The first act of the evening featured a range of interesting works, dip though they occasionally did into the aforementioned camp.  Several opera pieces featured excellent soloists like baritone John Musselman and the engaging, exuberant tenor DJ Pick.  The opportunity for gesture and expression allowed a greater range for the performative singers.  The evening’s conductor, Dominic Gregorio, was finishing his tenure with the group gracefully, and his enthusiasm for the operatic numbers was especially enjoyable.

After a short intermission, a world-premiere commissioned work brought the choir together with electronica musician John Tejada.  “The End of It All” was part house music, part movie chorus, and, though musically somewhat infantile, fascinating.  The interactions between live, organic sound and hyper-produced beats and tones synthesized, at its best, a uniquely pleasing listening experience.

“Baba Yetu,” which introduced the GSA Youth Choir, struck me as odd, but this may be because the tune is used in (if not from?) turn-based computer game Civilization IV.  The “Dance With Me Medley,” with Madonna and Gaga and a great deal of musical mash-up and soul bearing, brought out the best of the smaller ensemble and brought the audience to its feet.  A brief solo from Pasadena City College student Cristie Wilson made the otherwise insufferable “Lean on Me” utterly pleasing — encore for Wilson, if you please?

A semi-costumed history lesson on Harvey Milk did get off on the right foot with the aforementioned and heart-wrenching Sondheim number.  That said, it otherwise felt somewhat clumsily integrated to the singers’ purpose, an obstructive framework for otherwise skillfully chosen songs like “There Won’t Be Trumpets” and Paul Simon’s “American Tune.”  (Barring these details, the Harvey Milk Schools Project is well worth looking into; see below.)

Ironically, the evening’s second-to-last number — one that had as much potential as “Lean on Me” to be made entirely of cheese — was “True Colors,” the Lauper pop-tune from pop songsters Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly.  The combined choirs — a veritable plethora of ages, aesthetics, and all other visible indicators of individuality — fully embodied the truth that a group of people with a common belief can demonstrate deepest humanity by cooperating in song.  This reviewer did a fair amount of tear drying.

Whether ending the evening with Michael Jackson’s “Will You Be There” was total overkill is debatable; there was also a short encore piece.  The truly powerful moments of the evening stood in the unity of the performers, the enthusiasm of the group, and the articulate, happy voice of its executive director, the praiseworthy Hywel W. Sims.  The group is entering its 32nd season, and while there will be a handing-off of the baton, the GMCLA’s capacity for meaningful entertainment is promising.

Notable performances (apart from Pick and Wilson) were ASL Interpreter Jon Maher, USC student Marisa Leigh Esposito, John Tejada, and John Tejada’s intuitive music technology.

The Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles will be performing a holiday concert Dec. 18 and 19 in Glendale, as well as two more concerts in the “Power of 3” season.  More information on this and the anti-bullying Harvey Milk Schools Foundation can be found at www.gmcla.org.

Trey McIntyre Project / photo courtesy of LA Phil

I imagine the artists who had the Hollywood Bowl stomping and shaking on Aug. 18 were booked well before April 20, when an explosion aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon precipitated the unthinkable. But Wednesday’s lineup of New Orleans music legends — the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and the Neville Brothers — paid tribute to a city that’s taken blow upon blow. And lending awe-inspiring physical form to a history of grief, endurance and vibrant spirit, dancers from the Trey McIntyre Project shared the stage with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in their electrifying 2008 collaboration, Ma Maison.

“If you hear that beat …” In raspy barks that sound like the blasts from his trumpet, Efrem Towns of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band calls, “Get up outta your seat,” and we gladly obey. The DDBB plays the music of a fading New Orleans institution: brass bands that perform dirges for funerals, and swinging dance tunes once the somber processions pass by. Here, rattling ragtime syncopations, martial marching band rat-a-tats, and racing, trilling, squealing horns keep us clapping and chanting “My feet … can’t … fail me now” along with “ET,” and we see mostly the mirthful side of the tradition. But in the bright choruses — “No matter what you heard, everythin’s alright and we gonna be alright” — throbs a mix of pain and fierce pride, hopeful mourning within the merriment.

After intermission, lights come up on the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and picnickers around me sit up and take notice. In black and white formal wear, arranged in neat, seated formation, with band name printed on drum and tuba, they play classic New Orleans jazz in old school style — standing in unison when tinny banjo and grunting trombone rev to a climax, and gesturing theatrically to show us how “everybody lookin’” at the “Short Dress Gal” in their song. The slightly stiff, choreographed feel is such a deliberate and welcome departure from today’s performance conventions that I find myself smiling through the set.

