Oscar™® buzzkill

This year we had a bunch of scrap wood and a parent who knew what to do with it.
He jigsawed plywood into freestanding mountain shapes, which we arranged
on stage to create depth. Then we propped flashlights behind some of the shapes
to uplight the letters, cut out of the wonder material, Foam Core®™.

I had my chance.

Picture it: An 8-foot tall Oscar®™ statue, cut from Foam Core™ and made up cleverly in tempera paint. It could have been mine.

It would be coated in dust in my office by now, so tall it would have to lean in one corner to fit.

Stuff I never look at but insist I need would be piled behind the base. Oscar™® would barely survive quarterly calls by my wife to get rid of the damn thing, already.

I wish I had kept one.

All that's left of that magical night* are these sketches.

About 10 larger-than-life Oscar™®s are long gone, fabulous wastes. They were the showcase of the fashion show fundraiser at the school our children attended. I played an art director each year because I couldn't or wouldn't do anything else among the parent/volunteer choices.

The theme for this one 20 years ago — really, 20 years ago?! — was Hollywood. Eventually any fashion show school fundraiser would pick Hollywood for at least one year; it's a law of the universe.

The task, as always, was to turn the small mauve-and-purple, linoleum-floored, laminate-beam arched (because it began as a church) parish hall into something that didn't remind parents they were having an expensive date night in the parish hall.

The foyer did not look at all like this sketch.
Oh well …

Not just the small stage but everything possible had to be disguised — the foyer, the school hallways leading to the classrooms where the silent auction was conducted), the laminate beams, the tables, the sidewalk leading to the parish hall. Everything.

It was a fool's errand, we all knew. But we got our volunteer hours!

These are sketches from the early stage known officially as Wishful Thinking.

It was a full frontal attack on reality, in stubborn defiance of resources, budget (ha!), able volunteers, available time and enthusiasm.

As a result, almost everything changed from these sketches. The ticket booth at the entrance of the hall became some kind of decorated skirt around a card table, for example. The grand entrance became much less grand — no red carpet, no rope and stanchions.

The table centerpieces became something else entirely, I forget what, though I remember that a

Seriously — I proposed three caricatures of Bette Davis taped together for a
centerpiece titled Three Faces of Eve. Maybe that's why someone else took
over centerpiece duty.

volunteer took them over. I learned early on to let go and not fall in love with any of my ideas, chanting quietly, "I'm getting my volunteer hours, I'm getting my volunteer hours …"

Oscar®™ remained. He didn't get folded down his length as I imagined. We stood him up flat in front of the laminate posts instead.

You might notice from the sketches that I loved Foam Core™. It's a rigid material made from paper laminated to both sides of a sheet of plastic foam; I learned about it when I used to belong to the Art Directors and Artists Club in town.

You can paint on it, cut shapes out of it, hot glue it together into three-dimensional objects. It was the wonder material for art directors of school fundraisers everywhere. I talked the school into buying a wholesale supply of it for a couple of years — 20 sheets, four feet by eight feet, in a great big box.

(After that I felt guilty and the decorations committee made do with large sheets of cardboard that a parent supplied from his job as a construction superintendent. It required more paint to disguise, and we had to paint both sides of whatever we made so the cardboard would flatten to its original shape as it dried. "I'm getting my volunteer hours. I'm getting my volunteer hours …")

After making an Oscar® template and having volunteers cut them out, I painted the statues — no one else wanted to try — with flat tempera paint in weird complements of color to create the illusion of light and shadow and reflection on metal.

I'm going to brag and say they turned out a lot better than I imagined. Of course, I have no evidence to refute me. The fact that I wanted to keep one should say it all.

But someone tossed it all instead. Another group of parents got their volunteer hours throwing everything away. Maybe they sensed the weeks of work that went into all this paint-and-glue camouflage. Or maybe in the early hours of the morning, making many trips to the Dumpsters®™, they sang quietly to themselves, "I'm getting my volunteer hours. I'm getting my volunteer hours …"

Anyway, I heard they were handing out Oscar™®s over the weekend — it seems like they do that every year now — so I wanted to ride their coattails. Gee, I hope The Shawshank Redemption won!

*I'm being flip.

Hidden away

The view from our window of a golden morning across Carquinez Strait.

"How about Benicia?"

So we went to Benicia for our anniversary. A lifetime of living near it and this year we finally went.

There never seemed a reason to go. We are of the great through-traffic world, the one that has to get from northern to southern California, or from Sacramento to San Francisco. So we travel the major freeways — 80 to The City, I-5 or 99 to Los Angeles, 680 to bypass the clustertruck of the Bay Area to get to 101.

We are in a hurry, no time for byroads.

The road to Benicia is 780, a spur of 680, a byroad, but why go? Benicia is not on the way to anything.

Besides, Benicia appears to be no more than so many gargantuan oil tanks the color of school buses, clinging to the hills like mussels at low tide. We've seen Benicia, and it does not beckon.

Or have we? And why does it not?

