Plus Letters to the Editor
How stylish do you feel? Got your groove on when it comes to wearing the clothes that make up you and your “look?” If there’s ever a time to ponder it all, it’s this week. Hopefully, we can give you a helping hand. In our annual fashion issue, fashion maven/Features Editor Christa Martin spotlights the creative movers and shakers on the local design scene, a fun endeavor. But be sure to check out what’s happening online, too—a great deal of fashion giveaways await. (See this page.) Embrace it all beginning.
Also on the fashion front: Mark your calendars for Saturday, Sept. 24.
That’s the day that Fashion Art Santa Cruz comes to life. If you’ve ever been to this art-as-fashion event, spearheaded by Angelo Grova and others from the creative confines in and around MichaelAngelo Gallery, then you already know it’s a wildly inviting affair. Each year, this event draws a bigger audience at the Civic. Fun and festive, it’s not to be missed. Stay tuned for updates about it here at GT but log on to fashionartsantacruz.com for more information.
Speaking of art, First Friday this week should usher in its usual amount of engaging creativity and socializing. Something new on the FF front is the First Friday Art & Wine Walk. It’s an inventive outing that invites our treasured local wineries into the FF mix. Learn more about what this all means and how you can participate in the fun.
In the meantime, as I ponder both fashion and art this week, I recall several things from growing up in Chicago. My Polish mother often took me to find clothing in the “hefty” department of Sears. (Oh, those eating and body-imgage issues, got me young.) At the counter, I’d look over our purchases and wonder why I was going to have to wear brown corduroy pants, and green and yellow shirts during the school year. Clearly, good fashion hadn’t been invented yet for young, overweight preteens who had cravings for cheese sandwiches and Doritos. But it recently sparked my imagination for a fascinating therapeutic art experiment—a project using old, tacky clothes sprinkled in Doritos and spray-painted. I may create it—for the “healing” of course. I’ll make sure wine is nearby.
Greg Archer | Editor-in-Chief
Letters to the Editor
Honing in on Home Schooling
Thank you for your sympathetic article on home schooling (GT 7/21). At a time when we are continually being told that “public schools” are underfunded, it is interesting to learn of the results achieved by parents teaching their children at home. “Public schools” is a euphemism for government schools, and most of the taxpayer money goes toward lining the pockets of bureaucrats, textbook publishers, and unionized instructors of questionable skills. As your article pointed out, much effort and taxpayer money is devoted to “socialization,” otherwise known as “social engineering.” Whether staunchly conservative Christians or radical Marxists, parents who do not approve of how their children are being “programed,” should exercise their rights, remove their children from the government school system, and take the responsibility to teach them themselves.
Edgar Darwin
Santa Cruz
Political Showdowns Go On
Regarding the recent comments on the political state of affairs, let’s see if I got this right. The Democratic Clinton administration left us with a surplus that Republican George W. Bush squandered by starting two wars to kill Osama bin Laden, which he didn’t do, and didn’t fund. Obama then restarts the economy, but not fast enough, so the Tea Party/Republicans took charge, and in the name of economic reform, doubled down on this losing hand, continuing to push us off a cliff. How far off that cliff are we going to allow them to shove us?
Bruce M. Gabriel
Santa Cruz
Best Online Comments
On the Homeless Survey …
Thank you for writing this article. It really helps us, who have been pointing at the disconnect between wages and housing cost. Many of us saw this coming for decades, and not just in Santa Cruz. It is not funny that in cities with high homelessness/”under-housed,” wherever there are seven-year-old-plus-plus old cars per house, the rate of vacant real estate is also very high. What is unique to Santa Cruz, however, is this blamegame, once you are homeless, so agencies are not trusted by either side. Real estate interests are king here.
—JDHC
On ‘Santa Cruz to Gaza’ …
Please, Hamas would love to be oppressing more people if they could and Debbie here is one of many “useful idiots” helping them. Hamas would oppress her if she lived in Gaza on a daily basis. Israel wants peace and Hamas does not.
—Cuda