A high steppin’, jelly-legged, rag-tag bunch of skeletons joins the suits on stage for Ma Maison, and together, with Sister Gertrude Morgan via recording, they generate an otherworldly energy. A skeleton in a jaunty green vest tosses white hands and feet out with the percussive hits of Carl LeBlanc’s strong banjo strumming in “Heebie Jeebies,” until a limb locks straight and he hobbles peg-legged in silly circles. The revelry feels mostly like joyful hilarity, but when one bag o’ bones keeps collapsing into his partner we smell death and feel frantic fear creep into the group’s sideways scurries and crazed kicks.

Morbid references lurk in all corners of this house — in the spidery shadows cast by spindly skeleton arms, in the bowed heads and softly prancing feet that sometimes turn the perpetual Mardi Gras parade into a solemn procession, and in the quick group exits with one merrymaker held stiff, aloft. But this crew parties in the face of death, hitching up legs, pumping arms, and leapfrogging over one another while the band sings, “Life is complicated … Oh, life is overrated.”

McIntyre works masterfully with the music, and he builds a movement vocabulary that draws on his dancers’ balletic virtuosity while transforming them into shaking, shimmying Lindy Hoppers who get down more convincingly than any ballet company I’ve seen.

Neville Brothers / photo courtesy of LA Phil

The skeletons take their party into the wings, but New Orleans’ first family of R&B, the Neville Brothers, keeps our celebration of the Big Easy going strong. Cyril slaps the drums and throws out fiery vocals in choppy bursts. Art’s fingers find funky up accents at the organ, while he sings, smirking, “Me oh my oh … gonna catch all the fish on the bayou.” Charles releases great swelling waves from the sax, then pulls back with a gentle turn to reveal Aaron’s voice — clear and shivering with soul. With eyes squeezed shut and shoulders hunched, he sings, “Long time comin’, change gonna come,” and I hear a wail rising under the soft, sweet sound.

Catch the conclusion of Jazz at the Bowl 2010 on Sept. 1, when Herbie Hancock celebrates his 70th birthday with help from a host of special musical guests.

Image from J-Walt's animated digital art show, part of Mindshare LA's July event.

Mindshare LA feels like a new experience made from a number of familiar ones.  On its website, the event calls itself an evening of “enlightened debauchery,” and it promises “intellectual stimulation in a club-like atmosphere.” Doug Campbell, co-founder (with Adam Mefford) and MC for the July 15 event, likened the evening to having one’s brain “poked from different directions.”  It is part work party, part lecture hall, part singles’ night with cocktails.  More to the point, Mindshare LA is a monthly event with short lectures, food trucks, a cash bar, and a DJ downstairs for listening-time chatterboxes.

Thursday’s event was held at Club 740 in downtown Los Angeles for a third time, though the Mindshare location does change.  (That said, who knew our city had such breathtaking alleyway views?)  Colored lights, free soda from sponsor Izze, and local jam band Boom Boom Boom set the opening mood.  Between the overpriced and underwhelming Munchie Machine and the CoolHaus ice cream truck that lacked my beloved mint chocolate chip, the food trucks were a bust — but, like the location, the food trucks do change with each event.

In a packed dance hall turned lecture hall, complete with white folding chairs I thought I’d only ever see at outdoor weddings, Caltech types mingled with American Apparel model lookalikes.  This writer chatted with IBM brains and a fair number of marketing and brand-formation types.  Read: mixed bag.     Hats, boots, bow ties, haircuts, beards, and wacky patterns made every person stand out at least a little, and that was before any of the talking started.

At 8:30, the short form lectures kicked off with Caltech’s Frances Arnold, Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, who discussed bacteria construction and design, paired somewhat forcibly with the idea of “Molecular Sex.”  (Sex prevailed as the evening’s theme.)  Arnold’s talk was brilliant and brief, and successfully piqued the audience’s attention.

The next lecture came from branding mind Eduardo Caccia, a riff on culture and attitude south of the border — in retrospect, an almost awkwardly powerful reminder that the subset of urban Americans at Club 740 for the evening may not have been as enlightened as they thought.