Benicia, we learn, is behind the forbidding tank farm. You can see part of it from the George Miller Jr. Memorial Bridge on 680 over the Carquinez Strait, but you don't know what you're looking at. Benicia is cleverly disguised behind the thrumming menace of commerce and industry.

I'd scouted the joint months before. Doug, my swimming friend, once invited his buddies to join him in the waters of the strait, where he swims occasionally after work from nearby Fairfield.

A town exists, by God, beyond the oil tanks! An actual town with a city park and a bandstand! Craftsman bungalows and quirky architectural one-offs and Victorian mansions and shopping centers. Multiple parks along the shoreline and a bustling main street (First Street), every shop open.

(Doug may have a hard time getting us to join him again for a swim there, though. We went near sundown at low tide, and a half-mile out from shore I was creeped out to discover I was still swimming in only two feet of water, my hand scraping through the sludge as I stroked. Creatures bumped into some of us — not me! — and one squirmed out from under Doug as he stepped on the soft shallows in the concrete-colored opaque water. We think they might have been sturgeon.

(A man greeted us at the boat lunch when we came back in. He was a silhouette in the new evening. I was breathing hard with the anxiety of a tide seeming to pull me away in these strange waters with their strange creatures. The man said he lived in Benicia 20 years and made his way to the park every day. The sight of us drew him to the water that evening because he thought we might be porpoises; we were rarer even than that: He said he had never seen swimmers in that water before.)

Nancy got us room at an inn by the water, near a ramshackle boatworks that proudly flew a U.S. and California flag. We were high above a beautifully sculpted walkway, part of a trail that girdles the entire Bay Area. The walkway is terraced here and there with inviting concrete benches and stools, where the many, many dogs of Benicia led their many, many owners.

And we did what we always do: Walked, to see what we could see and discover what we were never planning to find. First Street, on closer look, is restaurants and real estate offices and antique stores and aromatic gift shops. Nothing anyone really needs, but all the businesses are open.

Benicia was an early capital of the state. I've never heard a consistent story why the capital is Sacramento; I've read the capitol building in Benicia was never big enough to comfortably accommodate the Legislature, or that Sacramento won in a battle of land and politics and pride and gamesmanship.

The capitol building in Benicia certainly is cozy, a two-story saltbox, but it would house the full Assembly and Senate. Those lawmakers, though, would have to make their own decisions and conduct their own research and be their own selves. Benicia doesn't have room for politicians' handlers.

Still, I wonder how Sacramento got to be the capital, except for the grit and obstinance of people long ago, with gifts I lack. Benicia is toward the back of the San Francisco Bay, past the northern lobe of this great harbor, called San Pablo Bay. The water is brackish here, worsened, I imagine, by the shipping that goes on here now.

Farther east as the strait narrows, the waters divide into the archipelago of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where the rivers empty.

Even today it's not easy to wend one's way through that maze to find the dripping tendril of the Sacramento River.

Imagining the headache navigation was 160 years ago, I picture myself among the pioneers of the state, the one in the back of the crowd who, having come to Benicia, might have said, "This is close enough. Let's just stop here, guys. Whaddya say, guys, call it good?"

It's got a nice view of the head of the strait, and it's a straight shot southwest to the Golden Gate. Even I could find that.

But these folks who made Sacramento capital, they're made of stronger stuff.

Besides, you have to really like wind here. Really, really like it. The Delta Breeze that saves Sacramento on summer evenings reaches wild puberty in Benicia.

In our entire time at the inn, the flags flying at the boatworks next door never slacked, rippling full staff to the east.

Practiced lotus eaters, we knew how to get out of the wind in style, watching it push the sage-colored water of the strait into whitecaps from the many windows of our room or, better still, with an anniversary tradition we started last year: Sipping beers and watching the San Francisco Giants play on the big screen at a corner bar.

The hated Dodgers beat the Giants Saturday, but the Giants rallied back Sunday, our anniversary; a Mother's Day gift for Nancy. Our son and his girlfriend spent the day with us and gifted us with India pale ales they had just made, serious tangy beer.

At a lull in the afternoon I leafed through the 1950 Blue and Gold, the yearbook of the University of California, Berkeley. It was the best choice from the inn's near-empty bookshelf, which held three books by Donald Trump, Lee Iacocca's autobiography, some old yacht parts manuals and even older directories. Remember directories?

The Blue and Gold is huge, well designed with watercolors of the campus by watercolorist Maurice Logan dividing the sections. UC Santa Barbara's campus was just about to be built in 1950. UC Riverside was no more than an agricultural research station. UCLA was a kid brother.

I looked without success for people who might be famous or notable today. I did find many senior women who aspired to be married by June or July, or who wished enthusiastically and publicly to do nothing at all.

Then I looked over at my energetic persevering wife, who had found a rare quiet moment to read in the sunny corner of the room, who did marry me soon after college but did not gush about it.

I'm trying to imagine the colorless world that would exist if Nancy had decided to do nothing at all.