Mountain Views News, Sierra Madre Edition [Pasadena] Saturday, March 25, 2017

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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Mountain Views-News Saturday, March 25, 2017 

On the Marquee: 

Notes from the Sierra MadrePlayhouse

BUSINESS NEWS & TRENDS

A SEASON REBOOT

FAMILY MATTERS By Marc Garlett


SPRING CLEANING 
FOR YOUR LEGAL AND 
FINANCIAL AFFAIRS

Spring has officially sprung and that means it’s spring cleaning 
time. Shake out the rugs, clean out the cupboards, and get 
your legal and financial affairs in order.

 For plenty of folks, it’s easy to know what to do when it 
comes to home organization, but the idea of legal and financial 
ordering can be complex and confusing.

 Here are a few places you can start:

1. Review Your Beneficiary Designations


Request updated beneficiary designation forms from your life 
insurance account and retirement account custodians. Look 
at the form and identify whether you have a minor designated 
as either a primary or contingent beneficiary. If you do, those 
assets will be tied up in Court, unnecessarily, and may not be 
available to the people you’ve named to care for your children. 
Consider designating your life insurance and retirement 
accounts to be distributed to a trust for the benefit of your heirs, 
providing Court and creditor protection, and ensuring your 
children do not inherit money before they are properly prepared.


2. Update Your Family Wealth Inventory


Your Family Wealth Inventory is a document – usually 
a spreadsheet – itemizing the assets you own, so that in 
the event you become incapacitated, or when you die, 
your family will know how to find everything you own. 
Without an updated Family Wealth Inventory, your assets 
could be lost to California’s department of unclaimed property. 
There’s currently over 8 billion – with a ‘B” – dollars of assets in 
California’ department of unclaimed property because most 
people do not leave a clear record of their assets at the time of 
their incapacity or death. Don’t let that happen to your assets!


3. Consider If You Need to Name New Guardians (Long or 
Short-Term)


Review your guardian nomination designations. Have you 
named guardians for both the short-term (local) and the long-
term (people you would trust to raise your kids fully)? If so, 
do they need to change? Is there anyone you would wish to 
exclude? Does the ID card for your wallet need to be updated? 
This is the time to check.

4. Check Out the Title to Your House


 Get a copy of the deed to your house and make sure that 
your trust is listed as the owner on the deed if you want your 
house to stay out of court in the event of your incapacity or 
death. If you see your personal name on the deed, and there 
is not a trust listed, you can bet your house would have to 
go through the court process of probate in the event of your 
death before it could be passed to your heirs. If you don’t want 
that, now is the perfect time to spruce up your planning.

5. Come In and Meet With Us For a Family Legacy Planning 
Session


 Last, but far from least, this is the perfect time of year 
to come in and meet with us for a Family Legacy Planning 
Session, whether you’ve done estate planning in the past or 
not. We will have a 2-hour working meeting that will get you 
more financially organized than you’ve likely ever been before 
(unless you’ve already done planning with us) and give you 
the confidence of knowing you’ve made the most empowered, 
informed and educated legal and financial decisions for the 
people you love. Call within the next week and mention this 
article to receive your session on a complimentary basis.

 Dedicated to empowering your family, building your 
wealth and securing your legacy,

A local attorney and father, Marc Garlett is on a mission 
to help parents protect what they love most. His office is 
located at 49 S. Baldwin Ave., Ste. G, Sierra Madre, CA 
91024. Schedule an appointment to sit down and talk 
about ensuring a legacy of love and financial security 
for your family by calling 626.587.3058 or visit www.
GarlettLaw.com for more information.

By Artistic Director, Christian Lebano

We have gotten really wonderful reviews for both 
“A Wrinkle in Time” and “The Belle of Amherst.” 
The LATimes called the effects and the direction of 
Wrinkle “superb” – a nice trick for a theater as small 
as ours – the other four reviews were equally good. 
Broadway World called Belle “another feather in 
the cap at SMP.” I do hope you will see both of these 
shows. They are so different one from the other – it 
has made for an interesting repertory.

We have decided to postpone our production of 
Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly. This is the second 
time we’ve had to postpone a production this year. 
The unrelenting production schedule doesn’t allow 
us to get any work done on the infrastructure of 
SMP. During this break we plan on making several 
changes to our systems – including migrating to 
a new ticketing service. The new service will be 
easier to use AND the service fees will be lower. 
We are also moving forward with our long-desired 
new website. But again this will take some time to 
create and not having a production to mount will 
make it feasible.

So our next show will be “The Marvelous 
Wonderettes” by Roger Bean. This is a really fun 
show about four women in a singing girl-group 
– we meet them first in 1958 at their high school 
graduation and then again ten years later at their 
reunion. The show is filled with more than 30 of 
the biggest hits of those years – from “Secret Love,” 
“You Don’t Own Me,” and “Wedding Bell Blues” 
to “Stupid Cupid,” “Hold Me, Thrill Me,” and 
“Rescue Me.” This should be a great summertime 
show. We are bringing back the team who created 
such a hit with “Always…Patsy Cline” – director/
choreographer Robert Marra and music director 
Sean Paxton.

