The Polish Joke

The Polish Joke by David Ives and Directed by Ed Emanuel
October 5-7 & 9-13, 2007

The Polish Joke is in the same theme as My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It celebrates cultural diversity in a marvelously peculiar way as a young man struggles to attain his individuality in a society that loves to pigeon hole everybody!

State of the State

Dan Walters, who has written more than 7,000 newspaper columns about California and its politics, will deliver a "state address" that paints a disturbing picture of what's ahead.

Walters says that "California is experiencing social and economic forces that are unprecedented in the history of humankind, making it the globe's most complex society and one that is testing whether the American system of self-governance is viable amid such complexity".

Dan Walters has been a journalist for more than 45 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. At one point in his career, at age 22, he was the nation's youngest daily newspaper editor.

He joined the Sacramento Union's Capitol bureau in 1975, just as Jerry Brown began his governorship, and later became the Union's Capitol bureau chief. In 1981, Mr. Walter's began writing the state's only daily newspaper column devoted to California political, economic and social events and in 1984, he and the column moved to the Sacramento Bee. His column now appears in more than 50 California newspapers.

Mr. Walters has written about California and its politics for a number of other publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor. In 1986, his book, The New California: Facing the 21st Century, was published in its first edition. The book has since undergone revisions and has become a widely used college textbook about socioeconomic and political trends in the state. He is also the founding editor of the "California Political Almanac," the co-author of a new book on lobbying entitled The Third House: Lobbyists, Money and Power in Sacramento, and is a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California politics.

Visit: www.sacbee.com/walters/

by Dan Walters
Keynote Speaker
California Political Columnist