A quick video from Hear Me passed along the mere idea of using online music composition to unite orphans across the globe; sonic artist Mileece represented the New Age with her art-and-sound installations based on feedback from plants.

When adult-film star Nina Hartley finally arrived to breeze through her principles of Radical Self-Acceptance, the somewhat forced sexual implications in every lecture came together.  I’m pleased to report that the Hear Me table and Nina Hartley’s sex-advice table seemed to have the longest lines in the post-lecture fair that the upstairs dance floor became.  None of the miniature lectures delved far into their subjects, though Mileece may have tried to do that.  Each could either pique just enough individual interest for a table visit or pass along information with as casual an acknowledgement as a Twitter feed.

To Mindshare LA’s credit, the evening reads and runs like an Internet browser window.  Everywhere there are tabs (like at the reasonably priced bar, for instance) and bookmarked (literally and figuratively) things to Check Out Later.  Everyone is checking messages and chatting.  Even as the noisemakers during the lectures were asked to relegate their conversations to Dr. Rx and DJ Sugarpill’s rooms downstairs, the Twitterers, bloggers, writers, text message addicts, and combinations of such stayed multiply occupied throughout the evening without offending a soul.

A self-help plug and a prize giveaway broke up the lecturing.  (I recommend J-Walt’s digital art, one of the best post-show installations.)  This was the only time the cleverly partitioned schedule for the evening felt fractured, and even the universal challenge of the Good Q&A seemed aptly met by the Mindshare LA production crew.

With an age- and appearance-range to skew the average years and lifestyle upward and inward, Mindshare LA reminded me somewhat of being at a little liberal arts college in Ohio that I used to know.  This is not necessarily a good thing.  But in the curious, questioning, happy-go-lucky, brain-teased mood of the evening at large, Campbell answered my sole question for him with poise and a smile.  Confronted with the fact that such a narrow margin of people in a clearly privileged atmosphere were perhaps doomed to objectify and demean the very classes and kinds they were purporting to include in Changing the World plans, Campbell basically replied: “I’ll think about it.”

Mindshare LA is a monthly event found online at www.mindshare.la and around downtown Los Angeles.  General admission is $30, with food trucks outside throughout the event.  Lectures are available online, a la TED, and Mind Share is on Twitter and Facebook.

Wednesday’s concert features a compelling mix of African beats, dance and jazz. Nigerian Afrobeat superstar Femi Kuti returns with his explosive rhythms and invigorating dancers for a night that celebrates the foundation of jazz music.

Superlative jazz trumpeter and film composer Terence Blanchard and modern dance troupe Lula Washington Dance Theatre collaborate for the first time. This performance also marks the first time a dance company has choreographed a piece specifically for a body of Blanchard’s work. This performance is the first of several dance events at the Bowl this season. Cameroonian bassist and singer Richard Bona starts things off with his unique style that blends a horde of influences, including jazz, bossa nova, pop, afro-beat, traditional song and funk.

Herbie Hancock begins his tenure as the Bill and Carolyn Powers Creative Chair for Jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Hollywood Bowl 2010 season. His influence has produced a jazz series that is filled with an eclectic mix of musical contributions from African and pop to soul and big band, typical of Hancock’s diverse tastes.

Other concerts in this series include:

Smokey Robinson and Lizz Wright (July 14)

Lee Ritenour & Dave Grusin and Dianne Reeves (July 21)

Count Basie Orchestra, Dave Holland Big Band and Dave Douglas Big Band (July 28)

B.B. King and Buddy Guy (Aug. 11)

The Neville Brothers, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Trey McIntyre Dance Project and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band (Aug. 18)

Gershwin Across America (Aug. 25)

Herbie Hancock: Seven Decades – The Birthday Celebration (Sept. 1).

Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood

Tickets ($1 – $99) are on sale now at HollywoodBowl.com, by calling (323) 850-2000, in person at the Hollywood Bowl Box Office (Tuesday–Saturday, noon–6 p.m.), or through Ticketmaster. Groups of 10 or more may call (323) 850-2050 for information about special rates, subject to availability.

Laurence Juber / Photo by Michael Lamont

World-class guitar virtuoso solo artist, composer and arranger Laurence Juber, who is also the former lead guitarist for Paul McCartney’s Wings, will perform in Culver City on Saturday, June 12. It’s amazing what Juber can do with just a guitar onstage, and it’s no surprise he was voted #1 by Fingerstyle Guitar magazine. Read more about Juber in our previous post, and get a feel for what his shows are like by reading our review of his concert at McCabe’s.