I do hope you will see both shows. Bring kids with 
you to see “Wrinkle” they will love it and so will 
you. And “Belle” is a treat for those of you who love 
Emily Dickinson, poetry, or bravura acting.

For tickets please call Mary in the box office at 
626.355.4318 or go to SierraMadrePlayhouse.org. 
Hope to see you soon! 


Jeff’s Book Pics By Jeff Brown

SEAN’S SHAMELESS REVIEWS: 

By Sean Kayden

Option B: Facing Adversity, 
Building Resilience, and Finding 
Joy by Sheryl Sandberg & 
Adam Grant 

From Facebook’s COO and Wharton’s 
top-rated professor, the #1 New York 
Times best-selling authors of Lean In 
and Originals: a powerful, inspiring, 
and practical book about building 
resilience and moving forward after 
life’s inevitable setbacks.After the 
sudden death of her husband, Sheryl 
Sandberg felt certain that she and her 
children would never feel pure joy 
again. “I was in ‘the void,’” she writes, “a 
vast emptiness that fills your heart and 
lungs and restricts your ability to think 
or even breathe.” Her friend Adam 
Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told 
her there are concrete steps people can 
take to recover and rebound from life-
shattering experiences. We are not born 
with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a 
muscle that everyone can build. Option 
B combines Sheryl’s personal insights 
with Adam’s eye-opening research on 
finding strength in the face of adversity. 
Beginning with the gut-wrenching 
moment when she finds her husband, 
Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym 
floor, Sheryl opens up her heart—and 
her journal—to describe the acute 
grief and isolation she felt in the 
wake of his death. But Option B goes 
beyond Sheryl’s loss to explore how a 
broad range of people have overcome 
hardships including illness, job loss, 
sexual assault, natural disasters, and the 
violence of war. Their stories reveal the 
capacity of the human spirit to persevere 
. . . and to rediscover joy.Resilience 
comes from deep within us and from 
support outside us. Even after the most 
devastating events, it is possible to grow 
by finding deeper meaning and gaining 
greater appreciation in our lives. Option 
B illuminates how to help others in 
crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, 
raise strong children, and create resilient 
families, communities, and workplaces. 
Many of these lessons can be applied 
to everyday struggles, allowing us to 
brave whatever lies ahead. Two weeks 
after losing her husband, Sheryl was 
preparing for a father-child activity. 
“I want Dave,” she cried. Her friend 
replied, “Option A is not available,” and 
then promised to help her make the 
most of Option B.We all live some form 
of Option B. This book will help us all 
make the most of it.Comes out April 24, 
2017.

The Transparency of Things: Contemplating 
the Nature of Experience by Rupert Spira and 
Peter Russell

The purpose of The Transparency of 
Things is to look clearly and simply 
at the nature of experience, without 
any attempt to change it.A series of 
contemplations leads us gently but 
directly to see that our essential nature 
is neither a body nor a mind. It is the 
conscious Presence that is aware of 
this current experience. As such, it is 
nothing that can be experienced as an 
object, and yet it is undeniably present.
However, these contemplations go 
much further than this. As we take 
our stand knowingly as this conscious 
Presence that we always already are, 
and reconsider the objects of the body, 
mind, and world, we find that they do 
not simply appear to this Presence; 
they appear within it. And further 
exploration reveals that they do not 
simply appear within this Presence but 
as this Presence.Finally, we are led to 
see that it is in fact this very Presence 
that takes the shape of our experience 
from moment to moment while always 
remaining only itself. We see that our 
experience is and has only ever been 
one seamless totality, with no separate 
entities, objects, or parts anywhere to 
be found.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley 
Robinson

New York Times bestselling author 
Kim Stanley Robinson returns with a 
bold and brilliant vision of New York 
City in the next century.For years, 
science fiction writers have tackled the 
scenario of rising sea levels, envisioning 
disastrous waves that destroy cities and 
cause social upheaval. Kim Stanley 
Robinson imagines how the metropolis 
and its inhabitants would adapt and 
thrive in the new environment.As the 
sea levels rose, every street became a 
canal. Every skyscraper an island. For 
the residents of one apartment building 
in Madison Square, however, New York 
in the year 2140 is far from a drowned 
city.There is the market trader, who 
finds opportunities where others 
find trouble. There is the detective, 
whose work will never disappear 
--- along with the lawyers, of course.
There is the internet star, beloved by 
millions for her airship adventures, 
and the building’s manager, quietly 
respected for his attention to detail. 
Then there are two boys who don’t live 
there, but have no other home-- and 
who are more important to its future 
than anyone might imagine.Lastly 
there are the coders, temporary residents on the roof, 
whose disappearance triggers a sequence of events that 
threatens the existence of all-- and even the long-hidden 
foundations on which the city rests.


