Following the success of DineLA’s restaurant weeks in February, many of the restaurants in and around Old Pasadena are taking part in Old Pasadena Restaurant Week, from June 1 to 8. Not only is each place offering a good-value fixed-price menu, but each is donating ten percent of revenue to Union Station Homeless Services, whose main facility [...]
Summer vacation is looming, which means it’s time for kids to get outdoors and get dirty. This year La Cañada’s Descanso Gardens gives your kids the chance to do just that and more with its Descanso Discoveries program. The camp aims to wrangle the natural curiosity and energy of kids 6 to 12 and channel it [...]
Worthy charity events fill up the spring calendar in Pasadena like so many poppies, and it’s hard to give them all their due. But we’re singling out one for special attention: the Taste of Art, an art-lover’s party at Gale’s Restaurant. This intensely local event started in 2007 when a group of friends having dinner [...]
It’s been a fun few weeks on my bedside table, starting with Gods Behaving Badly, by Marie Phillips, a silly romp that puts a dysfunctional, dissipated and dispirited family of Greek gods in a dilapidated house in contemporary London. Aphrodite is a phone-sex operator, Artemis is a dog walker, and a couple of innocent mortals [...]
We have lots of friends in Altadena who compost, grow their own fruits and vegetables, have drought-tolerant yards and shop farmers’ markets; some even keep their own chickens (including Hometown Pasadena’s own egg farmer, Sandy Gillis) or have invested in solar panels. So it’s no surprise to hear that Altadena Heritage is going beyond the [...]
If you didn’t know that May was Historic Preservation Month, you have one last chance to celebrate, by joining Pasadena Heritage on Sunday in honoring the midcentury modern homes of Ain, Johnson and Day. First attend a lecture and book signing by Professor Anthony Denzer of the University of Wyoming, author of Gregory Ain: The Modern House [...]
Somehow I’d lived several decades without ever visiting Rubel Castle, or even hearing about it. And now I shall try to save you from the same fate.
Way up on Live Oak in Glendora is an honest-to-goodness castle so jam-packed with sometimes-historic flotsam and jetsam that it’s taking a fleet of volunteers years to catalogue it [...]
Few restaurant neighborhoods in the San Gabriel Valley are more depressing than the stretch of Huntington connecting Monrovia and Arcadia. You name the soulless chain, and it’s here, from Macaroni Grill to the Olive Garden. So we’re grateful to our friend Sherri (Vroman’s book buyer and avid cook) for turning us on to Basil Thai, [...]
Hardcover Fiction
Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Alexander Smith
Gone Tomorrow, Lee Child
Sunny Side, Glen David Gold
Road Dogs, Elmore Leonard
First Farmily, David Baldacci
Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
Dead & Gone, Charlaine Harris
Cemetery Dance, Douglas Preston
The Host, Stephenie Meyer
Into The Beautiful North, Alberto Luis Urrea
Hardcover Non-Fiction
10 10 10, Suzy Welch
Letter to My Daughter, Maya Angelou
How to Win a Cosmic War, [...]
Altadena’s one and only Ian Whitcomb — musician, music historian, bon vivant, wit and Grammy winner— returns to his favorite hometown performance space, the Coffee Gallery Backstage, for an evening with guitarist Fred Sokolow and possible “surprise guests.” He’ll be playing ukelele, accordian and piano, and singing songs both comic and sentimental, from the Tin [...]
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