Show starts at 8 p.m.; doors open at 7:30 p.m. at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda Blvd., Culver City. Tickets are $17.50; call (310) 398-2583 or visit www.boulevardmusic.com.

A friend in the arts community who is a documentary filmmaker sent an email out just the other day recommending the film. She said, “Anyone interested in art, museums, nonprofit organizations, Board of Directors, charities or POWER AND MONEY should enjoy this!”

I was lucky to see masterpieces from the Barnes Collection when they traveled to Forth Worth’s Kimbell Museum years ago. I wish I had also had a chance to see them in their original setting, a 12-acre arboretum less than five miles from Philly. The collection is apparently going to relocate to “Philadelphia’s museum-lined Benjamin Franklin Parkway as part of a $150-million public arts project in 2012,” according to the LA Times. Read the entire article here:

latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-steal11-2010mar11,0,339305.story

The film opened yesterday at various theaters in LA, including the Landmark and Laemmle. The Landmark in West LA will have a Q&A with the filmmakers following today’s 7:20 p.m. show.

I saw the low-budget The Hurt Locker long before the mega-million-dollar 3D IMAX film, and when I left the theater I couldn’t imagine any other film being my Best Picture pick. I was right. All the special effects of Avatar, all the clever inventions, did not convince me otherwise — and I am a (secret, unconscious?) sci-fi fan (going back to the original Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Star Wars).

The Hurt Locker, about a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq, was an edge-of-your-seat thriller, especially when you think about the fact that war is not fiction and there are thousands of people facing danger and death every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Director Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, a journalist who wrote the script after being embedded with a bomb unit in Iraq, captured the reality of the Iraq War, from the different psychological responses of the troops to the torture of thirst and the agonizing pace of time when the soldiers are ambushed in the desert to the horror of not knowing who the enemy is when anyone could be holding a bomb detonator. The character of Sgt. James, played masterfully by Jeremy Renner, is a fictionalized daredevil addicted to the adrenaline rush of facing his own mortality, but it has often been the experience of soldiers at war that there is no easy way to adjust to civilian life afterward. The movie opens with a quote from war correspondent Chris Hedges’ 2002 book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” (It reminded me of a great book, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, written in 1977 about the Vietnam War; it is fascinating and reads like fiction, which sadly it isn’t. Incidentally, Herr, also a war correspondent, co-wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.) I might add that it doesn’t matter if the film didn’t get all the details right, according to the military; it’s not a documentary and it still conveys truths of war. And it doesn’t matter that Bigelow is a woman either.

A great movie has many things, and Avatar just lacked some of the most important ones: like a great story and dialogue. You can’t cover that up with 3D animated dandelion fluff floating off the screen. You’d think if director James Cameron was going to spend more than a decade working on this magnum opus, he would have invested as much in the script as he did in the technology. I was ready to be dazzled by the imagery though. Yes, there were beautiful scenes like Pandora’s amazing floating mountains, creative and fascinating flora and fauna, and even some very cool futuristic technology evidenced in the space ships and the equipment on board. But the creative stuff was not above and beyond other films from decades ago, like say, Star Wars, or even Alien (both of which really had much more interesting creatures and developed characters). And there were plenty of questions that could have been more creatively answered: Why is the military still using helicopters and machine guns? Why did the military have to destroy the Na’vi “Hometree” to dig in the ground for (the stupidly named) unobtanium? Why are people still talking about problems with access to health care and references to the Iraq War in the year 2154? Wouldn’t we have moved on to other, similarly vexing issues sometime by, oh, I don’t know, 2020? Such elements emphasized the weaknesses of the story, which should have been infused with at least as much creativity as the animation.

I won’t even go into my personal tolerance level for 3D IMAX. Let’s just say that it doesn’t take a big budget to make the best film. In fact, exactly the opposite may be true most of the time.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed Avatar. But there was also some great cinematography in The Hurt Locker, like the slow-motion close-up of dirt and rocks flying in the air when a bomb detonates. It’s much more subtle, but that can be so much more artistic sometimes. And how can you be dazzled by the basically humanoid Na’vi and not that much more awestruck by learning that the Iraqis were using children’s dead bodies to house bombs. There was really some amazing work there that hit the heart and mind in a way unlike anything in Avatar.