EMBRACE THE SPRING SEASON WITH 
THESE HIDDEN GEMS

The Districts – “Ordinary 
Day” – Philadelphia indie 
rock quartet, The Districts, 
develop a profounder 
approach on their latest single, “Ordinary Day.” With 
a soft open before throwing out a few jabs of its own, 
the track showcases a different tactic for the critically 
acclaimed rock act. In 2015 they released their second 
record, “A Flourish And A Spoil” to strong reviews. 
With Ordinary Day, the band demonstrates piercing 
guitars and sharp vocals. Even with laconic lyrics, the 
hazy induced track is a daydream with its entrancing 
melody. The band is gearing up to release their third LP 
sometime this year and this single is a strong indication 
to what could be the band’s most celebrated outing to 
date. 

Future Islands – Ran – Future Islands could very well 
be the best indie rock act in today’s music. With their 
successful fourth studio album, “Singles” in 2014, it 
provided the band with a way of breaking out of being 
relatively unknowns to headliners and becoming the 
highlight at music festivals all over the world. The new 
single is the stimulating, “Ran.” It’s the first glimpse into 
the band’s forthcoming record, “The Far Field” due out 
April 8th. With the mixture of deep, contemplative lyrics 
and dark synth tones, the single will take a strong hold 
on you. Lead singer Samuel Herring’s vocals have always 
been the band’s greatest instrument and it’s still in tact 
with this one. Future Islands have consistently marched 
down their own path and because of that, have found 
much breakthrough success. You can call them seasoned 
veterans, but this feels like the start of something new yet 
beautifully familiar from the Baltimore, Maryland snyth-
rock-pop act.

The Drums – Blood Under My Belt – The Drums are 
back in their true form with “Blood Under My Belt.” It’s 
the first taste of “Abysmal Thoughts”, due out June 16 
as the Drums’ first record for Anti-. The jangly guitars, 
Jonny Pierce’s 80s style vocals, and brisk snyths are 
all here and it’s a good feeling. Hopefully, The Drums 
can rebound off their dismal third LP, “Encyclopedia” 
which took them to darker places that didn’t work for 
them as they abandoned their beachy/surf rock roots. 
In fact, after that album, one part of the duo, guitarist 
Jacob Graham departed from the band. From the looks 
of it, it’s a one-man show now for Pierce. Maybe, just 
maybe, he can start making the music he was always 
meant to create. “Blood Under My Belt” is a terrific start 
to say the very least.

Beach Fossils – “This Year” – Here’s another band making 
a return after an absence of nearly four years. Beach Fossils 
have two records under their belt, 2010’s self-titled lo-fi, 
breezy, minimalistic indie debut and 2013’s more aggressive-
punk rock inspired, “Clash The Truth.” Now that they’re 
older (and assuming wiser), their new single, “This Year” is 
a dreamy, pop endeavor of yesteryear. It’s more mellow and 
heartfelt than the band has ever crafted before. Frontman 
Dustin Payseur’s, the only original member of the band, has 
shown a greater maturity on this latest single that expands 
the band’s sonic palette in many improved ways. Payseur 
says “it’s about facing mistakes you’ve made, aiming to work 
on it and better yourself, but ending up making the same 
mistakes again. It’s kind of an endless loop. People always 
aim to make New Year’s resolutions, get a fresh start, but 
ultimately fall back into these old bad habits.” Whatever the 
case may be, “This Year” is ultimately Beach Fossils at their 
finest and 2017 just got a little better with their forthcoming 
record, “Summersault” due out in June. 


NUTS AND BOLTS OF ACTING TECHNIQUE 

A FOUR MONTH INTENSIVE 

Sundays, January 15 - May 7 (No class Easter, April 16) 

2:00pm - 4:00pm 

Zydeco Casting Studios 

626-355-4572 

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foundation from which to work. This will always be the most important step an actor can take on the path to a 
rewarding career.

Career Launching 
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LEARN THE PROCESS

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COMMERCIAL AUDITION TECHNIQUES... 

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Sundays, January 8 - Febuary 12 

5:00pm to 9:00pm 

Zydeco Casting Studios 

Call: 626-355-4572


All Things By Jeff Brown


The man who wants to 
improve himself can never be 
aware, because improvement 
implies condemnation and 
the achievement of a result. 
Whereas in awareness, 
there is observation without 
condemnation, without denial 
or acceptance. That awareness 
begins with outward things, 
being aware, being in contact 
with objects, with nature. First, 
there is awareness of things 
about one, being sensitive to 
objects, to nature, then to people, 
which means relationship; then 
there is awareness of idea. This 
awareness, being sensitive to 
things, to nature, to people, 
to ideas is not made up of 
separate processes, but is one 
unitary process. It is a constant 
observation of everything, of 
every thought and feeling and 
action as they arise within 
oneself. This awareness, this 
empty conscious presence in 
which all things manifest is 
one’s true being-Krishnamurti 
& Mooji


Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com