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

This is Not the Life I Ordered: Fifty Ways to Keep Your Head Above Water When Life Keeps Dragging You Down

Meeting monthly for over a decade, four women shared their lives with one another and encouraged one another. Collectively, they experienced the extreme joys and deep sorrows that life offers up. From mundane moments to the dramatic and surreal, the authors have a history of six marriages, ten children, four stepchildren, six dogs, two miscarriages, two cats, a failed adoption, widowhood, and foster parenthood. They have built companies, lost companies, sold companies. One of them was shot and left for dead on a tarmac in South America, and two lived through the deaths of spouses. Raising babies and teenagers together, they have known celebrity and success along with loneliness and self-doubt.

Jan Yanehiro has skydived with the Army's Golden Knights and ventured up a frozen waterfall...all in the name of getting a good story! Jan pioneered the magazine format on television as co-host of Evening Magazine, a nightly program in San Francisco from 1976-90. Currently, Jan is the host of Everyday Angels on Comcast Cable TV and the Executive Producer of Pacific Fusion TV. Her latest documentary, Resettlement to Redress, examines the resettlement of Japanese Americans after WWII and the apology from the U.S. government regarding internment. Married and mother of six, Jan has won multiple awards and the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award. She holds seat on several boards including the Kristi Yamaguchi Always Dream Foundation and the Bank of Marin.


Michealene Cristini Risley is an entrepreneur who has created some of the largest deals in consumer products and entertainment industries. As an executive with twenty-plus years experience, Ms. Cristini Risley launched the first-ever branded maternity line in association with Adidas. As vice president of licensing and character development for Sega of America, she championed the Sega Girls' Task Force. She has also produced, directed and funded a short film called Flashcards, which won Best Cineematography at the California Independent Film Festival, Best Short film at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, and the film screened at the Cannes Film Festival Shorts Du Jour program. American Public Television on PBS stations is currently distibuting the film.

Visit: www.thisisnotthelifeiordered.com

by Jan Yanehiro
B.A. Journalism 1970
Broadcast Journalist, Documentary Producer, and Author
Speaking with co-author Michealene Cristini Risley

The Mystique of the Ancient Greek Olympics

The ancient Greeks had a passion for athletics that makes our own enthusiasm for sports seem lukewarm by comparison. Typically, they staged their games in their most hallowed sacred spaces; some of their most successful athletes were literally worshipped hundreds of years after their deaths at purpose-built shrines; and ultimately they even came to measure the passage of time itself by the stately sequence of quadrennial Olympiads. How, then can we explain the extraordinary force and resonance of sports in Greek culture? My paper will attempt to answer this question by investigating the beginnings of organized athletics at ancient Olympia.

Professor Anderson is a specialist in the history of ancient Greece. He is a graduate of the universities of Newcastle and London in his native Britain, and holds M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in Classics from Yale University.

Professor Anderson's primary area of interest is political culture in Greek city-states during the archaic (700-480 BC) and classical (480-320 BC) periods. His work explores the dynamic interplay between politics and other key realms of human experience, especially art and architecture, cult, warfare, memory, and identity. His first book, The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 BC (University of Michigan Press, 2003), rethinks the beginnings of democracy and civic order in ancient Athens. To date, he has nine other scholarly pieces in print or in press. Their topics range from the origins of the ancient Olympic games to social memory formation in classical Athens. Professor Anderson's principal current project is a second book, provisionally entitled The Invention of Citizenship, which reexamines patterns of early political development across the Greek world as a whole. Its ultimate aim is to offer a new way of looking at the creation of the world's first citizen-states.

Visit: http://history.osu.edu/people/person.cfm?ID=2101

by Dr. Greg Anderson
Assistant Professor of History, Ohio State University

Learning Like a Girl: Educating Our Daughters in Schools of Their Own

Faced with a spirited eleven-year-old daughter, a concern about what therapists have called a 'poisonous' youth culture - especially for girls - and a conviction that parents need powerful tools to help their daughters realize their potential, educator-activitst Meehan decided with two other mothers to create a new school based on social science and brain research about how girls learn best. The result, The Archer School in L.A., has in only ten years become a model for girls' schools nationwide. In this entertaining, inspiring book, Meehan describes her journey to create a nrew institution to serve girls first and foremost, while laying out through vivid stories and examples what girls need to thrive. She explains why co-education so often doesn't serve them (just as it doesn't serve boys), takes sides in the controversy over male/female learning differences, and advocates for schools' role in giving girls tools to navigate through our sexualized, materialistic culture. She also visits other schools around the country - private and public - to show how single sex education works, and how every girl everywhere can benefit from having a classroom of her own.

Diana Meehan, Ph.D., is the co-founder of the Archer School for Girls and founding-director of the Institute for the Study of Women and men at USC. She currently serves on the Board of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, the Children's Action Network, and the Communication Consortium Media Center. Meehan is a founding partner of VU Productions - a documentary film company attached to Paramount. Among her award-winning productions are Women in War (A&E) and A Century of Women (Turner Broadcasting). She is married to writer-producer Gary David Goldberg.

by Dr. Diana Meehan
B.A. English 1966
Author, Educator, Presidential Advisor
Documentary Producer