Dirty Projectors / photo by Sarah Cass, courtesy of LA Phil

When David Longstreth heard his music Saturday night (Feb. 27) at Walt Disney Concert Hall, his body reacted.  Deft toe tapping and a kind of rhythmic saunter embodied the swells and trills of The Getty Address, played in its entirety with the small orchestra of Alarm Will Sound.  The operatic and genre-dissolving 2005 album would serve as an oeuvre all by itself if Dirty Projectors, Longstreth’s Brooklyn-based ensemble, had ceased music-making that year.  (They didn’t, and 2009’s Bitte Orca reached the top tier of album reviews for publications like Pitchfork Media and TIME.)

The concert began with four pieces of music by the LA Philharmonic under the baton of Diego Matheuz, who, like LA Phil Music Director Gustavo Dudamel, studied in Venezuela’s El Sistema.  John Orfe performed two Ligeti etudes as if the piano were an extension of himself; between the etudes, an orchestral Wagner prelude from Tristan und Isolde hinted at the foreboding and resolution of Getty. Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite closed the first segment of the concert, and its adoption of various styles and attitudes into a coherent whole unlatched the mental gates that keep music in categories.

The Getty Address poured out soon after from baroque, opera, folk, epic poetry, and some new, strange, effective vocal style that involves vowels with one’s tongue out.  With Alan Pierson conducting the sizeable ensemble of Dirty Projectors and Alarm Will Sound, the sonic variety and mind-bending percussive precision of the album came to life.  A trio of vocalists — Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, and Haley Dekle in red, blue and yellow cloaks — struck complex harmonies with almost unsettling ease.  Deradoorian, in red, simultaneously managed a keyboard and computer.  Brian McOmber and Nat Baldwin provided heart-fluttering drums and bass.  Longstreth’s eyes darted from conductor to ensemble, from the trio’s rhythmic swaying to his own guitars; throughout, a live connection to the music kept him engaged almost to distraction.  As Alarm Will Sound colored in the landscape of The Getty Address, the captivated audience of young and old, American Apparel and Brooks Brothers, was energized and reverent, seeming to float away with the strings and jump to life with McOmber’s sudden entrances.

Pierson, it should be noted, conducted a wide-ranging and stylistically unprecedented group with ease.  The journey of Getty’s fictional protagonist Don Henley – “based more on my brother Jake, Hernán Cortes and also Stephen Dedalus from… Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” than on the Eagle frontman himself, says Longstreth – takes route through sleepy strings and driving rhythms, with vocals as unpredictable as they are perfectly suited to the concept.  “Ponds and Puddles,” mid-Getty, brings to mind the rock opera; “Finches’ Song at Oceanic Parking Lot,” which ends the journey, warbles its way past any such simple categorization.

Even in the recent evolution of cross-generic pastiche across the fine arts, Saturday night was a feat.  Longstreth’s work in Getty is a patchwork without seams.  Dirty Projectors, Alarm Will Sound, and the inimitable Alan Pierson filled the potential of genre defiance to its greatest capacity.  Furthermore, the already coherent work in Getty seemed all the more unified under a baton.

After multiple standing ovations from the packed hall, Dirty Projectors returned to the stage for a kind of chaser, calm selections from Bitte Orca.  Songs from the equally engaging if far less conceptual album served to showcase the band by itself.  The trio of women from Getty’s “chorus” continued to strike remarkable chords, McOmber and Baldwin filled in the counterintuitive rhythm, and Longstreth carried on his tiny dance of mini-conducting.

Upcoming events of similar genre-blending at Disney Hall include French electronic duo Air on March 28 and guitarist Pat Metheny’s new Orchestrionics tour on April 19. Visit www.laphil.com.

But this was far from an evening of Hallmark cards.  As if anyone needed proof that Los Angeles fosters dazzling wits, every piece was original, enrapturing, and deeply relatable.  This included Michael Redfield’s praise of fatherhood versus the haze of twenty-something-hood while his wife and infant daughter stood by, and Betsy Zajko’s chronology of how one’s unique heart is shaped by both the good and the bad.

It also included a pleasing hybridization of universal themes and local lore.  In the work of Julio Martinez, theater critic and KPFK voice, both the golden heart of honest parenting and the totally disturbing reality of reality television made appearances.  Even the political realities of love, the ones fueled by Prop 8 and the question of marriage across the country, came into play with Ralph Bruneau and Katherine Cortez.  Their tales were poignant and quiet, but firm, reminders that politics is not a player in who loves whom, but rather an unwelcome jury to the private and the sacred.

