 years, was hard at work this week, ‘still crunching the numbers,’ he said. Owner of a sporting goods store at the corner of Swarthmore and Monument, and a former Chamber of Commerce president, Benton is still awaiting a resolution of his lease negotiations, which have been going on since November. Benton told the Palisadian-Post Tuesday that, initially, the landlord offered him a five-year lease, which would see his rent jump from $2.50 to $4.50 a square foot per month. After Palisades Partners rejected his counterproposal in early March, he told the Post: ‘If we can’t resolve this, somehow, and I can’t find another location in the Palisades, I guess I will go out of business. I’m still weighing all my options. We’re working the numbers as best we can.’ Yesterday, a trustee for Palisades Partners told the Post that they are still willing to work with Benton to reach an agreement. Benton was the first Swarthmore merchant to be offered a new lease by trustees Bob Stelzl, John Wilson and John Watkins, the three representatives from Palisades Partners, a multi-family trust that owns 18 of the 22 retail and commercial properties on the 1000 block of Swarthmore. On Monday, March 14, the three men met with Katie O’Laughlin of Village Books, kids’ clothier Ivy Greene, and members of the McCrory-Irwin family, owners of Michelle International and Palisades Beauty Supply, to present new five-year leases which include rent increases. Meetings with the remaining Swarthmore merchants, some of which were scheduled for this week, were unexpectedly canceled. Other businesses that will be affected by the proposed rent increases include Mort’s Deli, Palisades Playthings, The Prince’s Table, Roy Robbins, Baskin-Robbins, Wells Fargo and three restaurants’Dante’s, Terri’s and a la Tarte. Bert Yellen, who has owned a la Tarte with his wife Bonnie for eight years, feels the landlord ‘has the right to increase the rent to whatever they want,’ but ‘how much more do they think I can charge for my croissants? Going from $2.25 to $2.35 is already a lot, but it will not pay for the increases I hear they are proposing. While we are prepared to spend $50,000 of our own money to improve our restaurant’we want to put in a second bathroom and get a beer and wine license’we are not prepared to spend it without a lease.’ Terri Festa, who owns a second Terri’s restaurant in Agoura Hills, where she recently moved, said she is ‘frightened’ and ‘saddened’ by what is going on on Swarthmore. ‘I’ve been in business here for 10 years. The landlord called me about six weeks ago and asked if I intended to stay. I told him yes. While every couple of months I have people interested in buying my business, I have no intention of selling. I just hope all of this can be resolved amicably.’ Tonight at 7 p.m. in the branch library on Alma Real, the Palisades Community Council will discuss whether the board should schedule a special April meeting to consider ‘the impending crisis regarding Swarthmore merchants,’ according to Council Chairman Norman Kulla. (Editor’s note: Owners of the new Boca Woman store at 1022 Swarthmore, which opened last November in the former Video 2010 space, have a five-year lease with Palisades Partners. The unaffected businesses on Swarthmore include Whispers, Solis Salon, Fernworks and Paliskate.)

Theatre Palisades regularly draws from a wide pool of talented actors living throughout Southern California, but with the new production of ‘Moon Over Buffalo,’ casting came about closer to home. Two Palisadians’Martha Hunter and Julia Whitcombe’ star in this comedy directed by Sherman Wayne and produced by Pat Perkins. The play centers on George (Jack Coppock) and Charlotte Hay (Martha Hunter), fading stars of repertory theater in 1950’s Buffalo. The couple have just lost their last chance at stardom’leads in a Frank Capra movie. To make matters worse, their agent is smitten with Charlotte and the company ingenue is pregnant by George. Add to the mix an almost deaf grandmother/costume mistress (Julia Whitcombe’s part) and a forgetful weatherman/fianc’ and the plot thickens. When the agent calls to say Frank Capra will be attending the matinee, George is missing and the company can’t figure out which play they are supposed to be performing, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ or ‘Private Lives.’ Misunderstandings, misplaced affections and missing persons work together to hilarious effect. This is Martha Hunter’s second appearance on the Theatre Palisades’ stage. Last fall, she was a force in another farce, playing the real inspector in ‘Inspecting Carol,’ also directed by Sherman Wayne. Hunter brings to the role of Charlotte a lifetime of acting experience, beginning with skits and later musicals at Brentwood Presbyterian Church as a child. ‘I remember doing ‘The Boyfriend’ and singing a duet with Dick Van Dyke.’ While living in Malibu for 15 years, Hunter was active in Malibu Summerstage. All the while, she worked regularly in commercials, TV and film, including a supporting role in the movie ‘Something’s Gotta Give.’ Hunter moved to the Palisades eight years ago. Acting is truly all in the family, with both of her daughters studying drama, one as a graduate student in London and the other as a junior at Northwestern University. Hunter laughingly describes her husband, Craig, as involved in a different kind of dramatic art: the law. Hunter is thrilled to have landed parts at Theatre Palisades, and relishes the community flavor the venue offers. ‘It shows there’s support and talent right here in the Palisades,’ says Hunter, referring not only to herself, but also to fellow actor Julia Whitcombe, who plays her mother in the production, and to three Corpus Christi eighth graders who are assisting with costumes and props. Whitcombe’s long affiliation with Theatre Palisades began in the mid-1970s. Over the years, she’s garnered eight ‘Best Actress’ awards with the organization. She cites Eleanor in ‘Lion in Winter’ and Sister Mary in ‘Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You’ as her most memorable roles. ‘Moon Over Buffalo’ represents her 18th appearance on the Theatre Palisades stage. ‘Oh, look, oh, look, there’s an old lady part,’ Whitcombe jokes about her excitement to learn of the grandmother part in ‘Moon Over Buffalo.’ Whitcombe and her husband, John’who divide their time between living in the Palisades and Rifle, Colorado’have longstanding involvement with Theatre Palisades. After retiring as a chemical engineer, John supervised the construction of the theater in the early 1980s and Julia has served the company in various capacities for over two decades. Whitcomb’s other passion is her ongoing work recording textbooks for the blind. ‘You use lots of the same skills as being an actor,’ she comments. ‘Moon Over Buffalo’also stars actors Jack Coppock, Meredith Dinneen, Matt Landig, Holly Sidell, Warren Steinman, and Larry Sutton. The play opens on Friday, April 1 and continues through May 8 at Pierson Playhouse, 941 Temescal Canyon Rd. Performances run Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Ticket prices range from $9 to $15. Contact: 822-0463 or 567-9995.

Author Tanyo Ravicz will return to his hometown to read from and discuss his new book ‘Ring of Fire and Other Stories,’ an Alaskan adventure novella and short stories set in the northernmost state. The 1979 Palisades High School grad will speak about his book on Thursday, March 31 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore. This is Ravicz’s first published book, although he has been writing fiction for 20 years and has been published in magazines and periodicals. Ravicz’s family bought their home on Castellammare in 1964. For 30 years, they owned the Barrymore house, so called because John Barrymore once lived there. ‘It was a great old place across from the beach,’ Tanyo recalls. After PaliHi, Ravicz studied literature at Harvard University and graduated in 1984. A few years later, he and his wife-to-be Martina settled in Alaska. While living in Alaska, Ravicz was writing and immersing himself in local activities, such as fishing and hiking. He worked as a substitute teacher during the year, and as an emergency firefighter during the summer, and also spent time working in the fishing industry. His writing was informed by the many different characters he met. ‘There’s a different variety of people you get at the extreme end of the empire’less varnished, less smoothed down by education.’ ‘Ring of Fire’ was inspired by an article Ravicz read about a Saudi crown prince who traveled to Alaska to hunt brown bears, just after the Gulf War. ‘It caught my imagination: the collision of the two worlds,’ Ravicz says. In the novella, Prince Tariz, the crown prince of the Islamic monarchy of Rahman, arrives with his entourage to hunt at the wilderness lodge of Hank Waters, a reclusive master hunting guide. The tension builds as the Rahman entourage, accustomed to having their way, violate hunting laws in the Alaskan wilderness, and Waters and crew see how far they will go to accommodate them. The six stories are of modern Alaskan characters from all walks of life, many exploring romantic relationships. Many of the stories had been previously published in Bellowing Ark, a literary journal. Bellowing Ark, a small press in Washington state, also published his book. When Tanyo’s wife, Martina, became tired of the cold, they moved to Palm Springs, where she set up her law practice. The couple and their two children, Miranda, 12, and Kody, 7, continue to spend their summers on 15 acres on Kodiak Island, land which Ravicz had homesteaded. Ravicz cites many literary influences’Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce, Mann, Maugham, Bellow, Steinbeck and Jack London. As far as what inspires him, Ravicz says ‘something triggers me, it comes out of something in my soul. Something you witness, hear, smell or recall fills you with a sense of relevance. Everybody has those experiences: writers just crawl away and scribble it down.’ Ravicz says writers explore ‘aspects of human nature that haven’t been explored before.’ He has received praise from authors Thomas Keneally, who compared the book to Styron’s first novel [‘Lie Down In Darkness’], and Judith Grossman, who said he ‘weaves his own way between Faulkner and Hemingway.’ Ravicz met Keneally and Grossman when he was briefly enrolled in the writing program at UC Irvine. Ravicz is currently working on a nonfiction essay as well as a ‘West Coast novel,’ which tells the story of a Mexican Indian migrant worker and his journey from Mexico to Alaska.