Michael O’Keefe read his poems straight, while Douglas Kearney created prose from poems, the latter eliciting shouts of praise with a streaming exploration of how to write a love poem for a wife who does not want a “love poem.”  Deborah Puette, the evening’s stand-out for timing and poise, achieved a unique sense of love first appearing: not taken for granted, or easily felt, but simply waiting for the right moment to enter, unexpected and strong.

Creator/producers Roxanne Hart and John Pollono played a part in the pace of the evening, which neither rushed the audience into philosophy of the heart nor put the evening’s album on a repeat of parenting stories.  The evening felt cohesive even as it featured a tremendous variety of attitude and style.  (Furthermore, with Ron Bottitta acting as a clever MC, the impressive résumés of each reader didn’t go unrecognized.)  Martinez’s familiar and easy way preceded Redfield’s excitability, then Zajko’s quiet sting.  Bruno’s wisdom as a counselor led to an intermission as cheerful and chatty as a well-planned cocktail party in the intimate black box theater setting.  Puette’s remarkable storytelling abilities brought the audience back to attention.  (She swung “the role of a 5-year-old in a petticoat” during her eighth pregnant month.)  O’Keefe’s arresting presence led smoothly into Cortez’s reality check, while the live praises for Kearney’s work ended the Rant & Rave of Love with an audience enthusiastic for more.

The next Rant & Rave event will be held on March 15, with the theme “secrets” and with performers to be announced.  Tickets are $15, but often sell out.  Email RSVP@roguemachinetheatre.com to reserve a ticket at will call.  For more information, check www.roguemachinetheatre.com.

Santa Monica Museum of Art

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, join SMMoA for a food drive and Cause for Creativity workshop to benefit the individuals at the Ocean Park Community Center (OPCC), the largest and most comprehensive provider of housing and services on the Westside to low-income and homeless communities.

This week only SMMoA will be accepting your generous donations! All donors will receive FREE participation in the Furoshiki Thanksgiving Bundles workshop led by artist Jay Lizo this Sunday; a raffle entry to win 4 tickets to KOOZA by Cirque du Soleil; and a free Cirque du Soleil clown nose.

Donation drop-off period: Now through November 21, 11 am – 6 pm at SMMoA
Furoshiki Thanksgiving Bundles workshop with Jay Lizo: Sunday, November 22, 2 – 5 pm

Food drive list

Food drive flyer

Union Station Homeless Services

WHAT: A star-studded list of celebrities, including actor Hector Elizondo (Monk, Cane, The Princess Diaries), actress Jane Kaczmarek (Raising The Bar, Malcolm in the MIddile), actress Alison Sweeney (The Biggest Loser, Days of Our Lives), and writer and producer Michael White (Nacho Libre, School of Rock), will join thousands of community volunteers on Thanksgiving Day to feed homeless men, women and children at Union Station Homeless Services’ Dinner-in-the-Park.

Volunteers from the greater Pasadena community will purchase, prepare and serve more than 5,000 meals at Union Station Homeless Services’ annual Thanksgiving Dinner-in-the-Park.  Meal recipients will include homeless adults and families, senior citizens, and those who are alone at the holidays or unable to afford a holiday meal.

WHEN: Thanksgiving Day, November 26, Noon – 2 pm

WHERE: Central Park, Pasadena • Raymond Avenue between Green Street and Del Mar Boulevard; two blocks south of Colorado Blvd.

HOW:  The community is invited to drop off fully cooked turkeys, hams, side dishes and desserts (safely prepared in disposable aluminum containers) at the corner of Fair Oaks and Del Mar, 9:30 – 11:00 am on the morning of the event.

Additional volunteer opportunities include:
9:30 – 11 am • Set up tables and chairs
11:30 am – 2 pm • Serve food and beverages
1:00 – 4 pm • Break down tables and chairs, wash dishes, clean up (We are often short of afternoon volunteers; please consider volunteering to assist with clean up).

To volunteer, contact (626) 240-4550 x 103 or volunteer@unionstationhs.org.

SPONSOR: To learn how you or your company can sponsor Dinner-in-the-Park, contact Victoria Stubrin at (626) 240-4557.

Food drive: An additional community-organized food drive on Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 21 and 22

Food drive list

Dinners in the Park: How to help with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners